Chapter VI: Part 6

His speech is a tissue of falsehoods and prevarications: if he uses a fact, it is only to twist it into a form of self-justification. He knows it is useless to deny the murder; his aim, then, is to explain and excuse it. Every device attainable by the instinct and the brain of hunted humanity he finds and uses. Now he slurs rapidly over an inconvenient fact; now, with the frank audacity of innocence, proclaims and blazons it abroad; now he is rhetorically eloquent, now ironically pathetic; always contriving to shift the blame upon others, and to make his own course appear the only one plausible or possible, the only one possible, at least, to a high-born, law-abiding son of the Church. Every shift and twist is subtly adapted to his audience of Churchmen, and the gradation of his pleading no less subtly contrived. No keener and subtler special pleading has ever been written, in verse certainly, and possibly in lawyers' prose; and it is poetry of the highest order of dramatic art.

Covering a narrower range, but still more significant within its own limits, the speech of _Giuseppe Caponsacchi_, the priest who assisted Pompilia in her flight to Rome (given now in her defence before the judges who have heard the defence of Guido) is perhaps the most passionate and thrilling piece of blank verse ever written by Browning. Indeed, I doubt if it be an exaggeration to say that such fire, such pathos, such splendour of human speech, has never been heard or seen in English verse since Webster. In tone and colour the monologue is quite new, exquisitely modulated to a surprising music. The lighter passages are brilliant: the eloquent passages full of a fine austerity; but it is in those passages directly relating to Pompilia that the chief greatness of the work lies. There is in these appeals a quivering, thrilling, searching quality of fervid pathetic directness: I can give no notion of it in words; but here are a few lines, torn roughly out of their context, which may serve in some degree to illustrate my meaning:--

"Pompilia's face, then and thus, looked on me
The last time in this life: not one sight since,
Never another sight to be! And yet
I thought I had saved her. I appealed to Rome:
It seems I simply sent her to her death.
You tell me she is dying now, or dead;
I cannot bring myself to quite believe
This is a place you torture people in:
What if this your intelligence were just
A subtlety, an honest wile to work
On a man at unawares? 'Twere worthy you.
No, Sirs, I cannot have the lady dead!
That erect form, flashing brow, fulgurant eye,
That voice immortal (oh, that voice of hers!)
That vision of the pale electric sword
Angels go armed with,--that was not the last
O' the lady! Come, I see through it, you find--
Know the manoeuvre! Also herself said
I had saved her: do you dare say she spoke false?
Let me see for myself if it be so!
Though she were dying a priest might be of use,
The more when he's a friend too,--she called me
Far beyond 'friend.'"

Severed from its connection, much of the charm of the passage vanishes away: always the test of the finest dramatic work; but enough remains to give some faint shadow of the real beauty of the work. Observe how the rhythm trembles in accord with the emotion of the speaker: now slow, solemn, sad, with something of the quiet of despair; now strenuously self-deluding and feverishly eager: "Let me see for myself if it be so!" a line which has all the flush and gasp in it of broken sudden utterance. And the monologue ends in a kind of desperate resignation:--

"Sirs, I am quiet again. You see, we are
So very pitiable, she and I,
Who had conceivably been otherwise.
Forget distemperature and idle heat;
Apart from truth's sake, what's to move so much?
Pompilia will be presently with God;
I am, on earth, as good as out of it,
A relegated priest; when exile ends,
I mean to do my duty and live long.
She and I are mere strangers now: but priests
Should study passion; how else cure mankind,
Who come for help in passionate extremes?
I do but play with an imagined life.

* * * * *

Mere delectation, fit for a minute's dream!--
Just as a drudging student trims his lamp,
Opens his Plutarch, puts him in the place
Of Roman, Grecian; draws the patched gown close,
Dreams, 'Thus should I fight, save or rule the world!'--
Then smilingly, contentedly, awakes
To the old solitary nothingness.
So I, from such communion, pass content ...

O great, just, good God! Miserable me!"

From the passionate defence of Caponsacchi, we pass to the death-bed of _Pompilia_. Like Shakespeare, Browning makes all his heroines young; and this child of seventeen, who has so much of the wisdom of youth, tells on her death-bed, to the kind people about her, the story of her life, in a simple, child-like, dreamy, wondering way, which can be compared, so far as I know, with nothing else ever written.

