Part 10 (1/2)
”I, Paracelsus,” he cries--and now Browning repeats the whole argument of the poem--”was one of these. To do this I vowed myself, soul and limb.
”But I mistook my means, I took the wrong path, led away by pride. I gazed on power alone, and on power won by knowledge alone. This I thought was the only note and aim of man, and it was to be won, at once and in the present, without any care for all that man had already done.
I rejected all the past. I despised it as a record of weakness and disgrace. Man should be all-sufficient now; a single day should bring him to maturity. He has power to reach the whole of knowledge at one leap.
”In that, I mistook the conditions of life. I did not see our barriers; nor that progress is slow; nor that every step of the past is necessary to know and to remember; nor that, in the shade of the past, the present stands forth bright; nor that the future is not to be all at once, but to dawn on us, in zone after zone of quiet progress. I strove to laugh down all the limits of our life, and then the smallest things broke me down--me, who tried to realise the impossible on earth. At last I knew that the power I sought was only G.o.d's, and then I prayed to die. All my life was failure.
”At this crisis I met Aprile, and learned my deep mistake. I had left love out; and love and knowledge, and power through knowledge, must go together. And Aprile had also failed, for he had sought love and rejected knowledge. Life can only move when both are hand in hand:
love preceding Power, and with much power, always much more love: Love still too straitened in its present means, And earnest for new power to set love free.
I learned this, and supposed the whole was learned.
”But to learn it, and to fulfil it, are two different things. I taught the simple truth, but men would not have it. They sought the complex, the sensational, the knowledge which amazed them. And for this knowledge they praised me. I loathed and despised their praise; and when I would not give them more of the signs and wonders I first gave them, they avenged themselves by casting shame on my real knowledge. Then I was tempted, and became the charlatan; and yet despised myself for seeking man's praise for that which was most contemptible in me. Then I sought for wild pleasure in the senses, and I hated myself still more. And hating myself I came to hate men; and then all that Aprile taught to me was lost.
”But now I know that I did not love enough to trace beneath the hate of men their love. I did not love enough to see in their follies the grain of divine wisdom.
To see a good in evil, and a hope In ill-success; to sympathise, be proud Of their half-reasons, faint aspirings, dim Struggles for truth, their poorest fallacies, Their prejudice and fears and cares and doubts; All with a touch of n.o.bleness, despite Their error, upward tending all though weak.
”I did not see this, I did not love enough to see this, and I failed.
”Therefore let men regard me, who rashly longed to know all for power's sake; and regard Aprile, the poet, who rashly longed for the whole of love for beauty's sake--and regarding both, shape forth a third and better-tempered spirit, in whom beauty and knowledge, love and power, shall mingle into one, and lead Man up to G.o.d, in whom all these four are One. In G.o.d alone is the goal.
”Meanwhile I die in peace, secure of attainment. What I have failed in here I shall attain there. I have never, in my basest hours, ceased to aspire; G.o.d will fulfil my aspiration:
If I stoop Into a dark tremendous sea of cloud.
It is but for a time; I press G.o.d's lamp Close to my breast; its splendour, soon or late, Will pierce the gloom: I shall emerge one day.
You understand me? I have said enough?
Aprile! Hand in hand with you, Aprile!”
And so he dies.
CHAPTER V
_THE POET OF ART_
The theory of human life which Browning conceived, and which I attempted in the last chapter to explain out of _Pauline_ and _Paracelsus_, underlies the poems which have to do with the arts. Browning as the poet of Art is as fascinating a subject as Browning the poet of Nature; even more so, for he directed of set purpose a great deal of his poetry to the various arts, especially to music and painting. Nor has he neglected to write about his own art. The lover in Pauline is a poet. Paracelsus and Aprile have both touched that art. Sordello is a poet, and so are many others in the poems. Moreover, he treats continually of himself as a poet, and of the many criticisms on his work.
