AN INTRODUCTION TO THE STUDY OF ROBERT BROWNING’S POETRY

by Hiram Corson

[This etext was prepared from a 1910 printing. This third edition was originally published in 1886.]

Hiram Corson, LL.D., Professor of English Literature in the Cornell University; Author of “An Introduction to the Study of Shakespeare”, “A Primer of English Verse, chiefly in its Aesthetic and Organic Character”, “The Aims of Literary Study”, etc.

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{The following is transcribed from a letter (from Browning to Corson) which Corson chose to use in facsimile form to begin his text. Unfortunately (or fortunately), it will be regular text here.}

19. Warwick Crescent. W.

Dec. 28. ‘86

My dear Dr. Corson,

I waited some days after the arrival of your Book and Letter, thinking I might be able to say more of my sense of your goodness: but I can do no more now than a week ago. You “hope I shall not find too much to disapprove of”: what I ought to protest against, is “a load to sink a navy—too much honor”: how can I put aside your generosity, as if cold justice—however befitting myself— would be in better agreement with your nature? Let it remain as an assurance to younger poets that, after fifty years’ work unattended by any conspicuous recognition, an over-payment may be made, if there be such another munificent appreciator as I have been privileged to find, in which case let them, even if more deserving, be equally grateful.

I have not observed anything in need of correction in the notes. The “little Tablet” was a famous “Last Supper”, mentioned by Vasari, (page. 232), and gone astray long ago from the Church of S. Spirito: it turned up, according to report, in some obscure corner, while I was in Florence, and was at once acquired by a stranger. I saw it, genuine or no, a work of great beauty. (Page 156.) “A canon”, in music, is a piece wherein the subject is repeated— in various keys: and being strictly obeyed in the repetition, becomes the “Canon”—the imperative law—to what follows. Fifty of such parts would be indeed a notable peal: to manage three is enough of an achievement for a good musician.

And now,—here is Christmas: all my best wishes go to you and Mrs Corson. Those of my sister also. She was indeed suffering from grave indisposition in the summer, but is happily recovered. I could not venture, under the circumstances, to expose her convalescence to the accidents of foreign travel: hence our contenting ourselves with Wales rather than Italy. Shall you be again induced to visit us? Present or absent, you will remember me always, I trust, as

Yours most affectionately,

Robert Browning.

“Quanta subtilitate ipsa corda hominum reserat, intimos mentis recessus explorat, varios animi motus perscrutatur. Quod ad tragoediam antiquiorem attinet, interpretatus est, uti nostis omnes, non modo Aeschylum quo nemo sublimior, sed etiam Euripidem quo nemo humanior; quo fit ut etiam illos qui Graece nesciunt, misericordia tangat Alcestis, terrore tangat Hercules. Recentiora argumenta tragica cum lyrico quodam scribendi genere coniunxit, duas Musas et Melpomenen et Euterpen simul veneratus. Musicae miracula quis dignius cecinit? Pictoris Florentini sine fraude vitam quasi inter crepuscula vesperascentem coloribus quam vividis depinxit. Vesperi quotiens, dum foco adsidemus, hoc iubente resurgit Italia. Vesperi nuper, dum huius idyllia forte meditabar, Cami inter arundines mihi videbar vocem magnam audire clamantis, Pa\n o’ me/gas ou’ te/qnhken. Vivit adhuc Pan ipse, cum Marathonis memoria et Pheidippidis velocitate immortali consociatus.”

—Eulogium pronounced by Mr. J. E. Sandys, Public Orator at the University of Cambridge, on presenting Mr. Browning for the honorary degree of Doctor of Laws, June 10, 1879.

PREFACE.

The purpose of the present volume is to afford some aid and guidance in the study of Robert Browning’s Poetry, which, being the most complexly subjective of all English poetry, is, for that reason alone, the most difficult. And then the poet’s favorite art-form, the dramatic, or, rather, psychologic, monologue, which is quite original with himself, and peculiarly adapted to the constitution of his genius and to the revelation of themselves by the several “dramatis personae”, presents certain structural difficulties, but difficulties which, with an increased familiarity, grow less and less. The exposition presented in the Introduction, of its constitution and skilful management, and the Arguments given of the several poems included in the volume, will, it is hoped, reduce, if not altogether remove, the difficulties of this kind. In the same section of the Introduction, certain peculiarities of the poet’s diction, which sometimes give a check to the reader’s understanding of a passage, are presented and illustrated.

I think it not necessary to offer any apology for my going all the way back to Chaucer, and noting the Ebb and Flow in English Poetry down to the present time, of the spirituality which constitutes the real life of poetry, and which should, as far as possible, be brought to the consciousness and appreciation of students. What I mean by spirituality is explained in my treatment of the subject. The degree to which poetry is quickened with it should always enter into an estimate of its absolute worth. It is that, indeed, which constitutes its absolute worth. The weight of thought conveyed, whatever that be, will not compensate for the absence of it.

The study of poetry, in our institutions of learning, so far as I have taken note of it, and the education induced thereby, are almost purely intellectual. The student’s spiritual nature is left to take care of itself; and the consequence is that he becomes, at best, only a thinking and analyzing machine.

The spiritual claims of the study of poetry are especially demanded in the case of Browning’s poetry. Browning is generally and truly regarded as the most intellectual of poets. No poetry in English literature, or in any literature, is more charged with discursive thought than his. But he is, at the same time, the most spiritual and transcendental of poets, the “subtlest assertor of the Soul in Song”. His thought is never an end to itself, but is always subservient to an ulterior spiritual end—always directed towards “a presentment of the correspondency of the universe to Deity, of the natural to the spiritual, and of the actual to the ideal”; and it is all-important that students should be awakened, and made, as far as possible, responsive to this spiritual end.

The sections of the Introduction on Personality and Art were read before the Browning Society of London, in June, 1882. I have seen no reason for changing or modifying, in any respect, the views therein expressed.

The idea of personality as a quickening, regenerating power, and the idea of art as an intermediate agency of personality, are, perhaps, the most reiterated (implicitly, not explicitly) in Browning’s poetry, and lead up to the dominant idea of Christianity, the idea of a Divine Personality; the idea that the soul, to use an expression from his earliest poem, ‘Pauline’, must “rest beneath some better essence than itself in weakness”.

The notes to the poems will be found, I trust, to cover all points and features of the text which require explanation and elucidation. I have not, at any rate, wittingly passed by any real difficulties. Whether my explanations and interpretations will in all cases be acceptable, remains to be seen.

Hiram Corson.

Cascadilla Cottage, Ithaca, N.Y.

September, 1886.

Note to the Second Edition.

In this edition, several errors of the first have been corrected. For the notes on “fifty-part canon”, p. 156, and “a certain precious little tablet”, p. 232, I am indebted to Mr. Browning.

H. C.

{p. 156—in this etext, see line 322 of “The Flight of the Duchess”, in the Poems section. p. 232—see Stanza 30 of “Old Pictures in Florence”, also in the Poems section.}

Note to the Third Edition.

In this edition have been added, ‘A Death in the Desert’, with argument, notes, and commentary, a fac-simile of a letter from the poet, and a portrait copied from a photograph (the last taken of him) which he gave me when visiting him in Venice, a month before his death.

It may be of interest, and of some value, to many students of Browning’s poetry, to know a reply he made, in regard to the expression in ‘My Last Duchess’, “I gave commands; then all smiles stopped together.”

We were walking up and down the great hall of the Palazzo Rezzonico, when, in the course of what I was telling him about the study of his works in the United States, I alluded to the divided opinion as to the meaning of the above expression in ‘My Last Duchess’, some understanding that the commands were to put the Duchess to death, and others, as I have explained the expression on p. 87 of this volume (last paragraph). {For etext use, section III (Browning’s Obscurity) of the Introduction, sixth paragraph before the end of the section.} He made no reply, for a moment, and then said, meditatively, “Yes, I meant that the commands were that she should be put to death.” And then, after a pause, he added, with a characteristic dash of expression, and as if the thought had just started in his mind, “Or he might have had her shut up in a convent.” This was to me very significant. When he wrote the expression, “I gave commands”, etc., he may not have thought definitely what the commands were, more than that they put a stop to the smiles of the sweet Duchess, which provoked the contemptible jealousy of the Duke. This was all his art purpose required, and his mind did not go beyond it. I thought how many vain discussions take place in Browning Clubs, about little points which are outside of the range of the artistic motive of a composition, and how many minds are occupied with anything and everything under the sun, except the one thing needful (the artistic or spiritual motive), the result being “as if one should be ignorant of nothing concerning the scent of violets, except the scent itself.”

H.C.

CONTENTS

PREFACE.

INTRODUCTION.

I. The Spiritual Ebb and Flow exhibited in English Poetry

Popularity.

II. The Idea of Personality and of Art as an intermediate agency of Personality

1. General Remarks.

2. The Idea of Personality as embodied in Browning’s Poetry.

3. Art as an Intermediate Agency of Personality.

III. Mr. Browning’s “Obscurity”.

IV. Browning’s Verse.

V. Arguments of the Poems.

Wanting is—What?

My Star.

The Flight of the Duchess.

The Last Ride Together.

By the Fireside.

Prospice.

Amphibian.

James Lee’s Wife.

A Tale.

Confessions.

Respectability.

Home-Thoughts from Abroad.

Home-Thoughts from the Sea.

Old Pictures in Florence.

Pictor Ignotus.

Andrea del Sarto.

Fra Lippo Lippi.

A Face.

The Bishop orders his Tomb.

A Toccata of Galuppi’s.

Abt Vogler.

‘Touch him ne’er so lightly’, etc.

Memorabilia.

How it strikes a Contemporary.

“Transcendentalism”.

Apparent Failure.

Rabbi Ben Ezra.

A Grammarian’s Funeral.

An Epistle containing the Strange Medical Experience of Karshish

A Martyr’s Epitaph.

Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister.

Holy-Cross Day.

Saul.

A Death in the Desert.

POEMS.

Wanting is—What?

My Star.

The Last Ride Together.

By the Fireside.

Prospice.

Amphibian.

James Lee’s Wife.

A Tale.

Epilogue to ‘The Two Poets of Croisic’.

Confessions.

Respectability.

Home Thoughts, from Abroad.

Home Thoughts, from the Sea.

Old Pictures in Florence.

Pictor Ignotus.

Andrea del Sarto.

Fra Lippo Lippi.

A Face.

The Bishop orders his Tomb.

A Toccata of Galuppi’s.

Abt Vogler.

Memorabilia.

How it strikes a Contemporary.

“Transcendentalism”:

Apparent Failure.

Rabbi Ben Ezra.

A Grammarian’s Funeral.

An Epistle containing the Strange Medical Experience of Karshish

A Martyr’s Epitaph.

Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister.

Holy-Cross Day.

Saul.

A Death in the Desert.

A LIST OF CRITICISMS OF BROWNING’S WORKS.

Notes on the Genius of Robert Browning. By James Thomson.

INTRODUCTION.

I. The Spiritual Ebb and Flow exhibited in English Poetry from Chaucer to Tennyson and Browning.

Literature, in its most restricted art-sense, is an expression in letters of the life of the spirit of man co-operating with the intellect. Without the co-operation of the spiritual man, the intellect produces only thought; and pure thought, whatever be the subject with which it deals, is not regarded as literature, in its strict sense. For example, Euclid’s ‘Elements’, Newton’s ‘Principia’, Spinoza’s ‘Ethica’, and Kant’s ‘Critique of the Pure Reason’, do not properly belong to literature. (By the “spiritual” I would be understood to mean the whole domain of the emotional, the susceptible or impressible, the sympathetic, the intuitive; in short, that mysterious something in the constitution of man by and through which he holds relationship with the essential spirit of things, as opposed to the phenomenal of which the senses take cognizance.)

The term literature is sometimes extended in meaning (and it may be so extended), to include all that has been committed to letters, on all subjects. There is no objection to such extension in ordinary speech, no more than there is to that of the signification of the word, “beauty” to what is purely abstract. We speak, for example, of the beauty of a mathematical demonstration; but beauty, in its strictest sense, is that which appeals to the spiritual nature, and must, therefore, be concrete, personal, not abstract. Art beauty is the embodiment, adequate, effective embodiment, of co-operative intellect and spirit,— “the accommodation,” in Bacon’s words, “of the shows of things to the desires of the mind.”

It follows that the relative merit and importance of different periods of a literature should be determined by the relative degrees of spirituality which these different periods exhibit. The intellectual power of two or more periods, as exhibited in their literatures, may show no marked difference, while the spiritual vitality of these same periods may very distinctly differ. And if it be admitted that literature proper is the product of co-operative intellect and spirit (the latter being always an indispensable factor, though there can be no high order of literature that is not strongly articulated, that is not well freighted, with thought), it follows that the periods of a literature should be determined by the ebb and flow of spiritual life which they severally register, rather than by any other considerations. There are periods which are characterized by a “blindness of heart”, an inactive, quiescent condition of the spirit, by which the intellect is more or less divorced from the essential, the eternal, and it directs itself to the shows of things. Such periods may embody in their literatures a large amount of thought,—thought which is conversant with the externality of things; but that of itself will not constitute a noble literature, however perfect the forms in which it may be embodied, and the general sense of the civilized world, independently of any theories of literature, will not regard such a literature as noble. It is made up of what must be, in time, superseded; it has not a sufficiently large element of the essential, the eternal, which can be reached only through the assimilating life of the spirit. The spirit may be so “cabined, cribbed, confined” as not to come to any consciousness of itself; or it may be so set free as to go forth and recognize its kinship, respond to the spiritual world outside of itself, and, by so responding, KNOW what merely intellectual philosophers call the UNKNOWABLE.

To turn now to the line of English poets who may be said to have passed the torch of spiritual life, from lifted hand to hand, along the generations. And first is

Chaucer exhibits, in a high degree, this life of the spirit, and it is the secret of the charm which his poetry possesses for us after a lapse of five hundred years. It vitalizes, warms, fuses, and imparts a lightsomeness to his verse; it creeps and kindles beneath the tissues of his thought. When we compare Dryden’s modernizations of Chaucer with the originals, we see the difference between the verse of a poet, with a healthy vitality of spirit, and, through that healthy vitality of spirit, having secret dealings with things, and verse which is largely the product of the rhetorical or literary faculty. We do not feel, when reading the latter, that any unconscious might co-operated with the conscious powers of the writer. But we DO feel this when we read Chaucer’s verse.

All of the Canterbury Tales have originals or analogues, most of which have been reproduced by the London Chaucer Society. Not one of the tales is of Chaucer’s own invention. And yet they may all be said to be original, in the truest, deepest sense of the word. They have been vitalized from the poet’s own soul. He has infused his own personality, his own spirit-life, into his originals; he has “created a soul under the ribs of death.” It is this infused vitality which will constitute the charm of the Canterbury Tales for all generations of English speaking and English reading people. This life of the spirit, of which I am speaking, as distinguished from the intellect, is felt, though much less distinctly, in a contemporary work, ‘The Vision of William concerning Piers the Plowman’. What the author calls “KIND WIT”, that is, “natural intelligence”, has, generally, the ascendency. We meet, however, with powerful passages, wherein the thoughts are aglow with the warmth from the writer’s inner spirit. He shows at times the moral indignation of a Hebrew prophet.

The ‘Confessio Amantis’ of John Gower, another contemporary work, exhibits comparatively little of the life of the spirit, either in its verse or in its thought. The thought rarely passes the limit of natural intelligence. The stories, which the poet drew from the ‘Gesta Romanorum’ and numerous other sources, can hardly be said to have been BORN AGAIN. The verse is smooth and fluent, but the reader feels it to be the product of literary skill. It wants what can be imparted only by an unconscious might back of the consciously active and trained powers. It is this unconscious might which John Keats, in his ‘Sleep and Poetry’, speaks of as “might half slumbering on its own right arm”, and which every reader, with the requisite susceptibility, can always detect in the verse of a true poet.

In the interval between Chaucer and Spenser, this life of the spirit is not distinctly marked in any of its authors, not excepting even Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, whose sad fate gave a factitious interest to his writings. It is more noticeable in Thomas Sackville, Lord Buckhurst’s ‘Induction to the Mirror for Magistrates’, which, in the words of Hallam, “forms a link which unites the school of Chaucer and Lydgate to the ‘Faerie Queene’.”

The Rev. James Byrne, of Trinity College, Dublin, in his lecture on ‘The Influence of National Character on English Literature’, remarks of Spenser: “After that dark period which separated him from Chaucer, after all the desolation of the Wars of the Roses, and all the deep trials of the Reformation, he rose on England as if, to use an image of his own,

“That baptism of blood and fire through which England passed at the Reformation, raised both Protestant and Catholic to a newness of life. That mighty working of heart and mind with which the nation then heaved throughout, went through every man and woman, and tried what manner of spirits they were of. What a preparation was this for that period of our literature in which man, the great actor of the drama of life, was about to appear on the stage! It was to be expected that the drama should then start into life, and that human character should speak from the stage with a depth of life never known before; but who could have imagined Shakespeare?”

And what a new music burst upon the world in Spenser’s verse! His noble stanza, so admirably adapted to pictorial effect, has since been used by some of the greatest poets of the literature, Thomson, Scott, Wordsworth, Byron, Keats, Shelley, and numerous others; but none of them, except in rare instances, have drawn the music out of it which Spenser drew.

Professor Goldwin Smith well remarks, in his article on Mark Pattison’s Milton, “The great growths of poetry have coincided with the great bursts of national life, and the great bursts of national life have hitherto been generally periods of controversy and struggle. Art itself, in its highest forms, has been the expression of faith. We have now people who profess to cultivate art for its own sake; but they have hardly produced anything which the world accepts as great, though they have supplied some subjects for ‘Punch’.”

Spenser who, of all the great English poets, is regarded by some critics as the most remote from real life, and the least reflecting his age, is, nevertheless, filled with the spirit of his age—its chivalric, romantic, patriotic, moral, and religious spirit. When he began to write, the nation had just passed through the fiery furnace of a religious persecution, and was rejoicing in its deliverance from the papistical rule of Mary. The devotion to the new queen with which it was inspired was grateful, generous, enthusiastic, and even romantic. This devotion Spenser’s great poem everywhere reflects, and it has been justly pronounced to be the best exponent of the subtleties of that Calvinism which was the aristocratic form of Protestantism at that time in both France and England.

The renewed spiritual life which set in so strongly with Spenser, reached its springtide in Shakespeare. It was the secret of that sense of moral proportion which pervades his plays. Moral proportion cannot be secured through the laws of the ancients, or through any formulated theory of art. It was, I am assured, through his deep and sensitive spirit-life that Shakespeare felt the universal spirit and constitution of the world as fully, perhaps, as the human soul, in this life, is capable of feeling it. Through it he took cognizance of the workings of nature, and of the life of man, BY DIRECT ASSIMILATION OF THEIR HIDDEN PRINCIPLES,— principles which cannot be reached through an observation, by the natural intelligence, of the phenomenal. He thus became possessed of a knowledge, or rather wisdom, far beyond his conscious observation and objective experience.

Shakespeare may be regarded as the first and the last great artistic physiologist or natural historian of the passions; and he was this by virtue of the life of the spirit, which enabled him to reproduce sympathetically the whole range of human passion within himself. He was the first of the world’s dramatists that exhibited the passions in their evolutions, and in their subtlest complications. And the moral proportion he preserved in exhibiting the complex and often wild play of the passions must have been largely due to the harmony of his soul with the constitution of things. What the Restoration dramatists regarded or understood as moral proportion, was not moral proportion at all, but a proportion fashioned according to merely conventional ideas of justice. Shakespeare’s moral proportion appeared to them, in their low spiritual condition, a moral chaos, which they set about converting, in some of his great plays, into a cosmos; and a sad muss, if not a ridiculous muss, they made of it. Signal examples of this are the ‘rifacimenti’ of the Tempest by Dryden and Davenant, the King Lear by Tate, and the Antony and Cleopatra (entitled ‘All for Love, or the World well Lost’) by Dryden.

In Milton, though there is a noticeable, an even distinctly marked, reduction of the life of the spirit (in the sense in which I have been using these words) exhibited by Shakespeare, it is still very strong and efficient, and continues uninfluenced by the malign atmosphere around him the last fifteen years of his life, which were lived in the reign of Charles II. Within that period he wrote the ‘Paradise Lost’, ‘Paradise Regained’, and ‘Samson Agonistes’. “Milton,” says Emerson, “was the stair or high table-land to let down the English genius from the summits of Shakespeare.”

“These heights could not be maintained. They were followed by a meanness and a descent of the mind into lower levels; the loss of wings; no high speculation. Locke, to whom the meaning of ideas was unknown, became the type of philosophy, and his “understanding” the measure, in all nations, of the English intellect. His countrymen forsook the lofty sides of Parnassus, on which they had once walked with echoing steps, and disused the studies once so beloved; the powers of thought fell into neglect.”

The highest powers of thought cannot be realized without the life of the spirit. It is this, as I have already said, which has been the glory of the greatest thinkers since the world began; not their intellects, but the co-operating, unconscious power IMMANENT in their intellects.

During the Restoration period, and later, spiritual life was at its very lowest ebb. I mean, spiritual life as exhibited in the poetic and dramatic literature of the time, whose poisoned fountain-head was the dissolute court of Charles II. All the slops of that court went into the drama, all the ‘sentina reipublicae’, the bilge water of the ship of state. The dramatic writers of the time, to use the words of St. Paul in his letter to the Ephesians, “walked in the vanity of their mind; having the understanding darkened, being alienated from the life of God through the ignorance that was in them because of the blindness of their heart; who, being past feeling, gave themselves over unto lasciviousness, to work all uncleanness with greediness.” The age, as Emerson says, had no live, distinct, actuating convictions. It was in even worse than a negative condition. As represented by its drama and poetry, it may almost be said to have repudiated the moral sentiment. A spiritual disease affected the upper classes, which continued down into the reign of the Georges. There appears to have been but little belief in the impulse which the heart imparts to the intellect, or that the latter draws greatness from the inspiration of the former. There was a time in the history of the Jews in which, it is recorded, “there was no open vision”. It can be said, emphatically, that in the time of Charles II. there was no open vision. And yet that besotted, that spiritually dark age, which was afflicted with pneumatophobia, flattered itself that there had never been an age so flooded with light. The great age of Elizabeth (which designation I would apply to the period of fifty years or more, from 1575 to 1625, or somewhat later), in which the human faculties, in their whole range, both intellectual and spiritual, reached such a degree of expansion as they had never before reached in the history of the world,— that great age, I say, the age of Spenser, Sidney, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Bacon, Raleigh, Hooker, Ben Jonson, Beaumont, Fletcher, Chapman, Dekker, Ford, Herbert, Heywood, Massinger (and this list of great names might be continued),—that great age, I say, was regarded by the men of the Restoration period as barbarous in comparison with their own. But beneath all, still lay the restorative elements of the English character, which were to reassert themselves and usher in a new era of literary productiveness, the greatest since the Elizabethan age, and embodying the highest ideals of life to which the race has yet attained. We can account, to some extent, for this interregnum or spiritual life, but only to some extent. The brutal heartlessness and licentiousness of the court which the exiled Charles brought back with him, and the release from Puritan restraint, explain partly the state of things, or rather the degree to which the state of things was pushed.

In the middle of the eighteenth century, or somewhat earlier, the rise of the spiritual tide is distinctly observable. We see a reaction setting in against the soulless poetry which culminated in Alexander Pope, whose ‘Rape of the Lock’ is the masterpiece of that poetry. It is, in fact, the most brilliant society-poem in the literature. De Quincey pronounces it to be, though somewhat extravagantly, “the most exquisite monument of playful fancy that universal literature offers.” Bishop Warburton, one of the great critical authorities of the age, believed in the infallibility of Pope, if not of THE Pope.

To notice but a few of the influences at work: Thomson sang of the Seasons, and invited attention to the beauties of the natural world, to which the previous generation had been blind and indifferent. Bishop Percy published his ‘Reliques of Ancient English Poetry’, thus awakening a new interest in the old ballads which had sprung from the heart of the people, and contributing much to free poetry from the yoke of the conventional and the artificial, and to work a revival of natural unaffected feeling. Thomas Tyrwhitt edited in a scholarly and appreciative manner, the Canterbury Tales of Chaucer. James McPherson published what he claimed to be translations from the poems of Ossian, the son of Fingal. Whether genuine or not, these poems indicated the tendency of the time. In Scotland, the old ballad spirit, which had continued to exist with a vigor but little abated by the influence of the artificial, mechanical school of poetry, was gathered up and intensified in the songs of him “who walked in glory and in joy, following his plow, along the mountain-side”, and who is entitled to a high rank among the poetical reformers of the age.

It is not surprising that the great literary dictator in Percy’s day, Dr. Samuel Johnson, should treat the old ballads with ridicule. The good man had been trained in a different school of poetry, and could not in his old age yield to the reactionary movement. Bishop Warburton, who ranked next to Johnson in literary authority, had nothing but sneering contempt to bestow upon upon the old ballads, and this feeling was shared by many others in the foremost ranks of literature and criticism. But in the face of all opposition, and aided by the yearning for literary liberty that was abroad, the old ballads grew more and more into favor. The influence of this folklore was not confined to England. It extended across the sea, and swayed the genius of such poets as Buerger and Goethe and Schiller.

Along with the poetical revival in the eighteenth century, came the great religious revival inaugurated by the Wesleys and Whitefield; and of this revival, the poetry of William Cowper was a direct product. But the two revivals were co-radical,— one was not derived from the other. The long-suppressed spiritual elements of the nation began to reassert themselves in religion and in poetry. The Church had been as sound asleep as the Muses.

Cowper belongs to the Whitefield side of the religious revival, the Evangelicals, as they were called (those that remained within the Establishment). In his poem entitled ‘Hope’, he vindicates the memory of Whitefield under the name Leuconomus, a translation into Greek, of White field. It was his conversion to Evangelicism which gave him his inspiration and his themes. ‘The Task’ has been as justly called the poem of Methodism as the ‘Paradise Lost’ has been called the epic of Puritanism. In it we are presented with a number of pictures of the utterly fossilized condition of the clergy of the day in the Established Church (see especially book II., vv. 326-832, in which he satirizes the clergy and the universities).

Cowper has been truly characterized by Professor Goldwin Smith, as “the apostle of feeling to a hard age, to an artificial age, the apostle of nature. He opened beneath the arid surface of a polished but soulless society, a fountain of sentiment which had long ceased to flow.”

The greatest things in this world are often done by those who do not know they are doing them. This is especially true of William Cowper. He was wholly unaware of the great mission he was fulfilling; his contemporaries were wholly unaware of it. And so temporal are the world’s standards, in the best of times, that spiritual regenerators are not generally recognized until long after they have passed away, when the results of what they did are fully ripe, and philosophers begin to trace the original impulses.

John Burroughs, in his inspiring essay on Walt Whitman entitled ‘The Flight of the Eagle’, quotes the following sentence from a lecture on Burns, delivered by “a lecturer from over seas”, whom he does not name: “When literature becomes dozy, respectable, and goes in the smooth grooves of fashion, and copies and copies again, something must be done; and to give life to that dying literature, a man must be found not educated under its influence.”

Such a man I would say was William Cowper, who, in his weakness, was

and who

John Keats, in his poem entitled ‘Sleep and Poetry’, has well characterized the soulless poetry of the period between the Restoration and the poetical revival in the latter part of the eighteenth century, but more especially of the Popian period. After speaking of the greatness of his favorite poets of the Elizabethan period, he continues:—

(Alluding to the rocking-horse movement of the Popian verse.)

It was these lines that raised the ire of Byron, who regarded them as an irreverent assault upon his favorite poet, Pope. In the controversy occasioned by the Rev. W. L. Bowles’s strictures on the Life and Writings of Pope, Byron perversely asks, “Where is the poetry of which one-half is good? Is it the Aeneid? Is it Milton’s? Is it Dryden’s? Is it any one’s except Pope’s and Goldsmith’s, of which ALL is good?”

In the first quarter of the nineteenth century, the spiritual flow which, as I have said, set in about the middle of the eighteenth century, and received its first great impulse from William Cowper, reached its high tide in Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, Southey, and Byron. These poets were all, more or less, influenced by that great moral convulsion, the French revolution, which stirred men’s souls to their deepest depths, induced a vast stimulation of the meditative faculties, and contributed much toward the unfolding of the ideas “on man, on nature, and on human life”, which have since so vitalized English poetry. *

Wordsworth exhibited in his poetry, as they had never before been exhibited, the permanent absolute relations of nature to the human spirit, interpreted the relations between the elemental powers of creation and the moral life of man, and vindicated the inalienable birthright of the lowliest of men to those inward “oracles of vital deity attesting the Hereafter.” Wordsworth’s poetry is, in fact, so far as it bears upon the natural world, a protest against the association theory of beauty of the eighteenth century—a theory which was an offshoot of the philosophy of Locke, well characterized by Macvicar, in his ‘Philosophy of the Beautiful’ (Introd., pp. xv., xvi), as “an ingenious hypothesis for the close of the eighteenth century, when the philosophy then popular did not admit, as the ground of any knowledge, anything higher than self-repetition and the transformation of sensations.”

Coleridge’s ‘Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ is an imaginative expression of that divine love which embraces all creatures, from the highest to the lowest, of the consequences of the severance of man’s soul from this animating principle of the universe, and of those spiritual threshings by and through which it is brought again under its blessed influence. In his ‘Cristabel’ he has exhibited the dark principle of evil, lurking within the good, and ever struggling with it. We read it in the spell the wicked witch Geraldine works upon her innocent and unsuspecting protector; we read it in the strange words which Geraldine addresses to the spirit of the saintly mother who has approached to shield from harm the beloved child for whom she died; we read it in the story of the friendship and enmity between the Baron and Sir Roland de Vaux of Tryermaine; we read it in the vision seen in the forest by the minstrel Bard, of the bright green snake coiled around the wings and neck of a fluttering dove; and, finally, we read it in its most startling form, in the conclusion of the poem, “A little child, a limber elf, singing, dancing to itself,” etc., wherein is exhibited the strange tendency to express love’s excess “with words of unmeant bitterness”. This dark principle of evil, we may suppose, after dwelling in the poet’s mind, in an abstract form, crept into this broken poem, where it lies coiled up among the choicest and most fragrant flowers, and occasionally springs its warning rattle, and projects its forked tongue, to assure us of its ugly presence.

Both these great poems show the influence of the revival of the old English Ballads. Coleridge had drunk deep of their spirit.

Shelley and Byron were fully charged with the revolutionary spirit of the time. Shelley, of all the poets of his generation, had the most prophetic fervor in regard to the progress of the democratic spirit. All his greatest poems are informed with this fervor, but it is especially exhibited in the ‘Prometheus Unbound’, which is, in the words of Todhunter, “to all other lyrical poems what the ninth symphony is to all other symphonies; and more than this, for Shelley has here outsoared himself more unquestionably than Beethoven in his last great orchestral work. . . . The Titan Prometheus is the incarnation of the genius of humanity, chained and suffering under the tyranny of the evil principle which at present rules over the world, typified in Jupiter; the name Prometheus, FORESIGHT, connecting him with that poetic imagination which is the true prophetic power, penetrating the mystery of things, because, as Shelley implies, it is a kind of divine Logos incarnate in man—a creative force which dominates nature by acting in harmony with her.”

It is, perhaps, more correct to say of Byron, that he was charged with the spirit of revolt rather than with the revolutionary spirit. The revolutionary spirit was in him indefinite, inarticulate; he offered nothing to put in the place of the social and political evils against which he rebelled. There is nothing CONSTRUCTIVE in his poetry. But if his great passion-capital, his keen spiritual susceptibility, and his great power of vigorous expression, had been brought into the service of constructive thought, he might have been a restorative power in his generation.

The greatest loss which English poetry ever sustained, was in the premature death of John Keats. What he would have done had his life been spared, we have an assurance in what he has left us. He was spiritually constituted to be one of the subtlest interpreters of the secrets of life that the whole range of English poetry exhibits. No poet ever more deeply felt “the vital connection of beauty with truth”. He realized in himself his idea of the poet expressed in his lines,—

— * “We often think of Shelley and Keats together, and they seem to have an attraction for minds of the same cast. They were both exposed to the same influences, those revolutionary influences in literature and religion which inaugurated a new period. Yet there is a great contrast as well as a great similarity between them, and it is interesting to remark the different spiritual results in the case of these two different minds subjected to conditions so similar in general, though different in detail. Both felt the same need, the need of ESCAPE, desiring to escape from the actual world in which they perceived more evil than good, to some other ideal world which they had to create for themselves. This is the point of their similarity; their need and motive were the same, to escape from the limitations of the present. But they escaped in different directions, Keats into the past where he reconstructed a mythical Greek world after the designs of his own fancy, Shelley into a future where he sought in a new and distant era, in a new and distant world, a refuge from the present. We may compare Keats’s ‘Hyperion’ with Shelley’s ‘Prometheus’, as both poems touch the same idea— the dominion of elder gods usurped by younger, for Prometheus belonged to the elder generation. The impression Keats gives us is that he represents the dethroned gods in the sad vale, “far from the fiery noon”, for the pleasure of moving among them himself, and creates their lonely world as a retreat for his own spirit. Whereas in the ‘Prometheus Unbound’ we feel that the scenes laid in ancient days and built on Greek myths, have a direct relation to the destinies of man, and that Shelley went back into the past because he believed it was connected with the future, and because he could use it as an artistic setting for exhibiting an ideal world in the future.

“This problem of escape—to rescue the soul from the clutches of time, ‘ineluctabile tempus’,—which Keats and Shelley tried to resolve for themselves by creating a new world in the past and the future, met Browning too. The new way which Browning has essayed—the way in which he accepts the present and deals with it, CLOSES with time instead of trying to elude it, and discovers in the struggle that this time, ‘ineluctabile tempus’, is really a faithful vassal of eternity, and that its limits serve and do not enslave illimitable spirit.”

—From a Paper by John B. Bury, B.A., Trin. Coll., Dublin, on Browning’s ‘Aristophanes’ Apology’, read at 38th meeting of the Browning Soc., Jan. 29, 1886. —

Wordsworth, and the other poets I have named, Byron, Shelley, Keats, and Coleridge, made such a protest against authority in poetry as had been made in the 16th century against authority in religion; and for this authority were substituted the soul-experiences of the individual poet, who set his verse to the song that was within him, and chose such subjects as would best embody and articulate that song.

But by the end of the first quarter of the present century, the great poetical billow, which was not indeed caused by, but received an impulse from, the great political billow, the French Revolution (for they were cognate or co-radical movements), had quite spent itself, and English poetry was at a comparatively low ebb. The Poetical Revolution had done its work. A poetical interregnum of a few years’ duration followed, in which there appeared to be a great reduction of the spiritual life of which poetry is the outgrowth.

Mr. Edmund W. Gosse, in his article ‘On the Early Writings of Robert Browning’, in the ‘Century’ for December, 1881, has characterized this interregnum a little too contemptuously, perhaps. There was, indeed, a great fall in the spiritual tide; but it was not such a dead-low tide as Mr. Gosse would make it.

At length, in 1830, appeared a volume of poems by a young man, then but twenty-one years of age, which distinctly marked the setting in of a new order of things. It bore the following title: ‘Poems, chiefly Lyrical. By Alfred Tennyson, London: Effingham Wilson, Royal Exchange, Cornhill, 1830.’ pp. 154.

The volume comprised fifty-three poems, among which were ‘The Poet’ and ‘The Poet’s Mind’. These two poems were emphatically indicative of the high ideal of poetry which had been attained, and to the development of which the band of poets of the preceding generation had largely contributed.

A review of the volume, by John Stuart Mill, then a young man not yet twenty-five years of age, was published in ‘The Westminster’ for January, 1831. It bears testimony to the writer’s fine insight and sure foresight; and it bears testimony, too, to his high estimate of the function of poetry in this world—an estimate, too, in kind and in degree, not older than this present century. The review is as important a landmark in the development of poetical criticism, as are the two poems I have mentioned, in the development of poetical ideals, in the nineteenth century.

