Part 11 (1/2)
He ive the public a new volu hadbefore her death, that her husband had then a considerable body of lyrical poetry in a state of completion An invitation to accept the editorshi+p of the _Cornhill Magazine_, on Thackeray's retirement, was after some hesitation declined He was now partly occupied with preparing for the press whatever writings by his wife seemed suitable for publication In 1862 he issued with a dedication ”to grateful Florence” her _Last Poems_; in 1863, her _Greek Christian Poets_; in 1865 he prepared a volume of Selections fro that the number of her readers had rather increased than diraphers to make capital out of the incidents of her life, and to publish such letters of hers as could be laid hands on, nation, which break forth in a letter to his friend Miss Blagden with unmeasured violence: what he felt with the ”paws” of these blackguards in his ”very bowels” God knows; beast and scah to relieve his wrath Such sudden whirls of extre, and were soret for his own diste task was laid on hi the three volume edition of his Poetical Works which was published in the following year At the same tied in preparing the first--and the best--of the several Selections frorowing interest in his writings and an effectivetheir influence He set hier upon his casual irded his loins and kept his laenius, such as it was--this was the field given him to till, and he must see that it bore fruit ”I certainly will do my utmost to make the most of ains in such a resolved method of work; but there were also losses Ahi to say; but it ht happen that such sheer brain-as carried on by plying other faculties than those which give its highest value to poetry[87]
In the late su, in coreen pleasant little Caay people of who but their outsides” The sea and sands were ay people[88] He had with hiorously, and that the readings were fruitful his later poetry of the Greek drama bears witness At present however his creative work lay in another direction; the whole of ”the Roman murder story”--the story of Po pretty well in his head It needed a long process of evolution before the ths in a series of volumes The visit to Ste-Marie ”a wild little place in Brittany” near pornic, in the summer of 1863--a visit to be repeated in the two su--is directly connected with two of the poems of _Dramatis Personae_ The story of _Gold Hair_ and the landscape details of _James Lee's Wife_ are alike derived from pornic
The solitude of the little Breton haood, stupid and dirty” people of the village were seldom visible except on Sunday; there were solitary walks ofthe coast; fruit and 's diet ”I feel out of the very earth sometimes,” he wrote, ”as I sit here at theSuch a soft sea, and such acharht back the old Siena s, which began betiiven to work; in his way of desperate resolve to be well occupied he infor yesterday written a poe whether he likes it or not[89]
”With the spring of 1863,” writes Mr Gosse, ”a great change ca's habits He had refused all invitations into society; but now, of evenings, after he had put his boy to bed, the solitude weighed intolerably upon hi afterwards, that it suddenly occurred to hiht in 1863 that this mode of life was morbid and unworthy, and, then and there, he determined to accept for the future every suitable invitation which caan to dine out, and in the process of tie at every dinner-table, concert-hall, and place of refined entertainment in London This, however, was a slow process” Mrs Ritchie refers to spoken words of Browning which declared that it was ”a mere chance whether he should live in the London house that he had taken and join in social life, or go away to some quiet retreat, and be seen no more” It was in a rown man,” in his own ”Daniel Bartoli,” who in his desolation, after the death of his lady,
Tree Of e He tried: then, kicked not at the pricks perverse, But took again, for better or for worse, The old way of the world, and, a had come to understand that in his relation to the past he was not ht be in society; it was indeed the manlier loyalty to bear his full part in life And as to his art, he felt that, with sufficient leisure to encounter the labour he had enjoined upon hi tith e or of the crowd and still be the victor:
Strength may conclude in Archelaos' court, And yet esteem the silken coht their praise or blath amid crowds as late in solitude May lead the still life, ply the wordless task[90]
One cannot prescribe a hygiene to poets; the poet of passionate contemplation, such as was Wordsworth, could hardly quicken or develop his peculiar faculty by devotion to the entertainments of successive London seasons And perhaps it is not certain that the genius of Browning holly a gainer by the superficial excitations of the dinner table and the reception roo had observed, that his energy was not exhausted by literary work, and that it preyed upon himself if no means of escape were found If he was not at the piano, or shaping clay, or at the drawing-board, or walking fast and far, inward disturbances were set up which rent and frayed his ued and rested Browning; they certainly relieved him from the troubles of super-abundant force
In 1864 _Draht be described as virtually a third volue of tone is discernible Italy is no longer the background of the huures There is perhaps less opulence of colour; less of the her points in the life of the spirit are not touched, the religious feeling has more of inwardness and is more detached from external historical fact than it had ever been before; there is more sense of resistance to and victory over whatever may seem adverse to the life of the soul In the poems which deal with love the situations and postures of the spirit are less sirotesque occupy a srave solees of _A Death in the Desert_, which had hardly been reached before Yet substantially the volume is a continuation of the poems of 1855; except in one instance, where Tennyson's method in _Maud_, that of a sequence of lyrics, is adopted, thetheion, are the predoht metrical complication--the internal rhyme in the second line of each stanza of _Dis aliter visum_ and in the third line of the quatrains of _May and Death_--'s love of new metrical experiments In the former of these poems the experiment cannot be called a success; the clash of sounds, ”a mass of brass,” ”walked and talked,” and the like, seems too much as if an accident had been converted into a rule
_Mr Sludge, ”the Mediuest piece in the voluirl of pornic, as Browning in a letter calls her, attracted hiical curiosity, partly because he cared to paint her hair in words,--gold in contrast with that pallid face--as ht have wished to display a like splendour with the strokes of his brush:
Hair such a wonder of flix and floss, Freshness and fragrance--floods of it too!
