FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 40: Handbook, p. 93.]

[Footnote 41: Swinburne, Essays and Studies, p. 220.]

18. BALAUSTION'S ADVENTURE: including a Transcript from Euripides.

[Published in August, 1871. Dedication: "To the Countess Cowper.—If I mention the simple truth: that this poem absolutely owes its existence to you,—who not only suggested, but imposed on me as a task, what has proved the most delightful of May-month amusements—I shall seem honest, indeed, but hardly prudent; for, how good and beautiful ought such a poem to be!—Euripides might fear little; but I, also, have an interest in the performance: and what wonder if I beg you to suffer that it make, in another and far easier sense, its nearest possible approach to those Greek qualities of goodness and beauty, by laying itself gratefully at your feet?—R. B., London, July 23, 1871." (Poetical Works, 1889, Vol. XI. pp. 1-122).]

The episode which supplies the title of Balaustion's Adventure was suggested by the familiar story told by Plutarch in his life of Nicias: that after the ruin of the Sicilian expedition, those of the Athenian captives who could repeat any poetry of Euripides were set at liberty, or treated with consideration, by the Syracusans. In Browning's poem, Balaustion tells her four girl-friends the story of her "adventure" at Syracuse, where, shortly before, she had saved her own life and the lives of a ship's-company of her friends by reciting the play of Alkestis to the Euripides-loving townsfolk. After a brief reminiscence of the adventure, which has gained her (besides life, and much fame, and the regard of Euripides) a lover whom she is shortly to marry, she repeats, for her friends, the whole play, adding, as she speaks the words of Euripides, such other words of her own as may serve to explain or help to realise the conception of the poet. In other words, we have a transcript or re-telling in monologue of the whole play, interspersed with illustrative comments; and after this is completed Balaustion again takes up the tale, presents us with a new version of the story of Alkestis, refers by anticipation to a poem of Mrs. Browning and a picture of Sir Frederick Leighton, and ends exultantly:—

"And all came—glory of the golden verse, And passion of the picture, and that fine Frank outgush of the human gratitude Which saved our ship and me, in Syracuse,— Ay, and the tear or two which slipt perhaps Away from you, friends, while I told my tale, —It all came of the play which gained no prize! Why crown whom Zeus has crowned in soul before?"

It will thus be seen that the "Transcript from Euripides" is the real occasion of the poem, Balaustion's adventure, though graphically described, and even Balaustion herself, though beautifully and vividly brought before us, being of secondary importance. The "adventure," as it has been said, is the amber in which Browning has embalmed the Alkestis. The play itself is rendered in what is rather an interpretation than a translation; an interpretation conceived in the spirit of the motto taken from Mrs. Browning's Wine of Cyprus:—

"Our Euripides, the human, With his droppings of warm tears, And his touches of things common Till they rose to touch the spheres."

Browning has no sympathy with those who impute to Euripides a sophistic rather than a pathetic intention; and it is conceivable that the "task" which Lady Cowper imposed upon him was to show, by some such method of translation and interpretation, the warm humanity, deep pathos, right construction and genuine truth to nature of the drama. With this end in view, Browning has woven the thread of the play into a sort of connected narrative, translating, with almost uniform literalness of language, the whole of the play as it was written by Euripides, but connecting it by comments, explanations, hints and suggestions; analyzing whatever may seem not easily to be apprehended, or not unlikely to be misapprehended; bringing out by a touch or a word some delicate shade of meaning, some subtle fineness of idea or intention.[42] A more creative piece of criticism can hardly be found, not merely in poetry, but even in prose. Perhaps it shares in some degree the splendid fault of creative criticism by occasionally lending, not finding, the noble qualities which we are certainly made to see in the work itself.

The translation, though not literal in form, is literal in substance, and it is rendered into careful and expressive blank verse. Owing to the scheme on which it is constructed, the choruses could not be rendered into lyrical verse; while, for the same reason, a few passages here and there are omitted, or only indicated by a word or so in passing. The omitted passages are very few in number; but it is not always easy to see why they should have been omitted.[43] Browning's canon of translation is "to be literal at every cost save that of absolute violence to our language," and here, certainly, he has observed his rule. Notwithstanding the greater difficulty of the metrical form, and the far greater temptation to "brighten up" a version by the use of paraphrastic but sonorous effects, it is improbable that any prose translation could be more faithful. And not merely is Browning literal in the sense of following the original word for word, he gives the exact root-meaning of words which a literal translator would consider himself justified in taking in their general sense. Occasionally a literality of this sort is less easily intelligible to the general reader than the more obvious word would have been; but, except in a very few instances, the whole translation is not less clear and forcible than it is exact. Whether or not the Alkestis of Browning is quite the Alkestis of Euripides, there is no doubt that this literal, yet glorified and vivified translation of a Greek play has added a new poem to English literature.

The blank verse of Balaustion's Adventure is somewhat different from that of its predecessor, The Ring and the Book: to my own ear, at least, it is by no means so original or so fine. It is indeed more restrained, but Browning seems to be himself working under a sort of restraint, or perhaps upon a theory of the sort of versification appropriate to classical themes. Something of frank vigour, something of flexibility and natural expressiveness, is lost, but, on the other hand, there is often a rich colour in the verse, a lingering perfume and sweetness in the melody, which has a new and delicate charm of its own.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 42: Note, for instance, the admirable exposition and defence of the famous and ill-famed altercation between Pheres and Admetos: one of the keenest bits of explanatory analysis in Mr. Browning's works. Or observe how beautifully human the dying Alkestis becomes as he interprets for her, and how splendid a humanity the jovial Herakles puts on.]

[Footnote 43: The two speeches of Eumelos, not without a note of pathos, are scarcely represented by—

"The children's tears ran fast Bidding their father note the eye-lids' stare, Hands'-droop, each dreadful circumstance of death."]

19. PRINCE HOHENSTIEL-SCHWANGAU, SAVIOUR OF SOCIETY.

[Published in December, 1871. (Poetical Works, Vol. XI. pp. 123-210).]

Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau[44] is a blank verse monologue, supposed to be spoken, in a musing day-dream, by Louis Napoleon, while Emperor of the French, and calling himself, to the delight of ironical echoes, the "Saviour of Society." The work is equally distant in spirit from the branding satire and righteous wrath of Victor Hugo's Chatiments and Napoleon le Petit, and from Lord Beaconsfield's couleur de rose portrait, in Endymion, of the nominally pseudonymous Prince Florestan. It is neither a denunciation nor a eulogy, nor yet altogether an impartial delineation. It is an "apology," with much the same object as those of Bishop Blougram or Mr. Sludge, the Medium: "by no means to prove black white or white black, or to make the worse appear the better reason, but to bring a seeming monster and perplexing anomaly under the common laws of nature, by showing how it has grown to be what it is, and how it can with more or less of self-illusion reconcile itself to itself."[45]

The poem is very hard reading, perhaps as a whole the hardest intellectual exercise in Browning's work, but this arises not so much from the obscurity of its ideas and phrases as from the peculiar complexity of its structure. To apprehend it we must put ourselves at a certain standpoint, which is not easy to reach. The monologue as a whole represents, as we only learn at the end, not a direct speech to a real person in England, but a mere musing over a cigar in the palace in France. It is divided into two distinct sections, which need to be kept clearly apart in the mind. The first section, up to the line, more than half-way through, "Something like this the unwritten chapter reads," is a direct self-apology. Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau puts forward what he represents as his theory of practice. It is founded on the principle of laisser-faire, and resolves itself into conformity: concurrence with things as they are, with society as it is. He finds existing institutions, not indeed perfect, but sufficiently good for practical purposes; and he conceives his mission to be that of a builder on existing foundations, that of a social conservator, not of a social reformer: "to do the best with the least change possible." On his own showing, he has had this single aim in view from first to last, and on this ground, that of expediency, he explains and defends every act of his tortuous and vacillating policy. He has had his ambitions and ideals of giving freedom to Italy, for example, but he has set them aside in the interests of his own people and for what he holds to be their more immediate needs. So far the direct apology. He next proceeds to show what he might have done, but did not, the ideal course as it is held; commenting the while, as "Sagacity," upon the imaginary new version of his career. His comments represent his real conduct, and they are such as he assumes would naturally be made on the "ideal" course by the very critics who have censured his actual temporising policy. The final pages contain an involuntary confession that, even in his own eyes, Prince Hohenstiel is not quite satisfied with either his conduct or his defence of it.

To separate the truth from the falsehood in this dramatic monologue has not been Browning's intention, and it need not be ours. It may be repeated that Browning is no apologist for Louis Napoleon: he simply calls him to the front, and, standing aside, allows him to speak for himself.[46] In his speech under these circumstances we find just as much truth entangled with just as much sophistry as we might reasonably expect. Here, we get what seems the genuine truth; there, in what appears to the speaker a satisfactory defence, we see that he is simply exposing his own moral defect; again, like Bishop Blougram, he "says true things, but calls them by wrong names." Passages of the last kind are very frequent; are, indeed, to be found everywhere throughout the poem; and it is in these that Browning unites most cleverly the vicarious thinking due to his dramatic subject, and the good honest thought which we never fail to find dominant in his most exceptional work. The Prince gives utterance to a great deal of very true and very admirable good sense; we are at liberty to think him insincere in his application of it, but an axiom remains true, even if it be wrongly applied.

The versification of the poem is everywhere vigorous, and often fine; perhaps the finest passage it contains is that referring to Louis Napoleon's abortive dreams on behalf of Italy.

"Ay, still my fragments wander, music-fraught, Sighs of the soul, mine once, mine now, and mine For ever! Crumbled arch, crushed aqueduct, Alive with tremors in the shaggy growth Of wild-wood, crevice-sown, that triumphs there Imparting exultation to the hills! Sweep of the swathe when only the winds walk And waft my words above the grassy sea Under the blinding blue that basks o'er Rome— Hear ye not still—'Be Italy again?' And ye, what strikes the panic to your heart? Decrepit council-chambers,—where some lamp Drives the unbroken black three paces off From where the greybeards huddle in debate, Dim cowls and capes, and midmost glimmers one Like tarnished gold, and what they say is doubt, And what they think is fear, and what suspends The breath in them is not the plaster-patch Time disengages from the painted wall Where Rafael moulderingly bids adieu, Nor tick of the insect turning tapestry To dust, which a queen's finger traced of old; But some word, resonant, redoubtable, Of who once felt upon his head a hand Whereof the head now apprehends his foot."