In the concluding paragraph of the review, Mill says: “A genuine poet has deep responsibilities to his country and the world, to the present and future generations, to earth and heaven. He, of all men, should have distinct and worthy objects before him, and consecrate himself to their promotion. It is thus that he best consults the glory of his art, and his own lasting fame. . . . Mr. Tennyson knows that “the poet’s mind is holy ground”; he knows that the poet’s portion is to be

he has shown, in the lines from which we quote, his own just conception of the grandeur of a poet’s destiny; and we look to him for its fulfilment. . . . If our estimate of Mr. Tennyson be correct, he too is a poet; and many years hence may be read his juvenile description of that character with the proud consciousness that it has become the description and history of his own works.”

Two years later, that is, in 1832 (the volume, however, is antedated 1833), appeared ‘Poems by Alfred Tennyson’, pp. 163. In it were contained ‘The Lady of Shalott’, and the untitled poems, known by their first lines, ‘You ask me why, tho’ ill at ease’, ‘Of old sat Freedom on the Heights’, and ‘Love thou thy Land, with Love far brought’.

In ‘The Lady of Shalott’ is mystically shadowed forth the relation which poetic genius should sustain to the world for whose spiritual redemption it labors, and the fatal consequences of its being seduced by the world’s temptations, the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life.

The other poems, ‘You ask me why’, ‘Of old sat Freedom’, and ‘Love thou thy land’, are important as exponents of what may be called the poet’s institutional creed. A careful study of his subsequent poetry will show that in these early poems he accurately and distinctly revealed the attitude toward outside things which he has since maintained. He is a good deal of an institutional poet, and, as compared with Browning, a STRONGLY institutional poet. Browning’s supreme and all-absorbing interest is in individual souls. He cares but little, evidently, about institutions. At any rate, he gives them little or no place in his poetry. Tennyson is a very decided reactionary product of the revolutionary spirit which inspired some of his poetical predecessors of the previous generation. He has a horror of the revolutionary. To him, the French Revolution was “the blind hysterics of the Celt”, {‘In Memoriam’, cix.}, and “the red fool-fury of the Seine” {‘I. M.’, cxxvii.}. He attaches great importance to the outside arrangements of society for upholding and advancing the individual. He would “make Knowledge circle with the winds”, but “her herald, Reverence”, must

He has a great regard for precedents, almost AS precedents. He is emphatically the poet of law and order. All his sympathies are decidedly, but not narrowly, conservative. He is, in short, a choice product of nineteenth century ENGLISH civilization; and his poetry may be said to be the most distinct expression of the refinements of English culture—refinements, rather than the ruder but more vital forms of English strength and power. All his ideals of institutions and the general machinery of life, are derived from England. She is

But the anti-revolutionary and the institutional features of Tennyson’s poetry are not those of the higher ground of his poetry. They are features which, though primarily due, it may be, to the poet’s temperament, are indirectly due to the particular form of civilization in which he has lived, and moved, and had his culture, and which he reflects more than any of his poetical contemporaries.

The most emphasized and most vitalized idea, the idea which glints forth everywhere in his poetry, which has the most important bearing on man’s higher life, and which marks the height of the spiritual tide reached in his poetry, is, that the highest order of manhood is a well-poised, harmoniously operating duality of the active or intellectual or discursive, and the passive or spiritually sensitive. This is the idea which INFORMS his poem of ‘The Princess’. It is prominent in ‘In Memoriam’ and in ‘The Idylls of the King’. In ‘The Princess’, the Prince, speaking of the relations of the sexes, says:—

To state briefly the cardinal Tennysonian idea, man must realize a WOMANLY MANLINESS, and woman a MANLY WOMANLINESS.

Tennyson presents to us his ideal man in the 109th section of ‘In Memoriam’. It is descriptive of his friend, Arthur Henry Hallam. All that is most characteristic of Tennyson, even his Englishness, is gathered up in this poem of six stanzas. It is interesting to meet with such a representative and comprehensive bit in a great poet.

The first two verses of this stanza also characterize the King Arthur of the ‘Idylls of the King’. *1* In the next stanza we have the poet’s institutional Englishness:—

— *1* See ‘The Holy Grail’, the concluding thirty-two verses, beginning: “And spake I not too truly, O my Knights”, and ending “ye have seen that ye have seen”.

*2* The idea of ‘The Princess’. —

Tennyson’s genius was early trained by the skeptical philosophy of the age. All his poetry shows this. The ‘In Memoriam’ may almost be said to be the poem of nineteenth century scepticism. To this scepticism he has applied an “all-subtilizing intellect”, and has translated it into the poetical “concrete”, with a rare artistic skill, and more than this, has subjected it to the spiritual instincts and apperceptions of the feminine side of his nature and made it vassal to a larger faith. But it is, after all, not the vital faith which Browning’s poetry exhibits, a faith PROCEEDING DIRECTLY FROM THE SPIRITUAL MAN. It is rather the faith expressed by Browning’s Bishop Blougram:—

And Tennyson, in picturing to us in the Idylls, the passage of the soul “from the great deep to the great deep”, appears to have felt it necessary to the completion of that picture (or why did he do it?), that he should bring out that doubt at the last moment. The dying Arthur is made to say:—

Tennyson’s poetry is, in fact, an expression of the highest sublimation of the scepticism which came out of the eighteenth century, which invoked the authority of the sensualistic philosophy of Locke, and has since been fostered by the science of the nineteenth; while Browning’s poetry is a decided protest against, and a reactionary product of, that scepticism, that infidel philosophy (infidel as to the transcendental), and has CLOSED with it and borne away the palm.

The key-note of his poetry is struck in ‘Paracelsus’, published in 1835, in his twenty-third year, and, with the exception of ‘Pauline’ published in 1833, the earliest of his compositions: Paracelsus says (and he who knows Browning knows it to be substantially his own creed):—

And again:—

In the last three verses is indicated the doctrine of the regenerating power of exalted personalities, so prominent in Browning’s poetry, and which is treated in the next paper.

— * proper: In the sense of the Latin PROPRIUS, peculiar, private, personal. —

There is no ‘tabula rasa’ doctrine in these passages, nor in any others, in the poet’s voluminous works; and of all men of great intellect and learning (it is always a matter of mere insulated intellect), born in England since the days of John Locke, no one, perhaps, has been so entirely untainted with this doctrine as Robert Browning. It is a doctrine which great spiritual vitality (and that he early possessed), reaching out, as it does, beyond all experience, beyond all transformation of sensations, and all conclusions of the discursive understanding, naturally and spontaneously rejects. It simply says, “I know better”, and there an end.

The great function of the poet, as poet, is, with Browning, to open out a way whence the imprisoned splendor may escape, not to effect entry for a light supposed to be without; to trace back the effluence to its spring and source within us, where broods radiance vast, to be elicited ray by ray.

In ‘Fifine at the Fair’, published thirty-seven years after ‘Paracelsus’, is substantially the same doctrine:—

In his poem entitled ‘Popularity’, included in his “fifty men and women”, the speaker, in the monologue, “draws” his “true poet”, whom HE knows, if others do not; who, though he renders, or stands ready to render, to his fellows, the supreme service of opening out a way whence the imprisoned splendor of their souls may escape, is yet locked safe from end to end of this dark world.

Though there may be, in his own time, no “reapers reaping early in among the bearded barley” and “piling sheaves in uplands airy” who hear his song, he holds the FUTURE fast, accepts the COMING AGES’ duty, their present for this past. This true, creative poet, whom the speaker calls “God’s glow-worm, creative in the sense of revealing, whose inmost centre, where truth abides in fulness, has that freedom of responsiveness to the divine which makes him the revealer of it to men, plays the part in the world of spirit which, in the material world was played by the fisher who, first on the coast of Tyre the old, fished up the purple-yielding murex. Until the precious liquor, filtered by degrees, and refined to proof, is flasked and priced, and salable at last, the world stands aloof. But when it is all ready for the market, the small dealers, “put blue into their line”, and outdare each other in azure feats by which they secure great popularity, and, as a result, fare sumptuously; while he who fished the murex up was unrecognized, and fed, perhaps, on porridge.

Popularity.

— *1* named: Announced. *2* Original reading:— “Till art comes,—comes to pound and squeeze And clarify,—refines to proof." *3* “Line” is perhaps meant to be used equivocally,— their line of business or line of their verse. —

The spiritual ebb and flow exhibited in English poetry (the highest tide being reached in Tennyson and Browning) which I have endeavored cursorily to present, bear testimony to the fact that human nature WILL assert its wholeness in the civilized man. And there must come a time, in the progress of civilization, when this ebb and flow will be less marked than it has been heretofore, by reason of a better balancing, which will be brought about, of the intellectual and the spiritual. Each will have its due activity. The man of intellectual pursuits will not have a starved spiritual nature; and the man of predominant spiritual functions will not have an intellect weakened into a submissiveness to formulated, stereotyped, and, consequently, lifeless dogmas.

Robert Browning is in himself the completest fulfilment of this equipoise of the intellectual and the spiritual, possessing each in an exalted degree; and his poetry is an emphasized expression of his own personality, and a prophecy of the ultimate results of Christian civilization.

II. The Idea of Personality and of Art as an intermediate agency of Personality, as embodied in Browning’s Poetry.

1. General Remarks.

The importance of Robert Browning’s poetry, as embodying the profoundest thought, the subtlest and most complex sentiment, and, above all, the most quickening spirituality of the age, has, as yet, notwithstanding the great increase within the last few years of devoted students, received but a niggardly recognition when compared with that received by far inferior contemporary poets. There are, however, many indications in the poetical criticism of the day that upon it will ere long be pronounced the verdict which is its due. And the founding of a society in England in 1881, “to gather together some at least of the many admirers of Robert Browning, for the study and discussion of his works, and the publication of papers on them, and extracts from works illustrating them” has already contributed much towards paying a long-standing debt.

Mr. Browning’s earliest poems, ‘Pauline’ (he calls it in the preface to the reprint of it in 1868 “a boyish work”, though it exhibits the great basal thought of all his subsequent poetry), was published in 1833, since which time he has produced the largest body of poetry produced by any one poet in English literature; and the range of thought and passion which it exhibits is greater than that of any other poet, without a single exception, since the days of Shakespeare. And he is the most like Shakespeare in his deep interest in human nature in all its varieties of good and evil. Though endowed with a powerful, subtle, and restless intellect, he has throughout his voluminous poetry made the strongest protest that has been made in these days against mere intellect. And his poetry has, therefore, a peculiar value in an age like the present—an age exhibiting “a condition of humanity which has thrown itself wholly on its intellect and its genius in physics, and has done marvels in material science and invention, but at the expense of the interior divinity.” It is the human heart, that is, the intuitive, the non-discursive side of man, with its hopes and its prophetic aspirations, as opposed to the analytic, the discursive understanding, which is to him a subject of the deepest and most scrutinizing interest. He knows that its deepest depths are “deeper than did ever plummet sound”; but he also knows that it is in these depths that life’s greatest secrets must be sought. The philosophies excogitated by the insulated intellect help nothing toward even a glimpse of these secrets. In one of his later poems, that entitled ‘House’, he has intimated, and forcibly intimated, his sense of the impossibility of penetrating to the Holy of Holies of this wondrous human heart, though assured as he is that all our hopes in regard to the soul’s destiny are warmed and cherished by what radiates thence. He quotes, in the last stanza of this poem, from Wordsworth’s sonnet on the Sonnet, “With this same key Shakespeare unlocked his heart,” and then adds, “DID Shakespeare? If so, the less Shakespeare he!”

Mrs. Browning, in the Fifth Book of her ‘Aurora Leigh’, has given a full and very forcible expression to the feeling which has caused the highest dramatic genius of the present day to seek refuge in the poem and the novel. “I will write no plays; because the drama, less sublime in this, makes lower appeals, defends more menially, adopts the standard of the public taste to chalk its height on, wears a dog-chain round its regal neck, and learns to carry and fetch the fashions of the day, to please the day; . . . ‘Tis that, honoring to its worth the drama, I would fear to keep it down to the level of the footlights. . . . The growing drama has outgrown such toys of simulated stature, face, and speech, it also, peradventure, may outgrow the simulation of the painted scene, boards, actors, prompters, gaslight, and costume; and TAKE FOR A WORTHIER STAGE, THE SOUL ITSELF, ITS SHIFTING FANCIES AND CELESTIAL LIGHTS, WITH ALL ITS GRAND ORCHESTRAL SILENCES TO KEEP THE PAUSES OF THE RHYTHMIC SOUNDS.”

Robert Browning’s poetry is, in these days, the fullest realization of what is expressed in the concluding lines of this passage: he has taken for a worthier stage, the soul itself, its shifting fancies and celestial lights, more than any other poet of the age. And he has worked with a thought-and-passion capital greater than the combined thought-and-passion capital of the richest of his poetical contemporaries. And he has thought nobly of the soul, and has treated it as, in its essence, above the fixed and law-bound system of things which we call nature; in other words, he has treated it as supernatural. “Mind,” he makes the Pope say, in ‘The Ring and the Book’,—and his poetry bears testimony to its being his own conviction and doctrine,—“Mind is not matter, nor from matter, but above.” With every student of Browning, the recognition and acceptance of this must be his starting-point. Even that which impelled the old dog, in his poem entitled ‘Tray’ (‘Dramatic Lyrics’, First Series), to rescue the beggar child that fell into the river, and then to dive after the child’s doll, and bring it up, after a long stay under water, the poet evidently distinguishes from matter,—regards as “not matter nor from matter, but above”:—

In his poem entitled ‘Halbert and Hob’ (‘Dramatic Lyrics’, First Series), quoting from Shakespeare’s ‘King Lear’, “Is there a reason in nature for these hard hearts?” the poet adds, “O Lear, That a reason OUT of nature must turn them soft, seems clear!”

Mind is, with Browning, SUPERNATURAL, but linked with, and restrained, and even enslaved by, the natural. The soul, in its education, that is, in its awakening, becomes more and more independent of the natural, and, as a consequence, more responsive to higher souls and to the Divine. ALL SPIRIT IS MUTUALLY ATTRACTIVE, and the degree of attractiveness results from the degree of freedom from the obstructions of the material, or the natural. Loving the truth implies a greater or less degree of that freedom of the spirit which brings it into SYMPATHY with the true. “If ye abide in My word,” says Christ (and we must understand by “word” His own concrete life, the word made flesh, and living and breathing), “if ye abide in My word” (that is, continue to live My life), “then are ye truly My disciples; and ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free” (John viii. 32).

In regard to the soul’s INHERENT possessions, its microcosmic potentialities, Paracelsus is made to say (and this may be taken, too, as the poet’s own creed), “Truth is WITHIN ourselves; it takes no rise from outward things, whate’er you may believe: there is an inmost centre in us all, where truth abides in fulness; and around, wall upon wall, the gross flesh hems it in, this perfect, clear perception—which is truth. A baffling and perverting carnal mesh blinds it, and makes all error: and, TO KNOW, rather consists in opening out a way whence the imprisoned splendour may escape, than in effecting entry for a light supposed to be without.”

All possible thought is IMPLICIT in the mind, and waiting for release—waiting to become EXPLICIT. “Seek within yourself,” says Goethe, “and you will find everything; and rejoice that, without, there lies a Nature that says yea and amen to all you have discovered in yourself.” And Mrs. Browning, in the person of Aurora Leigh, writes: “The cygnet finds the water; but the man is born in ignorance of his element, and feels out blind at first, disorganized by sin in the blood,—his spirit-insight dulled and crossed by his sensations. Presently we feel it quicken in the dark sometimes; then mark, be reverent, be obedient,— for those dumb motions of imperfect life are oracles of vital Deity attesting the Hereafter. Let who says ‘The soul’s a clean white paper’, rather say, a palimpsest, a prophet’s holograph defiled, erased, and covered by a monk’s,— the Apocalypse by a Longus! poring on which obscure text, we may discern perhaps some fair, fine trace of what was written once, some off-stroke of an alpha and omega expressing the old Scripture.”

This “fair, fine trace of what was written once”, it was the mission of Christ, it is the mission of all great personalities, of all the concrete creations of Genius, to bring out into distinctness and vital glow. It is not, and cannot be, brought out,— and this fact is emphasized in the poetry of Browning,— it cannot be brought out, through what is born and resides in the brain: it is brought out, either directly or indirectly, by the attracting power of magnetic personalities, the ultimate, absolute personality being the God-man, Christ, qea/nqrwpos.

The human soul is regarded in Browning’s poetry as a complexly organized, individualized divine force, destined to gravitate towards the Infinite. How is this force, with its numberless checks and counter-checks, its centripetal and centrifugal tendencies, best determined in its necessarily oblique way? How much earthly ballast must it carry, to keep it sufficiently steady, and how little, that it may not be weighed down with materialistic heaviness? How much certainty must it have of its course, and how much uncertainty, that it may shun the “torpor of assurance”, *1* and not lose the vigor which comes of a dubious and obstructed road, “which who stands upon is apt to doubt if it’s indeed a road.” *2* “Pure faith indeed,” says Bishop Blougram, to Gigadibs, the literary man, “you know not what you ask! naked belief in God the Omnipotent, Omniscient, Omnipresent, sears too much the sense of conscious creatures, to be borne. It were the seeing him, no flesh shall dare. Some think, Creation’s meant to show him forth: I say, it’s meant to hide him all it can, and that’s what all the blessed Evil’s for. Its use in time is to environ us, our breath, our drop of dew, with shield enough against that sight till we can bear its stress. Under a vertical sun, the exposed brain and lidless eye and disimprisoned heart less certainly would wither up at once, than mind, confronted with the truth of Him. But time and earth case-harden us to live; the feeblest sense is trusted most: the child feels God a moment, ichors o’er the place, plays on and grows to be a man like us. With me, faith means perpetual unbelief kept quiet like the snake ‘neath Michael’s foot, who stands calm just because he feels it writhe.” *3*

There is a remarkable passage to the same effect in ‘Paracelsus’, in which Paracelsus expatiates on the “just so much of doubt as bade him plant a surer foot upon the sun-road.”

And in ‘Easter Day’:—

And the good Pope in ‘The Ring and the Book’, alluding to the absence of true Christian soldiership, which is revealed by Pompilia’s case, says: “Is it not this ignoble CONFIDENCE, cowardly hardihood, that dulls and damps, makes the old heroism impossible? Unless. . .what whispers me of times to come? What if it be the mission of that age my death will usher into life, to SHAKE THIS TORPOR OF ASSURANCE FROM OUR CREED, reintroduce the DOUBT discarded, bring the formidable danger back we drove long ago to the distance and the dark?”

True healthy doubt means, in Browning, that the spiritual nature is sufficiently quickened not to submit to the conclusions of the insulated intellect. It WILL reach out beyond them, and assert itself, whatever be the resistance offered by the intellect. Mere doubt, without any resistance from the intuitive, non-discursive side of our nature, is the dry-rot of the soul. The spiritual functions are “smothered in surmise”. Faith is not a matter of blind belief, of slavish assent and acceptance, as many no-faith people seem to regard it. It is what Wordsworth calls it, “a passionate intuition”, and springs out of quickened and refined sentiment, out of inborn instincts which are as cultivable as are any other elements of our complex nature, and which, too, may be blunted beyond a consciousness of their possession. And when one in this latter state denies the reality of faith, he is not unlike one born blind denying the reality of sight.

A reiterated lesson in Browning’s poetry, and one that results from his spiritual theory, is, that the present life is a tabernacle-life, and that it can be truly lived only as a tabernacle-life; for only such a life is compatible with the ever-continued aspiration and endeavor which is a condition of, and inseparable from, spiritual vitality.

Domizia, in the tragedy of ‘Luria’, is made to say:—

The dying John in ‘A Death in the Desert’, is made to say:—

And again:—

Browning has given varied and beautiful expressions to these ideas throughout his poetry.

The soul must rest in nothing this side of the infinite. If it does rest in anything, however relatively noble that thing may be, whether art, or literature, or science, or theology, even, it declines in vitality—it torpifies. However great a conquest the combatant may achieve in any of these arenas, “striding away from the huge gratitude, his club shouldered, lion-fleece round loin and flank”, he must be “bound on the next new labour, height o’er height ever surmounting— destiny’s decree!” *

But this tabernacle-life, which should ever look ahead, has its claims which must not be ignored, and its standards which must not be too much above present conditions. Man must “fit to the finite his infinity” (‘Sordello’). Life may be over-spiritual as well as over-worldly. “Let us cry, ‘All good things are ours, nor soul helps flesh more, now, than flesh helps soul!’” * The figure the poet employs in ‘The Ring and the Book’ to illustrate the art process, may be as aptly applied to life itself— the greatest of all arts. The life-artist must know how to secure the proper degree of malleability in this mixture of flesh and soul. He must mingle gold with gold’s alloy, and duly tempering both effect a manageable mass. There may be too little of alloy in earth-life as well as too much—too little to work the gold and fashion it, not into a ring, but ring-ward. “On the earth the broken arcs; in the heaven a perfect round” (‘Abt Vogler’). “Oh, if we draw a circle premature, heedless of far gain, greedy for quick returns of profit, sure, bad is our bargain” (‘A Grammarian’s Funeral’).

‘An Epistle containing the Strange Medical Experiences of Karshish, the Arab Physician’, is one of Browning’s most remarkable psychological studies. It may be said to polarize the idea, so often presented in his poetry, that doubt is a condition of the vitality of faith. In this poem, the poet has treated a supposed case of a spiritual knowledge “increased beyond the fleshly faculty—heaven opened to a soul while yet on earth, earth forced on a soul’s use while seeing heaven”, a spiritual state, less desirable and far less favorable to the true fulfilment of the purposes of earth-life, than that expressed in the following lines from ‘Easter Day’:—

The Epistle is a subtle representation of a soul conceived with absolute spiritual standards, while obliged to live in a world where all standards are relative and determined by the circumstances and limitations of its situation.

The spiritual life has been too distinctly revealed for fulfilling aright the purposes of earth-life, purposes which the soul, while in the flesh, must not ignore, since, in the words of Rabbi Ben Ezra, “all good things are ours, nor soul helps flesh more, now, than flesh helps soul.” The poem may also be said to represent what is, or should be, the true spirit of the man of science. In spite of what Karshish writes, apologetically, he betrays his real attitude throughout, towards the wonderful spiritual problem involved.

It is, as many of Browning’s Monologues are, a double picture— one direct, the other reflected, and the reflected one is as distinct as the direct. The composition also bears testimony to Browning’s own soul-healthfulness. Though the spiritual bearing of things is the all-in-all, in his poetry, the robustness of his nature, the fulness and splendid equilibrium of his life, protect him against an inarticulate mysticism. Browning is, in the widest and deepest sense of the word, the healthiest of all living poets; and in general constitution the most Shakespearian.

What he makes Shakespeare say, in the Monologue entitled ‘At the Mermaid’, he could say, with perhaps greater truth, in his own person, than Shakespeare could have said it:—

It is the spirit expressed in these lines which has made his poetry so entirely CONSTRUCTIVE. With the destructive spirit he has no affinities. The poetry of despair and poets with the dumps he cannot away with.

Perhaps the most comprehensive passage in Browning’s poetry, expressive of his ideal of a complete man under the conditions of earth-life, is found in ‘Colombe’s Birthday’, Act IV. Valence says of Prince Berthold:—

“He gathers earth’s WHOLE GOOD into his arms, standing, as man, now, stately, strong and wise—marching to fortune, not surprised by her: one great aim, like a guiding star above—which tasks strength, wisdom, stateliness, to lift his manhood to the height that takes the prize; a prize not near—lest overlooking earth, he rashly spring to seize it—nor remote, so that he rests upon his path content: but day by day, while shimmering grows shine, and the faint circlet prophesies the orb, he sees so much as, just evolving these, the stateliness, the wisdom, and the strength to due completion, will suffice this life, and lead him at his grandest to the grave.”

Browning fully recognizes, to use an expression in his ‘Fra Lippo Lippi’, fully recognizes “the value and significance of flesh.” A healthy and well-toned spiritual life is with him the furthest removed from asceticism. To the passage from his ‘Rabbi Ben Ezra’ already quoted, “all good things are ours, nor soul helps flesh more, now, than flesh helps soul”, should be added what David sings to Saul, in the poem entitled ‘Saul’. Was the full physical life ever more beautifully sung?

Though this is said in the person of the beautiful shepherd-boy, David, whoever has lived any time with Browning, through his poetry, must be assured that it is also an expression of the poet’s own experience of the glory of flesh. He has himself been an expression of the fullest physical life: and now, in his five and seventieth year, since the 7th of last May, he preserves both mind and body in a magnificent vigor. If his soul had been lodged in a sickly, rickety body, he could hardly have written these lines from ‘Saul’. Nor could he have written ‘Caliban upon Setebos’, especially the opening lines: “Will sprawl, now that the heat of day is best, flat on his belly in the pit’s much mire, with elbows wide, fists clenched to prop his chin. And, while he kicks both feet in the cool slush, and feels about his spine small eft-things course, run in and out each arm, and make him laugh: and while above his head a pompion-plant, coating the cave-top as a brow its eye, creeps down to touch and tickle hair and beard, and now a flower drops with a bee inside, and now a fruit to snap at, catch and crunch,— he looks out o’er yon sea which sunbeams cross and recross till they weave a spider-web (meshes of fire, some great fish breaks at times), and talks to his own self, howe’er he please, touching that other, whom his dam called God.”

There’s a grand passage in ‘Balaustion’s Adventure: including a transcript from Euripides’, descriptive of Herakles as he returns, after his conflict with Death, leading back Alkestis, which shows the poet’s sympathy with the physical. The passage is more valuable as revealing that sympathy, from the fact that it’s one of his additions to Euripides:—

It is not so much the glory of flesh which Euripides represents in Herakles, as the indulgence of appetite, at a time, too, when that indulgence is made to appear the more culpable and gross.

This idea of “the value and significance of flesh”, it is important to note, along with the predominant spiritual bearing of Browning’s poetry. It articulates everywhere the spiritual, so to speak—makes it healthy and robust, and protects it against volatility and from running into mysticism.

2. The Idea of Personality as embodied in Browning’s Poetry.

A cardinal idea in Browning’s poetry is the regeneration of men through a personality who brings fresh stuff for them to mould, interpret, and prove right,—new feeling fresh from God— whose life re-teaches them what life should be, what faith is, loyalty and simpleness, all once revealed, but taught them so long since that they have but mere tradition of the fact,— truth copied falteringly from copies faint, the early traits all dropped away. (‘Luria’.) The intellect plays a secondary part. Its place is behind the instinctive, spiritual antennae which conduct along their trembling lines, fresh stuff for the intellect to stamp and keep—fresh instinct for it to translate into law.

“A people is but the attempt of many to rise to the completer life of one.” (‘A Soul’s Tragedy’.)

Only the man who supplies new feeling fresh from God, quickens and regenerates the race, and sets it on the King’s highway from which it has wandered into by-ways—not the man of mere intellect, of unkindled soul, that supplies only stark-naked thought. Through the former, “God stooping shows sufficient of His light for those i’ the dark to rise by.” (‘R. and B., Pompilia’.) In him men discern “the dawn of the next nature, the new man whose will they venture in the place of theirs, and whom they trust to find them out new ways to the new heights which yet he only sees.” (‘Luria’.) It is by reaching towards, and doing fealty to, the greater spirit which attracts and absorbs their own, that, “trace by trace old memories reappear, old truth returns, their slow thought does its work, and all’s re-known.” (‘Luria’.)

A dangerous tendency of civilization is that towards crystallization— towards hardened, inflexible conventionalisms which “refuse the soul its way”.

Such crystallization, such conventionalisms, yield only to the dissolving power of the spiritual warmth of life-full personalities.

The quickening, regenerating power of personality is everywhere exhibited in Browning’s poetry. It is emphasized in ‘Luria’, and in the Monologues of the Canon Caponsacchi and Pompilia, in the ‘Ring and the Book’; it shines out, or glints forth, in ‘Colombe’s Birthday’, in ‘Saul’, in ‘Sordello’, and in all the Love poems. I would say, en passant, that Love is always treated by Browning as a SPIRITUAL claim; while DUTY may be only a worldly one. SEE especially the poem entitled ‘Bifurcation’. In ‘Balaustion’s Adventure: including a transcipt from Euripides’, the regenerating power of personality may be said to be the leavening idea, which the poet has introduced into the Greek play. It is entirely absent in the original. It baptizes, so to speak, the Greek play, and converts it into a Christian poem. It is the “new truth” of the poet’s ‘Christmas Eve’.

After the mourning friends have spoken their words of consolation to the bereaved husband, the last word being, “Dead, thy wife— living, the love she left”, Admetos “turned on the comfort, with no tears, this time. HE WAS BEGINNING TO BE LIKE HIS WIFE. I told you of that pressure to the point, word slow pursuing word in monotone, Alkestis spoke with; so Admetos, now, solemnly bore the burden of the truth. And as the voice of him grew, gathered strength, and groaned on, and persisted to the end, we felt how deep had been descent in grief, and WITH WHAT CHANGE HE CAME UP NOW TO LIGHT, and left behind such littleness as tears.”

And when Alkestis was brought back by Herakles, “the hero twitched the veil off: and there stood, with such fixed eyes and such slow smile, Alkestis’ silent self! It was the crowning grace of that great heart to keep back joy: procrastinate the truth until the wife, who had made proof and found the husband wanting, might essay once more, hear, see, and feel him RENOVATED now— ABLE TO DO, NOW, ALL HERSELF HAD DONE, RISEN TO THE HEIGHT OF HER: so, hand in hand, the two might go together, live and die.” (Compare with this the restoration of Hermione to her husband, in ‘The Winter’s Tale’, Act V.)

A good intellect has been characterized as the chorus of Divinity. Substitute for “good intellect”, an exulted magnetic personality, and the thought is deepened. An exalted magnetic personality is the chorus of Divinity, which, in the great Drama of Humanity, guides and interprets the feelings and sympathies of other souls and thus adjusts their attitudes towards the Divine. It is not the highest function of such a personality to TEACH, but rather to INFORM, in the earlier and deeper sense of the word. Whatever mere doctrine he may promulgate, is of inferior importance to the spontaneous action of his concrete life, in which the True, the Beautiful, and the Good, breathe and live. What is born in the brain dies there, it may be; at best, it does not, and cannot of itself, lead up to the full concrete life. It is only through the spontaneou and unconscious fealty which an inferior does to a superior soul (a fealty resulting from the responsiveness of spirit to spirit), that the former is slowly and silently transformed into a more or less approximate image of the latter. The stronger personality leads the weaker on by paths which the weaker knows not, upward he leads him, though his steps be slow and vacillating. Humility, in the Christian sense, means this fealty to the higher. It doesn’t mean self-abasement, self-depreciation, as it has been understood to mean, by both the Romish and the Protestant Church. Pride, in the Christian sense, is the closing of the doors of the soul to a great magnetic guest.

Browning beautifully expresses the transmission of personality in his ‘Saul’. But according to Browning’s idea, personality cannot strictly be said to be transmitted. Personality rather evokes its LIKE from other souls, which are “all in degree, no way diverse in kind.” (‘Sordello’.)

David has reached an advanced stage in his symbolic song to Saul. He thinks now what next he shall urge “to sustain him where song had restored him?—Song filled to the verge his cup with the wine of this life, pressing all that it yields of mere fruitage, the strength and the beauty: beyond, on what fields glean a vintage more potent and perfect to brighten the eye and bring blood to the lip, and commend them the cup they put by?” So once more the string of the harp makes response to his spirit, and he sings:—

In the concluding lines is set forth what might be characterized as the apostolic succession of a great personality—the succession of those “who in turn fill the South and the North with the radiance his deed was the germ of.”

What follows in David’s song gives expression to the other mode of transmitting a great personality—that is, through records that “give unborn generations their due and their part in his being”, and also to what those records owe their effectiveness, and are saved from becoming a dead letter.

What is said in this passage is applicable to the record we have of Christ’s life upon earth. Christianity has only to a very limited extent been perpetuated through the letter of the New Testament. It has been perpetuated chiefly through transmissions of personalities, through apostolic succession, in a general sense, and through embodiments of his spirit in art and literature—“the stateman’s great word”, “the poet’s sweet comment”. Were it not for this transmission of the quickening power of personality, the New Testament would be to a great extent a dead letter. It owes its significance to the quickened spirit which is brought to the reading of it. The personality of Christ could not be, through a plastic sympathy, moulded out of the New Testament records, without the aid of intermediate personalities.

The Messianic idea was not peculiar to the Jewish race— the idea of a Person gathering up within himself, in an effective fulness and harmony, the restorative elements of humanity, which have lost their power through dispersion and consequent obscuration. There have been Messiahs of various orders and ranks in every age,— great personalities that have realized to a greater or less extent (though there has been but one, the God-Man, who fully realized), the spiritual potentialities in man, that have stood upon the sharpest heights as beacons to their fellows. In the individual the species has, as it were, been gathered up, epitomized, and intensified, and he has thus been a prophecy, and to some extent a fulfilment of human destiny.

“A poet must be earth’s ESSENTIAL king”, as Sordello asserts, and he is that by virtue of his exerting or shedding the influence of his essential personality. “If caring not to exert the proper essence of his royalty, he, the poet, trifle malapert with accidents instead— good things assigned as heralds of a better thing behind”—he is “deposed from his kingly throne, and his glory is taken from him”. Of himself, Sordello says: “The power he took most pride to test, whereby all forms of life had been professed at pleasure, forms already on the earth, was but a means of power beyond, whose birth should, in its novelty, be kingship’s proof. Now, whether he came near or kept aloof the several forms he longed to imitate, not there the kingship lay, he sees too late. Those forms, unalterable first as last, proved him her copier, not the protoplast of nature: what could come of being free by action to exhibit tree for tree, bird, beast, for beast and bird, or prove earth bore one veritable man or woman more? Means to an end such proofs are: what the end?”

The answer given involves the great Browning idea of the quickening power of personality: “Let essence, whatsoe’er it be, extend—never contract!”

By “essence” we must understand that which “constitutes man’s self, is what Is”, as the dying John, in ‘A Death in the Desert’, expresses it—that which backs the active powers and the conscious intellect, “subsisting whether they assist or no”.

“Let essence, whatsoe’er it be, extend—never contract!” Sordello says. “Already you include the multitude”; that is, you gather up in yourself, in an effective fulness and harmony, what lies scattered and ineffective in the multitude; “then let the mulitude include yourself”; that is, be substantiated, essenced with yourself; “and the result were new: themselves before, the multitude turn YOU” (become yourself). “This were to live and move and have, in them, your being, and secure a diadem you should transmit (because no cycle yearns beyond itself, but on itself returns) when the full sphere in wane, the world o’erlaid long since with you, shall have in turn obeyed some orb still prouder, some displayer, still more potent than the last, of human will, and some new king depose the old.”

This is a most important passage to get hold of in studying Browning. It may be said to gather up Browning’s philosophy of life in a nutshell.

There’s a passage to the same effect in ‘Balaustion’s Adventure’, in regard to the transmission of the poet’s essence. The enthusiastic Rhodian girl, Balaustion, after she has told the play of Euripides, years after her adventure, to her four friends, Petale, Phullis, Charope, and Chrusion, says:—

“I think I see how. . . you, I, or any one, might mould a new Admetos, new Alkestis. Ah, that brave bounty of poets, the one royal race that ever was, or will be, in this world! They give no gift that bounds itself, and ends i’ the giving and the taking: theirs so breeds i’ the heart and soul of the taker, so transmutes the man who only was a man before, that he grows god-like in his turn, can give—he also: share the poet’s privilege, bring forth new good, new beauty from the old. As though the cup that gave the wine, gave too the god’s prolific giver of the grape, that vine, was wont to find out, fawn around his footstep, springing still to bless the dearth, at bidding of a Mainad.”

