The Poetry Of Robert Browning Part 11

All we have willed or hoped or dreamed of good shall exist; Not its semblance, but itself; no beauty, nor good, nor power Whose voice has gone forth, but each survives for the melodist When eternity affirms the conception of an hour.

The high that proved too high, the heroic for earth too hard, The pa.s.sion that left the ground to lose itself in the sky, Are music sent up to G.o.d by the lover and the bard; Enough that he heard it once: we shall hear it by-and-by.

Well, it is earth with me; silence resumes her reign: I will be patient and proud, and soberly acquiesce.

Give me the keys. I feel for the common chord again, Sliding by semitones, till I sink to the minor,--yes, And I blunt it into a ninth, and I stand on alien ground, Surveying awhile the heights I rolled from into the deep; Which, hark, I have dared and done, for my resting-place is found, The C Major of this life: so, now I will try to sleep."

With that he returns to human life, content to labour in its limits--the common chord is his. But he has been where he shall be, and he is not likely to be satisfied with the C major of life. This, in Browning's thought, is the true comfort and strength of the life of the artist, to whom these fallings from us, vanis.h.i.+ngs, these transient visits of the infinite Divine, like swallows that pa.s.s in full flight, are more common than to other men. They tell him of the unspeakable beauty; they let loose his spirit to fly into the third heaven.

So much for the theory in this poem. As to the artist and his art in it, that is quite a different matter; and as there are few of Browning's poems which reach a higher level than this both in form, thought, and spiritual pa.s.sion, it may be worth while, for once, to examine a poem of his at large.

Browning's imagination conceived in a moment the musician's experience from end to end; and the form of the experience arose along with the conception. He saw Abt Vogler in the silent church, playing to himself before the golden towers of the organ, and slipping with sudden surprise into a strain which is less his than G.o.d's. He saw the vision which accompanied the music, and the man's heart set face to face with the palace of music he had built. He saw him live in it and then pa.s.s to heaven with it and lose it. And he saw the close of the experience, with all its scenery in the church and in Abt Vogler's heart, at the same time, in one vision. In this unconscious shaping of his thought into a human incident, with its soul and scenery, is the imagination creating, like a G.o.d, a thing unknown, unseen before.

Having thus shaped the form, the imagination pa.s.sed on to make the ornament. It creates that far-off image of Solomon and his spirits building their palace for the Queen of Sheba which exalts the whole conception and enlarges the reader's imagination through all the legends of the great King--and then it makes, for fresh adornment, the splendid piling up of the sounds into walls of gold, pinnacles, splendours and meteor moons; and lastly, with upward sweeping of its wings, bids the sky to fall in love with the glory of the palace, and the mighty forms of the n.o.ble Dead to walk in it. This is the imagination at play with its conception, adorning, glorifying, heightening the full impression, but keeping every imaged ornament misty, impalpable, as in a dream--for so the conception demanded.

And then, to fill the conception with the spirit of humanity, the personal pa.s.sion of the poet rises and falls through the description, as the music rises and falls. We feel his breast beating against ours; till the time comes when, like a sudden change in a great song, his emotion changes into ecstasy in the outburst of the 9th verse:

Therefore to whom turn I but to thee, the ineffable Name?

It almost brings tears into the eyes. This is art-creation--this is what imagination, intense emotion, and individuality have made of the material of thought--poetry, not prose.

Even at the close, the conception, the imagination, and the personal pa.s.sion keep their art. The rush upwards of the imaginative feeling dies slowly away; it is as evanescent as the Vision of the Palace, but it dies into another picture of humanity which even more deeply engages the human heart. Browning sees the organ-loft now silent and dark, and the silent figure in it, alone and bowed over the keys. The church is still, but aware of what has been. The golden pipes of the organ are lost in the twilight and the music is over--all the double vision of the third heaven into which he has been caught has vanished away. The form of the thing rightly fits the idea. Then, when the form is shaped, the poet fills it with the deep emotion of the musician's soul, and then with his own emotion; and close as the air to the earth are the sorrow and exultation of Abt Vogler and Browning to the human heart--sorrow for the vanis.h.i.+ng and the failure, exultant joy because what has been is but an image of the infinite beauty they will have in G.o.d. In the joy they do not sorrow for the failure. It is nothing but an omen of success. Their soul, greater than the vision, takes up common life with patience and silent hope. We hear them sigh and strike the chord of C.

This is lyric imagination at work in lyric poetry. There are two kinds of lyrics among many others. One is where the strong emotion of the poet, fusing all his materials into one creation, comes to a height and then breaks off suddenly. It is like a thunderstorm, which, doubling and redoubling its flash and roar, ends in the zenith with the brightest flash and loudest clang of thunder. There is another kind. It is when the storm of emotion reaches, like the first, its climax, but does not end with it. The lyric pa.s.sion dies slowly away from the zenith to the horizon, and ends in quietude and beauty, attended by soft colour and gentle sounds; like the thunderstorm which faints with the sunset and gathers its clouds to be adorned with beauty. This lyric of Browning's is a n.o.ble example of the second type.

