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The Ring and the Book is a great receptacle into which Browning poured, with an affluence that perhaps is excessive, all his powers—his searchings for truth, his passion, his casuistry, his feeling for beauty, his tenderness, his gift of pity, his veiled memories of what was most precious in the past, his hopes for the future, his worldly knowledge, his unworldly aspirations, his humour, such as it was, robust rather than delicate. Could the three monologues which tell how in various ways it strikes a Roman contemporary have been fused into a single dialogue, could the speeches of the two advocates have been briefly set over, one against the other, instead of being drawn out at length, we might still have got the whole of Browning's mind. But we must take things as we find them, and perhaps a skilled writer knows his own business best. Never was Browning's mastery in narrative displayed with such effect as in Caponsacchi's account of the flight to Rome, which is not mere record, but record winged with lyrical enthusiasm. Never was his tenderness so deep or poignant as in his realisation of the motherhood of Pompilia. Never were the gropings of intellect and the intuitions of the spirit shown by him in their weakness and their strength with such a lucid subtlety as in the deliberations and decisions of the Pope. The whole poem which he compares to a ring was the ring of a strong male finger; but the posy of the ring, and the comparison is again his own, tells how it was a gift hammered and filed during the years of smithcraft "in memoriam"; in memory and also with a hope.

The British Public, whom Browning addresses at the close of his poem, and who "liked him not" during so many years, now when he was not far from sixty went over to his side. The Ring and the Book almost immediately passed into a second edition. The decade from 1869 onwards is called by Mrs Orr the fullest period in Browning's life. His social occupations and entertainments both in London and for a time as a visitor at country-houses became more numerous and absorbing, yet he had energy for work as well as for play. During these ten years no fewer than nine new volumes of his poetry appeared. None of them are London poems, and Italy is for the present almost forgotten; it is the scene of only two or three short pieces, which are included in the volume of 1876—Pacchiarotto and how he worked in distemper; with other Poems. The other pieces of the decade as regards their origin fall with a single exception into two groups; first those of ancient Greece, suggested by Browning's studies in classical drama; secondly those, which in a greater or less degree, are connected with his summer wanderings in France and Switzerland. The dream-scene of Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau is Leicester Square; but this also is one of the poems of France. The Inn Album alone is English in its characters and their surroundings. Such a grouping of the works of the period is of a superficial nature, and it can be readily dismissed. It brings into prominence, however, the fact that Browning, while resolved to work out what was in him, lay open to casual suggestions. He had acquired certain methods which he could apply to almost any topic. He had confidence that any subject on which he concentrated his powers of mind could be compelled to yield material of interest. It cannot be said that he exercised always a wise discretion in the choice of subjects; these ought to have been excellent in themselves; he trusted too much to the successful issue of the play of his own intellect and imagination around and about his subjects. The Ring and the Book had given him practice, extending over several years, in handling the large dramatic monologue. Now he was prepared to stretch the dramatic monologue beyond the bounds, and new devices were invented to keep it from stagnating and to carry it forward. Imaginary disputants intervene in the monologue; there are objections, replies, retorts; a second player in the game not being found, the speaker has to play against himself.

