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Title: A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.)

Author: Mrs. Sutherland Orr

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Language: English

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A HANDBOOK TO THE WORKS OF ROBERT BROWNING

BY MRS. SUTHERLAND ORR

LONDON G. BELL AND SONS, LTD. 1927

PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY PURNELL AND SONS

PAULTON, SOMERSET, ENGLAND

PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION.

This book was written at the request of some of the members of the Browning Society, and was originally intended to be a primer. It bears the marks of this intention in its general scheme, and in the almost abrupt brevity which the desired limits of space seemed to impose on its earlier part. But I felt from the first that the spirit of Mr. Browning's work could neither be compressed within the limits, nor adapted to the uses, of a primer, as generally understood; and the book has naturally shaped itself into a kind of descriptive Index, based partly on the historical order and partly or the natural classification of the various poems. No other plan suggested itself, at the time, for bringing the whole series of these poems at once under the reader's eye: since a description which throughout followed the historical order would have involved both lengthiness and repetition; while, as I have tried to show, there exists no scheme of natural classification into which the whole series could have been forced. I realize, only now that it is too late, that the arrangement is clumsy and confusing: or at least has become so by the manner in which I have carried it out; and that even if it justify itself to the mind of my readers, it can never be helpful or attractive to their eye, which had the first right to be considered. That I should have failed in a first attempt, however earnest, to meet the difficulties of such a task, is so natural as to be almost beyond regret, where my credit only is concerned; but I shall be very sorry if this result of my inexperience detracts from any usefulness which the Handbook might otherwise possess as a guide to Mr. Browning's works. I note also, and with real vexation, some blunders of a more mechanical kind, which I might have been expected to avoid.

I have been indebted for valuable advice to Mr. Furnivall; and for fruitful suggestion to Mr. Nettleship, whose proposed scheme of classification I have in some degree followed.

A. ORR.

March 2nd, 1885.

PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION.

In preparing the Handbook for its second edition, my first endeavour has been to correct, as far as possible, the faults which I acknowledged in my Preface to the first. But even before the time for doing so had arrived, I had convinced myself that where construction or arrangement was concerned, these faults could not be corrected: that I, at least, could discover no more artistic method of compressing into a small space, and to any practical purpose, an even relatively just view of Mr. Browning's work. The altered page-headings will, where they occur, soften away the harshness of the classification, while they remove a distinct anomaly: the discussion of such a poem as "Pauline" under its own title, such a one as "Aristophanes' Apology," under that of a group; but even this slight improvement rather detracts from than increases what little symmetry my scheme possessed. The other changes which, on my own account, I have been able to make, include the re-writing of some passages in which the needful condensation had unnecessarily mutilated the author's sense; the completing of quotation references which through an unforeseen accident had been printed off in an unfinished state; and the addition of a few bibliographical facts. By Mr. Browning's desire, I have corrected two mistakes: the misreading, on my part, of an historical allusion in "The Statue and the Bust," and of a poetical sentiment expressed in "Pictor Ignotus"—and, by the insertion of a word or sentence in the notice of each, expanded or emphasized the meaning of several of the minor poems. I should have stated in my first Preface, had not the fact appeared to me self-evident, that I owe to Mr. Browning's kindness all the additional matter which my own reading could not supply: such as the index to the Greek names in "Aristophanes' Apology," and the Persian in "Ferishtah's Fancies;" the notes to "Transcendentalism," and "Pietro of Abano;" and that he has allowed me to study in the original documents the story of "The Ring and the Book." The two signed notes by which he has enriched the present edition have grown out of recent circumstances.

A. ORR.

January 11th, 1886.

PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION.

The present edition of the Handbook includes a summary of Mr. Browning's "Parleyings," which from the contents of this volume, as well as from its recent appearance, finds its natural place in a Supplement.

I have added an Index to the six volumes of the "Works," which has been desired for greater facility of reference.

Various corrections and improvements of the nature indicated in the Preface to my second edition have been also made in the book.

A. ORR.

June 25th, 1887.

PREFACE TO THE FIFTH EDITION.

The deeply painful circumstances in which the Handbook re-appears have compelled me to defer the fulfilment of Mr. Browning's wish, that its quotation references should be adapted to the use of readers of his new edition. They also leave it the poorer by some interesting notes which he more than once promised me for my next reprint; I had never the heart to say to him: "Is it not safer to give them now?"

The correction, p. 149, of the note referring to p. 184 of "Aristophanes' Apology," was lately made by Mr. Browning in the Handbook, pending the time when he could repeat it in his own work. The cancelled footnote on my 353rd page means that he did remove the contradiction of which I spoke.

An open discussion on "Numpholeptos," which took place some months ago, made me aware that my little abstract was less helpful even than its brevity allowed, because I had emphasized the imagery of the poem where it most obscured—or least distinctly illustrated—its idea; and I re-wrote a few sentences which I now offer in their amended form. A phrase or two in "One Word More" has been altered for the sake of more literal accuracy. No other correction worth specifying has been made in the book.

A. ORR.

January 7th, 1890.

PREFACE TO THE SIXTH EDITION.

The changes made in the present edition have been almost entirely bibliographical. Their chief object was that indicated in an earlier preface, of bringing the Handbook into correspondence with the latest issue of Mr. Browning's works. I felt reluctant when making them, to entirely sacrifice the convenience of those students of Browning who from necessity, or, as in my own case, from affection, still cling to the earlier editions; and would gladly have retained the old references while inserting the new. All however that seemed practical in this direction was to combine the index of 1868 with that of 1889 in so far as they run parallel with each other.

A long felt want has been supplied by the addition to the Handbook of a Bibliography of Mr. Browning's works, based on that of Dr. Furnivall, and thoroughly revised by Mr. Dykes Campbell. The bibliographical details scattered throughout the work have also been made more complete.

The time and trouble required for the altered quotation references have been reduced to a minimum by the thoughtful kindness of my friend Miss Fanny Carey of Trent Leigh, Nottingham; who voluntarily, many months ago, prepared for me a list of the new page numbers, leaving them only to be transcribed when the time came. I have also to thank Mr. G. M. Smith for a copy of his general Index to the works.

A. ORR.

Dec. 1st, 1891.

TABLE OF CONTENTS.

HANDBOOK TO BROWNING'S WORKS

GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS.

THE NATURE OF MR. BROWNING'S GENIUS.

If we were called upon to describe Mr. Browning's poetic genius in one phrase, we should say it consisted of an almost unlimited power of imagination exerted upon real things; but we should have to explain that with Mr. Browning the real includes everything which a human being can think or feel, and that he is realistic only in the sense of being never visionary; he never deals with those vague and incoherent fancies, so attractive to some minds, which we speak of as coming only from the poet's brain. He imagines vividly because he observes keenly and also feels strongly; and this vividness of his nature puts him in equal sympathy with the real and the ideal—with the seen and the unseen. The one is as living to him as the other.

His treatment of visible and of invisible realities constitutes him respectively a dramatic and a metaphysical poet; but, as the two kinds of reality are inseparable in human life, so are the corresponding qualities inseparable in Mr. Browning's work. The dramatic activity of his genius always includes the metaphysical. His genius always shows itself as dramatic and metaphysical at the same time.

Mr. Browning's genius is dramatic because it always expresses itself in the forms of real life, in the supposed experiences of men and women. These men and women are usually in a state of mental disturbance or conflict; indeed, they think much more than they act. But their thinking tends habitually to a practical result; and it keeps up our sense of their reality by clothing itself always in the most practical and picturesque language which thought can assume. It has been urged that he does not sink himself in his characters as a completely dramatic writer should; and this argument must stand for what it is worth. His personality may in some degree be constructed from his works: it is, I think, generally admitted, that that of Shakespeare cannot; and in so far as this is the test of a complete dramatist, Mr. Browning fails of being one. He does not sink himself in his men and women, for his sympathy with them is too active to admit of it. He not only describes their different modes of being, but defends them from their own point of view; and it is natural that he should often select for this treatment characters with which he is already disposed to sympathize. But his women are no less living and no less distinctive than his men; and he sinks his individuality at all times enough to interest us in the characters which are not akin to his own as much as in those which are. Even if it were otherwise, if his men and women were all variations of himself, as imagined under differences of sex, of age, of training, or of condition, he would still be dramatic in this essential quality, the only one which bears on our contention: that everything which, as a poet, he thinks or feels, comes from him in a dramatic, that is to say, a completely living form.

It is in this way also that his dramatic genius includes the metaphysical. The abstract, no less than the practical questions which shape themselves in his mind, are put before us in the thoughts and words, in the character and conduct of his men and women. This does not mean that human experience solves for him all the questions which it can be made to state, or that everything he believes can be verified by it: for in that case his mode of thought would be scientific, and not metaphysical; it simply means, that so much of abstract truth as cannot be given in a picture of human life, lies outside his philosophy of it. He accepts this residue as the ultimate mystery of what must be called Divine Thought. Thought or spirit is with him the ultimate fact of existence; the one thing about which it is vain to theorize, and which we can never get behind. His gospel would begin, "In the beginning was the Thought;" and since he can only conceive this as self-conscious, his "Alpha and Omega" is a Divine intelligence from which all the ideas of the human intellect are derived, and which stamps them as true. These religious conceptions are the meeting-ground of the dramatic and the metaphysical activity of his poetic genius. The two are blended in the vision of a Supreme Being not to be invested with human emotions, but only to be reached through them.

To show that Mr. Browning is a metaphysical poet, is to show that he is not a metaphysical thinker, though he is a thinker whose thought is metaphysical so far as principle goes. A metaphysical thinker is always in some way or other thinking about thought; and this is precisely what Mr. Browning has no occasion to do, because he takes its assumptions upon trust. He is a constant analyst of secondary motives and judgments. No modern freethinker could make a larger allowance for what is incidental, personal, and even material in them: we shall see that all his practical philosophy is bound up with this fact. But he has never questioned the origin of our primary or innate ideas, for he has, as I have said, never questioned their truth. It is essential to bear in mind that Mr. Browning is a metaphysical poet, and not a metaphysical thinker, to do justice to the depth and originality of his creative power; for his imagination includes everything which at a given moment a human being can think or feel, and often finds itself, therefore, at some point to which other minds have reasoned their way. The coincidence occurs most often with German lines of thought, and it has therefore been concluded that he has studied the works in which they are laid down, or has otherwise moved in the same track; the fact being that he has no bond of union with German philosophers, but the natural tendencies of his own mind. It may be easily ascertained that he did not read their language until late in life; and if what I have said of his mental habits is true, it is equally certain that their methods have been more foreign to him still. He resembles Hegel, Fichte, or Schelling, as the case may be, by the purely creative impulse which has met their thought, and which, if he had lived earlier, might have forestalled it. Mr. Browning's position is that of a fixed centre of thought and feeling. Fifty years ago he was in advance of his age. He stood firm and has allowed the current to overtake him, or even leave him behind. If I may be allowed a comparison: other mental existences suggest the idea of a river, flowing onwards, amidst varying scenes, and in a widening bed, to lose itself in the sea. Mr. Browning's genius appears the sea itself, with its immensity and its limits, its restlessness and its repose, the constant self-balancing of its ebb and flow.

As both dramatic and metaphysical poet, Mr. Browning is inspired by one central doctrine: that while thought is absolute in itself, it is relative or personal to the mind which thinks it; so that no one man can attain the whole truth of any abstract subject, and no other can convict him of having failed to do so. And he also believes that since intellectual truth is so largely for each of us a matter of personal impression, no language is special enough to convey it. The arguments which he carries on through the mouths of his men and women often represent even moral truth as something too subtle, too complex, and too changing, to be definitely expressed; and if we did not see that he reverences what is good as much as he excuses what is bad, we might imagine that even on this ground he considered no fixed knowledge to be attainable. These opinions are, however, closely bound up with his religious beliefs, and in great measure explained by them. He is convinced that uncertainty is essential to the spiritual life; and his works are saturated by the idea that where uncertainty ceases, stagnation must begin; that our light must be wavering, and our progress tentative, as well as our hopes chequered, and our happiness even devoid of any sense of finality, if the creative intention is not to frustrate itself; we may not see the path of progress and salvation clearly marked out before us. On the other hand, he believes that the circumstances of life are as much adapted to the guidance of each separate soul as if each were the single object of creative care; and that therefore while the individual knows nothing of the Divine scheme, he is everything in it.

This faith in personality is naturally abstruse on the metaphysical side, but it is always picturesque on the dramatic; for it issues in that love of the unusual which is so striking to every reader of Mr. Browning's works; and we might characterize these in a few words, by saying that they reflect at once the extent of his general sympathies, and his antagonism to everything which is general. But the "unusual" which attracts him is not the morbid or the monstrous, for these mean defective life. It is every healthy escape from the conventional and the commonplace, which are also defective life; and this is why we find in his men and women those vivid, various, and subtly compounded motives and feelings, which make our contact with them a slight, but continuous electric shock.