3. Art as an Intermediate Agency of Personality.

If Browning’s idea of the quickening, the regeneration, the rectification of personality, through a higher personality, be fully comprehended, his idea of the great function of Art, as an intermediate agency of personality, will become plain. To emphasize the latter idea may be said to be the ultimate purpose of his masterpiece, ‘The Ring and the Book’.

The complexity of the circumstances involved in the Roman murder case, adapts it admirably to the poet’s purpose—namely, to exhibit the swervings of human judgment in spite of itself, and the conditions upon which the rectification of that judgment depends.

This must be taken, however, as only the articulation, the framework, of the great poem. It is richer in materials, of the most varied character, than any other long poem in existence. To notice one feature of the numberless features of the poem, which might be noticed, Browning’s deep and subtle insight into the genius of the Romish Church is shown in it more fully than in any other of his poems,—though special phases of that genius are distinctly exhibited in numerous poems: a remarkable one being ‘The Bishop orders his Tomb at St. Praxed’s Church’. It is questionable whether any work of any kind has ever exhibited that genius more fully and distinctly than ‘The Ring and the Book’ exhibits it. The reader breathes throughout the ecclesiastical atmosphere of the Eternal City.

To return from this digression, the several monologues of which the poem consists, with the exception of those of the Canon Caponsacchi, Pompilia, and the Pope, are each curious and subtle and varied exponents of the workings, without the guidance of instinct at the heart, of the prepossessed, prejudiced intellect, and of the sources of its swerving into error. What is said of the “feel after the vanished truth” in the monologue entitled ‘Half Rome’—the speaker being a jealous husband—will serve to characterize, in a general way, “the feel after truth” exhibited in the other monologues: “honest enough, as the way is: all the same, harboring in the CENTRE OF ITS SENSE a hidden germ of failure, shy but sure, should neutralize that honesty and leave that feel for truth at fault, as the way is too. Some prepossession, such as starts amiss, by but a hair’s-breadth at the shoulder-blade, the arm o’ the feeler, dip he ne’er so brave; and so leads waveringly, lets fall wide o’ the mark his finger meant to find, and fix truth at the bottom, that deceptive speck.”

The poet could hardly have employed a more effective metaphor in which to embody the idea of mental swerving. The several monologues all going over the same ground, are artistically justified in their exhibiting, each of them, a quite distinct form of this swerving. For the ultimate purpose of the poet, it needed to be strongly emphasized. The student of the poem is amazed, long before he gets over all these monologues, at the Protean capabilities of the poet’s own intellect. It takes all conceivable attitudes toward the case, and each seems to be a perfectly easy one.

These monologues all lead up to the great moral of the poem, which is explicitly set forth at the end, namely, “that our human speech is naught, our human testimony false, our fame and human estimation, words and wind. Why take the artistic way to prove so much? Because, it is the glory and good of Art, that Art remains the one way possible of speaking truth, to mouths like mine, at least. How look a brother in the face and say, Thy right is wrong, eyes hast thou yet art blind, thine ears are stuffed and stopped, despite their length: and, oh, the foolishness thou countest faith! Say this as silvery as tongue can troll—the anger of the man may be endured, the shrug, the disappointed eyes of him are not so bad to bear— but here’s the plague, that all this trouble comes of telling truth, which truth, by when it reaches him, looks false, seems to be just the thing it would supplant, nor recognizable by whom it left: while falsehood would have done the work of truth. But Art,— wherein man nowise speaks to men, only to mankind,—Art may tell a truth obliquely, DO THE THING SHALL BREED THE THOUGHT”, that is, bring what is IMPLICIT within the soul, into the right attitude to become EXPLICIT—bring about a silent adjustment through sympathy induced by the concrete; in other words, prepare the way for the perception of the truth— “do the thing shall breed the thought, nor wrong the thought missing the mediate word”; meaning, that Art, so to speak, is the word made flesh,—IS the truth, and, as Art, has nothing directly to do with the explicit. “So may you paint your picture, twice show truth, beyond mere imagery on the wall,— so, note by note, bring music from your mind, deeper than ever the Andante dived,—so write a book shall mean beyond the facts, suffice the eye and save the soul beside.”

And what is the inference the poet would have us draw from this passage? It is, that the life and efficacy of Art depends on the personality of the artist, which “has informed, transpierced, thridded, and so thrown fast the facts else free, as right through ring and ring runs the djereed and binds the loose, one bar without a break.” And it is really this fusion of the artist’s soul, which kindles, quickens, INFORMS those who contemplate, respond to, reproduce sympathetically within themselves the greater spirit which attracts and absorbs their own. The work of Art is apocalyptic of the artist’s own personality. It CANNOT be impersonal. As is the temper of his spirit, so is, MUST be, the temper of his Art product.* It is hard to believe, almost impossible to believe, that ‘Titus Andronicus’ could have been written by Shakespeare, the external testimony to the authorship, notwithstanding. Even if he had written it as a burlesque of such a play as Marlow’s ‘Jew of Malta’, he could not have avoided some revelation of that sense of moral proportion which is omnipresent in his Plays. But I can find no Shakespeare in ‘Titus Andronicus’. Are we not certain what manner of man Shakespeare was from his Works (notwithstanding that critics are ever asserting their impersonality) —far more certain than if his biography had been written by one who knew him all his life, and sustained to him the most intimate relations? We know Shakespeare—or he CAN be known, if the requisite conditions are met, better, perhaps, than any other great author that ever lived—know, in the deepest sense of the word, in a sense other than that in which we know Dr. Johnson, through Boswell’s Biography. The moral proportion which is so signal a characteristic of his Plays could not have been imparted to them by the conscious intellect. It was SHED from his spiritual constitution.

By “speaking truth” in Art’s way, Browning means, inducing a right ATTITUDE toward, a full and free SYMPATHY with, the True, which is a far more important and effective way of speaking truth than delivering truth ‘in re’. A work of Art, worthy of the name, need not be true to fact, but must be true in its spiritual attitude, and being thus true, it will tend to induce a corresponding attitude in those who do fealty to it. It will have the influence, though in an inferior degree, it may be, of a magnetic personality. Personality is the ultimate source of spiritual quickening and adjustment. Literature and all forms of Art are but the intermediate agencies of personalities. The artist cannot be separated from his art. As is the artist so MUST be his art. The ‘aura’, so to speak, of a great work of Art, must come from the artist’s own personality. The spiritual worth of Shakespeare’s ‘Winter’s Tale’ is not at all impaired by the fact that Bohemia is made a maritime country, that Whitsun pastorals and Christian burial, and numerous other features of Shakespeare’s own age, are introduced into pagan times, that Queen Hermione speaks of herself as a daughter of the Emperor of Russia, that her statue is represented as executed by Julio Romano, an Italian painter of the 16th century, that a puritan sings psalms to hornpipes, and, to crown all, that messengers are sent to consult the oracle of Apollo, at Delphi, which is represented as an island! All this jumble, this gallimaufry, I say, does not impair the spiritual worth of the play. As an Art-product, it invites a rectified attitude toward the True and the Sweet.

If we look at the letter of the trial scene in ‘The Merchant of Venice’, it borders on the absurd; but if we look at its spirit, we see the Shakespearian attitude of soul which makes for righteousness, for the righteousness which is inherent in the moral constitution of the universe.

The inmost, secretest life of Shakespeare’s Plays came from the personality, the inmost, secretest life, of the man Shakespeare. We might, with the most alert sagacity, note and tabulate and aggregate his myriad phenomenal merits as a dramatic writer, but we might still be very far from that something back of them all, or rather that IMMANENT something, that mystery of personality, that microcosmos, that “inmost centre, where truth abides in fulness”, as Browning makes Paracelsus characterize it, “constituting man’s self, is what Is”, as he makes the dying John characterize it, in ‘A Death in the Desert’, that “innermost of the inmost, most interior of the interne”, as Mrs. Browning characterizes it, “the hidden Soul”, as Dallas characterizes it, which is projected into, and constitutes the soul of, the Plays, and which is reached through an unconscious and mystic sympathy on the part of him who habitually communes with and does fealty to them. That personality, that living force, co-operated spontaneously and unconsciously with the conscious powers, in the creative process; and when we enter into a sympathetic communion with the concrete result of that creative process, our own mysterious personalities, being essentially identical with, though less quickened than, Shakespeare’s, respond, though it may be but feebly, to his. This response is the highest result of the study of Shakespeare’s works.

It is a significant fact that Shakespearian critics and editors, for nearly two centuries, have been a ‘genus irritabile’, to which genus Shakespeare himself certainly did not belong. The explanation may partly be, that they have been too much occupied with the LETTER, and have fretted their nerves in angry dispute about readings and interpretations; as theologians have done in their study of the sacred records, instead of endeavoring to reach, through the letter, the personality of which the letter is but a manifestation more or less imperfect. To KNOW a personality is, of course, a spiritual knowledge—the result of sympathy, that is, spiritual responsiveness. Intellectually it is but little more important to know one rather than another personality. The highest worth of all great works of genius is due to the fact that they are apocalyptic of great personalities.

Art says, as the Divine Person said, whose personality and the personalities fashioned after it, have transformed and moulded the ages, “Follow me!” Deep was the meaning wrapt up in this command: it was, Do as I do, live as I live, not from an intellectual perception of the principles involved in my life, but through a full sympathy, through the awakening, vitalizing, actuating power of the incarnate Word.

Art also says, as did the voice from the wilderness, inadequately translated, “REPENT ye, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand”. (Metanoei^te h'/ggike ga\r h’ Basilei/a tw^n ou’ranw^n.) Rather, be transformed, or, as De Quincey puts it, “Wheel into a new centre your spiritual system; GEOCENTRIC has that system been up to this hour—that is, having earth and the earthly for its starting-point; henceforward make it HELIOCENTRIC (that is, with the sun, or the heavenly, for its principle of motion).”

The poetry of Browning everywhere says this, and says it more emphatically than that of any other poet in our literature. It says everywhere, that not through knowledge, not through a sharpened intellect, but through repentance, in the deeper sense to which I have just alluded, through conversion, through wheeling into a new centre its spiritual system, the soul attains to saving truth. Salvation with him means that revelation of the soul to itself, that awakening, quickening, actuating, attitude-adjusting, of the soul, which sets it gravitating toward the Divine.

Browning’s idea of Conversion is, perhaps, most distinctly expressed in a passage in the Monologue of the Canon Caponsacchi, in ‘The Ring and the Book’, wherein he sets forth the circumstances under which his soul was wheeled into a new centre, after a life of dalliance and elegant folly, and made aware of “the marvellous dower of the life it was gifted and filled with”. He has been telling the judges, before whom he has been summoned, the story of the letters forged by Guido to entrap him and Pompilia, and of his having seen “right through the thing that tried to pass for truth and solid, not an empty lie”. The conclusion and the resolve he comes to, are expressed in the soliloquy which he repeats to the judges, as having uttered at the time: “So, he not only forged the words for her but words for me, made letters he called mine: what I sent, he retained, gave these in place, all by the mistress messenger! As I recognized her, at potency of truth, so she, by the crystalline soul, knew me, never mistook the signs. Enough of this—let the wraith go to nothingness again, here is the orb, have only thought for her!” What follows admits us to the very HEART of Browning’s poetry—admits us to the great Idea which is almost, in these days, strange to say, peculiarly his— which no other poet, certainly, of this intellectual, analytic, scientific age, with its “patent, truth-extracting processes”, has brought out with the same degree of distinctness—the great Idea which may be variously characterized as that of soul-kindling, soul-quickening, adjustment of soul-attitude, regeneration, conversion, through PERSONALITY—a kindling, quickening, adjustment, regeneration, conversion in which THOUGHT is not even a coefficient. As expressed in Sordello, “Divest mind of e’en thought, and lo, God’s unexpressed will dawns above us!” “Thought?” the Canon goes on to say, “Thought? nay, Sirs, what shall follow was not thought: I have thought sometimes, and thought long and hard. I have stood before, gone round a serious thing, tasked my whole mind to touch it and clasp it close, . . . God and man, and what duty I owe both,—I dare say I have confronted these in thought: but no such faculty helped here. I put forth no thought,—powerless, all that night I paced the city: it was the first Spring. By the INVASION I LAY PASSIVE TO, in rushed new things, the old were rapt away; alike abolished—the imprisonment of the outside air, the inside weight o’ the world that pulled me down. Death meant, to spurn the ground, soar to the sky,—die well and you do that. The very immolation made the bliss; death was the heart of life, and all the harm my folly had crouched to avoid, now proved a veil hiding all gain my wisdom strove to grasp. . . . Into another state, under new rule I knew myself was passing swift and sure; whereof the initiatory pang approached, felicitous annoy, as bitter-sweet as when the virgin band, the victors chaste, feel at the end the earthy garments drop, and rise with something of a rosy shame into immortal nakedness: so I lay, and let come the proper throe would thrill into the ecstasy and out-throb pain. I’ the gray of the dawn it was I found myself facing the pillared front o’ the Pieve—mine, my church: it seemed to say for the first time, ‘But am not I the Bride, the mystic love o’ the Lamb, who took thy plighted troth, my priest, to fold thy warm heart on my heart of stone and freeze thee nor unfasten any more? This is a fleshly woman,—let the free bestow their life blood, thou art pulseless now!’ . . . Now, when I found out first that life and death are means to an end, that passion uses both, indisputably mistress of the man whose form of worship is self-sacrifice—now, from the stone lungs sighed the scrannel voice, ‘Leave that live passion, come be dead with me!’ As if, i’ the fabled garden, I had gone on great adventure, plucked in ignorance hedge-fruit, and feasted to satiety, laughing at such high fame for hips and haws, and scorned the achievement: then come all at once o’ the prize o’ the place, the thing of perfect gold, the apple’s self: and, scarce my eye on that, was ‘ware as well of the sevenfold dragon’s watch. Sirs, I obeyed. Obedience was too strange,—this new thing that had been STRUCK INTO ME BY THE LOOK OF THE LADY, to dare disobey the first authoritative word. ‘Twas God’s. I had been LIFTED TO THE LEVEL OF HER, could take such sounds into my sense. I said, ‘We two are cognizant o’ the Master now; it is she bids me bow the head: how true, I am a priest! I see the function here; I thought the other way self-sacrifice: this is the true, seals up the perfect sum. I pay it, sit down, silently obey.’”

Numerous and varied expressions of the idea of conversion set forth in this passage, occur in Browning’s poetry, evidencing his deep sense of this great and indispensable condition of soul-life, of being born anew (or from above, as it should be rendered in the Gospel, a'/nwqen, that is, through the agency of a higher personality), in order to see the kingdom of God— evidencing his conviction that “the kingdom of God cometh not with observation: for lo! the kingdom of God is within you.” In the poem entitled ‘Cristina’, the speaker is made to say,—

And again, when the Pope in ‘The Ring and the Book’ has come to the decision to sign the death-warrant of Guido and his accomplices, he says: “For the main criminal I have no hope except in such a SUDDENNESS OF FATE. I stood at Naples once, a night so dark I could have scarce conjectured there was earth anywhere, sky or sea or world at all: but the night’s black was burst through by a blaze— thunder struck blow on blow, earth groaned and bore, through her whole length of mountain visible: there lay the city thick and plain with spires, and, like a ghost disshrouded, white the sea. SO MAY THE TRUTH BE FLASHED OUT BY ONE BLOW, AND GUIDO SEE, ONE INSTANT, AND BE SAVED. Else I avert my face, nor follow him into that sad obscure sequestered state where God UNMAKES BUT TO REMAKE the soul he else made first in vain; which must not be. Enough, for I may die this very night: and how should I dare die, this man let live? Carry this forthwith to the Governor!”

Browning is the most essentially Christian of living poets. Though he rarely speaks ‘in propria persona’ in his poetry, any one who has gone over it all, can have no doubt as to his own most vital beliefs. What the Beauty-loving Soul in Tennyson’s ‘Palace of Art’ say of herself, cannot be suspected even, of Browning:—

Religion with him is, indeed, the all-in-all; but not any particular form of it as a finality. This is not a world for finalities of any kind, as he constantly teaches us: it is a world of broken arcs, not of perfect rounds. Formulations of some kind he would, no doubt, admit there must be, as in everything else; but with him all formulations and tabulations of beliefs, especially such as “make square to a finite eye the circle of infinity”, *1* are, at the best, only PROVISIONAL, and, at the worst, lead to spiritual standstill, spiritual torpor, “a ghastly smooth life, dead at heart.” *2* The essential nature of Christianity is contrary to special prescription, do this or do that, believe this or believe that. Christ gave no recipes. Christianity is with Browning, and this he sets forth again and again, a LIFE, quickened and motived and nourished by the Personality of Christ. And all that he says of this Personality can be accepted by every Christian, whatever theological view he may entertain of Christ. Christ’s teachings he regards but as INCIDENTS of that Personality, and the records we have of his sayings and doings, but a fragment, a somewhat distorted one, it may be, out of which we must, by a mystic and plastic sympathy, {*} aided by the Christ spirit which is immanent in the Christian world, mould the Personality, and do fealty to it. The Christian must endeavor to be able to say, with the dying John, in Browning’s ‘Death in the Desert’, “To me that story,—ay, that Life and Death of which I wrote ‘it was’— to me, it is.”

The poem entitled ‘Christmas Eve’ contains the fullest and most explicit expression, in Browning, of his idea of the personality of Christ, as being the all-in-all of Christianity.

— * “Subsists no law of life outside of life.” . . . . . “The Christ himself had been no Lawgiver, Unless he had given the LIFE, too, with the law." Mrs. Browning’s ‘Aurora Leigh’. —

If all Christendom could take this remarkable poem of ‘Christmas Eve’ to its heart, its tolerance, its Catholic spirit, and, more than all, the fealty it exhibits to the Personality who essentially is Lord of Life, what a revolution it would undergo! and what a mass of dogmatic and polemic theology would become utterly obsolete! The most remarkable thing, perhaps, about the vast body of Christian theology which has been developed during the eighteen centuries which have elapsed since Christ was in the flesh, is, that it is occupied so largely, it might almost be said, exclusively, with what Christ and his disciples TAUGHT, and with fierce discussions about the manifold meanings which have been ingeniously extorted from the imperfect RECORD of what he taught. British museum libraries of polemics have been written in defence of what Christ himself would have been indifferent to, and written with an animosity towards opponents which has been crystallized in a phrase now applied in a general way to any intense hate—ODIUM THEOLOGICUM.

If the significance of Christ’s mission, or a large part of it, is to be estimated by his teachings, from those teachings important deductions must be made, as many of them had been delivered long before his time.

Browning has something to say on this point, in this same poem of ‘Christmas Eve’:—

Browning’s poetry is instinct with the essence of Christianity— the LIFE of Christ. There is no other poetry, there is no writing of any form, in this age, which so emphasizes the fact (and it’s the most consoling of all facts connected with the Christian religion), that the Personality, Jesus Christ, is the impregnable fortress of Christianity. Whatever assaults and inroads may be made upon the original records by Goettingen professors, upon the august fabric of the Church, with its creeds and dogmas, and formularies, and paraphernalia, this fortress will stand forever, and mankind will forever seek and find refuge in it.

The poem entitled ‘Cleon’ bears the intimation (there’s nothing directly expressed thereupon), that Christianity is something distinct from, and beyond, whatever the highest civilization of the world, the civilization of Greece, attained to before Christ. Through him the world obtained “a new truth—no conviction gained of an old one merely, made intense by a fresh appeal to the faded sense.”

Cleon, the poet, writes to Protos in his Tyranny (that is, in the Greek sense, Sovereignty). Cleon must be understood as representing the ripe, composite result, as an individual, of what constituted the glory of Greece—her poetry, sculpture, architecture, painting, and music, and also her philosophy. He acknowledges the gifts which the King has lavished upon him. By these gifts we are to understand the munificent national patronage accorded to the arts. “The master of thy galley still unlades gift after gift; they block my court at last and pile themselves along its portico royal with sunset, like a thought of thee.”

By the slave women that are among the gifts sent to Cleon, seems to be indicated the degradation of the spiritual by its subjection to earthly ideals, as were the ideals of Greek art. This is more particularly indicated by the one white she-slave, the lyric woman, whom further on in his letter, Cleon promises to the King he will make narrate (in lyric song we must suppose) his fortunes, speak his great words, and describe his royal face.

He continues, that in such an act of love,—the bestowal of princely gifts upon him whose song gives life its joy,— men shall remark the King’s recognition of the use of life— that his spirit is equal to more than merely to help on life in straight ways, broad enough for vulgar souls, by ruling and the rest. He ascribes to the King, in the building of his tower (and by this must be understood the building up of his own selfhood), a higher motive than work for mere work’s sake,— that higher motive being, the luring hope of some EVENTUAL REST atop of it (the tower), whence, all the tumult of the building hushed, the first of men may look out to the east. *

By the eventual rest atop of the tower, is indicated the aim of the Greek civilization, to reach a calm within the finite, while the soul is constituted and destined to gravitate forever towards the infinite—to “force our straitened sphere. . . display completely here the mastery another life should learn.” (‘Sordello’.) The eventual rest in this world is not the Christian ideal. Earth-life, whatever its reach, and whatever its grasp, is to the Christian a broken arc, not a perfect round.

Cleon goes on to recount his accomplishments in the arts, and what he has done in philosophy, in reply to the first requirement of Protos’s letter, Protos, as it appears, having heard of, and wonderingly enumerated, the great things Cleon has effected; and he has written to know the truth of the report. Cleon replies, that the epos on the King’s hundred plates of gold is his, and his the little chaunt so sure to rise from every fishing-bark when, lights at prow, the seamen haul their nets; that the image of the sun-god on the light-house men turn from the sun’s self to see, is his; that the Poecile, o’erstoried its whole length with painting, is his, too; that he knows the true proportions of a man and woman, not observed before; that he has written three books on the soul, proving absurd all written hitherto, and putting us to ignorance again; that in music he has combined the moods, inventing one; that, in brief, all arts are his, and so known and recognized. At this he writes the King to marvel not. We of these latter days, he says, being more COMPOSITE, appear not so great as our forerunners who, in their simple way, were greater in a certain single direction, than we; but our composite way is greater. This life of men on earth, this sequence of the soul’s achievements here, he finds reason to believe, was intended to be viewed eventually as a great whole, the individual soul being only a factor toward the realization of this great whole—toward spelling out, so to speak, Zeus’s idea in the race. Those divine men of old, he goes on to say, reached each at one point, the outside verge that rounds our faculty, and where they reached, who could do more than reach? I have not chaunted, he says, verse like Homer’s, nor swept string like Terpander, nor carved and painted men like Phidias and his friend; I am not great as they are, point by point; but I have entered into sympathy with these four, running these into one soul, who, separate, ignored each other’s arts. The wild flower was the larger— I have dashed rose-blood upon its petals, pricked its cup’s honey with wine, and driven its seed to fruit, and show a better flower, if not so large.

And now he comes to the important questions in the King’s letter— whether he, the poet, his soul thus in men’s hearts, has not attained the very crown and proper end of life—whether, now life closeth up, he faces death with success in his right hand,—whether he fears death less than he, the King, does himself, the fortunate of men, who assigns the reason for thinking that he does, that he, the poet, leaves much behind, his life stays in the poems men shall sing, the pictures men shall study; while the King’s life, complete and whole now in its power and joy, dies altogether with his brain and arm, as HE leaves not behind, as the poet does, works of art embodying the essence of his life which, through those works, will pass into the lives of men of all succeeding times. Cleon replies that if in the morning of philosophy, the King, with the light now in him, could have looked on all earth’s tenantry, from worm to bird, ere man appeared, and if Zeus had questioned him whether he would improve on it, do more for visible creatures than was done, he would have answered, “Ay, by making each grow conscious in himself: all’s perfect else, life’s mechanics can no further go, and all this joy in natural life is put, like fire from off thy fingers into each, so exquisitely perfect is the same. But ‘tis pure fire—and they mere matter are; it has THEM, not they IT: and so I choose, for man, that a third thing shall stand apart from both, a quality arise within the soul, which, intro-active, made to supervise and feel the force it has, may view itself and so be happy.” But it is this quality, Cleon continues, which makes man a failure. This sense of sense, this spirit consciousness, grew the only life worth calling life, the pleasure-house, watch-tower, and treasure-fortress of the soul, which whole surrounding flats of natural life seemed only fit to yield subsistence to; a tower that crowns a country. But alas! the soul now climbs it just to perish there, for thence we have discovered that there’s a world of capability for joy, spread round about us, meant for us, inviting us; and still the soul craves all, and still the flesh replies, “Take no jot more than ere you climbed the tower to look abroad! Nay, so much less, as that fatigue has brought deduction to it.” After expatiating on this sad state of man, he arrives at the same conclusion as the King in his letter: “I agree in sum, O King, with thy profound discouragement, who seest the wider but to sigh the more. Most progress is most failure! thou sayest well.”

And now he takes up the last point of the King’s letter, that he, the King, holds joy not impossible to one with artist-gifts, who leaves behind living works. Looking over the sea, as he writes, he says, “Yon rower with the moulded muscles there, lowering the sail, is nearer it that I.” He presents with clearness, and with rigid logic, the DILEMMA of the growing soul; shows the vanity of living in works left behind, and in the memory of posterity, while he, the feeling, thinking, acting man, shall sleep in his urn. The horror of the thought makes him dare imagine at times some future state unlimited in capability for joy, as this is in DESIRE for joy. But no! Zeus had not yet revealed such a state; and alas! he must have done so were it possible!

He concludes, “Live long and happy, and in that thought die, glad for what was! Farewell.” And then, as a matter of minor importance, he informs the King, in a postscript, that he cannot tell his messenger aright where to deliver what he bears to one called Paulus. Protos, it must be understood, having heard of the fame of Paul, and being perplexed in the extreme, has written the great apostle to know of his doctrine. But Cleon writes that it is vain to suppose that a mere barbarian Jew, one circumcised, hath access to a secret which is shut from them, and that the King wrongs their philosophy in stooping to inquire of such an one. “Oh, he finds adherents, who does not. Certain slaves who touched on this same isle, preached him and Christ, and, as he gathered from a bystander, their doctrines could be held by no sane man.”

There is a quiet beauty about this poem which must insinuate itself into the feelings of every reader. In tone it resembles the ‘Epistle of Karshish, the Arab Physician’. The verse of both poems is very beautiful. No one can read these two poems, and ‘Bishop Blougram’s Apology’, and ‘The Bishop orders his Tomb at St. Praxed’s Church’, and not admit that Browning is a master of blank verse in its most difficult form—a form far more difficult than that of the epic blank verse of Milton, or the Idyllic blank verse of Tennyson, argumentative and freighted with thought, and, at the same time, almost chatty, as it is, and bearing in its course exquisitely poetical conceptions. The same may be said of much of the verse of ‘The Ring and the Book’, especially that of the monologues of the Canon Caponsacchi, Pompilia, the Pope, and Count Guido Franceschini. But this by the way.

‘Cleon’ belongs to a grand group of poems, in which Browning shows himself to be, as I’ve said, the most essentially Christian of living poets—the poet who, more emphatically than any of his contemporaries have done, has enforced the importance, the indispensableness of a new birth, the being born from above (a'/nwqen) as the condition not only of soul vitality and progress, but also of intellectual rectitude. In this group of poems are embodied the profoundest principles of education— principles which it behoves the present generation of educators to look well to. The acquisition of knowledge is a good thing, the sharpening of the intellect is a good thing, the cultivation of philosophy is a good thing; but there is something of infinitely more importance than all these—it is, the rectification, the adjustment, through that mysterious operation we call sympathy, of the unconscious personality, the hidden soul, which co-operates with the active powers, with the conscious intellect, and, as this unconscious personality is rectified or unrectified, determines the active powers, the conscious intellect, for righteousness or unrighteousness.

The attentive reader of Browning’s poetry must soon discover how remarkably homogeneous it is in spirit. There are many authors, and great authors too, the reading of whose collected works gives the impression of their having “tried their hand” at many things. No such impression is derivable from the voluminous poetry of Browning. Wide as is its range, one great and homogeneous spirit pervades and animates it all, from the earliest to the latest. No other living poet gives so decided an assurance of having a BURDEN to deliver. An appropriate general title to his works would be, ‘The Burden of Robert Browning to the 19th Century’. His earliest poems show distinctly his ATTITUDE toward things. We see in what direction the poet has set his face— what his philosophy of life is, what soul-life means with him, what regeneration means, what edification means in its deepest sense of building up within us the spiritual temple. And if he had left this world after writing no more than those poems of his youth, ‘Pauline’ and ‘Paracelsus’, a very fair ‘ex-pede-Herculem’ estimate might have been made of the possibilities which he has since so grandly realized.

III. Mr. Browning’s “Obscurity”.

It was long the FASHION—and that fashion has not yet passed away —with skimming readers and perfunctory critics to charge Mr. Browning with being “wilfully obscure, unconscientiously careless, and perversely harsh.”

There are readers and readers. One class, constituting, perhaps, not more than one-tenth of one per cent, or a thousandth part of the whole number, “read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest”; the remaining ninety-nine and nine-tenths per cent, through a habit of loose and indiscriminate reading, are unequal to the sustained concentration of mind demanded by the higher poetry, the language of which is characterized by a severe economy of expression—a closeness of texture, resulting from the elliptical energy of highly impassioned thought.

Reading is, perhaps, more superficial at the present day than it ever was before. There is an almost irresistible temptation to reverse the “multum legendum esse non multa” of Quintilian, overwhelmed as we are with books, magazines, and newspapers, which no man can number, and of which thousands and tens of thousands of minds endeavor to gobble up all they can; and yet, from want of all digestive and assimilating power, they are pitiably famished and deadened.

Sir John Lubbock has lately been interested in the preparation of a list of the best hundred books, and to that end has solicited the aid of a number of prominent scholars. Prof. Edward Dowden remarks thereupon, in an article on ‘The Interpretation of Literature’, “It would have been more profitable for us had we been advised how to read any one of the hundred; for what, indeed, does it matter whether we read the best books or the worst, if we lack the power or the instinct or the skill by which to reach the heart of any of them? Books for most readers are, as Montaigne says, ‘a languid pleasure’; and so they must be, unless they become living powers, with a summons or a challenge for our spirit, unless we embrace them or wrestle with them.”

To return from this digression to the charge against Browning of obscurity. And, first, it should be said that Browning has so much material, such a large thought and passion capital, that we never find him making a little go a great way, by means of EXPRESSION, or rather concealing the little by means of rhetorical tinsel. We can never justly demand of him what the Queen in ‘Hamlet’ demands of Polonius, “more matter with less art”. His thought is wide-reaching and discursive, and the motions of his mind rapid and leaping. The connecting links of his thought have often to be supplied by an analytic reader whose mind is not up to the required tension to spring over the chasm. He shows great faith in his reader and “leaves the mere rude explicit details”, as if he thought,

— * ‘Sordello’. —

A truly original writer like Browning, original, I mean, in his spiritual attitudes, is always more of less difficult to the uninitiated, for the reason that he demands of his reader new standpoints, new habits of thought and feeling; says, virtually, to his reader, Metanoei^te; and until these new standpoints are taken, these new habits of thought and feeling induced, the difficulty, while appearing to the reader at the outset, to be altogether objective, will really be, to a great extent, subjective, that is, will be in himself.

Goethe, in his ‘Wahrheit und Dichtung’, says:—

“Wer einem Autor Dunkelheit vorwerfen will, sollte erst sein eigenes Innere besuchen, ob es denn da auch recht hell ist. In der Daemmerung wird eine sehr deutliche Schrift unlesbar.” *

And George Henry Lewes, in his ‘Life of Goethe’, well says:—

“A masterpiece excites no sudden enthusiasm; it must be studied much and long, before it is fully comprehended; we must grow up to it, for it will not descend to us. Its emphasis grows with familiarity. We never become disenchanted; we grow more and more awe-struck at its infinite wealth. We discover no trick, for there is none to discover. Homer, Shakespeare, Raphael, Beethoven, Mozart, never storm the judgment; but once fairly in possession, they retain it with unceasing influence.”

And Professor Dowden, in the article from which I have just quoted, says:—

“Approaching a great writer in this spirit of courageous and affectionate fraternity, we need all our forces and all our craft for the friendly encounter. If we love ease and lethargy, let us turn in good time and fly. The interpretation of literature, like the interpretation of Nature, is no mere record of facts; it is no catalogue of the items which make up a book— such catalogues and analyses of contents encumber our histories of literature with some of their dreariest pages. The interpretation of literature exhibits no series of dead items, but rather the life and power of one mind at play upon another mind duly qualified to receive and manifest these. Hence, one who would interpret the work of a master must summon up all his powers, and must be alive at as many points as possible. He who approaches his author as a whole, bearing upon life as a whole, is himself alive at the greatest possible number of points, will be the best and truest interpreter. For he will grasp what is central, and at the same time will be sensitive to the value of all details, which details he will perceive not isolated, but in connection with one another, and with the central life to which they belong and from which they proceed.”

In his poem entitled ‘Pacchiarotto, and how he worked in distemper’, Mr. Browning turns upon his critics, whom he characterizes as “the privileged fellows, in the drabs, blues, and yellows” (alluding to the covers of the leading British Reviews), and especially upon Alfred Austin, the author of that work of wholesale condemnation, ‘The Poetry of the Period’, and gives them a sound and well-deserved drubbing. At the close of the onset he says:—

In a letter written to Mr. W. G. Kingsland, in 1868, Mr. Browning says:—

“I can have little doubt that my writing has been in the main too hard for many I should have been pleased to communicate with; but I never designedly tried to puzzle people, as some of my critics have supposed. On the other hand, I never pretended to offer such literature as should be a substitute for a cigar or a game at dominoes to an idle man. So, perhaps, on the whole I get my deserts, and something over—not a crowd, but a few I value more.” *

It was never truer of any author than it is true of Browning, that ‘Le style c’est l’homme’; and Browning’s style is an expression of the panther-restlessness and panther-spring of his impassioned intellect. The musing spirit of a Wordsworth or a Tennyson he partakes not of.

Mr. Richard Holt Hutton’s characterization of the poet’s style, as a “crowded note-book style”, is not a particularly happy one. In the passage, which he cites from Sordello, to illustrate the “crowded note-book style”, occurs the following parenthesis:—

“What the parenthesis means,” he says, “I have not the most distant notion. Mr. Browning might as well have said, ‘to be by him her himself herself themselves made act’, etc., for any vestige of meaning I attach to this curious mob of pronouns and verbs. It is exactly like the short notes of a speech intended to be interpreted afterwards by one who had heard and understood it himself.” *

At first glance, this parenthesis is obscure; but the obscurity is not due to its being “exactly like the short notes of a speech”, etc. It is due to what the “obscurity” of Mr. Browning’s language, as language, is, in nine cases out of ten, due, namely, to the COLLOCATION of the words, not to an excessive economy of words. He often exercises a liberty in the collocation of his words which is beyond what an uninflected language like the English admits of, without more or less obscurity. There are difficult passages in Browning which, if translated into Latin, would present no difficulty at all; for in Latin, the relations of words are more independent of their collocation, being indicated by their inflections.

The meaning of the parenthesis is, and, independently of the context, a second glance takes it in (the wonder is, Mr. Hutton didn’t take it in),—

There are two or three characteristics of the poet’s diction which may be noticed here:—

1. The suppression of the relative, both nominative and accusative or dative, is not uncommon; and, until the reader becomes familiar with it, it often gives, especially if the suppression is that of a subject relative, a momentary, but only a momentary, check to the understanding of a passage.

The following examples are from ‘The Ring and the Book’:—

i.e., which had (would have) else swelled to the full, etc.