Gold, did I say? Nay, gold's ratify a cynical observer of hu without a touch of cynicisood easy ained an altar A saint _h, but ruesome, becomes for the poet an involuntary witness of the Christian faith, and a type of the ical contrasts of the auous creature, saint-sinner, and the visual contrast of
that face, like a silver wedge 'Mid the yelloealth,
are of more worth than the sermon which the writer preaches in exposition of his tale Had the forue, we can i at least to Half-pornic, could have been offered for the perversity of the dying girl's rifting every golden tress with gold
No poem in the volume of _Dramatis Personae_ is connected with pictorial art, unless it be the few lines entitled _A Face_, lines of which Emily Patmore, the poet's wife, was the subject, and written, as Browning seldom wrote, for the mere record of beauty That ”little head of hers”
is transferred to Browning's panel in the manner of an early Tuscan piece of ideal loveliness; in purity of outline and of colour the delicate profile, the opening lips, the neck, the chin so naturally ally theh its iues_ of the earlier collection of poe technique of music into poetry, and discovers in its intricate construction a certain interposing web spun by the brain between the soul and things divine, so _Abt Vogler_ interprets music on the other side--that of immediate inspiration, to which the constructive eleht--is subordinate In the silence and vacuity which follow the impromptu on his orchestrion, the cohostly troop of sounds reanimated and incarnated into industrious life 's verse They climb and crowd, they mount and march, and then pass away; but the musician's spirit is borne onward by the wind of his own ht until it has found rest in God; all that was actual of harmonious sound has collapsed; but the sense of a estion abides in his heart; the partial beauty becoentle return upon himself he resumes the life of every day, sobered, quieted and coion meet The _Toccata of Galuppi_ left behind as its relics the melancholy of mundane pleasure and a sense of its transitory existence The exteler_ fills the void which it has opened with the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things unseen
Faith, victor over loss, in _Abt Vogler_, is victor over te of triue
Neither the shrunken sadness of Matthew Arnold's poee, nor the wise moderation and acquiescence in the economy of force which an admirable poem by Emerson expresses, can be found here; and perhaps so's effort to maintain his position It is no ”vale of years” of which _Rabbi Ben Ezra_ tells; old age is viewed as an apex, a pinnacle, from which in thin translucent air all the efforts and all the errors of the past can be reviewed; the gifts of youth, the gifts of the flesh are not depreciated; but the highest attaine which can divide good froe which can put a just valuation not only on deeds but on every faint desire and unaccomplished purpose, and not only on achievee, tried in the probation of life and not found wanting, accepting its own peculiar trials, old age can enter into the rest of a clear and sole qualified at last to start forth upon that ”adventure brave and new” to which death is a suives our life its law is equalled by a superintending love Ardour, and not lethargy, progress and not decline, are here represented as the characteristics of extree An enthusiasm of effort and of strenuous endurance, an enthusiase, an enthusiasm of self-abandonment to God and the divine purposewrite verse which soars with aDeath in _Rabbi Ben Ezra_ is death as a friend In the lines entitled _Prospice_ it is death the adversary that is confronted and conquered; the poeh love; it is ascribed to no iinary speaker, and does not, indeed, veil its personal character No lonely adventure is here to reward the victor over death; the transcendent joy is hu once recovered, let whatever God ives the reason of that gallant beating up against the wind, noticeable in 's later poems He could not cease from hope; but hope and faith had rounds of his hope to the lowest, as if to ainst illusion and to test the fortitude of hope even at its weakest The hope of immortality which was his own inevitably extended itself beyond himself, and became an interpreter of the mysteries of our earthly life In contrast with the ardent ideality of _Rabbi Ben Ezra_realisue The lover of life will scrutinise death at its ugliest and worst, blinking no hideous fact Yet, even so, the reverence for humanity--
Poor men, God made, and all for that!--
is not quenched, nor is the hope quenched that
After Last returns the First, Though a wide coan best, can't end worst
The optihtly so, for the spirit of the poeumentative The sense of ”the pity of it” in one heart, remorse which has somehow come into existence out of the obscure storehouse of nature, or out of God, is the only justification suggested for a hope that nature or God ood and not evil to the poor defeated abjects, who most abhorred their lives in Paris yesterday And the word ”Nature” here would be rejected by Browning as less than the truth
In 1864 under soround so in _A Death in the Desert_ and the _Epilogue_ to ”Dray for the Christian faith The apologetics are, however, in the first instance poeinary scene of the death of the Evangelist John is rendered with the finest art; its dignity is that of a certain noble bareness; in the diroup of witnesses to whoe is the Bactrian crying from time to time his bird-like cry of assurance:
Outside was all noon and the burning blue