Chapter XI: Preface (9)

=Epistle, An, Containing the Strange Medical Experience of Karshish, the Arab Physician.= (_Men and Women_, vol. i., 1855.) [The subject of the poem is the raising of Lazarus from the dead.] Karshish, a wandering scholar-physician, writing to the sage Abib, from whom he has learned his art, gives him an account of certain matters of medical interest which he has discovered in the course of his travels, and which, like a good student, he communicates to his venerable teacher. After informing him that he has sent him some samples of rare pharmaceutical substances, he says that his journeyings brought him to Jericho, on the dangerous road from which city to Jerusalem he had met with sundry misadventures, and noted several cases of clinical interest, all of which he reports in the matter-of-fact way which betokens the scientific practitioner of the period. Amongst his plague, ague, epileptic, scalp-disease, and leprosy cures, he particularly describes "a case of mania subinduced by epilepsy," which especially interested him. The disorder seemed to him of quite easy diagnosis: "Tis but a case of mania," complicated by trance and epilepsy, but well within his powers as a physician to account for, except in the after circumstances and the means of cure. "Some spell, exorcisation or trick of art" had evidently been employed by a Nazarene physician of his tribe, who bade him, when he seemed dead, "Rise!" and he did rise. He was "one Lazarus, a Jew"--of good habit of body, and indeed quite beyond ordinary men in point of health; and his three days' sleep had so brightened his body and soul that it would be a great thing if the medical art could always ensure such a result from the use of any drug. He has undergone such change of mental vision that he eyes the world now like a child, and puts all his old joys in the dust. He has lost his sense of the proportion of things: a great armament or a mule load of gourds are all the same to him, while some trifle will appear of infinite import; yet he is stupefied because his fellow-men do not view things with his opened eyes. He is so perplexed with impulses that his heart and brain seem occupied with another world while his feet stay here. He desires only perfectly to please God; he is entirely apathetic when told that Rome is on the march to destroy his town and tribe, yet he loves all things old and young, strong and weak, the flowers and birds, and is harmless as a lamb: only at ignorance and sin he is impatient, but promptly curbs himself. The physician would have sought out the Nazarene who worked the cure, and would have held a consultation with him on the case, but discovered that he perished in a tumult many years ago, accused of wizardry, rebellion, and of holding a prodigious creed. Lazarus--it is well, says the physician, to keep nothing back in writing to a brother in the craft--regards the curer as God the Creator and sustainer of the world, that dwelt in flesh amongst us for a while; but why write of trivial matters? He has more important things to tell.

"I noticed on the margin of a pool,
Blue-flowering borage, the Aleppo sort
Aboundeth, very nitrous. It is strange!"

He begs the sage's pardon for troubling him with this man's tedious case, but it has touched him with awe, it may be partly the effect of his weariness. But he cannot close his letter without returning to the tremendous suggestion once more. "Think, Abib! The very God!"--

"So the All-Great, were the All-Loving too,--
It is strange."

Professor Corson says this poem "is one of Browning's most remarkable psychological studies. It may be said to polarise the idea, so often presented in his poetry, that doubt is a condition of the vitality of faith. It 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." Lazarus has seen things as they are. "This show of things," so far as he is concerned, is done with. He now leads the _actual_ life; his wonder and his sorrow are drawn from the reflection that his fellow-men remain in the region of phantasm. He lives really in the world to come. How infinitely little he found the things of time and sense in the presence of the eternal verities is grandly shown in the poem. The attitude of Lazarus under his altered conditions affords an answer to those who demand that an All-Wise Being should not leave men to struggle in a region of phenomena but exhibit the actual to us in the present life. Under such conditions our probation would be impossible. As Browning shows in _La Saisiaz_, a condition of certainty would destroy the school-time value of life; the highest truths are insusceptible of scientific demonstration. Lazarus is the hero of the poem, not Karshish. As the Bishop of Durham says in his paper "On Browning's View of Life," Lazarus "is not a man, but a sign: he 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 phenomena 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." The professional attitude of Karshish is drawn with marvellous fidelity. A paper in the _Lancet_ on such a "case" would be precisely on the same lines to-day, though the wandering off into side details would not be quite so obvious, and there would be an entire absence of any trifling with the idea that "the All-Great were the All-Loving too." This is "emotional," and modern science has nothing but contempt for that.