"Then a soul sighs its lowest and its last
After the loud ones;"

and we have here the whole heart of a woman, the whole heart and the very speech and accent of the most womanly of women. No woman has ever written anything so close to the nature of women, and I do not know what other man has come near to this strange and profoundly manly intuition, this "piercing and overpowering tenderness which glorifies," as Mr. Swinburne has said, "the poet of Pompilia." All _The Ring and the Book_ is a leading up to this monologue, and a commentary round it. It is a song of serene and quiet beauty, beautiful as evening-twilight. To analyse it is to analyse a rose's perfume: to quote from it is to tear off the petal of a rose. Here, however, for their mere colour and scent, are a few lines. Pompilia is speaking of the birth of her child.

"A whole long fortnight: in a life like mine
A fortnight filled with bliss is long and much.
All women are not mothers of a boy,
Though they live twice the length of my whole life,
And, as they fancy, happily all the same.
There I lay, then, all my great fortnight long,
As if it would continue, broaden out
Happily more and more, and lead to heaven:
Christmas before me,--was not that a chance?
I never realized God's birth before--
How He grew likest God in being born.
This time I felt like Mary, had my babe
Lying a little on my breast like hers."

With a beautiful and holy confidence she now "lays away her babe with God," secure for him in the future. She forgives the husband who has slain her: "I could not love him, but his mother did." And with her last breath she blesses the friend who has saved her:--

"O lover of my life, O soldier-saint,
No work begun shall ever pause for death.

* * * * *

So, let him wait God's instant men call years;
Meantime hold hard by truth and his great soul,
Do out the duty! Through such souls alone
God stooping shows sufficient of His light
For us i' the dark to rise by. And I rise."

After _Pompilia_, we have the pleadings and counterpleadings of the lawyers on either side: _Dominus Hyacinthus de Archangelis, Pauperum Procurator_ (the counsel for the defendant), and _Juris Doctor Johannes-Baptista Bottinius_, _Fisci et Rev. Cam. Apostol. Advocatus_ (public prosecutor). Arcangeli,--

"The jolly learned man of middle age,
Cheek and jowl all in laps with fat and law,
Mirthful as mighty, yet, as great hearts use,
Despite the name and fame that tempt our flesh,
Constant to the devotion of the hearth,
Still captive in those dear domestic ties!"--

is represented, with fine grotesque humour, in the very act of making his speech, pre-occupied, all the while he "wheezes out law and whiffles Latin forth," with a birthday-feast in preparation for his eight-year-old son, little Giacinto, the pride of his heart. The effect is very comic, though the alternation or intermixture of lawyer's-Latin and domestic arrangements produces something which is certainly, and perhaps happily, without parallel in poetry. His defence is, and is intended to be, mere quibbling. _Causâ honoris_ is the whole pith and point of his plea: Pompilia's guilt he simply takes for granted. Bottini, the exact opposite in every way of his adversary,--

"A man of ready smile and facile tear,
Improvised hopes, despairs at nod and beck,
And language--ah, the gift of eloquence!
Language that goes as easy as a glove
O'er good and evil, smoothens both to one"--

Bottini presents us with a full-blown speech, intended to prove Pompilia's innocence, though really in every word a confession of her utter depravity. His sole purpose is to show off his cleverness, and he brings forward objections on purpose to prove how well he can turn them off; assumes guilt for the purpose of arguing it into comparative innocence.

"Yet for the sacredness of argument, ...
Anything, anything to let the wheels
Of argument run glibly to their goal!"

He pretends to "paint a saint," whom he can still speak of, in tones of earnest admiration, as "wily as an eel." His implied concessions and merely parenthetic denials, his abominable insinuations and suggestions, come, evidently enough, from the instincts of a grovelling mind, literally incapable of appreciating goodness, as well as from professional irritation at one who will

"Leave a lawyer nothing to excuse,
Reason away and show his skill about."

The whole speech is a capital bit of satire and irony; it is comically clever and delightfully exasperating.

After the lawyers have spoken, we have the final judgment, the summing-up and laying bare of the whole matter, fact and motive, in the soliloquy of _The Pope_. Guido has been tried and found guilty, but, on appeal, the case had been referred to the Pope, Innocent XII. His decision is made; he has been studying the case from early morning, and now, at the

"Dim
Droop of a sombre February day,
In the plain closet where he does such work,
With, from all Peter's treasury, one stool,
One table and one lathen crucifix,"

he passes the actors of the tragedy in one last review, nerving himself to pronounce the condemnation which he feels, as judge, to be due, but which he shrinks from with the natural shrinking of an aged man about to send a strong man to death before him. Pompilia he pronounces faultless and more,--

"My rose, I gather for the breast of God;"

Caponsacchi, not all without fault, yet a true soldier of God, prompt, for all his former seeming frivolousness, to spring forward and redress the wrong, victorious, too, over temptation:--

"Was the trial sore?
Temptation sharp? Thank God a second time!
Why comes temptation but for man to meet
And master and make crouch beneath his foot,
And so be pedestalled in triumph? Pray
'Lead us into no such temptation, Lord!'
Yea, but, O Thou, whose servants are the bold,
Lead such temptations by the head and hair,
Reluctant dragons, up to who dares fight,
That so he may do battle and have praise!"

