Robert Browning

Make new hopes shine through the flesh they fray,New fears aggrandize the rags and tatters:To bring the invisible full into play!Let the visible go to the dogs—what matters?

The prophecy with which the poem concludes, of a great revival of Italian art consequent on the advent of political and intellectual liberty, has not obtained fulfilment in the course of the half century that has elapsed since it was uttered. Browning's doctrine that aspiration towards what is higher is more to be valued in art than the attainment of what is lower is a leading motive in the admirable dramatic monologue placed in the lips of Andrea del Sarto, the faultless painter. His craftsmanship is unerring; whatever he imagines he can achieve; nothing in line or in colour is other than it ought to be; and yet precisely because he has succeeded, his failure is profound and irretrievable:

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

He could set right the arm which is wrongly put in Rafael's work that fronts him; but "all the play, the insight and the stretch" of Rafael are lacking in his own faultless lines. He looks back regretfully to his kingly days at Fontainebleau with the royal Francis, when what seemed a veritable fire was in his heart. And he tries to find an excuse for his failure as artist and as man in the coldness of his beautiful Lucrezia—for he who has failed in the higher art has also failed in the higher love—Lucrezia, who values his work only by the coins it brings in, and who needs those coins just now for one whose whistle invites her away. All might be so much better otherwise! Yet otherwise he cannot choose that it should be; his art must remain what it is—not golden but silver-grey; and his Lucrezia may attend to the Cousin's whistle if only she retains the charm, not to be evaded, of her beauty.67

Browning does not mean that art in its passionate pursuit of the highest ends should be indifferent to the means, or that things spiritual do not require as adequate a sensuous embodiment as they are capable of receiving from the painter's brush or the poet's pen. Were art a mere symbol or suggestion, two bits of sticks nailed crosswise might claim to be art as admirable as any. What is the eye for, if not to see with vivid exactness? what is the hand for, if not to fashion things as nature made them? It is through body that we reach after the soul; and the passion for truth and reality is a passion for the invisible which is expressed in and through these. Such is the pleading of Fra Lippo Lippi, the tonsured painter caught out of bounds, in that poem in which the dramatic monologue of Browning attains its perfection of life and energy. Fra Lippo is intoxicated by the mere forms and colours of things, and he is assured that these mean intensely and mean well:

The beauty and the wonder and the power,The shapes of things, their colours, lights and shades,Changes, surprises—and God made it all!

These are the gospel to preach which he girds loin and lights the lamp, though he may perforce indulge a patron in shallower pieties of the conventional order, and though it is not all gospel with him, for now and again, when the moon shines and girls go skipping and singing down Florence streets—"Zooks, sir, flesh and blood, that's all I'm made of!" Fra Lippo with his outbreaks of frank sensuality is far nearer to Browning's kingdom of heaven than is the faultless painter; he presses with ardour towards his proper goal in art; he has full faith in the ideal, but with him it is to be sought only through the real; or rather it need not be sought at all, for one who captures any fragment of reality captures also undesignedly and inevitably its divine significance.68

The same doctrine which is applied to art in Old Pictures in Florence, that high aims, though unattained, are of more worth than a lower achievement, is applied, and with a fine lyrical enthusiasm, to the pursuit of knowledge in A Grammarian's Funeral. The time is "shortly after the Revival of Learning in Europe"; the place—

a tall mountain, citied to the top,Crowded with culture!—

is imagined to suit the idea of the poem. The dead scholar, borne to the summit for burial on the shoulders of his disciples, had been possessed by the aspiration of Paracelsus—to know; and, unlike Paracelsus, he had never sought on earth both to know and to enjoy. He has been the saint and the martyr of Renaissance philology. For the genius of such a writer as the author of Hudibras, with his positive intellect and dense common sense, there could hardly have been found a fitter object for mockery than this remorseless and indefatigable pedant. Browning, through the singing voices of the dead master's disciples, exalts him to an eminence of honour and splendid fame. To a scholar Greek particles may serve as the fittest test of virtue; this glorious pedant has postponed life and the enjoyments of life to future cycles of existence; here on earth he expends a desperate passion—upon what? Upon the dryasdust intricacies of grammar; and it is not as though he had already attained; he only desperately follows after:

That low man seeks a little thing to do,Sees it and does it:This high man, with a great thing to pursue,Dies ere he knows it.