NOTES.--_Snake-stone_, a name applied to any substance used as a remedy for snake-bites. Professor Faraday once analysed several which had been used for this purpose in Ceylon. One turned out to be a piece of animal charcoal, another was chalk, and a third a vegetable substance like a bezoar. The animal charcoal might possibly have been useful if applied immediately. The others were valueless for the purpose. (Tennant, _Ceylon_, third ed., i., 200.) "_A spider that weaves no web._" Dr. H. McCook, a specialist in spider lore, has explained this passage in _Poet-Lore_, vol. i., p. 518. He says the spider referred to belongs to the Wandering group: they stalk their prey in the open field, or in divers lurking places, and are quite different in their habits from the web-spinners. The spider sprinkled with mottles he thinks is the Zebra spider (_Epiblemum scenicum_). It belongs to the Saltigrade tribe. The use of spiders in medicine is very ancient. Pliny describes many diseases for which they were used. Spiders were boiled in water and distilled for wounds by Sir Walter Raleigh. _Greek-fire_ was the precursor of gunpowder; it was the _oleum incendiarum_ of the Romans. Probably petroleum, tar, sulphur, and nitre were its chief ingredients. _Blue flowering borage_ (_Borago officinalis_). The ancients deemed this plant one of the four "cordial flowers" for cheering the spirits, the others being the rose, violet, and alkanet. Pliny says it produces very exhilarating effects. The stem contains nitre, and the whole plant readily gives its flavour even to cold water. (See Anne Pratt's _Flowering Plants_, vol. iv., p. 75.)

=Este.= (_Sordello._) A town of Lombardy, in the delegation of Padua, situated at the southern extremity of the Euganean hills. The Rocca or castle is a donjon tower occupying the site of the original fortress of Este.

=Este, The House of.= (_Sordello._) One of the oldest princely houses of Italy, called Este after the name of the town above mentioned. Albert Azzo II. first bore the title of Marquis of Este; he married a sister of Guelph III., who was duke of Carinthia. The Italian title and estates were inherited by Fulco I. (1060-1135), son of Albert Azzo II. In the twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth centuries the history of the house of Este is mixed up with that of the other noble houses of Italy in the struggles of the Guelphs and Ghibellines. The Estena were the head of the Guelph party, and at different times were princes of Ferrara, Modena and Reggio. "Obizzo I., son of Folco I., entered into a league against Frederick Barbarossa, and was comprehended in the Venetian treaty of 1177, by which municipal podestas (chief magistrates of great cities) were instituted" (_Encyc. Brit._). Strife existed between this house and that of the Torelli, which raged for two centuries, in consequence of Obizzo I. carrying off Marchesella, heiress of the Adelardi family, of Ferrara, and marrying her to his son Azzo V.

=Eulalia.= (_A Soul's Tragedy._) The shrewd woman who was betrothed to Luitolfo.

=Euripides.= The Greek tragic poet, who was born of Athenian parents in 480 B.C. He brought out his first play--_The Peliades_--at the age of twenty-five. At thirty-nine he gained the first prize, which honour he received only five times in his long career of fifty years. He was the mediator between the ancient and modern drama, and was regarded at Athens as an innovator. Aristophanes was an exceedingly hostile and witty critic of Euripides, and from his point of view his conduct was justified, taking as he did the standard of Æschylus and Sophocles as the only right model of tragedy. He is variously said to have written seventy-five, seventy-eight and ninety-two tragedies. Eighteen only have come down to us: _The Alcestis_, _Andromache_, _Bacchæ_, _Hecuba_, _Helena_, _Electra_, _Heraclidæ_, _Heracles in Madness_, _The Suppliants_, _Hippolytus_, _Iphigenia at Aulis_, _Iphigenia among the Tauri_, _Ion_, _Medea_, _Orestes_, _Rhesus_, the _Troades_, the _Phoenissæ_, and a satiric play, the _Cyclops_. "Aristophanes calls Euripides 'meteoric,' because he was always rising into the air; he was famous for allusions to the stars, the sea and the elements. Aristophanes uses the epithet sneeringly: Browning, praisingly" (_Br. P._ iii. 43).

=Eurydice to Orpheus. A Picture by Leighton.= (Published for the first time in the Royal Academy Catalogue, 1864. It was reprinted in the first volume of the _Selections_ in 1865.) Orpheus was a famous mythical poet, who was so powerful in song that he could move trees and rocks and tame wild beasts by the charms of his voice. His wife (the nymph Eurydice) died from the bite of a serpent, and Orpheus descended to the lower regions in search of her. He so influenced Persephone by his music that she gave him permission to take back his wife on the condition that he should not look round during his passage from the nether world to the regions above. In his impatience he disregarded the condition, and having turned his head to gaze back, Eurydice had to return for ever to Hades (Vergil, _Geor._ iv., v. 457, etc.). The poet has represented Eurydice speaking to Orpheus the passionate words of love which made him forget the commands of Pluto and Persephone not to look back on pain of losing his wife again.

=Euthukles.= (_Balaustion's Adventure_; _Aristophanes' Apology._) He was the man of Phokis who heard Balaustion recite _Alcestis_ at Syracuse, and who followed her when she returned to Athens, and married her. On their voyage to Rhodes, after the fall of Athens, Balaustion dictated to him the _Apology_ of Aristophanes, which he wrote down on board the vessel. It was Euthukles, according to Browning, who saved Athens from destruction by reciting at a critical moment the lines from Euripides' _Electra_ and _Agamemnon_.