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 44: The name Hohenstiel-Schwangau is formed from Hohen Schwangau, one of the castles of the late king of Bavaria.]

[Footnote 45: James Thomson on The Ring and the Book.]

[Footnote 46: I find in a letter of Browning, which Mrs Orr has printed in her Life and Letters of Browning (1891), a reference to "what the editor of the Edinburgh calls my eulogium on the Second Empire—which it is not, any more than what another wiseacre affirms it to be—'a scandalous attack on the old constant friend of England'—it is just what I imagine the man might, if he pleased, say for himself."]

20. FIFINE AT THE FAIR.

[Published in 1872 (Poetical Works, Vol. XI. pp. 211-343).]

Fifine at the Fair is a monologue at once dramatic and philosophical. Its arguments, like those of Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau, are part truth, part sophistry. The poem is prefaced by a motto from Moliere's Don Juan, in which Donna Elvira suggests to her husband, with a bitter irony, the defence he ought to make for himself. Don Juan did not take the hint. Browning has done so. The genesis of the poem and the special form it has assumed are further explained by the following passage from Mrs. Orr:—

"Mr. Browning was, with his family, at Pornic, many years ago, and there saw the gypsy who is the original of Fifine. His fancy was evidently set roaming by her audacity, her strength—the contrast which she presented to the more spiritual types of womanhood; and this contrast eventually found expression in a poetic theory of life, in which these opposite types and their corresponding modes of attraction became the necessary complement of each other. As he laid down the theory, Mr. Browning would be speaking in his own person. But he would turn into someone else in the act of working it out—for it insensibly carried with it a plea for yielding to those opposite attractions, not only successively, but at the same time; and a modified Don Juan would grow up under his pen."[47]

This modified Don Juan is the spokesman of the poem: not the "splendid devil" of Tirso de Molina, but a modern gentleman, living at Pornic, a refined, cultured, musical, artistic and philosophical person, "of high attainments, lofty aspirations, strong emotions, and capricious will." Strolling through the fair with his wife, he expatiates on the charm of a Bohemian existence, and, more particularly, on the charms of one Fifine, a rope-dancer, whose performance he has witnessed. Urged by the troubled look of his wife, he launches forth into an elaborate defence of inconstancy in love, and consequently of the character of his admiration for Fifine.

He starts by arguing:—

"That bodies show me minds, That, through the outward sign, the inward grace allures, And sparks from heaven transpierce earth's coarsest covertures,— All by demonstrating the value of Fifine!"

He then applies his method to the whole of earthly life, finally resolving it into the principle:—

"All's change, but permanence as well.

* * * * *

Truth inside, and outside, truth also; and between Each, falsehood that is change, as truth is permanence. The individual soul works through the shows of sense, (Which, ever proving false, still promise to be true) Up to an outer soul as individual too; And, through the fleeting, lives to die into the fixed, And reach at length 'God, man, or both together mixed.'"

Last of all, just as his speculations have come to an end in an earnest profession of entire love to his wife, and they pause for a moment on the threshold of the villa, he receives a note from Fifine.

"Oh, threaten no farewell! five minutes shall suffice To clear the matter up. I go, and in a trice Return; five minutes past, expect me! If in vain— Why, slip from flesh and blood, and play the ghost again!"

He exceeds the allotted five minutes. Elvire takes him at his word; and, as we seem to be told in the epilogue, husband and wife are reconciled only in death.

Such is the barest outline of the structure and purport of the poem. But no outline can convey much notion of the wide range, profound significance and infinite ingenuity of the arguments; of the splendour and vigour of the poetry; or of the subtle consistency and exquisite truth of the character-painting. Small in amount as is this last in proportion to the philosophy, it is of very notable kind and quality. Not only the speaker, but Fifine, and still more Elvire, are quickened into life by graphic and delicate touches. If we except Lucrezia in Andrea del Sarto, in no other monologue is the presence and personality of the silent or seldom-speaking listener so vividly felt. We see the wronged wife Elvire, we know her, and we trace the very progress of her moods, the very changes in her face, as she listens to the fluent talk of her husband. Don Juan (if we may so call him) is a distinct addition to Browning's portrait-gallery. Let no one suppose him to be a mere mouthpiece for dialectical disquisitions. He is this certainly, but his utterances are tinged with individual colour. This fact which, from the artistic point of view, is an inestimable advantage, is apt to prove, as in the case of Prince Hohenstiel, somewhat of a practical difficulty. "The clearest way of showing where he uses (1) Truth, (2) Sophism, (3) a mixture of both—is to say that wherever he speaks of Fifine (whether as type or not) in relation to himself and his own desire for truth, or right living with his wife, he is sophistical: wherever he speaks directly of his wife's value to him he speaks truth with an alloy of sophism; and wherever he speaks impersonally he speaks the truth.[48]" Keeping this in mind, we can easily separate the grain from the chaff; and the grain is emphatically worth storing. Perhaps no poem of Browning's contains so much deep and acute comment on life and conduct: few, such superabounding wealth of thought and imagery. Browning is famed for his elaborate and original similes; but I doubt if he has conceived any with more originality, or worked them out with richer elaboration, than those of the Swimmer, of the Carnival, of the Druid Monument, of Fifine herself. Nor has he often written more original poetry than some of the more passionate or imaginative passages of the poem. The following lines, describing an imaginary face representing Horror, have all the vivid sharpness of an actual vision or revelation:—

"Observe how brow recedes, Head shudders back on spine, as if one haled the hair, Would have the full-face front what pin-point eye's sharp stare Announces; mouth agape to drink the flowing fate, While chin protrudes to meet the burst o' the wave; elate Almost, spurred on to brave necessity, expend All life left, in one flash, as fire does at its end."

Just as good in a different style, is this quaint and quiet landscape:—

"For, arm in arm, we two have reached, nay, passed, you see, The village-precinct; sun sets mild on Saint-Marie— We only catch the spire, and yet I seem to know What's hid i' the turn o' the hill: how all the graves must glow Soberly, as each warms its little iron cross, Flourished about with gold, and graced (if private loss Be fresh) with stiff rope-wreath of yellow, crisp bead-blooms Which tempt down birds to pay their supper, mid the tombs, With prattle good as song, amuse the dead awhile, If couched they hear beneath the matted camomile."

The poem is written in Alexandrine couplets, and is, I believe, the only English poem of any length written in this metre since Drayton's Polyolbion. Browning's metre has scarcely the flexibility of the best French verse, but he allows himself occasionally two licenses not used in French since the time of Marot: (1) the addition of an unaccented syllable at the end of the first half of the verse, as:—

"'Twas not for every Gawain to gaze upon the Grail!"—

(2) the addition of two syllables, making seven instead of six beats.

"What good were else i' the drum and fife? O pleasant land of France!"

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 47: Handbook, p. 148.]

[Footnote 48: J.T. Nettleship on "Fifine at the Fair" (Browning Society's Papers, Part II. p. 223). Mr. Nettleship's elaborate analysis of the poem is a most helpful and admirable piece of work.]

21. RED COTTON NIGHT-CAP COUNTRY; OR, TURF AND TOWERS.

[Published in 1873 (Poetical Works, 1889, Vol XII. pp. 1-177).]

Red Cotton Night-Cap Country is a story of real life, true in all its facts, and studied at the place where it had occurred a few years before: St. Aubin, in Normandy (the St. Rambert of the poem). It is the story of the life of Antoine Mellerio, the Paris jeweller, whose tragic death occurred at St. Aubin on the 13th April 1870. A suit concerning his will, decided only in the summer of 1872, supplied Browning with the materials of his tragedy. In the first proof of the poem the real names of persons and places were given; but they were changed before publication, and are now in every case fictitious. The second edition of Mrs. Orr's Handbook contains a list of the real names, which I subjoin.[49]

The book is dedicated to Miss Thackeray (Mrs. Richmond Ritchie), and the whole story is supposed to be told to her (as in substance it was) by Browning, who has thus given to the poem a tone of pleasant colloquialism. Told as it is, it becomes in part a dramatic monologue of which the dramatis persona is Robert Browning. It is full of quiet, sometimes grim, humour; of picturesque and witty touches; of pungency and irony. Its manner, the humorous telling of a tragic tale, is a little after the pattern of Carlyle. In such a setting the tragic episodes, sometimes all but heroic, sometimes almost grotesque, have all the impressiveness of contrast.

The story itself, in the main, is a sordid enough tragedy: like several of Browning's later books, it is a study in evil. The two characters who fill the stage of this little history are tragic comedians; they, too, are "real creatures, exquisitely fantastical, strangely exposed to the world by a lurid catastrophe, who teach us that fiction, if it can imagine events and persons more agreeable to the taste it has educated, can read us no such furrowing lesson in life." The character of Miranda, the sinner who would reconcile sin with salvation, is drawn with special subtlety; analysed, dissected rather, with the unerring scalpel of the experienced operator. Miranda is swayed through life by two opposing tendencies, for he is of mixed Castilian and French blood. He is mastered at once by two passions, earthly and religious, illicit love and Catholic devotion: he cannot let go the one and he will not let go the other; he would enjoy himself on the "Turf" without abandoning the shelter of the "Towers." His life is spent in trying to effect a compromise between the two antagonistic powers which finally pull down his house of life. Clara, his mistress-wife, is a mirror of himself; she humours him, manages him, perhaps on his own lines of inclination.

"'But—loved him?' Friend, I do not praise her love! True love works never for the loved one so, Nor spares skin-surface, smoothening truth away, Love bids touch truth, endure truth, and embrace Truth, though, embracing truth, love crush itself. 'Worship not me, but God!' the angels urge!"

This man and woman are analysed with exquisite skill; but they are not in the strict sense inventions, creations: we understand rather than see them. Only towards the end, where the facts leave freer play for the poetic impulse, do they rise into sharp vividness of dramatic life and speech. Nothing in the poem equals in intensity the great soliloquy of Miranda before his strange and suicidal leap, and the speech of Clara to the "Cousinry." Here we pass at a bound from chronicling to creation. As a narrative, Red Cotton Night-Cap Country has all the interest of a novel, with the concentration and higher pitch of poetry. Less ingenious and philosophical than Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau and Fifine at the Fair, it is far more intimately human, more closely concerned with "man's thoughts and loves and hates," with the manifestations of his eager and uneasy spirit, in strange shapes, on miry roads, in dubious twilights. Of all Browning's works it is perhaps the easiest to read; no tale could be more straightforward, no language more lucid, no verse more free from harshness or irregularity, The versification, indeed, is exceptionally smooth and measured, seldom rising into strong passion, but never running into volubility. Here and there are short passages, which I can scarcely detach for quotation, with a singular charm of vague remote music. The final summary of Clara and Miranda, excellent and convenient alike, may be severed without much damage from the context.

