Part 16 (1/2)
The _Pacchiarotto_ volume of 1876 was the first collection ofsince the appearance, twelve years previously, of _Drahout the whole the presence of a vigorous personality; we can in an occasional h verse of _Pacchiarotto_, as we do on a choppy sea on which the sun is a-shi+ne, and which invigorates while it--not always agreeably--bobs our head, and dashes down our throat But vigour alone does not produce poetry, and it ood-humoured effrontery The speciality of the volume as compared with its predecessors is that it contains not a little running coether with a jocular-savage reply to his unfriendly critics There is a little too reat voice before hie to ads has been administered to every one who enters the world, and that as sure as he attracts, so surely ue_ the poet informs his readers that those who expect fro wine of verse which is also sweet de wine can beco in the cask The experience of Browning's readers contradicted the assertion Soood wines of 1855 and of 1864 in the year of the vintages found that they were strong and needed no keeping to be sweet Wine-tasters must make distinctions, and the quality of the yield of 1876 does not entitle it to be remembered as an extraordinary year
The poem from which the volume was named tells in verse, ”timed by raps of the knuckle,” how the painter Pacchiarotto must needs become a world-reformer, or at least a city-reforood results for his city and with disastrous results for himself He learns by unsavoury experience his lesson, to hold on by the paint-brush and led evil and good of life in a spirit of strenuous--not indolent--_laissez-faire_, playing, as energetically as a hu others to play theirs, assured that for all and each this life is the trial-time and test of eternity, the rehearsal for the perforo s as seen in this serio-grotesque jingle was great; some readers may be permitted to wish that many of his rhymes were not iven by Sir Leslie Stephen he e to produce a rhyme for ”rhinoceros,” and for Tennyson's diversion he delivered himself of an improenputtock” But in rhy is inferior to the author of ”Hudibras,” in a rhyant effrontery he is inferior to the author of ”Don Juan” Browning's good-huood-huh and ready successes, but cannot often be delighted by brilliant gymnastics of sound and sense In like manner it asks for a particularly well-disposed reader to appreciate the wit of Browning's retort upon his critics: ”You are chireat voice, ”listen! I have invented several insulting nickna the slops in your faces” This enial and clever It certainly has none of the exquisite nity of Pope's poisoned rapier Perhaps it is a little dull; perhaps it is a little outrageous
The Browning who masks as Shakespeare in _At the Mer a poetical faction, condemns the Byronic _Welt-schmerz_, and announces his resolvedly cheerful acceptance of life Elsewhere he assures his readers that though his work is theirs his life is his own; he will not unlock his heart in sonnets Such is the drift of the verses entitled _House_; a peep through theis permitted, but ”please you, no foot over threshold of mine” This was not Shakespeare's wiser way; if he hid himself behind his work, it ith the openness and with the taciturnity of Nature He did not stand in theof his ”House” declaring that he was not to be seen; he did not pull up and dran the blind to make it appear that he was at ho continues his assurances that he is no Eglaue and vast” Verse- is the goldsmith's--but do you suppose that the poet lives no life of his own?--how and where it is not for you to guess, only be certain it is far away from his counter and his till These poems were needless confidences to the public that no confidences would be vouchsafed to them
But the volume of 1876 contains better work than these pieces of self-assertion The two love-lyrics _Natural Magic_ and _Magical Nature_ have each of them a surprise of beauty; the one tells of the fairy-tale of love, the other of its inward glow and gem-like stability
_Bifurcation_ is characteristic of the writer; the woman who chooses duty rather than love may have done well, but she has chosen the easier way and perhaps has evaded the probation of life; the man who chooses passion rather than duty has slipped and stumbled, but his was the harder course and perhaps the better Which of the tas sinner? which was saint? To be i of offences In _St Martin's Su a love that has grown upon the graves of the past, is a check upon passion, which by a sudden turn at the close triumphs in a victory that is defeat _Fears and Scruples_ is a confession of the trials of theistic faith in a world from which God seems to be an absentee What had been supposed to be letters fro actions are the accumulated results of the natural law of heredity Yet even if theism had to be abandoned, it would have borne fruit:
All o the softlier, sadlier For that dreah ladlier Lives my friend because I love him still?”