In the story of the Roman murder-case fancy was mingled with fact, and truth with falsehood, with a view to making truth in the end the more salient. The poet had used to the full his dramatic right of throwing himself into intellectual sympathy with persons towards whom he stood in moral antagonism or at least experienced an inward sense of alienation. The characteristic of much of his later poetry is that it is for ever tasking falsehood to yield up truth, for ever (to employ imagery of his own) as a swimmer beating the treacherous water with the feet in order that the head may rise higher into the pure air made for the spirit's breathing. Browning's genius united an intellect which delighted in the investigation of complex problems with a spiritual and emotional nature manifesting itself in swift and simple solutions of those problems; it united an analytic or discursive power supplied by the head with an intuitive power springing from the heart. He employed his brain to twist and tangle a Gordian knot in order that in a moment it might be cut with the sword of the spirit. In the earlier poems his spiritual ardours and intuitions were often present throughout, and without latency, without reserve; impassioned truth often flashed upon the reader through no intervening or resisting medium. In The Ring and the Book, and in a far greater degree in some subsequent poems, while the supreme authority resides in the spiritual intuitions or the passions of the heart, their instantaneous, decisive work waits until a prolonged casuistry has accomplished its utmost; falsehood seems almost more needful in the process of the poet than truth. And yet it is never actually so. Rather to the poet, as a moral explorer, it appeared a kind of cowardice to seek truth only where it may easily be found; the strenuous hunter will track it through all winding ways of error; it is thrown out as a spot of intense illumination upon a background of darkness; it leaps forth as the flash of the search-light piercing through a mist. The masculine characters in the poems are commonly made the exponents of Browning's intellectual casuistry—a Hohenstiel-Schwangau, an Aristophanes; and they are made to say the best and the most truthful words that can be uttered by such as they are and from such positions as theirs; the female characters, a Balaustion, the Lady of Sorrows in The Inn Album, and others are often revealers of sudden truth, which with them is either a divine revelation—the vision seen from a higher and clearer standpoint—or a dictate of pure human passion. Eminent moments in life had an extraordinary interest for Browning—moments when life, caught up out of the habitual ways and the lower levels of prudence, takes its guidance and inspiring motive from an immediate discovery of truth through some noble ardour of the heart. Therefore it did not seem much to him to task his ingenuity through almost all the pages of a laborious book in creating a tangle and embroilment of evil and good, of truth and falsehood, in view of the fact that a shining moment is at last to spring forward and do its work of severing absolutely and finally right from wrong, and shame from a splendour of righteousness. Browning's readers longed at times, and not without cause, for the old directness and the old pervading presence of spiritual and impassioned truth.¹⁰²

Chapter XIII
Poems on Classical Subjects

During these years, 1869-1878, Browning's outward life maintained its accustomed ways. In the summer of 1869 he wandered with his son and his sister, in company with his friends of Italian days, the Storys, in Scotland, and at Lock Luichart Lodge visited Lady Ashburton.¹⁰³ Three summers, those of 1870, 1872 and 1873 were spent at Saint-Aubin, a wild "un-Murrayed" village on the coast of Normandy, where Milsand occupied a little cottage hard by. At night the light-house of Havre shot forth its beam, and it was with "a thrill" that Browning saw far off the spot where he had once sojourned with his wife.¹⁰⁴ "I don't think we were ever quite so thoroughly washed by the sea-air from all quarters as here," he wrote in August 1870. Every morning, as Mme. Blanc (Th. Bentzon) tells us, he might be seen "walking along the sands with the small Greek copy of Homer which was his constant companion. On Sunday he went with the Milsands … to a service held in the chapel of the Chateau Blagny, at Lion-sur-Mer, for the few Protestants of that region. They were generally accompanied by a young Huguenot peasant, their neighbour, and Browning with the courtesy he showed to every woman, used to take a little bag from the hands of the strong Norman girl, notwithstanding her entreaties." The visit of 1870 was saddened by the knowledge of what France was suffering during the progress of the war. He lingered as long as possible for the sake of comradeship with Milsand, around whose shoulder Browning's arm would often lie as they walked together on the beach.¹⁰⁵ But communication with England became daily more and more difficult. Milsand insisted that his friend should instantly return. It is said by Mme. Blanc that Browning was actually suspected by the peasants of a neighbouring village of being a Prussian spy. Not without difficulty he and his sister reached Honfleur, where an English cattle-boat was found preparing to start at midnight for Southampton.