=Evelyn Hope.= (_Men and Women_, 1855; _Lyrics_, 1863; _Dramatic Lyrics_, 1868.) The lament of a man who loved a young girl who died before she was old enough to appreciate his love. The maiden was sixteen, the man "thrice as old." He contemplates her as she lies in the beauty of death, and asks: "Is it too late then? Because you were so young and I so old, were we fellow-mortals and nought beside? Not so: God creates the love to reward the love," and he will claim her not in the next life alone, but, if need be, through lives and worlds many yet to come. His love will not be lost, for his gains of the ages and the climes will not satisfy him without his Evelyn Hope. He can wait. He will be more worthy of her in the worlds to come. Modern science has taught us that no atom of matter can ever be lost to the world, no infinitesimal measure of energy but is conserved, and the poet holds that there shall never be one lost good. The eternal atoms, the vibrations that cease not through the eternal years, shall not mock at the evanescence of human love.

=Face, A.= (_Dramatis Personæ_, 1864.) A portrait of a beautiful girl painted in words by a poet who had all the sympathies of an artist.

=Family, The.= (_Ferishtah's Fancies_, 4: "On the Lawfulness of Prayer.") Ferishtah has prayed for a dying man that he might recover. An objector asks why he does this: if God is all-wise and good, what He does must be right: "Two best wills cannot be." Man has only to acquiesce and be thankful. The dervish tells a tale. A man had three sons, and a wife who was bitten by a serpent. The husband called in a doctor, who said he must amputate the injured part. The husband assented. The eldest son said, "Pause, take a gentler way." The next in age said, "The doctor must and should save the limb." The youngest said, "The doctor knows best: let him operate!" He agreed with the doctor. Let God be the doctor; let us call the husband's acquiescence wise understanding, call the first son's opinion a wise humanity. In the second son we see rash but kind humanity; in the youngest one who apes wisdom above his years. "Let us be man and nothing more," says Ferishtah.--man hoping, fearing, loving and bidding God help him till he dies. The lyric bids us while on earth be content to be men. The wider sense of the angel cannot be expected while we remain under human conditions.

=Fancy and Reason=, in _La Saisiaz_, discuss the _pros_ and _cons_ of the probabilities of the existence of God, the soul, and future life, etc.

=Fears and Scruples.= (_Pacchiarotto and Other Poems_, 1876: "The Spiritual Uses of Uncertainty.") "Why does God never speak?" asks the doubter. The analogy of the poem compares this silence of the Divine Being with that of a man's friend, who wrote him many valued letters, but otherwise kept aloof from him. It is suggested by experts that the letters are forgeries. The man loves on. It is then suggested that his friend is acting as a spy upon him, sees him readily enough and knows all he does, and some day will show himself to punish him. But this is to make the friend a monster! Hush!--"What if this friend happen to be--God?" In explanation of this poem, Mr. Kingsland received from the poet the following letter:--"I think that the point I wanted to illustrate in the poem you mention was this: Where there is a genuine love of the 'letters' and 'actions' of the invisible 'friend,' however these may be disadvantaged by an inability to meet the objections to their authenticity or historical value urged by 'experts' who assume the privilege of learning over ignorance, it would indeed be a wrong to the wisdom and goodness of the 'friend' if he were supposed capable of overlooking the actual 'love' and only considering the 'ignorance' which, failing to in any degree affect 'love,' is really the highest evidence that 'love' exists. So I _meant_, whether the result be clear or no."

=Ferishtah's Fancies.= A criticism of Life: Browning's mellow wisdom. Published in 1884, with the following quotations as mottoes on the page facing the title:--

"His genius was jocular, but, when disposed, he could be very
serious."--Article _Shakespeare_, Jeremy Collier's _Historical, etc.,
Dictionary_, 2nd edition, 1701. "You, sir, I entertain you for one of
my Hundred; only, I do not like the fashion of your garments: you will
say, they are Persian; but let them be changed."--_King Lear_, Act
III., sc. vi.

