[Footnote 92:  Easter-Day, xxx.]

VI.

3.  JOY IN POWER.

Browning was thus announced, we have seen, even by his splendour of colouring and his rich and clear-cut plasticity, as something more than a feaster upon colour and form.  In his riot of the senses there was more of the athlete than of the voluptuary.  His joy was that of one to whom nervous and muscular tension was itself a stimulating delight.  In such a temperament the feeling of energy was an elementary instinct, a passionate obsession, which projected itself through eye and ear and imagination into the outer world, filling it with the throbbing pulsations or the clashing conflict of vehement powers.  We know that it was thus with Browning.  “From the first Power was, I knew,” he wrote in the last autumn of his life.[93] It was a primitive instinct, and it remained firmly rooted to the last.  As Wordsworth saw Joy everywhere, and Shelley Love, so Browning saw Power.  If he later “saw Love as plainly,” it was the creative and transforming, not the emotional, aspect of Love which caught his eye.  His sense of Power played a yet more various part in the shaping of his poetic world than did his sense of form.  But intellectual growth inevitably modified the primitive instinct which it could not uproot; and his sense of Power traverses the whole gamut of dynamic tones, from the lusty “barbaric” joy in the sheer violence of ripping and clashing, to the high-wrought sensibility which throbs in sympathy with the passionate heart-beats of the stars.

[Footnote 93:  Asolando:  Reverie.]

No one can miss the element of savage energy in Browning.  His associates tell us of his sudden fits of indignation, “which were like thunder-storms”; of his “brutal scorn” for effeminacy, of the “vibration of his loud voice, and his hard fist upon the table,” which made short work of cobwebs.[94] The impact of hard resisting things, the jostlings of stubborn matter bent on going its own way, attracted him as the subtle compliances of air appealed to Shelley; and he runs riot in the vocabulary (so abundantly developed in English) which conveys with monosyllabic vigour to the ear these jostlings and impacts.

[Footnote 94:  Mr E. Gosse, in Dict. of N.B.]

     “Who were the stragglers, what war did they wage;
      Whose savage trample thus could pad the dank
      Soil to a plash?”

he asks in Childe Roland,—­altogether an instructive example of the ways of Browning’s imagination when working, as it so rarely did, on a deliberately fantastic theme.  Hear again with what savage joy his Moon “rips the womb” of the cloud that crosses it; Shelley’s Moon, in keeping with the ways of his more tender-hefted universe, merely broke its woof.  So the gentle wife of James Lee sees in a vineyard “the vines writhe in rows each impaled on its stake.”