Part 8 (1/2)
[Footnote 59: EBB to Ruskin, _Letters_, ii 199]
[Footnote 60: Which, however, did not prevent certain errors noted in a letter of Browning to Dante Rossetti]
[Footnote 61: Dante Gabriel Rossetti His ”Family Letters,” i 190, 191]
[Footnote 62: Letters of DG Rossetti to Willia's letter to Mrs Tennyson in Memoir of Tennyson by his son, I vol edition, p 329]
[Illustration: PORTRAIT OF FILIPPO LIPPI
_By himself A detail froraph by_ ALINARI]
Chapter IX
Men and Women
Rossetti expresses his first enthusiasm about _Men and Women_ in a hen he calls the poems ”my Elixir of Life” To Ruskin these, with other pieces which he now read for the first time, were as he declared in a rebellious mood, a mass of conundrums ”He compelled e for one whole night; the result of which was that he sent , in which I trust he told hireatest man since Shakespeare” The poerowth of a considerable nuroup of short poee of forty-three, he had attained the fulness of intellectual and iinative power, varied experience of life and the artistic culture of Italy The _Drah level reached in the volumes of 1855; but is there any later volu which, taken as a whole, approaches in excellence the collections of 1855 and 1864?
There is no need now to ”lay siege” to the poems of _Men and Women_; they have expounded themselves, if ever they needed exposition; and the truth is that they are by no means nut-shells into whichof the intellect have been inserted, but fruits rich in colour and perfuination, the passions, the spirit in sense, and also for the faculty of thought which lives in the heart of these If a criticism or a doctrine of life lies in them--and that it should do so means that the poet's totalconveys his doctrine not as such but as an enthusiaseneralized truth saturates a ue to _Fifine at the Fair_ he compares the joy of poetry to a swiour that such disport in sun and sea coour of joyous play; afterwards, if we please, we can ascertain the constituents of sea-water by a chemical analysis; but the analysis will not convey to us the sensations of the sunshi+ne and the dancing brine One of the blank-verse pieces of _Men and Women_ rebukes a youthful poet of the transcendental school whose aht” in poetry Why take the harp to his breast ”only to speak dry words across the strings”? Better hollo abstract ideas through the six-foot Alpine horn of prose Boys ing objects which obsess their senses and their feelings; th which co of a rose is the rose itself with its spirit enveloped in colour and perfue John of Halberstadt:
He with a 'look you!' vents a brace of rhymes, And in there breaks the sudden rose herself, Over us, under, round us every side,
Buries us with a glory, young onceheaven into this shut house of life
Browning in _Men and Women_ is in truth a John of Halberstadt; he enriches life with colour, warht and intellectual energy, rather possessing and being possessed by these Not a single poele poeraument or a chain of ideas
In few of these poe speak in his own person; the verses addressed to his wife, which present her with ”his fifty men and women”
and tell of mysteries of love that can never be told, the lines, _Memorabilia_, addressed to one who had seen Shelley, and _Old Pictures in Florence_, are perhaps the only exceptions to the drah the's mind is clearly discernible; and even his central convictions, his working creed of life, can with no sense of uncertainty be gathered from them
To attribute to the writer the opinions and the feelings of his _dramatis personae_ would of course be the crudest of h many poems written at various times and seasons, when it appears and reappears under various clothings of circumstance, when it is employed as if it had a crucial value, when it becomes a test or touchstone of character, we cannot doubt that it is an intimate possession of the writer's mind Such an idea is not a ain, after a tangle of casuistic reasoning or an es, some idea suddenly flashes forth, and like a sword sunders truth froht, we may be assured that it has ain the sas and inspires elevated lyrical utterance, or if in pieces of casuistical brain-work it enters as a passionate eleinates not debate but song or that fro is made, we know that the writer's heart has e had his oell-defined view of truth, he could confidently lend his mind away to his fifty or his hundred ive his ideas a concrete body By syence he widened the basis of his own existence If the poet loses hih sympathy with external nature, how h syht and feeling are effected Thus a kind of experi how they behave when brought into connection with these new combinations Truth is relative, and the best truth of our own is worth testing under various conditions and circumstances The truth or falsehood which is not our own has a right to say the best for itself that can be said Let truth and falsehood grapple Let us hear the counter-truth or the rival falsehood which is the complement or the criticism of our own, and hear it stated with the ut spent in cos to tell us which Luther never knew