The work embraces the following collection of poems:--Prologue. 1. "The Eagle." 2. "The Melon-seller." 3. "Shah Abbas." 4. "The Family." 5. "The Sun." 6. "Mihrab Shah." 7. "A Camel-driver." 8. "Two Camels." 9. "Cherries." 10. "Plot Culture." 11. "A Pillar at Sebzevah." 12. "A Bean Stripe: also Apple Eating." Epilogue. There was a real personage named Ferishtah, a celebrated Persian historian, born about 1570. He is one of the most trustworthy of the Oriental historians. Several portions of his work have been translated into English. He has, however, no connection with the subject-matter of Mr. Browning's book, but it is probable that his name suggested itself to the poet as a good one for his work. We have here Mr. Browning in a dervish's robe, philosophising in a Persian atmosphere, yet talking the most perfect Browningese, just as do the Pope in the _Ring and the Book_ and the rabbis in the Jewish poems. Age, experience, and the calm philosophy of a religious mind, are required for the poet's highest teaching. It matters little, these being given, whether the philosophers wear the tiara of the pope, the robe of the dervish, or the gaberdine of the Jew: the philosophy is the same. The aim is "to justify the ways of God to men," and to make reasonable an exalted Christian Theism. Three great Eastern classics--_The Fables of Bidpai_, Firdausi's _Sháh-Námeh_, and the Book of Job--are the sources of the inspiration of the pages of _Ferishtah's Fancies_. Both the _Sháh-Náhmeh_ and the _Fables of Bidpai_, or _Pilpay_ as they are commonly termed, are published in the _Chandos Classics_. Bidpai is supposed to be the author of a famous collection of Hindu fables. The name Bidpai occurs in their Arabic version. Their origin was doubtless the _Pantcha Tantra_, or "Five Sections," a great collection of fables. The _Hitopadesa_ is another such collection. The fables were translated into Pehlvi in the sixth century. Then the Persian fables were translated into Arabic, and were transmitted to Europe. They were translated into Greek in the eleventh century, then into Hebrew and Latin, afterwards into nearly every European tongue. We must go to Firdausi, the Persian author of that "standing wonder in poetic literature," the _Sháh Námeh_, for an explanation of several allusions in the poem. This great chronicle, the Persian Book of Kings, is a history of Persia in sixty thousand verses. The poem is as familiar to every Persian as our own great epics to us, and the use Mr. Browning makes of it in this work is managed in the most natural manner. This we shall notice more particularly in dealing with the separate poems which compose the volume. In a letter to a friend, Browning wrote:--"I hope and believe that one or two careful readings of the poem will make its sense clear enough. Above all, pray allow for the poet's inventiveness in any case, and do not suppose there is more than a thin disguise of a few Persian names and allusions. There was no such poet as Ferishtah--the stories are all inventions.... The Hebrew quotations are put in for a purpose, as a direct acknowledgment that certain doctrines may be found in the Old Book, which the concocters of novel schools of morality put forth as discoveries of their own."

=Festus.= (_Paracelsus._) The old and faithful friend of Paracelsus, who believes in him from the first. He is the husband of Michal, and both influence the mind of the hero of medicine for good at various stages of his career.

