Читать книгу A Bundle of Memories - Henry Scott Holland - Страница 6

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A hundred years ago! Impossible! How can he have been born so far back behind everything, before the boom of the guns at Waterloo had, “on that loud Sabbath,” shaken the spoiler down--before the finest and worst gentleman in Europe had come to the throne--before the flood-gates had burst and modern life had begun? Born, then; and certainly alive to-day: walking at our side: level with our hopes and fears: speaking to our hearts: a vital voice that tells of active companionship, and daily intimacy, and quick give-and-take, and all the immediate efficacy of a life shared and understood. It is amazing to think that he should be still with us, keeping step, giving utterance to our souls, unjaded and alert. He is still so fresh-aired: so spontaneous: so alive. We hear him talking: we feel him in movement: he and we live together. Nothing has yet thrown him behind: or come between: or divided him off from actual present speech on life’s affairs as they occur. He is not relegated to a distinguished sanctuary into which we withdraw. He takes part with us in the breathing, seething, boisterous Present. We and he are of one date.

Now, this is startling, if he really was born a hundred years ago. He ought to have taken on, by this time, a reverential dignity, a touch of seclusion. He ought to be showing signs of becoming a Classic. We should be taking him down from our shelves, and dusting him with a pocket-handkerchief, and giving him sonorous utterance, to the restrained horror of a younger generation. But nothing of the kind. He still belongs to the hour. He is with us, not above us. He is our mate: he tips us the word that we want. He is at hand, ready at need, to interpret our actual experience as it grows. This is the wonder.

The skilled gentry of “The Times Literary Supplement” say that this is only true of the Browning who took life for its own sake in the spirit of the intuitionalist and the emotionalist: but not of the Browning who set himself to justify the ways of God to man, and to argue out a moral creed. The true Browning stands with Shakespeare, not with Milton or Æschylus. His deliberate intellectuality may all be dropped out. It came to little. He never went to the bottom of the problem. And he let argumentation ruin his work. Let all this go, they now tell us; and be content that you have the poems of the Bells and Pomegranate type, and the “Men and Women”: the splendid colour and passion and force of the Bishop ordering his tomb, and of the Lost Duchess, and all the glowing, glorious splendours caught from out of the heart of the Italian Renaissance.

These are wonders and delights, indeed. But dare we drive this dreadful cleavage? Dare we sever our babe in twain? Surely, the lines cross. The greatest work of all that he gave us involves the fusion of the intellectual with the imaginative. What about “A Death in the Desert”? What about the Pope in “The Ring and the Book”? Can we refuse to poems of this order the recognition that places them at the very top of Browning’s poems? Has he not here given us the work by which the final verdict stands? Did he ever rise higher? Can you pretend to estimate his position as a poet, and drop them out of account? Yet in them the intellectualism is pronounced and emphatic. He throws into them all his familiar argument, all his formal Creed. His Apologetic for Christianity finds, in these poems, its finest and fullest form.

We cannot then exclude from his supreme moments as a poet his capacity as a thinker. How can the two sides be reconciled? We must remember that he himself foresaw and discounted the difficulties involved in the fusion.

First, he himself chaffed the attempt to wring poetry out of metaphysic, in “Transcendentalism: a Poem in twelve books.”

“Stop playing, poet! May a brother speak?

’Tis you speak, that’s your error. Song’s our art:

Whereas you please to speak these naked thoughts

Instead of draping them in sights and sounds.”

He wants the poet to do the magic trick so that “in there breaks” not words about roses but

“the very rose herself,

Over us, under, round us every side,

Buries us with a glory, young once more,

Pouring heaven into this shut house of life,

“So come, the harp back to your heart again!

You are a poem, though your poem’s naught.

The best of all you showed before, believe,

Was your own boy-face o’er the finer chords

Bent, following the cherub at the top

That points to God with his paired half-moon wings.”

So much for argumentation: and then, again, in “Pacchiarotto,” he indignantly and scornfully derides the introduction of the private personality of the poet into the domain of his art. He will not be a Byron, who uses his poetic gift to tell the wide world that he has quarrelled with his wife. The poet’s views on life, the poet’s conduct at home, are matters with which the outside world which reads his poetry has no concern whatever. Only the unnatural horror of an earthquake reveals, by destroying the outer walls of the poet’s house, how he lived inside with his wife. It is the sin of sins to try and get round to that other secret side of the moon which the poet reserves from his art, and keeps for his love.

We ought not to want to know what Browning, the man, thought about his religion. Yes! But, then, he did let us know. We could not mistake him. He told it us over and over again. We cannot read “Easter Day” and “Christmas Eve” or the “Epilogue,” and yet declare that these are but dramatic studies, and tell us no secrets about the soul of the poet. If Shakespeare disclosed himself in the Sonnets, and unlocked the key of his heart to us, “the less Shakespeare he.” Well, but Browning does unlock his heart: there is no denying it. He himself, then, broke his own canon. He allowed his poetic art to tell us what he himself thought, and how he argued for it. Was the result poetry? Did it justify itself from the point of view of Art?