I take another poem, the _Grammarian's Funeral_, to ill.u.s.trate his art.

The main matter of thought in it is the same as that of _Abt Vogler_, with the variation that the central figure is not a musician but a grammarian; that what he pursued was critical knowledge, not beauty, and that he is not a modern, like Abt Vogler, but one of the Renaissance folk, and seized, as men were seized then, with that insatiable curiosity which characterised the outbreak of the New Learning. The matter of thought in it is of less interest to us than the poetic creation wrought out of it, or than the art with which it is done. We see the form into which the imaginative conception is thrown--the group of sorrowing students carrying their master's corpse to the high platform of the mountain, singing what he was, in admiration and honour and delight that he had mastered life and won eternity; a conception full of humanity, as full of the life of the dead master's soul as of the students' enthusiasm. This thrills us into creation, with the poet, as we read. Then the imagination which has made the conception into form adorns it. It creates the plain, the encircling mountains, one cloudy peak higher than the rest; as we mount we look on the plain below; we reach the city on the hill, pa.s.s it, and climb the hill-top; there are all the high-flying birds, the meteors, the lightnings, the thickest dew. And we lay our dead on the peak, above the plain. This is the scenery, the imaginative ornament, and all through it we are made to hear the chant of the students; and so lifting is the melody of the verse we seem to taste the air, fresher and fresher as we climb. Then, finally, into the midst of this flows for us the eager intensity of the scholar. Dead as he is, we feel him to be alive; never resting, pus.h.i.+ng on incessantly, beating failure beneath his feet, making it the step for further search for the infinite, resolute to live in the dull limits of the present work, but never content save in waiting for that eternity which will fulfil the failure of earth; which, missing earth's success, throws itself on G.o.d, dying to gain the highest. This is the pa.s.sion of the poem, and Browning is in it like a fire. It was his own, his very life. He pours it into the students who rejoice in the death of their master, and he gives it to us as we read the poem. And then, because conception, imagination, and intensity of thought and emotion all here work together, as in _Abt Vogler_, the melody of the poem is lovely, save in one verse which ought to be out of the poem. As to the conclusion, it is priceless. Such a conclusion can only emerge when all that precedes it finely contains it, and I have often thought that it pictures Browning himself. I wish he had been buried on a mountain top, all Italy below him.

Well, here's the platform, here's the proper place: Hail to your purlieus, All ye high-flyers of the feathered race, Swallows and curlews!

Here's the top-peak; the mult.i.tude below Live, for they can, there: This man decided not to Live but Know-- Bury this man there?

Here--here's his place, where meteors shoot, clouds form, Lightenings are loosened.

Stars come and go! Let joy break with the storm, Peace let the dew send!

Lofty designs must close in like effects: Loftily lying, Leave him--still loftier than the world suspects, Living and dying.

This is the artist at work, and I doubt whether all the laborious prose written, in history and criticism, on the revival of learning, will ever express better than this short poem the inexhaustible thirst of the Renaissance in its pursuit of knowledge, or the enthusiasm of the pupils of a New Scholar for his desperate strife to know in a short life the very centre of the Universe.

Another poem on the arts which is mixed up with Browning's theory of life is _Andrea del Sarto_. Into it the theory slips, like an uninvited guest into a dinner-party of whom it is felt that he has some relation to some one of the guests, but for whom no cover is laid. The faulty and broken life of Andrea, in its contrast with his flawless drawing, has been a favourite subject with poets. Alfred de Musset and others have dramatised it, and it seems strange that none of our soul-wrecking and vivisecting novelists have taken it up for their amus.e.m.e.nt. Browning has not left out a single point of the subject. The only criticism I should make of this admirable poem is that, when we come to the end, we dislike the woman and despise the man more than we pity either of them; and in tragic art-work of a fine quality, pity for human nature with a far-off tenderness in it should remain as the most lasting impression.

All the greater artists, even while they went to the bottom of sorrow and wickedness, have done this wise and beautiful thing, and Browning rarely omits it.

The first art-matter in the poem is Browning's sketch of the sudden genesis of a picture. Andrea is sitting with his wife on the window-seat looking out to Fiesole. As he talks she smiles a weary, lovely, autumn smile, and, born in that instant and of her smile, he sees his picture, knows its atmosphere, realises its tone of colour, feels its prevailing sentiment. How he will execute it is another question, and depends on other things; but no better sketch could be given of the sudden spiritual fas.h.i.+on in which great pictures are generated. Here are the lines, and they also strike the keynote of Andrea's soul--that to which his life has brought him.