=Fifine at the Fair.= (1872.) The key-note of the work is given in the quotation before the Prologue, which is the motto of the poem, from Molière's _Don Juan_, Act I., Sc. 3. There is a certain historic basis for the character of the Don Juan of European legend. In Seville, in the time of Peter the Cruel, lived Don Juan Tenorio, the prince of libertines. He attempted to abduct Giralda, daughter of the governor of Seville: the consequence was a duel, in which the lady's father was killed. The sensual excesses of Don Juan had destroyed his faith, and he defied the spirit-world so far as to visit the tomb of the murdered man and challenge his statue to follow him to supper. The statue accepted the invitation, and appeared amongst the guests at the meal, and carried the blaspheming sceptic to hell. "As a dramatic type," says the author of the article "Don Juan," in the _Encyclopædia Britannica_, "Don Juan is essentially the impersonation of the scepticism that results from sensuality, and is thus the complement of Faust, whose scepticism is the result of speculation." The Prologue describes a swimmer far out at sea, disporting himself under the noon-sun; as he floats, a beautiful butterfly hovers above him, a creature of the sky, as he for the time a creature of the water; neither can unite with the other, for neither can exchange elements; still, if we cannot fly, the next best thing is to swim,--a half-way house, as it were, between the world of spirit and that of grosser earth. Poetry is in this sense, a substitute for heaven: whatever the heaven-dwellers are, the poets seem; what deeds they do, the poets dream. Does the soul of his departed wife hover over him in this way, and look with pity on the mimicry of her airy flight? he wonders. (Mrs. Browning died eleven years before _Fifine_ was published.)--The scenery of the poem is that of the neighbourhood of Pornic, a seaside town in the department of the Loire, in Brittany, the little town being twenty-seven miles distant from Nantes. It is noted for its sea bathing and mineral waters, and, like many other places in Brittany, possesses some curious Druidical and other architectural remains. Mr. Browning, while staying at Pornic with his family, saw the gipsy woman who suggested to him the idea of Fifine. He selected her as a type of the sensual woman, in contrast to the spiritual type of womanhood. The poem deals with incidents connected with Pornic fair. Don Juan, addressing his wife Elvire, says: "Let us see the strolling players and the fun of the fair! Who would have supposed that the night could effect such a change? Yesterday all was rough and raw--mere tubs, poles and hoarding; now this morning all is gay as a butterfly, the scaffolding has burst out in colour like a flower-bed in full bloom. Nobody saw them enter the village, but that is the way of these tumblers, they like to steal a march and exhibit their spectacle only when the show is ready. Had any one wandered about the place at night he would have seen the sober caravan which was the bud that blossomed to-day into all this gaiety. An airy structure pitched beneath the tower appeared in the morning surmounted by a red pennon fluttering in the air, and frantic to be free. To be free!--the fever of the flag finds a response in my soul, my heart fires up for liberty from the restraints of law, I would lead the bohemian life these players lead. Why is it that disgraced people, those who have burst the bonds of conventional life, always seem to enjoy their existence more than others? They seem conscious of possessing a secret which sets them out of reach of our praise or blame; now and again they return to us because they must have our money, just as a bird must bear off a bit of rag filched from mankind to work up into his nest. But why need they do that? We think much of our reputation and family honour, but these people for a penny or two will display themselves undraped to any visitor. You may tell the showman that his six-legged sheep is an imposition,--he does not care, he values his good name at nothing. But offer to make these mountebanks respectable, promise them any reward you like to forsake their ways, to work and live as the rest of the world, and your offer will not tempt them. What is the compensatory unknown joy which turns dross to gold in their case? You sigh," says the speaker to his wife, "you shake your head: what have I said to distress you? Fifine, the gipsy beauty of the show, will illustrate my meaning: this woman is to me a queen, a sexless, bloodless sprite; yet she has conquered me. I want to understand how. There is a honeyed intoxication in the Eastern lily, which lures insects to their death for its own nourishment: is that a flaw in the flower? Wiser are we not to be tempted by such dangerous delights; we may admire and keep clear of them: not poison lilies, but the rose, the daisy, or the violet, for me,--it is Elvire, not Fifine, I love. You ask how does this woman explain my thought? When Louis the Eleventh lay dying he had a procession of the famous women of all time made to pass before him: Helen of Troy, who magically brought men to acquiesce in their own destruction; next was Cleopatra, all the wonder of her body dominated by her high and haughty soul, and trampling on her lovers; then the saint of Pornic church who saves the shipwrecked sailors, and who thinks in her innocence that Cleopatra has given away her clothes to the poor; then comes my gipsy beauty Fifine, with her tambourine. Suppose you, Elvire, in spirit join this procession; then you confront yourself, and I will show you how you beat each personage there--even this Fifine, whom I will reward with a franc that you may study her. You draw back your skirts from such filth as you consider her to be; though, born perhaps as pure and sensitive as any other woman, she can afford to bear your scorn possibly,--we know such people often thus minister to age and the wants of sick parents. Her ogre husband, with his brute-beast face, takes the money she has earned by her exhibiting herself to us as she passes into the tent. I want to make you see the beauty of the mind underlying the form in all these women. No creature is made so mean but boasts an inward worth: this Fifine, a mere sand-grain on the shore, reflects some ray of sunshine. Say that there was no worst of degradation spared this woman, yet she makes no pretence--she is absolutely truthful, she assumes not to be Helen or the Pornic Saint, she only offers to exhibit herself to you for money." The wife is not deceived by all this sophistry; Fifine's attraction for the man lies in the fact, not that she possesses some hidden beauty of soul, but some unconcealed physical charms which awaken desire in him because they are not his own. What is one's own is safe, and so despised; any waif which is a neighbour's is for the time more desirable,--"Give you the sun to keep, you would want to steal a boor's rushlight or a child's squib." He explains that this is always women's way about such matters--they cannot be made to comprehend mental analysis. He reminds her how at great cost and a year's anxiety he had purchased a Rafael; he gloated over his prize for a week, and then had more relish in turning over leaf by leaf Doré's last picture-book. Suppose the picture reproached him with inconstancy, he would reply that he knew the picture was his own; anxiety had given place to confidence, and were the house on fire, he would risk his life to save it, though he were knee deep in Doré's engravings. He tells his wife she is to him as the Rafael, the Fifines are as Doré's wood engravings. Elvire is the precious wife, her face fits into the cleft in the heart of him, to him she is perfection; but is she perfect to her mirror? He thinks not. Where, then, is her beauty? In his soul. He cannot explain the reason, any more than naming the notes will explain a symphony or describing lines will call up the idea of a picture. Still there is reason in our choice of each other. It is principally the effort of one soul to seek its own completion--that which shall aid its development--in another's. As the artist's soul sees the form he is about to create in the marble block, so does the lover see in his choice that which will draw out his soul-picture into concrete perfection. The world of sense has no real value for any of us, save in so far as our souls can detect and appropriate it. It is the idea which gives worth to that on which it is exercised. The value of all externals to the soul is just in proportion to its own power of transmuting them into food for its own growth. The soul flame is maintained not only by gums and spices, but straw and rottenness may feed it; if the soul has power to extract from evil things that which supports its life, what matters the straw so long as the ash is left behind? and so of the conquests of the soul, its power to evoke the good from the ungainly and the partial, gives us courage to ignore the failures and the slips of our lives. The pupil does not all at once evoke the masterpiece from the marble--he puts his idea in plaster by the side of the Master's statue. If the scholar at last evoke Eidotheé, the Master is to thank. "To love" in its intensest form means to yearn to invest another soul with the accumulated treasures of our own. The chemic force exerted by one soul in transmuting coarse things to beautiful is aided by another's flame. Each may continue to supplement the other, till the red, green, blue and yellow imperfections may be fused into achromatic white, the perfect light-ray. Soul is discernible by soul, and soul is evoked by soul--Elvire by Don Juan. The wife objects that he abdicates soul's empire and accepts the rule of sense: man has left the monarch's throne, and lies in the kennel a brute. Searching for soul through all womankind, you find no face so vile but sense may extract from it some good for soul. This fine-spun theory, this elaborate sophistry, she declares, is merely an ingenious excuse for sensuality:--

"Be frank--who is it you deceive--
Yourself, or me, or God?"