Here the infinitive “To take” might be understood, at first look, as the subject of “Would buffet”; but it depends on “putting”, etc., and the subject relative “that” is suppressed: “an argument {that} would buffet their stolidity in vain.”

i.e., “that firm foot {that} had (would have) pinned.”

i.e., “sin, {that} would.”

2. The use of the infinitive without the prepositive “to”, is frequently extended beyond present usage, especially in ‘Sordello’ and ‘The Ring and the Book’. The following are examples:—

Here are two infinitives, with the prepositive omitted, “expostulate” and “attempt”, both dependent on the noun “time”, and another, “withdraw”, without the prepositive, dependent on “attempt”: “but when ‘twas time {to} expostulate, {to} attempt {to} withdraw”, etc.

i.e., for thus he ventured {to} push to the verge a vain mummery.

i.e. only allowed {to} initiate, {to} set man’s step, etc.

Here the subject relative of “refuses” is omitted, and the verb followed by an infinitive without the prepositive: “many a flower {that} refuses obstinately {to} blow in print.”

3. Instead of the modern analytic form, the simple form of the past subjunctive derived from the Anglo-Saxon inflectional form, and identical with that of the past indicative, is frequently employed, the context only showing that it is the subjunctive. (See Abbott’s ‘Shakespearian Grammar’, 361 et seq.)

i.e., as we should do best.

i.e., would be abolished.

i.e., would have promptly put aside.

i.e., as the context shows, {it} might please the plunderer {to} dole.

i.e., would have lost you.

But the verbs “be” and “have” are chiefly so used, and not often beyond what present usage allows. *

4. The use of the dative, or indirect object, without “to” or “for”.

Such datives are very frequent, and scarcely need illustration. The poet has simply carried the use of them beyond the present general usage of the language. But there’s a noticeable one in the Pope’s Monologue, in ‘The Ring and the Book’, vv. 1464-1466: The Archbishop of Arezzo, to whom poor Pompilia has applied, in her distress, for protection against her brutal husband, thinks it politic not to take her part, but send her back to him and enjoin obedience and submission. The Pope, in his Monologue, represents the crafty Archbishop as saying, when Pompilia cries, “Protect me from the wolf!”

i.e., thus I throw back {to} him the fawn which limps up bleeding to my foot and lies. The parenthesis, “Come to me, daughter”, being interposed, and which is introduced as preparatory to his purpose, adds to the difficulty of the construction.

There are, after all, but comparatively few instances in Browning’s poetry, where these features of his diction can be fairly condemned. They often impart a crispness to the expressions in which they occur.

The contriving spirit of the poet’s language often results in great complexity of construction. Complexity of construction may be a fault, and it may not. It may be justified by the complexity of the thought which it bears along. “Clear quack-quack is easily uttered.” But where an author’s thought is nimble, far-reaching, elliptical through its energy, and discursive, the expression of it must be more or less complex or involved; he will employ subordinate clauses, and parentheses, through which to express the outstanding, restricting, and toning relations of his thought, that is, if he is a master of perspective, and ranks his grouped thoughts according to their relative importance.

The poet’s apostrophe to his wife in the spirit-world, which closes the long prologue to ‘The Ring and the Book’ (vv. 1391-1416), and in which he invokes her aid and benediction, in the work he has undertaken, presents a greater complexity of construction than is to be met with anywhere else in his works; and of this passage it may be said, as it may be said of any other having a complex construction, supposing this to be the only difficulty, that it’s hard rather than obscure, and demands close reading. But, notwithstanding its complex structure and the freight of thought conveyed, the passage has a remarkable LIGHTSOMENESS of movement, and is a fine specimen of blank verse. The unobtrusive, but distinctly felt, alliteration which runs through it, contributes something toward this lightsomeness. The first two verses have a Tennysonian ring:—

“his”, v. 5, the sun’s. “Yet human”, v. 6: though ‘kindred’ to the sun, yet proved ‘human’. . .‘when the first summons’, etc. “This is the same voice”, v. 11, i.e., a voice of the same import as was “the first summons”—one invoking help. The nouns “interchange”, “splendour”, “benediction”, vv. 17, 18, 19, are appositives of “what”, v. 17. “Never conclude”, v. 20, to be construed with “commence”, v. 13: “Never {may I} conclude”. “Their utmost up and on”, v. 23, to be construed with “yearn”, v. 21. “so”, v. 23, looks back to “raising hand and head”, etc. “Some whiteness” . . . v. 25, “Some wanness” . . . v. 26, to be construed with “blessing back”.

See an elaborate analysis of this Invocation, by Dr. F. J. Furnivall, read at the forty-eighth meeting of the Browning Society, February 25, 1887, being No. 39 of the Society’s Papers.

But, after all, the difficulties in Browning which result from the construction of the language, be that what it may, are not the main difficulties, as has been too generally supposed. THE MAIN DIFFICULTIES ARE QUITE INDEPENDENT OF THE CONSTRUCTION OF THE LANGUAGE.

Many readers, especially those who take an intellectual attitude toward all things, in the heavens above and in the earth beneath, suppose that they are prepared to understand almost anything which is understandable if it is only PUT right. This is a most egregious mistake, especially in respect to the subtle and complex spiritual experiences which the more deeply subjective poetry embodies. What De Quincey says in his paper on Kant,* of the comprehension of the higher philosophical truths, can, with still better reason, be said of the responsiveness to the higher spiritual truths: “No complex or very important truth was ever yet transferred in full development from one mind to another: truth of that character is not a piece of furniture to be shifted; it is a seed which must be sown, and pass through the several stages of growth. No doctrine of importance can be transferred in a matured shape into any man’s understanding from without: it must arise by an act of genesis within the understanding itself.”

And so it may be said in regard to the responsiveness to the higher spiritual truths—I don’t say COMPREHENSION of the higher spiritual truths (that word pertains rather to an intellectual grasp), but RESPONSIVENESS to the higher spiritual truths. Spiritual truths must be spiritually responded to; they are not and cannot be intellectually comprehended. The condition of such responsiveness it may require a long while to fulfil. New attitudes of the soul, a meta/noia, may be demanded, before such responsiveness is possible. And what some people may regard in the higher poetry as obscure, by reason of the mode of its presentation on the part of the poet, may be only relatively so —that is, the obscurity may be wholly due to the wrong attitudes, or the no attitudes, of their own souls, and to the limitations of their spiritual experiences. In that case “the patient must minister to himself”.

While on the subject of “obscurity”, I must notice a difficulty which the reader at first experiences in his study of Browning’s poetry —a difficulty resulting from the poet’s favorite art-form, the dramatic or psychologic monologue.* The largest portion of his voluminous poetry is in this form. Some speaker is made to reveal his character, and, sometimes, by reflection, or directly, the character of some one else—to set forth some subtle and complex soul-mood, some supreme, all-determining movement or experience of a life; or, it may be, to RATIOCINATE subtly on some curious question of theology, morals, philosophy, or art. Now it is in strictly preserving the monologue character that obscurity often results. A monologue often begins with a startling abruptness, and the reader must read along some distance before he gathers what the beginning means. Take the monologue of Fra Lippo Lippi for example. The situation is necessarily left more or less unexplained. The poet says nothing ‘in propria persona’, and no reply is made to the speaker by the person or persons addressed. Sometimes a look, a gesture, or a remark, must be supposed on the part of the one addressed, which occasions a responsive remark. Sometimes the speaker IMPUTES a question; and the reader is sometimes obliged to stop and consider whether a question is imputed by the speaker to the one he is addressing, or is a direct question of his own. This is often the case throughout ‘The Ring and the Book’. But to the initiated, these features of the monologue present little or no difficulty, and they conduce to great compactness of composition— a closeness of texture which the reader comes in time to enjoy, and to prefer to a more loosely woven diction.

The monologue entitled ‘My Last Duchess. Ferrara’ is a good example of the constitution of this art-form. It is one of the most perfect in artistic treatment, and exhibits all the features I have just noticed. Originally, this monologue and that now entitled ‘Count Gismond. Aix in Provence’, had the common title, ‘Italy and France’, the former being No. I. Italy; the latter, No. II. France. The poet, no doubt, afterward thought that the Duke of the one monologue, and the Count of the other, could not justly be presented as representatives, respectively, of Italy and France. In giving the monologues new titles, ‘My Last Duchess’ and ‘Count Gismond’, he added to the one, ‘Ferrara’, and to the other, ‘Aix in Provence’, thus locally restricting the order of character which they severally represent.

In ‘My Last Duchess’, the speaker is a soulless VIRTUOSO— a natural product of a proud, arrogant, and exclusive aristocracy, on the one hand, and on the other, of an old and effete city, like Ferrara, where art, rather than ministering to soul-life and true manliness of character, has become an end to itself— is valued for its own sake.

The Duke is showing, with the weak pride of the mere virtuoso, a portrait of his last Duchess, to some one who has been sent to negotiate another marriage. We see that he is having an entertainment or reception of some kind in his palace, and that he has withdrawn from the company with the envoy to the picture-gallery on an upper floor. He has pulled aside the curtain from before the portrait, and in remarking on the expression which the artist, Fra Pandolf, has given to the face, he is made to reveal a fiendish jealousy on his part, occasioned by the sweetness and joyousness of his late Duchess, who, he thought, should show interest in nothing but his own fossilized self. “She had,” he says, “a heart— how shall I say?—too soon made glad, too easily impressed; she liked whate’er she looked on, and her looks went everywhere. Sir, ‘twas all one! My favour at her breast, the dropping of the daylight in the West, the bough of cherries some officious fool broke in the orchard for her, the white mule she rode with round the terrace—all and each would draw from her alike the approving speech, or blush, at least. She thanked men,—good! but thanked somehow—I know not how—as if she ranked my gift of a nine-hundred-years-old name with anybody’s gift.”

Her fresh interest in things, and the sweet smile she had for all, due to a generous soul-life, proved fatal to the lovely Duchess: “Oh sir, she smiled, no doubt, whene’er I passed her; but who passed without much the same smile? This grew; I gave commands; then all smiles stopped together.”

He succeeded, and he seems to be proud of it, in shutting off all her life-currents, pure, and fresh, and sparkling, as they were, and we must suppose that she than sank slowly and uncomplainingly away. What a deep pathos there is in “then all smiles stopped together”! *

The contemptible meanness and selfishness of jealousy were never exhibited with greater power, than they are exhibited in this short monologue—a power largely due to the artistic treatment. The jealousy of Leontes, in ‘The Winter’s Tale’, of Shakespeare, is nobility itself, in comparison with the Duke’s. How distinctly, while indirectly, the sweet Duchess is, with a few masterly touches, placed before us! The poet shows his artistic skill especially in his indirect, reflected portraitures.

This short composition, comprising as it does but fifty-six lines, is, of itself, sufficient to prove the poet a consummate artist. Tennyson’s TECHNIQUE is quite perfect, almost “faultily faultless”, indeed; but in no one of his compositions has he shown an equal degree of art-power, in the highest sense of the word.

The last ten verses illustrate well the poet’s skilful management of his difficult art-form. After the envoy has had his look at the portrait, the Duke, thinking it time to return to his guests, says “Will’t please you rise? We’ll meet the company below, then.” His next speech, which indicates what he has been talking about, during the envoy’s study of the picture, must be understood as uttered while they are moving toward the stairway. The next, “Nay, we’ll go together down, sir”, shows that they have reached the head of the stairway, and that the envoy has politely motioned the Duke to lead the way down. This is implied in the “Nay”. The last speech indicates that on the stairway is a window which affords an outlook into the courtyard, where he calls the attention of the envoy to a Neptune, taming a sea-horse, cast in bronze for him by Claus of Innsbruck. The pride of the virtuoso is also implied in the word, “though”.

It should be noticed, also, that the Duke values his wife’s picture wholly as a picture, not as the “counterfeit presentment” and reminder of a sweet and lovely woman, who might have blessed his life, if he had been capable of being blessed. It is to him a picture by a great artist, and he values it only as such. He says, parenthetically, “since none puts by the curtain I have drawn for you, but I.” It’s too precious a work of art to be entrusted to anybody else.

IV. Browning’s Verse.

It seems to be admitted, even by many of the poet’s most devoted students, that his verse is, in its general character, harsh and rugged. To judge it fairly, one must free his mind of many merely conventional canons in regard to verse. Pure music is absolute. The music of verse moves, or should move, under the conditions of the thought which articulates it. It should serve as a chorus to the thought, expressing a mystic sympathy with it. Verse may be very musical, and yet more or less mechanical; that is, it may CLOTHE thought and sentiment, but not be a part of it, not EMBODY it. Unrippled verse, which many readers demand, MUST be more or less mechanical. Such verse flows according to its own sweet will, independently of the thought-articulation. But the thought-articulation may be so flimsy that it’s well enough for the verse so to flow.

The careful student of Browning’s language-shaping must discover— the requisite susceptibility to vitality of form being supposed— that his verse is remarkably organic: often, indeed, more organic, even when it appears to be clumsy, than the “faultily faultless” verse of Tennyson. The poet who has written ‘In a Gondola’, ‘By the Fireside’, ‘Meeting at Night’, ‘Parting at Morning’, ‘Gold Hair’, ‘May and Death’, ‘Love among the Ruins’, ‘Home Thoughts from Abroad’, ‘Home Thoughts from the Sea’, the Incantation in ‘The Flight of the Duchess’ (some of which are both song and picture), and many, many more that might be named, certainly has the very highest faculty of word and verse music, of music, too, that is entirely new in English Poetry; and it can be shown that he always exercises that faculty WHENEVER THERE’S A REAL ARTISTIC OCCASION FOR IT, not otherwise. Verse-music is never with him a mere literary indulgence. The grotesquerie of rhythm and rhyme which some of his poems exhibit, is as organic as any other feature of his language-shaping, and shows the rarest command of language. He has been charged with having “failed to reach continuous levels of musical phrasing”. It’s a charge which every one who appreciates Browning’s verse in its higher forms (and its higher forms are not those which are addressed especially to the physical ear) will be very ready to admit. In the general tenor of his poetry, he is ABOVE the Singer,— he is the Seer and Revealer, who sees great truths beyond the bounds of the territory of general knowledge, instead of working over truths within that territory; and no seer of modern times has had his eyes more clearly purged with euphrasy and rue. Poetry is with him, in the language of Mr. E. Paxton Hood (‘Eclectic and Congregational Rev.’, Dec., 1868), “no jingle of words, or pretty amusement for harpsichord or piano, but rather a divine trigonometry, a process of celestial triangulation, a taking observations of celestial places and spheres, an attempt to estimate our world, its place, its life amidst the boundless immeasurable sweeps of space and time; or if describing, then describing the animating stories of the giants, how they fought and fell, or conquered. . .a great all-inclusive strength of song, which is as a battle march to warriors, or as the refreshment of brooks and dates to the spent and toiling soldiers on their way, is more than the pretty idyll, whose sweet and plaintive story pleases the idle hour or idle ear.”

The Rev. Prof. E. Johnson, in the section entitled ‘Poets of the Ear and of the Eye’, of his valuable paper on ‘Conscience and Art in Browning’ (‘Browning Soc. Papers’, Part III., pp. 345-380), has ably shown that “the economy of music is a necessity of Browning’s Art”—that music, instead of ever being an end to itself, is with him a means to a much higher end. He says:—

“All poetry may be classified according to its form or its contents. Formal classification is easy, but of little use. When we have distinguished compositions as dramatic, lyrical, or characterized a poet in like manner, we have done little. What we want to ascertain is the peculiar quality of the imaginative stuff with which he plastically works, and to appreciate its worth. This is always a great task, but one particularly necessary in the case of Browning, because the stuff in which he has wrought is so novel in the poet’s hands. Psychology itself is comparatively a new and modern study, as a distinct science; but a psychological poet, who has made it his business to clothe psychic abstractions ‘in sights and sounds’, is entirely a novel appearance in literature.

“Now that phrase ‘clothing in sights and sounds’ may yield us the clue to the classification we are seeking. The function of artists, that is, musicians, poets in the narrower sense, and painters, is to clothe Truth in sights and sounds for the hearing and seeing of us all. Their call to do this lies in their finer and fuller aesthetic faculty. The sense of hearing and that of seeing stand in polar opposition, and thus a natural scale offers itself by which we may rank and arrange our artists. At the one end of the scale is the acoustic artist, i.e., the musician. At the other end of the scale is the optic artist, the painter and sculptor. Between these, and comprising both these activities in his own, is the poet, who is both acoustic and optic artist. He translates the sounds of the world, both external and internal,— the tumult of storms, the murmurs of waves, the SUSURRUS of the woodland, the tinkling of brooks, the throbbing of human hearts, the cries of all living creatures; all those groans of pain, stammers of desire, shrieks of despair, yawns even of languor, which are ever breaking out of the heart of things; and beside all this, the hearsay, commonplace, proverbial lore of the world. He turns these into melodies which shall be caught up by those who listen. In short, he converts by his alchemy the common stuff of pain and of joy into music. But he is optic as well as acoustic; that is, he calls up at the same time by his art a procession of images which march or dance across the theatre of the listener’s fancy. Now the question of classification on this scheme comes to this, Does the particular poet who invites our attention deal more with the aesthesis of the ear or with that of the eye? Does he more fill our ear with sweet tunes or our fancy with shapes and colours? Does he compel us to listen and shut our eyes, or to open our eyes wide and dispense with all but the faintest musical accompaniment? What sense, in short, does he mainly address himself to? Goethe said that he was a ‘seeing’ man; W. von Humboldt, the great linguist, that he was a ‘listening’ man. The influence of Milton’s blindness on his poetry was noticed by Lessing. The short-sightedness of Wieland has also been detected in his poetry.

“If we apply these tests to Browning, there can be, I think, no doubt as to the answer. He is, in common with all poets, both musician and painter, but much more the latter than the former. He is never for a moment the slave of his ear, if I may so express it. We know that he has, on the contrary, the mastery of music. But music helps and supports his imagination, never controls it. Music is to Browning an inarticulate revelation of the truth of the supersensual world, the ‘earnest of a heaven’. He is no voluptuary in music. Music is simply the means by which the soul wings its way into the azure of spiritual theory and contemplation. Take only ‘Saul’ and ‘Abt Vogler’ in illustration. ‘Saul’ is a magnificent interpretation of the old theme, a favorite with the mystics, that evil spirits are driven out by music. But in this interpretation it is not the mere tones, the thrumming on the harp, it is the religious movement of the intelligence, it is the truth of Divine love throbbing in every chord, which constitutes the spell. And so in ‘Abt Vogler’; the abbot’s instrument is only the means whereby he strikes out the light of faith and hope within him. Not to dwell upon this point, I would only say that it seems clear that Browning has the finest acoustic gifts, and could, if he had chosen, have scattered musical bons-bons through every page. But he has printed no ‘versus inopes rerum, nugaeque canorae’ (Hor. ad Pis.). He has had higher objects in view, and has dispensed better stuff than that which lingers in the ear, and tends to suppress rather than support the higher activity of thought.

“When for a moment he shuts his eyes, and falls purely into the listening or ‘musing’ mood, he becomes the instrument of a rich deep music, breaking out of the heart of the unseen world, as in the Dirge of unfaithful Poets in ‘Paracelsus’, or the Gypsy’s Incantation in the ‘Flight of the Duchess’, or the Meditation at the crisis of Sordello’s temptation.

“When the keen inquisitive intelligence is in its full waking activity there grows ‘more of the words’ and thought, and ‘less of the music’, to invert a phrase of the poet’s. The melody ceases, the rhythm is broken, as in all intense, earnest conversation. At times only the tinkle of the pairing rhymes, of which Browning has made a most witty use, reminds that we are called to partake a mood in which commonplace associations are melting into the ideal. I believe the economy of music is a necessity of Browning’s art; and it would be only fair, if those who attack him on this ground would consider how far thought of such quality as his admits of being chanted, or otherwise musically accompanied. In plain words the problem is, how far the pleasures of sound and of sense can be united in poetry; and it will be found in every case that a poet sacrifices something either to the one or to the other. Browning has said something in his arch way on this point. In effect, he remarks, Italian prose can render a simple thought more sweetly to the ear than either Greek or English verse. It seems clear from many other of his critical remarks that he considers the demand for music in preference to thought in poetry, as the symptom of a false taste.

“Browning’s poetry is to be gazed at, rather than listened to and recited, for the most part. It is infinitely easier to listen for an hour to spiritual music than to fix one’s whole attention for a few minutes on a spiritual picture. In the latter act of mind we find a rich musical accompaniment distracting, while a slight musical accompaniment is probably helpful. And perhaps we may characterize Browning’s poetry as a series of spiritual pictures with a faint musical accompaniment.

“For illustration by extreme contrast, Milton may be compared with Browning. Milton was a great hearsay poet, Browning repeats no hearsay. In reading Milton, the difficulty is to keep up the mental tension where there is so little thought, strictly speaking. With Browning the highest tension is exacted.

“He is pre-eminently the looker, the seer, the ‘maker-see’; the reporter, the painter of the scenery and events of the soul. And if the sense of vision is our noblest, and we instinctively express the acts of intelligence in terms drawn from physical vision, the poet who leans most towards the ‘SEER of Power and Love in the absolute, Beauty and Goodness in the concrete’, takes the higher rank. This is no matter for bigotry of taste. Singers and seers, musicians and reporters, and reproducers of every degree, who have something to tell us or to show us of the ‘world as God has made it, where all is beauty’, we have need of all. But of singers there are many, of seers there are few, that is all.”

In the most difficult form of verse, namely, blank verse, Browning has shown himself a great master, and has written some of the very best in the literature. And great as is the extent of his blank verse, the ‘Ring and the Book’ alone containing 21,116 verses, it never entirely lapses into prose.

One grand merit of blank verse is in the SWEEP of it; another, in its pause-melody, which can be secured only by a skilful recurrence of an unbroken measure; without this, variety of pause ceases to be variety, and results in a metrical chaos; a third is in its lightsomeness of movement, its go, when well-freighted with thought. All these merits are found united in much of Browning’s blank verse, especially in that of ‘The Ring and the Book’. As an example of this, take the following passage from the monologue of the Canon Caponsacchi. It gives expression to his vision of Count Guido’s spiritual down-sliding; “in the lowest deep a lower deep still threatening to devour him, opens wide”:—

Browning has distinctly indicated the standard by which he estimates art-work, in the closing paragraph of his Essay ‘On the Poet objective and subjective; on the latter’s aim; on Shelley as man and poet’.

“I would rather,” he says, “consider Shelley’s poetry as a sublime fragmentary essay towards a presentment of the correspondency of the universe to Deity, of the natural to the spiritual, and of the actual to the ideal, than I would isolate and separately appraise the worth of many detachable portions which might be acknowledged AS UTTERLY PERFECT IN A LOWER MORAL POINT OF VIEW, UNDER THE MERE CONDITIONS OF ART. It would be easy to take my stand on successful instances of objectivity in Shelley: there is the unrivalled ‘Cenci’; there is the ‘Julian and Maddalo’ too; there is the magnificent ‘Ode to Naples’: why not regard, it may be said, the less organized matter as the radiant elemental foam and solution, out of which would have been evolved, eventually, creations as perfect even as those? But I prefer to look for the highest attainment, not simply the high, —and, seeing it, I hold by it. There is surely enough of the work ‘Shelley’ to be known enduringly among men, and, I believe, to be accepted of God, as human work may; and AROUND THE IMPERFECT PROPORTIONS OF SUCH, THE MOST ELABORATED PRODUCTIONS OF ORDINARY ART MUST ARRANGE THEMSELVES AS INFERIOR ILLUSTRATIONS.”

The italics are mine. I would say, but without admitting imperfect art on the part of Browning, for I regard him as one of the greatest of literary artists, that HE must be estimated by the standard presented in this passage, by the “presentment”, everywhere in his poetry, “of the correspondency of the universe to Deity, of the natural to the spiritual, and of the actual to the ideal.”

The same standard is presented in ‘Andrea del Sarto’, in ‘Old Pictures in Florence’, and in other of his poems.

V. Arguments of the Poems.

Wanting is—What?

“Love, the soul of soul, within the soul”, the Christ-spirit, the spirit of the “Comer” (o’ e’rxo/menos, Matt. 11:3), completes incompletion, reanimates that which without it is dead, and admits to a fellowship with the soul of things; ‘Ubi caritas, ibi claritas’. See passage from ‘Fifine at the Fair’, quoted under ‘My Star’.

My Star.

The following passage from ‘Fifine at the Fair’, section 55, is an expansion of the idea involved in ‘My Star’, and is the best commentary which can be given on it:—

The Flight of the Duchess.

In ‘The Flight of the Duchess’ we are presented with a generous soul-life, as exhibited by the sweet, glad Duchess, linked with fossil conventionalism and mediaevalsim, and an inherited authority which brooks no submissiveness, as exhibited by the Duke, her husband, “out of whose veins ceremony and pride have driven the blood, leaving him but a fumigated and embalmed self”. The scene of the poem is a “rough north land”, subject to a Kaiser of Germany. The story is so plainly told that no prose summary of it could make it plainer. Its deeper meaning centres in the incantation of the old gypsy woman, in which is mystically shadowed forth the long and painful discipline through which the soul must pass before being fully admitted to the divine arcanum, “how love is the only good in the world”.

The poem is one which readily lends itself to an allegorical interpretation. For such an interpretation, the reader is referred to Mrs. Owen’s paper, read before the Browning Society of London, and contained in the Society’s Papers, Part IV., pp. 49* et seq. It is too long to be given here.

The Last Ride Together.

“The speaker is a man who has to give up the woman he loves; but his love is probably reciprocated, however inadequately, for his appeal for ‘a last ride together’ is granted. The poem reflects his changing moods and thoughts as ‘here we are riding, she and I’. ‘Fail I alone in words and deeds? Why, all men strive, and who succeeds?’ Careers, even careers called ‘successful’, pass in review—statesmen, poets, sculptors, musicians—each fails in his ideal, for ideals are not attainable in this life of incompletions. But faith gains something for a man. He has loved this woman. That is something gained. If this life gave all, what were there to look forward to? ‘Now, heaven and she are beyond this ride.’ Again,—and this is his closing reflection,—

By the Fireside.

Perhaps in no other of Mr. Browning’s poems are the spiritual uses of “the love of wedded souls” more fully set forth than in the poem, ‘By the Fireside’.

The Monologue is addressed by a happy husband to his “perfect wife, my Leonor”. He looks forward to what he will do when the long, dark autumn evenings come—the evenings of declining age, when the pleasant hue of his soul shall have dimmed, and the music of all its spring and summer voices shall be dumb in life’s November. In his “waking dreams” he will “live o’er again” the happy life he has spent with his loved and loving companion. Passing out where the backward vista ends, he will survey, with her, the pleasant wood through which they have journeyed together. To the hazel-trees of England, where their childhood passed, succeeds a rarer sort, till, by green degrees, they at last slope to Italy, and youth,—Italy, the woman-country, loved by earth’s male-lands. She being the trusted guide, they stand at last in the heart of things, the heaped and dim woods all around them, the single and slim thread of water slipping from slab to slab, the ruined chapel perched half-way up in the Alpine gorge, reached by the one-arched bridge where the water is stopped in a stagnant pond, where all day long a bird sings, and a stray sheep drinks at times. Here, where at afternoon, or almost eve, the silence grows conscious to that degree, one half feels it must get rid of what it knows, they walked side by side, arm in arm, and cheek to cheek; cross silent the crumbling bridge, pity and praise the sweet chapel, read the dead builder’s date, ‘five, six, nine, recross the bridge, take the path again—but wait! Oh moment one and infinite! the west is tender, with its one star, the chrysolite! the sights and sounds, the lights and shades, make up a spell; a moment after, and unseen hands are hanging the night around them fast, but they know that a bar has been broken between life and life, that they are mixed at last in spite of the mortal screen.

Browning everywhere lays great stress on those moments of exalted feeling, when the soul has an unchecked play and is revealed to itself. See in the section of the Introduction on Personality and Art, the passage quoted from the Canon’s Monologue in ‘The Ring and the Book’, and the remarks on conversion.

Mr. Nettleship, in his ‘Essays on Browning’s Poetry’, has traced somewhat minutely the symbolical meaning which he sees in the scenery and circumstances of ‘By the Fireside’. Readers are referred to these Essays.

Prospice.

The speaker in this noble monologue is one who, having fought a good fight and finished his course, lived and wrought thoroughly in sense, and soul, and intellect, is now ready and eager to encounter the ‘Arch-Fear’, Death; and then he will clasp again his Beloved, the soul of his soul, who has gone before. He leaves the rest to God.

With this monologue should be read the mystical description, in ‘The Passing of Arthur’ (Tennyson’s Idylls of the King), of “the last, dim, weird battle of the west”, beginning,—

Amphibian.

This poem is the Prologue to ‘Fifine at the Fair’.

Amphibian is one who unites both lives within himself, the material and the spiritual, in complete concord and mutual subservience— one who “lives and likes life’s way”, and can also free himself of tether, leave the solid land, and, unable to fly, swim “in the sphere which overbrims with passion and thought”,— the sphere of poetry. Such an one may be said to be Browning’s ideal man. “The value and significance of flesh” is everywhere recognized in his poetry. “All good things are ours,” Rabbi Ben Ezra is made to say, “nor soul helps flesh more, now, than flesh helps soul.” The full physical life, in its relation to the spiritual, was never more beautifully sung than it is sung by David, in the poem of ‘Saul’. See the passage beginning, “Oh! our manhood’s prime vigor!” and the passage in ‘Balaustion’s Adventure’, descriptive of Hercules, as he returns, after his conflict with Death, leading back Alkestis.

James Lee’s Wife.

The original title in ‘Dramatis Personae’ (first published in 1864) was ‘James Lee’.

The poem consists of a succession of soliloquies (rather than monologues*), separated, it must be supposed, by longer or shorter intervals of time, and expressive of subjective states induced in a wife whose husband’s love, if it ever were love, indeed, gradually declines to apathy and finally entire deadness. What manner of man James Lee was, is only faintly intimated. The interest centres in, is wholly confined to, the experiences of the wife’s heart, under the circumstances, whatever they were.

The scene is a cottage on a “bitter coast of France”.

I. ‘James Lee’s Wife speaks at the Window’.—The first misgivings of her heart are expressed; and these misgivings are responded to by the outer world. Summer has stopped. Will the summer of her husband’s love stop too, and be succeeded by cheerless winter? The revolt of her heart against such a thought is expressed in the third stanza.

II. ‘By the Fireside’.—Here the faintly indefinite misgiving expressed in the first soliloquy has become a gloomy foreboding of ill; “the heart shrinks and closes, ere the stroke of doom has attained it.”

The fire on the hearth is built of shipwreck wood, which tells of a “dim dead woe befallen this bitter coast of France”, and omens to her foreboding heart the shipwreck of their home. The ruddy shaft of light from the casement must, she thinks, be seen by sailors who envy the warm safe house and happy freight. But there are ships in port which go to ruin,

Her mind reverts to the former occupants of their house, as if she felt an influence shed within it by some unhappy woman who, like herself, in Love’s voyage, saw planks start and open hell beneath.

III. ‘In the Doorway’.—As she looks out from the doorway, everything tells of the coming desolation of winter, and reflects the desolation which, she feels, is coming upon herself. The swallows are ready to depart, the water is in stripes, black, spotted white with the wailing wind. The furled leaf of the fig-tree, in front of their house, and the writhing vines, sympathize with her heart and her spirit:—

But there is to them two, she thinks, no real outward want, that should mar their peace, small as is their house, and poor their field. Why should the change in nature bring change to the spirit which should put life in the darkness and cold?

IV. ‘Along the Beach’.—It does not appear that she anywhere in the poem addresses her husband, face to face. It is soliloquy throughout. In this section it does appear, more than in the others, that she is directly addressing him; but it’s better to understand it as a mental expostulation. He wanted her love, and got it, in its fulness; though an expectation of all harvest and no dearth was not involved in that fulness of love.

Though love greatens and even glorifies, she knew there was much in him waste, with many a weed, and plenty of passions run to seed, but a little good grain too. And such as he was she took him for hers; and he found her his, to watch the olive and wait the vine of his nature; and when rivers of oil and wine came not, the failure only proved that he was her whole world, all the same. But he has been averse to, and has resented, the tillage of his nature to which she has lovingly devoted herself, feeling it to be a bondage;

such as the one with which she closes this soliloquy, representing a love which cares only for outside charms (which, later in the poem, we learn she has not) and looks not deeper.

V. ‘On the Cliff’.—Leaning on the barren turf, which is dead to the roots, and looking at a rock, flat as an anvil’s face, and left dry by the surf, with no trace of living thing about it (Death’s altar by the lone shore), she sees a cricket spring gay, with films of blue, upon the parched turf, and a beautiful butterfly settle and spread its two red fans, on the rock. And then there is to her, wholly taken up, as she is, with their beauty,

and they symbolize to her, Love settling unawares upon men, the level and low, the burnt and bare, in themselves (as are the turf and the rock).

VI. ‘Reading a Book, under the Cliff’.—The first six stanzas of this section she reads from a book. *

Her experiences have carried her beyond what these Lines convey, and she speaks of them somewhat sarcastically and ironically. This “young man”, she thinks, will be wiser in time,

and then the wind, when it begins among the vines, so low, so low, will have for him another language; such as this:—

This is the language SHE has learned: We cannot draw one beauty into our hearts’ core, and keep it changeless. This is the old woe of the world; the tune, to whose rise and fall we live and die. RISE WITH IT, THEN! REJOICE THAT MAN IS HURLED FROM CHANGE TO CHANGE UNCEASINGLY, HIS SOUL’S WINGS NEVER FURLED! To this philosophy of life has she been brought. But she must still sadly reflect how bitter it is for man not to grave, on his soul, one fair, good, wise thing just as he grasped it! For himself death’s wave; while time washes (ah, the sting!) o’er all he’d sink to save.

This reflection must be understood, in her own case, as prompted by her unconquerable wifely love. It is this which points the sting.

VII. ‘Among the Rocks’.—The brown old earth, in autumn, when all the glories of summer are fading, or have faded, wears a good gigantic smile, looking not backward, but forward, with his feet in the ripples of the sea-wash, and listening to the sweet twitters of the ‘white-breasted sea-lark’. The entire stanza has a mystical meaning and must be interpreted in its connection.

She has reached, in this soliloquy, high ground:—

The versification of the first stanza of this section is very lovely, and subtly responsive to the feeling. It exhibits the completest inspiration. No mere metrical skill, nor metrical sensibility even, could have produced it.

VIII. ‘Beside the Drawing-Board’.—She is seated at her drawing-board, and has turned from the poor coarse hand of some little peasant girl she has called in as a model, to work, but with poor success, after a clay cast of a hand by Leonardo da Vinci, who

Her effort has taught her a wholesome lesson: “the worth of flesh and blood at last!” There’s something more than beauty in a hand. Da Vinci would not have turned from the poor coarse hand of the little girl who has been standing by in wondering patience. He, great artist as he was, owed all he achieved to his firm grasp upon, and struggle with, and full faith in, the real. She imagines him saying:—

She has been brought to the last stage of initiation into the mystery of Life. But, as is shown in the next and final section of the poem, the wifely heart has preserved its vitality, has, indeed, grown in vitality, and cherishes a hope which shows its undying love, and is not without a touch of pathos.

IX. ‘On Deck’.—In Sections V.-VIII. the soliloquies are not directed to the husband, as they are in I.-IV. In this last, he is again mentally addressed. She is on board the vessel which is to convey, or is conveying, her to her English home, or somewhere else. As there is nothing in her for him to remember, nothing in her art efforts he cares to see, nothing she was that deserves a place in his mind, she leaves him, sets him free, as he has long shown to her he has wished to be. She, conceding his attitude toward her, asks him to concede, in turn, that such a thing as mutual love HAS been. There’s a slight retaliation here of the wounded spirit. But her heart, after all, MUST have its way; and it cherishes the hope that his soul, which is now cabined, cribbed, confined, may be set free, through some circumstance or other, and she may then become to him what he is to her. And then, what would it matter to her that she was ill-favored? All sense of this would be sunk in the strange joy that he possessed her as she him, in heart and brain. Hers has been a love that was life, and a life that was love. Could one touch of such love for her come in a word of look of his, why, he might turn into her ill-favoredness, she would know nothing of it, being dead to joy.