For Guido he can see no excuse, can find no loophole for mercy, and but little hope of penitence or salvation, and he signs the death-warrant.

"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."

The whole monologue is of different order from all the others. Every one but this expresses a more or less partial and fragmentary view. _Tertium Quid_ alone makes any pretence at impartiality, and his is the result of indifference, not of justice. The Pope's speech is long, slow, discoursive, full of aged wisdom, dignity and nobility. The latter part of it, containing some of Browning's most characteristic philosophy, is by no means out of place, but perfectly coherent and appropriate to the character of the speaker.

Last of all comes the second and final speech of _Guido_, "the same man, another voice," as he "speaks and despairs, the last night of his life," before the Cardinal Acciaiuoli and Abate Panciatichi, two old friends, who have come to obtain his confession, absolve him, and accompany him to the scaffold:--

"The tiger-cat screams now, that whined before,
That pried and tried and trod so gingerly,
Till in its silkiness the trap-teeth join;
Then you know how the bristling fury foams.
They listen, this wrapped in his folds of red,
While his feet fumble for the filth below;
The other, as beseems a stouter heart,
Working his best with beads and cross to ban
The enemy that come in like a flood
Spite of the standard set up, verily
And in no trope at all, against him there:
For at the prison-gate, just a few steps
Outside, already, in the doubtful dawn,
Thither, from this side and from that, slow sweep
And settle down in silence solidly,
Crow-wise, the frightful Brotherhood of Death."

We have here the completed portrait of Guido, a portrait perhaps unsurpassed as a whole by any of Browning's studies in the complexities of character. In his first speech he fought warily, and with delicate skill of fence, for life. Here, says Mr. Swinburne, "a close and dumb soul compelled into speech by mere struggle and stress of things, labours in literal translation and accurate agony at the lips of Guido." Hopeless, but impelled by the biting frenzy of despair, he pours out on his awe-stricken listeners a wild flood of entreaty, defiance, ghastly and anguished humour, flattery, satire, raving blasphemy and foaming impenitence. His desperate venom and blasphemous raillery is part despair, part calculated horror. In his last revolt against death and all his foes, he snatches at any weapon, even truth, that may serve his purpose and gain a reprieve:--

"I thought you would not slay impenitence,
But teazed, from men you slew, contrition first,--
I thought you had a conscience ...
Would you send
A soul straight to perdition, dying frank
An atheist?"

How much of truth there is in it all we need not attempt to decide. It is not likely that Guido could pretend to be much worse than he really was, though he unquestionably heightens the key of his crime, working up to a pitch of splendid ferocity almost sublime, from a malevolence rather mean than manly. At the last, struck suddenly, as he sees death upon him, from his pretence of defiant courage, he hurls down at a blow the whole structure of lies, and lays bare at once his own malignant cowardice and the innocence of his murdered wife:--is it with a touch of remorse, of saving penitence?

"Nor is it in me to unhate my hates,--
I use up my last strength to strike once more
Old Pietro in the wine-house-gossip-face,
To trample underfoot the whine and wile
Of beast Violante,--and I grow one gorge
To loathingly reject Pompilia's pale
Poison my hasty hunger took for food.
A strong tree wants no wreaths about its trunk,
No cloying cups, no sickly sweet of scent,
But sustenance at root, a bucketful.
How else lived that Athenian who died so,
Drinking hot bull's blood, fit for men like me?
I lived and died a man, and take man's chance,
Honest and bold: right will be done to such.
Who are these you have let descend my stair?
Ha, their accursed psalm! Lights at the sill!
Is it 'Open' they dare bid you? Treachery!
Sirs, have I spoken one word all this while
Out of the world of words I had to say?
Not one word! All was folly--I laughed and mocked!
Sirs, my first true word, all truth and no lie,
Is--save me notwithstanding! Life is all!
I was just stark mad,--let the madman live
Pressed by as many chains as you please pile!
Don't open! Hold me from them! I am yours,
I am the Granduke's,--no, I am the Pope's!
Abate,--Cardinal,--Christ,--Maria,--God, ...
Pompilia, will you let them murder me?"

The coward's agony of the fear of death has never been rendered in words so truthful or so terrible.