Don Juan would reply by an illustration from music, which can penetrate more subtly than words: he would show how we may rise out of the false into the true, out of the dark into the brightness above the dense and dim regions where doubt is bred. Bathing in the sea that morning, out in mid-channel, he was standing in the water with head back, chin up, body and limbs below--he kept himself alive by breath in the nostrils, high and dry; ever and again a wavelet or a ripple would threaten life, then back went the head, and all was safe. But did he try to ascend breast high, wave arms free of tether, to be in the air and leave the water, under he went again; before he had mastered his lesson he had plenty of water in mouth and eyes. "I compare this," he says, "to the spirit's efforts to rise out of the medium which sustains it." He was upborne by that which he beat against, too gross an element to live in, were it not for the dose of life-breath in the soul. Our business is with the sea, not with the air, so we must endure the false below while we bathe in this life. It is by practice with the false that we reach the true. We gain confidence, and learn the trick of doing what we will--sink or rise. His senses do not reel when a billow breaks over him; he grasps at a wave that will not be grasped at all, but glides through the fingers--still the failure to grasp the water sends the head above, far beyond the wave he tried to hold:--

"So with this work o' the world,"

we try to grasp a soul, catch at it, think we have a prize; it eludes us, yet the soul helped ours to mount. He seizes Elvire by grasping at Fifine. Not even this specious reasoning deceives the wife. It is an ugly fact that the wave grasped at is a woman. He replies that a woman can be absorbed into the man: women _grow_ you, men at best _depend_ upon you. A rill that empties itself into the sea can never be separated from it. That is woman. Man takes all and gives nought. To raise men you must stoop to teach them, learn their ignorance, stifle your soul in their mediocrities; but to govern women you must abandon stratagem, cast away disguise, and reveal your best self at your uttermost. When the music of Arion attracted the dolphins to the doomed man, one of them bore him on its back to the coast, and so saved his life; revealing his best to this "true woman-creature," he was saved from the men who would have killed him for gain. A man never puts out his whole self in love--this is reserved for hate. You do not get the best out of a man by nourishing his root, but by pruning his branch; as wine came through goats, which, browsing on the tendrils of the grape, "stung the stock to fertility," and so gained "the indignant wine--wrath of the red press." Mites of men are sore that God made mites at all; love avails not from such men-animalculæ to coax a virile thought, but touch the elf with hate, and the insect swells to thrice its bulk "and cuckoo-spits some rose!" Nothing is to be gained from ruling men; women take nothing, and give all. Elvire and Fifine, in their degree, are alike in this respect. "To have secured a woman's faith in me is to have centred my soul on a fact. Falseness and change I see all around me; I expect truth because Fifine knows me much more than Elvire does." To this his wife replies, "Why not only she? There can be for each but one Best, which abolishes the simply Good and Better. Why not be content with the Elvire, who substitutes belief in truth, in your own soul, for the falseness which you fear? By toil and effort the boatman may do with pole and oars what by waiting a few hours the rising water would do for him without his labour; but men affect unusual ways,--Elvire could do far better for you all that you expect from Fifine." To this he replies that "a voyage may be too safe; there is no excitement, no experiment when wind and tide do all the needful work. Then may not our hate of falsehood be that which charms us in these actors who confess 'A lie is all we do or say'? Everything has a false outside, stage-play is honest cheating. The poet never dreams; prose-folk always do." Then he tells how his thought had recently sought expression in music rather than in words--as he played Schumann's _Carnival_, and reflected that in the masque of life and banquet of the world we have ever the same things in a new guise, the difficulty was ever to conquer commonplace and spice the same old viands and games. His fancies bore him to a pinnacle above St. Mark's at Venice, in Carnival time; he gazed down on a prodigious Fair, the men and women were disguised as beasts, birds, and fishes. Descending into the crowd, disgust gave way to pity; the people were not so beast-like, but much more human, than when he viewed them from the height, and he began to contemplate them with a delight akin to that which animates the chemist when he untwines the composite substance, traces effect back to cause, and then constructs from its elements the complex and complete. So did he get to know the thing he was, while contemplating in that Carnival the thing he was not. Thus Venice Square became the world, the masquerade was life, the disgust at the pageant was due to the distance from which it was contemplated, when he learned that the proper goal for wisdom is the ground and not the sky, he discovered how _wisely balanced are our hates and loves_, and how peace and good come from strife and evil. It is no business of ours to fret about what should be, but we should accept and welcome what is--_is_, that is to say, for the hour, for change is the law even of the religions by which man approaches God. His temples fade to recompose into other fanes. And not only temples, but the domes of learning and the seats of science are subject to the same law. Yet Religion has always her true temple-type; Truth, though founded in a rock, builds on sands; churches and colleges that grow to nothing always reappear as something; some building, round or square or polygonal, we shall always have. But leave the buildings, and let us look at the booths in the Fair. History keeps a stall, Morality and Art set up their shops. They acquiesce in law, and adapt themselves to the times; and so, as from a distance the scene is contemplated as a whole, the multiform subsides in haze, the buildings, distinct in the broad light of day, merge and lose their individuality in a common shape. See this Druid monument: how does its construction strike you? How came this cross here? Learning cannot enlighten us. It meant something when it was erected which is lost now, yet the people of the place respect it and are persuaded that what a thing meant once it must still mean. They thought it had some reference to the Creator of the world, and was there to remind them that the world came not of itself. And so, with all the change in religions, there is an imperial chord which subsists and underlies the mists of music. In all the change there is permanence as a substratum. Truth inside and truth outside, but falsehood is between each; it is the falsehood which is change, the truth is the permanence. There is an unchanging truth to which man in all his waverings is constant. This Druid monument said what it had to say to its own age; it never promised to help our dream. Don Juan and his wife having now completed their walk, he proposes to return home to end where they began; as we were nursed into life, death's bosom receives us at last, and that is final, for death is defeat. Our limbs came with our need of them, our souls grew by mastering the lessons of life; but when death comes, the soul, which ruled by right while the bodily powers remained, loses its right to rule. And so the soul has run its round. Love ends too where love began, and goes back to permanence; each step aside (from Elvire to Fifine, for example) proves divergency in vain:

"Inconstancy means raw, 'tis faith alone means ripe."

And as they reach their villa, he resolves to live and die a quiet married man, earning the approbation of the mayor, and unoccupied with soul problems, especially those of women. At that moment a letter is put into his hand: there has been some mistake, Fifine thinks--he has given her gold instead of silver; he will go and see about it, and is off. Five minutes was all the time he asked. He is absent much longer, and on his return Elvire has vanished.

The Epilogue describes the householder sitting desolate in his melancholy home, weary and stupid; he is suddenly surprised by the appearance of his lost wife, whose spirit has returned to claim him; he tells her how the time has dragged without her, "And was I so much better off up there?" quoth she. For decency, arrangements are made that the reunion may be in order; and so, the powers above and those below having been duly conciliated, husband and wife are once more united: "Love is all, and death is nought"--the final lesson of life.

The means whereby we may rise from the false to the true are never wanting to the earnest and faithful striver, this is the esoteric truth of _Fifine at the Fair_. The exoteric meaning may be "an apologia for the revolt of passion against social rules and fetters." "Frenetic to be free," like the pennon, is in this sense the concentration of its meaning. What was Browning's object in this difficult and remarkable work? The question is not so difficult to answer as it appears at first sight. The poet is a soul analyst first, and a teacher next. He teaches admirably in scores of passages in _Fifine_, but his main idea has been to interpret the mental processes which he supposed might underlie the actions of such a selfish and heartless voluptuary as Don Juan. Not, of course, was there any idea of rehabilitating the character of the historic personage; but, as Browning held that every soul has something to say for itself, every man some ideal soul-advance at which he aims, however mistaken may be his methods, so he imagined that even this selfish libertine had his golden ideal, however deeply bedded in mire. He has not--like the great dramatists--sunk himself in his character, and striven thus to present the real man on his stage, but he has lent Don Juan his Browning soul for a while, that he may make his Apologia to the wife, whom he finds it very hard to deceive. Dr. Furnivall once asked the poet what his idea really was in the poem. The poet replied that his "fancy was to show morally how a Don Juan might justify himself partly by truth, somewhat by sophistry." (_Browning Society Papers_, vol. ii., p. 242*.) See also vol. i., pp. 377, 379, pp. 18*, 61*, vol ii., p. 240*. Mr. Nettleship's exhaustive analysis leaves nothing to be desired. (_Essays_, p. 221.)

