Read Ebook: The Poetry Of Robert Browning by Brooke Stopford A Stopford Augustus

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Ebook has 835 lines and 137695 words, and 17 pages

And then, beyond all these matters of form, there is the poet himself, alone among his fellows in his unique and individual power, who has fastened himself into our hearts, added a new world to our perceptions, developed our lives and enlarged our interests. And there are the separate and distinguished excellences of his work--the virtues which have no defects, the virtues, too, of his defects, all the new wonders of his realm--the many originalities which have justly earned for him that high and lonely seat on Parnassus on which his noble Shadow sits to-day, unchallenged in our time save by that other Shadow with whom, in reverence and love, we have been perhaps too bold to contrast him.

FOOTNOTES:

It is a difficult task to explain or analyse the treatment of Nature by Browning. It is easy enough to point out his remarkable love of her colour, his vivid painting of brief landscapes, his minute observation, his flashing way of description, his feeling for the breadth and freshness of Nature, his love of flowers and animals, and the way he has of hitting and emphasising the central point or light of a landscape. This is easy work, but it is not so easy to capture and define the way in which his soul, when he was alone, felt with regard to the heavens, and the earth and all that therein is. Others, like Wordsworth, have stated this plainly: Browning has nowhere defined his way. What his intellect held the Natural World to be, in itself; what it meant for man; the relation in which it stood to God and God to it--these things are partly plain. They have their attraction for us. It is always interesting to know what an imaginative genius thinks about such matters. But it is only a biographical or a half-scientific interest. But what we want to discover is how Browning, as a poet, felt the world of Nature. We have to try and catch the unconscious attitude of his soul when the Universe was at work around him, and he was for the time its centre--and this is the real difficulty.

Sometimes we imagine we have caught and fixed this elusive thing, but we finally give up the quest. The best we can do is to try to find the two or three general thoughts, the most frequently recurring emotions Browning had when Nature at sundry hours and in diverse manners displayed before him her beauty, splendour and fire, and seemed to ask his worship; or again, when she stood apart from him, with the mocking smile she often wears, and whispered in his ear, "Thou shall pursue me always, but never find my secret, never grasp my streaming hair." And both these experiences are to be found in Browning. Nature and he are sometimes at one, and sometimes at two; but seldom the first, and generally the second.

Oh, good gigantic smile o' the brown old earth, This autumn morning! How he sets his bones To bask i' the sun, and thrusts out knees and feet For the ripple to run over in its mirth; Listening the while, where on the heap of stones The white breast of the sea-lark twitters sweet.

The smile, the mirth, the listening, might be said to impute humanity to Nature: but the Earth and the Sea are plainly quite distinct from us. These are great giant creatures who are not ourselves: Titans who live with one another and not with us; and the terms of our humanity are used to make us aware of their separate existence from us, not of their being images only of our mind.

It is plain that Browning separates us altogether from the elemental life of these gigantic beings. And what is true of these passages is true, with one or two exceptions, of all the natural descriptions of Browning in which the pathetic fallacy seems to be used by him. I need not say how extraordinarily apart this method of his is from that of Tennyson. Then Tennyson, like Coleridge--only Tennyson is as vague and wavering in this belief as Coleridge is firm and clear in it--sometimes speaks as if Nature did not exist at all apart from our thought:

Her life the eddying of our living soul--

It has had its scenes, its joys and crimes, But that is its own affair.

And its silence also is its own. Those who linger there think that the place longs to speak; its bosom seems to heave with all it knows; but the desire is its own, not ours transferred to it. But when the two lovers were there, Nature, of her own accord, made up a spell for them and troubled them into speech:

A moment after, and hands unseen Were hanging the night around us fast; But we knew that a bar was broken between Life and life: we were mixed at last In spite of the mortal screen.

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

Not one of the poets of this century would have thought in that fashion concerning Nature. Only for a second, man happened to be in harmony with the Powers at play in Nature. They took the two lovers up for a moment, made them one, and dropped them. "They relapsed to their ancient mood." The line is a whole lesson in Browning's view of Nature. But this special interest in us is rare, for we are seldom in the blessed mood of unselfconscious joy and love. When we are, on the other hand, self-conscious, or in doubt, or out of harmony with love and joy, or anxious for the transient things of the world--Nature, unsympathetic wholly, mocks and plays with us like a faun. When Sordello climbs the ravine, thinking of himself as Apollo, the wood, "proud of its observer," a mocking phrase, "tried surprises on him, stratagems and games."

Or, our life is too small for her greatness. When we are unworthy our high lineage, noisy or mean, then we

quail before a quiet sky Or sea, too little for their quietude.

And God's own profound Was above me, and round me the mountains, And under, the sea, And within me, my heart to bear witness What was and shall be.

He is worthy of the glorious sight; full of eternal thoughts. Wordsworth would then have made the soul of Nature sympathise with his soul. But Browning makes Nature manifest her apartness from the man. The mountains know nothing of his soul: they amuse themselves with him; they are even half angry with him for his intrusion--a foreigner who dares an entrance into their untrespassed world. Tennyson could not have thought that way. It is true the mountains are alive in the poet's thought, but not with the poet's life: nor does he touch them with his sentiment.

Oh, those mountains, their infinite movement Still moving with you; For, ever some new head and heart of them Thrusts into view To observe the intruder; you see it If quickly you turn And, before they escape you surprise them. They grudge you should learn How the soft plains they look on, lean over And love -- Cower beneath them.