"Clara, I hold the happier specimen,— It may be, through that artist-preference For work complete, inferiorly proposed, To incompletion, though it aim aright. Morally, no! Aspire, break bounds! I say, Endeavour to be good, and better still, And best! Success is nought, endeavour's all. But intellect adjusts the means to ends, Tries the low thing, and leaves it done, at least; No prejudice to high thing, intellect Would do and will do, only give the means. Miranda, in my picture-gallery, Presents a Blake; be Clara—Meissonnier! Merely considered so, by artist, mind! For, break through Art and rise to poetry, Bring Art to tremble nearer, touch enough The verge of vastness to inform our soul What orb makes transit through the dark above, And there's the triumph!—there the incomplete, More than completion, matches the immense,— Then, Michelagnolo against the world!"

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 49: Page 2. The Firm Miranda—Mellerio Brothers. Page 4. St. Rambert—St Aubin; Joyeux, Joyous Gard—Lion, Lionesse. Page 6. Vire—Caen. Page 25. St. Rambertese—St. Aubinese. Page 29. Londres—Douvres; London—Dover; La Roche—Courcelle; Monlieu—Bernieres; Villeneuve—Langrune; Pons—Luc; La Ravissante—La Delivrande. Page 33. Raimbaux—Bayeux. Page 34. Morillon—Hugonin; Mirecourt—Bonnechose; Miranda—Mellerio. Page 35. New York—Madrid. Page 41. Clairvaux—Tailleville. Page 42. Madrilene—Turinese. Page 43. Gonthier—Beny; Rousseau—Voltaire; Leonce—Antoine. Page 52. Of "Firm Miranda, London and New York"—"Mellerio Brothers"—Meller, people say. Page 79. Rare Vissante—Del Yvrande; Aldabert—Regnobert. Page 80. Eldobert—Ragnebert; Mailleville—Beaudoin. Page 81. Chaumont—Quelen; Vertgalant—Talleyrand. Page 89. Ravissantish—Delivrandish. Page 101. Clara de Millefleurs—Anna de Beaupre; Coliseum Street—Miromesnil Street. Page 110. Steiner—Mayer; Commercy—Larocy; Sierck—Metz. Page 111. Muhlhausen—Debacker. Page 112, Carlino Centofanti—Miranda di Mongino. Page 121. Portugal—Italy. Page 125. "Gustave"—"Alfred." Page 135. Vaillant—Meriel. Page 149. Thirty-three—Twenty-five. 152. Beaumont—Pasquier. Page 167. Sceaux—Garges. Page 203. Luc de la Maison Rouge—Jean de la Becquetiere; Claise—Vire; Maude—Anne. Page 204. Dionysius—Eliezer; Scolastica—Elizabeth. Page 214. Twentieth—Thirteenth. Page 241. Fricquot—"Picot."—Mrs. Orr's Handbook, Second Edition, pp. 261-2.]

22. ARISTOPHANES' APOLOGY: including a Transcript from Euripides; being the Last Adventure of Balaustion.

[Published in April, 1875. (Poetical Works, 1889, Vol. XIII. pp. 1-258).]

Aristophanes' Apology, as its sub-title indicates, is a kind of sequel to Balaustion's Adventure. It is the record, in Balaustion's words, of an adventure which happened to her after her marriage with Euthukles. On the day when the news of Euripides' death reached Athens, as Balaustion and her husband were sitting at home, toward nightfall, Aristophanes, coming home with his revellers from the banquet which followed his triumph in the play of Thesmophoriazousai, burst in upon them.

"There stood in person Aristophanes. And no ignoble presence! On the bulge Of the clear baldness,—all his head one brow,— True, the veins swelled, blue net-work, and there surged A red from cheek to temple, then retired As if the dark-leaved chaplet damped a flame,— Was never nursed by temperance or health. But huge the eyeballs rolled black native fire, Imperiously triumphant: nostrils wide Waited their incense; while the pursed mouth's pout Aggressive, while the beak supreme above, While the head, face, nay, pillared throat thrown back, Beard whitening under like a vinous foam, These made a glory, of such insolence— I thought,—such domineering deity Hephaistos might have carved to cut the brine For his gay brother's prow, imbrue that path Which, purpling, recognized the conqueror. Impudent and majestic: drunk, perhaps, But that's religion; sense too plainly snuffed: Still, sensuality was grown a rite."

He, too, has just heard of Euripides' death, and an impulse, part sympathy, part mockery, has brought him to the "house friendly to Euripides." The revellers retire abashed before Balaustion; he alone remains. From the extraordinary and only too natural gabble and garbage of his opening words, he quickly passes to a more or less serious explanation and defence of his conduct toward the dead poet; to an exposition, in fact, of his aims and doings as a writer of comedy. When his "apology" is ended, Balaustion replies, censuring him pretty severely, making adroit use of the licence of a "stranger" and a woman, and defending Euripides against him. For a further (and the best) defence, she reads the whole of the Herakles, which Browning here translates. Aristophanes, naturally, is not convinced; impressed he must have been, to have borne so long a reading without demur: he flings them a snatch of song, finding in his impromptu a hint for a new play, the Frogs, and is gone. And now, a year after, as the couple return to Rhodes from a disgraced and dismantled Athens, Balaustion dictates to Euthukles her recollection of the "adventure," for the double purpose of putting the past events on record, and of eluding the urgency of the present sorrow.

It will thus be seen that the book consists of two distinct parts. There is, first, the apology of Aristophanes, second, the translation of the play of Euripides. Herakles, or, as it is more generally known, Hercules Furens, is rendered completely and consecutively, in blank verse and varied choric measures. It is not, as was the case with Alkestis worked into the body of the poem; not welded, but inserted. We have thus, while losing the commentary, the advantage of a detached transcript, with a lyrical rendering of the lyrical parts of the play. These are given with a constant vigour and closeness, often with a rare beauty (as in the famous "Ode bewailing Age," and that other on the labours of Herakles). Precisely the same characteristics that we have found in the translation of the Alkestis are here again to be found, and all that I said on the former, considered apart from its setting, may be applied to the latter. We have the same literalness (again with a few apparent exceptions), the same insistence on the root-meaning of words, the same graphic force and vivifying touch, the same general clearness and charm.

The original part of the book is of far closer texture and more remarkable order than "the amber which embalms Alkestis" the first adventure of Balaustion; but it has less human emotion, less general appeal. It is nothing less than a resuscitation of the old controversy between Aristophanes and Euripides; a resuscitation, not only of the controversy, but of the combatants. "Local colour" is laid on with an unsparing hand, though it cannot be said that the atmosphere is really Greek. There is hardly a line, there is never a page, without an allusion to some recondite thing: Athenian customs, Greek names, the plays of Euripides, above all, the plays of Aristophanes. "Every line of the poem," it has been truly said, "shows Mr. Browning as soaked and steeped in the comedies as was Bunyan in his Bible." The result is a vast, shapeless thing, splendidly and grotesquely alive, but alive with the obscure and tangled life of the jungle.

Browning's attitude towards the controversy, the side he takes as champion of Euripides, is distinctly shown, not merely in Balaustion's statement and defence, but in the whole conduct of the piece. Aristophanes, though on his own defence, is set in a decidedly unfavourable light; and no one, judging from Browning's work, can doubt as to his opinion of the relative qualities of the two great poets. It is possible even to say there is a partiality in the presentment. But it must be remembered on the other hand that Browning is not concerned simply with the question of art, but with the whole bearings, artistic and ethical, of the contest; and it must be remembered that the aim of Comedy is intrinsically lower and more limited than that of Tragedy, that it is destructive, disintegrating, negative, concerned with smaller issues and more temporary questions; and that Euripides may reasonably be held a better teacher, a keener, above all a more helpful, reader of the riddle of life, than his mighty assailant. This is how Aristophanes has been described, by one who should know:—

"He is an aggregate of many men, all of a certain greatness. We may build up a conception of his powers if we mount Rabelais upon Hudibras, lift him with the songfulness of Shelley, give him a vein of Heinrich Heine, and cover him with the mantle of the Anti-Jacobin, adding (that there may be some Irish in him) a dash of Grattan, before he is in motion."[50]

Now the "Titanic pamphleteer" is more recognisable in Browning's most vivid portrait than the "lyric poet of aerial delicacy" who in some strange fashion, beyond his own wildest metamorphoses, distracted and idealised the otherwise congruous figure. Not that this is overlooked or forgotten: it is brought out admirably in several places, notably in the fine song put into the mouth of Aristophanes at the close; but it is scarcely so prominent as lovers of him could desire. It is possible, too, that Browning somewhat over-accentuates his earnestness; not his fundamental earnestness, but the extent to which he remembered and exhibited it. "My soul bade fight": yes, but "laugh," too, and laugh for laughter's as well as fight for principle's sake. This, again, is merely a matter of detail, of shading. There can be little doubt that the whole general outline of the man is right, none whatever that it is a living and breathing outline. His apology is presented in Browning's familiar manner of genuine feeling tempered with sophistry. As a piece of dramatic art it is worthy to stand beside his famous earlier apologies; and it has value too as a contribution to criticism, to a vital knowledge of the Attic drama and the work and personality of Aristophanes and Euripides, and to a better understanding of the drama as a criticism of life.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 50: George Meredith, On the Idea of Comedy.]

23. THE INN ALBUM.

[Published in November, 1875. (Poetical Works, 1889, Vol XII. pp. 179-311.) Translated into German in 1877: "Das Fremdenbuch von Robert Browning. Aus dem Englischen von E. Leo. Hamburg: W. Mauke Soehne."]

The story of The Inn Album is founded on fact, though it is not, like Red Cotton Night-Cap Country, an almost literal transcript from life. The characters of the poem are four, all unnamed: a young "polished snob," an impoverished middle-aged nobleman, a woman, whom he had seduced, and who is now married to a clergyman; and a young girl, her friend, who is betrothed to the younger of the two men. Of these characters, the only one whom Browning has invented is the girl, through whom, in his telling of the story, the tragedy is brought about. But he has softened the repulsiveness of the original tale, and has also brought it to a ringing close, not supplied by the bare facts. The career of the elder man, which came to an end in 1839, did not by any means terminate with the events recorded in the poem.