NOTES.--Verse ii., "_bateleurs and baladines_," conjurors and mountebanks. Verse iv., "_Gawain to gaze upon the Grail_": Gawain was the son of King Lot and Margause, in the Arthurian legend of the Holy Grail. Verse xv., _almandines_, a variety of garnet. Verse xix., _sick Louis_: King Louis XI. of France. Verse xxv., _tricot_: a knitted vest. Verse xxvii., _Helen_: she was declared by some of the Greeks never to have been really present at Troy, and that Paris only carried off a phantom created by Hera: the real Helen, they said, was wafted by Hermes to Proteus in Egypt, whence she was taken home by Menelaus. Verse xxxvi., _pochade_, a rough sketch. Verse xlii., _Razzi_, a corruption of Bazzi, or properly Il Sodona, the Italian painter (1479-1549). Verse xlvii., _Gerôme_, a French painter (born 1824): he exhibited a great picture at the Exposition of 1859, called "The Gladiators." Verse lii., _Eidotheé_: a sea-goddess, daughter of Proteus, the old man of the sea. Verse lix., _Glumdalclich_, in _Gulliver's Travels_, was a girl nine years old, and "only forty feet high." "_Theosutos e broteios eper kekramene_," Greek for "God, man, or both together mixed," from the _Prometheus Bound of Æschylus_. Verse lx., _Chrysopras_: a precious stone, a variety of chalcedony, or perhaps beryl. Verse lxvii. cannot be understood without reference to the fourth canto of Byron's _Childe Harold_: the lines and words between inverted commas are taken from verse clxxx., and the argument is directed against Byron's teaching as therein expressed: this verse was particularly obnoxious to Mr. Browning, both on account of its sentiments and grammar (see under LA SAISIAZ, p. 247). Verse lxix., _Thalassia_: sea-nymph, from the Greek word for the sea: _Triton_, a sea deity, a son of Neptune. Verse lxxviii., _Arion_: a Greek poet and musician: he was rescued from drowning on the back of a dolphin; his song to his lyre drew the creatures round the vessel, and one of them bore him to the shore. _Periander_, the tyrant of Corinth. "_Methymnæan hand_": Arion was born at Methymna, in Lesbos. _Orthian_, of Orthia: this was a surname of Diana. _Tænarus_, the point of land to which the dolphin carried Arion, whence he travelled to the court of Periander. Verse lxxxii., "_See Horace to the boat_": the ode is the third of the First Book of Horace's Odes. Verse lxxxiii., "_The long walls of Athens_" (see under ARISTOPHANES' APOLOGY, p. 36). _Iostephanos_, violet crowned--a name of Athens. Verse xcviii., _Simulacra_, images or likenesses. Verse cxxiv., _protoplast_, the original, the thing first formed. Verse cxxv., _Moirai Trimorphoi_, the Tri-form Fates.

=Filippo Baldinucci= on the Privilege of Burial: A Reminiscence of A.D. 1676. (_Pacchiarotto and other Poems_, 1876.) Filippo Baldinucci was a distinguished Italian writer on the history of the arts. He was born at Florence in 1624, and died in 1696. His chief work is entitled _Notizie de Professori del Disegno da Cimabue in quà_ (_dal_ 1260 _sino al_ 1670), and was first published, in six vols. 4to, 1681-1728. The _Encyclopædia Britannica_ says: "The capital defect of this work is the attempt to derive all Italian art from the schools of Florence." The incidents of the poem are historical, and are related in the account which Baldinucci gives of the painter Buti. Its subject is that of the persecution to which the Jews were subjected in Italy, as in other countries of Europe, and unhappily down to the present time in Russia. We have the story as told by a frank persecutor, who regrets that the altered state of the law no longer permits the actual pelting of the Jews. The good old times had departed, but in his youth they could play some capital tricks with "the crew," as he will narrate. There was a Jews' burying-place hard by San Frediano, in Florence. Just below the Blessed Olivet, and adjoining this cemetery, was "a good farmer's Christian field." The Jews hedged their ground round with bushes, to conceal their rites from Christian gaze, for the public road ran by one corner of it. The farmer, partly from devotion, partly to annoy the Jews, built a shrine in his vineyard, and employed the painter Buti to depict thereon the Virgin Mary, fixing the picture just where it would be most annoying to the Jews. They tried to bribe the owner of the shrine to turn the picture the other way, to remove its disturbing presence from spectators to whom it could do no good, and let it face the public road, frequented by a class of Christians evidently much in need of religious supervision and restraint. The farmer agreed to remove the offending fresco in consideration of the bag of golden ducats offered; and he at once called the painter to cause Our Lady to face the other way. Buti covers up the shrine with a hoarding, and sets to work. Meanwhile the Chief Rabbi's wife died, and was taken for burial to the cemetery. In passing the shrine in the farmer's field the mourners became aware of a scurvy trick played upon them by the Christians; for the Virgin was removed according to the bargain, but a Crucifixion had been substituted, and now confronted them. The cheated Jews protested, but in vain: there was nothing for them but to suffer. Next day, as the farmer and his artist friend sat laughing over the trick, the athletic young son of the Rabbi entered the studio, desiring to purchase the original oil painting of the Madonna from which the fresco of the shrine was painted. The artist was so frightened at his stalwart form, and so amazed at the request, that, taken unaware, he asked no more than the proper price! and Mary was borne in triumph to deck a Hebrew household. They thought a miracle had happened, and that the Jew had been converted; but the Israelite explained that the only miracle wrought was that which had restrained him from throttling the painter. The truth was, he had changed his views about art, and had reflected that, since cardinals hung up heathen gods and goddesses in their palaces, there was no reason why his picture of Mary should not be hung with Ledas and what not, and be judged on its merits, or, more probably, on its flaws! And he walked off with his picture.

=Fire is in the Flint.= (_Ferishtah's Fancies_--opening words of the fifth lyric.)