You smile? why, there's my picture ready made, There's what we painters call our harmony!

A common greyness silvers everything,-- All in a twilight, you and I alike--, You at the point of your first pride in me (That's gone, you know),--but I, at every point; My youth, my hope, my art, being all toned down To yonder sober pleasant Fiesole.

There's the bell clinking from the chapel-top; That length of convent-wall across the way Holds the trees safer, huddled more inside; The last monk leaves the garden; days decrease, And autumn grows, autumn in everything.

Eh? the whole seems to fall into a shape As if I saw alike my work and self And all that I was born to be and do, A twilight piece. Love, we are in G.o.d's hand.

In G.o.d's hand? Yes, but why being free are we so fettered? And here slips in the unbidden guest of the theory. Andrea has chosen earthly love; Lucrezia is all in all; and he has reached absolute perfection in drawing--

I do what many dream of, all their lives.

He can reach out beyond himself no more. He has got the earth, lost the heaven. He makes no error, and has, therefore, no impa.s.sioned desire which, flaming through the faulty picture, makes it greater art than his faultless work. "The soul is gone from me, that vext, suddenly-impa.s.sioned, upward-rus.h.i.+ng thing, with its play, insight, broken sorrows, sudden joys, pursuing, uncontented life. These men reach a heaven shut out from me, though they cannot draw like me. No praise or blame affects me. I know my handiwork is perfect. But there burns a truer light of G.o.d in them. Lucrezia, I am judged."

Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp, Or what's a heaven for? All is silver-grey Placid and perfect with my art:--the worse

"Here," he says, "is a piece of Rafael. The arm is out of drawing, and I could make it right. But the pa.s.sion, the soul of the thing is not in me. Had you, my love, but urged me upward, to glory and G.o.d, I might have been uncontent; I might have done it for you. No," and again he sweeps round on himself, out of his excuses, "perhaps not, 'incentives come from the soul's self'; and mine is gone. I've chosen the love of you, Lucrezia, earth's love, and I cannot pa.s.s beyond my faultless drawing into the strife to paint those divine imaginations the soul conceives."

That is the meaning of Browning. The faultless, almost mechanical art, the art which might be born of an adulterous connection between science and art, is of little value to men. Not in the flawless painter is true art found, but in those who painted inadequately, yet whose pictures breathe

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

In this incessant strife to create new worlds, and in their creation, which, always ending in partial failure, forces fresh effort, lies, Browning might have said, the excuse for G.o.d having deliberately made us defective. Had we been made good, had we no strife with evil; had we the power to embody at once the beauty we are capable of seeing; could we have laid our hand on truth, and grasped her without the desperate struggle we have to win one fruit from her tree; had we had no strong crying and tears, no agony against wrong, against our own pa.s.sions and their work, against false views of things--we might have been angels; but we should not have had humanity and all its wild history, and all its work; we should not have had that which, for all I know, may be unique in the universe; no, nor any of the great results of the battle and its misery. Had it not been for the defectiveness, the sin and pain, we should have had nothing of the interest of the long evolution of science, law and government, of the charm of discovery, of pursuit, of the slow upbuilding of moral right, of the vast variety of philosophy.

Above all, we should have had none of the great art men love so well, no _Odyssey_, _Divine Comedy_ no _Hamlet_, no _Oedipus_, no Handel, no Beethoven, no painting or sculpture where the love and sorrow of the soul breathe in canvas, fresco, marble and bronze, no, nor any of the great and loving lives who suffered and overcame, from Christ to the poor woman who dies for love in a London lane. All these are made through the struggle and the sorrow. We should not have had, I repeat, humanity; and provided no soul perishes for ever but lives to find union with undying love, the game, with all its terrible sorrow, pays for the candle. We may find out, some day, that the existence and work of humanity, crucified as it has been, are of untold interest and use to the universe--which things the angels desire to look into. If Browning had listened to that view, he would, I think, have accepted it.

_Old Pictures in Florence_ touches another side of his theory.

In itself, it is one of Browning's half-humorous poems; a pleasantly-composed piece, glancing here and glancing there, as a man's mind does when leaning over a hill-villa's parapet on a sunny morning in Florence. I have elsewhere quoted its beginning. It is a fine example of his nature-poetry: it creates the scenery and atmosphere of the poem; and the four lines with which the fourth verse closes sketch what Browning thought to be one of his poetic gifts--

And mark through the winter afternoons.

By a gift G.o.d grants me now and then, In the mild decline of those suns like moons.

Who walked in Florence, besides her men.

This, then, is a poem of many moods, beginning with Giotto's Tower; then wondering why Giotto did not tell the poet who loved him so much that one of his pictures was lying hidden in a shop where some one else picked it up; then, thinking of all Giotto's followers, whose ghosts he imagines are wandering through Florence, sorrowing for the decay of their pictures.