The Inn Album is a story of wrecked lives, lost hopes, of sordid and gloomy villainies; with only light enough in its darkness to make that darkness visible. It is profoundly sad; yet

"These things are life: And life, they say, is worthy of the Muse."

It would also be profoundly depressing but for the art which has wrung a grandeur out of grime, which has uplifted a story of mere vulgar evil to the height of tragedy. Out of materials that might be melodramatic, Browning has created a drama of humanity of which the impression is single, intense and overpowering. Notwithstanding the clash of physical catastrophe at the close, it is really a spiritual tragedy; and in it Browning has achieved that highest of achievements: the right, vivid and convincing presentment of human nature at its highest and lowest, at its extremes of possible action and emotion. It is not perfect: the colloquialism which truth and art alike demand sinks sometimes, though not in the great scenes, to the confines of a bastard realism. But in the main the poem is an excellent example of the higher imaginative realism, of the close, yet poetic or creative, treatment of life.

The four characters who play out the brief and fateful action of this drama in narrative (the poem is more nearly related in form to the pure drama than any other of Browning's poems not cast in the dramatic form) are creations, three of them at least, in a deeper sense than the characters in Red Cotton Night-Cap Country, or than the character in Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau. The "good gay girl," serving her unconscious purpose in the tragic action, is properly enough a mere sketch; but the two men and the elder woman are profoundly studied characters, struck into life and revealed to themselves, to one another and to us, at the supreme moment of a complex crisis. The elder man is one of Browning's most finished studies, and, morally, one of the worst characters even he has ever investigated. He is at once bad, clever and cynical, the combination, of all others, most noxious and most hopeless. He prides himself above all things on his intellect; and it is evident that he has had the power to shape his course and to sway others. But now, at fifty, he knows himself to be a failure. The cause of it he traces mainly to a certain crisis of his life, when he won, only to abuse, the affections of a splendidly beautiful woman, whose equal splendour of soul he saw only when too late. It is significant of him that he never views his conduct as a crime, a wrong to the woman, but as a mistake on his part; and his attitude is not that of remorse, but of one who has missed a chance. When, after four years, he meets unexpectedly the woman whom he has wronged and lost, the good and evil in him blaze out in a sudden and single flame of earnest appeal. In the fact that this passionate appeal should be only half-sincere, or, if sincere, then only for the moment, that to her who hears it, it should seem wholly insincere, lies the intensity of the situation.

The character of the woman is less complex but not less consistent and convincing. Like the man, her development has been arrested and distorted by the cause which has made him too a wreck. Her love was single-hearted and over-mastering; its very force, in recoil, turned it into hate. Yoked to a soulless husband, whom she has married half in pity, half in despair, her whole nature has frozen; so that when we see her she is, while physically the same, spiritually the ghost of her former self. The subtlety of the picture is to show what she is now while making equally plain what she was in the past. She is a figure not so much pathetic as terrible.

Pathetic, despite its outer comedy, is the figure of the young man, the great rough, foolish, rich youth, tutored in evil by his Mephistopheles, but only, we fancy, skin-deep in it, slow of thought but quick of feeling, with his one and only love, never forgotten, and now found again in the very woman whom his "friend" has wronged. His last speech, with its clumsy yet genuine chivalry, its touching, broken words, its fine feeling and faltering expression, is one of the most pathetic things I know. Such a character, in its very absence of subtlety, is a triumph of Browning's, to whom intellectual simplicity must be the hardest of all dramatic assumptions.

24. PACCHIAROTTO, and how he worked in Distemper: with other poems.

[Published in July, 1876 (Poetical Works, 1889, Vol. XIV. pp. 1-152).]

Pacchiarotto and other Poems is the first collection of miscellaneous pieces since the Dramatis Personae of 1864. It is somewhat of an exception to the general rule of Browning's work. A large proportion of it is critical rather than creative, a criticism of critics; perhaps it would be at once more correct and concise to call it "Robert Browning's Apology." Pacchiarotto, At the "Mermaid", House, Shop and Epilogue, are all more or less personal utterances on art and the artist, sometimes in a concrete and impersonal way, more often in a somewhat combative and contemptuous spirit. The most important part of the volume, however, is that which contains the two or three monodramatic poems and the splendid ballad of the fleet, Herve Riel.

The first and longest poem, Of Pacchiarotto, and how he worked in Distemper, divides itself into two parts, the first being the humorous rendering of a true anecdote told in Vasari, of Giacomo Pacchiarotto, a Sienese painter of the sixteenth century; and the second, a still more mirthful onslaught of the poet upon his critics. The story—

"Begun with a chuckle, And throughout timed by raps of the knuckle,"—

is funny enough in itself, and it points an excellent moral; but it is chiefly interesting as a whimsical freak of verse, an extravaganza in staccato. The rhyming is of its kind almost incomparable as a sustained effort in double and triple grotesque rhymes. Not even in Hudibras, not even in Don Juan, is there anything like them. I think all other experiments of the kind, however successful as a whole, let you see now and then that the author has had a hard piece of work to keep up his appearance of ease. In Pacchiarotto there is no evidence of the strain. The masque of critics, under the cunning disguise of May-day chimney-sweepers:—

"'We critics as sweeps out your chimbly! Much soot to remove from your flue, sir! Who spares coal in kitchen an't you, sir! And neighbours complain it's no joke, sir! You ought to consume your own smoke, sir!'"—

this after-part, overflowing with jolly humour and comic scorn, a besom wielded by a laughing giant, is calculated to put the victims in better humour with their executioner than with themselves. Browning has had to endure more than most men at the hands of the critics, and he takes in this volume, not in this poem only, a full and a characteristically good-humoured revenge. The Epilogue follows up the pendant to Pacchiarotto. There is the same jolly humour, the same combative self-assertiveness, the same retort Tu quoque, with a yet more earnest and pungent enforcement.

"Wine, pulse in might from me! It may never emerge in must from vat, Never fill cask nor furnish can, Never end sweet, which strong began— God's gift to gladden the heart of man; But spirit's at proof, I promise that! No sparing of juice spoils what should be Fit brewage—wine for me.

Man's thoughts and loves and hates! Earth is my vineyard, these grow there: From grape of the ground, I made or marred My vintage; easy the task or hard, Who set it—his praise be my reward! Earth's yield! Who yearn for the Dark Blue Sea's Let them 'lay, pray, bray'[51]—the addle-pates! Mine be Man's thoughts, loves, hates!"

Despite its humorous expression, the view of poetic art contained in these verses is both serious and significant. It is a frank (if defiant) confession of faith.

At the "Mermaid", a poem of characteristic energy and directness, is a protest against the supposition or assumption that the personality and personal views and opinions of a poet are necessarily reflected in his dramatic work. It protests, at the same time, against the sham melancholy and pseudo-despair which Byron made fashionable in poetry:—

"Have you found your life distasteful? My life did and does smack sweet. Was your youth of pleasure wasteful? Mine I saved and hold complete.

Do your joys with age diminish? When mine fail me, I'll complain. Must in death your daylight finish? My sun sets to rise again.

* * * * *

I find earth not gray but rosy, Heaven not grim but fair of hue. Do I stoop? I pluck a posy. Do I stand and stare? All's blue."

House confirms or continues the primary contention in At the "Mermaid": this time by the image of a House of Life, which some poets may choose to set on view: "for a ticket apply to the Publisher." Browning not merely denounces but denies the so-called self-revelations of poets. He answers Wordsworth's

"With this same key Shakespeare unlocked his heart,"

by the characteristic retort:—

"Did Shakespeare? If so, the less Shakespeare he!"

In Shop we have another keen piece of criticism: a protest against poets who make their shop their home, and their song mere ware for sale.

After the personal and critical section we pass to half-a-dozen lyrics: Fears and Scruples, a covert and startling poem, a doctrine embodied in a character; then two beautiful little Pisgah-Sights, a dainty experiment in metre, and in substance the expression of Browning's favourite lesson, the worth of earth and the need of the mystery of life; Appearances, a couple of stanzas whose telling simplicity recalls the lovely earlier lilt, Misconceptions; Natural Magic and Magical Nature, two magical snatches, as perfect as the "first fine careless rapture" of the earlier lyrics. I quote the latter:—

"MAGICAL NATURE.

1.

Flower—I never fancied, jewel—I profess you! Bright I see and soft I feel the outside of a flower. Save but glow inside and—jewel, I should guess you, Dim to sight and rough to touch: the glory is the dower.

2.

You, forsooth, a flower? Nay, my love, a jewel— Jewel at no mercy of a moment in your prime! Time may fray the flower-face: kind be time or cruel, Jewel, from each facet, flash your laugh at time!"

But the finest lyric in the volume is St. Martin's Summer, a poem fantastically tragic, hauntingly melodious, mysterious and chilling as the ghostly visitants at late love's pleasure-bower of whom it sings. I do not think Browning has written many lyrical poems of more brilliant and original quality. Bifurcation, as its name denotes, is a study of divided paths in life, the paths of Love and Duty chosen severally by two lovers whose epitaphs Browning gives. The moral problem, which is sinner, which is saint, is stated and left open. The poem is an etching, sharp, concise and suggestive. Numpholeptos (nymph-entranced) has all the mystery, the vague charm, the lovely sadness, of a picture of Burne Jones. Its delicately fantastic colouring, its dreamy passion, and the sad and quiet sweetness of its verse, have some affinity with St. Martin's Summer, but are unlike anything else in Browning. It is the utterance of a hopeless-hoping and pathetically resigned love: the love of a merely human man for an angelically pure and unhumanly cold woman, who requires in him an unattainable union of immaculate purity and complete experience of life.

"Still you stand, still you listen, still you smile! Still melts your moonbeam through me, white awhile, Softening, sweetening, till sweet and soft Increase so round this heart of mine, that oft I could believe your moonbeam smile has past The pallid limit and, transformed at last, Lies, sunlight and salvation—warms the soul It sweetens, softens!

* * * * *

What means the sad slow silver smile above My clay but pity, pardon?—at the best, But acquiescence that I take my rest, Contented to be clay, while in your heaven The sun reserves love for the Spirit-Seven Companioning God's throne they lamp before, —Leaves earth a mute waste only wandered o'er By that pale soft sweet disempassioned moon Which smiles me slow forgiveness! Such the boon I beg? Nay, dear ... Love, the love whole and sole without alloy!"