And since the belief in personality is the belief in human life in its fullest and truest form, it includes the belief in love and self-sacrifice. It may, indeed, be said that while Mr. Browning's judgments are leavened by the one idea, they are steadily coloured by the other; this again being so evident to his serious renders that I need only indicate it here. But the love of love does more than colour his views of life; it is an essential element in his theology; and it converts what would otherwise be a pure Theism into a mystical Christianity which again is limited by his rejection of all dogmatic religious truth. I have already alluded to his belief that, though the Deity is not to be invested with human emotions, He can only be reached through them. Love, according to him, is the necessary channel; since a colourless Omnipotence is outside the conception as outside the sympathies of man. Christ is a message of Divine love, indispensable and therefore true; but He is, as such, a spiritual mystery far more than a definable or dogmatic fact. A definite revelation uttered for all men and for all time is denied by the first principles of Mr. Browning's religious belief. What Christianity means for him, and what it does not, we shall also see in his works.

It is almost superfluous to add that Mr. Browning's dramatic sympathies and metaphysical or religious ideas constitute him an optimist. He believes that no experience is wasted, and that all life is good in its way. We also see that his optimism takes the individual and not the race for its test and starting point; and that he places the tendency to good in a conscious creative power which is outside both, and which deals directly with each separate human soul. But neither must we forget that the creative purpose, as he conceives it, fulfils itself equally through good and evil; so that he does not shrink from the contemplation of evil or by any means always seek to extenuate it. He thinks of it philosophically as a condition of good, or again, as an excess or a distortion of what is good; but he can also think of it, in the natural sense, as a distinct mode of being which a bad man may prefer for its own sake, as a good man prefers its opposite, and may defend accordingly. He would gladly admit that the coarser forms of evil are passing away; and that it is the creative intention that they should do so. Evil remains for him nevertheless essential to the variety, and invested with the dignity of human life; and on no point does he detach himself so clearly from the humanitarian optimist who regards evil and its attendant sufferings as a mere disturbance to life. Even where suffering is not caused by evil doing, he is helped over it by his individual point of view; because this prevents his ever regarding it as distinct from the personal compensations which it so often brings into play. He cannot think of it in the mass; and here again his theism asserts itself, though in a less obvious manner.

So much of Mr. Browning's moral influence lies in the hopeful religious spirit which his works reveal, that it is important to understand how elastic this is, and what seeming contradictions it is competent to unite. The testimony of one poem might otherwise be set against that of another with confusing results.

Mr. Browning's paternal grandfather was an Englishman of a west country stock;^[1] his paternal grandmother a Creole. The maternal grandfather was a German from Hamburg named Wiedemann, an accomplished draughtsman and musician.^[2] The maternal grandmother was completely Scotch.

This pedigree throws a valuable light on the vigour and variety of Mr. Browning's genius; for it shows that on the ground of heredity they are, in great measure, accounted for. It contains almost the only facts of a biographical nature which can be fitly introduced into the present work.

HIS CHOICE AND TREATMENT OF SUBJECT.

VERSIFICATION.

Mr. Browning's choice of subject is determined by his belief that individual feeling and motive are the only true life: hence the only true material of dramatic art. He rejects no incident which admits of development on the side of feeling and motive. He accepts none which cannot be so developed. His range of subject covers, therefore, a great deal that is painful, but nothing that is simply repulsive: because the poetry of human life, that is of individual experience, is absent from nothing which he portrays.

His treatment of his subject is realistic in so far that it is always picturesque. It raises a distinct image of the person or action he intends to describe; but the image is, so to speak, always saturated with thought: and I shall later have occasion to notice the false impression of Mr. Browning's genius which this circumstance creates. Details, which with realists of a narrower kind would give only a physical impression of the scene described, serve in his case to build up its mental impression. They create a mental or emotional atmosphere which makes us vaguely feel the intention of the story as we travel through it, and flashes it upon us as we look back. In "Red Cotton Night-cap Country" (as we shall presently see) he dwells so significantly on the peacefulness of the neighbourhood in which the tragedy has occurred, that we feel in it the quiet which precedes the storm, and which in some measure invites it. In one of the Idyls, "Ivàn Ivànovitch," he begins by describing the axe which will strike off the woman's head, and raising a vague idea of its fitness for any possible use. In another of them, "Martin Relph," the same process is carried on in an opposite manner. We see a mental agony before we know its substantial cause; and we only see the cause as reflected in it "Ned Bratts," again, conveys in its first lines the sensation of a tremendously hot day in which Nature seems to reel in a kind of riotous stupefaction; and the grotesque tragedy on which the idyl turns, becomes a matter of course. It would be easy to multiply examples.

Mr. Browning's verse is also subordinate to this intellectual theory of poetic art. It is uniformly inspired by the principle that sense should not be sacrificed to sound: and this principle constitutes his chief ground of divergence from other poets. It is a case of divergence—nothing more: since he is too deeply a musician to be indifferent to sound in verse, and since no other poet deserving the name would willingly sacrifice sense to it. But while all agree in admitting that sense and sound in poetry are the natural complement of each other, each will be practically more susceptible to one than to the other, and will unconsciously seek it at the expense of the other. With all his love for music, Mr. Browning is more susceptible to sense than to sound. He values though more than expression; matter, more than form; and, judging him from a strictly poetic point of view, he has lost his balance in this direction, as so many have lost it in the opposite one. He has never ignored beauty, but he has neglected it in the desire for significance. He has never meant to be rugged, but he has become so, in the exercise of strength. He has never intended to be obscure, but he has become so from the condensation of style which was the excess of significance and of strength. Habit grows on us by degrees till its slight invisible links form an iron chain, till it overweights its object, and even ends in crushing it out of sight; and Mr. Browning has illustrated this natural law. The self-enslavement was the more inevitable in his case that he was not only an earnest worker, but a solitary one. His genius^[3] removed him from the first from that sphere of popular sympathy in which the tendency to excess would have been corrected; and the distance, like the mental habit which created it, was self-increasing.

It is thus that Mr. Browning explains the eccentricities of his style; and his friends know that beyond the point of explaining, he does not defend them. He has never blamed his public for accusing him of obscurity or ugliness He has only thought those wrong who taxed him with being wilfully ugly or obscure. He began early to defy public opinion because his best endeavours had failed to conciliate it; and he would never conciliate it at the expense of what he believed to be the true principles of his art. But his first and greatest failure from a popular point of view was the result of his willingness to accept any judgment, however unfavourable, which coincided with this belief.

"Paracelsus," had recently been published, and declared "unintelligible;" and Mr. Browning was pondering this fact and concluding that he had failed to be intelligible because he had been too concise, when an extract from a letter of Miss Caroline Fox was forwarded to him by the lady to whom it had been addressed. The writer stated that John Sterling had tried to read the poem and been repelled by its verbosity; and she ended with this question: "doth he know that Wordsworth will devote a fortnight or more to the discovery of the single word that is the one fit for his sonnet?"

Mr. Browning was not personally acquainted with either John Sterling or Caroline Fox, and what he knew of the former as a poet did not, to his mind, bear out this marked objection to wordiness. Still, he gave the joint criticism all the weight it deserved; and much more than it deserved in the case of Miss Fox, whom he imagined, from her self-confident manner, to be a woman of a certain age, instead of a girl some years younger than himself; and often, he tells us, during the period immediately following, he contented himself with two words where he would rather have used ten. The harsh and involved passages in "Sordello," which add so much to the remoteness of its thought, were the first consequence of this lesson. "Pauline" and "Paracelsus" had been deeply musical, and the music came back to their author's verse with the dramas, lyrics, and romances by which "Sordello" was followed. But the dread of being diffuse had doubly rooted itself in his mind, and was to bear fruit again as soon as the more historical or argumentative mood should prevail.

The determination never to sacrifice sense to sound is the secret of whatever repels us in Mr. Browning's verse, and also of whatever attracts. Wherever in it sense keeps company with sound, we have a music far deeper than can arise from mere sound, or even from a flow of real lyric emotion, which has its only counterpart in sound. It is in the idea, and of it. It is the brain picture beating itself into words.

The technical rules by which Mr. Browning works, carry out his principle to the fullest extent.

I. He uses the smallest number of words which his meaning allows; is particularly sparing in adjectives.

II. He uses the largest relative number of Saxon (therefore picturesque) words.^[4]

III. He uses monosyllabic words wherever this is possible.

IV. He farther condenses his style by abbreviations and omissions, of which some are discarded, but all warranted by authority: "in," "on," and "of," for instance, become "i'," "o'," and "o'." Pronouns, articles, conjunctions, and prepositions are, on the same principle, occasionally left out.

V. He treats consonants as the backbone of the language, and hence, as the essential feature in a rhyme; and never allows the repetition of a consonant in a rhyme to be modified by a change in the preceding vowel, or by the recurrence of the rhyming syllable in a different word—or the repetition of a consonant in blank verse to create a half-consonance resembling a rhyme: though other poets do not shrink from doing so.^[5]

VI. He seldom dilutes his emphasis by double rhymes, reserving these—especially when made up of combined words, and producing a grotesque effect—for those cases in which the meaning is given with a modifying colour: a satirical, or self-satirical, intention on the writer's part. Strong instances of this occur in "The Flight of the Duchess," "Christmas Eve," and "Pacchiarotto."

VII. He always uses the measure most appropriate to his subject, whether it be the ten-syllabled blank verse which makes up "The Ring and the Book," the separate dramatic monologues, and nearly all the dramas, or the heroic rhymed verse which occurs in "Sordello" and "Fifine at the Fair;" or one of the lyrical measures, of which his slighter poems contain almost, if not quite, every known form.^[6]

VIII. He takes no liberties with unusual measures; though he takes any admissible liberty with the usual measures, which will interrupt their monotony, and strengthen their effect.

IX. He eschews many vulgarisms or inaccuracies which custom has sanctioned, both in prose and verse, such as, "thou wert;" "better than them all;" "he need not;" "he dare not." The universal "I had better;" "I had rather," is abhorrent to him.^[7]

X. No prosaic turns or tricks of language are ever associated in his verse with a poetic mood.

THE CONTINUOUS CHARACTER OF HIS WORK.

The writer of a handbook to Mr. Browning's poetry must contend with exceptional difficulties, growing out of what I have tried to describe as the unity in variety of Mr. Browning's poetic life. This unity of course impresses itself on his works; and in order to give a systematic survey of them, we must treat as a collection of separate facts what is really a living whole; and seek to give the impression of that whole by a process of classification which cuts it up alive. Mr. Browning's work is, to all intents and purposes, one group; and though we may divide and subdivide it for purposes of illustration, the division will be always more or less artificial, and, unless explained away, more or less misleading. We cannot even divide it into periods, for if the first three poems represent the author's intellectual youth, the remainder are one long maturity; while even in these the poetic faculty shows itself full-grown. We cannot trace in it the evidence of successive manners like those of Raphael, or successive moods like those of Shakespeare; or, if we do, this is neutralized by the simple fact that Mr. Browning's productive career has been infinitely longer than was Raphael's, and considerably so than Shakespeare's; and that changes which meant the development of a genius in their case, mean the course of a life in his.

And this is the central fact of the case. Mr. Browning's work is himself. His poetic genius was in advance of his general growth, but it has been subject to no other law. "The Ring and the Book" was written at what may be considered the turning-point of a human life. It was in some degree a turning-point in the author's artistic career: for most of his emotional poems were published before, and most of the argumentative after it; and in this sense his work may be said to divide itself into two. But the division is useless for our purpose. The Browning of the second period is the Browning of the first, only in a more crystallized form. No true boundary line can be drawn even here.

My endeavour will, therefore, be to bring the sense of this real continuity into the divisions which I must impose on Mr. Browning's work; and thus also to infuse something of his life into the meagre statement of contents to which I am forced to reduce it. The few words of explanation by which I preface each group may assist this end. At the same time I shall resist all temptation to "bring out" what I have indicated as Mr. Browning's leading ideas by headings, capitals, italics, or any other artificial device whatever; as in so doing I should destroy his emphasis and hinder the right reading, besides effacing the usually dramatic character, of the individual poems. The impressions I have received from the collective work will, I trust, be confirmed by it.

FOOTNOTES:

"VENICE, Oct. 25, 1885."

"R. B."

I.

INTRODUCTORY GROUP.

"PAULINE," "PARACELSUS," "SORDELLO."

These three poems are Mr. Browning's first, and they are also, as I have said, the one partial exception to the unity and continuousness of his work; they have, at least, one common characteristic which detaches them from the remainder of it. Each is in its different way the study of a human spirit, too ambitious to submit to the limits of human existence, and which learns humility in its unsuccessful conflict with them. This ambition is of its nature poetic, and seems so much in harmony with Mr. Browning's mind—young and untutored by experience as it then was, full of the consciousness of its own powers as it must have been—that it is difficult not to recognize in it a phase of his own intellectual life. But if it was so, it is one which he had already outgrown, or lived much more in fancy than in fact. His sympathy with the ambition of Paracelsus and Sordello is steadily counteracted by his judgment of it; and we are only justified in asserting what is beyond dispute: that these poems represent an introductory phase of the author's imagination, one which begins and ends in them. The mind of his men and women will be exercised on many things, but never again so much upon itself. The vivid sense of their personality will be less in their minds than in his own.

"PAULINE." (1832.)