All through this work on the arts, the theory of which we have written appears continuously. It emerges fully in the close of _Easter-Day_. It is carefully wrought into poems like _Abt Vogler_ and _A Grammarian's Funeral_, in which the pursuit of grammar is conceived of as the pursuit of an art. It is introduced by the way in the midst of subjects belonging to the art of painting, as in _Old Pictures in Florence_ and _Andrea del Sarto_. Finally, in those poems which represent in vivid colour and selected personalities special times and forms of art, the theory still appears, but momentarily, as a dryad might show her face in a wood to a poet pa.s.sing by. I shall be obliged then to touch again and again on this theory of his in discussing Browning as the poet of the arts. This is a repet.i.tion which cannot be helped, but for which I request the pardon of my readers.
The subject of the arts, from the time when Caliban ”fell to make something” to the re-birth of naturalism in Florence, from the earliest music and poetry to the latest, interested Browning profoundly; and he speaks of them, not as a critic from the outside, but out of the soul of them, as an artist. He is, for example, the only poet of the nineteenth century till we come to Rossetti, who has celebrated painting and sculpture by the art of poetry; and Rossetti did not link these arts to human life and character with as much force and penetration as Browning.
Morris, when he wrote poetry, did not care to write about the other arts, their schools or history. He liked to describe in verse the beautiful things of the past, but not to argue on their how and why. Nor did he ever turn in on himself as artist, and ask how he wrote poetry or how he built up a pattern. What he did as artist was to _make_, and when he had made one thing to make another. He ran along like Pheidippides to his goal, without halting for one instant to consider the methods of his running. And all his life long this was his way.
Rossetti described a picture in a sonnet with admirable skill, so admirable that we say to ourselves--”Give me the picture or the sonnet, not both. They blot out one another.” But to describe a picture is not to write about art. The one place where he does go down to its means and soul is in his little prose masterpiece, _Hand and Soul_, in which we see the path, the goal, the pa.s.sion, but not the power of art. But he never, in thought, got, like Browning, to the bottom-joy of it. He does not seem to see, as clearly as Browning saw, that the source of all art was love; and that the expression of love in beautiful form was or ought to be accomplished with that exulting joy which is the natural child of self-forgetfulness. This story of Rossetti's was in prose. In poetry, Rossetti, save in description from the outside, left art alone; and Browning's special work on art, and particularly his poetic studies of it, are isolated in English poetry, and separate him from other poets.
I cannot wish that he had thought less and written less about other arts than poetry. But I do wish he had given more time and trouble to his own art, that we might have had clearer and lovelier poetry. Perhaps, if he had developed himself with more care as an artist in his own art, he would not have troubled himself or his art by so much devotion to abstract thinking and intellectual a.n.a.lysis. A strange preference also for naked facts sometimes beset him, as if men wanted these from a poet.
It was as if some scientific demon entered into him for a time and turned poetry out, till Browning got weary of his guest and threw him out of the window. These reversions to some far off Browning in the past, who was deceived into thinking the intellect the king of life, enfeebled and sometimes destroyed the artist in him; and though he escaped for the best part of his poetry from this position, it was not seldom in his later years as a brand plucked from the burning. Moreover, he recognised this tendency in himself; and protested against it, sometimes humorously, sometimes seriously. At least so I read what he means in a number of poems, when he turns, after an over-wrought piece of a.n.a.lysis, upon himself, and bursts out of his cobwebs into a solution of the question by pa.s.sion and imagination. Nevertheless the charm of this merely intellectual play pulled at him continually, and as he could always embroider it with fancy it seemed to him close to imagination; and this belief grew upon him as he got farther away from the warmth and natural truth of youth. It is the melancholy tendency of some artists, as they feel the weakness of decay, to become scientific; and a fatal temptation it is. There is one poem of his in which he puts the whole matter clearly and happily, with a curious and suggestive t.i.tle, ”_Transcendentalism_: A Poem in Twelve Books.”
He speaks to a young poet who will give to men ”naked thought, good, true, treasurable stuff, solid matter, without imaginative imagery, without emotion.”