Two years later Miss Thackeray was also on the coast of Normandy and at no great distance. "It was a fine hot summer," she writes, "with sweetness and completeness everywhere; the cornfields gilt and far-stretching, the waters blue, the skies arching high and clear, and the sunsets succeeding each other in most glorious light and beauty." Some slight misunderstanding on Browning's part, the fruit of mischief-making gossipry, which caused constraint between him and his old friend was cleared away by the good offices of Milsand. While Miss Thackeray sat writing, with shutters closed against the blazing sun, Browning himself "dressed all in white, with a big white umbrella under his arm," arrived to take her hand with all his old cordiality. A meeting of both with the Milsands, then occupying a tiny house in a village on the outer edges of Luc-sur-mer, soon followed, and before the sun had fallen that evening they were in Browning's house upon the cliff at Saint-Aubin. "The sitting-room door opened to the garden and the sea beyond—fresh-swept bare floor, a table, three straw chairs, one book upon the table. Mr Browning told us it was the only book he had with him. The bedrooms were as bare as the sitting-room, but I remember a little dumb piano standing in a corner, on which he used to practise in the early morning. I heard Mr Browning declare they were perfectly satisfied with their little house; that his brains, squeezed as dry as a sponge, were only ready for fresh air."¹⁰⁶ Perhaps Browning's "only book" of 1872 contained the dramas of Æschylus, for at Fontainebleau where he spent some later weeks of the year these were the special subject of his study. It was at Saint-Aubin in 1872 that he found the materials for his poem of the following year, and to Miss Thackeray's drowsy name for the district,

 
Symbolic of the place and people too,
 

White Cotton Night-Cap Country, the suggestion of Browning's title Red Cotton Night-Cap Country is due. To her the poem is dedicated.

Browning's interest in those who were rendered homeless and destitute in France during the Prussian invasion was shown in a practical way in the spring of 1871. He had for long been averse to the publication of his poems in magazines and reviews. In 1864 he had gratified his American admirers by allowing Gold Hair and Prospice to appear in the Atlantic Monthly previous to their inclusion in Dramatis Persona. A fine sonnet written in 1870, suggested by the tower erected at Clandeboye by Lord Dufferin in memory of his mother, Helen, Countess of Gifford, had been inserted in some undistributed copies of a pamphlet, "Helen's Tower," privately printed twenty years previously; the sonnet was published at the close of 1883 in the Pall Mall Gazette, but was not given a place by Browning in the collected editions of his Poetical Works. In general he felt that the miscellaneous contents of a magazine, surrounding a poem, formed hardly an appropriate setting for such verse as his. In February 1871, however, he offered to his friend and, publisher Mr Smith the ballad of Hervé Riel for use in the Cornhill Magazine of March, venturing for once, as he says, to puff his wares and call the verses good. His purpose was to send something to the distressed people of Paris, and one hundred guineas, the sum liberally fixed by Mr Smith as the price of the poem, were duly forwarded—the gift of the English poet and his Breton hero. The facts of the story had been forgotten and were denied at St Malo; the reports of the French Admiralty were examined and indicated the substantial accuracy of the poem. On one point Browning erred; it was not a day's holiday to be spent with his wife "la Belle Aurore" which the Breton sailor petitioned for as the reward of his service, but a "congé absolu," the holiday of a life-time. In acknowledging his error to Dr Furnivall, and adding an explanation of its cause, he dismissed the subject with the word, "Truth above all things; so treat the matter as you please."¹⁰⁷

For the purposes of holiday-making the resources of the northern French coast, with which Browning's ballad of the Croisickese pilot is associated, were, says Mrs Orr, becoming exhausted. Yet some rest and refreshment after the heavy tax upon his strength made by a London season with its various claims were essential to his well-being. His passion for music would not permit him during his residence in town to be absent from a single important concert; the extraordinary range of his acquaintance with the works of great and even of obscure composers was attested by Halle. In his sonnet of 1884, inscribed in the Album to Mr Arthur Chappell, The Founder of the Feast, a poem not included in any edition of his works, he recalls these evenings of delight:

 
Sense has received the utmost Nature grants,
My cup was filled with rapture to the brim,
When, night by night—ah, memory, how it haunts!—
Music was poured by perfect ministrants,
By Halle, Schumann, Piatti, Joachim.
 

