Part 5 (1/2)
Browning is foreshadowed in his earliest writings, as perhaps no other poet has been to like extent In the ”Venus and Adonis,” and the ”Rape of Lucrece,” we have but the dimmest foreview of the author of ”Hamlet,”
”Othello,” and ”Macbeth”; had Shakspere died prematurely none could have predicted, from the exquisite blossoms of his adolescence, the i's three earliest works, we clearly discern hih-hewn block
Thenceforth, to change the iery, he developed rapidly upon the same lines, or doubled upon himself in intricate revolutions; but already his line of life, his poetic parallel, was definitely established
In the consideration of Browning's drament The first step towards this assurance is the ablation of the chronic Shaksperian coht Shakspere and Browning to radically divergent methods of expression, but each to a method in profound hare in which he lived Above all others, the Elizabethan era was rich in romantic adventure, of the mind as well as of the body, and above all others, save that of the Renaissance in Italy, animated by a passionate curiosity So, too, supremely, the Victorian era has been prolific of novel and vast titanic struggles of the human spirit to reach those Gates of Truth whose lowest steps are the scarce discernible stars and furthest suns we scan, by piling Ossas of searching speculation upon Pelions of hardly-won positive knowledge
The highest exe the profoundest interpreter of the latter To achieve supre actuality, a world of keenest living, of acts and intervolved situations and episodes: the other to fashi+on a mentality so passionately alive that its manifold phases should have all the reality of concrete individualities The one reveals individual life to us by the play of circumstance, the interaction of events, the correlative eduction of personal characteristics: the other by his apprehension of that quintessential movement or mood or phase wherein the soul is transitorily visible on its lonely pinnacle of light The elder poet reveals life to us by the sheer vividness of his own vision: the younger, by a newer, a less picturesque but s of each soul-star to a singular siain, fulfils his aim by a broad synthesis based upon the vivid observance and selection of vital details: the other by an extraordinary acute psychic analysis In a word, Shakspere works as with the clay of huht
As for the difference in value of the two matise The psychic portraiture produced by either is valuable only so far as it is convincingly true
The profoundest insight cannot reach deeper than its own possibilities of depth The physiognomy of the soul is never visible in its entirety, barely ever even its profile The utmost we can expect to reproduce, perhaps even to perceive in the most quintessential moment, is a partially faithful, partially deceptive silhouette As no hu has ever seen his or her own soul, in all its rounded coth and weakness, of what is teerminal and essential, how can we expect even the subtlest analyst to adequately depict other souls than his own It is Browning's high distinction that he has this soul-depictive faculty--restricted as even in his instance it perforce is--to an extent unsurpassed by any other poet, ancient or e is not the visible phenoland (or elsewhere) of history; it is a point in the spiritual universe, where naked souls ame of life, for counters, the true value of which can only be realised in the bullion of a higher life than this” No doubt there is ”a certain crudeness in the manner in which these naked souls are presented,” not only in ”Strafford” but elsewhere in the plays Browning markedly has the defects of his qualities
As part of his ue rather than upon dialogue To one orks from within outward--in contradistinction to the Shaksperianto win from outward forms ”the passion and the life whose fountains are within”--the propriety of this draainsaid
The swift complicated mental machinery can thus be exhibited infinitely more coherently and coain and again Browning has nigh foundered in the , he transcends in this draranted that the author of the ”Blot on the 'Scutchcon,” ”Luria,” ”In a Balcony,” is not dramatic in even the most conventional sense Above all, indeed--as Mr Walter Pater has said--his is the poetry of situations In each of the _dra characteristics is loyalty to a do devotion to the King: in Mildred's and in Thorold's, in the ”Blot on the 'Scutcheon,” it is that of subservience respectively to conventional morality and family pride (Lord Tresham, it may be added, is the 's ”monomaniacs”): in Valence's, in ”Colo Victor and King Charles,” to kingly and filial duty: in Anael's and Djabal's, in ”The Return of the Druses,” respectively to religion and unscrupulous ambition edy,”
to purely sordid ambition: in Luria's, to noble steadfastness: and in Constance's, in ”In a Balcony,” to self-denial Of these plays, ”The Return of the Druses” seems to nified, and ”In a Balcony” the reat drah the integer of a great unaccomplished drama, is as complete in itself as the Funeral March in Beethoven's _Eroica_ Symphony The ”Blot on the 'Scutcheon” has the radical fault characteristic of writers of sensational fiction, a too proround” by syncope and suicide Another is the juvenility of Mildred:--a serious infraction of dra with history, as in the circu Victor's death in the earlier play, is at least excusable by high precedent More disastrous, poetically, is the ruinous banality of Mildred's anticlimax when, after her brother reveals hi _Miss Anglaise_ of certain French novelists, betrays her incapacity for true passion by exclai, in effect, ”What, you've murdered my lover! Well, tell me all Pardon? Oh, well, I pardon you: at least I _think_ I do Thorold, my dear brother, how very wretched you must be!”
