Part 17 (2/2)

O enemy sly and serpentine, Uncoil thee from the waking man!

Do I hold the Past Thus firm and fast Yet doubt if the Future hold I can?

This path so soft to pace shall lead Through the magic of May to herself indeed!

Or narrow if needs the house must be, Outside are the storms and strangers: we-- Oh, close, safe, warm sleep I and she, --I and she!

That, indeed, is pa.s.sionate enough.

Then there is another group--tales which embody phases of love. _Count Gismond_ is one of these. It is too long, and wants Browning's usual force. The outline of the story was, perhaps, too simple to interest his intellect, and he needed in writing poetry not only the emotional subject, but that there should be something in or behind the emotion through the mazes of which his intelligence might glide like a serpent.[10]

_The Glove_ is another of these tales--a good example of the brilliant fas.h.i.+on in which Browning could, by a strange kaleidoscopic turn of his subject, give it a new aspect and a new ending. The world has had the tale before it for a very long time. Every one had said the woman was wrong and the man right; but here, poetic juggler as he is, Browning makes the woman right and the man wrong, reversing the judgment of centuries. The best of it is, that he seems to hold the truth of the thing. It is amusing to think that only now, in the other world, if she and Browning meet, will she find herself comprehended.

Finally, as to the mightier kinds of love, those supreme forms of the pa.s.sion, which have neither beginning nor end; to which time and s.p.a.ce are but names; which make and fill the universe; the least grain of which predicates the whole; the spirit of which is G.o.d Himself; the breath of whose life is immortal joy, or sorrow which means joy; whose vision is Beauty, and whose activity is Creation--these, united in G.o.d, or divided among men into their three great ent.i.ties--love of ideas for their truth and beauty; love of the natural universe, which is G.o.d's garment; love of humanity, which is G.o.d's child--these pervade the whole of Browning's poetry as the heat of the sun pervades the earth and every little grain upon it. They make its warmth and life, strength and beauty. They are too vast to be circ.u.mscribed in a lyric, represented in a drama, bound up even in a long story of spiritual endeavour like _Paracelsus_. But they move, in dignity, splendour and pa.s.sion, through all that he deeply conceived and n.o.bly wrought; and their triumph and immortality in his poetry are never for one moment clouded with doubt or subject to death. This is the supreme thing in his work. To him Love is the Conqueror, and Love is G.o.d.

FOOTNOTES:

[10] There is one simple story at least which he tells quite admirably, _The Pied Piper of Hamelin_. But then, that story, if it is not troubled by intellectual matter, is also not troubled by any deep emotion. It is told by a poet who becomes a child for children.

CHAPTER X

_THE Pa.s.sIONS OTHER THAN LOVE_

The poems on which I have dwelt in the last chapter, though they are mainly concerned with love between the s.e.xes, ill.u.s.trate the other n.o.ble pa.s.sions, all of which, such as joy, are forms of, or rather children of, self-forgetful love. They do not ill.u.s.trate the evil or ign.o.ble pa.s.sions--envy, jealousy, hatred, base fear, despair, revenge, avarice and remorse--which, driven by the emotion that so fiercely and swiftly acc.u.mulates around them, master the body and soul, the intellect and the will, like some furious tyrant, and in their extremes hurry their victim into madness. Browning took some of these terrible powers and made them subjects in his poetry. Short, sharp-outlined sketches of them occur in his dramas and longer poems. There is no closer image in literature of long-suppressed fear breaking out into its agony of despair than in the lines which seal Guido's pleading in the _The Ring and the Book_.

Life is all!

I was just stark mad,--let the madman live Pressed by as many chains as you please pile!

Don't open! Hold me from them! I am yours, I am the Grand Duke's--no, I am the Pope's!

Abate,--Cardinal,--Christ,--Maria,--G.o.d, ...

Pompilia, will you let them murder me?

But there is no elaborate, long-continued study of these sordid and evil things in Browning. He was not one of our modern realists who love to paddle and splash in the sewers of humanity. Not only was he too healthy in mind to dwell on them, but he justly held them as not fit subjects for art unless they were bound up with some form of pity, as jealousy and envy are in Shakespeare's treatment of the story of Oth.e.l.lo; or imaged along with so much of historic scenery that we lose in our interest in the decoration some of the hatefulness of the pa.s.sion. The combination, for example, of envy and hatred resolved on vengeance in _The Laboratory_ is too intense for any pity to intrude, but Browning realises not only the evil pa.s.sions in the woman but the historical period also and its temper; and he fills the poem with scenery which, though it leaves the woman first in our eyes, yet lessens the malignant element. The same, but of course with the difference Browning's variety creates, may be said of the story of the envious king, where envy crawls into hatred, hatred almost motiveless--the _Instans Tyrannus_. A faint vein of humour runs through it. The king describes what has been; his hatred has pa.s.sed. He sees how small and fanciful it was, and the ill.u.s.trations he uses to express it tell us that; though they carry with them also the contemptuous intensity of his past hatred. The swell of the hatred remains, though the hatred is past.

So we are not left face to face with absolute evil, with the corruption hate engenders in the soul. G.o.d has intervened, and the worst of it has pa.s.sed away.

Then there is the study of hatred in the _Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister_. The hatred is black and deadly, the instinctive hatred of a brutal nature for a delicate one, which, were it unrelieved, would be too vile for the art of poetry. But it is relieved, not only by the scenery, the sketch of the monks in the refectory, the garden of flowers, the naughty girls seated on the convent bank was.h.i.+ng their black hair, but also by the admirable humour which ripples like laughter through the hopes of his hatred, and by the brilliant sketching of the two men. We see them, know them, down to their little tricks at dinner, and we end by realising hatred, it is true, but in too agreeable a fas.h.i.+on for just distress.

In other poems of the evil pa.s.sions the relieving element is pity. There are the two poems ent.i.tled _Before_ and _After_, that is, before and after the duel. _Before_ is the statement of one of the seconds, with curious side-thoughts introduced by Browning's mental play with the subject, that the duel is absolutely necessary. The challenger has been deeply wronged; and he cannot and will not let forgiveness intermit his vengeance. The man in us agrees with that; the Christian in us says, ”Forgive, let G.o.d do the judgment.” But the pa.s.sion for revenge has here its way and the guilty falls. And now let Browning speak--Forgiveness is right and the vengeance-fury wrong. The dead man has escaped, the living has not escaped the wrath of conscience; pity is all.

Take the cloak from his face, and at first Let the corpse do its worst!

How he lies in his rights of a man!

Death has done all death can.

And, absorbed in the new life he leads, He recks not, he heeds

Nor his wrong nor my vengeance; both strike On his senses alike, And are lost in the solemn and strange Surprise of the change.

Ha, what avails death to erase His offence, my disgrace?

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