The Poetry Of Robert Browning Part 28

_Jocoseria_ has poems of a higher quality, some of which, like the lovely _Never the Time and Place_, I have been already quoted. _Ixion_ is too obscurely put to attain its end with the general public. But it may be recommended, though vainly, to those theologians who, hungry for the Divine Right of torture, build their G.o.d, like Caliban, out of their own minds; who, foolish enough to believe that the everlasting endurance of evil is a necessary guarantee of the everlasting endurance of good, are still bold and bad enough to proclaim the abominable lie of eternal punishment. They need that spirit the little child whom Christ placed in the midst of his disciples; and in gaining which, after living the life of the lover, the warrior, the poet, the statesman, _Jochanan Hakkadosh_ found absolute peace and joy. Few poems contain more of Browning's matured theory of life than this of the Jewish Rabbi; and its seriousness is happily mingled with imaginative ill.u.s.trations and with racy wit. The sketch of Tsaddik, who puts us in mind of Wagner in the _Faust_, is done with a sarcastic joy in exposing the Philistine, and with a delight in its own cleverness which is fascinating.

_Ferishtah's Fancies_ and _Parleyings with Certain People_ followed _Jocoseria_ in 1884 and 1887. The first of these books is much the better of the two. A certain touch of romance is given by the Dervish, by the Fables with which he ill.u.s.trates his teaching, and by the Eastern surroundings. Some of the stories are well told, and their scenery is truthfully wrought and in good colour. The subjects are partly theological, with always a reference to human life; and partly of the affections and their working. It is natural to a poet, and delightful in Browning, to find him in his old age dwelling from poem to poem on the pre-eminence of love, on love as the ultimate judge of all questions. He a.s.serts this again and again; with the greatest force in _A Pillar at Sebzevar_, and, more lightly, in _Cherries_. Yet, and this is a pity, he is not satisfied with the decision of love, but spends pages in argumentative discussions which lead him away from that poetical treatment of the subjects which love alone, as the master, would have enabled him to give. However, the treatment that love gives we find in the lyrics at the end of each _Fancy_; and some of these lyrics are of such delicate and subtle beauty that I am tempted to think that they were written at an earlier period, and their _Fancies_ composed to fit them. If they were written now, it is plain that age had not disenabled him from walking with pleasure and power among those sweet, enamelled meadows of poetry in whose soil he now thought great poetry did not grow. And when we read the lyrics, our regret is all the more deep that he chose the thorn-clad and desert lands, where barren argument goes round and round its subjects without ever finding the true path to their centre.

He lost himself more completely in this error in _Parleyings with Certain People_, in which book, with the exception of the visionary landscapes in _Gerard de Lairesse_, and some few pa.s.sages in _Francis Furini_ and _Charles Avison_, imagination, such as belongs to a poet, has deserted Browning. He feels himself as if this might be said of him; and he asks in _Gerard de Lairesse_ if he has lost the poetic touch, the poetic spirit, because he writes of the soul, of facts, of things invisible--not of fancy's feignings, not of the things perceived by the senses? "I can do this," he answers, "if I like, as well as you,"

and he paints the landscape of a whole day filled with mythological figures. The pa.s.sage is poetry; we see that he has not lost his poetic genius. But, he calls it "fooling," and then contrasts the spirit of Greek lore with the spirit of immortal hope and cheer which he possesses, with his faith that there is for man a certainty of Spring.

But that is not the answer to his question. It only says that the spirit which animates him now is higher than the Greek spirit. It does not answer the question--Whether _Daniel Bartoli_ or _Charles Avison_ or any of these _Parleyings_ even approach as poetry _Paracelsus_, the _Dramatic Lyrics_, or _Men and Women_. They do not. Nor has their intellectual work the same force, unexpectedness and certainty it had of old. Nevertheless, these _Parleyings_, at the close of the poet's life, and with biographical touches which give them vitality, enshrine Browning's convictions with regard to some of the greater and lesser problems of human life. And when his personality is vividly present in them, the argument, being thrilled with pa.s.sionate feeling, rises, but heavily like a wounded eagle, into an imaginative world.