"But at least they have escaped, and have their holiday in heaven, and do not care one straw for our praise or blame. They did their work, they and the great masters. We call them old Masters, but they were new in their time; their old Masters were the Greeks. They broke away from the Greeks and revolutionised art into a new life. In our turn we must break away from them."

And now glides in the theory. "When Greek art reached its perfection, the limbs which infer the soul, and enough of the soul to inform the limbs, were faultlessly represented. Men said the best had been done, and aspiration and growth in art ceased. Content with what had been done, men imitated, but did not create. But man cannot remain without change in a past perfection; for then he remains in a kind of death.

Even with failure, with faulty work, he desires to make new things, and in making, to be alive and feel his life. Therefore Giotto and the rest began to create a fresh aspect of humanity, which, however imperfect in form, would suggest an infinite perfection. The Greek perfection ties us down to earth, to a few forms, and the sooner, if it forbid us to go on, we reject its ideal as the only one, the better for art and for mankind.

'Tis a life-long toil till our lump be leaven-- The better! What's come to perfection perishes.

Things learned on earth, we shall practise in heaven: Works done least rapidly, Art most cherishes.

"The great Campanile is still unfinished;" so he shapes his thoughts into his scenery. Shall man be satisfied in art with the crystallised joy of Apollo, or the petrified grief of Niobe, when there are a million more expressions of joy and grief to render? In that way felt Giotto and his crew. "We will paint the whole of man," they cried, "paint his new hopes and joys and pains, and never pause, because we shall never quite succeed. We will paint the soul in all its infinite variety--bring the invisible full into play. Of course we shall miss perfection--who can get side by side with infinitude?--but we shall grow out of the dead perfection of the past, and live and move, and have our being.

Let the visible go to the dogs--what matters?"

Thus art began again. Its spring-tide came, dim and dewy; and the world rejoiced.

And that is what has happened again and again in the history of art.

Browning has painted a universal truth. It was that which took place when Wordsworth, throwing away the traditions of a century and all the finished perfection, as men thought, of the Augustan age, determined to write of man as man, whatever the issue; to live with the infinite variety of human nature, and in its natural simplicities. What we shall see, he thought, may be faulty, common, unideal, imperfect. What we shall write will not have the conventional perfection of Pope and Gray, which all the cultivated world admires, and in which it rests content--growth and movement dead--but it will be true, natural, alive, running onwards to a far-off goal. And we who write--our loins are accinct, our lights burning, as men waiting for the revelation of the Bridegroom. Wordsworth brought back the soul to Poetry. She made her failures, but she was alive. Spring was blossoming around her with dews and living airs, and the infinite opened before her.

So, too, it was when Turner recreated landscape art. There was the perfect Claudesque landscape, with all its parts arranged, its colours chosen, the composition balanced, the tree here, the river there, the figures in the foreground, the accurate distribution and gradation of the ma.s.ses of light and shade. "There," the critics said, "we have had perfection. Let us rest in that." And all growth in landscape-art ceased. Then came Turner, who, when he had followed the old for a time and got its good, broke away from it, as if in laughter. "What," he felt, "the infinite of nature is before me; inconceivable change and variety in earth, and sky, and sea--and shall I be tied down to one form of painting landscape, one arrangement of artistic properties? Let the old perfection go." And we had our revolution in landscape art: nothing, perhaps, so faultless as Claude's composition, but life, love of nature, and an illimitable range; incessant change, movement, and aspiration which have never since allowed the landscape artist to think that he has attained.

On another side of the art of painting, Rossetti, Millais, Hunt arose; and they said, "We will paint men as they actually were in the past, in the moments of their pa.s.sion, and with their emotions on their faces, and with the scenery around them as it was; and whatever background of nature there was behind them, it shall be painted direct from the very work of nature herself, and in her very colours. In doing this our range will become infinite. No doubt we shall fail. We cannot grasp the whole of nature and humanity, but we shall be _in_ their life: aspiring, alive, and winning more and more of truth." And the world of art howled at them, as the world of criticism howled at Wordsworth. But a new life and joy began to move in painting. Its winter was over, its spring had begun, its summer was imagined. Their drawing was faulty; their colour was called crude; they seemed to know little or nothing of composition; but the Spirit of Life was in them, and their faults were worth more than the best successes of the school that followed Rafael; for their faults proved that pa.s.sion, aspiration and originality were again alive:

Give these, I exhort you, their guerdon and glory For daring so much, before they well did it.

If ever the artist should say to himself, "What I desire has been attained: I can but imitate or follow it"; or if the people who care for any art should think, "The best has been reached; let us be content to rest in that perfection"; the death of art has come.