The action of this soul's tragedy takes place under "the light that never was on sea or land": it is the tragedy of a soul, but of a disembodied soul.

A Forgiveness is a drama of this world. It is the legitimate successor of the monologues of Men and Women; it may, indeed, be most precisely compared with an earlier monologue, My Last Duchess; and it is, like these, the concentrated essence of a complete tragedy. Like all the best of Browning's poems, it is thrown into a striking situation, and developed from this central point. It is the story of a love merged in contempt, quenched in hate, and rekindled in a fatal forgiveness, told in confession to a monk by the man whom the monk has wronged. The personage who speaks is one of the most sharply-outlined characters in Browning: a clear, cold, strong-willed man, implacable in love or hate. He tells his story in a quiet, measured, utterly unemotional manner, with reflective interruptions and explanations, the acute analysis of a merciless intellect; leading gradually up to a crisis only to be matched by the very finest crises in Browning:—

"Immersed In thought so deeply, Father? Sad, perhaps? For whose sake, hers or mine or his who wraps —Still plain I seem to see!—about his head The idle cloak,—about his heart (instead Of cuirass) some fond hope he may elude My vengeance in the cloister's solitude? Hardly, I think! As little helped his brow The cloak then, Father—as your grate helps now!"

The poem is by far the greatest thing in the volume; it is, indeed, one of the very finest examples of Browning's psychological subtlety and concentrated dramatic power.[52]

The ballad of Herve Riel which has no rival but Tennyson's Revenge among modern sea-ballads, was written at Croisic, 30th September 1867, and was published in the Cornhill Magazine for March, 1871 in, order that the L100 which had been offered for it might be sent to the Paris Relief Fund. It may be named, with the "Ride from Ghent to Aix," as a proof of how simply and graphically Browning can write if he likes; how promptly he can stir the blood and thrill the heart. The facts of the story, telling how, after the battle of the Hogue, a simple Croisic sailor saved all that was left of the French fleet by guiding the vessels into the harbour, are given in the Croisic guide-books; and Browning has followed them in everything but the very effective end:—

"'Since 'tis ask and have, I may— Since the others go ashore— Come! A good whole holiday! Leave to go and see my wife, whom I call the Belle Aurore!' That he asked and that he got,—nothing more."

"Ce brave homme," says the account, "ne demanda pour recompense d'un service aussi signale, qu'un conge absolu pour rejoindre sa femme, qu'il nomma la Belle Aurore."

Cenciaja, the only blank verse piece in the volume, is of the nature of a note or appendix to Shelley's "superb achievement" The Cenci. It serves to explain the allusion to the case of Paolo Santa Croce (Cenci, Act V. sc. iv.). Browning obtained the facts from a MS. volume of memorials of Italian crime, in the possession of Sir John Simeon, who published it in the series of the Philobiblon Society.[53]

Filippo Baldinucci on the Privilege of Burial, a grotesque and humorously-told "reminiscence of A.D. 1670," is, up to stanza 35, the versification of an anecdote recorded by Baldinucci, the artist and art critic (1624-1696), in his History of Painters. The incident with which it concludes is imaginary.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 51: The jocose vindictiveness with which Browning returns again and again to the assault of the bad grammar and worse rhetoric of Byron's once so much belauded address to the ocean is very amusing. The above is only one out of four or five instances.]

[Footnote 52: It is worth comparing A Forgiveness with a poem of very similar motive by Leconte de Lisle: Le Jugement de Komor (Poemes Barbares). Each is a fine example of its author, in just those qualities for which both poets are eminent: originality and subtlety of subject, pregnant picturesqueness of phrase and situation, and grimly tragic power. The contrast no less than the likeness which exists between them will be evident on a comparison of the two poems.]

[Footnote 53: In reference to the title Cenciaja, and the Italian proverb which follows it, Ogni cencio vuol entrare in bucato, Browning stated, in a letter to Mr. H.B. Forman (printed in his Shelley, 1880, ii. 419), that "'aia' is generally an accumulative yet depreciative termination: 'Cenciaja'—a bundle of rags—a trifle. The proverb means, 'Every poor creature will be pressing into the company of his betters,' and I used it to deprecate the notion that I intended anything of the kind."]

25. THE AGAMEMNON OF AESCHYLUS.

[Published in October, 1877 (Poetical Works, 1889, Vol. XIII. pp. 259-357).]

Browning prefaces his transcript of the Agamemnon with a brief introduction, in which he thus sets forth his theory of translation:—

"If, because of the immense fame of the following Tragedy, I wished to acquaint myself with it, and could only do so by the help of a translator, I should require him to be literal at every cost save that of absolute violence to our language. The use of certain allowable constructions which, happening to be out of daily favour, are all the more appropriate to archaic workmanship, is no violence: but I would be tolerant for once,—in the case of so immensely famous an original,—of even a clumsy attempt to furnish me with the very turn of each phrase in as Greek a fashion as English will bear: while, with respect to amplifications and embellishments, anything rather than, with the good farmer, experience that most signal of mortifications, 'to gape for AEschylus and get Theognis.' I should especially decline,—what may appear to brighten up a passage,—the employment of a new word for some old one—[Greek: phonos], or [Greek: megas], or [Greek: telos], with its congeners, recurring four times in three lines.... Further,—if I obtained a mere strict bald version of thing by thing, or at least word pregnant with thing, I should hardly look for an impossible transmission of the reputed magniloquence and sonority of the Greek; and this with the less regret, inasmuch as there is abundant musicality elsewhere, but nowhere else than in his poem the ideas of the poet. And lastly, when presented with these ideas I should expect the result to prove very hard reading indeed if it were meant to resemble AEschylus."

Every condition here laid down has been carried out with unflinching courage. Browning has rendered word by word and line by line; with, indeed, some slight inevitable expansion in the rhymed choruses, very slight, infinitely slighter than every other translator has found needful. Throughout, there are numberless instances of minute and happy accuracy of phrase, re-creations of the very thoughts of AEschylus. An incomparable dexterity is shown in fitting phrase upon phrase, forcing line to bear the exact weight of line, rendering detail by detail. But for this very reason, as a consequence of this very virtue, there is no denying that Browning's version is certainly "very hard reading," so hard reading that it is sometimes necessary to turn to the Greek in order to fully understand the English. Browning has anticipated, but not altogether answered, this objection. For, besides those passages which in their fidelity to every "minute particular," simply reproduce the obscurity of the original, there is much that seems either obscure or harsh, and is so simply because it gives "the turn of each phrase," not merely "in as Greek a fashion as English will bear," but beyond it: phrases which are native to Greek, foreign to English. The choruses, which are attempted in metre as close as English can come to Greek metre, suggest the force, but not the dignity of the original; and seem often to be content to drop much of the poem by the way in getting at "the ideas of the poet." It is a Titan's version of an Olympian, and it is thus no doubt the scholar rather than the general reader who will find most to please him in "this attempt to give our language the similitude of Greek by close and sustained grappling, word to word, with so sublime and difficult a masterpiece."[54]

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 54: J.A. Symonds, Academy, Nov. 10, 1877.]

26. LA SAISIAZ: THE TWO POETS OF CROISIC.

[Published in May, 1878. La Saisiaz (written November, 1877), pp. 1-82; The Two Poets of Croisic, pp. 83-201. (Poetical Works, 1889, Vol. XIV. pp. 153-204, 205-279).]

In La Saisiaz Browning reasons of God and the soul, of life here and of life to come. The poem is addressed to a friend of old date, who died suddenly while she was staying with Browning and his sister, in the summer of 1877, at a villa called La Saisiaz (The Sun) in the mountains near Geneva. The first twenty pages tell the touching story; the rest of the poem records the argument which it called forth. "Was ending ending once and always, when you died?" Browning asks himself, and he attempts to answer the question, not on traditional grounds, or on the authority of a creed, but by honest reasoning. He assumes two postulates, and two only, that God exists and that the soul exists; and he proceeds to show, very forcibly, the unsatisfactory nature of life if consciousness ends with death, and its completely satisfactory nature if the soul's existence continues.

"Without the want, Life, now human, would be brutish: just that hope, however scant, Makes the actual life worth leading; take the hope therein away, All we have to do is surely not endure another day. This life has its hopes for this life, hopes that promise joy: life done— Out of all the hopes, how many had complete fulfilment? none. 'But the soul is not the body': and the breath is not the flute; Both together make the music: either marred and all is mute."

This hypothesis is purely personal, and as such he holds it. But, to his own mind at least, he finds that

"Sorrow did and joy did nowise,—life well weighed—preponderate. By necessity ordained thus? I shall bear as best I can; By a cause all-good, all-wise, all-potent? No, as I am man!"

Yet, if only the assumption of a future life may be made, he will thankfully acquiesce in an earthly failure, which will then be only relative, and the earnest of a heavenly gain. Having arrived at this point, Browning proceeds to argue out the question yet further, under the form of a dialogue between "Fancy" (or the soul's instinct) and "Reason." He here shows that not merely is life explicable only as a probation, but that probation is only possible under our present conditions, in our present uncertainty. If it were made certain that there is a future life in which we shall be punished or rewarded, according as we do evil or good, we should have no choice of action, hence no virtue in doing what were so manifestly to our own advantage. Again, if we were made certain of this future life of higher faculties and greater happiness, should we hesitate to rush to it at the first touch of sorrow, before our time? He ends, therefore, with a "hope—no more than hope, but hope—no less than hope," which amounts practically to the assurance that, as he puts it in the last line—

"He at least believed in Soul, was very sure of God!"

The Two Poets of Croisic is a comedy in narrative, dealing mainly with the true tale of Paul Desforges-Maillard, whose story furnished Piron with the matter of his Metromanie. The first of the "two poets" is one Rene Gentilhomme, born 1610, once page to the Prince of Conde, afterwards court-poet to Louis XIII. His story, by an easy transition, leads into the richer record of Desforges, which Browning gives with not a few variations, evidently intentional, from the facts of the case. Paul-Briand Maillard, self-surnamed Desforges, was born at Croisic, April 24, 1699: he died at the age of seventy-three. His memory has survived that of better poets on account of the famous hoax which he played on the Paris of his day, including no less a person than Voltaire. The first part of the story is told pretty literally in Browning's pages:—how Desforges, unsuccessful as a poet in his own person, assumed the title of a woman, and as Mlle. Malcrais de la Vigne (his verses being copied by an obliging cousin, Mme. Mondoret) obtained an immediate and astonishing reputation. The sequel is somewhat altered. Voltaire's revenge when the cheat was discovered, so far from being prompt and immediate, was treacherously dissimulated, and its accomplishment deferred for more than one long-subsequent occasion. Desforges lived to have the last word, in assisting at the first representation of Piron's Metromanie, in which Voltaire's humiliation and the Croisic poet's clever trick are perpetuated for as long as that sprightly and popular comedy shall be remembered.