A Tale.

(The Epilogue to ‘The Two Poets of Croisic’.)

The speaker in this monologue is the wife of a poet, and she tells the story to her husband, of the little cricket that came to the aid of the musician who was contending for a prize, when one of the strings of his lyre snapped. So he made a statue for himself, and on the lyre he held perched his partner in the prize. If her poet-husband gain a prize in poetry, she asks, will some ticket when his statue’s built tell the gazer ‘twas a cricket helped his crippled lyre; that when one string which made “love” sound soft, was snapt in twain, she perched upon the place left vacant and duly uttered, “Love, Love, Love”, whene’er the bass asked the treble to atone for its somewhat sombre drone?

Confessions.

The speaker is a dying man, who replies very decidedly in the negative to the question of the attendant priest as to whether he views the world as a vale of tears. The memory of a past love, which is running through his mind, still keeps the world bright. Of the stolen interviews with the girl he loved he makes confession, using the physic bottles which stand on a table by the bedside to illustrate his story.

The monologue is a choice bit of grotesque humor touched with pathos.

Respectability.

By the title of the poem is meant respectability according to the standard of the beau monde.

The speaker is a woman, as is indicated in the third stanza. The monologue is addressed to her lover.

Stanza 1 shows that they have disregarded the conventionalities of the beau monde. Had they conformed to them, many precious months and years would have passed before they found out the world and what it fears. One cannot well judge of any state of things while in it. It must be looked at from the outside.

Stanza 2. The idea is repeated in a more special form in the first four verses of the stanza; and in the last four their own non-conventional and Bohemian life is indicated.

Stanza 3, vv. 1-4. The speaker knows that this beau monde does not proscribe love, provided it be in accordance with the proprieties which IT has determined upon and established. v. 5. “The world’s good word!” a contemptuous exclamation: what’s the world’s good word worth? “the Institute!” (the reference is, of course, to the French Institute), the Institute! with all its authoritative, dictatorial learnedness! v.6. Guizot and Montalembert were both members of the Institute, and being thus in the same boat, Guizot conventionally receives Montalembert. vv. 7 and 8. These two unconventional Bohemian lovers, strolling together at night, at their own sweet will, see down the court along which they are strolling, three lampions flare, which indicate some big place or other where the “respectables” do congregate; and the woman says to her companion, with a humorous sarcasm, “Put forward your best foot!” that is, we must be very correct passing along here in this brilliant light.

By the two lovers are evidently meant George Sand (the speaker) and Jules Sandeau, with whom she lived in Paris, after she left her husband, M. Dudevant. They took just such unconventional night-strolls together, in the streets of Paris.

Home-Thoughts from Abroad.

An Englishman, in some foreign land, longs for England, now that April’s there, with its peculiar English charms; and then will come May, with the white-throat and the swallows, and, most delightful of all, the thrush, with its rapturous song! And the buttercups, far brighter than the gaudy melon-flower he has before him!

Home-Thoughts from the Sea.

A paean, inspired by the sight, from the sea, of Cape Trafalgar and Gibraltar, both objects of patriotic pride to an Englishman; the one associated with the naval victory gained by the English fleet, under Nelson, over the combined French and Spanish fleets; the other, England’s greatest stronghold.

The first four verses make a characteristic Turner picture.

Old Pictures in Florence.

The speaker in the monologue is looking down upon Florence, in the valley beneath, from a villa on one of the surrounding heights. The startling bell-tower Giotto raised more than startles him. (For an explanation of this, see note under Stanza 2.) Although the poem presents a general survey of the old Florentine masters, the THEME of the poem is really Giotto, who received the affectionate homage of the Florentines, in his own day, and for whom the speaker has a special love. The poem leads up to the prophesied restoration of Freedom to Florence, the return of Art, that departed with her, and the completion of the Campanile, which will vindicate Giotto and Florence together, and crown the restoration of freedom to the city, and its liberation from the hated Austrian rule.

Mrs. Browning’s ‘Casa Guidi Windows’ should be read in connection with this monologue. The strong sympathy which is expressed in the last few stanzas of the monologue, with Italian liberty, is expressed in ‘Casa Guidi Windows’ at a white heat.

“We find,” says Professor Dowden, “a full confession of Mr. Browning’s creed with respect to art in the poem entitled ‘Old Pictures in Florence’. He sees the ghosts of the early Christian masters, whose work has never been duly appreciated, standing sadly by each mouldering Italian Fresco; and when an imagined interlocutor inquires what is admirable in such work as this, the poet answers that the glory of Christian art lies in its rejecting a limited perfection, such as that of the art of ancient Greece, the subject of which was finite, and the lesson taught by which was submission, and in its daring to be incomplete, and faulty, faulty because its subject was great with infinite fears and hopes, and because it must needs teach man not to submit but to aspire.”

Pictor Ignotus.

{Florence, 15—.}

An unknown painter reflects, but without envy, upon the praise which has been bestowed on a youthful artist,—what that praise involves. He himself was conscious of all the power, and more, which the youth has shown; no bar stayed, nor fate forbid, to exercise it, nor would flesh have shrunk from seconding his soul. All he saw he could have put upon canvas;

And when he thought how sweet would be the earthly fame which his work would bring him, “the thought grew frightful, ‘twas so wildly dear!” But a vision flashed before him and changed that thought. Along with the loving, trusting ones were cold faces, that begun to press on him and judge him. Such as these would buy and sell his pictures for garniture and household-stuff. His pictures, so sacred to his soul, would be the subject of their prate, “This I love, or this I hate, this likes me more, and this affects me less!” To avoid such sacrilege, he has chosen his portion. And if his heart sometimes sinks, while at his monotonous work of painting endless cloisters and eternal aisles, with the same series, Virgin, Babe, and Saint, with the same cold, calm, beautiful regard, at least no merchant traffics in his heart. Guarded by the sanctuary’s gloom, from vain tongues, his pictures may die, surely, gently die.

Andrea del Sarto.

(Called “The Faultless Painter”.)

In this monologue, “the faultless painter” (Andrea Senza Errori, as he was surnamed by the Italians) is the speaker. He addresses his worthless wife, Lucrezia, upon whom he weakly dotes, and for whom he has broken faith with his royal patron, Francis I. of France, in order that he might meet her demands for money, to be spent upon her pleasures. He laments that he has fallen below himself as an artist, that he has not realized the possibilities of his genius, half accusing, from the better side of his nature, and half excusing, in his uxoriousness, the woman who has had no sympathy with him in the high ideals which, with her support, he might have realized, and thus have placed himself beside Angelo and Rafael. “Had the mouth then urged ‘God and the glory! never care for gain. The present by the future, what is that? Live for fame, side by side with Angelo— Rafael is waiting. Up to God all three!’ I might have done it for you.”

In his ‘Comparative Study of Tennyson and Browning’ *, Professor Edward Dowden, setting forth Browning’s doctrines on the subject of Art, remarks:—

“The true glory of art is, that in its creation there arise desires and aspirations never to be satisfied on earth, but generating new desires and new aspirations, by which the spirit of man mounts to God Himself. The artist (Mr. Browning loves to insist on this point) who can realize in marble or in color, or in music, his ideal, has thereby missed the highest gain of art. In ‘Pippa Passes’ the regeneration of the young sculptor’s work turns on his finding that in the very perfection which he had attained lies ultimate failure. And one entire poem, ‘Andrea del Sarto’, has been devoted to the exposition of this thought. Andrea is ‘the faultless painter’; no line of his drawing ever goes astray; his hand expressed adequately and accurately all that his mind conceives; but for this very reason, precisely because he is ‘the faultless painter’, his work lacks the highest qualities of art:—

“And in the youthful Raphael, whose technical execution fell so far below his own, Andrea recognizes the true master:—

“In Andrea del Sarto,” says Vasari, “art and nature combined to show all that may be done in painting, where design, coloring, and invention unite in one and the same person. Had this master possessed a somewhat bolder and more elevated mind, had he been as much distinguished for higher qualifications as he was for genius and depth of judgment in the art he practised, he would, beyond all doubt, have been without an equal. But there was a certain timidity of mind, a sort of diffidence and want of force in his nature, which rendered it impossible that those evidences of ardor and animation which are proper to the more exalted character, should ever appear in him; nor did he at any time display one particle of that elevation which, could it but have been added to the advantages wherewith he was endowed, would have rendered him a truly divine painter: wherefore the works of Andrea are wanting in those ornaments of grandeur, richness, and force, which appear so conspicuously in those of many other masters. His figures are, nevertheless, well drawn, they are entirely free from errors, and perfect in all their proportions, and are for the most part simple and chaste: the expression of his heads is natural and graceful in women and children, while in youths and old men it is full of life and animation. The draperies of this master are beautiful to a marvel, and the nude figures are admirably executed, the drawing is simple, the coloring is most exquisite, nay, it is truly divine.”

Mr. Ernest Radford, quoting this passage, in the Browning Society’s ‘Illustrations to Browning’s Poems’, remarks that “nearly the whole POEM of ‘Andrea del Sarto’ is a mere translation into the SUBJECTIVE Mood (if I may so say) of this passage in which the painter’s work is criticised from an external standpoint. . . .

“Recent researches into Andrea’s life throw doubt upon a good deal that Vasari has written concerning the unhappiness of his marriage and the manner of his death. And the biographer himself modifies, in his second edition, the account he had given of the fair Lucrezia. Vasari, it should be said, was a pupil of Andrea, and therefore must, in this instance, have had special opportunities of knowledge, though he may, on the same account, have had some special ‘animus’ when he wrote. For the purposes of his poem, Browning is content to take the traditional account of the matter, which, after all, seems to substantially accurate. The following is from the first edition:—

“At that time there was a most beautiful girl in Via di San Gallo, who was married to a cap-maker, and who, though born of a poor and vicious father, carried about her as much pride and haughtiness, as beauty and fascination. She delighted in trapping the hearts of men, and amongst others ensnared the unlucky Andrea, whose immoderate love for her soon caused him to neglect the studies demanded by his art, and in great measure to discontinue the assistance which he had given to his parents.

“Certain pictures of Andrea’s which had been painted for the King of France were received with much favor, and an invitation to Andrea soon followed their delivery, to ‘go and paint at the French Court’. He went accordingly, and ‘painted proudly’, as Browning relates, and prospered every way. But one day, being employed on the figure of a St. Jerome doing penance, which he was painting for the mother of the King, there came to him certain letters from Florence; these were written him by his wife; and from that time (whatever may have been the cause) he began to think of leaving France. He asked permission to that effect from the French King accordingly, saying that he desired to return to Florence, but that, when he had arranged his affairs in that city, he would return without fail to his Majesty; he added, that when he came back, his wife should accompany him, to the end that he might remain in France the more quietly; and that he would bring with him pictures and sculptures of great value. The King, confiding in these promises, gave him money for the purchase of those pictures and sculptures, Andrea taking an oath on the gospels to return within the space of a few months, and that done he departed to his native city.

“He arrived safely in Florence, enjoying the society of his beautiful wife, and that of his friends, with the sight of his native city, during several months; but when the period specified by the King, and that at which he ought to have returned, had come and passed, he found himself at the end, not only of his own money, but, what with building” (the “melancholy little house they built to be so gay with”) “indulging himself with various pleasures, and doing no work, of that belonging to the French monarch also, the whole of which he had consumed. He was, nevertheless, determined to return to France, but the prayers and tears of his wife had more power than his own necessities, or the faith which he had pledged to the King.”

“And so for a pretty woman’s sake, was a great nature degraded. And out of sympathy with its impulses, broad, and deep, and tender as only the greatest can show, ‘Andrea del Sarto’, our great, sad poem, was written.”

The monologue exhibits great perfection of finish. Its composition was occasioned, as Mr. Furnivall learned from the poet himself (see ‘Browning Society’s Papers’, Part II., p. 161), by the portrait of Andrea del Sarto and his wife, painted by himself, and now in the Pitti Palace, in Florence. Mr. Browning’s friend, and his wife’s friend, Mr. John Kenyon (the same to whom Mrs. Browning dedicated ‘Aurora Leigh’), had asked the poet to buy him a copy of Andrea del Sarto’s picture. None could be got, and so Mr. Browning put into a poem what the picture had said to himself, and sent it to Mr. Kenyon. It was certainly a worthy substitute.

Fra Lippo Lippi.

The Italian artist, Lippi, is the speaker. Lippi was one of the representatives of the protest made in the fifteenth century against the conventional spiritualization in the art of his time. In the monologue he gives expression to his faith in the real, in the absolute spiritual significance of the lineaments of the human face, and in the forms of nature. The circumstances under which this faith is expressed, are somewhat droll. Lippi was a wild fellow and given to excesses of various kinds. When a boy he took refuge against starvation in the convent of the Carmelites, in Florence, and became a monk; but he proved unfaithful to his religious vows, and, impelled by his genius for art, made his escape from the convent, having first profited by the work of Masaccio, and devoted himself to painting. After many romantic experiences, and having risen to distinction in his art, he returned to Florence and became known to Cosimo de’ Medici, in whose employ he is at the time he is presented to us in the monologue. It appears he had been shut up by his patron, for three weeks, in order to be kept at work, “a-painting for the great man, saints and saints and saints again. I could not paint all night—Ouf! I leaned out of window for fresh air. There came a hurry of feet, and little feet, a sweep of lutestrings, laughs, and whifts of song,”—etc. In his eagerness to join in the fun, he tears into shreds curtain, and counterpane, and coverlet, makes a rope, descends, and comes up with the fun hard by Saint Laurence, hail fellow, well met. On his way back toward daybreak, he is throttled by the police, and it is to them the monologue is addressed. He ingratiates himself with them by telling his history, and by his talk on art, and a most interesting and deeply significant talk it is, the gist of it being well expressed in a passage of Mrs. Browning’s ‘Aurora Leigh’, “paint a body well, you paint a soul by implication, like the grand first Master. . . . Without the spiritual, observe, the natural’s impossible;— no form, no motion! Without sensuous, spiritual is inappreciable;— no beauty or power! And in this twofold sphere the two-fold man (and still the artist is intensely a man) holds firmly by the natural, to reach the spiritual beyond it,—fixes still the type with mortal vision, to pierce through, with eyes immortal, to the antetype, some call the ideal,—better called the real, and certain to be called so presently when things shall have their names.”

Browning has closely followed, in the monologue, the art-historian, Giorgio Vasari, as the following extracts will show (the translation is that of Mrs. Jonathan Foster, in the Bohn Library):—

“The Carmelite monk, Fra Filippo di Tommaso Lippi (1412-1469) *1* was born at Florence in a bye-street called Ardiglione, under the Canto alla Cuculia, and behind the convent of the Carmelites. By the death of his father he was left a friendless orphan at the age of two years, his mother having also died shortly after his birth. The child was for some time under the care of a certain Mona Lapaccia, his aunt, the sister of his father, who brought him up with very great difficulty till he had attained his eighth year, when, being no longer able to support the burden of his maintenance, she placed him in the above-named convent of the Carmelites. Here, in proportion as he showed himself dexterous and ingenious in all works performed by hand, did he manifest the utmost dulness and incapacity in letters, to which he would never apply himself, nor would he take any pleasure in learning of any kind. The boy continued to be called by his worldly name of Filippo, *2* and being placed with others, who like himself were in the house of the novices, under the care of the master, to the end that the latter might see what could be done with him; in place of studying, he never did anything but daub his own books, and those of the other boys, with caricatures, whereupon the prior determined to give him all means and every opportunity for learning to draw. The chapel of the Carmine had then been newly painted by Masaccio, and this being exceedingly beautiful, pleased Fra Filippo greatly, wherefore he frequented it daily for his recreation, and, continually practising there, in company with many other youths, who were constantly drawing in that place, he surpassed all the others by very much in dexterity and knowledge. . . . Proceeding thus, and improving from day to day, he had so closely followed the manner of Masaccio, and his works displayed so much similarity to those of the latter, that many affirmed the spirit of Masaccio to have entered the body of Fra Filippo. . . .

“It is said that Fra Filippo was much addicted to the pleasures of sense, insomuch that he would give all he possessed to secure the gratification of whatever inclination might at the moment be predominant; . . . It was known that, while occupied in the pursuit of his pleasures, the works undertaken by him received little or none of his attention; for which reason Cosimo de’ Medici, wishing him to execute a work in his own palace, shut him up, that he might not waste his time in running about; but having endured this confinement for two days, he then made ropes with the sheets of his bed, which he cut to pieces for that purpose, and so having let himself down from a window, escaped, and for several days gave himself up to his amusements. When Cosimo found that the painter had disappeared, he caused him to be sought, and Fra Filippo at last returned to his work, but from that time forward Cosimo gave him liberty to go in and out at his pleasure, repenting greatly of having previously shut him up, when he considered the danger that Fra Filippo had incurred by his folly in descending from the window; and ever afterwards laboring to keep him to his work by kindness only, he was by this means much more promptly and effectually served by the painter, and was wont to say that the excellencies of rare genius were as forms of light and not beasts of burden.”

A Face.

The speaker imagines the head of a beautiful girl he knows, “painted upon a background of pale gold, such as the Tuscan’s early art prefers”, and details the picture as he would have it.

The Bishop orders his Tomb.

The Bishop orders his Tomb at St. Praxed’s Church. * {Rome, 15—.}

The dying Bishop pleads with his natural sons that they give him the sumptuous tomb they stand pledged to,—such a tomb as will excite the envy of his old enemy Gandolf, who cheated him out of a favorite niche in St. Praxed’s Church, by dying before him, and securing it for his tomb.

It is not necessary to suppose that the natural sons are present. His, perhaps, delirious mind is occupied with the precious marbles and stones and other luxuries he has loved to much, and with his old rival and enemy, Gandolf.

John Ruskin, in his ‘Modern Painters’ (Vol. IV., chap. XX., Section 32), remarks:—

“Robert Browning is unerring in every sentence he writes of the Middle Ages; always vital, right, and profound; so that in the matter of art, . . .there is hardly a principle connected with the mediaeval temper, that he has not struck upon in those seemingly careless and too rugged rhymes of his. There is a curious instance, by the way, in a short poem *1* referring to this very subject of tomb and image sculpture; all illustrating just one of those phases of local human character which, though belonging to Shakespeare’s own age, he {Shakespeare} never noticed, because it was specially Italian and un-English; connected also closely with the influence of mountains on the heart, and therefore with our immediate inquiries.*2* I mean the kind of admiration with which a southern artist regarded the STONE he worked in; and the pride which populace or priest took in the possession of precious mountain substance, worked into the pavements of their cathedrals, and the shafts of their tombs.

“Observe, Shakespeare, in the midst of architecture and tombs of wood, or freestone, or brass, naturally thinks of GOLD as the best enriching and ennobling substance for them; in the midst also of the fever of the Renaissance he writes, as every one else did, in praise of precisely the most vicious master of that school— Giulio Romano*; but the modern poet, living much in Italy, and quit of the Renaissance influence, is able fully to enter into the Italian feeling, and to see the evil of the Renaissance tendency, not because he is greater than Shakespeare, but because he is in another element, and has seen other things. . . .

“I know no other piece of modern English, prose or poetry, in which there is so much told, as in these lines {‘The Bishop orders his Tomb’}, of the Renaissance spirit,—its worldliness, inconsistency, pride, hypocrisy, ignorance of itself, love of art, of luxury, and of good Latin. It is nearly all that I said of the Central Renaissance in thirty pages of the ‘Stones of Venice’ put into as many lines, Browning’s being also the antecedent work. The worst of it is that this kind of concentrated writing needs so much SOLUTION before the reader can fairly get the good of it, that people’s patience fails them, and they give the thing up as insoluble; though, truly, it ought to be to the current of common thought like Saladin’s talisman, dipped in clear water, not soluble altogether, but making the element medicinable.”

Professor Dowden, in regard to Mr. Browning’s doctrines on the subject of art, remarks:—

“It is always in an unfavorable light that he depicts the virtuoso or collector, who, conscious of no unsatisfied aspirations such as those which make the artist’s joy and sorrow, rests in the visible products of art, and looks up to nothing above or beyond them. . . . The unbelieving and worldly spirit of the dying Bishop, who orders his tomb at St. Praxed’s, his sense of the vanity of the world simply because the world is passing out of his reach, the regretful memory of the pleasures of his youth, the envious spite towards Gandolf, who robbed him of the best position for a tomb, and the dread lest his reputed sons should play him false and fail to carry out his designs, are united with a perfect appreciation of Renaissance art, and a luxurious satisfaction, which even a death-bed cannot destroy, in the splendor of voluptuous form and color. The great lump of lapis lazuli,

must poise between his sculptured knees; the black basalt must contrast with the bas-relief in bronze below:—

the inscription must be ‘choice Latin, picked phrase, Tully’s every word’.”

A Toccata of Galuppi’s.

The speaker is listening to a Toccata of Galuppi’s, and the music tells him of how they lived once in Venice, where the merchants were the kings. He was never out of England, yet it’s as if he SAW it all, through what is addressed to the ear alone.

But the music does more than reflect the life of mirth and folly which was led in the gay and voluptuous city. It has an undertone of sadness; its lesser thirds so plaintive, its sixths diminished, sigh on sigh, tell the votaries of pleasure something; its suspensions, its solutions, its commiserating sevenths, awaken in them the question of their hold on life. That question the music answers.

Abt Vogler.

(After he has been extemporizing upon the musical instrument of his invention.)

The Abbe Georg Joseph Vogler was born at Wuerzburg (Bavaria), June 15, 1749; appointed Kappelmeister to the King of Sweden, in 1786. While in this capacity, the “musical instrument of his invention”, called the Orchestrion, was constructed; * went to London with his organ, in 1790, and gave a series of successful concerts, realizing some 1200 Pounds, and making a name as an organist; commissioned to reconstruct the organ of the Pantheon on the plan of his Orchestrion; and later, received like commissions at Copenhagen and at Neu Ruppin in Prussia; founded a school of music at Copenhagen, and published there many works; in 1807 was appointed by the Grand Duke, Louis I., Kappelmeister at Darmstadt; founded there his last school, two of his pupils being Weber and Meyerbeer; died in 1814. Browning presents Vogler as a great extemporizer, in which character he appears to have been the most famous. For a further account, see Miss Eleanor Marx’s paper on the Abbe Vogler, from which the above facts have been derived (‘Browning Soc. Papers’, Pt. III., pp. 339-343). Her authorities are Fetis’s ‘Biogr. Univ. des Musiciens’ and Nisard’s ‘Vie de l’Abbe Vogler’.

Mrs. Turnbull, in her paper on ‘Abt Vogler’ (‘Browning Soc. Papers’, Pt. IV., pp. 469-476), has so well traced the argument of the monologue, that I cannot do better than quote the portion of her paper in which she presents it:—

“Abt Vogler has been extemporizing on his instrument, pouring out through it all his feelings of yearning and aspiration; and now, waking from his state of absorption, excited, and trembling with excess of emotion, he breaks out into the wish, ‘Would it might tarry!’ In verses {stanzas} one and two he compares the music he has made to a palace, which Solomon (as legends of the Koran relate) summoned all creatures, by the magic name on his ring, to raise for the princess he loved; so all the keys, joyfully submitting to the magic power of the master, combine to aid him, the low notes rushing in like demons to give him the base on which to build his airy structure; the high notes like angels throwing decoration of carving and tracery on pinnacle and flying buttress, till in verse three its outline, rising ever higher and higher, shows in the clouds like St. Peter’s dome, illuminated and towering into the vasty sky; and it seems as if his soul, upborne on the surging waves of music, had reached its highest elevation. But no. Influences from without, inexplicable, unexpected, join to enhance his own attempts; the heavens themselves seem to bow down and to flash forth inconceivable splendors on his amazed spirit, till the limitations of time and space are gone—‘there is no more near nor far’.

“. . .In this strange fusion of near and far, of heaven and earth, presences hover, spirits of those long dead or of those yet to be, lured by the power of music to return to life, or to begin it. Figures are dimly descried in the fervor and passion of music, even as of old in the glare and glow of the fiery furnace.

“Verses four and five are a bold attempt to describe the indescribable, to shadow forth that strange state of clairvoyance when the soul shakes itself free from all external impressions, which Vogel tells us was the case with Schubert, and which is true of all great composers— ‘whether in the body or out of the body, I cannot say’.

“In the sixth verse we come to a comparison of music with the other arts. Poetry, painting, and sculpture deal with actual form, and the tangible realities of life. They are subject to laws, and we know how they are produced; can watch the painting grow beneath the artist’s touches, or the poem take shape line by line.

“True it needs the soul of the artist to combine and to interfuse the elements with which he wishes to create any true work of art, but music is almost entirely independent of earthly element in which to clothe and embody itself. It does not allow of a realistic conception, but without intermediate means is in a direct line from God, and enables us to comprehend that Power which created all things out of nothing, with whom TO WILL and TO DO are one and the same.

“Schopenhauer says, ‘There is no sound in Nature fit to serve the musician as a model, or to supply him with more than an occasional suggestion for his sublime purpose. He approaches the original sources of existence more closely than all other artists, nay, even than Nature herself.’

“Heine has also noticed this element of miracle, which coincides exactly with Browning’s view expressed in the lines:—

Now, these seven verses contain the music of the poem; in the remaining ones we pass to Browning’s Platonic philosophy.

“In the eighth verse a sad thought of the banished music obtrudes— ‘never to be again’. So wrapt was he in the emotions evoked, he had no time to think of what tones called them up, and now all is past and gone. His magic palace, unlike that of Solomon, has ‘melted into air, into thin air’, and, ‘like the baseless fabric of a vision’, only the memory of it is left. . . . And, depressed by this saddest of human experiences, . . .he turns away impatient from the promise of more and better, to demand from God the same— the very same. Browning with magnificent assurance answers, ‘yes, you shall have the same’.

“. . .the ineffable Name which built the palace of King Solomon, which builds houses not made with hands—houses of flesh which souls inhabit, craving for a heart and a love to fill them, can and will satisfy their longings; . . .I know no other words in the English language which compresses into small compass such a body of high and inclusive thought as verse nine. (1) God the sole changeless, to whom we turn with passionate desire as the one abiding-place, as we find how all things suffer loss and change, ourselves, alas! the greatest. (2) His power and love able and willing to satisfy the hearts of His creatures— the thought expatiated on by St. Augustine and George Herbert here crystallized in one line:—‘Doubt that Thy power can fill the heart that Thy power expands?’ (3) Then the magnificent declaration, ‘There shall never be one lost good’—the eternal nature of goodness, while its opposite evil. . .is a non-essential which shall one day pass away entirely, and be swallowed up of good. . . .

“Now follows an announcement, as by tongue of prophet or seer, that we shall at last find all our ideals complete in the mind of God, not put forth timorously, but with triumphant knowledge— knowledge gained by music whose creative power has for the moment revealed to us the permanent existence of these ideals.

“The sorrow and pain and failure which we are all called upon to suffer here, . . .are seen to be proofs and evidences of this great belief. Without the discords how should we learn to prize the harmony?

“Carried on the wings of music and high thought, we have ascended one of those Delectable mountains—Pisgah-peaks from which

and whence we can descry, however faintly, the land that is very far off to which we travel, and we would fain linger, nay, abide, on the mount, building there our tabernacles.

“But it cannot be. That fine air is difficult to breathe long, and life, with its rounds of custom and duty, recalls us. So we descend with the musician, through varying harmonies and sliding modulations. . .deadening the poignancy of the minor third in the more satisfying reassuring chord of the dominant ninth, which again finds its rest on the key-note—C major— the common chord, so sober and uninteresting that it well symbolizes the common level of life, the prosaic key-note to which unfortunately most of our lives are set.

“We return, however, strengthened and refreshed, braced to endure the wrongs which we know shall be one day righted, to acquiesce in the limited and imperfect conditions of earth, which we know shall be merged at last in heaven’s perfect round, and to accept with patience the renunciation demanded of us here, knowing

In his ‘Introductory Address to the Browning Society’, the Rev. J. Kirkman, of Queen’s College, Cambridge, says of ‘Abt Volger’:—

“The spiritual transcendentalism of music, the inscrutable relation between the seen and the eternal, of which music alone unlocks the gate by inarticulate expression, has never had an articulate utterance from a poet before ‘Abt Vogler’. This is of a higher order of composition, quite nobler, than the merely fretful rebellion against the earthly condition imposed here below upon heavenly things, seen in ‘Master Hughes’ {of Saxe-Gotha}. In that and other places, I am not sure that persons of musical ATTAINMENT, as distinguished from musical SOUL AND SYMPATHY, do not rather find a professional gratification at the technicalities. . .than get conducted to ‘the law within the law’. But in ‘Abt Vogler’, the understanding is spell-bound, and carried on the wings of the emotions, as Ganymede in the soft down of the eagle, into the world of spirit. . . .

“The beautiful utterances of Richter alone approach to the value of Browning’s on music. Well does he deserve remembrance for the remark, that ‘Music is the only language incapable of expressing anything impure’, and for many others. They all {the poets quoted in the passage omitted above}, comparatively, speak FROM OUTSIDE; Browning speaks FROM INSIDE, as if an angel came to give all the hints we could receive,

He speaks of music as Dante does of Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory, because he has been there. Even the musical Milton, whose best line is, ‘In linked sweetness long drawn out’, whose best special treatment of music is in the occasional poem, ‘At a solemn music’, has given us nothing of the nature of ‘Abt Vogler’. It should be perfectly learnt by heart; and it will be ever whispering analogies to the soul in daily life. Because, of course, the mystery of life and the mystery of music make one of the most fundamental transcendental harmonies breathed into our being.”

‘Touch him ne’er so lightly’, etc.

In the first stanza some one describes admiringly a writer of mushroom poems. In the second stanza another gives the genesis of a poem which becomes a nation’s heritage.

Memorabilia.

The speaker is one to whom Shelley is an almost ideal being. He can hardly think of him as a man of flesh and blood. He meets some one who has actually seen him and talked with him; and it’s all so strange to him, and he expresses so much surprise at it, that it moves the laughter of the other, and he breaks off and speaks of crossing a moor. Only a hand’s breadth of it shines alone ‘mid the blank miles round about; for there he picked up, and put inside his breast, a moulted feather, an eagle-feather. He forgets the rest. There is, in fact, nothing more for him to remember. The eagle-feather causes an isolated flash of association with the poet of the atmosphere, the winds, and the clouds,

How it strikes a Contemporary.

The speaker, a Spaniard, it must be supposed, describes to his companion the only poet he knew in his life, who roamed along the promenades and through the by-streets and lanes and alleys of Valladolid, an old dog, bald and blindish, at his heels. He appeared interested in whatever he looked on, and his looks went everywhere, taking in the cobbler at his trade, the man slicing lemons into drink, the coffee-roaster’s brazier, and the boys turning its winch; books on stalls, strung-up fly-leaf ballads, posters by the wall;

Popular imagination is active as to who and what he is; perhaps a spy, or it may be “a recording chief-inquisitor, the town’s true master if the town but knew”, who by letters keeps “our Lord the King” well informed “of all thought, said, and acted”; but of the King’s approval of these letters there has been no evidence of any kind.

The speaker found no truth in one of the popular reports, namely, that this strange man lived in great luxury and splendor. On the contrary, he lived in the plainest, simplest manner; played a game of cribbage with his maid, in the evening, and, when the church clock struck ten, went straight off to bed. It seems that while the belief of the people was, that this man kept up a correspondence with their earthly Lord, the King, noting all that went on, the speaker, in the monologue is aware that it was the Heavenly King with whom he corresponded. In the last paragraph of his monologue he expresses the wish that he might have looked in, yet had haply been afraid, when this man came to die, and seen, ministering to him, the heavenly attendants,—

He then adds that there was

we who are so inferior to that divine poet; but,

“Transcendentalism”.

This monologue is addressed by a poet to a brother-poet whom he finds fault with for speaking naked thoughts instead of draping them in sights and sounds. If boys want images and melody, grown men, you think, want abstract thought. Far from it. The objects which throng our youth, we see and hear, quite as a matter of course. But what of it, if you could tell what they mean? The German Boehme, with his affinities for the abstract, never cared for plants until, one day, he noticed they could speak; that the daisy colloquized with the cowslip on SUCH themes! themes found extant in Jacob’s prose. But when life’s summer passes while reading prose in that tough book he wrote, getting some sense or other out of it, who helps, then, to repair our loss? Another Boehme, say you, with a tougher book and subtler abstract meanings of what roses say? Or some stout Mage like John of Halberstadt, who MADE THINGS Boehme WROTE THOUGHTS about? Ah, John’s the man for us! who instead of giving us the wise talk of roses, scatters all around us the roses themselves, pouring heaven into this shut house of life. So come, the harp back to your heart again, instead of speaking dry words across its strings. Your own boy-face bent over the finer chords, and following the cherub at the top that points to God with his paired half-moon wings, is a far better poem than your poem with all its naked thoughts.

Apparent Failure.

The poet, it appears, speaks here in his own person. Sauntering about Paris, he comes upon the Doric little Morgue, the dead-house, where they show their drowned. He enters, and sees through the screen of glass, the bodies of three men who committed suicide, the day before, by drowning themselves in the Seine.

In the last stanza, he gives expression to his hopeful philosophy, which recognizes “some soul of goodness, in things evil”; * which sees in human nature, “potentiality of final deliverance from the evil in it, given only time enough for the work”. In this age of professed and often, no doubt, affected, agnosticism and pessimism, Browning is the foremost apostle of Hope. He, more than any other great author of the age, whether philosopher, or poet, or divine, has been inspired with the faith that

Compare with this, the following stanzas from Tennyson’s ‘In Memoriam’, Section 54:—

Rabbi Ben Ezra.

Accompany me, my young friend, in my survey of life from youth to old age.

The present life does not rise to its best and then decline to its worst; “the best is yet to be, the last of life, for which the first was made.”

The indecisions, perplexities, and yearnings, the hopes and fears of youth, I do not remonstrate against. They are the conditions of vitality and growth, distinguish man’s life from the limited completeness of the “low kinds” of creation, “finished and finite clods untroubled by a spark”; and should be prized as inseparable from his high rank in existence.

Life would have nothing to boast of, were man formed but to experience an unalloyed joy, to find always and never to seek. Care irks not the crop-full bird, and doubt frets not the maw-crammed beast. But man is disturbed by a divine spark which is his title to a nearer relationship with God who gives than with his creatures that receive.

The rebuffs he meets with should be welcomed. Life’s true success is secured through obstacles, and seeming failures, and unfulfilled aspirations. He is but a brute whose soul is conformed to his flesh, whose spirit works for the play of arms and legs. The test of the body’s worth should be, the extent to which it can project the soul on its lone way.

But we must not calculate soul-profits all the time. Gifts of every kind which belong to our nature should prove their use, their own good in themselves. I own that the past was for me profuse of power on every side, of perfection at every turn, which my eyes and ears took in, and my brain treasured up. The heart should beat in harmony with this life, and feel how good it is to live and learn, and see the whole design. I who once saw only Power, now see Love perfect also, and am thankful that I was a man, and trust what my Maker will do with me.

This flesh is pleasant, and the soul can repose in it, after its own activities. It is the solid land to which it can return when wearied with its flights; and we often wish, in our yearnings for rest, that we might hold some prize to match those manifold possessions of the brute, might gain most as we should do best; but the realization of such a wish is not compatible with the dignity of our nature.

Flesh and soul must be mutually subservient; one must not be merely subjected to the other, not even the inferior to the superior. Let us cry, “All good things are ours, nor soul helps flesh more, now, than flesh helps soul.”