Long since in Florence he had become acquainted with Miss Egerton-Smith, who loved music like himself, and was now often his companion at public performances in London. She was wealthy, and with too little confidence in her power to win the regard of others, she lived apart from the great world. In 1872 Browning lost the warm-hearted and faithful friend who had given him such prompt, womanly help in his worst days of grief—Miss Blagden. Her place in his memory remained her own. Miss Egerton-Smith might seem to others wanting in strength of feeling and cordiality of manner. Browning knew the sensitiveness of her nature, which responded to the touch of affection, and he could not fail to discover her true self, veiled though it was by a superficial reserve. And as he knew her, so he wrote of her in the opening of his La Saisiaz:

 
You supposed that few or none had known and loved you in the world:
May be! flower that's full-blown tempts the butterfly, not flower that's furled.
But more learned sense unlocked you, loosed the sheath and let expand
Bud to bell and out-spread flower-shape at the least warm touch of hand
—Maybe throb of heart, beneath which,—quickening farther than it knew,—
Treasure oft was disembosomed, scent all strange and unguessed hue.
Disembosomed, re-embosomed,—must one memory suffice,
Prove I knew an Alpine rose which all beside named Edelweiss?
 

Miss Egerton-Smith was the companion and house-mate of Browning and his sister in their various summer wanderings from 1874 to 1877. In the first of these years the three friends occupied a house facing the sea at the village of Mers near Tréport. Browning at this time was much absorbed by his Aristophanes' Apology. "Here," writes Mrs Orr, "with uninterrupted quiet, and in a room devoted to his use, Mr Browning would work till the afternoon was advanced, and then set off on a long walk over the cliffs, often in the face of a wind, which, as he wrote of it at the time, he could lean against as if it were a wall." The following summers were spent at Villers in Normandy (1875), at the Isle of Arran (1876), and in the upland country of the Salève, near Geneva. During the visit to the Salève district, where Browning and his sister with Miss Egerton-Smith occupied a chalet named La Saisiaz, he was, Mrs Orr tells us, "unusually depressed and unusually disposed to regard the absence from home as a banishment." Yet the place seemed lovely to him in its solitude and its beauty; the prospect of Geneva, with lake and plain extended below, varying in appearance with the shifting of clouds, was repose to his sense of sight. He bathed twice each day in the mountain stream—"a marvel of delicate delight framed in with trees." He read and rested; and wrote but little or not at all. Suddenly the repose of La Saisiaz was broken up; the mood of languorous pleasure and drowsy discontent was at an end. While preparing to join her friend on a long-intended mountain climb Miss Egerton-Smith, with no forewarning, died. The shock was for a time overwhelming. When Browning returned to London the poem La Saisiaz, the record of his inquisition into the mystery of death, of his inward debate concerning a future life, was written. It was the effort of resilience in his spirit in opposition to that stroke which deprived him of the friend who was so near and dear.

The grouping of the works produced by Browning from the date of the publication of The Ring and the Book (1868) to the publication of La Saisias (1878), which is founded upon the occasions that suggested them, has only an external and historical interest. The studies in the Greek drama and the creations to which these gave rise extend at intervals over the whole decade. Balaustion's Adventure was published in 1871, Aristophanes' Apology in 1875, the translation of The Agamemnon of Æschylus in 1877. Two of the volumes of this period, Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau (1871) and Fifine at the Fair (1872) are casuistical monologues, and these, it will be observed, lie side by side in the chronological order. The first of the pair is concerned with public and political life, with the conduct and character of a man engaged in the affairs of state; the second, with a domestic question, the casuistry of wedded fidelity and infidelity, from which the scope of the poem extends itself to a wider survey of human existence and its meanings.¹⁰⁸ Two of the volumes are narrative poems, each tending to a tragic crisis; Red Cotton Night-Cap Country (1873) is a story entangled with questions relating to religion; The Inn Album (1875) is a tragedy of the passion of love. The volume of 1876, Pacchiarotto with other Poems, is the miscellaneous gathering of lyrical and narrative pieces which had come into being during a period of many years. Finally in La Saisiaz Browning, writing in his own person, records the experience of his spirit in confronting the problem of death. But it was part of his creed that the gladness of life may take hands with its grief, that the poet who would live mightily must live joyously; and in the volume which contained his poem of strenuous and virile sorrow he did not refrain from including a second piece, The two Poets of Croisic, which has in it much matter of honest mirth, and closes with the declaration that the test of greatness in an artist lies in his power of converting his more than common sufferings into a more than common joy.

