Part 12 (1/2)
The next poem belonging to this subject is the second part of _Pippa Pa.s.ses_. What concerns us here is that Jules, the French artist, loves Phene; and on his return from his marriage pours out his soul to her concerning his art.
In his work, in his pursuit of beauty through his aspiration to the old Greek ideal, he has found his full content--his heaven upon earth. But now, living love of a woman has stolen in. How can he now, he asks, pursue that old ideal when he has the real? how carve Tydeus, with her about the room? He is disturbed, thrilled, uncontent A new ideal rises.
How can he now
Bid each conception stand while, trait by trait, My hand transfers its lineaments to stone?
Will my mere fancies live near you, their truth-- The live truth, pa.s.sing and repa.s.sing me, Sitting beside me?
Before he had seen her, all the varied stuff of Nature, every material in her workshop, tended to one form of beauty, to the human archetype.
But now she, Phene, represents the archetype; and though Browning does not express this, we feel that if Jules continue in that opinion, his art will die. Then, carried away by his enthusiasm for his art, he pa.s.ses, through a statement that nature suggests in all her doings man and his life and his beauty--a statement Browning himself makes in _Paracelsus_--to a description of the capabilities of various stuffs in nature under the sculptor's hand, and especially of marble as having in it the capabilities of all the other stuffs and also something more a living spirit in itself which aids the sculptor and even does some of his work.
This is a subtle thought peculiarly characteristic of Browning's thinking about painting, music, poetry, or sculpture. I believe he felt, and if he did not, it is still true, that the vehicle of any art brought something out of itself into the work of the artist. Abt Vogler feels this as he plays on the instrument he made. Any musician who plays on two instruments knows that the distinct instrument does distinct work, and loves each instrument for its own spirit; because each makes his art, expressed in it, different from his art expressed in another. Even the same art-creation is different in two instruments: the vehicle does its own part of the work. Any painter will say the same, according as he works in fresco or on canvas, in water-colour or in oil. Even a material like charcoal makes him work the same conception in a different way. I will quote the pa.s.sage; it goes to the root of the matter; and whenever I read it, I seem to hear a well-known sculptor as he talked one night to me of the spiritual way in which marble, so soft and yet so firm, answered like living material to his tool, sending flame into it, and then seemed, as with a voice, to welcome the emotion which, flowing from him through the chisel, pa.s.sed into the stone.
But of the stuffs one can be master of, How I divined their capabilities!
From the soft-rinded smoothening facile chalk That yields your outline to the air's embrace, Half-softened by a halo's pearly gloom: Down to the crisp imperious steel, so sure To cut its one confided thought clean out Of all the world. But marble!--'neath my tools More pliable than jelly--as it were Some clear primordial creature dug from depths In the earth's heart, where itself breeds itself.
And whence all baser substance may be worked; Refine it off to air, you may--condense it Down to the diamond;--is not metal there, When o'er the sudden speck my chisel trips?
--Not flesh, as flake off flake I scale, approach, Lay bare those bluish veins of blood asleep?
Lurks flame in no strange windings where, surprised By the swift implement sent home at once, Flushes and glowings radiate and hover About its track?
But Jules finds that Phene, whom he has been deceived into believing an intelligence equal to his own, does not understand one word he has said, is nothing but an uneducated girl; and his dream of perfection in the marriage of Art and Love vanishes away, and with the deception the aims and hopes of his art as it has been. And Browning makes this happen of set purpose, in order that, having lost satisfaction in his art-ideal, and then his satisfaction in that ideal realised in a woman--having failed in Art and Love--he may pa.s.s on into a higher aim, with a higher conception, both of art and love, and make a new world, in the woman and in the art. He is about to accept the failure, to take only to revenge on his deceivers, when Pippa sings as she is pa.s.sing, and the song touches him into finer issues of thought. He sees that Phene's soul is, like a b.u.t.terfly, half-loosed from its chrysalis, and ready for flight.
The sight and song awake a truer love, for as yet he has loved Phene only through his art. Now he is impa.s.sioned with pity for a human soul, and his first new sculpture will be the creation of her soul.
Shall to produce form out of unshaped stuff Be Art--and further, to evoke a soul From form be nothing? This new soul is mine!
At last, he is borne into self-forgetfulness by love, and finds a man's salvation. And in that loss of self he drinks of the deep fountain of art. Aprile found that out. Sordello dies as he discovers it, and Jules, the moment he has touched its waters with his lip, sees a new realm of art arise, and loves it with such joy that he knows he will have power to dwell in its heart, and create from its joy.
One may do whate'er one likes In Art; the only thing is, to make sure That one does like it--which takes pains to know.
He breaks all his models up. They are paltry, dead things belonging to a dead past. ”I begin,” he cries, ”art afresh, in a fresh world,
Some unsuspected isle in far-off seas.”
The ideal that fails means the birth of a new ideal. The very centre of Browning as an artist is there:
Held we fall to rise, are baffled to fight better, Sleep to wake!