This poem is, as its title declares, a fragment of a confession. The speaker is a man, probably still young; and Pauline, the name of the lady who receives the confession, and is supposed to edit it. It is not, however, "fragmentary" in the sense of revealing only a small part of the speaker's life, or of only recording isolated acts, from which the life may be built up. Its fragmentary character lies in this: that, while very explicit as a record of feeling and motive, it is entirely vague in respect to acts. It is an elaborate retrospect of successive mental states, big with the sense of corresponding misdeeds; and pointing among these to some glaring infidelities to Pauline, the man's constant love and friend; but on the whole conveying nothing beyond an impression of youthful excesses, and of an extreme and fantastic self-consciousness which has inspired these excesses, and which now magnifies and distorts them.

An ultra-consciousness of self is in fact the key-note of the whole mental situation. Pauline's lover has been a prey to the spiritual ambition so distinctly illustrated in these three first poems; and, unlike Paracelsus and Sordello, he has given it no outlet in unselfish aims. His life has not been wholly misspent; he is a poet and a student; he has had dreams of human good; he has reverenced great men: and never quite lost the faith in God, and the sense of nearness to Him; and he alleges some of these facts in deprecation of his too harsh verdict upon himself. But his ultimate object has been always the gratification of Self—the ministering to its pleasures and to its powers; and this egotism has become narrower and more consuming, till the thirst for even momentary enjoyment has banished the very belief in higher things. The belief returns, and we leave him at the close of his confession exhausted by the mental fever, but released from it—new-born to a better life; though how and why this has happened is again part of the mystery of the case. "Pauline" is the one of Mr. Browning's longer poems of which no intelligible abstract is possible: a circumstance the more striking that it is perfectly transparent, as well as truly poetical, so far as its language is concerned.

The defects and difficulties of "Pauline" are plainly admitted in an editor's note, written in French, and signed by this name; and which, proceeding as it does from the author himself, supplies a valuable comment on the work.

"I much fear that my poor friend will not be always perfectly understood in what remains to be read of this strange fragment, but it is less calculated than any other part to explain what of its nature can never be anything but dream and confusion. I do not know moreover whether in striving at a better connection of certain parts, one would not run the risk of detracting from the only merit to which so singular a production can pretend: that of giving a tolerably precise idea of the manner (genre) which it can merely indicate. This unpretending opening, this stir of passion, which first increases, and then gradually subsides, these transports of the soul, this sudden return upon himself, and above all, my friend's quite peculiar turn of mind, have made alterations almost impossible. The reasons which he elsewhere asserts, and others still more cogent have secured my indulgence for this paper, which otherwise I should have advised him to throw into the fire. I believe none the less in the great principle of all composition—in that principle of Shakespeare, of Raphael, and of Beethoven, according to which concentration of ideas is due much more to their conception than to their execution; I have every reason to fear that the first of these qualities is still foreign to my friend, and I much doubt whether redoubled labour would enable him to acquire the second. It would be best to burn this; but what can I do?"

We might infer from this, as from his subsequent introduction, that Mr. Browning disclaimed all that is extravagant in the poem, and laid it simply to the charge of the imaginary person it is intended to depict: but that he has also prefaced it with a curious Latin quotation which identifies that person with himself.^[8]

"Pauline" did not take its place among the author's collected works till 1868, when the uniform edition of them appeared; and he then introduced it by a preface (to which I have just alluded) in which he declared his unwillingness to publish such a boyish production, and gave the reasons which induced him to do so. The poem is boyish, or at all events youthful, in point of conception; and we need not wonder that this intellectual crudeness should have outweighed its finished poetic beauties in its author's mind. It contains however one piece of mental portraiture which, with slight modifications, might have stood for Mr. Browning when he re-edited the work, as it clearly did when he wrote it. It begins thus (vol. i. page 14):

The tribute at page 14^[9] to the saving power of imagination is also characteristic of his maturer mind, though expressed in an ambiguous manner. It is interesting to know that in the line (page 26),

he was thinking of Agamemnon: as this shows how early his love of classic literature began. The allusion to Plato, at pages 19, 20, and 21, largely confirms this impression. The feeling for music asserts itself also at page 18, though in a less spiritual form than it assumes in his later works. But the most striking piece of true biography which "Pauline" contains, is its evidence of the young writer's affectionate reverence for Shelley, whom he idealizes under the name of Sun-treader. An invocation to his memory occupies three pages, beginning with the ninth; it is renewed at the end of the poem, and there can be no doubt that the pathetic language in which it is couched came straight from the young poet's own heart. We even fancy that Shelley's influence is visible in the poem itself, which contains a profusion of natural imagery, and some touches of naturalistic emotion, not at all in keeping with Mr. Browning's picturesque, but habitually human genius. The influence, if it existed, passed away with his earliest youth; not so the admiration and sympathy which it implied; and this, considering the wide difference which separated the two minds, is an interesting fact.^[10]

"PARACELSUS." (1835.)

"Paracelsus" is a summary of the life, as Mr. Browning conceives it, of this well-known physicist of the sixteenth century; and is divided into five scenes, or groups of scenes, each representing a critical moment in his experience, and reviewing in his own words the circumstances by which it has been prepared. The personages whom it includes are, besides the principal one, Festus and Michal, early friends of Paracelsus, and now man and wife; and the Italian poet Aprile. Michal appears only in the first scene; Aprile in the second or third; but Festus accompanies Paracelsus throughout the drama, in the constant character of judicious, if not profound, adviser, and of tender friend. His personality is sufficiently marked to claim the importance of a type; and as such he stands forth, as contrasted with both Paracelsus and Aprile, and yet a bond of union between them. It is more probable however that he was created for the mere dramatic purpose of giving shape to the confession of Paracelsus, and preserving it from monotony. The story is principally told in a dialogue between them.

The first scene is entitled "Paracelsus aspires;" and takes place at Würzburg between himself, Festus, and Michal, on the eve of his departure from their common home. Both friends begin by opposing his aspirations, and thus lead him to expound and defend them. The aim and spirit of these is the distinguishing feature of the poem. Paracelsus aspires to knowledge: such knowledge as will benefit his fellow-men. He will seek it in the properties of nature, and, as history tells us, he will succeed. But his aspirations pass over these isolated discoveries, which he has no idea of connecting into scientific truths: and tend ever towards some final revelation of the secret of life, to flash forth from his own brain when the flesh shall have been subdued, and the imprisoned light of intellect set free. And here Mr. Browning's metaphysical fancy is somewhat at issue with his facts. Paracelsus employed nature in the quest of the supernatural or magical; this is shown by the poem, though in it he begins by repudiating, with all other external aids, the help of the black art. He therefore relied on other kinds of knowledge than that which springs direct from the human mind. The inconsistency however disappears in Mr. Browning's conception of the case, and the metaphysical language which he imputes to Paracelsus in the earlier stages of his career, is not felt to be untrue.

Paracelsus not only aspires to know: he believes it his mission to acquire knowledge; and he believes also that it is only to be acquired through untried methods, through untaught men: most of all through solitary communion with nature, and at the sacrifice of all human joys. Festus regards this as a delusion, and combats it, in this first scene, with the arguments of common sense; overshooting the mark just enough to leave his friend the victory. Paracelsus has declared that he appreciates all he is renouncing, but that he has no choice. He knows that the way on which he is about to enter is "trackless;" but so is the bird's: God will guide him as He guides the bird. And Festus replies that the road to knowledge is not trackless. "Mighty marchers" have left their footprints upon it. Nature has not written her secrets in desert places, but in the souls of great men: the "Stagirite,"^[11] and the sages who form a glory round him. He urges Paracelsus to learn what they can teach, and then take the torch of wisdom from the exhausted runner's hand, and let his fresh strength continue the race. He warns him against the personal ambition which alloys his unselfish thirst for knowledge; against the presumption which impels him to serve God (and man).

against the dangers of a course which cuts him adrift from human love. But Paracelsus has his answer ready. "The wisdom of the past has done nothing for mankind. Men have laboured and grown famous: and the evils of life are unabated: the earth still groans in the blind and endless struggle with them. Truth comes from within the human intellect. To KNOW is to have opened a way for its escape—not a way for its admission. It has often refused itself to a life of study. It has been born of loitering idleness. The force which inspires him proves his mission to be authentic. His own will could not create such promptings. He dares not set them aside."

The depth of his conviction carries the day, and the scene ends with these expressive words:—

The next two, or indeed three scenes are united under the title "Paracelsus attains;" but the attainment is not at first visible. We find him at Constantinople, in the house of the Greek conjuror, nine years after his departure from home. He has not discovered the magical secret which he came to seek; and his tone, as he reviews his position, is full of a bitter and almost despairing sense of failure. His desultory course has borne scanty and confused results. His powers have been at once overstrained and frittered away. He is beset by the dread of madness; and by the fear, scarcely less intolerable, of a moral shipwreck in which even the purity of his motives will disappear. His thoughts revert sadly to his youth, and its lost possibilities of love and joy. At this juncture the poet Aprile appears, and unconsciously reveals to him the secret of his unsuccess. He has sought knowledge at the sacrifice of love; in so doing he has violated a natural law and is suffering for it. Knowledge is inseparable from love in the scheme of life. Aprile too has sinned, but in the opposite manner; he has refused to know. He has loved blindly and immoderately, and retribution has overtaken him also: for he is dying. If the one existence has lacked sustaining warmth, the other has burned itself away. Aprile's "Love" is not however restricted to the personal sense of the word; it means the passion for beauty, the impulse to possess and to create it; everything which belongs to the life of art. He represents the æsthetic or emotional in life, as Paracelsus represents the intellectual. We see this in the sorrowful confession of Paracelsus:—

and, in the words already addressed to Aprile (page 65):—

Aprile acknowledges his own mistake, in a passage which fully completes the moral of the story, and begins thus (page 59):—

Paracelsus never sees him again, and will speak of him on a subsequent occasion as a madman; but he evidently accepts him as a messenger of the truth; and the message sinks into his soul.

In what is called the third scene, five years more have elapsed; and Paracelsus is at Bâle, again opening his heart to his old friend. He is professor at the University. His fame extends far beyond it. Outwardly he has "attained." But the sense of a wasted life, and above all, of moral deterioration, is stronger on him than ever, and the tone in which he expresses it is only calmer than in the previous soliloquy, because it is more hopeless. He has failed in his highest aims—and failed doubly: because he has learned to content himself with low ones. He believes that he is teaching useful, although fragmentary truths; that these may lead to more; that those who follow him may stand on his shoulders and be considered great. But the crowning TRUTH is as far from him as ever; and the mass of those who crowd his lecture-room do not even come for what they can learn, but for the vulgar pleasure of seeing old beliefs subverted, and old methods exposed. He is humiliated at having declined on to what seems to him a lower range of knowledge; still more by the kind of men with whom it has brought him into contact; and he sees himself sinking into a lower depth, in which such praise as they can give will repay him. His contempt for himself and them is making him reckless of consequences, and preparing the way for his disgrace.

In spite however of his failure Paracelsus has done so much, that Festus is converted; and ready to justify both his early belief in his own mission, and the abnormal means by which he has chosen to carry it out. Their positions are reversed, and he combats his friend's self-abasement as he once combated his too great confidence in himself. He grieves over what seems to him the depression of an over-wrought mind, and what he will not regard as due to any deeper cause. But Paracelsus will take no comfort; and when, finally, he denounces the folly of intellectual pretensions, and ends with the pathetic words—in part the echo of Festus' own:—

Festus has no answer to give. He parts from Paracelsus perplexed and saddened rather than convinced, but with a dawning consciousness of depths in life, to which his strong but simple soul has no key.

In the fourth scene these depths are more fully and more perplexingly revealed. Two years more have elapsed. Paracelsus has escaped from Bâle, and is at Colmar, once more confessing himself to Festus, and once more said to "aspire." But his aspirations are less easy to understand than formerly, because their aim is less single. The sense of wasted life, Aprile's warnings, some natural rebound against the continued intellectual strain have determined him to strive for a fuller existence, and neglect no opportunity of usefulness or enjoyment. A serious and commendable change would seem to be denoted by the words, "I have tried each way singly: now for both!" (page 121); and again at page 126, where a new-born softness asserts itself. His language has, however, a vein of bitterness, sometimes even of cynicism, which belies the idea of any sustained impulse to good. He is worn in body, weary in mind, fitful and wayward in mood, and just in the condition in which men half impose on others, and half on themselves. He alludes to the habit of drinking as one which he has now contracted; and he is clearly entering on the period of his greatest excesses, perhaps also of his most strenuous exertions in the cause of knowledge. But his energy is reckless and irregular, and the spirit of the gambler rather than that of the student is in it. He works all night to forget himself by day, gathering up his diminished strength for, a lavish expenditure; and a new misgiving as to the wisdom of his "aspirations" pierces through the assertion that even sickness may lend an aid; since

We feel that henceforward his path will be all downhill.