In his graphic and condensed version of the tale, Browning has used a poet's licence to heighten the effect and increase the piquancy of the narrative. The poem is written in ottava rima, but, very singularly, there is not one double rhyme from beginning to end. It is difficult to see why Browning, a finer master of grotesque compound rhymes than Byron, should have so carefully avoided them in a metre which, as in Byron's hands, owes no little of its effect to a clever introduction of such rhymes. The lines (again of set purpose, it is evident) overlap one another without an end-pause where in Italian it is almost universal, namely, after the sixth line. The result of the innovation is far from successful: it destroys the flow of the verse and gives it an air of abruptness. Of the liveliness, vivacity and pungency of the tale, no idea can be given by quotation: two of the stanzas in which the moral is enforced, the two finest, perhaps, in the poem, are, however, severable from their context:—

"Who knows most, doubts most; entertaining hope, Means recognizing fear; the keener sense Of all comprised within our actual scope Recoils from aught beyond earth's dim and dense. Who, grown familiar with the sky, will grope Henceforward among groundlings? That's offence Just as indubitably: stars abound O'erhead, but then—what flowers made glad the ground!

So, force is sorrow, and each sorrow, force: What then? since Swiftness gives the charioteer The palm, his hope be in the vivid horse Whose neck God clothed with thunder, not the steer Sluggish and safe! Yoke Hatred, Crime, Remorse, Despair: but ever 'mid the whirling fear, Let, through the tumult, break the poet's face Radiant, assured his wild slaves win the race!"

The poem is followed by an exquisite Epilogue, one of the most delicately graceful and witty and tender of Browning's lyrics. The briefer Prologue is not less beautiful:—

"Such a starved bank of moss Till, that May-morn, Blue ran the flash across: Violets were born!

Sky—what a scowl of cloud Till, near and far, Ray on ray split the shroud: Splendid, a star!

World—how it walled about Life with disgrace Till God's own smile came out: That was thy face!"

27. DRAMATIC IDYLS.

[Published in May 1879 (Poetical Works, 1889, Vol. XV. pp. 1-80).]

In the Dramatic Idyls Browning may almost be said to have broken new ground. His idyls are short poems of passionate action, presenting in a graphic and concentrated way a single episode or tragic crisis. Not only by their concreteness and popular effectiveness, their extraordinary vigour of conception and expression, are they distinguished from much of Browning's later writing: they have in addition this significant novelty of interest, that here for the first time Browning has found subjects for his poetry among the poor, that here for the first time he has painted, with all his close and imaginative realism, the human comedy of the lower classes. That he has never done so before, though rather surprising, comes, I suppose, from his preponderating interest in intellectual problems, and from the difficulty of finding such among what Leon Cladel has called tragiques histoires plebeiennes. But the happy instinct has at last come to him, and we are permitted to watch the humours of that delicious pair of sinners saved, "Publican Black Ned Bratts and Tabby his big wife too," as a relief to the less pleasant and profitable spectacle of His Majesty Napoleon III., or of even the two poets of Croisic. All the poems in the volume (with the exception of a notable and noble protest against vivisection, in the form of a touching little true tale of a dog) are connected together by a single motive, on which every poem plays a new variation. The motto of the book might be:—

"There is a tide in the affairs of men, Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune; Omitted, all the voyage of his life Is bound in shallows and in miseries."

This idea of a turning-point or testing-time in the lives of men is more or less expressed or implied in very much of Browning's poetry, but nowhere is it expressed so completely, so concisely, or so consecutively, as here. In Martin Relph (which "embodies," says Mrs. Orr, "a vague remembrance of something read by Mr. Browning when he was himself a boy") we have an instance of the tide "omitted," and a terrible picture of the remorse which follows. Martin Relph has the chance presented to him of saving two lives, that of the girl he loves and of his rival whom she loves. The chance is but of an instant's duration. He hesitates, and the moment is for ever lost. In that one moment his true soul, with its instinctive selfishness, has leapt to light, and the knowledge of it torments him with an inextinguishable agony. In Ivan Ivanovitch (founded on a popular Russian story of a woman throwing her children to the wolves to save her own life) we have a twofold illustration of the theme. The testing-moment comes to the mother, Louscha, and again to Ivan Ivanovitch. While the woman fails terribly in her duty, and meets a terrible reward, the man rises to a strange and awful nobility of action, and "acts for God." Halbert and Hob, a grim little tragedy (suggested by a passage in the Nicomachean Ethics of Aristotle), presents us with the same idea in a singularly concrete form. The crisis has a saving effect, but it is an incomplete, an unwilling or irresistible, act of grace, and it bears but sorry fruit. In Ned Bratts (suggested by the story of "Old Tod," in Bunyan's Life and Death of Mr. Badman[55]) we have a prompt and quite hurried taking of the tide: the sudden conversion, repentance, and expiation of the "worst couple, rogue and quean, unhanged." Pheidippides (the legend of the runner who brought the news of Marathon to Athens, and died in the utterance) illustrates the idea in a more obvious but less individual way.

Perhaps for sheer perfection of art, for fundamental tragedy, for a quality of compassionate and unflinching imaginative vision, nothing in the book quite comes up to Halbert and Hob. There is hardly in Browning a more elemental touch than that of: "A boy threw stones: he picked them up and stored them in his breast." Martin Relph, besides being a fine tale splendidly told, is among the most masterly of all renderings of remorse, of the terrors and torments of conscience. Every word is like a drop of agony wrung out of a tortured soul. Ivan Ivanovitch is, as a narrative, still finer: as a piece of story-telling Browning has perhaps never excelled it. Nothing could be more graphic and exciting than the description of the approach of the wolves: the effective change from iambs to anapaests gives their very motion.

"Was that—wind? Anyhow, Droug starts, stops, back go his ears, he snuffs, Snorts,—never such a snort! then plunges, knows the sough's Only the wind: yet, no—our breath goes up too straight! Still the low sound,—less low, loud, louder, at a rate There's no mistaking more! Shall I lean out—look—learn The truth whatever it be? Pad, pad! At last, I turn— 'Tis the regular pad of the wolves in pursuit of the life in the sledge! An army they are: close-packed they press like the thrust of a wedge: They increase as they hunt: for I see, through the pine-trunks ranged each side, Slip forth new fiend and fiend, make wider and still more wide The four-footed steady advance. The foremost—none may pass: They are elders and lead the line, eye and eye—green-glowing brass! But a long way distant still. Droug, save us! He does his best: Yet they gain on us, gain, till they reach,—one reaches.... How utter the rest?"

The setting of the story, the vast motionless Russian landscape, the village life, the men and women, has a singular expressiveness; and the revelation of the woman's character, the exposure of her culpable weakness, seen in the very excuses by which she endeavours to justify herself, is brought about with singularly masterly art. There are moments of essential drama, not least significantly in the last lines, above all in those two pregnant words: "How otherwise? asked he."

Ned Bratts takes almost the same position among Browning's humorous poems that Ivan Ivanovitch does among his narratives. It is a whole comedy in itself. Surroundings and atmosphere are called up with perfect art and the subtlest sympathy. What opening could be a better preparation for the heated and grotesque utterances of Ned Bratts than the wonderful description of the hot day? It serves to put us into precisely the right mood for seeing and feeling the comic tragedy that follows. Dickens himself never painted a more riotously realistic scene, nor delineated a better ruffian than the murderous rascal precariously converted by Bunyan and his book.

In the midst of these realistic tragedies and comedies, Pheidippides, with its clear Greek outline and charm and heroical grace, stands finely contrasted. The measure is of Browning's invention, and is finely appropriate to the character of the poem.

"So, to this day, when friend meets friend, the word of salute Is still 'Rejoice!'—his word which brought rejoicing indeed. So is Pheidippides happy for ever,—the noble strong man Who could race like a God, bear the face of a God, whom a God loved so well He saw the land saved he had helped to save, and was suffered to tell Such tidings, yet never decline, but, gloriously as he began, So to end gloriously—once to shout, thereafter be mute: 'Athens is saved!' Pheidippides dies in the shout for his meed."

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 55: At a summer Assizes holden at Hartfort, while the Judge was sitting upon the Bench, comes this old Tod into the Court, cloathed in a green Suit with his Leathern Girdle in his hand, his bosom open, and all on a dung sweat, as if he had run for his Life; and, being come in, he spake aloud as follows: My Lord, said he, Here is the veryest Rogue that breaths upon the face of the earth, ... My Lord, there has not been a Robbery committed this many years, within so many miles of this place but I have either been at it or privy to it.

"The Judge thought the fellow was mad, but after some conference with some of the Justices, they agreed to Indict him; and so they did, of several felonious Actions; to all of which he heartily confessed Guilty, and so was hanged with his wife at the same time....

"As for the truth of this Story, the Relator told me that he was at the same time himself in the Court, and stood within less than two yards of old Tod, when he heard him aloud to utter the words."—Bunyan's Life and Death of Mr. Badman, 1680.]

28. DRAMATIC IDYLS. Second Series.

[Published in July, 1880. Poetical Works, 1889, Vol. XV. pp. 81-163.]

The second series of Dramatic Idyls is bound together, like the first, though somewhat less closely, by a leading idea, which, whether consciously or not, is hinted at in a pointed little prologue: the idea of the paradox of human action, and the apparent antagonism between motive and result. The volume differs considerably from its precursor, and it contains nothing quite equal to the best of the earlier poems. There is more variety, perhaps, but the human interest is less intense, the stories less moving and absorbing. With less humour, there is a much more pronounced element of the grotesque. And most prominent of all is that characteristic of Browning which a great critic has called agility of intellect.

The first poem, Echetlos, is full of heroical ardour and firm, manly vigour of movement. Like Pheidippides, it is a legend of Marathon. It sings of the mysterious helper who appeared to the Greeks, in rustic garb and armed with a plough.

"But one man kept no rank and his sole arm plied no spear, As a flashing came and went, and a form i' the van, the rear, Brightened the battle up, for he blazed now there, now here.

* * * * *

Did the steady phalanx falter? To the rescue, at the need, The clown was ploughing Persia, clearing Greek earth of weed, As he routed through the Sakian and rooted up the Mede."

