The Poetry Of Robert Browning Part 10

"I, Paracelsus," he cries--and now Browning repeats the whole argument of the poem--"was one of these. To do this I vowed myself, soul and limb.

"But I mistook my means, I took the wrong path, led away by pride. I gazed on power alone, and on power won by knowledge alone. This I thought was the only note and aim of man, and it was to be won, at once and in the present, without any care for all that man had already done.

I rejected all the past. I despised it as a record of weakness and disgrace. Man should be all-sufficient now; a single day should bring him to maturity. He has power to reach the whole of knowledge at one leap.

"In that, I mistook the conditions of life. I did not see our barriers; nor that progress is slow; nor that every step of the past is necessary to know and to remember; nor that, in the shade of the past, the present stands forth bright; nor that the future is not to be all at once, but to dawn on us, in zone after zone of quiet progress. I strove to laugh down all the limits of our life, and then the smallest things broke me down--me, who tried to realise the impossible on earth. At last I knew that the power I sought was only G.o.d's, and then I prayed to die. All my life was failure.

"At this crisis I met Aprile, and learned my deep mistake. I had left love out; and love and knowledge, and power through knowledge, must go together. And Aprile had also failed, for he had sought love and rejected knowledge. Life can only move when both are hand in hand:

love preceding Power, and with much power, always much more love: Love still too straitened in its present means, And earnest for new power to set love free.

I learned this, and supposed the whole was learned.

"But to learn it, and to fulfil it, are two different things. I taught the simple truth, but men would not have it. They sought the complex, the sensational, the knowledge which amazed them. And for this knowledge they praised me. I loathed and despised their praise; and when I would not give them more of the signs and wonders I first gave them, they avenged themselves by casting shame on my real knowledge. Then I was tempted, and became the charlatan; and yet despised myself for seeking man's praise for that which was most contemptible in me. Then I sought for wild pleasure in the senses, and I hated myself still more. And hating myself I came to hate men; and then all that Aprile taught to me was lost.

"But now I know that I did not love enough to trace beneath the hate of men their love. I did not love enough to see in their follies the grain of divine wisdom.

To see a good in evil, and a hope In ill-success; to sympathise, be proud Of their half-reasons, faint aspirings, dim Struggles for truth, their poorest fallacies, Their prejudice and fears and cares and doubts; All with a touch of n.o.bleness, despite Their error, upward tending all though weak.

"I did not see this, I did not love enough to see this, and I failed.

"Therefore let men regard me, who rashly longed to know all for power's sake; and regard Aprile, the poet, who rashly longed for the whole of love for beauty's sake--and regarding both, shape forth a third and better-tempered spirit, in whom beauty and knowledge, love and power, shall mingle into one, and lead Man up to G.o.d, in whom all these four are One. In G.o.d alone is the goal.

"Meanwhile I die in peace, secure of attainment. What I have failed in here I shall attain there. I have never, in my basest hours, ceased to aspire; G.o.d will fulfil my aspiration:

If I stoop Into a dark tremendous sea of cloud.

It is but for a time; I press G.o.d's lamp Close to my breast; its splendour, soon or late, Will pierce the gloom: I shall emerge one day.

You understand me? I have said enough?

Aprile! Hand in hand with you, Aprile!"

And so he dies.

CHAPTER V

_THE POET OF ART_

The theory of human life which Browning conceived, and which I attempted in the last chapter to explain out of _Pauline_ and _Paracelsus_, underlies the poems which have to do with the arts. Browning as the poet of Art is as fascinating a subject as Browning the poet of Nature; even more so, for he directed of set purpose a great deal of his poetry to the various arts, especially to music and painting. Nor has he neglected to write about his own art. The lover in Pauline is a poet. Paracelsus and Aprile have both touched that art. Sordello is a poet, and so are many others in the poems. Moreover, he treats continually of himself as a poet, and of the many criticisms on his work.

All through this work on the arts, the theory of which we have written appears continuously. It emerges fully in the close of _Easter-Day_. It is carefully wrought into poems like _Abt Vogler_ and _A Grammarian's Funeral_, in which the pursuit of grammar is conceived of as the pursuit of an art. It is introduced by the way in the midst of subjects belonging to the art of painting, as in _Old Pictures in Florence_ and _Andrea del Sarto_. Finally, in those poems which represent in vivid colour and selected personalities special times and forms of art, the theory still appears, but momentarily, as a dryad might show her face in a wood to a poet pa.s.sing by. I shall be obliged then to touch again and again on this theory of his in discussing Browning as the poet of the arts. This is a repet.i.tion which cannot be helped, but for which I request the pardon of my readers.

The subject of the arts, from the time when Caliban "fell to make something" to the re-birth of naturalism in Florence, from the earliest music and poetry to the latest, interested Browning profoundly; and he speaks of them, not as a critic from the outside, but out of the soul of them, as an artist. He is, for example, the only poet of the nineteenth century till we come to Rossetti, who has celebrated painting and sculpture by the art of poetry; and Rossetti did not link these arts to human life and character with as much force and penetration as Browning.