In the fifth and closing scene, thirteen years later, Paracelsus "attains" again, and for the last time. He is dying. Festus watches by him in his hospital cell with a very touching tenderness; and as Paracelsus awakes from a period of lethargy to a delirious remembrance of his past life, he soothes and guides him to an inspired calm in which its true meaning is revealed to him. The half prophetic death-bed vision includes everything which experience had taught him; and a great deal which we cannot help thinking only a more modern experience could have taught. It disclaims all striving after absolute knowledge, and asserts the value of limitation in every energy of life. The passage in which he describes the faculties of man, and which begins

contains the natural lesson of the speaker's career, supposing him in a condition to receive it. But it also reflects Mr. Browning's constant ideal of a fruitful and progressive existence; and the very beautiful monologue of which it forms part is, so far as it goes, his actual confession of faith. The scientific idea of evolution is here distinctly foreshadowed: though it begins and ends, in Mr. Browning's mind, in the large Theism which was and is the basis of his religious belief.

The poem is followed by an historical appendix, which enables the reader to verify its facts, and judge Mr. Browning's interpretation of them.

"SORDELLO." (1840.)

"Sordello" is, like "Paracelsus," the imaginary reconstruction of a real life, in connection with contemporary facts; but its six "books" present a much more complicated structure. The historical part of "Paracelsus" is all contained in the one life. In "Sordello" it forms a large and moving background, which often disputes our attention with the central figure, and sometimes even absorbs it: projecting itself as it were in an artistic middle distance, in which fact and fancy are blended; while the mental world through which the hero moves, is in its way, as restless and as crowded as the material. It may save time and trouble to readers of the poem to know something of its historical foundation and poetic motive, before making any great effort to disentangle its various threads; but it will always be best to read it once without this key: since the story, involved as it is, has a sustained dramatic interest which is destroyed by anticipating its course.

The historical personages who take part in it directly and indirectly, are

The poet SORDELLO.

Historical basis of the Story.

A Mantuan poet of the name of Sordello is mentioned by Dante in the "Purgatorio," where he is supposed to be recognized as a fellow-townsman by Virgil.

And also in his treatise "De vulgare Eloquentiâ," where he speaks of him as having created the Italian language. These facts are related by Sismondi in his "Italian Republics," vol. ii., page 202; and the writer refers us for more particulars to his work on the "Literature of Southern Europe." He seems, however, to exhaust the subject when he tells us that the nobility of Sordello's birth, and his intrigue or marriage with Cunizza are attested by contemporaries; that a "mysterious obscurity" shrouds his life; and that his violent death is obscurely indicated by Dante, whose mention of him is now his only title to immortality. According to one tradition he was the son of an archer named Elcorte. Another seems to point to him when it imputes a son to Salinguerra as the only offspring of his first marriage, and having died before himself. Mr. Browning accepts the latter hypothesis, whilst he employs both.

The birth of his Sordello, as probably of the real one, coincides with the close of the twelfth century; and with an active condition of the family feuds which were just merging in the conflict of Guelphs and Ghibellines. The "Biographie Universelle" says:

"The first encounter between the two parties took place at Vicenza towards 1194. Eccelino the Second, who allied himself with the republics of Verona and Padua, was exiled from Vicenza himself his whole family and his faction, by a Podesta, his enemy. Before submitting to this sentence, he undertook to defend himself by setting fire to the neighbouring houses; a great part of the town was burned during the conflict, in which Eccelino was beaten. These were the first scenes of confusion and massacre, which met the eyes of the son of the Lord of Romano, the ferocious Eccelino the Third, born 4th of April, 1194."

In Mr. Browning's version, Adelaide, wife of Eccelino II., is saved with her infant son—this Eccelino the Third—by the devotion of an archer, Elcorte, who perishes in the act. Retrude, wife of Salinguerra, and also present on this occasion, only lives to be conveyed to Adelaide's castle at Goito; but her new-born child survives; and Adelaide, dreading his future rivalry with her own, allows his father to think him dead, and brings him up, under the name of Sordello, as her page, declaring him to be Elcorte's son adopted out of gratitude. The "intrigue" between him and Palma (Cunizza) appears in due time as a poetical affinity, strongest on her side, and which determines her to see him restored to his rightful place. Palma's subsequent marriage with Richard, Count of San Bonifacio, serves to justify the idea of an engagement to him, ratified by her father before his retirement from the world, and which she and Salinguerra conspire to break, the one from love of Sordello, the other in the interests of her House. Eccelino's real assumption of the monastic habit after Adelaide's death is represented as in part caused by remorse—for Salinguerra is his old and faithful ally, and he has connived at the wrong done to him in the concealment of his son; and his return to the Guelph connexion from which his daughter has sprung, as a general disclaimer of his second wife's views.

The Lombard League also figures in the story, as the consequence of Salinguerra's and Palma's conspiracy against San Bonifacio; though it also appears as brought about by the historic course of events. Salinguerra, under cover of military reprisals, has entrapped the Count into Ferrara, and detained him there, at the moment when he was expected to meet his lady-love in his own city of Verona. Verona prepares to resent this outrage on its Prince, and with it, the other States which represent the Guelph cause; and when Palma—seizing her opportunity—summons Sordello thither in his character of her minstrel, and reveals to him her projects for him and for herself, their interview is woven into the historical picture of a great mediæval city suddenly called to arms. What Sordello sees when he goes with Palma to Ferrara, belongs to the history of all mediæval warfare; and his sudden and premature death revives the historical tradition though in a new form. The intermediate details of his minstrel's career are of course imaginary; but his struggle to increase the expressiveness of his mother tongue again records a fact.

I have mentioned such accessible authorities as Sismondi and the "Biographie Universelle," because they are accessible: not from any idea that they give the measure of Mr. Browning's knowledge of his subject. He prepared himself for writing "Sordello" by studying all the chronicles of that period of Italian history which the British Museum supplied; and we may be sure that every event he alludes to as historical, is so in spirit, if not in the letter; while such details as come under the head of historical curiosities are absolutely true. He also supplemented his reading by a visit to the places in which the scenes of the story are laid.

Its Dramatic Idea.

The dramatic idea of "Sordello" is that of an imaginative nature, nourished by its own creations, and also consumed by them; and breaking down in consequence under the first strain of real conflict and passion. The mysterious Italian poet,—scarcely known but as a voice, a mere phantom among living men—was well fitted to illustrate such an idea; he might also perhaps have suggested it. But we know that it was already growing in Mr. Browning's mind; for Sordello had been foreshadowed in Aprile, though the two are as different as their common poetic quality allows. Aprile is consumed by a creative passion, which is always akin to love; Sordello by an imaginative fever which has no love in it; and in this respect he presents a stronger contrast to Aprile than Paracelsus himself. As a poet he may be said to contain both the artist and the thinker, and therefore to transcend both; and his craving is for neither love nor knowledge, as the foregoing poem represents them, but for that magnitude of poetic existence, which means all love and all knowledge, as all beauty and all power in itself. But he makes the same mistake as Aprile, or at least as Paracelsus, and makes it in a greater degree; for he rejects all the human conditions of the poetic life: and strives to live it, not in experience or in sympathy, but by a pure act of imagination, or as he calls it, of Will; and he wears himself out body and soul by a mental strain which proves as barren as it is continuous. The true joy of living comes home to him at last, and with it the first challenge to self-sacrifice. Duty prevails; but he dies in the conflict, or rather of it.

The intended lesson of the story is distinctly enforced in its last scene, but is patent almost from the first—that the mind must not disclaim the body, nor imagination divorce itself from reality: that the spiritual is bound up with the material in our earthly life. All Mr. Browning's practical philosophy is summed up in this truth, and much of his religion; for it points to the necessity of a human manifestation of the Divine Being; and though Sordello's story contains no explicit reference to Christian doctrine, an unmistakeable Christian sentiment pervades its close. That restless and ambitious spirit had missed its only possible anchorage: the ideal of an intellectual existence at once guided and set free by love.

Mr. Browning has indeed prefaced the poem by saying that in writing it he has laid his chief stress on the incidents in the development of a soul. It must be read with reference to this idea; and I should be bound to give precedence to it over the poetic inspiration of the story if Mr. Browning had practically done so. This is not, however, the case. Sordello's poetic individuality overshadows the moral, and for a time conceals it altogether. The close of his story is distinctly the emerging of a soul from the mists of poetic egotism by which it has been obscured; and Mr. Browning has meant us from the first to see it struggling through them. But in so doing he has judged Sordello's poetic life as a blind aspiration after the spiritual, while the egotism which he represents as the keynote of his poetic being was in fact the negation of it. The idea was just: that the greatest poet must have in him the making of the largest man. His Sordello is imperial among men for the one moment in which his song is in sympathy with human life; and Mr. Browning would have made it more consistently so, had he worked out his idea at a later time. But the poem was written at a period in which his artistic judgment was yet inferior to his poetic powers, and the need of ordering his vast material from the reader's, as well as the writer's, point of view—though he states it by implication at the end of the third book—had not thoroughly penetrated his mind.

I venture on this criticism, though it is no part of my task to criticize, because "Sordello" is the one of Mr. Browning's works which still remains to be read; and even a mistaken criticism may sometimes afford a clue. "Sordello" is not only harder to read than "Paracelsus," but harder than any other of Mr. Browning's works; its complications of structure being interwoven with difficulties of a deeper kind which again react upon them. Enough has been said to show that the conception of the character is very abstruse on the intellectual and poetic side; that it presents us with states of thought and feeling, remote from common experience, and which no language could make entirely clear; and unfortunately the style is sometimes in itself so obscure that we cannot judge whether it is the expression or the idea which we fail to grasp. The poem was written under the dread of diffuseness which had just then taken possession of Mr. Browning's mind, and we have sometimes to struggle through a group of sentences out of which he has so laboured to squeeze every unnecessary word, that their grammatical connection is broken up, and they present a compact mass of meaning which without previous knowledge it is almost impossible to construe. We are also puzzled by an abridged, interjectional, way of carrying on the historical part of the narrative; by the author's habit of alluding to imaginary or typical personages in the same tone as to real ones; and by misprints, including errors in punctuation, which will be easily corrected in a later edition, but which mar the present one.

It is only fair to add that he would deprecate the idea of any excessive labour as bestowed on this, to his mind, immature performance. It is for us, not for him, to do justice to it. With all its faults and obscurities, "Sordello" is a great work; full moreover of pregnant and beautiful passages which are not affected by them. When Mr. Browning re-edited "Sordello" in 1863, he considered the possibility of re-writing it in a more transparent manner; but he concluded that the labour would be disproportionate to the result, and contented himself with summarizing the contents of each "book" in a continuous heading, which represents the main thread of the story. It will be useful to read this carefully.

BOOK THE FIRST.

The story opens at Verona, at the moment of the formation of the Lombard League—a well-known union of Guelph cities against the Ghibellines in Northern Italy. Mr. Browning, addressing himself to an imaginary audience composed of living and dead, describes the city as it hastens to arms, and the chain of circumstances through which she has been called upon to do so; and draws a curious picture of two political ideals which he considers respectively those of Ghibelline and Guelph: the one symbolized by isolated heights, the other by a continuous level growth; those again suggesting the violent disruptions which create imperial power; these the peaceful organic processes of democratic life. The poet Shelley is desired to withdraw his "pure face" from among the spectators of this chequered scene; and Dante is invoked in the name of him whose fame preceded his, and has been absorbed by it. A secret chamber in Count Richard's palace shows Palma and Sordello in earnest conference with each other. Then the curtain falls; and we are carried back thirty years, and to Goito Castle.

Sordello is there: a refined and beautiful boy; framed for all spiritual delights. As his life is described, it has neither duties nor occupations; no concern with the outer world; no contact even with that of Adelaide, his supposed protectress. He is dreaming away his childhood in the silent gloom of the castle, or the sunny outdoor life of the hills and woods. He lives in imagination, blends the idea of his own being with everything he sees; and for years is happy in the bare fact of existence. But the germ of a fatal spiritual ambition is lurking within him; and as he grows into a youth, he hankers after something which he calls sympathy, but which is really applause. He therefore makes a human crowd for himself out of carved and tapestried figures, and the few names which penetrate into his solitude, and fancies himself always the greatest personage amongst them. He simulates all manner of heroic performances and of luxurious rest. He is Eccelino, the Emperor's vicar; he is the Emperor himself. He becomes more than this; for his fancy has soared upwards to the power which includes all empire in one—the spiritual power of song. Apollo is its representative. Sordello is he. He has had one glimpse of Palma; she becomes his Daphne; the dream life is at its height.

And now Sordello is a man. He begins to sicken for reality. Vanity and ambition are ripe in him. His egotisms are innocent, but they are absorbing. The soul is as yet dormant.^[13]

BOOK THE SECOND.

The dream-life becomes a partial reality. Sordello's wanderings carry him one day to the walls of Mantua, outside which Palma is holding a "Court of Love." Eglamor sings. His song is incomplete. Sordello feels what is wanting; catches up the thread of the story; and sings it to its proper close.^[14] His triumph is absolute. He is installed as Palma's minstrel in Eglamor's place. Eglamor accepts his defeat with touching gentleness, and lies down to die. This poet is meant to embody the limited art, which is an end in itself, and one with the artist's life. Sordello, on the other hand, represents the boundless aspirations which art may subserve, but which must always leave it behind. The parallel will be stated more distinctly later on.