Let, then, youth enter into its heritage, and use and enjoy it; let it then pass into an approved manhood, “for aye removed from the developed brute; a God, though in the germ”; let it pass fearless and unperplexed as to what weapons to select, what armor to indue for the battle which awaits that approved manhood.

Youth ended, let what it has resulted in, be taken account of; wherein it succeeded, wherein it failed; and having proved the past, let it face the future, satisfied in acting to-morrow what is learned to-day.

As it was better that youth should awkwardly strive TOWARD making, than repose in what it found made, so is it better that age, exempt from strife, should know, than tempt further. As in youth, age was waited for, so in age, wait for death, without fear, and with the absolute soul-knowledge which is independent of the reasoning intellect of youth. It is this absolute soul-knowledge which severs great minds from small, rather than intellectual power.

Human judgments differ. Whom shall my soul believe? One conclusion may, at least, be rested in: a man’s true success must not be estimated by things done, which had their price in the world; but by that which the world’s coarse thumb and finger failed to plumb; by his immature instincts and unsure purposes which weighed not as his work in the world’s estimation, yet went toward making up the main amount of his real worth; by thoughts which could not be contained in narrow acts, by fancies which would not submit to the bonds of language; by all that he strived after and could not attain, by all that was ignored by men with only finite and realizable aims: such are God’s standards of his worth.

All the true acquisitions of the soul, all the reflected results of its energizing after the unattainable in this life, all that has truly BEEN, belong to the absolute, and are permanent amid all earth’s changes. It is, indeed, through these changes, through the dance of plastic circumstance, that the permanent is secured. They are the machinery, the Divine Potter’s wheel, which gives the soul its bent, tries it, and turns it forth a cup for the Master’s lips, sufficiently impressed.

The following account of Rabbi Ben Ezra, I take from Dr. F. J. Furnivall’s ‘Bibliography of Rober Browning’ (‘Browning Soc. Papers’, Part II., p. 162):—

“Rabbi Ben Ezra, or Ibn Ezra, was a learned Jew, 1092-1167 A.D. Ibn Ezra and Maimonides, whom he is said to have visited in Egypt, were two of the four great Philosophers or Lights of the Jews in the Middle Ages. Ibn Ezra was born at Toledo in Spain, about 1092 or 1093 A.D., or in 1088 according to Graetz, ‘Geschichte der Juden’, vi. 198. He was poor, but studied hard, composed poems wherewith to ‘Adorn my own, my Hebrew nation’, married, had a son Isaac (a poet too), travelled to Africa, the Holy Land, Rome in 1140, Persia, India, Italy, France, England. He wrote many treatises on Hebrew Grammar, astronomy, mathematics, &c., commentaries on the books of the Bible, &c.—many of them in Rome—and two pamphlets in England ‘for a certain Salomon of London’. Joseph of Maudeville was one of his English pupils. He died in 1167, at the age of 75, either in Kalahorra, on the frontier of Navarre, or in Rome. His commentary on Isaiah has been englished by M. Friedlaender, and published by the Society of Hebrew Literature, Truebner, 1873. From the Introduction to that book I take these details. Ibn Ezra believed in a future life. In his commentary on Isaiah 55:3, ‘AND YOUR SOUL SHALL LIVE’, he says, ‘That is, your soul shall live forever after the death of the body, or you will receive new life through Messiah, when you will return to the Divine Law.’ See also on Isaiah 39:18. Of the potter’s clay passage, Isaiah 29:16, he has only a translation, ‘Shall man be esteemed as the potter’s clay’, and no comment that could ever have given Browning a hint for his use of the metaphor in his poem, even if he had ever seen Ibn Ezra’s commentary. See Rabbi Ben Ezra’s fine ‘Song of Death’ in stanzas 12-20 of the grimly humorous Holy-Cross Day.”

A Grammarian’s Funeral.

The devoted disciples of a dead grammarian are bearing his body up a mountain-side for burial on its lofty summit, “where meteors shoot, clouds form, lightnings are loosened, stars come and go! Lofty designs must close in like effects: loftily lying, leave him,— still loftier than the world suspects, living and dying”.

This poem is INFORMED throughout with the poet’s iterated doctrine in regard to earth life,—to the relativity of that life. The grammarian, in his hunger and thirst after knowledge and truth, thought not of time. “What’s time? Leave Now for dogs and apes! Man has Forever.” “Oh, if we draw a circle premature, heedless of far gain, greedy for quick returns of profit, sure bad is our bargain!”

The poem “exhibits something of the life of the Scaligers and the Casaubons, of many an early scholar, like Roger Bacon’s friend, Pierre de Maricourt, working at some region of knowledge, and content to labor without fame so long as he mastered thoroughly whatever he undertook” (‘Contemporary Rev.’, iv., 135).

But the grammarian was true to one side only of Browning’s philosophy of life. He disregarded the claims of the physical life, and became “soul-hydropic with a sacred thirst”. *

The lyrico-dramatic verse of this monologue is especially noticeable. There is a march in it, exhibiting the spirit with which the bearers of the corpse are conveying it up the mountain-side.

An Epistle containing the Strange Medical Experience of Karshish, the Arab Physician.

Karshish, the Arab physician, has been journeying in quest of knowledge pertaining to his art, and writes to his all-sagacious master, Abib, ostensibly about the specimens he has gathered of medicinal plants and minerals, and the observations he has made; but his real interest, which he endeavors to conceal by passing to matters of greater import to him, as he would have his sage at home believe, is in what he pronounces “a case of mania, subinduced by epilepsy”. His last letter brought his journeyings to Jericho. He is now on his way to Jerusalem, and has reached Bethany, where he passes the night.

The case of mania which so interests him,—far more than he is willing to admit,—is that of Lazarus, whose firm conviction rests that he was dead (in fact they buried him) and then restored to life by a Nazarene physician of his tribe, who afterwards perished in a tumult. The man Lazarus is witless, he writes, of the relative value of all things. Vast armaments assembled to besiege his city, and the passing of a mule with gourds, are all one to him; while at some trifling fact, he’ll gaze, rapt with stupor, as if it had for him prodigious import. Should his child sicken unto death, why look for scarce abatement of his cheerfulness, or suspension of his daily craft; while a word, gesture, or glance from that same child at play or laid asleep, will start him to an agony of fear, exasperation, just as like! The law of the life, it seems, to which he was temporarily admitted, has become to him the law of this earthly life; his heart and brain move there, his feet stay here. He appears to be perfectly submissive to the heavenly will, and awaits patiently for death to restore his being to equilibrium. He is by no means apathetic, but loves both old and young, affects the very brutes and birds and flowers of the field. This man, so restored to life, regards his restorer as, who but God himself, Creator and Sustainer of the world, that came and dwelt in flesh on it awhile, taught, healed the sick, broke bread at his own house, then died! Here Karshish breaks off and asks pardon for writing of such trivial matters, when there are so important ones to treat of, and states that he noticed on the margin of a pool blue-flowering borage abounding, the Aleppo sort, very nitrous. But he returns again to the subject, and tries to explain the peculiar interest, and awe, indeed, the man has inspired him with. Perhaps the journey’s end, and his weariness, he thinks, may have had something to do with it. He then relates the weird circumstances under which he met him, and concludes by saying that the repose he will have at Jerusalem shall make amends for the time his letter wastes, his master’s and his own. Till when, once more thy pardon and farewell!

But in spite of himself, his suppressed interest in the strange case MUST have full expression, and he gives way to all reserve and ejaculates in a postscript:—

See before, p. 41 {about one-fifth into Part II of the Introduction}, some remarks on the psychological phase of the monologue.

“The monologue is a signal example of ‘emotional ratiocination’. There is a flash of ecstasy through the strangely cautious description of Karshish; every syllable is weighed and thoughtful, everywhere the lines swell into perfect feeling.”—Robert Buchanan.

“As an example of our poet’s dramatic power in getting right at the heart of a man, reading what is there written, and then looking through his eyes and revealing it all in the man’s own speech, nothing can be more complete in its inner soundings and outer-keeping, than the epistle containing the ‘Strange Medical Experience of Karshish, the Arab Physician’, who has been picking up the crumbs of learning on his travels in the Holy Land, and writes to Abib, the all-sagacious, at home. It is so solemnly real and so sagely fine.”—N. Brit. Rev., May, 1861.

A Martyr’s Epitaph.

A wonderfully effective expression, effective through its pathetic simplicity, of the peaceful spirit of a Christian, who has triumphed over persecution and death, and passed to his reward.

Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister.

The speaker in this monologue is a Spanish monk, whose jealousy toward a simple and unoffending brother has, in the seclusion of the cloister, developed into a festering malignity. If hate, he says, could kill a man, his hate would certainly kill Brother Laurence. He is watching this brother, from a window of the cloister, at work in the garden. He looks with contempt upon his honest toil; repeats mockingly to himself, his simple talk when at meals, about the weather and the crops; sneers at his neatness, and orderliness, and cleanliness; imputes to him his own libidinousness. He takes credit to himself in laying crosswise, in Jesu’s praise, his knife and fork, after refection, and in illustrating the Trinity, and frustrating the Arian, by drinking his watered orange-pulp in three sips, while Laurence drains his at one gulp. Now he notices Laurence’s tender care of the melons, of which it appears the good man has promised all the brethren a feast; “so nice!” He calls to him, from the window, “How go on your flowers? None double? Not one fruit-sort can you spy?” Laurence, it must be understood, kindly answers him in the negative, and then he chuckles to himself, “Strange!—and I, too, at such trouble, keep ‘em close-nipped on the sly!” He thinks of devising means of causing him to trip on a great text in Galatians, entailing “twenty-nine distinct damnations, one sure, if another fails”; or of slyly putting his “scrofulous French novel” in his way, which will make him “grovel hand and foot in Belial’s gripe”. In his malignity, he is ready to pledge his soul to Satan (leaving a flaw in the indenture), to see blasted that rose-acacia Laurence is so proud of. Here the vesper-bell interrupts his filthy and blasphemous eructations, and he turns up his eyes and folds his hands on his breast, mumbling “Plena gratia ave Virgo!” and right upon the prayer, his disgust breaks out, “Gr-r-r—you swine!”

This monologue affords a signal illustration of the poet’s skill in making a speaker, while directly revealing his own character, reflect very distinctly the character of another. This has been seen in ‘My Last Duchess’, given as an example of the constitution of this art-form, in the section of the Introduction on ‘Browning’s Obscurity’.

“The ‘Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister’, is a picture (ghastly in its evident truth) of superstition which has survived religion; of a heart which has abandoned the love of kindred and friends, only to lose itself in a wilderness of petty spite, terminating in an abyss of diabolical hatred. The ordinary providential helps to goodness have been rejected; the ill-provided adventurer has sought to scale the high snow-peaks of saintliness,—he has missed his footing,— and the black chasm which yawns beneath, has ingulfed him.” —E. J. H{asell}, in St. Paul’s Magazine, December, 1870.

An able writer in ‘The Contemporary Review’, Vol. IV., p. 140, justly remarks:—

“No living writer—and we do not know any one in the past who can be named, in this respect, in the same breath with him {Browning} —approaches his power of analyzing and reproducing the morbid forms, the corrupt semblances, the hypocrisies, formalisms, and fanaticisms of man’s religious life. The wildness of an Antinomian predestinarianism has never been so grandly painted as in ‘Johannes Agricola in Meditation’; the white heat of the persecutor glares on us, like a nightmare spectre, in ‘The Heretic’s Tragedy’. More subtle forms are drawn with greater elaboration. If ‘Bishop Blougram’s Apology’, in many of its circumstances and touches, suggests the thought of actual portraiture, recalling a form and face once familiar to us, . . .it is also a picture of a class of minds which we meet with everywhere. Conservative scepticism that persuades itself that it believes, cynical acuteness in discerning the weak points either of mere secularism or dreaming mysticism, or passionate eagerness to reform, avoiding dangerous extremes, and taking things as they are because they are comfortable, and lead to wealth, enjoyment, reputation,—this, whether a true account or not of the theologian to whom we have referred. . .is yet to be found under many eloquent defences of the faith, many fervent and scornful denunciations of criticism and free thought. . . . In ‘Calaban upon Setebos’, if it is more than the product of Mr. Browning’s fondness for all abnormal forms of spiritual life, speculating among other things on the religious thoughts of a half brute-like savage, we must see a protest against the thought that man can rise by himself to true thoughts of God, and develop a pure theology out of his moral consciousness. So far it is a witness for the necessity of a revelation, either through the immediate action of the Light that lighteth every man, or that which has been given to mankind in spoken or written words, by The WORD that was in the beginning. In the ‘Death in the Desert’, in like manner, we have another school of thought analyzed with a corresponding subtlety. . . . The ‘Death in the Dessert’ is worth studying in its bearing upon the mythical school of interpretation, and as a protest, we would fain hope, from Mr. Browning’s own mind against the thought that because the love of God has been revealed in Christ, and has taught us the greatness of all true human love, therefore,

“In one remarkable passage at the close of ‘The Legend of Pornic’, Mr. Browning, speaking apparently in his own person, proclaims his belief in one great Christian doctrine, which all pantheistic and atheistic systems formally repudiate, and which many semi-Christian thinkers implicitly reject:—

Holy-Cross Day.

On which the Jews were forced to attend an annual Christian sermon in Rome.

The argument is sufficiently shown by what is prefixed to this poem. The ‘Diary by the Bishop’s Secretary, 1600’, is presumably imaginary.

Saul.

This is, in every respect, one of Browning’s grandest poems; and in all that is included in the idea of EXPRESSION, is quite perfect.

The portion of Scripture which is the germ of the poem, and it is only the germ, is contained in the First Book of Samuel 16:14-23.

To the present consolation which David administers to Saul, with harp and song, and the Scripture story does not go beyond this, is added the assurance of the transmission of his personality, and of the influence of his deeds; first, through those who have been quickened by them, and who will, in turn, transmit that quickening— “Each deed thou hast done, dies, revives, goes to work in the world: . . .each ray of thy will, every flash of thy passion and prowess, long over, shall thrill thy whole people, the countless, with ardor, till they too give forth a like cheer to their sons: who, in turn, fill the South and the North with the radiance thy deed was the germ of”; and, then, through records that will give unborn generations their due and their part in his being.

The consolation is, moreover, carried beyond that afforded by earthly fame and influence. David’s yearnings to give Saul “new life altogether, as good, ages hence, as this moment,— had love but the warrant, love’s heart to dispense”, pass into a prophecy, based on his own loving desires, of the God-Man who shall throw open to Saul the gates of that new life.

With this prophecy, David leaves Saul. On his way home, in the night, he represents himself as attended by witnesses, cohorts to left and to right. At the dawn, all nature, the forests, the wind, beasts and birds, even the serpent that slid away silent, appear to him aware of the new law; the little brooks, witnessing, murmured with all but hushed voices, “E’en so, it is so!”

A Death in the Desert.

‘A Death in the Desert’ appears to have been inspired by the controversies in regard to the historical foundations of Christianity, and, more especially, in regard to the character and the authorship of the Fourth Gospel—controversies which received their first great impulse from the ‘Leben Jesu’ of David Friedrich Strauss, first published in 1835. An English translation of the fourth edition, 1840, by Marian Evans (George Eliot), was published in London, in 1846.

The immediate occasion of the composition of ‘A Death in the Desert’ was, perhaps, the publication, in 1863, of Joseph Ernest Renan’s ‘Vie de Jesus’. ‘A Death in the Desert’ was included in the poet’s ‘Dramatis Personae’, published in the following year.

“In style, the poem a little recalls ‘Cleon’; with less of harmonious grace and clear classic outline, it possesses a certain stilled sweetness, a meditative tenderness, all its own, and beautifully appropriate to the utterance of the ‘beloved disciple’.”—Arthur Symons.

During a persecution of the Christians, the aged John of Patmos has been secretly conveyed, by some faithful disciples, to a cave in the desert, where he is dying. Revived temporarily by the tender ministrations of his disciples, he is enabled to tell over his past labors in the service of his beloved Master, to refute the Antichrist already in the world, and to answer the questions which, with his far-reaching spiritual vision, he foresees will be raised in regard to Christ’s nature, life, doctrine, and miracles, as recorded in the Gospel he has written. These services he feels to be due from him, in his dying hour, as the sole survivor of Christ’s apostles and intimate companions.

This is the only composition in which Browning deals directly with historical Christianity; and its main purpose may, in brief, be said to be, to set forth the absoluteness of Christianity, which cannot be affected by any assaults made upon its external, historical character.

The doctrine of the trinal unity of man (the what Does, what Knows, what Is) ascribed to John (vv. 82-104), and upon which his discourse may be said to proceed, leads up the presentation of the final stage of the Christian life on earth—that stage when man has won his way to the kingdom of the “what Is” within himself, and when he no longer needs the outward supports to his faith which he needed before he passed from the “what Knows”. Christianity is a religion which is only secondarily a doctrine addressed to the “what Knows”. It is, first of all, a religion whose fountain-head is a Personality in whom all that is spiritually potential in man, was realized, and in responding to whom the soul of man is quickened and regenerated. And the Church, through the centuries, has been kept alive, not by the letter of the New Testament, for the letter killeth, but by a succession of quickened and regenerated spirits, “the noble Living and the noble Dead”, through whom the Christ has been awakened and developed in other souls.

POEMS.

Wanting is—What?

— 4. spot: defect, imperfection.

9. O Comer: o’ e’rxo/menos, Matt. 3:11; 11:3; 21:9; 23:39; Luke 19:38; John 1:15; 3:31; 12:13. Without love, the Christ-spirit, the spirit of the Comer, man sees, at best, only dynamic action, blind force, in nature; but

My Star.

— 10. Then it stops like a bird: it beats no longer with emotion responsive to loving eyes, but stops, as a bird stops its song when disturbed. —

The Flight of the Duchess.

— 2. I was the man: see vv. 440 and 847. He’s proud of the honor done him.

— 74. Berold: the old Duke’s favorite hunting-horse.

78. merlin: a species of hawk.

80. falcon-lanner: a long-tailed species of hawk, ‘falco laniarius’.

— 101. struck at himself: astonished at his own importance.

119. lathy: long and slim.

— 130. urox: wild bull; Ger. ‘auer-ochs’. buffle: buffalo.

— 180. such an one: i.e., for a shepherd’s, miner’s, huntsman’s wife.

— 238. St. Hubert: patron saint of huntsmen.

247. lacquer: yellowish varnish.

249. Venerers, Prickers, and Verderers: huntsmen, light-horsemen, and guardians of the vert and venison in the Duke’s forest.

— 263. wind a mort: announce that the deer is taken.

273. sealed: more properly spelt ‘seeled’, a term in falconry; Lat. ‘cilium’, an eyelid; ‘seel’, to close up the eyelids of a hawk, or other bird (Fr. ‘ciller les yeux’). “Come, seeling Night, Skarfe vp the tender Eye of pittiful Day.” ‘Macbeth’, III. II. 46.

322. fifty-part canon: “A canon, in music, is a piece wherein the subject is repeated, in various keys: and being strictly obeyed in the repetition, becomes the ‘canon’—the imperative LAW—to what follows. Fifty of such parts would be indeed a notable peal: to manage three is enough of an achievement for a good musician.”—From Poet’s Letter to the Editor.

— 354. Catch they and keep: i.e., in their expression, or bearing, or manner.

407. level: monotonous.

439. helicat: for hell-cat? hag or witch.

454. imps: repairs a wing by inserting feathers; ‘impen’ or ‘ympen’, in O. E., means to ingraft. “It often falls out that a hawk breaks her wing and train-feathers, so that others must be set in their steads, which is termed ‘ymping’ them.”—The Gentleman’s Recreation, Part 2, Hawking, 1686.

— 463. curveter: a leaping horse.

480. tomans: Persian coins.

490. by the same token: by a presentiment or forewarning of the same.

— 501. you: ethical dative; there are several examples in the poem, and of “me”; see especially v. 876.

586. impinge: to strike or fall upon or against; in the following passage used ethically:—

“For I find this black mark impinge the man, That he believes in just the vile of life.”—The Ring and the Book: The Pope, v. 511.

567-689. “When higher laws draw the spirit out of itself into the life of others; when grief has waked in it, not a self-centred despair, but a divine sympathy; when it looks from the narrow limits of its own suffering to the largeness of the world and the sorrows it can lighten, we can dimly apprehend that it has taken flight and has found its freedom in a region whither earth-bound spirits cannot follow it. Surely the Gypsy’s message was this—if the Duchess would leave her own troubles and throw herself into the life of others, she would be free. None can give true sympathy but those who have suffered and learnt to love, therefore she must be proved,—‘Fit when my people ope their breast’, etc. (vv. 592-601). Passing from the bondage she has endured she will still have trials, but the old pain will have no power to touch her. She has learnt all it can teach, and the world will be richer for it. The Gypsy Queen will not foretell what her future life may be; the true powers of self-less love are not yet gauged, and the power of the union of those that truly love has never been tried. ‘If any two creatures grew into one’, etc. (vv. 626-631). Love at its highest is not yet known to us, but the passionate eyes of the Duchess tell us it will not be a life of quiescence. Giving herself out freely for the good of all she can never be alone again,—‘We are beside thee in all thy ways’. The great company of those who need her, the gypsy band of all human claims. Death to such a life is but ‘the hand that ends a dream’. What was to come after not even the Gypsy Queen could tell.”— Mrs. Owen (‘Browning Soc. Papers’, Part IV. p. 52*).

712. had: past subj., should have.

753. that pitiful method: i.e., patting her palfrey.

784. And then,—and then: his feelings overcome him.

— 793. Carib: a Caribbee, a native of the Caribbean islands.

— 845. I have seen: i.e., in imagination, while telling the story.

864. morion: a sort of helmet.

884. What age had Methusalem: the old man forgets his Bible.

906. He also must be such a lady’s scorner: he who is such a poor judge of horses and wines.

910. Orson the wood-knight (Fr. ‘ourson’, a small bear): twin-brother of Valentine, and son of Bellisant. The brothers were born in a wood near Orleans, and Orson was carried off by a bear, which suckled him with her cubs. When he grew up, he became the terror of France, and was called “The Wild Man of the Forest”. Ultimately he was reclaimed by his brother Valentine, overthrew the Green Knight, his rival in love, and married Fezon, daughter of the duke of Savary, in Aquitaine.—‘Romance of Valentine and Orson’ (15th cent.). Brewer’s ‘Reader’s Handbook’ and ‘Dictionary of Phrase and Fable’.

The Last Ride Together.

— St. 1. Browning has no moping melancholy lovers. His lovers generally reflect his own manliness; and when their passion is unrequited, they acknowledge the absolute value of love to their own souls. As Mr. James Thomson, in his ‘Notes on the Genius of Robert Browning’, remarks (‘B. Soc. Papers’, Part II., p. 246), “Browning’s passion is as intense, noble, and manly as his intellect is profound and subtle, and therefore original. I would especially insist on its manliness, because our present literature abounds in so-called passion which is but half-sincere or wholly insincere sentimentalism, if it be not thinly disguised prurient lust, and in so-called pathos which is maudlin to nauseousness. The great unappreciated poet last cited {George Meredith} has defined passion as ‘noble strength on fire’; and this is the true passion of great natures and great poets; while sentimentalism is ignoble weakness dallying with fire; . . . Browning’s passion is of utter self-sacrifice, self-annihilation, self-vindicated by its irresistible intensity. So we read it in ‘Time’s Revenges’, so in the scornful condemnation of the weak lovers in ‘The Statue and the Bust’, so in ‘In a Balcony’, and ‘Two in the Campagna’, with its

Is the love rejected, unreturned? No weak and mean upbraidings of the beloved, no futile complaints; a solemn resignation to immitigable Fate; intense gratitude for inspiring love to the unloving beloved. So in ‘A Serenade at the Villa’; so in ‘One Way of Love’, with its

So in ‘The Last Ride Together’, with its

By the Fireside.

— St. 21. He digresses here, and does not return to the subject till the 31st stanza, “What did I say?—that a small bird sings”. The path gray heads abhor: this verse and the following stanza are, with most readers, the CRUX of the poem; “gray heads” must be understood with some restriction: many gray heads, not all, abhor —gray heads who went along through their flowery youth as if it had no limit, and without insuring, in Love’s true season, the happiness of their lives beyond youth’s limit, “life’s safe hem”, which to cross without such insurance, is often fatal. And these, when they reach old age, shun retracing the path which led to the gulf wherein their youth dropped.

— St. 37, 38. “Mr. Browning’s most characteristic feeling for nature appears in his rendering of those aspects of sky, or earth, or sea, of sunset, or noonday, or dawn, which seem to acquire some sudden and passionate significance; which seem to be charged with some spiritual secret eager for disclosure; in his rendering of those moments which betray the passion at the heart of things, which thrill and tingle with prophetic fire. When lightning searches for the guilty lovers, Ottima and Sebald {in ‘Pippa Passes’}, like an angelic sword plunged into the gloom, when the tender twilight with its one chrysolite star, grows aware, and the light and shade make up a spell, and the forests by their mystery, and sound, and silence, mingle together two human lives forever {‘By the Fireside’}, when the apparition of the moon-rainbow appears gloriously after storm, and Christ is in his heaven {‘Christmas Eve’}, when to David the stars shoot out the pain of pent knowledge and in the grey of the hills at morning there dwells a gathered intensity {‘Saul’},—then nature rises from her sweet ways of use and wont, and shows herself the Priestess, the Pythoness, the Divinity which she is. Or rather, through nature, the Spirit of God addresses itself to the spirit of man.”—Edward Dowden.

— St. 49. “Those periods of life which appear most full of moral purpose to Mr. Tennyson, are periods of protracted self-control, and those moments stand eminent in life in which the spirit has struggled victoriously in the cause of conscience against impulse and desire. With Mr. Browning the moments are most glorious in which the obscure tendency of many years has been revealed by the lightning of sudden passion, or in which a resolution that changes the current of life has been taken in reliance upon that insight which vivid emotion bestows; and those periods of our history are charged most fully with moral purpose, which take their direction from moments such as these. . . . In such a moment the somewhat dull youth of ‘The Inn Album’ rises into the justiciary of the Highest; in such a moment Polyxena with her right woman’s-manliness, discovers to Charles his regal duty, and infuses into her weaker husband, her own courage of heart {‘King Victor and King Charles’}; and rejoicing in the remembrance of a moment of high devotion which determined the issues of a life, the speaker of ‘By the Fireside’ exclaims,— ‘How the world is made for each of us!’” etc.—Edward Dowden.

Prospice.

Amphibian.

James Lee’s Wife.

— St. 1. Ah, Love, but a day: Rev. H. J. Bulkeley, in his paper on ‘James Lee’s Wife’ (‘Browning Soc. Papers’, iv., p. 457), explains, “One day’s absence from him has caused the world to change.” It’s better to understand that something has occurred to cause the world to change in a single day; that James Lee has made some new revelation of himself, which causes the wife’s heart to have misgivings, and with these misgivings comes the eager desire expressed in St. 3, to show her love, when he returns, more strongly than ever.

— St. 2. her five fingers: referring to the shape of the fig-leaf.

— St. 3. a bent: a bit of coarse grass; A.-S. ‘beonet’, an adduced form; Ger. ‘binse’.

— St. 4. Whom Summer made friends of, etc.: i.e., let Winter (Adversity) estrange those whom Summer (Prosperity) made friends of, but let it not estrange us.

— St. 5. yours, to watch the olive and wait the vine: “olive” and “vine” are used metaphorically for the capabilities of her husband’s nature.

— St. 6. The failure of fruit in her husband proved the absoluteness of her love, proved that he was her all, notwithstanding.

— St. 7. Yet this turns now to a fault: i.e., her watching the olive and waiting the vine of his nature. there! there!: I’ve come out plainly with the fact.

— St. 8. bond: refers to what is said in St. 7; why should you look beyond?: i.e., beyond a laughing eye, which does not “watch” and “wait”, and thus “weary” and “wear”.

— St. 3. No cricket, I’ll say: but to my lively admiration, a warhorse, barded and chanfroned too: see Webster’s Dict., s.v. “chamfrain”. {also chamfron: armor for a horse’s head}.

— St. 4. they: i.e., the ‘two red fans’. no turf, no rock: i.e., the eye is taken up entirely with cricket and butterfly; blue and red refer respectively to cricket and butterfly.

— St. 5. Love: settling on the minds of men, the level and low, the burnt and bare, is compared to the cricket and the butterfly settling on the turf and the rock.

— St. 1-6. See foot-note to the Argument of this section.

— St. 7-9. She reflects, ironically and sarcastically, upon the confidence of the young poet, resulting from his immaturity, in his future triumph over all obstacles. Inexperienced as he is, he feels himself the god in babe’s disguise, etc. He will learn after a while what the wind means in its moaning. The train of thought in St. 11-16 is presented in the Argument.

— * Lines 27-87 {below—the rest of this section except the last two lines} were added in the edition of 1868; they clear up the obscurity of this section of the poem, as it stood in the original edition of 1864. —

— St. 1. Nothing I did that you care to see: refers to her art-work.

— St. 6. vv. 3-5 express the entire devotion and submissiveness of her love.

A Tale.

Epilogue to ‘The Two Poets of Croisic’.

— St. 7. “Cicada”: do you say? Pooh!: that’s bringing the mysterious little thing down to the plane of entomology.

— St. 11. when Music’s son, etc.: a fling at Goethe.

Confessions.

Respectability.

— St. 3. Guizot: Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot, French statesman and historian, b. 1787, d. 1874. Montalembert: Charles Forbes Rene, Comte de Montalembert, French statesman, orator, and political writer, b. 1810, d. 1870. Guizot receives Montalembert: i.e., on purely conventional grounds.

Home Thoughts, from Abroad.

{despite this stanza being numbered 1, there is apparently no 2.}

Home Thoughts, from the Sea.

Old Pictures in Florence.

— St. 1. washed by the morning water-gold: the water of the Arno, gilded by the morning sun;

— St. 2. the startling bell-tower Giotto raised: the Campanile of the Cathedral, or Duomo, of Florence (La Cattedrale di S. Maria del Fiore), begun in 1334.

“The characteristics of Power and Beauty occur more of less in different buildings, some in one and some in another. But all together, and all in their highest possible relative degrees, they exist, as far as I know, only in one building of the world, the Campanile of Giotto.”—Ruskin. But why did it more than startle me?: There’s a rumor “that a certain precious little tablet which Buonarotti eyed like a lover” has been discovered by somebody. If this rumor is true, the speaker feels that Giotto, whom he has so loved, has played him false, in not favoring him with the precious find. See St. 30. “The opinion which his contemporaries entertained of Giotto, as the greatest genius in the arts which Italy in that age possessed, has been perpetuated by Dante in the lines in which the illuminator, Oderigi, says:—

“Giotto di Bondone was born at Del Colle, a village in the commune of Vespignano near Florence, according to Vasari, A.D. 1276, but more probably A.D. 1266. He went through his apprenticeship under Cimabue, and practised as a painter and architect not only in Florence, but in various parts of Italy, in free cities as well as in the courts of princes. . . . On April 12, 1334, Giotto was appointed by the civic authorities of Florence, chief master of the Cathedral works, the city fortifications, and all public architectural undertakings, in an instrument of which the wording constitutes the most affectionate homage to the ‘great and dear master’. Giotto died January 8, 1337.” —Woltmann and Woermann’s History of Painting.

For a good account of the Campanile, see Susan and Joanna Horner’s ‘Walks in Florence’, v. I, pp. 62-66; Art. in ‘Macmillan’s Mag.’, April, 1877, by Sidney Colvin,—‘Giotto’s Gospel of Labor’.

— St. 4. By a gift God grants me now and then: the gift of spiritual vision.

— St. 6. “He sees the ghosts of the early Christian masters, whose work has never been duly appreciated, standing sadly by each mouldering Italian Fresco.”—Dowden.

— St. 8. Much they reck of your praise and you!: the Michaels and Rafaels. Leonardo da Vinci (b. at Vinci, in the Val d’Arno, below Florence, 1452); “in him the two lines of artistic descent, tracing from classic Rome and Christian Byzantium, meet.”—Heaton’s ‘History of Painting’. Dello di Niccolo Delli, painter and sculptor, fl. first half 15th cent.

— St. 9. “Stefano is extolled by Vasari as having left Giotto himself far behind, but it is very difficult to ascertain what were really his works.”—Heaton. “Stefano appears from Landinio’s Commentary on Dante to have been called ‘scimia della natura’, the ape of nature, which seems to refer to the strong realistic tendencies common to the school.”—Woltmann and Woermann’s History of Painting. Giorgio Vasari, an Italian painter of Arezzo, b. 1512, d. 1574; author of ‘Vite de’ piu excellenti pittori scultori ed architettori’. Florence, 1550.

— St. 11. “If you knew their work”, etc.: The speaker imputes this remark to some one; the meaning is, if you really knew these old Christian painters, you would deal them your mite of praise, damn them, perhaps, with faint praise, and no more. The poet then proceeds to instruct this person.

— St. 13. Theseus: a reclining statue from the eastern pediment of the Parthenon, now in the British Museum. The Son of Priam: probably the Paris of the Aeginetan Sculptures (now in the Glyptothek at Munich), which is kneeling and drawing the bow.

Apollo: “A word on the line about Apollo the snake-slayer, which my friend Professor Colvin condemns, believing that the God of the Belvedere grasps no bow, but the Aegis, as described in the 15th Iliad. Surely the text represents that portentous object (qou^rin, deinh/n, a’mfida/seian, a’riprepe/’—marmare/hn) as ‘shaken violently’ or ‘held immovably’ by both hands, not a single one, and that the left hand:—

and so on, th\n a'/r’ o'/ g’ e’n xei/ressin e'/xwn— xersi\n e'/x’ a’tre/ma, k.t.l. Moreover, while he shook it he ‘shouted enormously’, sei^s’, e’pi\ d’ au’to\s au'/se ma/la me/ga, which the statue does not. Presently when Teukros, on the other side, plies the bow, it is to/j’on e'/xwn e’n xeiri\ pali/ntonon. Besides, by the act of discharging an arrow, the right arm and hand are thrown back as we see,—a quite gratuitous and theatrical display in the case supposed. The conjecture of Flaxman that the statue was suggested by the bronze Apollo Alexikakos of Kalamis, mentioned by Pausanias, remains probable; though the ‘hardness’ which Cicero considers to distinguish the artist’s workmanship from that of Muron is not by any means apparent in our marble copy, if it be one.—Feb. 16, 1880.”—The Poet’s Note.

Niobe: group of ancient sculpture, in the gallery of the Uffizi Palace, in Florence, representing Niobe mourning the death of her children. the Racers’ frieze: the frieze of the Parthenon is perhaps meant, the reference being to the FULNESS OF LIFE exhibited by the men and horses.

The dying Alexander: “‘The Dying Alexander’, at Florence. This well-known, beautiful, and deeply affecting head, which bears a strong resemblance to the Alexander Helios of the Capitol —especially in the treatment of the hair—has been called by Ottfried Mueller a riddle of archaeology. It is no doubt a Greek original, and one of the most interesting remains of ancient art, but we cannot take it for granted that it is intended for Alexander, and still less that it is the work of Lysippus. It is difficult to imagine that the favored and devoted artist of the mighty conqueror would choose to portray his great master in a painful and impotent struggle with disease and death. This consideration makes it extremely improbable that it was executed during the lifetime of Alexander, and the whole character of the work, in which free pathos is the prevailing element, and its close resemblance in style to the heads on coins of the period of the Diadochi, point to a later age than that of Lysippus.” —‘Greek and Roman Sculpture’ by Walter Copland Perry. London, 1882. p. 484.

— St. 14. common: general.