Morris, when he wrote poetry, did not care to write about the other arts, their schools or history. He liked to describe in verse the beautiful things of the past, but not to argue on their how and why. Nor did he ever turn in on himself as artist, and ask how he wrote poetry or how he built up a pattern. What he did as artist was to _make_, and when he had made one thing to make another. He ran along like Pheidippides to his goal, without halting for one instant to consider the methods of his running. And all his life long this was his way.

Rossetti described a picture in a sonnet with admirable skill, so admirable that we say to ourselves--"Give me the picture or the sonnet, not both. They blot out one another." But to describe a picture is not to write about art. The one place where he does go down to its means and soul is in his little prose masterpiece, _Hand and Soul_, in which we see the path, the goal, the pa.s.sion, but not the power of art. But he never, in thought, got, like Browning, to the bottom-joy of it. He does not seem to see, as clearly as Browning saw, that the source of all art was love; and that the expression of love in beautiful form was or ought to be accomplished with that exulting joy which is the natural child of self-forgetfulness. This story of Rossetti's was in prose. In poetry, Rossetti, save in description from the outside, left art alone; and Browning's special work on art, and particularly his poetic studies of it, are isolated in English poetry, and separate him from other poets.

I cannot wish that he had thought less and written less about other arts than poetry. But I do wish he had given more time and trouble to his own art, that we might have had clearer and lovelier poetry. Perhaps, if he had developed himself with more care as an artist in his own art, he would not have troubled himself or his art by so much devotion to abstract thinking and intellectual a.n.a.lysis. A strange preference also for naked facts sometimes beset him, as if men wanted these from a poet.

It was as if some scientific demon entered into him for a time and turned poetry out, till Browning got weary of his guest and threw him out of the window. These reversions to some far off Browning in the past, who was deceived into thinking the intellect the king of life, enfeebled and sometimes destroyed the artist in him; and though he escaped for the best part of his poetry from this position, it was not seldom in his later years as a brand plucked from the burning. Moreover, he recognised this tendency in himself; and protested against it, sometimes humorously, sometimes seriously. At least so I read what he means in a number of poems, when he turns, after an over-wrought piece of a.n.a.lysis, upon himself, and bursts out of his cobwebs into a solution of the question by pa.s.sion and imagination. Nevertheless the charm of this merely intellectual play pulled at him continually, and as he could always embroider it with fancy it seemed to him close to imagination; and this belief grew upon him as he got farther away from the warmth and natural truth of youth. It is the melancholy tendency of some artists, as they feel the weakness of decay, to become scientific; and a fatal temptation it is. There is one poem of his in which he puts the whole matter clearly and happily, with a curious and suggestive t.i.tle, "_Transcendentalism_: A Poem in Twelve Books."

He speaks to a young poet who will give to men "naked thought, good, true, treasurable stuff, solid matter, without imaginative imagery, without emotion."

Thought's what they mean by verse, and seek in verse.

Boys seek for images and melody, Men must have reason--so, you aim at men.

It is "quite otherwise," Browning tells him, and he ill.u.s.trates the matter by a story.

Jacob Bohme did not care for plants. All he cared for was his mysticism.

But one day, as if the magic of poetry had slipped into his soul, he heard all the plants talking, and talking to him; and behold, he loved them and knew what they meant. Imagination had done more for him than all his metaphysics. So we give up our days to collating theory with theory, criticising, philosophising, till, one morning, we wake "and find life's summer past."

What remedy? What hope? Why, a brace of rhymes! And then, in life, that miracle takes place which John of Halberstadt did by his magic. We feel like a child; the world is new; every bit of life is run over and enchanted by the wild rose.

And in there breaks the sudden rose herself, Over us, under, round us every side, Nay, in and out the tables and the chairs And musty volumes, Boehme's book and all--Buries us with a glory, young once more, Pouring heaven into this shut house of life.

So come, the harp back to your heart again!

I return, after this introduction, to Browning's doctrine of life as it is connected with the arts. It appears with great clearness in _Easter-Day_. He tells of an experience he had when, one night, musing on life, and wondering how it would be with him were he to die and be judged in a moment, he walked on the wild common outside the little Dissenting Chapel he had previously visited on Christmas-Eve and thought of the Judgment. And Common-sense said: "You have done your best; do not be dismayed; you will only be surprised, and when the shock is over you will smile at your fear." And as he thought thus the whole sky became a sea of fire. A fierce and vindictive scribble of red quick flame ran across it, and the universe was burned away. "And I knew," thought Browning, "now that Judgment had come, that I had chosen this world, its beauty, its knowledge, its good--that, though I often looked above, yet to renounce utterly the beauty of this earth and man was too hard for me." And a voice came: "Eternity is here, and thou art judged." And then Christ stood before him and said: "Thou hast preferred the finite when the infinite was in thy power. Earthly joys were palpable and tainted.

The heavenly joys flitted before thee, faint, and rare, and taintless.

