Part 5 (1/2)
Again, there is no poet whose love of animals is greater than Browning's, and none who has so frequently, so carefully, so vividly described them. It is amazing, as we go through his work, to realise the largeness of his range in this matter, from the river-horse to the lizard, from the eagle to the wren, from the loud singing bee to the filmy insect in the suns.h.i.+ne. I give a few examples. Mortal man could not see a lynx more clearly than Kars.h.i.+sh--
A black lynx snarled and p.r.i.c.ked a tufted ear; l.u.s.t of my blood inflamed his yellow b.a.l.l.s.
And the very soul of the Eagle is in this question--
Ask the geier-eagle why she stoops at once Into the vast and unexplored abyss, What full-grown power informs her from the first, Why she not marvels, strenuously beating The silent boundless regions of the sky!
He has watched the heavy-winged osprey in its haunts, fain to fly,
but forced the earth his couch to make Far inland, till his friend the tempest wake,
on whose fiercer wings he can flap his own into activity.
In _Caliban upon Setebos_, as would naturally be the case, animal life is everywhere; and how close to truth, how keenly observed it is, how the right points for description are chosen to make us feel the beast and bird in a single line; how full of colour, how flashed into words which seem like colours, the descriptions are, any animal-lover may hear in the few lines I quote:
Yon otter, sleek-wet, black, lithe as a leech; Yon auk, one fire-eye in a ball of foam, That floats and feeds; a certain badger brown He hath watched hunt with that slant white-wedge eye.
By moonlight.
That is enough to prove his power. And the animals are seen, not as a cultured person sees them, but as a savage, with his eyes untroubled by thoughts, sees them; for Browning, with his curious self-trans.m.u.ting power, has put himself into the skin of Caliban. Then again, in that lovely lyric in _Paracelsus_,
Thus the Mayne glideth,
the banks and waves are full of all the bird and beast life of a river.
Elsewhere, he sees the falcon spread his wings like a banner, the stork clapping his bill in the marsh, the coot dipping his blue breast in the water, the swallow flying to Venice--”that stout sea-farer”--the lark s.h.i.+vering for joy, and a hundred other birds; and lastly, even the great bird of the Imagination, the Phoenix, flying home; and in a splendid verse records the sight:
As the King-bird with ages on his plumes Travels to die in his ancestral glooms.
Not less wonderful, and more unique in English poetry, is his painting of insects. He describes the hermit-bee, the soft, small, unfrighted thing, lighting on the dead vine-leaf, and twirling and filing all day.
He strikes out the gra.s.shopper at a touch--
Chirrups the contumacious gra.s.shopper.
He has a swift vision of the azure damsel-fly flittering in the wood:
Child of the simmering quiet, there to die.
He sees all the insect population of an old green wall; fancies the fancies of the crickets and the flies, and the carousing of the cicala in the trees, and the bee swinging in the chalice of the campanula, and the wasps p.r.i.c.king the papers round the peaches, and the gnats and early moths craving their food from G.o.d when dawn awakes them, and the fireflies crawling like lamps through the moss, and the spider, sprinkled with mottles on an ash-grey back, and building his web on the edge of tombs. These are but a few things out of this treasure-house of animal observation and love. It is a love which animates and populates with life his landscapes.
Many of the points I have attempted here to make are ill.u.s.trated in _Saul_. In verse v. the sheep are pictured, with all a shepherd's delightful affection, coming back at evening to the folding; and, with David's poetic imagination, compared to the stars following one another into the meadows of night--
And now one after one seeks his lodging, as star follows star Into eve and the blue far above us,--so blue and so far!--
In verse vi. the quails, and the crickets, and the jerboa at the door of his sand house, are thrilled into quicker life by David's music. In verse ix. the full joy of living in beasts and men is painted in the midst of landscape after landscape, struck out in single lines,--till all nature seems crowded and simmering with the intense life whose rapture Browning loved so well. These fully reveal his poetic communion with animals. Then, there is a fine pa.s.sage in verse x. where he describes the loosening of a thick bed of snow from the mountain-side[4]--an occurrence which also drew the interest on Sh.e.l.ley in the _Prometheus_--which ill.u.s.trates what I have said of Browning's conception of the separate life, as of giant t.i.tans, of the vaster things in Nature. The mountain is alive and lives his life with his own grim joy, and wears his snow like a breastplate, and discharges it when it pleases him. It is only David who thinks that the great creature lives to guard us from the tempests. And Hebron, high on its crested hill, lifts itself out of the morning mist in the same giant fas.h.i.+on,
For I wake in the grey dewy covert, while Hebron upheaves The dawn struggling with night on his shoulder, and Kidron retrieves Slow the damage of yesterday's suns.h.i.+ne.
Then, at the end of the poem, Browning represents all Nature as full of emotion, as gathered into a fuller life, by David's prophecy of the coming of immortal Love in Christ to man. This sympathy of Nature with humanity is so rare a thought in Browning, and so apart from his view of her, that I think he felt its strangeness here; so that he has taken some pains to make us understand that it is not Nature herself who does this, but David, in his uplifted inspiration, who imputes it to her. If that is not the case, it is at least interesting to find the poet, impa.s.sioned by his imagination of the situation, driven beyond his usual view into another land of thought.
There is one more thing to say in closing this chapter. Browning, unlike Tennyson, did not invent his landscapes. He drew directly from nature.