I think that he saved it as Art by his insistence on choice, on decision, as the sole material of artistic interest. The spiritual and emotional significance of life lies in Decision. So he believed. We are here on earth to make a judgment. Heaven and Hell are at stake. We choose. And that choice is life. Poem after poem preached the high Gospel. We all know it. Its triumph is sung in “At the Fireside.” Its failure is read out defiantly in “Dis Aliter Visum” and “Youth and Art”:--

“Now I may speak: you fool, for all

Your lore! Who made things plain in vain?

What was the sea for? What, the grey

Sad church, that solitary day,

Crosses and graves and swallows’ call?

“Was there naught better than to enjoy?

No feat which, done, would make time break,

And let us pent-up creatures through

Into eternity, our due?

No forcing earth teach heaven’s employ?

“No wise beginning, here and now,

What cannot grow complete (earth’s feat)

And heaven must finish, there and then?

No tasting earth’s true food for men,

Its sweet in sad, its sad in sweet?”

. . . . . .

“It once might have been, once only:

We lodged in a street together,

You, a sparrow on the housetop lonely,

I, a lone she-bird of his feather.

“Why did not you pinch a flower

In a pellet of clay and fling it?

Why did not I put a power

Of thanks in a look, or sing it?

“Each life unfulfilled, you see;

It hangs still, patchy and scrappy:

We have not sighed deep, laughed free,

Starved, feasted, despaired,--been happy.

“And nobody calls you a dunce,

And people suppose me clever:

This could but have happened once,

And we missed it, lost it for ever.”

And fiercely in the “Statue and the Bust.” Its glory fills the world in “The Flight of the Duchess.” And its trumpet-blast is blown in “Childe Roland”:--

“There they stood, ranged along the hill-sides, met

To view the last of me, a living frame

For one more picture! in a sheet of flame

I saw them and I knew them all. And yet

Dauntless the slug-horn to my lips I set,

And blew ‘Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came.’ ”

It is the real motive and secret of “Christmas Eve” and “Easter Day.”

Now, the excitement of making a choice allows for the introduction of a mass of argumentation. You can discuss the pros and the cons without stint. You can indulge in endless apologetics. You can go behind the choice, and let yourself loose on all the infinite intellectual process by which decision was reached. And yet, with the concrete, emotional, dramatic act of choice as the determinate throughout, as the resultant climax, all this intellectual business will fall within the poetic motive. It will belong to the imaginative impulse. It will minister to the artistic crisis. It is not a mere argument that it is there: but an argument which exalts the spiritual excitement--argument which holds the issue in breathless suspense. So used, in service to the gathering storm-pressure, it is fused with real passion, and becomes true material for poetry. The poetic element lies wholly in the agony of the decision that has to be made: and, swept into this stress of critical judgment which will determine the character of a life and decide between heaven and hell, the most prolonged logomachy may be filled with rapturous thrill. This is how Browning contrives to make his speculative apologetics justifiable. They serve to heighten and intensify the passion that is engaged in coming to a vital decision.

And, again, is it not this emphasis on decision, as the vital significance of life, which accounts for the gross amount of clumsy stuff, which his poetic current carries along with it? The final choice is his real poetic subject. The choice is a growth: a result. To appreciate a choice, you must know what lies behind it: you must be aware of the hidden processes through which it arrived at itself. You must feel the rough-and-tumble antecedents--the wild tumult of the warring forces. The beauty of the ultimate decision turns on the ugliness of the preliminary conditions. The honour of the choice wrung out of unfavourable auspices cannot be recognized unless the ghastly possibilities have been fitly felt. So Browning must force us back, behind the actual decision of which he sings the praise or the blame, on to the noises, the clamour, the stupidities, the meannesses, which were doing their utmost to pervert it. He must bring in a whole mob of ugly matters, into order, to justify his passionate interest in the strange and eventful outcome. His poetry cannot tell of the fair and beautiful fruit of life, without taking us below ground to see the grim root at work in the dark, among the insects and the worms.

That is why his wonderful verse which, at its best, is so exquisite in form and sound, is like the music of a great organ which is all the more effective because it carries with it the clatter of the valves, and the groan of the tubes, and the creaks and noises of the pedals. An enormous process is to be heard at its work. The music is simply the top event of a tumultuous movement underlying it. And the tumult of the tumbled movement is essential to the white rare radiance of the event.

Yet music there certainly is. Radiance he most certainly gave us. Our life braces itself under the call, the inspiration. We rise and follow our leader, who moved through this crowded and tired world of ours with step alert, and back straight, and head erect, and eyes set forward: and who told us of hope, and joy, and the glory of strength, and the glow of victory, and the peace that comes after the storm, and the infinite value of love.

“Oh heart! oh blood that freezes, blood that burns!

Earth’s returns

For whole Centuries of folly, noise, and sin!

Shut them in.

Love is best.”