Part 3 (2/2)

Certain social conditions are studied as they enter into and help to form an individual The Bishop who orders his tomb at St Praxed's is in part a product of the Italian Renaissance, but the causes are seen only in their effects upon the character of a representative person If the plain, substantial style of _King Victor and King Charles_ is proper to a play with such a hero as Charles and such a heroine as Polyxena, the coloured style, rich in iht in _The Return of the Druses_, where religious and chivalric enthusiasm are blended with the enthusias to bear in es where Djabal and Khalil, Djabal and Anael, Anael and Loys are the speakers, ues conducted by ination of a reader resents a construction of scenes which requires these duets of soliloquies, these long sequences of the audible-inaudible With the ”very tragical mirth” of the second part of Chiappino's story of e have wholly disappeared frohly dramatic, in one sense of the word, and is admirable in its kind, but we transport ourselves best to thein an easy chair

_Pippa Passes_ is singular in its construction; scenes detached, though not wholly disconnected, are strung pendant-wise upon the gold thread, slender but sufficiently strong, of an idea; realiss froriefs, its grossnesses, its heroisives unity to the whole is not a ic practised by the unconscious Pippa through her songs is of that genuine and beautiful kind which the Renaissance ia Naturalis” It is no fantasy but a fact that each of us influences the lives of others ree, in ways of which we are not aware Let this fact be seized with iination render it into a sy down the grass-paths and under the pine-wood of Asolo Her only service to God on this one holiday of a toilso that concerns ”Asolo's Four Happiest Ones”--to her fancy Ottima is blessed with love, Jules is no victii's content in his lot is deep and unassailable, and Monsignor is a holy and beloved priest; and, unawares to her, in ined, each of her dreanor for one er of God Her own service, though she knows it not, is ladness; she, the little silk-winder, rays forth the influences of a heart that has the potency ascribed to gems of unflawed purity; and such influences--here e the precious realities of our life Nowhere in literature has the virtue of ined than in her lee, half spiritual joy; the ”whole sunrise, not to be suppressed” is a limitless splendour, but the reflected bea on her poor ceiling is the sareat exotic blooon lily, over which she queens it? With God all service ranks the saratitude

_Pippa Passes_ is a sequence of dramatic scenes, with lyrics interspersed, and placed in a lyrical setting; the figures dark or bright, of the painting are ”ringed by a flowery bowery angel-brood” of song But before his _Bells and Po had discovered in the short monodrama, lyrical or reflective, the most appropriate vehicle for his powers of passion and of thought

Here a single situation sufficed; characters were seen rightly in position; the action of the piece holly internal; a passion could be isolated, and could be either traced through its varying moods or seized in its moment of culmination; the casuistry of the brain could be studied apart,--it ht be suddenly encountered and dissipated by soht froreat literary form were not here a cause of embarrassment; they need not, as in work for the theatre, be laboriously observed or injuriously violated; the poet inal

And original, in the best sense of the word--entirely true to his highest self--Browning was in the ”Dramatic Lyrics” of 1842, and the ”Dramatic Roularly keen and energetic, and singularly capacious of delight; his eyes were active instruments of observation, and at the same time were possessed by a kind of rapture in form--and not least in fantastic form--and a rapture still finer in the opulence and variety of colour

In these poeht into what may truly be called an enthusiasood for their own sakes, are good also as inlets to the spirit Having returned frohts and sounds, striking upon the retina and the auditory nerve, with the intensity of a new experience, still attack the eye and ear _as_ he writes his _Englisher obsession demand and summon forth the appropriate word[32] The fisherman from A alive With pink and grey jellies, your sea-fruit, --You touch the strange luape there, eyes open, all manner Of horns and of humps

Or it is the ”quick rustle-down of the quail-nets,” or the ”whistling pelt” of the olives, when Scirocco is loose, that invades our ears And by and by a the mountains the play of the senses expands, and the soul has its great word to utter:

God's own profound Was above me, and round me the mountains, And under, the sea, And within me, my heart to bear witness hat was and shall be

Not less vivid is the vision of the light craft with its lateen sail outside Triest, in which Waring--the Flying Englishrass hat and kerchief black,” looking up for a ly throat,” till suddenly in the sunset splendour the boat veers weather-ward and goes off, as with a bound, ”into the rose and golden half of the sky” And what aniiven more of the leonine wrath inhas conveyed into his lion of King Francis with three strokes of the brush?

Or it is only a bee upon a sunflower on which the gazer's eye is fixed, and we get the word of Rudel:

And therefore bask the bees On rief to booklovers!--the sarotesquerie of insect life in the revel over that unhappy to's _Garden Fancy_, which creeps and craith beetle and spider, worht by the sandy shore, and for a moment--before love enters--all the mind of the irey sea and the long black land; And the yellow half-e and low; And the startled little waves that leap In fiery ringlets fro prow

If Browning did not rejoice in perfect health and animal spirits--and in the letters to Miss Barrett we hear of frequent headaches and find a reference to his pale thin face as seen in a ination of perfect vitality and of those ”wild joys of living,”

sung by the young harper David in that poeranates_, and as a whole ten years later, with the awe and rapture of the spirit rising above the rapture of the senses[34]

Of these poems of 1842 and 1845 one _The Pied Piper_, ritten in the spirit of ranates_ only to make up a number, for which the printer required more copy One or two--the flesh and blood incarnations of the wines of France and Hungary, _Claret_ and _Tokay_, are no more than clever caprices of the fancy One, _The Lost Lender_, reested by the conservatism of Wordsworth's elder days, but possibly deflected by so attributed to Pym in relation to Strafford of the drama, and certainly detached fro's liberal sentiuizes_, is the sole rement of a classical draainst matical phrase--”while in bed with a fever” A considerable nuether as expressions or de which is the passion of love A few, and these conspicuous for theirof novel the for art as seen in the painter of pictures or in the connoisseur Nor is the interpretation of religious eh in a phase that otten