After the battle, the man was nowhere to be seen, and inquiry was made of the oracle.

"How spake the Oracle? 'Care for no name at all! Say but just this: We praise one helpful whom we call The Holder of the Ploughshare. The great deed ne'er grows small.'"

With Echetlos may be mentioned the Virgilian legend of Pan and Luna, a piece of graceful fancy, with its exquisite burden, that

"Verse of five words, each a boon: Arcadia, night, a cloud, Pan, and the moon."

Clive, the most popular in style, and certainly one of the finest poems in the volume, is a dramatic monologue very much akin, in subject, treatment and form, to the narratives in the first series. The story deals with an episode in the life of Clive, when, as a young man, he first proved his courage in the face of a bully whom he had caught cheating at cards. The poem is full of fire and brilliance, and is a subtle analysis and presentation of the character of Clive. Its structure is quite in Browning's best manner: a central situation, illumined by "what double and treble reflection and refraction!" Like Balzac (whose Honorine, for instance, is constructed on precisely similar lines) Browning often increases the effect of his picture by setting it in a framework, more or less elaborate, by placing the central narrative in the midst of another slighter and secondary one, related to it in some subtle way. The story of Clive obtains emphasis, and is rendered more impressive, by the lightly but strongly sketched-in figure of the old veteran who tells the tale. Scarcely anything in the poem seems to me so fine as this pathetic portrait of the lonely old man, sitting, like Colonel Newcome, solitary in his house among his memories, with his boy away: "I and Clive were friends."

The Arabian tale of Muleykeh is the most perfect and pathetic piece in the volume. It is told in singularly fine verse, and in remarkably clear, simple, yet elevated style. The end is among the great heroic things in poetry. Hoseyn, though he has neither herds nor flocks, is the richest and happiest of men, for he possesses the peerless mare, Muleykeh the Pearl, whose speed has never been outstripped. Duhl, the son of Sheyban, who envies Hoseyn and has endeavoured by every means, but without success, to obtain the mare, determines at last to steal her. He enters Hoseyn's tent noiselessly by night, saddles Muleykeh, and gallops away. In an instant Hoseyn is on the back of Buheyseh, the Pearl's sister, only less fleet than herself, and in pursuit.

"And Hoseyn—his blood turns flame, he has learned long since to ride, And Buheyseh does her part,—they gain—they are gaining fast On the fugitive pair, and Duhl has Ed-Darraj to cross and quit, And to reach the ridge El-Saban,—no safety till that be spied! And Buheyseh is, bound by bound, but a horse-length off at last, For the Pearl has missed the tap of the heel, the touch of the bit.

She shortens her stride, she chafes at her rider the strange and queer: Buheyseh is mad with hope—beat sister she shall and must, Though Duhl, of the hand and heel so clumsy, she has to thank. She is near now, nose by tail—they are neck by croup—joy! fear! What folly makes Hoseyn shout 'Dog Duhl, Damned son of the Dust, Touch the right ear and press with your foot my Pearl's left flank!'

And Duhl was wise at the word, and Muleykeh as prompt perceived Who was urging redoubled pace, and to hear him was to obey, And a leap indeed gave she, and evanished for evermore. And Hoseyn looked one long last look as who, all bereaved, Looks, fain to follow the dead so far as the living may: Then he turned Buheyseh's neck slow homeward, weeping sore.

And, lo, in the sunrise, still sat Hoseyn upon the ground Weeping: and neighbours came, the tribesmen of Benu-Asad In the vale of green Er-Rass, and they questioned him of his grief; And he told them from first to last how, serpent-like, Duhl had wound His way to the nest, and how Duhl rode like an ape, so bad! And how Buheyseh did wonders, yet Pearl remained with the thief.

And they jeered him, one and all: 'Poor Hoseyn is crazed past hope! How else had he wrought himself his ruin, in fortune's spite! To have simply held the tongue were a task for a boy or girl, And here were Muleykeh again, the eyed like an antelope, The child of his heart by day, the wife of his breast by night!' 'And the beaten in speed!' wept Hoseyn: 'You never have loved my Pearl!'"

There remain Pietro of Abano[56] and Doctor ——. The latter, a Talmudic legend, is probably the poorest of Browning's poems: it is rather farce than humour. The former is a fine piece of genuine grotesque art, full of pungent humour, acuteness, worldly wisdom, and clever phrasing and rhyming. It is written in an elaborate comic metre of Browning's invention, indicated at the end by eight bars of music. The poem is one of the most characteristic examples of that "Teutonic grotesque, which lies in the expression of deep ideas through fantastic forms," a grotesque of noble and cultivated art, of which Browning is as great a master in poetry as Carlyle in prose.

The volume ends with a charming lyrical epilogue, not without its personal bearing, though it has sometimes, very unfairly, been represented as a piece of mere self-gratulation.

"Thus I wrote in London, musing on my betters,"

Browning tells us in some album-verses which have found their way into print, and he naturally complains that what he wrote of Dante should be foisted upon himself. Indeed, he has quite as much the characteristics of the "spontaneous" as of the "brooding" poet of his parable.

"'Touch him ne'er so lightly, into song he broke: Soil so quick-receptive,—not one feather-seed, Not one flower-dust fell, but straight its fall awoke Vitalising virtue: song would song succeed Sudden as spontaneous—prove a poet soul!' Indeed? Rock's the song-soil rather, surface hard and bare: Sun and dew their mildness, storm and frost their rage Vainly both expend,—few flowers awaken there: Quiet in its cleft broods—what the after age Knows and names a pine, a nation's heritage."

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 56: Pietro of Abano was an Italian physician, alchemist and philosopher, born at Abano, near Padua, in 1246, died about 1320. He had the reputation of a wizard, and was imprisoned by the Inquisition. He was condemned to be burnt; he died in prison, and his dead body was ordered to be burnt; but as that had been taken away by his friends, the Inquisition burnt his portrait. His reputed antipathy to milk and cheese, with its natural analogy, suggested the motive of the poem. The book referred to in it is his principal work, Conciliator differentiarum quae inter philosophos et medicos versantur. Mantua, 1472.]

29. JOCOSERIA.

[Published in March, 1883 (Poetical Works, 1889, pp. 165-266).]

The name Jocoseria (mentioned by Browning in its original connection, Melander's "Jocoseria," in the notes to Paracelsus) expresses very cleverly the particular nature of the volume, in its close union and fusion of grave and gay. The book is not, as a whole, so intense or so brilliant as the first and second series of Dramatic Idyls, but one or two of the shorter poems are, in their way, hardly excelled by anything in either volume.

The longest poem, though by no means the best is the imaginary Rabbinical legend of Jochanan Hakkadosh (John the Saint), which Browning, with a touch of learned quizzicalness, states in his note[57] "to have no better authority than that of the treatise, existing dispersedly, in fragments of Rabbinical writing, [the name, 'Collection of many Lies,' follows in Hebrew,] from which I might have helped myself more liberally." It is written in terza rima, like Doctor —— in the second series of Dramatic Idyls, and is supposed to be told by "the Jew aforesaid" in order to "make amends and justify our Mishna." That it may to some extent do, but it seems to me that its effectiveness as an example of the serio-grotesque style would have been heightened by some metre less sober and placid than the terza rima; by rhythm and rhyme as audacious and characteristic as the rhythm and the rhymes of Pietro of Abano, for instance.

Ixion, a far finer poem than Jochanan Hakkadosh, is, no doubt, an equally sincere utterance of personal belief. The poem is a monologue, in unrhymed hexameters and pentameters. It presents the old myth in a new light. Ixion is represented as the Prometheus of man's righteous revolt against the tyranny of an unjust God. The poem is conceived in a spirit of intense earnestness, and worked out with great vigour and splendour of diction. For passion and eloquence nothing in it surpasses the finely culminating last lines, of which I can but tear a few, only too barbarously, from their context:—

"What is the influence, high o'er Hell, that turns to a rapture Pain—and despair's murk mists blends in a rainbow of hope? What is beyond the obstruction, stage by stage tho' it baffle? Back must I fall, confess 'Ever the weakness I fled'? No, for beyond, far, far is a Purity all-unobstructed! Zeus was Zeus—not Man: wrecked by his weakness I whirl. Out of the wreck I rise—past Zeus to the Potency o'er him! I—to have hailed him my friend! I—to have clasped her—my love! Pallid birth of my pain,—where light, where light is, aspiring Thither I rise, whilst thou—Zeus, keep the godship and sink!"

While Ixion is the noblest and most heroically passionate of these poems, Adam, Lilith, and Eve, is the most pregnant and suggestive. Browning has rarely excelled it in certain qualities, hardly found in any other poet, of pungency, novelty, and penetrating bitter-sweetness.

"ADAM, LILITH, AND EVE.

One day it thundered and lightened. Two women, fairly frightened, Sank to their knees, transformed, transfixed, At the feet of the man who sat betwixt; And 'Mercy!' cried each, 'If I tell the truth Of a passage in my youth!'

Said This: 'Do you mind the morning I met your love with scorning? As the worst of the venom left my lips, I thought, "If, despite this lie, he strips The mask from my soul with a kiss—I crawl, His slave,—soul, body and all!"'

Said That: 'We stood to be married; The priest, or someone, tarried; "If Paradise-door prove locked?" smiled you. I thought, as I nodded, smiling too, "Did one, that's away, arrive—nor late Nor soon should unlock Hell's gate!"'

It ceased to lighten and thunder. Up started both in wonder, Looked round, and saw that the sky was clear, Then laughed, 'Confess you believed us, Dear!' 'I saw through the joke!' the man replied They seated themselves beside."

Much of the same power is shown in Cristina and Monaldeschi,[58] a dramatic monologue with all the old vigour of Browning's early work of that kind; not only keen and subtle, but charged with a sharp electrical quality, which from time to time darts out with a sudden and unexpected shock. The style and tone are infused with a peculiar fierce irony. The metre is rapid and stinging, like the words of the vindictive queen as she hurries her treacherous victim into the hands of the assassins. There is dramatic invention in the very cadence:

"Ah, but how each loved each, Marquis! Here's the gallery they trod Both together, he her god, She his idol,—lend your rod, Chamberlain!—ay, there they are—'Quis Separabit?'—plain those two Touching words come into view, Apposite for me and you!"