Sordello is another example of his theory, of a different type from Aprile, or that poet in _Pauline_ who gave Browning the sketch from which Sordello was conceived. But Browning, who, as I have said, repeated his theory, never repeated his examples: and Sordello is not only clearly varied from Aprile and the person in _Pauline_, but the variations themselves are inventively varied. The complex temperament of Sordello incessantly alters its form, not only as he grows from youth to manhood, but as circ.u.mstances meet him. They give him a shock, as a slight blow does to a kaleidoscope, and the whole pattern of his mind changes. But as with the bits of coloured gla.s.s in the kaleidoscope, the elements of Bordello's mind remain the same. It is only towards the end of his career, on the forcible introduction into his life of new elements from the outward world, that his character radically changes, and his soul is born. He wins that which he has been without from the beginning. He wins, as we should say, a heart. He not only begins to love Palma otherwise than in his dreams, but with that love the love of man arises--for, in characters like Sordello, personal love, once really stirred, is sure to expand beyond itself--and then, following on the love of man, conscience is quickened into life, and for the first time recognises itself and its duties. In this new light of love and conscience, directed towards humanity, he looks back on his life as an artist, or rather, Browning means us to do so; and we understand that he has done nothing worthy in his art; and that even his gift of imagination has been without the fire of true pa.s.sion. His aspirations, his phantasies, his songs, done only for his own sake, have been cold, and left the world cold.
He has aspired to a life in the realm of pure imagination, to winning by imagination alone all knowledge and all love, and the power over men which flows from these. He is, in this aspiration, Paracelsus and Aprile in one. But he has neither the sincerity of Paracelsus nor the pa.s.sion of Aprile. He lives in himself alone, beyond the world of experience, and only not conscious of those barriers which limit our life on which Browning dwells so much, because he does not bring his aspirations or his imaginative work to the test by shaping them outside of himself. He fails, that is, to create anything which will please or endure; fails in the first aim, the first duty of an artist. He comes again and again to the verge of creating something which may give delight to men, but only once succeeds, when by chance, in a moment of excited impulse, caused partly by his own vanity, and partly by the waves of humanity at Palma's _Court of Love_ beating on his soul, he breaks for a pa.s.sing hour into the song which conquers Eglamor. When, at the end, he does try to shape himself without for the sake of men he is too late for this life. He dies of the long struggle, of the revelation of his failure and the reasons of it, of the supreme light which falls on his wasted life; and yet not wasted, since even in death he has found his soul and all it means. His imagination, formerly only intellectual, has become emotional as well; he loves mankind, and sacrifices fame, power, and knowledge to its welfare. He no longer thinks to avoid, by living only in himself, the baffling limitations which inevitably trouble human life; but now desires, working within these limits, to fix his eyes on the ineffable Love; failing but making every failure a ladder on which to climb to higher things. This--the true way of life--he finds out as he dies. To have that spirit, and to work in it, is the very life of art. To pa.s.s for ever out of and beyond one's self is to the artist the lesson of Bordello's story.
It is hardly learnt. The self in Sordello, the self of imagination unwarned by love of men, is driven out of the artist with strange miseries, battles and despairs, and these Browning describes with such inventiveness that at the last one is inclined to say, with all the pitiful irony of Christ, ”This kind goeth not forth but with prayer and fasting.”
The position in the poem is at root the same as that in Tennyson's _Palace of Art_. These two poets found, about the same time, the same idea, and, independently, shaped it into poems. Tennyson put it into the form of a vision, the defect of which was that it was too far removed from common experience. Browning put it into the story of a man's life.
Tennyson expressed it with extraordinary clearness, simplicity, and with a wealth of lovely ornament, so rich that it somewhat overwhelmed the main lines of his conception. Browning expressed it with extraordinary complexity, subtlety, and obscurity of diction. But when we take the trouble of getting to the bottom of _Sordello_, we find ourselves where we do not find ourselves in _The Palace of Art_--we find ourselves in close touch and friends.h.i.+p with a man, living with him, sympathising with him, pitying him, blessing him, angry and delighted with him, amazingly interested in his labyrinthine way of thinking and feeling; we follow with keen interest his education, we see a soul in progress; we wonder what he will do next, what strange turn we shall come to in his mind, what new effort he will make to realise himself; and, loving him right through from his childhood to his death, we are quite satisfied when he dies. At the back of this, and complicating it still more--but, when we arrive at seeing it clearly, increasing the interest of the poem--is a great to-and-fro of humanity at a time when humanity was alive and keen and full of attempting; when men were savagely original, when life was lived to its last drop, and when a new world was dawning.
Of all this outside humanity there is not a trace in Tennyson, and Browning could not have got on without it. Of course, it made his poetry difficult. We cannot get excellences without their attendant defects. We have a great deal to forgive in _Sordello_. But for the sake of the vivid humanity we forgive it all.
Sordello begins as a boy, living alone in a castle near Mantua, built in a gorge of the low hills, and the description of the scenery of the castle, without and within, is one example of the fine ornament of which _Sordello_ is so full. There, this rich and fertile nature lives, fit to receive delight at every sense, fit to shape what is received into imaginative pictures within, but not without; content with the contemplation of his own imaginings. At first it is Nature from whom Sordello receives impressions, and he amuses himself with the fancies he draws from her. But he never shapes his emotion into actual song. Then tired of Nature, he dreams himself into the skin and soul of all the great men of whom he has read. He becomes them in himself, as Pauline's lover has done before him; but one by one they fade into unreality--for he knows nothing of men--and the last projection of himself into Apollo, the Lord of Poetry, is the most unreal of them all: at which fantasy all the woods and streams and suns.h.i.+ne round Goito are infinitely amused.