And the friend will value love all the norance[118] The blank verse edy,” is a roic in its action Out of its darkness gleae--the description of those weapons of Eastern work with voluptuousness--
one of which is the instru his conterirotesque incident from the history of the Jews in Italy related in _Filippo Baldinucci_ recalls the comedy and the pathos of _Holy Cross Day_, to which it is in every respect inferior The Jew of the centuries of Christian persecution is for Browning's irotesque, and wholly human _Cenciaja_, a note in verse connected with Shelley's _Cenci_, would be excellent as a note in prose appended to the tragedy, explaining, as it does, why the Pope, inclining to pardon Beatrice, was turned aside froains in value by having been thrown into verse To recover our loyalty to Browning as a poet, which this voluht well reserve _Numpholeptos_ for the close The pure and diseht face to face with the passionate and sullied lover, to whom her char above this lost Endyoes forth on hopeless quests at the bidding of his mistress, and wins for all his reward the ”sad, slow, silver smile,” which is now pity, now disdain, and never love The subjugating power of chaste and beautiful superiority to passion over this mere mortal devotee is absolute and inexorable Is the ny that may be found in womanhood?
Is she an embodiment of the Ideal, which sends out many questers, and pities and disdains them when they return soiled and defeated? Soft and sweet as she appears, she is _La belle Dame sans merci_, and her worshi+pper is as desperately lost as the knight-at-arms of Keats's poem
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 112: See Morley's ”Life of Gladstone,” vol iii p 417]
[Footnote 113: Pages 46, 47 of the first edition]
[Footnote 114: Pages 58-60]
[Footnote 115: It may here be noted that Dante Rossetti in a es of _Fifine_ were directed against hi]
[Footnote 116: fanny Kemble also derived froedy”]
[Footnote 117: Some sentences in what follows are taken from a notice of the volume which I wrote on its appearance for _The Acadesland in ”Robert Browning” by W G Kingsland (1890), pp 32, 33]
Chapter XV
Solitude and Society
The volume which consists of _La Saisiaz_ and _The Two Poets of Croisic_ (1878) brings the work of this decade to a close[119] _La Saisiaz_, the record of thoughts that were awakened during that solitary claerton-Sy, but it re it we discern the tall white figure of the ”stranger lady,” leaning through the terrace wreaths of leaf and bloorass-path which she had loved and called her own It serves Browning's purpose in the poem that she should have been one of those persons who in this world have not manifested all that lies within the which lies in the little enclosure at Collonge? The poem after its solemn and impressive prelude becomes the record of an hour's debate of the writer with hiht to a definite issue In conducting that debate on i is neither Christian nor anti-Christian The Christian creed involves a question of history; he cannot here admit historical considerations; he will see the ested by his individual consciousness and his personal knowledge It may be that any result he arrives at is a result for hiument in verse? Is not prose a fitter medium for such a discussion? The answer is that the poeument; it is the record in verse of an experience, the story of a pregnant and passionate hour, during which passion quickened the intellect; and the head, while resisting all illusions of the heart, was roused to that resistance by the heart itself Such an hour is full of events; it may be almost epic in its plenitude of action; but the events are ideas The fra of the discussion also are hts; they for the mountains, with dawn and sunset for associates, Jura thrilled to gold at sunrise, Saleve in its evening rose-blooht he is beneath the lu--chiefly that prepotency of Mars
While he climbs towards the summit he is aware of ”Earth's most exquisite disclosures, heaven's own God in evidence”; he stands face to face with Nature--”rather with Infinitude” All through his our of life is aroused within hirave