But again the grammarian, like the painter, does not strive after a vague, transcendental ideal; he is not as one that beateth the air; his quest for knowledge is definite and positive enough; he throws all care for infinite things, except the infinite of philological accuracy, upon God; and the viaticum of his last moments is one more point of grammar.

Two of the poems of Men and Women are pages tragic-grotesque and pathetic-grotesque from the history of religion. In The Heretic s Tragedy John, Master of the Temple, burns alive in Paris square for his sins against the faith and Holy Church; the glow of the blazing larch and pine almost reaches the reader of the stanzas; the great petals of this red rose of flame bend towards him; the gust of sulphur offends his nostrils. And the rage of piety is hotter than the fire; it is a mingled passion, compounded of delight in the fierce spectacle, a thrilling ecstacy at the sight of a fellow-creature tortured, the self-complacency of conscious orthodoxy, and the horrible zeal of the Lord's house. Yet though the event is sung by one of the rejoicing orthodox, somehow we are made to feel that when John the apostate, bound in the flames and gagged, prays to Jesus Christ to save him, that prayer may have been answered. This passage from the story of the age of faith was not selected with a view to please the mediaeval revivalists of the nineteenth century, but in truth its chief value is not theological or historical but artistic. Holy Cross Day, a second fragment from history, does not fall from the sublime to the ridiculous but rises from the ridiculous to the sublime. The picture of the close-packed Jews tumbling or sidling churchwards to hear the Christian sermon (for He saith "Compel them to come in") and to partake of heavenly grace has in it something of Rembrandt united with something of Callot. Such a crew of devout impostors is at once comic and piteous. But while they are cared for in the merciful bowels of the Church, and groan out the expected compunction, their ancient piety is not extinct; their hearts burn in them with the memory of Jacob's House and of Jerusalem. Christ at least was of their kindred, and if they wronged Him in past time, they will not wrong Him now by naming these who outrage and insult them after His name.

The historical distortions of the religion of Christ do not, however, disturb the faith of Browning in the Christian revelation of Divine love. In Cleon he exhibits the failure of Paganism, even in its forms of highest culture, to solve the riddle of life and to answer the requirements of the human spirit. All that regal power liberally and wisely used can confer belongs to Protus in his Tyranny; all that genius, and learning and art can confer is the possession of Cleon; and a profound discouragement has settled down upon the soul of each. The race progresses from point to point; self-consciousness is deepened and quickened as generation succeeds generation; the sympathies of the individual are multiplied and extended. But he that increases knowledge, increases sorrow; most progress is most failure; the soul climbs the heights only to perish there. Every day the sense of joy grows more acute; every day the soul grows more enlarged; and every day the power to put our best attainments to use diminishes. "And how dieth the wise man? As the fool. Therefore I hated life; yea, I hated all my labour that I had taken under the sun." The poem is, indeed, an Ecclesiastes of pagan religion. The assurance of extinction is the worm which gnaws at the heart of the rose:

It is so horribleI dare at times imagine to my needSome future state revealed to us by Zeus,Unlimited in capabilityFor joy, as this is in desire for joy.

But this is no better than a dream; Zeus could not but have revealed it, were it possible. Browning does not bring his Cleon, as Pater brings his Marius, into the Christian catacombs, where the image of the Shepherd bearing his lamb might interpret the mystery of death, nor to that house of Cecilia where Marius sees a new joy illuminating every face. Cleon has heard of Paulus and of Christus, but who can suppose that a mere barbarian Jew

Hath access to a secret shut from us?

The doctrine of Christ, preached on the island by certain slaves, is reported by an intelligent listener to be one which no sane man can accept. And Cleon will not squander the time that might be well employed in studying the proportions of a man or in combining the moods of music—the later hours of a philosopher and a poet—on the futile creed of slaves.