Thou hast chosen those of this world. They are thine."

"O rapture! is this the Judgment? Earth's exquisite treasures of wonder and delight for me!"

"So soon made happy," said the voice. "The loveliness of earth is but like one rose flung from the Eden whence thy choice has excluded thee.

The wonders of earth are but the tapestry of the ante-chamber in the royal house thou hast abandoned.

All partial beauty was a pledge Of beauty in its plenitude: But since the pledge sufficed thy mood, Retain it! plenitude be theirs Who looked above!

"O sharp despair! but since the joys of earth fail me, I take art. Art gives worth to nature; it stamps it with man. I'll take the Greek sculpture, the perfect painting of Italy--that world is mine!"

"Then obtain it," said the voice: "the one abstract form, the one face with its one look--all they could manage. Shall I, the illimitable beauty, be judged by these single forms? What of that perfection in their souls these artists were conscious of, inconceivably exceeding all they did? What of their failure which told them an illimitable beauty was before them? What of Michael Angelo now, who did not choose the world's success or earth's perfection, and who now is on the breast of the Divine? All the beauty of art is but furniture for life's first stage. Take it then. But there are those, my saints, who were not content, like thee, with earth's sc.r.a.p of beauty, but desired the whole.

They are now filled with it. Take thy one jewel of beauty on the beach; lose all I had for thee in the boundless ocean."

"Then I take mind; earth's knowledge carries me beyond the finite.

Through circling sciences, philosophies and histories I will spin with rapture; and if these fail to inspire, I will fly to verse, and in its dew and fire break the chain which binds me to the earth;--Nay, answer me not, I know what Thou wilt say: What is highest in knowledge, even those fine intuitions which lead the finite into the infinite, and which are best put in n.o.ble verse, are but gleams of a light beyond them, sparks from the sum of the whole. I give that world up also, and I take Love. All I ask is leave to love."

"Ah," said the voice, "is this thy final choice? Love is the best; 'tis somewhat late. Yet all the power and beauty, nature and art and knowledge of this earth were only worth because of love. Through them infinite love called to thee; and even now thou clingest to earth's love as all. It is precious, but it exists to bear thee beyond the love of earth into the boundless love of G.o.d in me." At last, beaten to his last fortress, all broken down, he cries:

Thou Love of G.o.d! Or let me die, Or grant what shall seem heaven almost.

Let me not know that all is lost, Though lost it be--leave me not tied To this despair--this corpse-like bride!

Let that old life seem mine--no more-- With limitation as before, With darkness, hunger, toil, distress: Be all the earth a wilderness!

Only let me go on, go on, Still hoping ever and anon To reach one eve the Better Land!

This is put more strongly, as in the line: "Be all the earth a wilderness!" than Browning himself would have put it. But he is in the pa.s.sion of the man who speaks, and heightens the main truth into an extreme. But the theory is there, and it is especially applied to the love of beauty and therefore to the arts. The ill.u.s.trations are taken from music and painting, from sculpture and poetry. Only in dwelling too exclusively, as perhaps the situation demands, on the renunciation of this world's successes, he has left out that part of his theory which demands that we should, accepting our limits, work within them for the love of man, but learn from their pressure and pain to transcend them always in the desire of infinite perfection. In _Rabbi Ben Ezra_, a masterpiece of argumentative and imaginative pa.s.sion--such a poem as only Browning could have written, who, more than other poets, equalised, when most inspired, reasoning, emotions and intuitions into one material for poetry--he applies this view of his to the whole of man's life here and in the world to come, when the Rabbi in the quiet of old age considers what his life has been, and how G.o.d has wrought him through it for eternity. But I leave that poem, which has nothing to do with art, for _Abt Vogler_, which is dedicated to music.

"When Solomon p.r.o.nounced the Name of G.o.d, all the spirits, good and bad, a.s.sembled to do his will and build his palace. And when I, Abt Vogler, touched the keys, I called the Spirits of Sound to me, and they have built my palace of music; and to inhabit it all the Great Dead came back, till in the vision I made a perfect music. Nay, for a moment, I touched in it the infinite perfection; but now it is gone; I cannot bring it back. Had I painted it, had I written it, I might have explained it. But in music, out of the sounds something emerges which is above the sounds, and that ineffable thing I touched and lost. I took the well-known sounds of earth, and out of them came a fourth sound, nay, not a sound--but a star. This was a flash of G.o.d's will which opened the Eternal to me for a moment; and I shall find it again in the eternal life. Therefore, from the achievement of earth and the failure of it, I turn to G.o.d, and in him I see that every image, thought, impulse, and dream of knowledge or of beauty--which, coming whence we know not, flit before us in human life, breathe for a moment, and then depart; which, like my music, build a sudden palace in imagination; which abide for an instant and dissolve, but which memory and hope retain as a ground of aspiration--are not lost to us though they seem to die in their immediate pa.s.sage. Their music has its home in the Will of G.o.d and we shall find them completed there.