Balaustion's Adventure, dedicated to the Countess Cowper by whom the transcript from Euripides was suggested, or, as Browning will have it, prescribed, proved, as the dedication declares, "the most delightful of May-month amusements" in the spring of 1871. It was the happiest of thoughts to give the version of Euripides' play that setting which has for its source a passage at the close of Plutarch's life of Nicias. The favours bestowed by the Syracusans upon Athenian slaves and fugitives who could delight them by reciting or singing the verses of Euripides is not to be marvelled at, says Plutarch, "weying a reporte made of a ship of the city of Caunus, that on a time being chased thether by pyrates, thinking to save themselves within their portes, could not at the first be received, but had repulse: howbeit being demaunded whether they could sing any of Euripides songes, and aunswering that they could, were straight suffered to enter, and come in."¹⁰⁹ From this root blossomed Browning's romance of the Rhodian girl, who saves her country folk and wins a lover and a husband by her delight in the poetry of one who was more highly honoured abroad than in his own Athens. Perhaps Browning felt that an ardent girl would be the best interpreter of the womanly heroism and the pathos of "that strangest, saddest, sweetest song," of Euripides. Of all its author's dramas the Alkestis is the most appropriate to the occasion, for it is the poem of a great deliverance from death, and here in effect it delivers from death, or worse, the fugitives from the pirate-bark, "at destruction's very edge," who are the suppliants to Syracuse. In accepting the task imposed upon him Browning must have felt that no other play of Euripides could so entirely have borne out the justice of the characterisation of the poet by Mrs Browning in the lines which he prefixed to Balaustions Adventure:

 
Our Euripides the human,
With his droppings of warm tears.
 

"If the Alkestis is not the masterpiece of the genius of Euripides," wrote Paul de Saint-Victor, "it is perhaps the masterpiece of his heart."¹¹⁰

Balaustion herself, not a rose of "the Rosy Isle" but its wild-pomegranate-flower, since amid the verdure of the tree "you shall find food, drink, odour all at once," is Hellenic in her bright and swift intelligence, her enthusiasm for all noble things of the mind, the grace of every movement of her spirit, her culture and her beauty. The atmosphere of the poem, which encircles the translation, is singularly luminous and animating; the narrative of the adventure is rapid yet always lucid; the verse leaps buoyantly like a wave of the sea. Balaustion tells her tale to the four Greek girls, her companions, amid the free things of nature, the overhanging grape vines, the rippling stream,

 
Outsmoothing galingale and watermint,
Its mat-floor,
 

and in presence of the little temple Baccheion, with its sanctities of religion and of art. By a happy and original device the transcript of the Alkestis is much more than a translation; it is a translation rendered into dramatic action—for we see and hear the performers and they are no longer masked—and this is accompanied with a commentary or an interpretation. Never was a more graceful apology for the function of the critic put forward than that of Balaustion:

 
'Tis the poet speaks:
But if I, too, should try and speak at times,
Leading your love to where my love, perchance,
Climbed earlier, found a nest before you knew—
Why, bear with the poor climber, for love's sake!
 

Browning has not often played the part of a critic, and the interpretation of a poet's work by a poet has the double value of throwing light upon the mind of the original writer and the mind of his commentator.