Sordello's first wish is fulfilled. He has found a career which will reconcile his splendid dreams with his real obscurity, and set him, by right of imagination—the true Apolloship—apart from other men. But his true difficulties have yet to begin. It is not enough that he feels himself a transcendent personage. He must make others believe that he is so. Every act of imagination is with him an act of existence, or as Mr. Browning calls it of Will; but this self-asserting was much easier with the imaginary crowd than it can be with the real one. Sordello is soon at cross-purposes with his hearers: for when he sings of human passion, or human prowess, they never dream of identifying him with it; and when he sings of mere abstract modes of being, they do not understand.

The love of abstract conception is indeed the rock on which he splits. The feelings which are real to us are unreal to him, because they are accidental. What is real to him is the underlying consciousness which according to his view is permanent: the "intensest" self described in "Pauline"—the mind which is spoken of in the fifth "book" of "Sordello" (vol. i. page 236) as nearest to God when emptied of even thought; and his aim is to put forth all the qualities which this absolute existence can assume, and yet be reflected in other men's minds as independent of them. This lands him in struggles not only with his hearers but with himself—for he is unused to expressing what he feels; and with a language which at best could convey "whole perceptions" like his, in a very meagre form, or a fragmentary one. He still retains the love of real life and adventure which inspired his boyish dreams. There is nothing, as I have said, that he does not wish to be; and now, amidst commonplace human beings, his human desires often take a more simple and natural form. But the poet in him pushes the man aside, and bids him, at all events, wait. He does not know that he is failing through the hopeless disunion of the two. He silences his better humanity, and retains the worst; for he is more and more determined to succeed at whatever cost. Yet failure meets him on every side. He is too large for his public, but he is also too small for it. Every question raised even in talk carries him into the infinite. Every man of his audience has a practical answer ready before he has. Naddo plies him with common sense. "He is to speak to the human heart—he is not to be so philosophical—he is not to seem so clever." Shallow judges pull him to pieces. Shallow rivals strive to sing him down.^[15] He loses his grasp of the ideal. He cannot clutch the real. His imagination dries up.

Meanwhile Adelaide has died. Salinguerra, who had joined the Emperor at Naples, is brought back in hot haste by the news that Eccelino has retired to a monastery, has disclaimed the policy of his House; and is sealing his peace with the Guelph princes by the promised marriage of his sons Eccelino and Alberic with the sisters of Este; and of his daughter Palma with Count Richard of San Bonifacio himself. He is coming to Mantua. Sordello must greet him with his best art. But Sordello shrinks from the trial, and escapes back to Goito, whence Palma has just departed. What his Mantuan life has taught him is thus expressed (vol. i. page 130):—

He is wiser than he was, but his objects remain the same. The sympathies—the moral sense—the soul—are still asleep.

BOOK THE THIRD.

Sordello buries himself once more in the contemplation of nature; but finds in it only a short-lived peace. The marshy country about Mantua is suddenly converted into water; and with the shock of this catastrophe comes also the feeling: Nature can do and undo; her opportunities are endless. With man

He has dreamed of love, of revel, and of adventure; but he has let pass the time when such dreams could be realized; and worst of all, the sacrifice has been useless. He has sacrificed the man in him to the poet; and his poetic existence has been impoverished by the act. He has rejected experience that he might be his fullest self before living it; and only living, in other words, experience, could have made that self complete. His later years have been paving the way for this discovery; it bursts on him all at once. He has been under a long strain. The reaction at length has come. He yearns helplessly for the "blisses strong and soft" which he has known he was passing by, but of which the full meaning never reached him until now. He must live yet. The question is, "in what way." And this is unexpectedly answered. Palma sends for him to Verona: tells him of her step-mother's death—of strange secrets revealed to herself—of the secret influence Sordello has exercised over her life—of a great future awaiting his own, and connecting it with the Emperor's cause. She summons him to accompany her to Ferrara, and hear from Salinguerra's lips what that future is to be.

Sordello has entered on a new phase of existence. He feels that henceforward he is not to act men, but to make them act; this is how his being is to be fulfilled. It is a first step in the direction of unselfishness, but not yet into it. The soul is not yet awake.

At this point of his narrative Mr. Browning makes a halt, and carries us off to Venice, where he muses on the various questions involved in Sordello's story. The very act of digression leads back to the comparison between Eglamor and Sordello: between the artist who is one with his work, and him who is outside and beyond it—between the completeness of execution which comes of a limited ideal, and the true greatness of those performances which "can never be more than dreamed." And the case of the true poet is farther illustrated by that of the weather-bound sailor, who seems to have settled down for life with the fruits of his adventures, but waits only the faintest sign of a favourable wind to cut his moorings and be off.

Then comes a vision of humanity, also in harmony with the purpose of the poem. It takes the form of some frail and suffering woman, and is addressed by the author with a tenderness in which we recognize one of his constant ideals of love: the impulse not to worship or to enjoy, but to comfort and to protect. He next considers the problem of human sorrow and sin, and deprecates the absolute condemnation of the sinner, in language which anticipates that of "Fifine at the Fair." "Every life has its own law. The 'losel,' the moral outcast, keeps his own conceit of truth though through a maze of lies. Good labours to exist through evil, by means of the very ignorance which sets each man to tackle it for himself, believing that he alone can."^[16] Mr. Browning rejects at least the show of knowledge which gives you a name for what you die of; and that deepening of ignorance which comes of the perpetual insisting that fountains of knowledge spring everywhere for those who choose to dispense it. "What science teaches is made useless by the shortness of human existence; it absorbs all our energy in building up a machine which we shall have no time to work. All direct truth comes to us from the poet: whether he be of the smaller kind who only see, or the greater, who can tell what they have seen, or the greatest who can make others see it." Corresponding instances follow.^[17]

Mr. Browning is aware that one is a poet at his own risk; and that the poetic chaplet may also prove a sacrificial one. He will still wear it, however, because in his case it means the suffrage of a "patron friend"^[18]

He recalls his readers to the "business" of the poem:

admits that the story sounds dull; but suggests the possibility of its containing an agreeable surprise. An amusing anecdote to this effect concludes the chapter.^[19]

BOOK THE FOURTH.

We are now introduced to Taurello Salinguerra: a fine soldier-like figure; the type of elastic strength in both body and mind. We are told that he possesses the courage of the fighter, the astuteness of the politician, the knowledge and graces of the man of leisure. He has shown himself capable of controlling an Emperor, and of giving precedence to a woman. He is young at sixty, while the son who is half his age, is "lean, outworn and really old." And the crowning difference between him and Sordello is this: that while Sordello only draws out other men as a means of displaying himself, he only displays himself sufficiently to draw out other men. "His choicest instruments" have "surmised him shallow."

He is in his palace at Ferrara, musing over the past—that past which held the turning-point of his career; which began the feud between himself and the now Guelph princes, and which naturally merged him in the Ghibelline cause. He remembers how the fathers of the present Este and San Bonifacio combined to cheat him out of the Modenese heiress who was to be his bride—how he retired to Sicily, to return with a wife of the Emperor's own house—how his enemies surprised him at Vicenza. He sees his old comrade Eccelino, so passive now, so brave and vigorous then. He sees the town as they fire it together: the rush for the gates: the slashing, the hewing, the blood hissing and frying on the iron gloves. His spirit leaps in the returning frenzy of that struggle and flight. It sinks again as he thinks of Elcorte—Adelaide's escape—her rescued child; his own doom in the wife and child who were not rescued.

"And now! he has effaced himself in the interests of the Romano house. Its life has grafted itself on his own; and to what end? The Emperor is coming. His badge and seal, already in Salinguerra's hands, bestow the title of Imperial Prefect on whosoever assumes the headship of the Ghibellines in the north of Italy; and Eccelino, its proper chief, recoils; withdraws even his name from the cause. Who shall wear the badge? None so fitly as himself, who holds San Bonifacio captive—who has dislocated if not yet broken the Guelph right arm. Yet, is it worth his while? Shall he fret his remaining years? Shall he rob his old comrade's son?" He laughs the idea to scorn....

Sordello has come with Palma to Ferrara. He came to find the men who were to be the body to his spirit, the instrument to his will. But he came, expecting that these would be great. And now he discovers that very few are great; while behind and beneath, and among them, extends something which has never yet entered his field of thought: the mass of mankind. The more he looks the more it grows upon him: this people with the

and the more he feels that the few are great because the many are in them—because they are types and representatives of these. Hitherto he has striven to impose himself on mankind. He now awakes to the joy and duty of serving it. It is the magnified body which his spirit needs. And in the new-found knowledge, the new-found sympathy, his soul springs full-grown into life.

But another check is in store for him. He has taken for granted that the cause in which he is to be enlisted is the people's cause. The new soul in him can conceive nothing less. A first interview with Salinguerra dispels this dream, and dispels it in such a manner that he leaves the presence of his unknown father years older and wearier than when he entered it. He wanders through the city, mangled by civil war. The effects of Ghibelline vengeance meet him on every side. Is the Guelph more humane? He discusses the case with Palma. They weigh deeds with deeds. "Guelph and Ghibelline are alike unjust and cruel, alike inveterate enemies of their fellow-men." Who then represents the people's cause? A sudden answer comes. A bystander recognizing his minstrel's attire begs Sordello to sing, and suggests the Roman Tribune Crescentius as his theme. Rome rises before his mind—the mother of cities—the great constructive power which weaves the past into the future; which represents the continuity of human life. The reintegration of Rome must typify the triumph of mankind. But Rome is now the Church; she is one with the Guelph cause. The Guelph cause is therefore in some sense the true one. Sordello's new-found spiritual and his worldly interests thus range themselves on opposite sides.

BOOK THE FIFTH.

The day draws to its close. Sordello has seen more of the suffering human beings whom he wishes to serve, and the ideal Rome has collapsed in his imagination like a mocking dream. Nothing can be effected at once. No deed can bridge over the lapse of time which divides the first stage of a great social structure from its completion. Each life may give its touch; it can give no more; through the endless generations. The vision of a regenerate humanity, "his last and loveliest," must depart like the rest. Then suddenly a voice,

The facts restate themselves, but from an opposite point of view. No man can give more than his single touch. The whole could not dispense with one of them. The work is infinite, but it is continuous. The later poet weaves into his own song the echoes of the first. "The last of each series of workmen sums up in himself all predecessors," whether he be the type of strength like Charlemagne, or of knowledge like Hildebrand. Strength comes first in the scheme of life; it is the joyousness of childhood. Step by step Strength works Knowledge with its groans and tears. And then, in its turn, Knowledge works Strength, Knowledge controls Strength, Knowledge supersedes Strength. It is Knowledge which must prevail now. May it not be he who at this moment resumes its whole inheritance—its accumulated opportunities, in himself? He could stand still and dream while he fancied he stood alone; but he knows now that he is part of humanity, and it of him. Goito is left behind; Ferrara is reached; he must do the one thing that is within his grasp.

He must influence Salinguerra. He must interest him in the cause of knowledge; which is the people's cause. With this determination, he proceeds once more to the appointed presence. His minstrelsy is at first a failure. He is, as usual, outside his song. He is trying to guide it; it is not carrying him away. He is paralysed by the very consciousness that he is urging the head of the Ghibellines to become a Guelph. Salinguerra's habitual tact and good-nature cannot conceal his own sense of the absurdity of the proposal. Sordello sees in

But he will not be beaten. He tries once more. We see the blood leap to his brain, the heart into his purpose, as he challenges Salinguerra to bow before the royalty of song. He owns himself its unworthy representative: for he has frittered away his powers. He has identified himself with existing forms of being, instead of proving his kingship by a new spiritual birth—by a supreme, as yet unknown revelation of the power of human will. He has resigned his function. He is a self-deposed king. He acknowledges the man before him as fitter to help the world than he is. But this is shame enough. He will not see its now elected champion scorn the post he renounces on his behalf. And his art is still royal though he is not. It is the utterance of the spiritual life: of the informing thought—which was in the world before deeds began—which brought order out of chaos—which guided deeds in their due gradation till itself emerged as SONG: to react in deed; but to need no help of it; to be (so we complete the meaning) as the knowledge which controls strength, which supersedes strength.^[20]

The walls of the presence-chamber have fallen away. Imaginary faces are crowding around him. He turns to these. He shows them human life as the poet's mirror reflects it: in its varied masquerade, in its mingled good and evil, in its steady advance; in the rainbow brightness of its obstructed lights; the deceptive gloom of its merely repeated shadows. He enforces in every tone that continuity of the plan of creation to which the poet alone holds the clue. Finally, in the name of the unlimited truth, the limited opportunity, the one duty which confronts him now, the People whose support, in his performance of it, he may claim for the first time, he forbids the Emperor's coming, and invokes Salinguerra's protection for the Guelph cause.

Salinguerra is moved at last, though not in the intended way. He does not yield to Sordello's enthusiasm, but he sees that it is worth employing. There is no question of his becoming a Guelph, but why should not Sordello turn Ghibelline? The cause requires a youth to "stalk, and bustle, and attitudinize;" and he clearly thinks this is all the youth before him wants to do, whether conscious of the fact or not. He thinks the thought aloud. "Palma loves her minstrel; it is written in her eyes; let her marry him. Were she Romano's son instead of his daughter, she could wear the Emperor's badge. Himself fate has doomed to a secondary position. To contend against it is useless." Before he knows what he has done, without really meaning to do it, he has thrown the badge across Sordello's neck, and thus created him Eccelino's successor.