Immortality and Divine love—these were the great words pronounced by Paul and by Christ. Cleon is the despairing cry of Pagan culture for the life beyond the grave which would attune to harmony the dissonances of earth, and render intelligible its mournful obscurities. Saul, in the completed form of 1855, and An Epistle of Karshish are, the one a prophecy, the other a divination, of the mystery of the love of God in the life and death of his Son. The culminating moment in the effort of David by which he rouses to life the sunken soul of the King, the moment towards which all others tend, is that in which he finds in his own nature love as God's ultimate gift, and assured that in this, as in other gifts, the creature cannot surpass the Creator, he breaks forth into a prophecy of God's love made perfect in weakness:

O Saul, it shall beA Face like my face that receives thee; a Man like to meThou shalt love and be loved by, for ever: a Hand like this handShall throw open the gates of new life to thee! See the Christ stand!

What follows in the poem is only the awe, the solemnity of this discovery which has come not through any processes of reasoning but by a passionate interpretation of the enthusiasm of love and self-sacrifice in David's own heart; only this awe, and the seeming extension of his throbbing emotion and pent knowledge over the face of external nature, until night passes and with the dawn earth and heaven resume their wonted ways. The case of Lazarus as studied by Karshish the Arabian physician results not in a rapturous prophecy like that of David, but in a stupendous conjecture of the heart which all the scepticism of the brain of a man of science cannot banish or reduce to insignificance. The unaccountable fascination of this case of mania, subinduced by epilepsy, is not to be resisted; Karshish would write, if he could, of more important matters than the madman of Bethany; he would record his discoveries in scalp-disease, describe the peculiar qualities of Judea's gum-tragacanth, and disclose the secret of those virtues derived from the mottled spiders of the tombs. But the face of Lazarus, patient or joyous, the strange remoteness in his gaze, his singular valuations of objects and events, his great ardour, his great calm, his possession of some secret which gives new meanings to all things, the perfect logic of his irrationality, his unexampled gentleness and love—these are memories which the keen-sighted Arabian physician is unable to put by, so curious, so attaching a potency lies in the person of this man who holds that he was dead and rose again, Karshish has a certain sense of shame that he, a man learned in all the wisdom of his day, should be so deeply moved. And yet how the thought of the secret possessed by this Judean maniac—it is the secret of Jesus—fills and expands the soul!

The very God! think, Abib: dost thou think?So, the All-Great were the All-Loving too—So through the thunder comes a human voiceSaying "O heart I made, a heart beats here!Face, my hands fashioned, see it in myself!Thou hast no power nor mayst conceive of mine,But love I gave thee, with myself to love,And thou must love me who have died for thee!"

Science has at least something to consider in a thought so strangely potent.

A nineteenth-century sceptic's exposition of his Christian faith is the paradoxical subject of Bishop Blougram's Apology, and it is one which admirably suited that side of Browning's genius which leaned towards intellectual casuistry. But the poem is not only skilful casuistry—and casuistry, let it be remembered, is not properly the art of defending falsehood but of determining truth,—it is also a character-study chosen from the age of doubt; a dramatic monologue with an appropriate mise en scène; a display of fence and thrust which as a piece of art and wit rewards an intelligent spectator. That Cardinal Wiseman sat for the Bishop's portrait is a matter of little consequence; the merit of the study is independent of any connection with an individual; it answers delightfully the cynical—yet not wholly cynical—question: How, for our gain in both worlds, can we best economise our scepticism and make a little belief go far?69 The nineteenth century is not precisely the age of the martyrs, or, if we are to find them, we must in general turn to politics and to science; Bishop Blougram does not pique himself on a genius for martyrdom; if he fights with beasts, it is on this occasion with a very small one, a lynx of the literary tribe, and in the arena of his own dining-room over the after-dinner wine. He is pre-eminently a man of his time, when the cross and its doctrine can be comfortably borne; both he and his table-companion, honoured for this one occasion only with the episcopal invitation, appreciate the good things of this world, but the Bishop has a vast advantage over the maker of "lively lightsome articles" for the reviews, and he uses his advantage, it must be confessed, to the full. We are in company with no petty man while we read the poem and hear the great Bishop roll out, with easy affluence, his long crumpled mind. He is delightfully frank and delightfully subtle; concealing himself by self-disclosure; opulent in ideas; shifting the pea of truth dexterously under the three gilded thimbles; blandly condescending and amiably contemptuous; a little feline, for he allows his adversary a moment's freedom to escape and then pounces upon him with the soft-furred claws; assured of his superiority in the game, yet using only half his mind; fencing with one arm pinioned; chess-playing with a rook and pawn given to his antagonist; or shall we say chess-playing blindfold and seeing every piece upon the board? Is Bishop Blougram's Apology a poem at all? some literary critics may ask. And the answer is that through it we make acquaintance with one of Browning's most genial inventions—the great Bishop himself, and that if Gigadibs were not present we could never have seen him at the particular angle at which he presents himself in his condescending play with truths and half-truths and quarter-truths, adapted to a smaller mind than his own. The sixteenth century gave us a Montaigne, and the seventeenth century a Pascal. Why should not the nineteenth century of mundane comforts, of doubt troubled by faith, and faith troubled by doubt, produce a new type—serious yet humorous—in an episcopal Pascal-Montaigne?

