VII.

The love-poetry of the Men and Women volumes, as originally published, was the most abundant and various, if not the most striking, part of its contents.  It was almost entirely transferred, in the collected edition of his Poems issued in 1863, to other rubrics, to the Dramatic Lyrics, of which it now forms the great bulk, and to the Dramatic Romances.  But of Browning’s original “fifty men and women,” nearly half were lovers or occupied with love.  Such fertility was natural enough in the first years of a supremely happy marriage, crowning an early manhood in which love of any kind had, for better or worse, played hardly any part at all.  Yet almost nothing in these beautiful and often brilliant lyrics is in any strict sense personal.  The biographer who searches them for traits quivering with intimate experience searches all but in vain.  Browning’s own single and supreme passion touched no fountain of song, such as love sets flowing in most poets and in many who are not poets:  even the memorable months of 1845-46 provoked no Sonnets “to the Portuguese.”  His personal story impresses itself upon his poetry only through the preoccupation which it induces with the love-stories of other people, mostly quite unlike his own.  The white light of his own perfect union broke from that prismatic intellect of his in a poetry brilliant with almost every other hue.  No English poet of his century, and few of any other, have made love seem so wonderful; but he habitually takes this wonder bruised and jostled in the grip of thwarting conditions.  In his way of approaching love Browning strangely blends the mystic’s exaltation with the psychologist’s cool penetrating scrutiny of its accompanying phenomena, its favourable or impeding conditions.  The keen analytic accent of Paracelsus mingles with the ecstatic unearthly note of Shelley.  “Love is all” might have served as the text for the whole volume of Browning’s love-poetry; but the text is wrought out with an amazingly acute vision for all the things which are not love.  “Love triumphing over the world” might have been the motto for most of the love-poems in Men and Women; but some would have had to be assigned to the opposite rubric, “The world triumphing over love.”  Sometimes Love’s triumph is, for Browning, the rapture of complete union, for which all outer things exist only by subduing themselves to its mood and taking its hue; sometimes it is the more ascetic and spiritual triumph of an unrequited lover in the lonely glory of his love.

The triumph of Browning’s united lovers has often a superb Elizabethan note of defiance.  Passion obliterates for them the past and throws a mystically hued veil over Nature.  The gentle Romantic sentiments hardly touch the fresh springs of their emotion.  They may meet and woo “among the ruins,” as Coleridge met and wooed his Genevieve “beside the ruined tower”; but their song does not, like his, “suit well that ruin old and hoary,” but, on the contrary, tramples with gay scorn upon the lingering memories of the ruined city,—­a faded pageant yoked to its triumphal car.