Total apartness from us! Nature mocking, surprising us; watching us from a distance, even pleased to see us going to our destruction. We may remember how the hills look grimly on Childe Roland when he comes to the tower. The very sunset comes back to see him die:

before it left, The dying sunset kindled through a cleft: The hills, like giants at a hunting, lay, Chin upon hand, to see the game at bay.--

Then, as if they loved to see the death of their quarry, cried, without one touch of sympathy:

"Now stab and end the creature--to the heft!"

On the whole, then, for these instances might be supported by many more, Nature is alive in Browning, but she is not humanised at all, nor at all at one with us. Tennyson does not make her alive, but he does humanise her. The other poets of the century do make her alive, but they harmonise her in one way or another with us. Browning is distinct from them all in keeping her quite divided from man.

His presence on all lifeless things; the winds Are henceforth voices, wailing or a shout, A querulous mutter or a quick gay laugh, Never a senseless gust now man is born. The herded pines commune and have deep thoughts A secret they assemble to discuss When the sun drops behind their trunks which glare Like grates of hell: the peerless cup afloat Of the lake-lily is an urn, some nymph Swims bearing high above her head: no bird Whistles unseen, but through the gaps above That let light in upon the gloomy woods, A shape peeps from the breezy forest-top, Arch with small puckered mouth and mocking eye. The morn has enterprise, deep quiet droops With evening, triumph takes the sunset hour. Voluptuous transport ripens with the corn Beneath a warm moon like a happy face: --And this to fill us with regard for Man.

It follows from this idea of Browning's that he was capable of describing Nature as she is, without adding any deceiving mist of human sentiment to his descriptions; and of describing her as accurately and as vividly as Tennyson, even more vividly, because of his extraordinary eye for colour. And Nature, so described, is of great interest in Browning's poetry.

Oh, what a dawn of day! How the March sun feels like May! All is blue again After last night's rain, And the South dries the hawthorn-spray.

That is well done--he has liked what he saw. But what is it all, he thinks; what do I care about it? And he ends the verse:

Only, my Love's away! I'd as lief that the blue were grey.

Then take the next verse:

Runnels, which rillets swell. Must be dancing down the dell, With a foaming head On the beryl bed Paven smooth as a hermit's cell.

It is excellent description, but it is only scenery for the real passion in Browning's mind.

Each with a tale to tell-- Could my Love but attend as well.

We have then direct description of Nature; direct description of man sometimes as influenced by Nature; sometimes Nature used as the scenery of human passion; but no intermingling of them both. Each is for ever distinct. The only thing that unites them in idea, and in the end, is that both have proceeded from the creative joy of God.

And still more labyrinthine buds the rose,

holds in its symbolism the whole essence of a great artist's nature. I quote the passage. It describes Sordello, and it could not better describe Italy:

Sordello foremost in the regal class Nature has broadly severed from the mass Of men, and framed for pleasure, as she frames Some happy lands, that have luxurious names, For loose fertility; a footfall there Suffices to upturn to the warm air Half-germinating spices; mere decay Produces richer life; and day by day New pollen on the lily-petal grows, And still more labyrinthine buds the rose.

That compares to the character of a whole country the character of a whole type of humanity. I take another of such comparisons, and it is as minute as this is broad, and done with as great skill and charm. Sordello is full of poetic fancies, touched and glimmering with the dew of youth, and he has woven them around the old castle where he lives. Browning compares the young man's imaginative play to the airy and audacious labour of the spider. He, that is, Sordello,

O'er-festooning every interval, As the adventurous spider, making light Of distance, shoots her threads from depth to height, From barbican to battlement: so flung Fantasies forth and in their centre swung Our architect,--the breezy morning fresh Above, and merry,--all his waving mesh Laughing with lucid dew-drops rainbow-edged.

It could not be better done. The description might stand alone, but better than it is the image it gives of the joy, fancifulness and creativeness of a young poet, making his web of thoughts and imaginations, swinging in their centre like the spider; all of them subtle as the spider's threads, obeying every passing wind of impulse, and gemmed with the dew and sunlight of youth.

Thamuris, marching, laughed "Each flake of foam" "Mocks slower clouds adrift in the blue dome!"

For Autumn was the season; red the sky Held morn's conclusive signet of the sun To break the mists up, bid them blaze and die.

Morn had the mastery as, one by one All pomps produced themselves along the tract From earth's far ending to near heaven begun.

Was there a ravaged tree? it laughed compact With gold, a leaf-ball crisp, high brandished now, Tempting to onset frost which late attacked.

Was there a wizened shrub, a starveling bough, A fleecy thistle filched from by the wind, A weed, Pan's trampling hoof would disallow?

Each, with a glory and a rapture twined About it, joined the rush of air and light And force: the world was of one joyous mind.

Say not the birds flew! they forebore their right-- Swam, revelling onward in the roll of things. Say not the beasts' mirth bounded! that was flight--

How could the creatures leap, no lift of wings? Such earth's community of purpose, such The ease of earth's fulfilled imaginings,--

So did the near and far appear to touch I' the moment's transport,--that an interchange Of function, far with near, seemed scarce too much;

And had the rooted plant aspired to range With the snake's licence, while the insect yearned To glow fixed as the flower, it were not strange--

No more than if the fluttery tree-top turned To actual music, sang itself aloft; Or if the wind, impassioned chantress, earned

The right to soar embodied in some soft Fine form all fit for cloud companionship, And, blissful, once touch beauty chased so oft.

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