Browning's moral sympathies, we may rest assured, do not go with one who like Blougram finds satisfaction in things realised on earth; one who declines—at least as he represents himself for the purposes of argument—to press forward to things which he cannot attain but might nobly follow after. But Browning's intellectual interest is great in seeing all that a Blougram can say for himself; and as a destructive piece of criticism directed against the position of a Gigadibs what he says may really be effective. The Bishop frankly admits that the unqualified believer, the enthusiast, is more fortunate than he; he, Sylvester Blougram, is what he is, and all that he can do is to make the most of the nature allotted to him. That there has been a divine revelation he cannot absolutely believe; but neither can he absolutely disbelieve. Unbelief is sterile; belief is fruitful, certainly for this world, probably for the next, and he elects to believe. Having chosen to believe, he cannot be too pronounced and decisive in his faith; he will never attempt to eliminate certain articles of the credenda, and so "decrassify" his faith, for to this process, if once begun, there is no end; having donned his uniform, he will wear it, laces and spangles and all. True, he has at times his chill fits of doubt; but is not this the probation of faith? Does not a life evince the ultimate reality that is within us? Are not acts the evidence of a final choice, of a deepest conviction? And has he not given his vote for the Christian religion?

With me faith means perpetual unbeliefKept quiet like the snake 'neath Michael's foot,Who stands calm just because he feels it writhe.

When the time arrives for a beatific vision Blougram will be ready to adapt himself to the new state of things. Is not the best pledge of his capacity for future adaptation to a new environment this—that being in the world he is worldly? We must not lose the training of each successive stage of evolution by for ever projecting ourselves half way into the next. So rolls on the argument to its triumphant conclusion—

Fool or knave?Why needs a bishop be a fool or knaveWhen there's a thousand diamond weights between?

Only at the last, were it not that we know that there is a firmer ground for Blougram than this on which he takes his stand in after-dinner controversy, we might be inclined to close the subject by adapting to its uses the title of a pamphlet connected with the Kingsley and Newman debate—"But was not Mr Gigadibs right after all?" Worsted in sword-play he certainly was; but the soul may have its say, and the soul, armed with its instincts of truth, is a formidable challenger.

Chapter X

Close of Mrs Browning's Life

When Men and Women was published in the autumn of 1855 the Brownings were again in Paris. An impulsive friend had taken an apartment for them in the Rue de Grenelle, facing east, and in all that concerned comfort splendidly mendacious. After some weeks of misery and illness Mrs Browning was conveyed to less glittering but more hospitable rooms in the Rue du Colisée by a desperate husband—"That darling Robert carried me into the carriage, swathed past possible breathing, over face and respirator in woollen shawls. No, he wouldn't set me down even to walk up the fiacre steps, but shoved me in upside down in a struggling bundle."70 Happily the winter was of a miraculous mildness. Mrs Browning worked Aurora Leigh in "a sort of furia," and Browning set himself to the task—a fruitless one as it proved—of rehandling and revising Sordello: "I lately gave time and pains," he afterwards told Milsand in his published dedication of the poem, "to turn my work into what the many might,—instead of what the few must—like: but after all I imagined another thing at first, and therefore leave as I find it"—proud but warrantable words. Some of his leisure was given to vigorous and not unsuccessful efforts in drawing. At the theatre he saw Ristori as Medea and admired her, but with qualifications. At Monckton Milnes's dinner-table he met Mignet and Cavour, and George Sand crowned with an ivy-wreath and "looking like herself." Mrs Browning records with pleasure that her husband's hostility to the French government had waned; at least he admitted that he was sick of the Opposition.