— St. 15-17. “Greek art had ITS lesson to teach, and it taught it. It reasserted the dignity of the human form. It re-stated THE TRUTH of the soul which informs the body, and the body which expresses it. Men saw in its creations their own qualities carried to perfection, and were content to know that such perfection was possible and to renounce the hope of attaining it. In this experience the first stage was progress, the second was stagnation. Progress began again when men looked on these images of themselves and said: ‘we are not inferior to these. We are greater than they. For what has come to perfection perishes, and we are imperfect because eternity is before us; because we were made to GROW.’”—Mrs. Orr’s Handbook to the Works of R. B.

St. 17. “O!”: Boniface VIII. (not Benedict IX., as Vasari has it), wishing to employ Giotto, sent a courtier to obtain some proof of his skill. The latter requesting a drawing to send to his Holiness, Giotto took a sheet of paper and a pencil dipped in red color; then resting his elbow on his side, to form a compass, with one turn of his hand he drew a circle so perfect and exact, that it was a marvel to behold. This done, he turned to the courtier, saying, “Here is your drawing.” The courtier seems to have thought that Giotto was fooling him; but the pope was easily convinced, by the roundness of the O, of the greatness of Giotto’s skill. This incident gave rise to the proverb, “Tu sei piu tondo che l’ O di Giotto”, the point of which lies in the word ‘tondo’, signifying slowness of intellect, as well as a circle. —Adapted from Vasari and Heaton.

— St. 23. Nicolo the Pisan: Nicolo Pisano, architect and sculptor, b. ab. 1207, d. 1278; the church and monastery of the Holy Trinity, at Florence, and the church of San Antonio, at Padua, are esteemed his best architectural works, and his bas-reliefs in the Cathedral of Sienna, his best sculptural.

Cimabue: Giovanni Cimabue, 1240-1302, “ends the long Byzantine succession in Italy. . . . In him ‘the spirit of the years to come’ is decidedly manifest; but he never entirely succeeded in casting off the hereditary Byzantine asceticism.”—Heaton. Giotto was his pupil. Ghiberti: Lorenzo Ghiberti, the great Florentine sculptor, 1381-1455; his famous masterpiece, the eastern doors of the Florentine Baptistery, of San Giovanni, of which Michael Angelo said that they were worthy to be the gates of Paradise.

Ghirlandajo: Domenico Bigordi, called Ghirlandajo, or the garland-maker, celebrated painter, b. in Florence, 1449, d. 1494; “in treatment, drawing, and modelling, G. excels any fresco-painter since Masaccio; shares with the two Lippis, father and son, a fondness for introducing subordinate groups which was unknown to Massaccio.”—Woltmann and Woermann’s History of Painting.

— St. 25. dree: endure (A. S. “dreo’gan”).

— St. 26. Bigordi: Ghirlandajo; see above. {note to St. 23.} Sandro: Sandro Filipepi, called Botticelli (1437-1515), “belonged in feeling, to the older Christian school, tho’ his religious sentiment was not quite strong enough to resist entirely the paganizing influence of the time” (Heaton); became a disciple of Savonarola.

Lippino: Filippino Lippi, son of Fra Filippo (1460-1505), “added to his father’s bold naturalism a dramatic talent in composition, which places his works above the mere realisms of Fra Filippo, and renders him worthy to be placed next to Masaccio in the line of progress.”—Heaton.

Fra Angelico: see under the Monologue of Fra Lippo Lippi. Taddeo Gaddi: “foremost amongst these (‘The Giotteschi’) stands the name of T. G. (1300, living in 1366), the son of Gaddo Gaddi, and godson of Giotto; was an architect as well as painter, and was on the council of Works of S. Maria del Fiore, after Giotto’s death, and carried out his design for the bell-tower.”—Heaton. intonaco: rough-casting.

Lorenzo Monaco: see under the Monologue of Fra Lippo Lippi.

— St. 27. Pollajolo: “Antonio Pollajuolo (ab. 1430-1498) was a sculptor and goldsmith, more than a painter; . . .his master-work in pictorial art is the Martyrdom of St. Sebastian, in the Nat. Gal., painted for the Pucci Chapel in the Church of San Sebastiano de’ Servi, at Florence. ‘This painting’, says Vasari, ‘has been more extolled than any other ever executed by Antonio’. It is, however, unpleasantly hard and obtrusively anatomical. Pollajuolo is said to have been the first artist who studied anatomy by means of dissection, and his sole aim in this picture seems to have been to display his knowledge of muscular action. He was an engraver as well as goldsmith, sculptor, and painter.”—Heaton.

Tempera: see Webster, s. vv. “tempera” and “distemper”. {paint types} Alesso Baldovinetti: Florentine painter, b. 1422, or later, d. 1499; worked in mosaic, particularly as a restorer of old mosaics, besides painting; he made many experiments in both branches of art, and attempted to work fresco ‘al secco’, and varnish it so as to make it permanent, but in this he failed. His works were distinguished for extreme minuteness of detail. “In the church of the Annunziata in Florence, he executed an historical piece in fresco, but finished ‘a secco’, wherein he represented the Nativity of Christ, painted with such minuteness of care, that each separate straw in the roof of a cabin, figured therein, may be counted, and every knot in these straws distinguished.”—Vasari. His remaining works are much injured by scaling or the abrasion of the colors.

— St. 28. Margheritone: Margaritone; painter, sculptor, and architect, of Arezzo (1236-1313); the most important of his remaining pictures is a Madonna, in the London National Gallery, from Church of St. Margaret, at Arezzo, “said to be a characteristic work, and mentioned by Vasari, who praises its small figures, which he says are executed ‘with more grace and finished with greater delicacy’ than the larger ones. Nothing, however, can be more unlike nature, than the grim Madonna and the weird starved Child in her arms (see ‘Wornum’s Catal. Nat. Gal.’, for a description of this painting). Margaritone’s favorite subject was the figure of St. Francis, his style being well suited to depict the chief ascetic saint. Crucifixions were also much to his taste, and he represented them in all their repulsive details. Vasari relates that he died at the age of 77, afflicted and disgusted at having lived to see the changes that had taken place in art, and the honors bestowed on the new artists.”—Heaton.

His monument to Pope Gregory X. in the Cathedral of Arezzo, is ranked among his best works. “Browning possesses the ‘Crucifixion’ by M. to which he alludes, as also the pictures of Alesso Baldovinetti, and Taddeo Gaddi, and Pollajuolo described in the poem.” —Browning Soc. Papers, Pt. II., p. 169.

— St. 29. tempera: see Webster, s.v. {a type of paint} tinglish: sharp? Zeno: founder of the Stoic philosophy. Carlino: some expressionless picture by Carlo, or Carlino, Dolci. His works show an extreme finish, often with no end beyond itself; some being, to use Ruskin’s words, “polished into inanity”.

— St. 30. a certain precious little tablet: “The ‘little tablet’ was a famous ‘Last Supper’, mentioned by Vasari, and gone astray long ago from the Church of S. Spirito: it turned up, according to report, in some obscure corner, while I was in Florence, and was at once acquired by a stranger. I saw it, genuine or no, a work of great beauty.”—From Poet’s Letter to the Editor.

Buonarotti: Michael Angelo (more correctly, Michel Agnolo) Buonarotti, b. 6th of March, 1475, at Castel Caprese, near Florence; d. at Rome, 18th of Feb., 1564.

and to whom?—to whom?: a contemptuous repetition.

— St. 31. San Spirito: a church of the 14th century, in Florence. Ognissanti: i.e., “All Saints”, in Florence.

I shall have it yet!: I shall make a happy find yet. Detur amanti!: let it be given to the loving one.

Koh-i-noor: “Mountain of Light”, a celebrated diamond, “the diamond of the great Mogul”, presented to Queen Victoria, in 1850. See Art. on the Diamond, ‘N. Brit. Rev.’ Vol. 18, p. 186, and Art., Diamond, ‘Encycl. Brit.’; used here, by metonymy, for a great treasure.

Jewel of Giamschid: the ‘Deria-i-noor’, or ‘the Sea of Light’, one of the largest of known diamonds, belonging to the king of Persia, is probably referred to. See ‘N. Brit. Rev.’, Vol. 18, p. 217.

— St. 32. a certain dotard: Joseph Wenzel Radetzky, b. Nov. 2, 1766, d. Jan. 5, 1858, in his 92d year; governed the Austrian possessions in Italy to Feb. 28, 1857.

Morello: Monte Morello, the highest of the spurs of the Apennines, to the north of Florence.

— St. 33. the stone of Dante: see ‘Casa Guidi Windows’, Pt. I, Sect. XIV., XV.

Witanagemot: A. S. ‘witena gemo^t’: an assembly of wise men, a parliament.

Casa Guidi: Mrs. Browning’s ‘Casa Guidi Windows’, a poem named from the house in Florence in which she lived, and giving her impressions of events in Tuscany at the time.

the Loraine’s: the “hated house” included the Cardinals of Guise, or Lorraine, and the Dukes of Guise, a younger branch of the house of Lorraine.

Orgagna: Andrea di Cione (surnamed Orcagna, or Arcagnolo, approximate dates of b. and d. 1315-1376), one of the most noted successors of Giotto, and allied to him in genius; though he owed much to Giotto, he showed great independence of spirit in his style.

— St. 35. an “issimo”: any adjective in the superlative degree. to end: complete.

our half-told tale of Cambuscan: by metonymy for the unfinished Campanile of Giotto;

An allusion to Chaucer, who left the ‘Squire’s Tale’ in the ‘Canterbury Tales’ unfinished. The poet follows Milton’s accentuation of the word “Cambuscan”, on the penult; it’s properly accented on the ultimate.

beccaccia: woodcock.

the Duomo’s fit ally: “There is, as far as I know, only one Gothic building in Europe, the Duomo of Florence, in which the ornament is so exquisitely finished as to enable us to imagine what might have been the effect of the perfect workmanship of the Renaissance, coming out of the hands of men like Verocchio and Ghiberti, had it been employed on the magnificent framework of Gothic structure.”—Ruskin in ‘Stones of Venice’.

— St. 36. and up goes the spire: Giotto’s plan included a spire of 100 feet, but the project was abandoned by Taddeo Gaddi, who carried on the work after the death of Giotto in 1336.

Pictor Ignotus.

{Florence, 15—.}

— 3. ah, thought which saddens while it soothes: the thought saddens him that he has not realized his capabilities, and soothes him that he has resisted the temptations to earthly fame, and been true to his soul.

14-22. he could have expressed Hope, Rapture, Confidence, and all other passions, in the human face, each clear proclaimed without a tongue.

23. hath it spilt, my cup?: the cup of his memory.

24. What did ye give me that I have not saved?: he has retained all the impressions he has received from human faces.

25 et seq.: Nor will I say I have not dreamed (how well I have dreamed!) of going forth in each new picture, as it went to Pope or Kaiser, etc., making new hearts beat and bosoms swell.

34. the star not yet distinct above his hair: his fame not having yet shone brightly out; “his” refers to “youth”.

35. lie learning: and should lie.

41. But a voice changed it: the voice of his secret soul.

67. travertine: coating of lime; properly a limestone. Lat., ‘lapis Tiburtinus’, found near Tibur, now Tivoli.

Andrea del Sarto.

{Called “The Faultless Painter”.}

— 29. My face, my moon:

35. A common grayness: Andrea del Sarto was distinguished for his skill in chiaro-oscuro.

82. low-pulsed forthright craftsman’s hand: “Andrea del Sarto’s was, after all, but the ‘low-pulsed forthright craftsman’s hand’, and therefore his perfect art does not touch our hearts like that of Fra Bartolommeo, who occupies about the same position with regard to the great masters of the century as Andrea del Sarto. Fra Bartolommeo spoke from his heart. He was moved by the spirit, so to speak, to express his pure and holy thoughts in beautiful language, and the ideal that presented itself to his mind, and from which he, equally with Raphael, worked, approached almost as closely as Raphael’s to that abstract beauty after which they both longed. Andrea del Sarto had no such longing: he was content with the loveliness of earth. This he could understand and imitate in its fullest perfection, and therefore he troubled himself but little about the ‘wondrous paterne’ laid up in heaven. Many of his Madonnas have greater beauty, strictly speaking, than those of Bartolommeo, or even of Raphael; but we miss in them that mysterious spiritual loveliness that gives the latter their chief charm.” —Heaton’s History of Painting.

93. Morello: the highest of the spurs of the Apennines to the north of Florence.

96. Speak as they please, what does the mountain care?: it’s beyond their criticism.

105. The Urbinate: Raphael Santi, born 1483, in Urbino. Andrea sees in Raphael, whose technique was inferior to his own, his superior, as he reached above and through his art— for it gives way.

106. George Vasari: see note under St. 9 of ‘Old Pictures in Florence’.

120. Nay, Love, you did give all I asked: it must be understood that his wife has replied with pique, to what he said in the two preceding lines.

129. by the future: when placed by, in comparison with, the future.

130. Agnolo: Michael Angelo (more correctly, Agnolo) Buonarotti. See note under St. 30 of ‘Old Pictures in Florence’.

146. For fear of chancing on the Paris lords: by reason of his breaking the faith he had pledged to Francis I. of France, and using for his own purposes, or his wife’s, the money with which the king had entrusted him to purchase works of art in Italy.

149-165. That Francis, that first time: he thinks with regret of the king and of his honored and inspiring stay at his court.

161. by those hearts: along with, by the aid of.

173. The triumph was. . .there: i.e., in your heart.

174. ere the triumph: in France.

177. Rafael did this, . . .was his wife: a remark ascribed to some critic.

198. If he spoke the truth: i.e., about himself.

199. What he: do you ask?

202. all I care for. . .is whether you’re.

209. Morello’s gone: its outlines are lost in the dusk. See v. 93.

218. That gold of his: see note to v. 146.

220. That cousin here again?: one of Lucrezia’s gallants is referred to, to pay whose gaming debts, it appears, she has obtained money of her husband. It must be understood that this gallant whistles here. See last verse of the monologue.

263. Leonard: Leonardo da Vinci.

Fra Lippo Lippi.

— 17. Cosimo of the Medici: Cosimo, or Cosmo, de’ Medici, surnamed the Elder, a celebrated Florentine statesman, and a patron of learning and the arts; b. 1389, d. 1464.

23. pilchards: a kind of fish.

34. John Baptist’s head: an imaginary picture.

67. Saint Lawrence: church of San Lorenzo, in Florence, famous for the tombs of the Medici, adorned with Michel Angelo’s Day and Night, Morning and Evening, etc. See ‘Hawthorne’s Italian Note-Books’.

88. Old aunt Lapaccia: Mona Lapaccia, his father’s sister.

121. the Eight: ‘gli Otto di guerra’, surnamed ‘i Santi’, the Saints; a magistracy composed of Eight citizens, instituted by the Florentines, during their war with the Church, in 1376, for the administration of the city government. Two were chosen from the ‘Signori’, three, from the ‘Mediocri’ (Middle Classes), and three, from the ‘Bassi’ (Lower Classes). For their subsequent history, see ‘Le Istorie Fiorentine di Niccolo Machiavelli’.

122. How say I?:—nay, worse than that, which dog bites, etc.

127. remarks: observations.

139. Camaldolese: monks of the celebrated convent of Camaldoli.

143. Thank you!: there’s a remark interposed here by one of the men, perhaps “YOU’RE no dauber”, to which he replies, “Thank you”.

145 et seq. The realistic painter, who disdains nothing, is shown here.

189. Giotto di Bondone (1266-1337): a pupil of Cimabue, and regarded as the principal reviver of art in Italy. He was a personal friend of Dante. See note under ‘Old Pictures in Florence’, St. 2.

223. I’m grown a man no doubt, I’ve broken bounds: all the editions are so punctuated; but it seems the comma should be after “man”, connecting “no doubt” with “I’ve broken bounds”.

235. “Giovanni da Fiesole, better known as Fra Angelico (1387-1455). Angelico was incomparably the greatest of the distinctively mediaeval school, whose ‘dicta’ the Prior in the poem has all at his tongue’s end. To ‘paint the souls of men’, to ‘make them forget there’s such a thing as flesh’, was the end of his art. And, side by side with Angelico, Masaccio painted. His short life taught him a different lesson—‘the value and significance of flesh’. He would paint by preference the BODIES of men, and would give us NO MORE OF SOUL than the body can reveal. So he ‘laboured’, saith the chronicler, ‘in nakeds’, and his frescoes mark an epoch in art.”—Ernest Bradford (B. S. Illustrations).

“One artist in the seclusion of his cloister, remained true to the traditions and mode of expression of the middle ages, into which, nevertheless, the incomparable beauty and feeling of his nature breathed fresh life. Fra Giovanni Angelico, called da Fiesole from the place of his birth, occupies an entirely exceptional position. He is the late-blooming flower of an almost by-gone time amid the pulsations of a new life. Never, in the whole range of pictorial art, have the inspired fervor of Christian feeling, the angelic beauty and purity of which the soul is capable, been so gloriously interpreted as in his works. The exquisite atmosphere of an almost supernaturally ideal life surrounds his pictures, irradiates the rosy features of his youthful faces, or greets us, like the peace of God, in the dignified figures of his devout old men. His prevailing themes are the humility of soul of those who have joyfully accepted the will of God, and the tranquil Sabbath calm of those who are lovingly consecrated to the service of the Highest. The movement and the changing course of life, the energy of passion and action concern him not.”—‘Outlines of the History of Art’. By Dr. Wilh. Luebke.

236. Lorenzo Monaco: a monk of the order of Camaldoli; a conservative artist of the time, who adhered to the manner of Taddeo Gaddi and his disciples, but Fra Angelico appears likewise to have influenced him.

238. Flower o’ the pine, etc.: this snatch of song applies to what he has just been talking about: you have your own notions of art, and I have mine.

276. Tommaso Guidi (1401-1428), better known as Masaccio, i.e., Tommasaccio, Slovenly or Hulking Tom. “From his time, and forward,” says Mr. Ernest Radford (B. S. Illustrations), “religious painting in the old sense was at an end. Painters no longer attempted to transcend nature, but to copy her, and to copy her in her loveliest aspects. The breach between the old order and the new was complete.” The poet makes him learn of Lippi, not, as Vasari states, Lippi of him.

“When Browning wrote this poem, he knew that the mastership or pupilship of Fra Lippo to Masaccio (called ‘Guidi’ in the poem), and vice versa, was a moot point; but in making Fra Lippi the master, he followed the best authority he had access to, the last edition of Vasari, as he stated in a Letter to the ‘Pall Mall’ at the time, in answer to M. Etienne {a writer in the ‘Revue des deux Mondes’.} Since then, he finds that the latest enquirer into the subject, Morelli, believes the fact is the other way, and that Fra Lippo was the pupil.”—B. Soc. Papers, Pt. II, p. 160.

The letter to the ‘Pall Mall Gazette’ I have not seen. M. Etienne’s Article is in Tome 85, pp. 704-735, of the ‘Revue des Deux Mondes’, 1870, and the letter probably appeared soon after its publication. What edition of Vasari is referred to, in the above note, as the last, is uncertain; but in Vasari’s own editions of 1550 and 1568, and in Mrs. Foster’s translation, 1855, Lippi is made the pupil, and not the master, of Masaccio.

323. Saint Laurence: suffered martyrdom in the reign of the Emperor Valerian, A.D. 258. He was broiled to death on a gridiron.

327. Already not one phiz of your three slaves. . .but’s scratched: the people are so indignant at what they are doing, in the life-like picture.

336. That is—: he fears he has spoken too plainly, and will be reported.

339. Chianti: a wine named from the part of Italy so called.

345. There’s for you: he tips them.

346. Sant’ Ambrogio’s: a convent in Florence.

354. Saint John: John the Baptist is meant; see v. 375.

355. Saint Ambrose: born about 340; made archbishop of Milan in 374; died 397; instituted the ‘Ambrosian Chant’.

377. Iste perfecit opus!: this is on a scroll, in the picture, held by the “sweet angelic slip of a thing”.

389. The picture referred to is ‘The Coronation of the Virgin’, in the ‘Accademia delle Belle Arti’, in Florence. There is a photograph of it in ‘Illustrations to Browning’s Poems’, Part I., published by the Browning Society, with an interesting description of the picture, by Mr. Ernest Radford. There’s no “babe” in the picture.

392. Zooks!: it’s high time I was back and in bed, that my night-larking be not known.

A Face.

— 1. If one could have: Oh, if one could only have, etc.

9, 10. to kiss and capture: gerundives: to be kissed and captured.

14. Correggio: Antonio Allegri da Correggio, born 1494, died 1534. “He was the first master—the Venetians notwithstanding— to take a scheme of color and chiaro-scuro as the ‘raison d’etre’ of a complete composition, and his brush, responding to the idea, blends light and shade in delicious harmony.”—Woltmann and Woermann’s ‘History of Painting’.

The Bishop orders his Tomb.

{Rome, 15—.}

— 1. Vanity, saith the preacher, vanity!: “The Bishop on his death-bed has reached Solomon’s conclusion that ‘all is vanity’. So he proceeds to specify his particular vanity in the choice of a tombstone.” —N. Brit. Rev. 34, p. 367. “In ‘The Palace of Art’, Mr. Tennyson has shown the despair and isolation of a soul surrounded by all luxuries of beauty, and living in and for them; but in the end the soul is redeemed and converted to the simple humanities of earth. Mr. Browning has shown that such a sense of isolation and such despair are by no means inevitable; there is a death in life which consists in tranquil satisfaction, a calm pride in the soul’s dwelling among the world’s gathered treasures of stateliness and beauty. . . . So the unbelieving and worldly spirit of the dying Bishop, who orders his tomb at Saint Praxed’s, his sense of the vanity of the world simply because the world is passing out of his reach, the regretful memory of the pleasures of his youth, the envious spite towards Gandolf, who robbed him of the best position for a tomb, and the dread lest his reputed sons should play him false and fail to carry out his designs, are united with a perfect appreciation of Renaissance art, and a luxurious satisfaction, which even a death-bed cannot destroy, in the splendor of voluptuous form and color.” —Edward Dowden.

46. Frascati: a town of central Italy, near the site of the ancient Tusculum, ten or twelve miles S. E. of Rome; it has many fine old villas.

53. Did I say, basalt for my slab, sons?: Note how all things else, even such reflections as are expressed in the two preceding verses, are incidental with the Bishop; his poor, art-besotted mind turns abruptly to the black basalt which he craves for the slab of his tomb; and see vv. 101, 102.

66. travertine: see note to v. 67 of ‘Pictor Ignotus’.

71. pistachio-nut: or, green almond.

79. Ulpian: Domitius Ulpianus, one of the greatest of Roman jurists, and chief adviser of the emperor, Alexander Severus; born about 170, died 228; belongs to the Brazen age of Roman literature.

95. Saint Praxed at his sermon on the mount: the poor dying Bishop, in the disorder of his mind, makes a ‘lapsus linguae’ here; see v. 59.

99. elucescebat: “he was beginning to shine forth”; a late Latin word not found in the Ciceronian vocabulary, and therefore condemned by the Bishop; this word is, perhaps, what is meant by the “gaudy ware” in the second line of Gandolf’s epitaph, referred to in v. 78.

A Toccata of Galuppi’s.

— St. 1. Galuppi, Baldassaro (rather Baldassare): b. 1703, in Burano, an island near Venice, and thence called Buranello; d. 1785; a distinguished composer, whose operas, about fifty in number, and mostly comic, were at one time the most popular in Italy; Galuppi is regarded as the father of the Italian comic opera.

— St. 2. Saint Mark’s: see Ruskin’s description of this glorious basilica, in ‘The Stones of Venice’.

— St. 6. Toccatas: the Toccata was a form of musical composition for the organ or harpsichord, somewhat in the free and brilliant style of the modern fantasia or capriccio; clavichord: “a keyed stringed instrument, now superseded by the pianoforte {now called a piano}.”—Webster.

— St. 7. The musical technicalities used in this stanza, any musician can explain and illustrate.

— St. 8. The questions in this stanza must be supposed to be caused by the effect upon the revellers of the “plaintive lesser thirds”, the “diminished sixths”, the “commiserating sevenths”, etc., of the preceding stanza.

— St. 11. While I triumph o’er a secret wrung from nature’s close reserve: the secret of the soul’s immortality.

— St. 13. The idea is involved in this stanza that the soul’s continued existence is dependent on its development in this life; the ironic character of the stanza is indicated by the merely intellectual subjects named, physics, geology, mathematics, which do not of themselves, necessarily, contribute to SOUL-development. All from the 2d verse of the 12th stanza down to “Dust and ashes” in the 15th, is what the music, “like a ghostly cricket, creaking where a house was burned”, says to the speaker, in the monologue, of the men and women for whom life meant simply a butterfly enjoyment.

Abt Vogler.

(After he has been extemporizing upon the Musical Instrument of his Invention.)

— St. 1. The leading sentence, “Would that the structure brave”, etc., is interrupted by the comparison, “as when Solomon willed”, etc., and continued in the 2d stanza, “Would it might tarry like his”, etc.; the construction of the comparison is, “as when Solomon willed that armies of angels, legions of devils, etc., should rush into sight and pile him a palace straight”; the reference is to the legends of the Koran in regard to Solomon’s magical powers.

— St. 2. the beautiful building of mine: “Of all our senses, hearing seems to be the most poetical; and because it requires most imagination. We do not simply listen to sounds, but whether they be articulate or inarticulate, we are constantly translating them into the language of sight, with which we are better acquainted; and this is a work of the imaginative faculty.” —‘Poetics: an Essay on Poetry’. By E. S. Dallas.

The idea expressed in the above extract is beautifully embodied in the following lines from Coleridge’s ‘Kubla Khan’:—

— St. 11. And what is our failure here: “As long as effort is directed to the highest, that aim, though it is out of reach, is the standard of hope. The existence of a capacity, cherished and quickened, is a pledge that it will find scope. The punishment of the man who has fixed all his thoughts upon earth, a punishment felt on reflection to be overwhelming in view of possibilities of humanity, is the completest gratification of desires unworthily limited:—

On the other hand, the soul which has found in success not rest but a starting-point, which refuses to see in the first-fruits of a partial victory the fulness of its rightful triumph, has ever before it a sustaining and elevating vision:—

— * See ‘Pages from an Album’, in ‘The Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine’ (Scribner’s), for November 1882, pp. 159, 160, where is given a fac-simile of the poet’s Ms. of these verses and of the ten verses he afterwards added, in response, it seems, to a carping critic. —

Memorabilia.

How it strikes a Contemporary.

“Transcendentalism”:

A Poem in Twelve Books.

— 22. German Boehme: Jacob Boehme (or Behmen), a shoemaker and a famous theosophist, b. 1575, at Old Seidenberg, a village near Goerlitz; d. 1624. The 24th verse of the poem, “He noticed all at once that plants could speak”, may refer to a remarkable experience of Boehme, related in Dr. Hans Lassen Martensen’s ‘Jacob Boehme: his life and teaching, or studies in theosophy: translated from the Danish by T. Rhys Evans’, London, 1885: “Sitting one day in his room, his eye fell upon a burnished pewter dish, which reflected the sunshine with such marvellous splendor that he fell into an inward ecstasy, and it seemed to him as if he could now look into the principles and deepest foundations of things. He believed that it was only a fancy, and in order to banish it from his mind he went out upon the green. But here he remarked that he gazed into the very heart of things, the very herbs and grass, and that actual nature harmonized with what he had inwardly seen.” Martensen, in his biography, follows that by Frankenberg, in which the experience may be given more in detail.

37-40. him of Halberstadt, John: “It is not a thinker like Boehme, who will compensate us for the lost summer of our life; but a magician like John of Halberstadt, who can, at any moment, conjure roses up.”

“The ‘magic’ symbolized, is that of genuine poetry; but the magician, or ‘Mage’, is an historical person; and the special feat imputed to him was recorded of other magicians in the Middle Ages, if not of himself. ‘Johannes Teutonicus, a canon of Halberstadht in Germany, after he had performed a number of prestigious feats almost incredible, was transported by the Devil in the likeness of a black horse, and was both seen and heard upon one and the same Christmas day, to say mass in Halberstadht, in Mayntz, and in Cologne’ (‘Heywood’s Hierarchy’, Bk. IV., p. 253). The ‘prestigious feat’ of causing flowers to appear in winter, was a common one.” —Mrs. Sutherland Orr’s ‘Handbook to the works of Robert Browning’, p. 209.

It may be said that the advice given in this poem, Browning has not sufficiently followed in his own poetry. On this point, a writer in the ‘British Quarterly Review’ (Vol. 23, p. 162) justly remarks: “Browning’s thought is always that of a poet. Subtle, nimble, and powerful as is the intellect, and various as is the learning, all is manifested through the imagination, and comes forth shaped and tinted by it. Thus, even in the foregoing passages {cited from ‘Transcendentalism’ and ‘Bishop Blougram’s Apology’}, where the matter is almost as purely as it can be the produce of the mere understanding, it is still evident that the method of the thought is poetic. The notions take the form of images. For example, the poet means to say that Prose is a good and mighty vehicle in its way, but that it is not Poetry; and how does the conception shape itself in his mind? Why, in an image. All at once it is not Prose that is thought about, but a huge six-foot speaking-trumpet braced round with bark, through which the Swiss hunters help their voices from Alp to Alp— Poetry, on the other hand, being no such big and blaring instrument, but a harp taken to the breast of youth and swept by ecstatic fingers. And so with the images of Boehme and his book, and John of Halberstadt with his magic rose—still a concrete body to enshrine an abstract meaning.”

Apparent Failure.

“We shall soon lose a celebrated building.”—Paris Newspaper.

— St. 1. To see the baptism of your Prince: the Prince Imperial, son of Napoleon III. and the Empress Eugenie, born March 16, 1856. the Congress: the Congress of Paris.

Gortschakoff: Prince Alexander Michaelowitsch Gortschakoff; while representing Russia at the Court of Vienna, he kept Austria neutral during the Crimean War.

Cavour: Count Camillo Benso di Cavour, Italian statesman, b. 1810; at the Congress of Paris, brought forward the question of the political consolidation of Italy, which led to the invasion of Italy by the Austrians, who were defeated; d. 6th June, 1861.

Buol: Karl Ferdinand von Buol-Schauenstein, Austrian diplomatist, and minister of foreign affairs from 1852 to 1859.

— St. 2. Petrarch’s Vaucluse makes proud the Sorgue: Fontaine de Vaucluse, a celebrated fountain, in the department of Vaucluse, in Southern France, the source of the Sorgues. The village named after it was for some time the residence of Petrarch.

Rabbi Ben Ezra.

— St. 1. Grow old along with me!: I understand that the aged Rabbi is addressing some young friend. The best is yet to be, the last of life:

— St. 2, 3. The construction is, I do not remonstrate that youth, amassing flowers, sighed, Which rose make ours, which lily leave, etc., nor that, admiring stars, it (youth) yearned, etc.

— St. 4. Irks care: does care irk. . .does doubt fret. . .

— St. 5. Nearer we hold of God: have title to a nearer relationship. See Webster, s.v. Hold, v.i. def. 3. {No edition is given.}

— St. 7. What I aspired to be: “‘tis not what man Does which exalts him, but what man Would do.”—‘Saul’, v. 296.

— St. 8. Thy body at its best, How far, etc.: “In our flesh grows the branch of this life, in our soul it bears fruit.”—‘Saul’, v. 151.

— St. 9. the Past: he means the past of his own life.

— St. 10. The original reading of the 3d verse was, “I, who saw Power, SHALL see Love perfect too.” The change has cleared up a difficulty. The All-Great is now to me, in my age, the All-Loving too. Maker, remake, complete: there seems to be an anticipation here of the metaphor of the Potter’s wheel, in stanzas 25-32, and see Jer. 18:4.

— St. 13. Thence shall I pass, etc.: It will be observed that here and in some of the following stanzas, the Rabbi speaks in the person of youth; so youth should say to itself.

— St. 20. knowledge absolute: soul knowledge, which is reached through direct assimilation by the soul of the hidden principles of things, as distinguished from intellectual knowledge, which is based on the phenominal, and must be more or less subject to dispute.

— St. 21, vv. 4, 5. The relatives are suppressed;—Was I whom the world arraigned, or were they whom my soul disdained, right?

— St. 26. Potter’s wheel: “But now, O Lord, thou art our Father: we are the clay, and thou our Potter; and we are all the work of thy hand.”—Is. 64:8; and see Jer. 18:2-6.

A Grammarian’s Funeral.

Shortly after the Revival of Learning in Europe.

— 18. overcome: pass over, overhang, overshadow; used as in Macbeth III. IV. 3, “overcome us like a summer’s cloud”.

39, 40. New measures, . . .finished?: do you say? not at all.

42. All in parentheses, throughout the poem, is addressed by the speaker directly to his companions.

57. Actual life comes next: do you say? No. I have more to do first.

86. Calculus: the stone.

88. Tussis: a cough.

95. hydroptic: hydropic, dropsical.

129. Hoti: the Greek particle ‘/Oti, conj. that, etc.

130. Oun: Greek particle Ou^'n, then, now then, etc.

131. the enclitic De: Greek De {Delta epsilon}; in regard to this, the following letter by Browning appeared in the London ‘Daily News’ of Nov. 21, 1874: “To the Editor of ‘The Daily News’. Sir,— In a clever article this morning you speak of ‘the doctrine of the enclitic De’—‘which, with all deference to Mr. Browning, in point of fact does not exist.’ No, not to Mr. Browning: but pray defer to Herr Buttmann, whose fifth list of ‘enclitics’ ends ‘with the inseparable De’—or to Curtius, whose fifth list ends also with ‘De (meaning ‘towards’ and as a demonstrative appendage)’. That this is not to be confounded with the accentuated ‘De, meaning BUT’, was the ‘doctrine’ which the Grammarian bequeathed to those capable of receiving it.— I am, sir, yours obediently, R. B.”—‘Browning Soc. Papers’, Part I., p. 56.

An Epistle containing the Strange Medical Experience of Karshish, the Arab Physician.

— 1. Karshish. . .To Abib. {that is, phrase finishes on line 7.}

17. snake-stone: a certain kind of stone supposed to be efficacious when placed upon the bite of a snake, in absorbing or charming away the poison.

21. My journeyings were brought to Jericho: i.e., in his last letter.

28. Vespasian: T. Flavius Sabinus Vespasianus, Roman emperor, A.D. 70-79; sent by Nero in 66 to conduct the war against the Jews; when proclaimed emperor, left his son Titus to continue the war.

24-33. his ardent scientific interest has caused him to brave all dangers.

49. The Syrian runagate: perhaps I’m writing for nothing in trusting my letter to him.

60. Thou hadst: wouldst have. Zoar: one of the “cities of the plain”, S. E. of the Dead Sea (Gen. 19:22).

65-78. Though he’s deeply impressed with the subject, he approaches it with extreme diffidence, writing to the “all-sagacious” Abib.

82. exhibition: used in its medical sense of administering a remedy.

103. fume: vaporish fancy.

106. As saffron tingeth: Chaucer uses “saffron” metaphorically as a verb:—

113. Think, could WE penetrate by any drug.

141, 142. “Browning has drawn the portraiture of one to whom the eternal is sensibly present, whose spirit has gained prematurely absolute predominance: . . .and the result is. . .a being ‘Professedly the faultier that he knows God’s secret, while he holds the thread of life’ (vv. 200, 201). Lazarus therefore, while he moves in the world, has lost all sense of proportion in things about him, all measure of and faculty of dealing with that which sways his fellows. He has no power or will to win them to his faith, but he simply stands among men as a patient witness of the overwhelming reality of the divine: a witness whose authority is confessed, even against his inclination, by the student of nature, who turns again and again to the phenomenon which he affects to disparage.