The life of mortals and the life of the immortal gods are brought into a beautiful relation throughout the play. It is pre-eminently human in its grief and in its joy; yet at every point the divine care, the divine help surrounds and supports the children of earth, with their transitory tears and smiles. Apollo has been a herdsman in the service of Admetos; Herakles, most human of demigods, is the king's friend and guest. The interest of the play for Browning lay especially in three things—the pure self-sacrifice of the heroine, devotion embodied in one supreme deed; and no one can heighten the effect with which Euripides has rendered this; secondly, the joyous, beneficent strength of Herakles, and this Browning has felt in a peculiar degree, and by his commentary has placed it in higher relief; and thirdly, the purification and elevation through suffering of the character of Admetos; here it would be rash to assert that Browning has not divined the intention of Euripides, but certainly he has added something of his own. It has been maintained that Browning's interpretation of the spiritual significance of the drama is a beautiful perversion of the purpose of the Greek poet; that Admetos needs no purification; that in accepting his wife's offer to be his substitute in dying, the king was no craven but a king who recognised duty to the state as his highest duty. The general feeling of readers of the play does not fall in with this ingenious plea. Browning, as appears from his imagined recast of the theme, which follows the transcript, had considered and rejected it. If Admetos is to be in some degree justified, it can only be by bearing in mind that the fact by which he shall himself escape from death is of Apollo's institution, and that obedience to the purpose of Apollo rendered self-preservation a kind of virtue. But Admetos makes no such defence of his action when replying to the reproaches of his father, and he anticipates that the verdict of the world will be against him. Browning undoubtedly presses the case against Admetos far more strongly than does Euripides, who seems to hold that a man weak in one respect, weak when brought to face the test of death, may yet be strong in the heroic mastery of grief which is imposed upon him by the duties of hospitality. Readers of the Winter's Tale have sometimes wondered whether there could be much rapture of joy in the heart of the silent Hermione when she received back her unworthy husband. If Admetos remained at the close of the play what he is understood by Browning to have been at its opening, reunion with a self-lover so base could hardly have flushed with gladness the spirit of Alkestis just escaped from the shades.¹¹¹ But Alkestis, who had proved her own loyalty by deeds, values deeds more than words. When dying she had put her love into an act, and had refrained from mere words of wifely tenderness; death put an end to her services to her husband; she felt towards him as any wife, if Browning's earlier poem be true, may feel to any husband; but still she could render a service to her children, and she exacts from Admetos the promise that he will never place a stepmother over them. His allegiance to this vow is an act, and it shall be for Alkestis the test of his entire loyalty. And the good Herakles, who enjoys a glorious jest amazingly, and who by that jest can benevolently retort upon Admetos for his concealment of Alkestis' death—for now the position is reversed and the king shall receive her living, and yet believe her dead—Herakles contrives to put Admetos to that precise test which is alone sufficient to assure Alkestis of his fidelity. Words are words; but here is a deed, and Admetos not only adheres to his pledge, but demonstrates to her that for him to violate it is impossible. She may well accept him as at length proved to be her very own.

Browning, who delights to show how good is brought out of evil, or what appears such to mortal eyes, is not content with this. He must trace the whole process of the purification of the soul of Admetos, by sorrow and its cruel yet beneficent reality, and in his commentary he emphasises each point of development in that process. When his wife lies at the point of death the sorrow of Admetos is not insincere, but there was a childishness in it, for he would not confront the fact that the event was of his own election. Presently she has departed, and he begins to taste the truth, to distinguish between a sorrow rehearsed in fancy and endured in fact. In greeting Herakles he rises to a manlier strain, puts tears away, and accepts the realities of life and death; he will not add ill to ill, as the sentimentalist does, but will be just to the rights of earth that remain; he catches some genuine strength from the magnanimous presence of the hero-god. He renders duty to the dead; is quieted; and enters more and more into the sternness of his solitary wayfaring. In dealing with the ignoble wrangle with old Pheres the critic is hard set; but Balaustion, speaking as interpreter for Browning, explains that for a little the king lapses back from the firmer foothold which he had attained. Perhaps it would have been wiser to admit that Euripides has marred his own work by this grim tragic-comic encounter of crabbed age and youth. But it is true that one who has much to give, like Alkestis, gives freely; and one who has little to give, like Pheres, clutches that little desperately and is starved not only in possessions but in soul. For Browning the significance of the scene lies in the idea, which if not just is ingenious, that the encounter with Pheres has an educational value for Admetos; he detests his father because he sees in him an image of his own egoism, and thus he learns more profoundly to hate his baser self. When the body of Alkestis has been borne away and the king re-enters his desolate halls the full truth breaks in upon him; nothing can be as it has been before—"He stared at the impossible mad life"; he has learnt that life, which yet shall be rightly lived, is a harder thing than death:

 
He was beginning to be like his wife.
 

And those around him felt that having descended in grief so far to the truth of things, he could not but return to the light an altered and a better man. Instructed so deeply in the realities of sorrow, Admetos is at last made worthy to receive the blessed realities of joy with the words,