The sub-consciousness in Browning's mind to which I have alluded--that these later productions of his were not as poetical as his earlier work and needed defence--is the real subject of a remarkable little poem at the end of the second volume of the _Dramatic Idyls_. He is thinking of himself as poet, perhaps of that double nature in him which on one side was quick to see and love beauty; and on the other, to see facts and love their strength. Sometimes the sensitive predominated. He was only the lover of beauty whom everything that touched him urged into song.

"Touch him ne'er so lightly, into song he broke: Soil so quick-receptive,--not one feather-seed, Not one flower-dust fell but straight its fall awoke Vitalising virtue: song would song succeed Sudden as spontaneous--prove a poet-soul!"

This, which Browning puts on the lips of another, is not meant, we are told, to describe himself. But it does describe one side of him very well, and the origin and conduct of a number of his earlier poems. But now, having changed his manner, even the principles of his poetry, he describes himself as different from that--as a sterner, more iron poet, and the work he now does as more likely to endure, and be a power in the world of men. He was curiously mistaken.

Indeed, he cries, is that the soil in which a poet grows?

"Rock's the song-soil rather, surface hard and bare: Sun and dew their mildness, storm and frost their rage Vainly both expend,--few flowers awaken there: Quiet in its cleft broods--what the after-age Knows and names a pine, a nation's heritage."

In this sharp division, as in his _Epilogue_ to _Pacchiarotto_, he misses the truth. It is almost needless to say that a poet can be sensitive to beauty, and also to the stern facts of the moral and spiritual struggle of mankind through evil to good. All the great poets have been sensitive to both and mingled them in their work. They were ideal and real in both the flower and the pine. They are never forced to choose one or other of these aims or lives in their poetry. They mingled facts and fancies, the intellectual and the imaginative. They lived in the whole world of the outward and the inward, of the senses and the soul. Truth and beauty were one to them. This division of which Browning speaks Was the unfortunate result of that struggle between his intellect and his imagination on which I have dwelt. In old days it was not so with him. His early poetry had sweetness with strength, stern thinking with tender emotion, love of beauty with love of truth, idealism with realism, nature with humanity, fancy with fact. And this is the equipment of the great poet. When he divides these qualities each from the other, and is only aesthetic or only severe in his realism; only the wors.h.i.+pper of Nature or only the wors.h.i.+pper of human nature; only the poet of beauty or only the poet of austere fact; only the idealist or only the realist; only of the senses or only of the soul--he may be a poet, but not a great poet. And as the singular pursuit of the realistic is almost always bound up with pride, because realism does not carry us beyond ourselves into the infinite where we are humbled, the realistic poetry loses imagination; its love of love tends to become self-love, or love of mere cleverness. And then its poetic elements slowly die.

There was that, as I have said, in Browning which resisted this sad conclusion, but the resistance was not enough to prevent a great loss of poetic power. But whatever he lost, there was one poetic temper of mind which never failed him, the heroic temper of the faithful warrior for G.o.d and man; there was one ideal view of humanity which dominated all his work; there was one principle which directed all his verse to celebrate the struggle of humanity towards the perfection for which G.o.d, he believed, had destined it. These things underlie all the poems in _Ferishtah's Fancies_ and the _Parleyings with Certain People_, and give to them the uplifted, n.o.ble trumpet note with which at times they are animated. The same temper and principle, the same view of humanity emerge in that fine lyric which is the Epilogue to _Ferishtah's Fancies_, and in the Epilogue to _Asolando_.

The first sees a vision of the present and the future in which all the battle of our life pa.s.ses into a glorious end; nor does the momentary doubt that occurs at the close of the poem--that his belief in a divine conclusion of our strife may only have been caused by his own happiness in love--really trouble his conviction. That love itself is part of the power which makes the n.o.ble conclusion sure. The certainty of this conclusion made his courage in the fight unwavering, despair impossible, joy in battle, duty; and to be "ever a fighter" in the foremost rank the highest privilege of man.

Then the cloud-rift broadens, spanning earth that's under, Wide our world displays its worth, man's strife and strife's success: All the good and beauty, wonder crowning wonder, Till my heart and soul applaud perfection, nothing less.