I am unaware if this anticlimax has been pointed out by any one, but surely it is one of the enius which could be indicated Even the beautiful song in the third scene of the first act, ”There's a woman like a dew-drop, she's so purer than the purest,” is, in the circue which divides the subliht the play was first acted, Mertoun's song, as he clah to ripple lightly a the tolerant auditory It is with diffidence I take so radically distinct a standpoint from that of dickens, who declared he knew no love like that of Mildred and Mertoun, no passion like it, noafter its conception, like it; who, further, at a later date, affirmed that he would rather have written this play than any work of modern times: nor with less reluctance, that I find myself at variance with Mr Skelton, who speaks of the drama as ”one of the edies in the language” In the instance of Luria, that second Othello, suicide has all the impressiveness of a plenary act of absolution: the death of Anael see after the concussion of thunder-clouds But Thorold's suicide is e; and Mildred's broken heart was an ill not beyond the healing of a morally robust physician
”Colombe's Birthday” has a certain remoteness of interest, really due to the reader's ence, for all Valence's greatness ofduchess and her chosen lover: a circumstance which h ”A Soul's Tragedy” has the saving quality of huhter
In each of these plays[14] the lover of Browning will recall passage after passage of superbly dramatic effect But supreme in his remembrance will be the wonderful scene in ”The Return of the Druses,”
where the Prefect, drawing a breath of relief, is almost simultaneously assassinated; and that where Anael, with every nerve at tension in her fierce religious resolve, with a poignant, life-surrendering cry, hails Djabal as _Hakeem_--as Divine--and therewith falls dead at his feet
Nor will he forget that where, in the ”Blot on the 'Scutcheon,” Mildred, with a dry sob in her throat, sta!
Besides I loved hiot me: so I fell----”
or that where, ”at end of the disastrous day,” Luria takes the phial of poison froht from my own land To helpVictor and King Charles,” 1842; ”The Return of the Druses,” and ”A Blot on the 'Scutcheon,” 1843; ”Coloedy,” 1845]
Before passing on fro's most imperishable because most nearly immaculate dramatic poem, ”Pippa Passes,” and to ”Sordello,” that colossal derelict upon the ocean of poetry, I should like--out of an e details--to remind the reader of two secondary matters of interest pertinent to the present the in ”A Blot on the 'Scutcheon,” ”There's a woman like a dew-drop,” written several years before the author'swith Elizabeth Barrett, is so closely in the style of ”Lady Geraldine's Courtshi+p,” and other ballads by the sweet singer who afterwards becae of which we have record in literary history, that, even were there nothing to substantiate the fact, it were fair to infer that Mertoun's song to Mildred was the electric touch which co's best-known poement of the dedication to hinant with the stateliest e:--
”Shakespeare is not our poet but the world's, Therefore on hi! Since Chaucer was alive and hale Noour roads with step So active, so enquiring eye, or tongue So varied in discourse But war: the breeze Of Alpine heights thou playest with, borne on Beyond Sorrento and A”
CHAPTER V
In my allusion to ”Pippa Passes,” towards the close of the preceding chapter, as the most i's dramatic poems, I would not have it understood that its pre-eminence is considered from the standpoint of technical achievement, of art, s, profound enough for the searching plummet of the most curious explorer of the depths of life It can be read, re-read, learned by heart, and theare the avenues of iht which it discloses It has,composition by its author, that quality of symmetry, that _symmetria prisca_ recorded of Leonardo da Vinci in the Latin epitaph of Platino Piatto; and, as ht be expected, its mental basis, what Rossetti called fundamental brain-work, is as lu air By its side, the ram and the rest, are mere skilled dialectics
The art that ismust ever be the simplest Whenever aeschylus, Dante, Shakspere, Milton, are at white heat they require no exposition, but meditation only--the meditation akin to the sentiment of little children who listen, intent upon every syllable, and passionately eager of soul, to hearth-side tragedies The play of genius is like the movement of the sea It has its solemn rhythm: its joy, irradiate of the sun; its e and turbulence under passing tempests: below all, the deep oceanic music There are, of course, many to whohway and as the nursery of the winds and rains For them there is no hint ”of the inco wave, nosounds, invisible things that laugh and clap their hands for joy and are no more To them it is but a desert: obscure, i, so dear a claim in the eyes of the poet's fanatical admirers, exists, in their sense, only in his inferior work There isdown the valleys wild,” or in Wordsworth's line, ”Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears,” or in Keats'
single verse, ”There is a buddingliving poet--