In May 1856 tidings from London of the illness of Kenyon caused him serious anxiety; he would gladly have hastened to attend upon so true and dear a friend, but this Kenyon would not permit. A month later he and Mrs Browning were in occupation of Kenyon's house in Devonshire Place, which he had lent to them for the summer, but the invalid had sought for restoration of his health in the Isle of Wight. On the day that Mr Barrett heard of his daughter's arrival he ordered his family away from London. Mrs Browning once more wrote to him, but the letter received no answer. "Mama," said little Pen earnestly, "if you've been very, very naughty I advise you to go into the room and say,'Papa, I'll be dood.'" But the situation, as Mrs Browning sadly confesses, was hopeless. Some companionship with her sister Arabel and her brothers was gained by a swift departure from London in August for Ventnor whither the Wimpole Street household, leaving its master behind, had been banished, and there "a happy sorrowful two weeks" were spent. At Cowes a grief awaited Browning and his wife, for they found Kenyon kind as ever but grievously broken in health and depressed in spirits. A short visit to Mrs Browning's married sister at Taunton closed the summer and autumn in England. Before the end of October they were on their way to Florence. "The Brownings are long gone back now," wrote Dante Rossetti in December, "and with them one of my delights—an evening resort where I never felt unhappy. How large a part of the real world, I wonder, are those two small people?—taking meanwhile so little room in any railway carriage and hardly needing a double bed at the inn."

The great event of the autumn for the Brownings and for the lovers of English poetry was the publication of Aurora Leigh. Its popularity was instantaneous; within a fortnight a second edition was called for; there was no time to alter even a comma. "That golden-hearted Robert," writes Mrs Browning, "is in ecstasies about it—far more than if it all related to a book of his own." The volume was dedicated to John Kenyon; but before the year was at an end Kenyon was dead. Since the birth of their son he had enlarged the somewhat slender incomings of his friends by the annual gift of one hundred pounds, "in order," says the editor of Mrs Browning's Letters, "that they might be more free to follow their art for its own sake only." By his will he placed them for the future above all possibility of straitened means. To Browning he left 6,500 l., to Mrs Browning 4,500 l. "These," adds Mr F.G. Kenyon, "were the largest legacies in a very generous will—the fitting end to a life passed in acts of generosity and kindness to those in need." The gain to the Brownings was shadowed by a sense of loss. "Christmas came," says Mrs Browning, "like a cloud." For the length of three winter months she did not stir out of doors. Then arrived spring and sunshine, carnival time and universal madness in Florence, with streets "one gigantic pantomime." Penini begged importunately for a domino, and could not be refused; and Penini's father and mother were for once drawn into the vortex of Italian gaiety. When at the great opera ball a little figure in mask and domino was struck on the shoulder with the salutation "Bella mascherina!" it was Mrs Browning who received the stroke, with her husband, also in domino, by her side. The absence of real coarseness in the midst of so much seeming license, and the perfect social equality gave her a gratifying impression of her Florentines.

In April it was summer weather; the drives of former days in the Cascine and to Bellosguardo, where a warm-hearted friend, Miss Isa Blagden, occupied a villa, were resumed. An American authoress of wider fame since her book of 1852 than even the authoress of Aurora Leigh, Mrs Beecher Stowe, was in Florence, and somewhat to their surprise she charmed both Browning and his wife by her simplicity and earnestness, her gentle voice and refinement of manner—"never," says Mrs Browning, "did lioness roar more softly." All pointed to renewed happiness; but before April was over pain of a kind that had a peculiar sting left Mrs Browning for a time incapable of any other feeling. Her father was dead, and no word of affection had been uttered at the last; if there was water in the rock it never welled forth. The kindly meant effort of a relative to reopen friendly communications between Mr Barrett and his daughters, not many months previously, had for its only result the declaration that they had disgraced the family.71 At first Mrs Browning was crushed and could shed no tear; she remained for many days in a state of miserable prostration; it was two months before she could write a letter to anyone outside the circle of her nearest kinsfolk.