And for that reason, because of the perfectness to come, Browning lived every hour of his life for good and against wrong. He said with justice of himself, and with justice he brought the ideal aim and the real effort together:

I looked beyond the world for truth and beauty: Sought, found, and did my duty.

Nor, almost in the very grasp of death, did this faith fail him. He kept, in the midst of a fretful, slothful, wailing world, where prophets like Carlyle and Ruskin were as impatient and bewildered, as lamenting and despondent, as the decadents they despised, the temper of his Herakles in _Balaustion_. He left us that temper as his last legacy, and he could not have left us a better thing. We may hear it in his last poem, and bind it about our hearts in sorrow and joy, in battle and peace, in the hour of death and the days of judgment.

At the midnight in the silence of the sleep-time When you set your fancies free, Will they pa.s.s to where--by death, fools think, imprisoned-- Low he lies who once so loved you, whom you loved so --Pity me?

Oh to love so, be so loved, yet so mistaken What had I on earth to do With the slothful, with the mawkish, the unmanly?

Like the aimless, helpless, hopeless, did I drivel --Being--who?

One who never turned his back, but marched breast forward, Never doubted clouds would break, Never dreamed, though right were worsted, wrong would triumph, Held we fall to rise, are baffled to fight better, Sleep to wake.

No, at noonday in the bustle of man's work-time Greet the unseen with a cheer!

Bid him forward, breast and back as either should be, "Strive and thrive!" cry "Speed,--fight on, fare ever There as here!"

With these high words he ended a long life, and his memory still falls upon us, like the dew which fell on Paradise. It was a life lived fully, kindly, lovingly, at its just height from the beginning to the end. No fear, no vanity, no lack of interest, no complaint of the world, no anger at criticism, no villain fancies disturbed his soul. No laziness, no feebleness in effort, injured his work, no desire for money, no faltering of aspiration, no pandering of his gift and genius to please the world, no surrender of art for the sake of fame or filthy lucre, no falseness to his ideal, no base pessimism, no slavery to science yet no boastful ignorance of its good, no morbid naturalism, no devotion to the false forms of beauty, no despair of man, no retreat from men into a world of sickly or vain beauty, no abandonment of the great ideas or disbelief in their mastery, no enfeeblement of reason such as at this time walks hand in hand with the wors.h.i.+p of the mere discursive intellect, no lack of joy and healthy vigour and keen inquiry and pa.s.sionate interest in humanity. Scarcely any special bias can be found running through his work; on the contrary, an incessant change of subject and manner, combined with a strong but not overweening individuality, raced, like blood through the body, through every vein of his labour. Creative and therefore joyful, receptive and therefore thoughtful, at one with humanity and therefore loving; aspiring to G.o.d and believing in G.o.d, and therefore steeped to the lips in radiant Hope; at one with the past, pa.s.sionate with the present, and possessing by faith an endless and glorious future--this was a life lived on the top of the wave, and moving with its motion from youth to manhood, from manhood to old age.

There is no need to mourn for his departure. Nothing feeble has been done, nothing which lowers the note of his life, nothing we can regret as less than his native strength. His last poem was like the last look of the Phoenix to the sun before the sunlight lights the odorous pyre from which the new-created Bird will spring. And as if the Muse of Poetry wished to adorn the image of his death, he pa.s.sed away amid a world of beauty, and in the midst of a world endeared to him by love.

Italy was his second country. In Florence lies the wife of his heart. In every city he had friends, friends not only among men and women, but friends in every ancient wall, in every fold of Apennine and Alp, in every breaking of the blue sea, in every forest of pines, in every Church and Palace and Town Hall, in every painting that great art had wrought, in every storied market place, in every great life which had adorned, honoured and made romantic Italy; the great mother of Beauty, at whose b.r.e.a.s.t.s have hung and whose milk have sucked all the arts and all the literatures of modern Europe. Venice saw and mourned his death.

The sea and sky and mountain glory of the city he loved so well encompa.s.sed him with her beauty; and their soft graciousness, their temperate power of joy and life made his departure peaceful. Strong and tender in life, his death added a new fairness to his life. Mankind is fortunate to have so n.o.ble a memory, so full and excellent a work to rest upon and love.