Part 2 (2/2)
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 G.o.d and G.o.d 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 att.i.tude 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 wors.h.i.+p; 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.
The natural world Tennyson describes is for the greater part of it a reflection of man, or used to heighten man's feeling, or to ill.u.s.trate his action, or sentimentalised by memorial a.s.sociations of humanity, or, finally, invented as a background for a human subject, and with a distinct direction towards that subject. Browning, with a few exceptions, does the exact opposite. His natural world is not made by our thought, nor does it reflect our pa.s.sions. His ill.u.s.trations, drawn from it, of our actions, break down at certain points, as if the ill.u.s.trating material were alien from our nature. Nature, it is true, he thinks, leads up to man, and therefore has elements in her which are dim prophecies and prognostics of us; but she is only connected with us as the road is with the goal it reaches in the end. She exists independently of us, but yet she exists to suggest to us what we may become, to awaken in us dim longings and desires, to surprise us into confession of our inadequacy, to startle us with perceptions of an infinitude we do not possess as yet but may possess; to make us feel our ignorance, weakness, want of finish; and by partly exhibiting the variety, knowledge, love, power and finish of G.o.d, to urge us forward in humble pursuit to the infinite in him. The day Browning climbs Mont Saleve, at the beginning of his poem _La Saisiaz_, after a description of his climb in which he notes a host of minute quaintnesses in rock and flower, and especially little flares of colour, all of them unsentimentalised, he suddenly stands on the mountain-top, and is smitten with the glory of the view. What does he see? Himself in Nature?
or Nature herself, like a living being? Not at all. He sees what he thinks Nature is there to teach us--not herself, but what is beyond herself. ”I was stationed,” he cries, deliberately making this point, ”face to face with--Nature?--rather with Infinitude.” We are not in Nature: a part of G.o.d aspiring to the whole is there, but not the all of G.o.d. And Nature shows forth her glory, not to keep us with herself, but to send us on to her Source, of whom the universe is but a shred.
The universe of what we call matter in all its forms, which is the definition of Nature as I speak of it here, is one form to Browning of the creative joy of G.o.d: we are another form of the same joy. Nor does Browning conceive, as Wordsworth conceived, of any pre-established harmony between us and the natural world, so that Humanity and Nature can easily converse and live together; so that we can express our thoughts and emotions in terms of Nature; or so that Nature can have, as it were, a human soul. This is not Browning's conception. If he had such a conception he would frequently use in his descriptions what Ruskin calls the ”pathetic fallacy,” the use of which is excessively common in Tennyson. I can scarcely recall more than a very few instances of this in all the poetry of Browning. Even where it seems to occur, where Nature is spoken of in human terms, it does not really occur. Take this pa.s.sage from _James Lee's Wife_:
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: t.i.tans 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.
Another pa.s.sage will ill.u.s.trate the same habit of Browning's mind with nature. He describes, for the purpose of his general thought, in _Fifine at the Fair_, the course of a stormy sunset. The clouds, the sun, the night, act like men, and are written of in terms of humanity. But this is only to explain matters to us; the mighty creatures themselves have nothing to do with us. They live their own vast, indifferent life; and we see, like spectators, what they are doing, and do not understand what we see. The sunset seems to him the last act of an ever-recurring drama, in which the clouds barricade the Sun against his rest, and he plays with their opposition like the huge giant he is; till Night, with her terrific mace, angry with them for preventing the Sun from repose, repose which will make her Queen of the world, beats them into ruin.
This is the pa.s.sage:
For as on edifice of cloud i' the grey and green Of evening,--built about some glory of the west, To barricade the sun's departure,--manifest, He plays, pre-eminently gold, gilds vapour, crag and crest Which bend in rapt suspense above the act and deed They cl.u.s.ter round and keep their very own, nor heed The world at watch; while we, breathlessly at the base O' the castellated bulk, note momently the mace Of night fall here, fall there, bring change with every blow, Alike to sharpened shaft and broadened portico I' the structure; heights and depths, beneath the leaden stress Crumble and melt and mix together, coalesce, Reform, but sadder still, subdued yet more and more By every fresh defeat, till wearied eyes need pore No longer on the dull impoverished decadence Of all that pomp of pile in towering evidence So lately.
_Fifine, cvi_.
It is plain that Browning separates us altogether from the elemental life of these gigantic beings. And what is true of these pa.s.sages 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--
a possible, even a probable explanation. But it is not Browning's view.
There is a celebrated pa.s.sage in _Paracelsus_ which is quite inconsistent with it. All Nature, from the beginning, is made to issue forth from the joy G.o.d has in making, in embodying his thought in form; and when one form has been made and rejoiced in, in making another still more lovely on the foundation of the last. So, joy after joy, the world was built, till, in the life of all he has made, G.o.d sees his ancient rapture of movement and power, and feels his delight renewed. I will not quote it here, but only mark that we and the ”eddying of our living soul” have nothing to do with the making of this Nature. It is not even the thoughts of G.o.d in us. G.o.d and Nature are alone, and were alone together countless years before we were born. But man was the close of all. Nature was built up, through every stage, that man might know himself to be its close--its seal--but not it. It is a separate, unhuman form of G.o.d. Existing thus apart, it does a certain work on us, impressing us from without. The G.o.d in it speaks to the G.o.d in us. It may sometimes be said to be interested in us, but not like a man in a man. He even goes so far as to impute to Nature, but rarely, such an interest in us; but in reality he rather thinks that we, being Nature's end, have at such times touched for a moment some of those elements in her which have come down to us--elements apart from the soul. And Browning takes care, even when he represents Nature as suddenly at one with us, to keep up the separateness. The interest spoken of is not a human interest, nor resembles it. It is like the interest Ariel takes in Prospero and Miranda--an elemental interest, that of a creature whose nature knows its radical difference from human nature. If Nature sees us in sorrow or in joy, she knows, in these few pa.s.sages of Browning's poetry, or seems to know, that we mourn or rejoice, and if she could feel with us she would; but she cannot quite do so. Like Ariel, she would be grieved with the grief of Gonzalo, were her affections human.
She has then a wild, unhuman, unmoral, unspiritual interest in us, like a being who has an elemental life, but no soul. But sometimes she is made to go farther, and has the same kind of interest in us which Oberon has in the loves of Helena and Hermia. When we are loving, and on the verge of such untroubled joy as Nature has always in her being, then she seems able, in Browning's poetry, actually to work for us, and help us into the fulness of our joy. In his poem, _By the Fireside_, he tells how he and the woman he loved were brought to know their love. It is a pa.s.sage full of his peculiar view of Nature. The place where the two lovers stay their footsteps on the hill knows all about them. ”It is silent and aware.” But it is apart from them also:
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 fas.h.i.+on 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.
That is a phrase which might fall in with Wordsworth's theory of Nature, but this which follows from _The Englishman in Italy_, is only Browning's. The man has climbed to the top of Calvano,
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