Last of all comes the Epilogue, entitled _The Book and the Ring_, giving an account of Count Guido's execution, in the form of contemporary letters, real and imaginary; with an extract from the Augustinian's sermon on Pompilia, and other documents needed to wind off the threads of the story.

_The Ring and the Book_ was the first important work which Browning wrote after the death of his wife, and her memory holds in it a double shrine: at the opening an invocation, at the close a dedication. I quote the invocation: the words are sacred, and nothing remains to be said of them except that they are worthy of the dead and of the living.

"O lyric Love, half-angel and half-bird
And all a wonder and a wild desire,--
Boldest of hearts that ever braved the sun,
Took sanctuary within the holier blue,
And sang a kindred soul out to his face,--
Yet human at the red-ripe of the heart--
When the first summons from the darkling earth
Reached thee amid thy chambers, blanched their blue,
And bared them of the glory--to drop down,
To toil for man, to suffer or to die,--
This is the same voice: can thy soul know change?
Hail then, and hearken from the realms of help!
Never may I commence my song, my due
To God who best taught song by gift of thee,
Except with bent head and beseeching hand--
That still, despite the distance and the dark,
What was, again may be; some interchange
Of grace, some splendour once thy very thought,
Some benediction anciently thy smile:
--Never conclude, but raising hand and head
Thither where eyes, that cannot reach, yet yearn
For all hope, all sustainment, all reward,
Their utmost up and on,--so blessing back
In those thy realms of help, that heaven thy home,
Some whiteness which, I judge, thy face makes proud,
Some wanness where, I think, thy foot may fall!"

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 40: _Handbook_, p. 93.]

[Footnote 41: Swinburne, _Essays and Studies_, p. 220.]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FOOTNOTES:

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

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

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

19. PRINCE HOHENSTIEL-SCHWANGAU, SAVIOUR OF SOCIETY.

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

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

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

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

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

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

FOOTNOTES:

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

[Footnote 45: James Thomson on _The Ring and the Book_.]

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

20. FIFINE AT THE FAIR.

[Published in 1872 (_Poetical Works_, Vol. XI. pp. 211-343).]

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

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

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

He starts by arguing:--

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

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

"All's change, but permanence as well.

* * * * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 47: _Handbook_, p. 148.]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 49: Page 2. _The Firm Miranda_--Mellerio Brothers. Page 4. _St. Rambert_--St Aubin; _Joyeux, Joyous Gard_--Lion, Lionesse. Page 6. _Vire_--Caen. Page 25. _St. Rambertese_--St. Aubinese. Page 29. _Londres_--Douvres; _London_--Dover; _La Roche_--Courcelle; _Monlieu_--Bernières; _Villeneuve_--Langrune; _Pons_--Luc; _La Ravissante_--La Délivrande. Page 33. _Raimbaux_--Bayeux. Page 34. _Morillon_--Hugonin; _Mirecourt_--Bonnechose; _Miranda_--Mellerio. Page 35. _New York_--Madrid. Page 41. _Clairvaux_--Tailleville. Page 42. _Madrilene_--Turinese. Page 43. _Gonthier_--Bény; _Rousseau_--Voltaire; _Léonce_--Antoine. Page 52. _Of "Firm Miranda, London and New York"_--"Mellerio Brothers"--Meller, people say. Page 79. _Rare Vissante_--Del Yvrande; _Aldabert_--Regnobert. Page 80. _Eldobert_--Ragnebert; _Mailleville_--Beaudoin. Page 81. _Chaumont_--Quelen; _Vertgalant_--Talleyrand. Page 89. _Ravissantish_--Délivrandish. Page 101. _Clara de Millefleurs_--Anna de Beaupré; _Coliseum Street_--Miromesnil Street. Page 110. _Steiner_--Mayer; _Commercy_--Larocy; _Sierck_--Metz. Page 111. _Muhlhausen_--Debacker. Page 112, _Carlino Centofanti_--Miranda di Mongino. Page 121. _Portugal_--Italy. Page 125. "_Gustave_"--"Alfred." Page 135. _Vaillant_--Mériel. Page 149. _Thirty-three_--Twenty-five. 152. _Beaumont_--Pasquier. Page 167. _Sceaux_--Garges. Page 203. _Luc de la Maison Rouge_--Jean de la Becquetière; _Claise_--Vire; _Maude_--Anne. Page 204. _Dionysius_--Eliezer; _Scolastica_--Elizabeth. Page 214. _Twentieth_--Thirteenth. Page 241. _Fricquot_--"Picot."--Mrs. Orr's _Handbook_, Second Edition, pp. 261-2.]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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