With every passion that expands the spirit beyond the bounds of self, Browning, as the dramas have made evident to us, is in cordial sympathy

The reckless loyalty, with its anirief land and to the tiallant bluffness

The leap-up of pride and joy in a boy's heart at the moment of death in his Eined than it is in the poem of the French camp, and all is made ure, intent on victory and sustaining the weight of imperial anxieties, which yet cannot be quite impassive in presence of a death so devoted And side by side with this poeenerous enthusiasm is placed the poem of passion reduced to its extreme of meanness, its most contracted form of petty spite and base envy--the _Soliloquy in a Spanish Cloister_; a grotesque insect, spitting ineffectual poison, is placed under the lass of the coion! A noble hatred, transcending personal considerations, les with a noble and solemn love--the passion of country--in the Italian exile's record of his escape from Austrian pursuers; with the clear-obscure of his patriotic les the proud recollection of the Italian woman as his saviour, over whose conjectured happiness as peasant wife and peasant mother the exile boith a tender joy The examples of abnormal passion are two--that of the amorous homicide ould set on one perfect moment the seal of eternity, in _Porphyria's Lover_, and that of the other occupier of the ion is pushed to the extre's poems of the love of man and woman are seldom a simple lyrical cry, but they are not on this account the less true in their presentuiser--Love When love takes possession of a nature which is complex, affluents and tributaries from many and various faculties run into the al power, but intellect, iination, fancy are its office-bearers for a time; then in a moment it resumes all authority into its own hands, resolves of a sudden all that is coleness of joy or pain, fuses all that isHis drale faculty should be seen in the environment of a character, and that its operations should be clothed enuities, its fine-spun and far-flung threads of association, its occult sy kno to press into the service of the central eery which rotesque

In _Rudel to the Lady of Tripoli_ love which co of the ear (for Rudel is a sun-worshi+pper who has never seen his sun) is a pure iinative devotion to the ideal In _Count Gismond_ love is the deliverer; the motive of the poem is essentially that of the Perseus and Andromeda myth refined upon and mediaevalised In _Cristine_ love is the interpreter of life; a h passion explains, and explains away, all else that would obscure the vision of what is best and most real in this our world and in the worlds that are yet unattained From a few lines written to illustrate a Venetian picture by Maclise _In a Gondola_ was evolved If Browning was not entirely accurate in his topography of Venice, he certainly did not fail in his sense of the depth and opulence of its colour Here the abandonenuities and fancies of love that seeks a e froerly upon itself; and the shadow of death is ever at hand, but like the shadows of a Venetian painter it gloith colour

The ht of the duchess_, have much in common; they lie in the contrast between the world of convention and the world of reality In each the insulter of proprieties, the breaker of bounds is a woman; in each the choice lies between a life of pretended love and vain dignities and a life of freedolad escape fro the incident of the glove Browning brings into play his casuistry, but casuistry is here used to justify a passion which the poet approves, to elucidate, not to obscure, what he represents as the truth of the situation _The Flight of the duchess_ in part took its rise ”fro the Queen of the Gipsies, O!'--the burden of a song, which the poet, when a boy, heard a wo on a Guy Fawkes' day” Soazine, at a ti him The poem was completed some months later It is written, like _The Glove_, in verse that runs for swiftness' sake, and that is pleased to show its paces on a road rough with boulder-like rhyely twisted ork of artificial modes and forms She is a prisoner who is starved for real life, and stifles; the fresh air and the open sky are good, are irresistible--and that is the whole long poem in brief Such a small prisoner, all life and fire, was before e in Wi in stature aipsy

Another duchess, who pined for freedom and never attained it, has her cold obituary notice from her bereaved Duke's lips in the _Dramatic Lyrics_ of 1842 _My Last duchess_ was there made a companion poem to _Count Gismond_; they are the pictures of the bond-woe The Italian duchess revolts from the laifehood no further than aher inward breathings and beas of the spirit; the noose of the ducal proprieties is around her throat, and when it tightens ”then all sentle up into a typical representative a whole phase of civilisation The Duke is Italian of Renaissance days; insensible in his egoistic pride to the beautiful huer-tips; and after all a duchess can be replaced, while the bronze of Glaus of Innsbruck--but the glory of his possessions h his nine hundred years old na in later poems frequently insists upon this--is not for the connoisseur or collector who rests in a material possession, but for the artist who, in the zeal of creation, presses through his oork to that unattainable beauty, that flying joy which exists beyond his grasp and for ever lures hinotus_ the earliest study in his lives of the painters was ross, its touch unsanctifies the sanctities of art; yet the brave audacity of genius is able to penetrate this gross world with spiritual fire Browning's unknown painter is a delicate spirit, who dares not ross world; he has failed for lack of a robust faith, a strenuous courage But his failure is beautiful and pathetic, and for a tiin, Babe, and Saint will smile froard” And yet to have done otherwise to have been other than this; to have striven like that youth--the Urbinate--men praise so!

More remarkable, as the summary of a civilisation, than _My Last duchess_, is the address of the worldling Bishop, who lies dying, to the ”nepheho are sons of his loins In its Paganisenuine Paganism--that portion of the artistic Renaissance which leans towards the world and the flesh is concentrated and is given as in quintessential for to the vanities of earth; the speaker babbles not of green fields but of his blue lump of lapis-lazuli; and the last word of all is alive only with senile luxury and therecollection

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