It was a prophetic act. At the moment of its performance

Palma's moment is come, and she relates the story, as she received it from Adelaide, of Sordello's birth. With blanched lips, and sweat-drops on his face, the old soldier takes the hand of his poet-son, and lays its consecrating touch on his own face and brow. Then, recovering himself, with his mailed arms on Sordello's shoulders, he launches forth in an eager survey of the situation as it may shape itself for both. Palma at last draws him away, and Sordello, exhausted and speechless, is left alone. The two are in a small stone chamber, below the one they have left. Half-drunk with his new emotions, Salinguerra paces the narrow floor. His eyes burn; his tread strikes sparks from the stone. The future glows before him. He and Sordello combined will break up Hildebrand. They will rebuild Charlemagne; not in the brute force of earlier days; but as strength adorned with knowledge, as empire imposing law. Palma listens in satisfied repose; her task is done.

A stamp is heard overhead.

BOOK THE SIXTH.

Sordello is alone—face to face with his memory, with his conscience, and, as we presently find out, with the greatest temptation he has ever known. The moon is slowly rising; and just so the light of truth is overflowing his past life, and laying bare its every recess. He sees no fault in this past, except the want of a uniform purpose in which its various moods could have coalesced, the all-embracing sense of existence been translated into fact; but he unconsciously confesses its selfishness, in deciding that this purpose should have been outside him—a remote and uplifting, though sympathetic influence, such as the moon is to the sea. Smaller lives than his have attained a higher completeness, because they have worked for an ideal: because they have had their moon.

"Where then is his moon? What the love, the fear, the motive, in short, that could match the strength, could sway the full tide, of a nature like his?" He doubts its existence. And if, after all, he has been destined to be a law to himself, must he not in some sense apply this relative standard to the rest of life; and may not the outward motive be at all times the embodiment of an inner want or law, which only the stronger nature can realize as such? He has found his purpose. That purpose is the people. "But the people is himself. The desire to help it comes from within. Will he fulfil this the better for regarding its suffering part as an outward motive, as something alien to himself, and for which Self must be forsaken?" In plain words: would he not serve it as well by serving his own interests as by forsaking them?

This sophistry is so patent that it startles even him; but it is only silenced to reassert itself in another form. "The Guelph rule would doubtless be the best. But what can he do to promote it? Attest his belief by refusing the Emperor's badge? That would be something in the end. But meanwhile, how many sympathies to be broken, how many aversions defied, before the one ideal can be made to prevail. Is not the proceeding too arbitrary? Would it be justified by the result? The question is only one of ideas. If the men who supported each opposite cause were wholly good or bad, his course would be clear. But such divisions do not exist. All men are composite. All nature is a blending of good and evil, in which the one is often but a different form of the other. Evil is in fact indispensable; for it is not only the ground of sympathy, but the active principle of life. Joy means the triumph over obstruction. The suspended effort is death, so far as it goes. Obstruction and effort must begin again and again. The sphere grows larger. It can never be more complete (more satisfying to those who are imprisoned within it). The only gain of existence is to be extracted from its hindrances, by each individual and for himself." The last plea for self-sacrifice is thus removed.

These arguments are often just, even profound; they might also have been sincere in this special case; for there was something to be said in favour of accepting the opportunities which offered themselves, and of guiding the course of events, instead of engaging in a probably fruitless opposition to it. But they are not sincere. Sordello is at best deceiving himself, and Mr. Browning intends us to to see this. He is struggling, if unconsciously, to evade the very trials which he thinks so good for other men. His true object soon stands revealed in a first and last effort at compromise. "The people's good is in the future. His is in the present. Can he not speed the one, and yet enjoy the other?" ... The present rises up, in its new-found richness, in its undisguised temptation. The joys which lure him become gigantic; the price of renunciation shrinks to nothing; and at last, the pent up passion breaks forth—that passion for life, for sheer life, which inspired his imagination as a boy, which nerved his ambition as a man; to which his late-found humanities have given voice and shape; which now gathers itself to a supreme utterance in the grasp of death. "The earthly existence now: the transcendent hereafter, if Fate will. A man's opportunities—a man's powers—a man's self-consciousness of joy and conflict—these things he craves while he may yet possess them."

Then a sudden revulsion. "He would drink the very dregs of life! How many have sacrificed it whilst its cup was full, because a better still seemed behind it."

"But they had a belief which he has not. They knew what 'masters life.' For him the paramount fact is that of his own being...."

This is the last protest of the flesh within him. Sordello is dying, and probably feels that he is so; and he lapses into a calm contemplation, which reveals to him the last secret of his mistaken career. He already knew that he had ignored the bodily to the detriment of his spiritual existence. He now feels that he has destroyed his body by forcing on it the exigencies of the spirit. He has striven to obtain infinite consciousness, infinite enjoyment, from finite powers. He has broken the law of life. He has missed (so we interpret Mr. Browning's conclusion) the ideal of that divine and human Love which would have given the freest range to his spirit and yet accepted that law. Eglamor began with love. Will Sordello find it, meeting that gentle spirit on his course?

We know at least that the soul in him has conquered. His stamp upon the floor has brought Palma and Salinguerra to him in anxious haste. They find him dead:

Sordello is buried at Goito Castle, in an old font-tomb in which his mother lies, and beside whose sculptured female forms the child-poet had dreamed his earliest dreams of life and of love. Salinguerra makes peace with the Guelphs, marries a daughter of Eccelino the monk, and effaces himself once for all in the Romano house, leaving its sons Eccelino and Alberic to plague the world at their pleasure, and meet the fate they have deserved. He himself, after varied fortunes, dwindles into a "showy, turbulent soldier," less "astute" than people profess to think: whose qualities even foes admire; and whose aggressions they punish, but do not much resent. We see him for the last time at the age of eighty, a nominal prisoner in Venice.

The drama is played out. Its actors have vanished from the stage. One only lives on in Mr. Browning's fancy, in the pathos of his modest hopes, and acknowledged, yet scarcely comprehended failure—more human, and therefore more undying than Naddo himself: the poet Eglamor. Sordello he recalls only to dismiss him with less sympathy than we should expect: as ending the ambition for what he could not become, by the well-meant renunciation of what he was born to be; made a hero of by legends which credited him with doing what his conscience had forbidden him to do; leaving the world to suffer by his self-sacrifice; a type of failure more rare and more brilliant than that of Eglamor, yet more full of the irony of life.

In one sense, however, he had lived for a better thing, and we are bidden look back, through the feverish years, on a bare-footed rosy child running "higher and higher" up a wintry hillside still crisp with the morning frost,

The poet in him had failed with the man, but less completely.

FOOTNOTES:

II.

NON-CLASSIFIED POEMS.

DRAMAS.

Our attention is next attracted to Mr. Browning's dramas; for his first tragedy, "Strafford," was published before "Sordello," having been written in an interval of its composition, and his first drama, "Pippa Passes," immediately afterwards. They were published, with the exception of "Strafford," and "In a Balcony," in the "Bells and Pomegranates" series, 1841-1846, together with the "Dramatic Lyrics," and "Dramatic Romances," which will be found distributed under various headings in the course of this volume.

The dramas are:—

The five-act tragedy of "STRAFFORD" turns on the impeachment and condemnation of the man whose name it bears. Its keynote is Strafford's devotion to the King, which Mr. Browning has represented as the constant motive of his life, and also the cause of his death. When the action opens, England is without a Parliament. The question of ship-money is "burning." The Scotch Parliament has just been dissolved, and Charles is determined to subdue the Scots by force. Wentworth has been summoned from Ireland to assist in doing so. He is worn and weary, but the King needs him, and he comes.

He accepts the Scotch war against his better judgment: and next finds himself entrapped by the King's duplicity and selfishness, not only into the command of the expedition to Scotland, but into the appearance of having advised it. Pym has vainly tried to win him back to the popular cause. Lady Carlisle vainly warns him of his danger in subserving the King's designs. No danger can shake his allegiance. He leads the army to the north; is beaten; discovers that the popular party is in league with the Scotch; returns home to impeach it, and finds himself impeached. A Bill of Attainder is passed against him; and Charles, who might prove by one word his innocence of the charges conveyed in it, promises to do so, evades his promise, and finally signs the warrant for Strafford's death. Pym, who loved him best, who trusted him longest, is he who demands the signature.

Lady Carlisle forms a plan for Strafford's escape from the Tower; but it fails at the last moment, and we see him led away to execution. True to the end, he has no thought but for the master who has betrayed him—whose terrible weakness must betray himself—whose fate he sees foreshadowed in his own. He kneels to Pym for the King's life; and, seeing him inexorable, thanks God that he dies first. Pym's last speech is a tender farewell to the friend whom he has sacrificed to his country's cause, but whom he trusts soon to meet in the better land, where they will walk together as of old, all sin and all error purged away.

We are told in the preface to the first edition of Strafford that the portraits are, so the author thinks, faithful: his "Carlisle," only, being imaginary; and we may add that he regards his conception of her as, in the main, confirmed by a very recent historian of the reign of Charles I. The tragedy was performed in 1837, at Covent Garden Theatre, under the direction of Macready, by whose desire it had been written, and who sustained the principal part.

The appearance of "Strafford" coincides so closely with at least the conception of "Sordello" as to afford a strong proof of the variety of the author's genius. The evidence is still stronger in "Pippa Passes," in which he leaps directly from his most abstract mode of conception to his most picturesque; and, from the prolonged strain of a single inward experience, to a quick succession of pictures, in which life is given from a general and external point of view. The humour which found little place in the earlier work has abundant scope here; and the descriptive power which was so vividly apparent in all of them, here shows itself for the first time in those touches of local colour which paint without describing. Mr. Browning is now fully developed, on the artistic and on the practical side of his genius.

Mr. Browning was walking alone, in a wood near Dulwich, when the image flashed upon him of some one walking thus alone through life; one apparently too obscure to leave a trace of his or her passage, yet exercising a lasting though unconscious influence at every step of it; and the image shaped itself into the little silk-winder of Asolo, Felippa, or Pippa.

"PIPPA PASSES" represents the course of one day—Pippa's yearly holiday; and is divided into what is virtually four acts, being the occurrences of "Morning," "Noon," "Evening," and "Night." Pippa rises with the sun, determined to make the best of the bright hours before her; and she spends them in wandering through the town, singing as she goes, and all the while thinking of its happiest men and women, and fancying herself they. These happy ones are four, each the object of a different love. Ottima, whose aged husband is the owner of the silk mills, has a lover in Sebald. Phene, betrothed to the French sculptor Jules, will be led this morning to her husband's home. Luigi (a conspiring patriot) meets his mother at eve in the turret. The Bishop, blessed by God, will sleep at Asolo to-night. Which love would she choose? The lover's? It gives cause for scandal. The husband's? It may not last. The parent's? it alone will guard us to the end of life. God's love? That is best of all. It is Monsignore she decides to be.

Ottima and her lover have murdered her husband at his villa on the hillside. She is the more reckless of the two, and she is striving by the exercise of her attractions to silence Sebald's remorse. She has succeeded for the moment, when Pippa passes—singing. Something in her song strikes his conscience like a thunderbolt, and its reviving force awakens Ottima's also. Both are spiritually saved.

Jules has brought home his bride, and is discovering that some students who owed him a grudge have practised a cruel cheat upon him; and that the refined woman by whom he fancied himself loved is but an ignorant girl of the lowest class, of whom also his enemies have made a tool. Her remorse at seeing what man she has deceived disarms his anger, and marks the dawning of a moral sense in her; and he is dismissing her gently, with all the money he can spare, when Pippa passes—singing.^[21] Something in her song awakens his truer manhood. Why should he dismiss his wife? Why cast away a soul which needs him, and which he himself has called into existence? He does not cast Phene away. Her salvation and his happiness are secured.

Luigi and his mother are in the turret on the hillside above Asolo. He believes it his mission to kill the Austrian Emperor. She entreats him to desist; and has nearly conquered his resolution by the mention of the girl he loves, when Pippa passes—singing. Something in her song revives his flagging patriotism. He rushes from the tower, thus escaping the police, who were on his track; and the virtuous, though mistaken motive, secures his liberty, and perhaps his life.

Monsignore and his "Intendant" are conferring in the palace by the Duomo; and the irony of the situation is now at its height. Pippa's fancy has been aspiring to three separate existences, which would each in its own way have been wrecked without her. The divinely-guarded one which she especially covets is at this moment bent on her destruction. For she is the child of the brother at whose death the Bishop has connived, and whose wealth he is enjoying. She is still in his way, and he is listening to a plan for removing her also, when Pippa passes—singing. Something in her song stings his conscience or his humanity to life. He starts up, summons his attendants, has his former accomplice bound hand and foot, and the sequel may be guessed.

The scene is varied by groups of students, of poor girls, and of Austrian policemen, all joking and chatting in characteristic fashion, and all playing their part in the story; and also by the appearance of Bluphocks, an English adventurer and spy, who is in league with the police for the detection of Luigi, and with the Intendant for Pippa's ruin; and the saving effect of Pippa's songs is the more dramatic that it becomes on one occasion the means of betraying herself. She goes home at sunset, unconscious of all she has effected and escaped, and wondering how near she may ever come to touching for good or evil the lives with which her fancy has been identifying her. "So far, perhaps," she says to herself, "that the silk she will wind to-morrow may some day serve to border Ottima's cloak. And if it be only this!"