Mary Wollstonecraft and Fuseli, a dramatic lyric of three verses, the pathetic utterance of an unloved loving woman's heart, is not dissimilar in style to Cristina and Monaldeschi. It would be unjust to Fuseli to name him Bottom, but only fair to Mary Wollstonecraft to call her Titania.

Of the remaining poems, Donald ("a true story, repeated to Mr. Browning by one who had heard it from its hero, the so-called Donald, himself,"[59]) is a ballad, not at all in Browning's best style, but certainly vigorous and striking, directed against the brutalising influences of sport, as Tray was directed against the infinitely worse brutalities of ignorant and indiscriminate vivisection. Its noble human sympathies and popular style appeal to a ready audience. Solomon and Balkis, though by no means among the best of Browning's comic poems, is a witty enough little tale from that inexhaustible repository, the Talmud. It is a dialogue between Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, not "solely" nor at all "of things sublime." Pambo is a bit of pointed fun, a mock-modest apology to critics. Finally, besides a musical little love-song named Wanting is—What? we have in Never the Time and the Place one of the great love-songs, not easily to be excelled, even in the work of Browning, for strength of spiritual passion and intensity of exultant and certain hope.

"NEVER THE TIME AND THE PLACE.

Never the time and the place And the loved one all together! This path—how soft to pace! This May—what magic weather! Where is the loved one's face? In a dream that loved one's face meets mine, But the house is narrow, the place is bleak Where, outside, rain and wind combine With a furtive ear, if I strive to speak, With a hostile eye at my flushing cheek, With a malice that marks each word, each sign! O enemy sly and serpentine, Uncoil thee from the waking man! Do I hold the Past Thus firm and fast Yet doubt if the Future hold I can? This path so soft to pace shall lead Thro' the magic of May to herself indeed! Or narrow if needs the house must be, Outside are the storms and strangers: we— Oh, close, safe, warm, sleep I and she, —I and she!"

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 57: This note contains three burlesque sonnets whose chief interest is, that they are, with the exception of the unclaimed sonnet printed in the Monthly Repository in 1834, the first sonnets ever published by Browning.]

[Footnote 58: One can scarcely read this poem without recalling the superb and not unsimilar episode in prose of another "great dramatic poet," Landor's Imaginary Conversation between the Empress Catherine and Princess Dashkof.]

[Footnote 59: Mrs. Orr, Handbook, p. 313.]

30. FERISHTAH'S FANCIES.

[Published in November, 1884 (Poetical Works, 1898, Vol. XVI. pp. 1-92).]

Ferishtah's Fancies consists of twelve sections, each an argument in an allegory, Persian by presentment, modern or universal in intention.[60] Lightly laid in between the sections, like flowers between the leaves, are twelve lyrics, mostly love songs addressed to a beloved memory, each lyric having a close affinity with the preceding "Fancy." A humorous lyrical prologue, and a passionate lyrical epilogue, complete the work. We learn from Mrs. Orr, that

"The idea of Ferishtah's Fancies grew out of a fable by Pilpay, which Mr. Browning read when a boy. He ... put this into verse; and it then occurred to him to make the poem the beginning of a series, in which the Dervish who is first introduced as a learner should reappear in the character of a teacher. Ferishtah's 'fancies' are the familiar illustrations by which his teachings are enforced."[61]

The book is Browning's West-Eastern Divan, and it is written at nearly the same age as Goethe's. But, though there is a good deal of local colour in the setting, no attempt, as the motto warns us, is made to reproduce Eastern thought. The "Persian garments" are used for a disguise, not as a habit; perhaps for the very reason that the thoughts they drape are of such intense personal sincerity. The drapery, however, is perfectly transparent, and one may read "Robert Browning" for "Dervish Ferishtah" passim.

The first two fancies (The Eagle and The Melon-Seller) give the lessons which Ferishtah learnt, and which determined him to become a Dervish: all the rest are his own lessons to others. These deal severally with faith (Shah Abbas), prayer (The Family), the Incarnation (The Sun), the meaning of evil and of pain (Mihrab Shah), punishment present and future (A Camel-Driver), asceticism (Two Camels), gratefulness to God for small benefits (Cherries), the direct personal relation existing between man and God (Plot-Culture), the uncertain value of knowledge contrasted with the sure gain of love (A Pillar at Sebzevah), and, finally, in A Bean-Stripe: also Apple Eating, the problem of life: is it more good than evil, or more evil than good? The work is a serious attempt to grapple with these great questions, and is as important on its ethical as on its artistic side. Each argument is conveyed by means of a parable, often brilliant, often quaint, always striking and serviceable, and always expressed in scrupulously clear and simple language. The teaching, put more plainly and definitely, perhaps, with less intellectual disguise than usual, is the old unconquered optimism which, in Browning, is so unmistakably a matter of temperament.

The most purely delightful poetry in the volume will be found in the delicate and musical love-songs which brighten its pages. They are snatches of spontaneous and exquisite song, bird-notes seldom heard except from the lips of youth. Perhaps the most perfect is the first.

"Round us the wild creatures, overhead the trees, Underfoot the moss-tracks,—life and love with these! I to wear a fawn-skin, thou to dress in flowers: All the long lone Summer-day, that greenwood life of ours!

Rich-pavilioned, rather,—still the world without,— Inside—gold-roofed silk-walled silence round about! Queen it thou in purple,—I, at watch and ward Couched beneath the columns, gaze, thy slave, love's guard!

So, for us no world? Let throngs press thee to me! Up and down amid men, heart by heart fare we! Welcome squalid vesture, harsh voice, hateful face! God is soul, souls I and thou: with souls should souls have place."

"With souls should souls have place," is, with Browning, the condensed expression of an experience, a philosophy, and an art. Like the lovers of his lyric, he has renounced the selfish serenities of wild-wood and dream-palace; he has gone up and down among men, listening to that human music, and observing that human or divine comedy. He has sung what he has heard, and he has painted what he has seen. If it should be asked whether such work will live, there can be only one answer, and he has already given it:

"It lives, If precious be the soul of man to man."

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 60: This is emphasized by the ingenious motto from King Lear: "You, Sir, I entertain you for one of my hundred; only, I do not like the fashion of your garments: you will say, they are Persian; but let them be changed."]

[Footnote 61: Handbook, p. 321.]

31. PARLEYINGS WITH CERTAIN PEOPLE OF IMPORTANCE IN THEIR DAY.

[Published in January 1887. Poetical Works, 1889, Vol. XVI., pp. 93-275.]

The method of the Parleying is something of a new departure, and at the same time something of a reversion. It is a reversion towards the dramatic form of the monologue; but it is a new departure owing to the precise form assumed, that of a "parleying" or colloquy of the author with his characters. The persons with whom Browning parleys are representative men selected from the England, Holland, and Italy of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. The parleying with Bernard de Mandeville (born at Dort, in Holland, 1670; died in London, 1733; author of The Fable of the Bees, or Private Vices, Public Benefits) takes up the optimistic arguments already developed in Ferishtah's Fancies and elsewhere, and preaches, through the dubious medium of the enigmatic fabulist, trust in the ordering of the world, confidence in discerning a "soul of goodness in things evil." Daniel Bartoli ("a learned and ingenius writer," born at Florence, 1608; died at Rome, 1685; the historian of the Order of Jesuits) serves to point a moral against himself, in the contrast between the pale ineffectual saints of his legendary record and the practically saint-like heroine of a true tale recounted by Browning, the graphic and brilliant story of the duke and the druggist's daughter. The parleying with Christopher Smart (the author of the Song to David, born at Shipborne, in Kent, 1722; died in the King's Bench, 1770) is a penetrating and characteristic study in one of the great poetic problems of the eighteenth century, the problem of a "void and null" verse-writer who, at one moment only of his life, sang, as Browning reminds him,

"A song where flute-breath silvers trumpet-clang, And stations you for once on either hand With Milton and with Keats."

George Bubb Dodington (Lord Melcombe, born 1691; died 1762) stands as type of the dishonest politician, and in the course of a colloquy, which is really a piece of sardonic irony long drawn out, a mock serious essay in the way of a Superior Rogues' Guide or Instructions for Knaves, receives at once castigation and instruction. The parleying with Francis Furini (born at Florence, 1600; died 1649) deals with its hero as a man, as artist and as priest; it contains some of Browning's noblest writing on art; and it touches on current and, indeed, continual controversies in its splendidly vigorous onslaught on the decriers of that supreme art which aims at painting men and women as God made them. Gerard de Lairesse (born at Liege, in Flanders, 1640; died at Amsterdam 1711; famed not only for his pictures, but for his Treatise on the Art of Painting, composed after he had become blind) gives his name to a discussion on the artistic interpretation of nature, its change and advancement, and the deeper and truer vision which has displaced the mythological fancies of earlier painters and poets. The parleying with Charles Avison (born at Newcastle, 1710; died there, 1770), the more than half forgotten organist-composer, embodies an inquiry, critical or speculative, into the position and function of music. All these poems are written in decasyllabic rhymed verse, with varied arrangement of the rhymes. They are introduced by a dialogue between Apollo and the Fates, and concluded by another between John Fust and his friends, both written in lyrical measures, both uniting deep seriousness of intention with capricious humour of form; the one wild and stormy as the great "Dance of Furies" in Gluck's Orfeo; the other quaint and grimly and sublimely grotesque as an old German print. Gerard de Lairesse contains a charming little "Spring Song" of three stanzas; and Charles Avison a sounding train-bands' chorus, written to the air of one of Avison's marches.

The volume as a whole is full of weight, brilliance, and energy; and it is not less notable for its fineness of versification, its splendour of sound and colour, than for its depth and acuteness of thought and keen grasp of intricate argument. Indeed, the quality which more than any other distinguishes it from Browning's later work is the careful writing of the verse, and the elaborate beauty of certain passages. Much of Browning's later work would be ill represented by a selection of the "purple patches." His strength has always lain, but of late has lain much more exclusively, in the ensemble. Here, however, there is not merely one passage of more than a hundred and fifty lines, the like of which (I do not say in every sense the equal, but certainly the like of which) we must go back to Sordello or to Paracelsus to find; but, again and again, wherever we turn, we meet with more than usually fine and impressive passages, single lines of more than usually exquisite quality. The glory of the whole collection is certainly the "Walk," or description, in rivalry with Gerard de Lairesse, of a whole day's changes, from sunrise to sunset. To equal it in its own way, we must look a long way back in our Browning, and nowhere out of Browning. Where all is good, any preference must seem partial; but perhaps nothing in it is finer than this picture of morning.