“In this crucial example Browning shows how the exclusive dominance of the spirit destroys the fulness of human life, its uses and powers, while it leaves a passive life, crowned with an unearthly beauty. On the other hand, he shows in his study of Cleon that the richest results of earth in art and speculation, and pleasure and power, are unable to remove from life the desolation of final gloom. . . . The contrast is of the deepest significance. The Jewish peasant endures earth, being in possession of heaven: the Greek poet, in possession of earth, feels that heaven, some future state,

is a necessity for man; but no,

But we must not pause to follow out the contrast into details. It is enough to see broadly that flesh and spirit each claim recognition in connection with their proper spheres, in order that the present life may bear its true result.”—Rev. Prof. Westcott on ‘Browning’s View of Life’ (‘B. Soc. Papers’, IV., pp. 401, 402).

166. object: offer in opposition; see v. 243.

167. our lord: some sage under whom they had learned; see v. 254.

174. Thou and the child have: i.e., for him, Lazarus.

177. Greek fire: see Gibbon, chap. 52. {a flammable liquid, kept so secret that its exact constitution is still unknown.}

281. Aleppo: a city of Syria; the blue-flowering borage was supposed to possess valuable medicinal virtues and exhilarating qualities.

301. Jerusalem’s repose shall make amends: he will avail himself of it to write a better letter than this one.

A Martyr’s Epitaph.

(From ‘Easter Day’.)

Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister.

— St. 5. the Arian: a follower of Arius (died 336 A.D.), who denied that the Son was co-essential and co-eternal with the Father.

— St. 7. text in Galatians: chap. 5, vv. 19-21, where are enumerated “the works of the flesh”. There are seventeen named; he uses twenty-nine indefinitely; it’s common in French to use trente-six (36) for any pretty big number. If I trip him: What if I; and so in next stanza. a Manichee: a follower of Mani, who aimed to unite Parseeism, or Parsism, with Christianity.

— St. 9. Hy, Zy, Hine: represent the sound of the vesper bell.

Holy-Cross Day.

On which the Jews were forced to attend an Annual Christian Sermon in Rome.

— * “By a bull of Gregory XIII. in the year 1584, all Jews above the age of twelve years were compelled to listen every week to a sermon from a Christian priest; usually an exposition of some passages of the Old Testament, and especially those relating to the Messiah, from the Christian point of view. This burden is not yet wholly removed from them; and to this day, several times in the course of a year, a Jewish congregation is gathered together in the church of S. Angelo in Pescheria, and constrained to listen to a homily from a Dominican friar, to whom, unless his zeal have eaten up his good feelings and his good taste, the ceremony must be as painful as to his hearers. In the same spirit of vulgar persecution, there is upon the gable of a church, opposite one of the gates of the Ghetto, a fresco painting of the Crucifixion, and, underneath, an inscription in Hebrew and Latin, from the 2d and 3d verses of the 65th chapter of Isaiah— ‘I have spread out my hands all the day unto a rebellious people, which walketh in a way that was not good, after their own thoughts; a people that provoketh me to anger continually to my face.’” —George S. Hillard’s Six Months in Italy. (1853.) —

{"Now was come about Holy-Cross Day, and now must my lord preach his first sermon to the Jews: as it was of old cared for in the merciful bowels of the Church, that, so to speak, a crumb, at least, from her conspicuous table here in Rome, should be, though but once yearly, cast to the famishing dogs, under-trampled and bespitten-upon beneath the feet of the guests. And a moving sight in truth, this, of so many of the besotted blind restif and ready-to-perish Hebrews! now maternally brought —nay (for He saith, ‘Compel them to come in’), haled, as it were, by the head and hair, and against their obstinate hearts, to partake of the heavenly grace. What awakening, what striving with tears, what working of a yeasty conscience! Nor was my lord wanting to himself on so apt an occasion; witness the abundance of conversions which did incontinently reward him: though not to my lord be altogether the glory.”—Diary by the Bishop’s Secretary, 1600.}

What the Jews really said, on thus being driven to church, was rather to this effect:—

— St. 12. Rabbi Ben Ezra: see biographical sketch subjoined to the Argument of the Monologue entitled ‘Rabbi Ben Ezra’.

— St. 19. Ghetto: the Jews’ quarter in Rome, Venice, and other cities. The name is supposed to be derived from the Hebrew ‘ghet’, meaning division, separation, divorce.

{The late Pope abolished this bad business of the sermon.—R. B.}

— The late Pope: Gregory XVI.

Saul.

— 320 et seq.: see note to St. 37, 38, of ‘By the Fireside’.

A Death in the Desert.

— 1-12. The bracketed prefatory lines, explanatory of the parchment on which are recorded the last hours and last talk of St. John with his devoted attendants, purport to have been written by one who was at the time the owner of the parchment. It appears to have come into his possession through his wife, a niece of the Xanthus who, with Pamphylax of Antioch, the supposed author of the narrative (he having told it on the eve of his martyrdom to a certain Phoebas, v. 653), and two others, is represented therein as waiting on the dying apostle, and who afterwards “escaped to Rome, was burned, and could not write the chronicle.” (vv. 56, 57.)

4. And goeth from Epsilon down to Mu: the reference is to some numbering on the parchment.

6. terebinth: the turpentine tree. —

— 23. the decree: of persecution of the Christians, perhaps that under Domitian. The poet probably did not think of any particular persecution. —

— 36. the Bactrian convert: in vv. 649, 650, he is spoken of as “but a wild childish man, and could not write nor speak, but only loved.” Bactria was a kingdom in Central Asia; the modern name is Balkh {a district in northern Afghanistan as of 1995}. having his desire: as a new convert, the simple man was eager to serve, even unto death.

41. aware: on the lookout; exercising a strict espionage. —

— 60. the seventh plate of graven lead: one of the plates on which John’s Gospel was graven. It contained, it appears, the 11th chapter, in which Jesus says to Martha, 25th verse, “I am the Resurrection and the Life.” The Boy uttered the words with such expression as ‘twere HIS mouth first proclaiming them. —

— 69. the lone desert-bird: the ruff may possibly be referred to. See Webster, s.v. —

— 76. withdrawn into my depths: into the depths of his absolute being, of the “what Is”; see the doctrine of the trinal unity of man which follows. —

— 82-104. The supposed narrator, Pamphylax, gives in these bracketed verses, on the authority of an imagined Theotypas, a doctrine John was wont to teach, of the trinal unity of man— the third “person” of which unity, “what Is”, being man’s essential, absolute nature. The dying John is represented as having won his way to the Kingdom of the “what Is”, the Kingdom of eternal truth within himself. In Luke 17:20-21, we read: “And when he was demanded of the Pharisees, when the Kingdom of God should come, he answered them and said, The Kingdom of God cometh not with observation: neither shall they say, Lo here! or, Lo there! for, behold, the Kingdom of God is within you.” In harmony with which, Paracelsus is made to say, in Browning’s poem, “Truth is within ourselves; . . . there is an inmost centre in us all, where truth abides in fulness”; etc. See pp. 24 and 25 of this volume. {In this etext, see Chapter I, ‘The Spiritual Ebb and Flow, etc.’, of the Introduction. Excerpt is shortly before the poem ‘Popularity’.} “Life, you’ve granted me, develops from within. But INNERMOST OF THE INMOST, MOST INTERIOR OF THE INTERNE, GOD CLAIMS HIS OWN, DIVINE HUMANITY RENEWING NATURE” (Mrs. Browning’s ‘Aurora Leigh’). Mrs. M. G. Glazebrook, in her paper on ‘A Death in the Desert’, read at the 48th meeting of the Browning Society, Feb. 25th, 1887, paraphrases these lines: “The first and lowest {soul} is that which has to do with earth and corporeal things, the animal soul, which receives primary sensations and is the immediate cause of action —‘what Does’. The second is the intellect, and has its seat in the brain: it is superior to the first, but dependent on it, since it receives as material the actual experience which the animal soul supplies; it is the feeling, thinking, willing soul —‘what Knows’. The third, and highest, is the spirit of man, the very principle of life, the divine element in man linking him to God, which is self-subsistent and therefore independent of sensation and knowledge, but nevertheless makes use of them, and gives them existence and energy—‘what Is’.” —

— 113. superficial truth: phenomenal, relative truth; that which is arrived at through the senses, and belongs to the domain of the “what Knows”. Essential, absolute truth can be known only through a response thereto of the essential, the absolute, the “what Is”, in man’s nature. John has attained to a measure of absolute truth, and smiles on reverting to the very superficial truth of things.

121-123. See The Revelation of St. John, chap. 1.

125. your brother: he means himself, of course. —

— 156. I saw, I heard, I knew: expressions which occur throughout John’s Revelation.

188-197. The poet provides, in these lines, for the prophetic character of John’s discourse, its solution of the difficulties destined to beset Christianity in the future, and especially of those which have been raised in our own times. The historical bulwarks which the Strausses and the Renans have endeavored to destroy, Christianity, in its essential, absolute character, its adaptiveness to spiritual vitality, and the wants of the soul, can do without. Indeed, there will be much gained when the historical character of Christianity is generally disregarded. Its impregnable fortress, namely, the Personality, Jesus Christ, will remain, and mankind will forever seek and find refuge in it. Arthur Symons, in his ‘Introduction to the Study of Browning’, remarks: . . ."it is as a piece of ratiocination—suffused, indeed, with imagination— that the poem seems to have its raison d’etre. The bearing of this argument on contemporary theories, may to some appear a merit, to others a blemish. To make the dying John refute Strauss or Renan, handling their propositions with admirable dialectical skill, is certainly, on the face of it, somewhat hazardous. But I can see no real incongruity in imputing to the seer of Patmos a prophetic insight into the future—no real inconsequence in imagining the opponent of Cerinthus spending his last breath in the defence of Christian truth against a foreseen scepticism.” —

— 202. “Oh, not alone when life flows still do truth and power emerge, but also when strange chance ruffles its current; in unused conjuncture, when sickness breaks the body—hunger, watching, excess, or languor— oftenest death’s approach—peril, deep joy, or woe.” —Browning’s ‘Paracelsus’.

“Drawing near her death, she sent most pious thoughts as harbingers to heaven; and her soul saw a glimpse of happiness through the chinks of her sickness-broken body.” Fuller’s ‘Holy and Profane State’, Book I., chap. 2.

203. With me: connect with ‘share’, v. 198.

208-209. See p. 62 of this volume. {In this etext, Part II, Section 3 in the Introduction. It is shortly before an excerpt from ‘Christmas Eve’.}

221-225. See stanzas 9 and 10 of ‘Rabbi Ben Ezra’.

227. an optic glass: perhaps anachronistic. —

— 284. the myth of Aeschylus: embodied in his ‘Prometheus Bound’.

295. the proofs shift: see pp. 37 and 38. {In etext, shortly before two excerpts from ‘A Death in the Desert’, Chapter II, Section 1 of Introduction.} Objective proofs, in spiritual matters, need reconstruction, again and again; and whatever may be their character, they are inadequate, and must finally, in the Christian life, be superseded by subjective proofs— by man’s winning his way to the kingdom of eternal truth within himself —the kingdom of the “what Is”.

307-310. See Matt. 26:56; Mark 14:50; John 18:3.

326-328. what the Roman’s lowered spear was found {to be, namely}, a bar, {etc.,} now proved {to be, etc.}.

329. This Ebion, this Cerinthus: see ‘Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire’, Chaps. 15, 21, 47. And see, especially, the able articles, “Cerinthus” and “Ebionism and Ebionites”, in the ‘Dictionary of Christian Biography’, etc., edited by Dr. William Smith and Professor Wace. “‘Ebion’ as a name first personified by Tertullian, was said to have been a pupil of Cerinthus, and the Gospel of St. John to have been as much directed against the former as the latter. St. Paul and St. Luke were asserted to have spoken and written against Ebionites. The ‘Apostolical Constitutions’ (vi. c. 6) traced them back to Apostolic times; Theodoret (Haer. fab. II. c. 2) assigned them to the reign of Domitian (A.D. 81-96). The existence of an ‘Ebion’ is, however, now surrendered.” From Art. Ebionism in ‘Dict. of Christian Biography’.

And see Prof. George P. Fisher’s ‘Beginnings of Christianity’, 1877.

“Cerinthus, a man who was educated in the wisdom of the Egyptians, taught that the world was not made by the primary God, but by a certain power far separated from him, and at a distance from that Principality who is supreme over the universe, and ignorant of him who is above all. He represented Jesus as having not been born of a virgin, but as being the son of Joseph and Mary according to the ordinary course of human generation, while he nevertheless was more righteous, prudent, and wise than other men. Moreover, after his baptism, Christ descended upon him in the form of a dove from the Supreme Ruler, and that then he proclaimed the unknown Father, and performed miracles. But at last Christ departed from Jesus, and that then Jesus suffered and rose again, while Christ remained impassible, inasmuch as he was a spiritual being.” ‘The Writings of Irenaeus, transl. by Rev. Alexander Roberts, D.D., and Rev. W. H. Rambaut, A.B.’, Edinburgh, 1868. Vol. I., Book I., Chap xxvi. —

— 346. darkling: an old adverbial form; in the dark. See ‘Paradise Lost’, III. 39. “O, wilt thou darkling leave me?” Sh’s ‘M. N. D.’, II. 2. 86; “So, out went the candle, and we were left darkling.” ‘Lear’, I. 4. 237; also ‘A. and C.’, IV. 15. 10.

353. What is the doubt, my brothers?: He addresses his brothers of the far future. The eight following verses are very beautiful.

362-365. The question, “Where is the promise of His coming?” asked in John’s own day, gives place in the far future to which the ken of the dying Apostle extends, to the question whether God was indeed revealed in Christ, ‘As Power, as Love, as Influencing Soul’, or whether, man having already love in himself, Christ were not a mere projection from man’s inmost mind (v. 383)? If so there is nothing to fall back on but force, or natural law. This anticipated questioning and reasoning extends from v. 370 to v. 421. —

— 367. And let us ask and answer: John’s talk, it must be understood, is with future people, not with the attendants.

368. My book speaks on: that is, to people of all futures, because it cannot pass away.

371. What truth, etc.: that is, truth is soon perverted, obscured, and often turned into positive untruth.

372. Wonders, that would prove doctrine: that is, whose purpose was to prove.

385. Comes to be considered as something outside of, and distinct from, himself. —

— 424. Here John’s answer begins to the questioning and reasoning contained in vv. 370-421.

In vv. 424-434, is contained a favorite teaching of Browning. It appears in various forms throughout his poetry. See the quotation from ‘Luria’, p. 38.

428. This imports solely: this is the one all important thing.

428-430. A similar comparison is used in ‘Julius Caesar’, A. II., S. I., 22-27:

452. This might be pagan teaching: that is, even pagan teaching might go so far as this. —

— 472. So faith grew, making void more miracles: the outward manifestations of spiritual powers (du/namis, ‘power’, ‘act of power’, and shmei^on, ‘sign’, ‘token’, are the original words in the N. T., which are translated ‘miracle’) gave place to subjective proof. Christianity was endorsed by man’s own soul. To this may be added, that even the historical bulwarks of Christianity may, ere long, be dispensed with.

474-481. These verses may be taken as presenting Browning’s own conclusion as to the whole duty of man, in a spiritual direction. And see the quotation from ‘Christmas Eve’ and the remarks which follow, on pp. 63 and 64. {In etext, Chapter II, Section 3 of Introduction.} —

— 514-539. John anticipates another objection that will be made to his Gospel, namely, that so many things therein are not cleared up, that the whole truth is not told in the proper words, the sceptic claiming that everything should have been so proved

that all after-doubt, impossible in the face of truth—truth absolute, uniform, might have been stopped.

523. Had stopped: would have stopped.

530. the heathen bard’s: Aeschylus’.

531. famous play: ‘Prometheus Bound’.

532. ephemerals’: mortals’.

537. Titan’s: Prometheus’. —

— 540-633. All that John says in these verses, in reply to the anticipated objections urged in vv. 514-539, are found, substantially, in several passages in Browning’s poetry. See remarks on pp. 36-38 beginning, “The human soul is regarded in Browning’s poetry”, etc. {Chapter II, Section 1 in this etext.} An infallible guide, which would render unnecessary any struggles on man’s part, after light and truth, would torpify his powers. And see vv. 582-633 of the present poem.

552. Man takes that title now: that is, of ‘First, last, and best of things”, if, etc. See sections 17 and 18 of ‘Saul’, and stanza 10 of ‘Rabbi Ben Ezra’. And see the grand dying speech of Paracelsus, which concludes Browning’s poem.

554. “A law of nature means nothing to Mr. Browning if it does not mean the immanence of power, and will, and love. He can pass with ready sympathy into the mystical feeling of the East, where in the unclouded sky, in the torrent of noonday light, God is so near

But the wisdom of a Western ‘savant’ who in his superior intellectuality replaces the will of God by the blind force of nature, seems to Mr. Browning to be science falsely so called, a new ignorance founded upon knowledge,

To this effect argues the prophet John in ‘A Death in the Desert’, anticipating with the deep prevision of a dying man the doubts and questionings of modern days. And in the third of those remarkable poems which form the epilogue of the ‘Dramatis Personae’, the whole world rises in the speaker’s imagination into one vast spiritual temple, in which voices of singers, and swell of trumpets, and cries of priests are heard going up to God no less truly than in the old Jewish worship, while the face of Christ, instinct with divine will and love, becomes apparent, as that of which all nature is a type or an adumbration.” —Prof. Edward Dowden in his Comparative Study of Browning and Tennyson (Studies in Literature, 1789-1877). —

— 652. Pamphylax tells the story to Phoebas, on the eve of his martyrdom.

654-660. See Gospel of St. John 21:20-24.

662. regard: look.

De Quincey remarks (Milton vs. Southey and Landor) in reply to Landor’s demurring that “meek regard conveys no new idea to placid aspect”: “But ASPECT is the countenance of Christ when passive to the gaze of others; REGARD is the same countenance in active contemplation of those others whom he loves or pities. The PLACID ASPECT expresses, therefore, the divine rest; the MEEK REGARD expresses the divine benignity; the one is the self-absorption of the total Godhead, the other the external emanation of the Filial Godhead.” —

— 665. Cerinthus read and mused: It must be supposed that an opportunity had been afforded Cerinthus of reading the MS. by the one who added the postscript, which is addressed to him, and who sought his conversion.

683. That is, ‘With me as {with} Pamphylax, with him as {with} John’: See Gospel of John, 17:11,21-23. —

“In the critical examination of the evangelical records, the fourth Gospel suffered most. Strauss—in this instance following his early master and later antagonist, Baur—denied that St. John had anything to do with its composition. The author, he held, was neither St. John nor any one else who had personally known Christ: nor, in accordance with a widely accepted theory, did he believe it to be the work of a pupil of St. John, who, after the death of his master, related, from memory or from fragmentary notes, traditions and sayings which had been taught him, and made out of them a continuous history. Strauss pronounced it to be a controversial work, written late in the second century after Christ, by a profound theologian of the Greek Gnostic and anti-Jewish school, whose design was not to add another to the existing biographies of Christ, not to represent him as a real man, nor to give an account of any human life, but to produce an elaborate theological work in which, under the veil of allegory, the Neo-platonic conception of Christ as the Logos, the realized Word of God, the divine principle of light and life, should be developed. With this purpose, the writer made a free selection from the sayings and doings of Christ as recorded in the three Gospels already written, and as freely invented others. All the events, all the words, of the Gospel thus composed, are subordinate to the main design, which was worked out by the author with an artistic completeness most ingeniously traced by his German interpreters. Each miracle symbolizes some important dogma, and its narration must be understood to mean that it embodies some deep spiritual truth, not, necessarily, that it ever actually took place. The author manifests, throughout, his ignorance of Jewish customs, and his antagonism to Jewish sentiments.”

“The general purport of the poem can scarcely be doubted, as we look back upon it as a whole and consider its main conclusions. The tendency of the argument is to diminish the importance of the original events—historical or traditional—on which the Christian religion is based. ‘It is not worth while,’ the writer seems to say to Strauss and his followers, ‘to occupy ourselves with discussions about miracles and events which are said to have taken place a long time ago, and can now neither be denied or proved. What we are concerned with, is, Christianity as it is now: as a religion which the human mind has through many generations developed, purified, spiritualized; and which has reacted upon human nature and made it wiser and nobler. Shall we give up this faith which has been so great a power for good in the world, and which, its whole past history justifies us in concluding, will continue its work of improvement, because our belief in certain events is shaken or destroyed? It would be vain, indeed, thus to build our religion on a foundation so unstable as material evidence. For human sensations are not infallible; they very often deceive us; we think we see objects, which are really the illusions of our own brain; others we see in part only, or distorted; others we fail to perceive at all. Our faith, essential as it is to the well-being of the deepest parts of our nature, must not be dependent on such controlling powers as these.’”

“He {Browning} was, we may suppose, offended by Strauss’s ruthless attack on much that mankind has held sacred for ages. His religious sense was revolted by the assumption that there was nothing in Christianity which could survive the destruction of the miraculous and supernatural elements in its history. He desired to represent Christianity as an entirely spiritual religion, independent of external, material agencies. In order to make his argument as powerful as possible, he chose for his mouth-piece one of the personal followers of Christ, on whom, it might be supposed, the actual human life of his master had made a permanent and lively impression. With the details of Biblical criticism he had nothing to do; his principles were unaffected by discussions about the authenticity of the various parts of Gospels; so, in defiance of Strauss, the disciple he chose was that very John, whose personality, as recognized by long tradition, had been so much discredited. He showed how even in one of the disciples the recollection of wonders and signs could be transcended, and at last obliterated, by a spiritual faith which was sustained by the needs and faculties of the soul. The poem is, in effect, an eloquent protest in defence of ‘the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge’.”

From Mrs. M. G. Glazebrook’s paper on ‘A Death in the Desert’, read before the London Browning Society.

A LIST OF CRITICISMS OF BROWNING’S WORKS.

(Selected from Dr. Frederick J. Furnivall’s ‘Bibliography of Robert Browning’, contained in ‘The Browning Society’s Papers’, Part I., with additions in Part II.)

1833. The Monthly Mag., N. S., V. 7, pp. 254-262: Review of ‘Pauline’, by W. J. Fox.

1835. The Examiner, Sept. 6, pp. 563-565: on ‘Paracelsus’, by John Forster.

1835. Monthly Repository, Nov., pp. 716-727: Review of ‘Paracelsus’, by W. J. Fox.

1836. New Monthly Mag., March, Vol. 46, pp. 289-308: ‘Evidences of a New Genius for Dramatic Poetry.—No. 1.’ On ‘Paracelsus’, by John Forster.

1837. Edinburgh Rev., July, Vol. 66, pp. 132-151: ‘Strafford’.

1848. N. A. Rev., April, Vol. 66, pp. 357-400: B.‘s ‘Plays and Poems’, by James Russell Lowell.

1849. Eclectic Rev., London, 4th S. V. 26, pp. 203-214: on 1. the ‘Poems’, 2 vols. 1849, and 2. ‘Sordello’, 1840. A sympathetic and excellent review.

1850. Massachusetts Quarterly Rev., No. XI. June, Art. IV. ‘Browning’s Poems’. 1. ‘Poems’, 2 vols., Boston, 1850. 2. ‘Christmas Eve’ and ‘Easter Day’, London, 1850.

1850. Littell’s Living Age, Vol. 25, pp. 403-409: on ‘Christmas Eve’ and ‘Easter Day’.

1857. The Christian Remembrancer, N. S., Vol. 39, pp. 361-390.

1861. North British Rev., May, pp. 350-374: on ‘The Poems and Plays of R. B.’, by F. H. Evans.

1863. Fraser’s Mag., Feb., pp. 240-256.

1863. The Eclectic Rev., No. 23, N. S., May, pp. 436-454.

1863. National Rev., Oct., Vol. 47, pp. 417-446. Poetical Works of R. B., 3 vols., 3d ed., by R. H. Hutton; republ. in Hutton’s ‘Literary Essays, 1871’.

1864. The Eclectic and Congregational Rev., July, pp. 61-72: on ‘Dramatis Personae’, by E. Paxton Hood.

1864. Edinburgh Rev., Oct., pp. 537-565: on ‘Poems’, 1863, and ‘Dramatis Personae’, 1864.

1864. National Rev., N. S., Nov., 1864; Wordsworth, Tennyson, and Browning; or Pure, Ornate, and Grotesque Art in English Poetry; republ. in ‘Literary Studies’, by Walter Bagshot.

1865. Quarterly Rev., July, Vol. 118, pp. 77-105: on ‘Dramatis Personae’, 1864, and ‘Poems’, 3 vols., 1863.

1867. Contemporary Rev., Jan. and Feb., 1867, Vol. 4, pp. 1-15, 133-148. Thoughtful and able articles.

1867. Fraser’s Mag., Oct., pp. 518-530: ‘Sordello’, by Edward Dowden.

1868. Athenaeum, Dec. 26, pp. 875, 876: ‘The Ring and the Book’, Vol. 1. by Robert Buchanan; revised and publ. in his ‘Master Spirits’, 1873.

1868. Eclectic and Congregational Rev., Dec., Art. II. ‘Poetical Works’, 6 vols., 1868, by E. Paxton Hood. See under 1864.

1868. Essays on B.‘s poetry, by J. T. Nettleship.

1869. Athenaeum, March 20, pp. 399, 400: on ‘The Ring and the Book’, Vols. 2, 3, and 4.

1869. Fortnightly Rev., March, Vol. 5, N. S., pp. 331-343: on ‘The Ring and the Book’, by John Morley. An able and generous article.

1869. Quarterly Rev., April, pp. 328-359: on Mod. Eng. Poets; a few pages are on B.‘s poems and ‘The Ring and the Book’.

1869. Edinburgh Rev., July, Vol. 130, pp. 164-186: on ‘The Ring and the Book’.

1869. London Quarterly Rev., July, on B.‘s Poetry— all then published.

1869. N. Brit. Rev., Oct., pp. 97-128: B.‘s Latest Poetry (‘The Ring and the Book’).

1871. Saint Paul’s Mag., Dec., 1870, and Jan., 1871, Vol. 7, pp. 257-276, 377-397: ‘Poems’ and ‘The Ring and the Book’, by E. J. Hasell.

1871. Athenaeum, Aug. 12, pp. 199, 200: on ‘Balaustion’s Adventure’.

1871. Contemporary Rev., Sept., pp. 284-296, on ‘Balaustion’s Adventure’, by Matthew Browne (pseudonym).

1871. The Times, Oct. 6: a long review of ‘Balaustion’s Adventure’.

1871. ‘Our Living Poets: an Essay in Criticism’. By H. Buxton Forman. 4th chap. on B., pp. 103-152.

1871. Fortnightly Rev., Oct., Vol. 10, N. S., pp. 478-490: on ‘Balaustion’s Adventure’, by Sidney Colvin.

1871. The Dark Blue Mag., Oct. and Nov., Vol. 2, pp. 171-184, 305-319: ‘Browning as a Preacher’, by Miss E. Dickinson West. An admirable essay.

1872. Edinburgh Rev., Jan., Vol. 135, pp. 221-249: on ‘Balaustion’s Adventure’.

1872. Academy, Jan. 15: on ‘Hohenstiel-Schwangau’.

1872. Academy, July 1: on ‘Fifine at the Fair’, by F. Wedmore.

1873. Athenaeum, May 10: on ‘Red Cotton Night-Cap Country’.

1873. Academy, June 2: on ‘Red Cotton Night-Cap Country’, by G. A. Simcox.

1873. ‘Master Spirits’, by Robert Buchanan; contains, pp. 89-109, a revised reprint of the Athenaeum reviews of ‘The Ring and the Book’, Dec., 1869, and March, 1870.

1875. Academy, April 17: on ‘Aristophanes’ Apology’, by J. A. Symonds.

1875. Athenaeum, April 17, pp. 513, 514: on ‘Aristophanes’ Apology’.

1875. Athenaeum, Nov. 27, pp. 701, 702: on ‘The Inn Album’.

1876. Academy, July 29: on ‘Pacchiarotto’, by Edward Dowden.

1876. Macmillan’s Mag., Feb., Vol. 33, pp. 347-354: on ‘Inn Album’, by A. C. Bradley.

1876. ‘Victorian Poets. By Edmund Clarence Stedman’. Boston: 1876. Chap. IX., pp. 292-341, devoted to Browning.

1877. Academy, Nov. 3: on ‘The Agamemnon of Aeschylus’, by J. A. Symonds.

1878. Church Quarterly Rev., Oct., pp. 65-92: on B.‘s Poems, by the Hon. and Rev. Arthur Lyttleton. An article to be read by all students of Browning.

1878. Academy, June 1: on ‘La Saisiaz’, and ‘The Two Poets of Croisic’, by G. A. Simcox.

1878. Athenaeum, May 25, pp. 661-664: on ‘La Saisiaz’, by W. Theodore Watts.

1879. ‘Studies in Literature, 1789-1877. By Edward Dowden, LL.D.’ London: C. Kegan Paul & Co., pp. 191-239: ‘Mr. Tennyson and Mr. Browning. A comparative study’. Ranks with the very best of Browning criticisms.

1879. Athenaeum, May 10: on ‘Dramatic Idyls’, I., by Walter Theodore Watts.

1879. Academy, May 10: on ‘Dramatic Idyls’, I., by F. Wedmore.

1880. Athenaeum, July 10, pp. 39-41: on ‘Dramatic Idyls’, 2d S., by W. Th. Watts.

1881. Gentleman’s Mag., Dec., pp. 682-695: on ‘The Ring and the Book’, by James Thomson.

1881. Scribner’s Century Mag., Dec. 1, pp. 189-200: on ‘The Early Writings of R. B.’, by E. W. Gosse.

1881. The Cambridge Review, Dec. 7, Vol. 3, pp. 146, 147: a review of ‘Rabbi ben Ezra’ and ‘Abt Vogler’, by A. W.

Some of the most valuable criticism of Browning’s Poetry has been produced and published by The Browning Society of London, founded in 1881 by Dr. F. J. Furnivall, and still in active operation. Dr. Furnivall’s ‘Bibliography of Robert Browning’, occupying Part I. of ‘The Browning Society’s Papers’, and continued in Part II., is a storehouse of valuable information, of all kinds, pertaining to Browning’s Poetry, and to Browning the man. Every Browning student should possess a copy of it. The following papers, among others, have been published by the Society:—

Introductory Address to the Browning Society. By the Rev. J. Kirkman, M.A., Queen’s Coll., Cambridge, Oct. 28, 1881.

On ‘Pietro of Abano’ and the leading ideas of ‘Dramatic Idyls’, second series, 1880. By the Rev. J. Sharpe, M.A. Read Nov. 25, 1881.

On Browning’s ‘Fifine at the Fair’. By J. T. Nettleship, Esq. Read Feb. 24, 1882.

Notes on the Genius of Robert Browning. By James Thomson.

Read Jan. 27, 1882.

Browning’s Philosophy. By John Bury, Trin. Coll., Dublin. Read April 28, 1882.

On ‘Bishop Blougram’s Apology’. By the Rev. Prof. E. Johnson, M.A. Read May 26, 1882.

The Idea of Personality, as embodied in Robert Browning’s Poetry. By Prof. Hiram Corson, LL.D., Cornell University. Read June 23, 1882. (Contained in this volume.)

The Religious Teaching of Browning. By Dorothea Beale. Read Oct. 27, 1882.

An Account of Abbe Vogler. (From Fetis & Nisard.) By Miss Eleanor Marx.

Conscience and Art in Browning. By the Rev. Prof. E. Johnson, M.A.

Browning’s Intuition, specially in regard of Music and the Plastic Arts. By J. T. Nettleship. Read Feb. 23, 1883.

On some Points in Browning’s View of Life. By the Rev. Prof. B. F. Westcott, D.D. Read before the Cambridge Browning Soc., Nov., 1882.

One aspect of Browning’s Villains. By Miss E. D. West. Read April 27, 1883.

Browning’s Poems on God and Immortality as bearing on life here. By William F. Revell. Read March 30, 1883.

James Lee’s Wife. By Rev. J. H. Bulkeley. Read May 25, 1883.

Abt Vogler. By Mrs. Turnbull. Read June 22, 1883.

On some prominent points of Browning’s teaching. By W. A. Raleigh, Esq., of King’s College, Cambridge. Read Feb. 22, 1884.

‘Caliban upon Setebos’, with some notes on Browning’s subtlety and humor. By J. Cotter Morison, Esq. Read April 25, 1884.

In a Balcony. By Mrs. Turnbull. Read July 4, 1884.

On ‘Mr. Sludge the Medium’. By Edwin Johnson, M.A. Read March 27, 1885.

Browning as a Scientific Poet. By Edward Berdoe, M.R.C.S. (Eng.), L.R.C.P. (Ed.). Read April 24, 1885.

On the development of Browning’s genius in his capacity as Poet or Maker. By J. T. Nettleship, Esq. Read Oct. 30, 1885.

On ‘Aristophanes’ Apology’. By John B. Bury, B.A., Trin. Coll., Dublin. Read Jan. 29, 1886.

Andrea Del Sarto. By Albert Fleming. Read Feb. 26, 1886.

The reasonable rhythm of some of Browning’s Poems. By the Rev. H. J. Bulkeley, M.A. Read May 28, 1886.

The following works should be mentioned:—

Stories from Robert Browning. By Frederic May Holland. With an Introduction by Mrs. Sutherland Orr. London: 1882.

Strafford: a Tragedy. By Robert Browning. With notes and preface by Emily H. Hickey {First Hon. Sec. of the Browning Society}. And an Introduction by Samuel R. Gardiner, LL.D., Professor of Modern History, King’s College, London. London: 1884.

A Handbook to the works of Robert Browning. By Mrs. Sutherland Orr. London: 1885. A good reference book.

Poets and Problems. By George Willis Cooke. Boston: 1886. pp. 269-388 devoted to Browning.

Essays on Poetry and Poets. By the Hon. Roden Noel. London: 1886. pp. 256-282 devoted to Browning.

Select Poems of Robert Browning. By W. J. Rolfe. Boston.

Important works published since the first edition of this book:—

Sordello’s Story retold in prose. By Annie Wall. Boston and New York: 1886.

Browning’s Women. By Mary E. Burt. With an introduction by Rev. Edward Everett Hale, D.D., LL.D. Chicago: 1887.

Studies in the Poetry of Robert Browning. By James Fotheringham. London: 1887.

An Introduction to the Poetry of Robert Browning. By William John Alexander, Ph.D. Boston: 1889.

Sordello: an outline analysis of Mr. Browning’s poem. By Jeanie Morison. Edinburgh and London: 1889.

Robert Browning Personalia. By Edmund Gosse. Boston and New York: 1890.

Robert Browning: Essays and Thoughts. By John T. Nettleship. New York: 1890.

Browning’s Message to his Time: his Religion, Philosophy, and Science. By Edward Berdoe. London: 1890.

A Guide-Book to the poetic and dramatic works of Robert Browning. By George Willis Cooke. Boston: 1891.

Life and Letters of Robert Browning. By Mrs. Sutherland Orr. Boston: 1891.

Browning as a philosophical and religious teacher. By Henry Jones, M.A. New York: 1891.

Some additional papers of the Browning Society, published since the first edition of this book:—

“A Death in the Desert”. By Mrs. M. G. Glazebrook. Read February 25, 1887.

Some Notes on Browning’s poems referring to music. By Helen J. Ormerod. Read May 27, 1887.

“Saul”. By Anna M. Stoddart. Read May 25, 1888.

Andrea del Sarto and Abt Vogler. By Helen J. Ormerod. Read November 30, 1888.

La Saisiaz. By Rev. W. Robertson. Read January 25, 1889.

On the difficulties and obscurities encountered in a study of Browning’s poems. By James Bertram Oldham, B.A. Read February 22, 1889.

Taurello Salinguerra: historical details illustrative of Browning’s Sordello. Muratori and Browning compared. By W. M. Rossetti. Read November 29, 1889.

The value of Browning’s work. By William F. Revell. Read May 30, 1890.

The student will find much other valuable material in the Browning Society papers.

For Articles in Periodical Literature, the student should consult Poole’s Indexes.