These are her last words as she lies down to sleep.

Pippa's songs are not impressive in themselves. They are made so in every case by the condition of her hearer's mind; and the idea of the story is obvious, besides being partly stated in the heroine's own words. No man is "great" or "small" in the sight of God—each life being in its own way the centre of creation. Nothing should be "great" or "small" in the sight of man; since it depends on personal feeling, or individual circumstance, whether a given thing will prove one or the other.

"KING VICTOR AND KING CHARLES" is an historical tragedy in two divisions and four parts, of which the time is 1730 and 31, and the place the castle of Rivoli near Turin. The episode which it records may be read in any chronicle of the period; and Mr. Browning adds a preface, in which he justifies his own view of the characters and motives involved in it. King Victor II. (first King of Sardinia) was sixty-four years old, and had been nominally a ruler from the age of ten, when suddenly (1730) he abdicated in favour of his son Charles. The Queen was dead, and he had privately married a lady of the Court, to whom he had been long attached; and the desire to acknowledge this union, combined with what seems to have been a premature old age, might sufficiently have explained the abdication; but Mr. Browning adopts the idea, which for a time found favour, that it had a deeper cause: that the King's intriguing ambition had involved him in many difficulties, and he had devised this plan for eluding them.

Charles has become his father's heir through the death of an older and better loved son. He has been thrust into the shade by the favourite, now Victor's wife, and by the Minister d'Ormea; his sensitive nature crushed into weakness, his loftiness of purpose never called into play. He seems precisely the person of whom to make at once a screen and a tool. But he has scarcely been crowned when it is evident that he will be neither. He assumes the character of king at the same time as the function; and by his honesty, courage, and humanity, restores the prosperity of his country, and the honour of his house. He secures even the devotion, interested though it be, of the unscrupulous d'Ormea himself.

Victor, however, is restless in his obscurity; and by the end of the year is scheming for the recovery of his crown. He presents himself before his son, and demands that it be restored to him; denouncing what he considers the weakness of King Charles' rule. Charles refuses, gently but firmly, to abandon what has become for him the post of duty; and King Victor departs, to conspire openly against him. D'Ormea is active in detecting the conspiracy and unveiling it; and Victor is brought back to the palace, this time a prisoner.

But Charles does not receive him as such. His filial piety is outraged by the unnatural conflict; and his wife Polixena has vainly tried to convince him that there is a higher because less obvious virtue in resisting than in giving way. He once more acknowledges his father as King. And both he and his wife are soon aware that in doing so, he is only humouring the caprice of a dying man. "I have no friend in the wide world is the old King's cry. Give me what I have no power to take from you."

Charles places the crown on his father's head. A strange conflict of gratified ambition, of remorseful tenderness, of dreamy regret, stirs the failing spirit. But command and defiance flash out in the old King's last words.

This death on the stage is the only point on which Mr. Browning diverges from historical truth. King Victor lived a year longer, in a modified captivity to which his son had most unwillingly consigned him; and he is made to suggest this story in the half-insanity of his last moments as one which may be told to the world; and will give his son the appearance of reigning, while he remains, in secret, King.

"THE RETURN OF THE DRUSES" is a tragedy in five acts, fictitious in plot, but historical in character. The Druses of Lebanon are a compound of several warlike Eastern tribes, owing their religious system to a caliph of Egypt, Hakeem Biamr Allah; and probably their name to his confessor Darazi, who first attempted to promulgate his doctrine among them; some also impute to the Druse nation a dash of the blood of the Crusaders. One of their chief religious doctrines was that of divine incarnations. It seems to have originated in the pretension of Hakeem to be himself one; and as organized by the Persian mystic Hamzi, his Vizier and disciple, it included ten manifestations of this kind, of which Hakeem must have formed the last. Mr. Browning has assumed that in any great national emergency, the miracle would be expected to recur; and he has here conceived an emergency sufficiently great to call it forth.

The Druses, according to him, have colonized a small island belonging to the Knights of Rhodes, and become subject to a Prefect appointed by the Order. This Prefect has almost extirpated the Druse sheikhs, and made the remainder of the tribe victims of his cruelty and lust. The cry for rescue and retribution, if not loud, is deep. It finds a passionate response in the soul of Djabal, a son of the last Emir, who escaped as a child from the massacre of his family, and took refuge in Europe; and who now returns, with a matured purpose of patriotic and personal revenge. He has secured an ally in the young Lois de Dreux—an intended Knight of the Order, and son of a Breton Count, whose hospitality he has enjoyed—and induced him to accompany him to the islet, and pass his probation there. This, he considers, will facilitate the murder of the Prefect, which is an essential part of his plan; and he has obtained the promise of the Venetians, who are hostile to the Knights, to lend their ships for his countrymen's escape as soon as the death of the tyrant shall have set them free.

So far his course is straight. But he has scarcely returned home, when he falls in love with Anael, a Druse girl, whose devotion to her tribe is a religion, and who is determined to marry none but the man who will deliver it; and he is then seized by an impulse to heighten the act of deliverance by a semblance of more than human power. He declares himself Hakeem, the Divine founder of the sect, again present in human form, and who will again be transformed, or "exalted," so soon as by the slaughter of their tyrant he has set the Druses free. His bride will be exalted with him. The imposture succeeds only too well. "Mystic" as well as "schemer," Djabal, for a moment, deceives even himself; and when the crisis is at hand, and reason and conscience reassert themselves, the enthusiasm which he has kindled still forces him on. His only refuge is in flight; and even this proves impossible. He nerves himself, before escaping, to the Prefect's murder; and is confronted on the threshold of the Prefect's chamber, by his promised wife, who has herself done the deed.

Anael has loved Djabal, believing him Divine, with what seemed to her too human a love. She felt unworthy to share his exaltation. She has done that which her humanity disclaimed that she might no longer be so. A few moments more, and they both know that the crime has been superfluous. Lois, who also loves Anael, and hopes to win her, has procured from the Chapter of his Order the removal of the tyrant, and been appointed by it in his place; the day of Druse oppression was already over. But Djabal and Anael are inseparably united. The scorn with which she received his now inevitable confession was intense but momentary. The woman's heart in her revels in its new freedom to cherish and to protect; and she embraces her lover's shame with a far greater joy than their common triumph could have aroused in her. She is brought forward as the Prefect's murderer in presence of all the personages of the drama; and falls dead with a cry of "Hakeem" on her lips. Djabal stabs himself on her body, thus "exalting" himself to her. But he has first committed his Druses to the care of Lois, to be led back to their mountain home. He remains Hakeem for them, though branded as an impostor by the rest of the world. Directly, or indirectly, he has done the work of the deliverer.

"A BLOT IN THE 'SCUTCHEON" is a tragedy in three acts, less intricate as well as shorter than those which precede it; and historical only in the simple motive, the uncompromising action, and the mediæval code of honour, which in some degree fix its date. Mr. Browning places this somewhere in the eighteenth century.

Lord Henry Mertoun has fallen in love with Mildred Tresham. His estates adjoin those of Earl Tresham, her brother and guardian. He inherits a noble name, and an unsullied reputation; and need only offer himself to be accepted. But the youthful reverence which he entertains for Lord Tresham makes him shrink from preferring his suit; and he allows himself and Mildred to drift into a secret intimacy, which begins in all innocence, but does not end so. Then his shyness vanishes. He seeks an interview with the Earl, and obtains his joyful consent to the union. All seems to be going well. But Mildred's awakened womanhood takes the form of an overpowering remorse and shame; and these become the indirect cause of the catastrophe.

Gerard, an old retainer of the family, has witnessed Lord Mertoun's nightly visits to the castle; and, amidst a bitter conflict of feeling, he tells the Earl what he has seen. Tresham summons his sister. He is writhing under the sense of outraged family honour; but a still stronger fraternal affection commends the culprit to his mercy. He assists her confession with touching delicacy and tenderness; shows himself prepared to share her shame, to help her to live it through—to marry her to the man she loves. He insists only upon this, that Mertoun shall not be deceived: and that she shall cancel the promise of an interview which she has given him for the following day.

Mildred tacitly owns her guilt, and invokes any punishment her brother may adjudge to it; but she will not betray her lover by confessing his name, and she will not forbid Mertoun to come. The Earl's mind does not connect the two. No extenuating circumstance suggests itself. He has loved his young sister with a chivalrous admiration and trust; and he is one of those men to whom a blot in the 'scutcheon is only less terrible than the knowledge that such trust has been misplaced. He is stung to madness by what seems this crowning proof of his sister's depravity; and by the thought of him who has thus corrupted her. He surprises Mertoun on the way to the last stolen visit to his love; and, before there has been time for an explanation, challenges and kills him.

The reaction of feeling begins when he perceives that Mertoun has allowed himself to be killed. Remorse and sorrow deepen into despair as the dying youth gasps out the story of his constant love, of his boyish error—of his manly desire of reparation; above all, as he reminds his hearer of the sister whose happiness he has slain; and asks if he has done right to set his "thoughtless foot" upon them both, and say as they perish—

Mildred is waiting for her lover. The usual signal has been made: the lighted purple pane of a painted window sends forth its beckoning gleam. But Mertoun does not appear; and as the moments pass, a despairing apathy steals over her, which is only the completed certainty of her doom. She has never believed in the promised happiness. In a strange process of self-consciousness she has realized at once the moral and the natural consequences of her transgression; the lost peace of conscience, the lost morning of her love. Her paramount desire has been for expiation and rest. In one more pang they are coming. Lord Tresham breaks in on her solitude. His empty scabbard shows what he has done. But she soon sees that reproach is unnecessary, and that Mertoun's death is avenged. It is best so. The cloud has lifted. The friend and the brother are one in heart again. She dies because her own heart is broken, but forgiving her brother, and blessing him. He has taken poison, and survives her by a few minutes only.

Mildred has a firm friend in her cousin Gwendolen: a quick-witted, true-hearted woman, the betrothed of Austin Tresham, who is next heir to the earldom. She alone has guessed the true state of the case, and, with the help of Austin, would have averted the tragedy, if Lord Tresham's precipitate passion had not rendered this impossible. These two are in no need of their dying kinsman's warning, to remember, if a blot should again come in the 'scutcheon, that "vengeance is God's, not man's."

This tragedy was performed in 1843, at Drury Lane Theatre, during the ownership of Macready; in 1848, at "Sadlers Wells," under the direction of Mr. Phelps, who had played the part of Lord Tresham in the Drury Lane performance.

COLOMBE'S BIRTHDAY is a play in five acts, of which the scene is the palace at Juliers, the time 16—. Colombe of Ravestein is ostensibly Duchess of Juliers and Cleves; but her title is neutralized by the Salic law under which the Duchy is held; and though the Duke, her late father, has wished to evade it in her behalf, those about her are aware that he had no power to do so, and that the legal claimant, her cousin, may at any moment assert his rights. This happens on the first anniversary of her accession, which is also her birthday.

Prince Berthold is to arrive in a few hours. He has sent a letter before him from which Colombe will learn her fate; and the handful of courtiers who have stayed to see the drama out are disputing as to who shall deliver it. Valence, an advocate of Cleves, arrives at this juncture, with a petition from his townspeople who are starving; and is allowed to place it in the Duchess's hands, on condition of presenting the Prince's letter at the same time. He does this in ignorance of its contents; he is very indignant when he knows them; and the incident naturally constitutes him Colombe's adviser and friend; while the reverence with which he owns himself her subject, also determines her if possible to remain his sovereign.

Prince Berthold arrives unprepared for any show of resistance; and is a little startled to find that Colombe defies him, and that one of her courtiers (not choosing to be outdone by Valence) has the courage to tell him so; but he treats the Duchess and her adviser with all the courtesy of a man whose right is secure; and Valence, to whom he entrusts his credentials, is soon convinced that it is so. But he has a far-sighted ambition which keeps him alive to all possible risks: and it occurs to him as wiser to secure the little sovereignty by marrying its heiress than by dispossessing her. He desires Valence to convey to the young Duchess the offer of his hand. The offer is worth considering, since as he asserts, it may mean the Empire: to which the Duchy is, in his case, but a necessary stepping-stone; and Valence, who has loved Colombe since his first glimpse of her at Cleves, a year ago; who has begun to hope that his affection is returned; and who knows that the Prince's message is not only a test of her higher nature, but a snare to it, feels nevertheless bound to leave her choice free. This choice lies clearly between love and power; for Berthold parades a cynicism half affected, half real; and on being questioned as to his feeling for the lady, has dismissed the question as irrelevant.

Valence is, throughout the play, an advocate in the best sense of the word. As he has pleaded the wrongs of an oppressed people, he sets forth the happiness of a successful prince—the happiness which the young Duchess is invited to share; and he departs from all the conventionalities of fiction, by showing her the true poetry, not the artificial splendours, of worldly success. Colombe is almost as grateful as the young Prince could desire, for she assumes that he has fallen in love with her, whether he says so or not; and here, too, Valence must speak the truth. "The Prince does not love her." "How does he know this?" "He knows it by the insight of one who does love." Astonished, vaguely pained, Colombe questions him as to the object of his attachment, and, in probably real ignorance of who it can be, draws him on to a confession. For a moment she is disenchanted. "So much unselfish devotion to turn out merely love! She will at all events see Valence's rival."