But precisely because truth is relative we must finally adhere to our own perceptions; they constitute the light for us; and the justice ould do to others we must also render to ourselves A wide survey may be made from a fixed centre ”Universal sympathies,” Miss Barrett wrote in one of the letters to her future husband, ”cannot make a man inconsistent, but on the contrary sublimely consistent A church towerto either, and stand fast: but thetree at the gable-end bloard the north and noard the south, while its natural leaning is due east or west, is different altogether_as_ different as atree from a church tower”[63]
The fifty poems of _Men and Woroups--those which interpret various careers or moods or , poetry, music--and with these we may class, as kindred in spirit, that poem which has for its subject the passionate pursuit of knowledge, _A Grammarian's Funeral_; and thirdly, those which are connected with religious thought and feeling, or present scenes froions Two poems may be called descriptive; both are Italian; both are founded upon a rivalry of contrasts, but one, _Up at a Villa--Down in the City_, is made up of humorous observations of Italian city and country life, expressing the mundane tastes and prudent economies of an Italian person of quality; the other, ”_De Gustibus_--,” which contrasts the happy quietudes of English landscape with the passionate landscape of the South, has romance at the heart of its realis its pictorial vividness _The Patriot_ is again Italian, suggested perhaps by the swift revolutions and restorations which Browning had witnessed in Florence, and again it uses with striking effect the principle of contrast; the patriot who a year ago had his intoxicating triumph is now on his way to the scaffold His year's toil for the good of his people has turned into a year'scharacteristically wrings a victory out of defeat; the crowd at the shaate may hoot; it is better so, for now the martyr can throw himself upon God, the Paymaster of all his labourers at the close of day The most remarkable of these poeroup, is that forlorn romance of weary and depressed heroism, _Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came_ It is in the main a fantaisie of description; but involved with the descriptive study is a roestions for the poe Lear_ which form the title, a tower seen in the Carrara ure of a horse in the tapestry of the drawing-roo ht-errantry which is the hardest? Not to coe men; not to bear down rival cha to a purpose amid all that depresses the senses at a ti; to advance where there is nothing to arouse energy by opposition, and everything without and within to sap the very life of the soul Childe Roland is himself hopeless and al cripple had pointed and over which he rides is created in the utter indigence of nature--a very nightmare of poverty and mean repulsiveness And yet he endures the test, and halts only when he faces the Dark Tower and blows the blast upon his horn Browning ise to carry his roh; it is the breaking of the spell, the waking fro questerby the abrupt conclusion
In the poeards the union of soul with soul as the capital achieve one of its chief tests When we have forroup falls in the main into two divisions--poems which tell of attainment, and poems which tell of failure or defeat Certain persons whose centre is a little hard kernel of egoisenerous passion Browning does not belabour with heavy invective the _Pretty Woman_ of his poem, who is born without a heart; she is a flower-like creature and of her kind is perfect; only the flower is to be gazed at, not gathered; or, if it athered, then at last to be throay The chief distinction between the love of man and the love of woman, implied in various poems, is this--the man at his most blissful moment cries ”What treasures I have obtained!” the woman cries ”What treasures have I to surrender and bestow?” Hence the singleness and finality in the election of passion made by a woht The unequal exchange of a transitory for an enduring surrender of self is the sorrohich pulsates through the lines of _In a Year_, as swift and broken with pauses as the beating of a heart:
Dear, the pang is brief, Do thy part, Have thy pleasure! How perplexed Grows belief!
Well, this cold clay clod Was man's heart: Crumble it and what co of love on the man's part, this is the point of central pain, in that poem of exquisite and pathetic distrust at the heart of trust and admiration, _Any Wife to any Husband_; noble and faithful as the husband has been, still he is only adoes justice to the pure chivalry of a man's devotion
Caponsacchi's joy is the joy of a saviour who hireat event of his life by which he is lifted above self is single and ultioisrace of love is here what the theologians called invincible grace, and invincible grace, we know, results in final perseverance Even here in _Men and Women_ two contrasted poems assure us that, while the passion of a man may be no more than _Love in a Life_, it may also be an unweariable _Life in a Love_
Of the poems of attainaiety in it Here love allant bid for freedom, fires up for lawlessness, if need be, and at least sets convention at defiance:
The world's good word!--the Institute!
Guizot receives Montalembert!