In the last act she discusses the Prince's proposal with himself. He frankly rests it on its advantages for both. He has much to say in favour of such an understanding, and reminds his listener as she questions and temporizes, that if he gives no heart he also asks none. The courtiers now see their opportunity. They inform the Prince that by her late father's will the Duchess forfeits her rights in the event of marrying a subject. They point to such a marriage as a natural result of the loving service which Valence has this day rendered to her, and the love which is its only fitting reward. And Colombe, listening to the just if treacherous praises of this man, feels no longer "sure" that she does "not love him." Valence is summoned; requested to assert his claim or to deny it; given to understand that the lady's interests demand the latter course. The manly dignity and exalted tenderness with which he resigns her convert, as it seems, the doubt into certainty; and Colombe takes him on this her birthday at the sacrifice of "Juliers and the world."

Berthold has a confidant, Melchior, a learned and thoughtful man, who is affectionately attached to the young prince, and who views with regret the easy worldly successes which neutralize his higher gifts. Melchior has also appreciated the genuineness of Colombe's nature, and conducted the last interview with Valence as one who desired that loyalty should be attested and love triumph. He now turns to Berthold with what seems an appeal to his generosity. But Berthold cannot afford to be generous. As he reminds the happy bride before him he wants her duchy much more than she does. He is, however, the sadder, and perhaps the wiser, for having found this out.

"Colombe's Birthday" was performed in 1853, at the Haymarket Theatre; in 1853 or '54, in the United States, at Boston. The part of Colombe was taken, as had been those of Mildred Tresham and Lady Carlisle, by Miss Helen Faucit, now Lady Martin.

"A SOUL'S TRAGEDY" brings us near to the period of the "Men and Women;" and displays, for the first time in Mr. Browning's work, a situation quite dramatic in itself, but which is nevertheless made by the characters, and imagined for them. It is a story of moral retrogression; but, setting aside its very humorous treatment, it is no "tragedy" for the reader, because he has never believed in that particular "soul," though its proprietor and his friends are justly supposed to do so. The drama is divided into two acts, of which the first represents the "poetry," the second the prose, of a certain Chiappino's life. The scene is Faenza; the time 15—.

Chiappino is best understood by comparison with Luitolfo, his fellow-townsman and friend. Luitolfo has a gentle, genial nature; Chiappino, if we may judge him by his mood at the time of the action, an ill-conditioned one. Luitolfo's gentleness is allied to physical timidity, but his moral courage is always equal to the occasion. Chiappino is a man more of words than of deeds, and wants both the courage and the rectitude which ill-conditioned people often possess. Faenza is governed by a provost from Ravenna. The present provost is a tyrant; and Chiappino has been agitating in a somewhat purposeless manner against him. He has been fined for this several times, and is now sentenced to exile, and confiscation of all his goods.

Luitolfo has helped him until now by paying his fines; but this is an additional grievance to him, for he is in love with Eulalia, the woman whom his friend is going to marry, and declares that he has only refrained from urging his own suit, because he was bound by this pecuniary obligation not to do so. He is not too delicate, however, to depreciate Luitolfo's generosity, and generally run him down with the woman who is to be his wife; and this is what he is doing in the first scene, under cover of taking leave of her, and while her intended husband is interceding with the provost in his behalf. A hurried knock, which they recognise as Luitolfo's, gives a fresh impulse to his spite; and he begins sneering at the milk-and-watery manner in which Luitolfo has probably been pleading his cause, and the awful fright in which he has run home, on seeing that the provost "shrugged his shoulders" at the intercession.

Luitolfo is frightened, for his friendship for Chiappino has been carrying him away; and on finding that entreaties were of no use, he has struck at the provost, and, as he thinks, killed him. A crowd which he imagines to be composed of the Provost's attendants has followed him from the palace. Torture stares him in the face; and his physical sensitiveness has the upper hand again. For a moment Chiappino becomes a hero; he is shamed into nobleness. He flings his own cloak over Luitolfo, gives him his passport, hurries him from the house, assumes his friend's blood-stained garment, and claims his deed. But he has scarcely done so when he perceives their mistake. Luitolfo's fears have distorted a friendly crowd into a hostile one; and the throng which Chiappino has nerved himself to defy is the populace of Faenza applauding him as its saviour. He postpones the duty of undeceiving it under pretence of the danger being not yet over. The next step will be to refuse to do so. His moral collapse, the "tragedy" of his "soul," has begun.

In the second act, a month later, this is complete. The papal legate, Ogniben, has ridden on his mule in to Faenza to find out what was wanted. "He has not come to punish; there is no harm done: for the provost was not killed after all. He has known twenty-three leaders of revolts," and therefore, so we understand, is not disposed to take such persons too seriously. He has made friends with Chiappino, accepting him in this character, and lured him on with the hope of becoming provost himself; and Chiappino again rising—or falling—to the situation, has discovered patriotic reasons for accepting the post. He has outgrown his love, as well as modified his ideas of civic duty; and he disposes of the obligations of friendship, by declaring (to Eulalia) that the blow imputed to him was virtually his, because Luitolfo would fain have avoided striking it, while he would have struck it if he could. The legate draws him out in a humorous dialogue; satirizes his flimsy sophistries under cover of endorsing them, and leads him up to a final self-exposure.

This occurs when he reminds Chiappino in the hearing of the crowd of the private agreement they have come to: that he is to have the title and privileges of Provost on the one hand, and pay implicit obedience to Rome, in the person of her legate, on the other; but with the now added condition, that if the actual assailant of the late provost is discovered, he shall be dealt with as he deserves. At which new view of the situation Chiappino is silent; and Luitolfo, who had missed all the reward of his deed, characteristically comes forward to receive its punishment. The legate orders him to his own house; advises Chiappino, with a little more joking at his expense, to leave the town for a short time; takes possession of the key of the provost's palace, to which he does not intend to give a new inmate; bids a cheery goodbye to every one, and rides away as he came. He has

The tragedy of "LURIA" is supposed to be enacted at some period of the fifteenth century; being an episode in the historical struggle between Florence and Pisa. It occupies one day; and the five acts correspond respectively to its "Morning," "Noon," "Afternoon," "Evening," and "Night." The day is that of a long-expected encounter which is to end the war. The Florentine troops are commanded by the Moorish mercenary Luria. He is encamped between the two cities; and with, or near him, are his Moorish friend and confidant Husain; Puccio—the officer whom he has superseded; Braccio—Commissary of the Republic; his secretary Jacopo, or Lapo; and a noble Florentine lady, Domizia.

Luria is a consummate general, a brave fighter, and a humane man. Every soldier of the army is devoted to him, and the triumph of the Republic seems secured. But the men who trust him to win the victory cannot trust him not to misuse it. They are afraid that his strength will be turned against themselves so soon as it has disposed of their foreign foe: and Braccio is on the spot, in order to watch his movements, to register every deed that can give the slightest hold for an accusation—in short, to supply the Signoria with the materials for a trial, which is proceeding step by step with Luria's successful campaign, and is to crush him the moment this is completed. Everyone but Husain is more or less his enemy. For Lapo is almost blindly devoted to his chief. Puccio is jealous of the stranger for whom he has been set aside. Domizia is making him an instrument of revenge. Her brothers have been faithful as he is, and condemned as he is to be. They accepted their sentence because it was the mother-city who passed it. She encourages Luria to encounter the same ingratitude, because she believes he will resist and punish it.

He is not unwarned of his danger. The Pisan general, Tiburzio, has discovered the conspiracy against him, and brings him, shortly before the battle, an intercepted letter from Braccio to the Signoria, in which he is convinced that he may read his fate. He urges him to open it; to desert the perfidious city, and to adopt Pisa's cause. But Luria's loyalty is unshaken. He tears up the letter in the presence of Braccio, Puccio, and Domizia: and only when the battle has been fought and won demands the secret of its contents. At the word "trial" he is carried away by a momentary indignation; but this subsides into a tender regret that "his Florentines" should have so misjudged him; that he should have given them cause to do it. He has laboured for their city, not only with the obedience of a son, but with the devotion of a lover. His Eastern fancy has been enslaved by her art, her intellect: by the life of educated thought which so far removed her from the blind unrest, and the animal strength of his savage world; Domizia's attractions have added to the spell. He has never guarded his love for Florence against doubt, for he never dreamed that it could be doubted. He cannot find it in his heart to chastise her now.

Temptation besets him on every side; for the armies of both Florence and Pisa are at his command. Husain and Domizia urge him on to revenge. Tiburzio entreats him to give to Pisa the head with which Florence will only decorate a gateway. Him he thanks and dismisses. To the others he prepares his answer. Alone for the last time; with eyes fixed on the setting sun—his "own orb" so much nearer to him in his Eastern home, and which will shine for him there no more—he drains a phial of poison: the one thing he has brought from his own land to help him in the possible adversity. Death was to be his refuge in defeat. He will die on his triumph-day instead.

They all gather round him once more: Puccio grateful and devoted; for he has seen that though discredited by Florence, Luria was still working for her success—Tiburzio, who returns from Florence, where he has tendered his submission to Luria's arms, and borne his heartfelt testimony to Luria's honour—Domizia, who has learned from Luria that there are nobler things than retaliation: and now entreats him to forego his vengeance against her city, as she foregoes her own—Braccio, repentant for the wrong done, and beseeching that Luria will not "punish Florence." But they cannot avert the one punishment which that gentle spirit could inflict. He lies dead before them.

"IN A BALCONY" is a dramatic fragment, equivalent to the third or fourth act, of what might prove a tragedy or a drama, as the author designed. The personages are "Norbert" and "Constance," a young man and woman; and the "Queen," a woman of a certain age. Constance is a relation and protégée of the Queen—as we imagine, a poor one. She is loved by Norbert; and he has entered the Queen's service, for the opportunity of wooing and winning her. His diplomatic exertions have been strenuous. They have secured to his royal mistress the possession of a double crown. The "Balcony" echoes with the sound of festivities which are intended to mark the event.

Constance returns Norbert's affection. He thinks the moment come for pleading his and her cause with their sovereign. But Constance entreats him to temporize: either to defer the proposal for her hand, or to make it in so indirect a manner, that the Queen may only see in it a tribute to herself. He has allowed her to think that he served her for her own sake; she must not be undeceived too roughly. Her heart has starved amidst the show of devotion: its hunger must not be roused by the touch of a living love in which she has no part. A shock of this kind would be painful to her—dangerous to themselves.

Norbert is an honest man, possessed of all the courage of his love: and he finds it hard to believe that the straightforward course would not be the best; but he yields to the dictates of feminine wisdom; and having consented to play a part, plays it with fatal success. The Queen is a more unselfish woman than her young cousin suspects. She has guessed Norbert's love for Constance, and is prepared to sanction it; but her own nature is still only too capable of responding to the faintest touch of affection: and at the seeming declaration that that love is her's, her joy carries all before it. She is married; but as she declares she will dissolve her marriage, merely formal as it has always been; she will cast convention to the winds, and become Norbert's wife. She opens her heart to Constance; tells her how she has yearned for love, and how she will repay it. Constance knows, as she never knew, what a mystery of pain and passion has been that outwardly frozen life; and in a sudden impulse of pity and compunction, she determines that if possible its new happiness shall be permanent—its delusions converted into truth.

She meets Norbert again; makes him talk of his future; discovers that he only dreams of it as bound up with the political career he has already entered upon; and though she sees that every vision of this future begins and ends in her, she sees, as justly, that its making or marring is in the Queen's hands. Here is a second motive for self-sacrifice. Norbert has no suspicion of what he has done. The Queen appears before Constance has had time to inform him of it; and the latter has now no choice but to let him learn it from the Queen's own lips. She draws her on, accordingly, under plea of Norbert's diffidence, to speak of what she believes him to have asked of her, and what she knows to be already granted. She tries to prompt his reply.

But Norbert will not be prompted. He is slow to understand what is expected of him, very indignant when he does so; and in terror lest he should still be misunderstood—in unconsciousness of the torture he is inflicting—he asserts and re-asserts his respect for the one woman, his absorbing passion for the other. The Queen goes out. Her looks and silence have been ominous. The shadow of a great dread falls upon the scene. The dance-music stops. Heavy footsteps are heard approaching. Norbert and Constance stand awaiting their doom. But they are united as they have never yet been, and they can defy it; for her love has shown itself as capable of all sacrifice—his as above temptation.

Various theories have been formed as to the kind of woman Mr. Browning meant Constance to be; but a careful and unbiassed reading of the poem can leave no doubt on the subject. He has given her, not the courage of an exclusively moral nature, but all the self-denial of a devoted one, growing with the demands which are made upon it. How single-hearted is her attempt to sacrifice Norbert's love, is sufficiently shown by one sentence, addressed to him after his interview with the Queen:

"THE RING AND THE BOOK." 1868-69.

From the dramas, we pass naturally to the dramatic monologues; poems embodying a lengthened argument or soliloquy, and to which there is already an approach in the tragedies themselves. The dramatic monologue repeats itself in the finest poems of the "Men and Women," and "Dramatis Personæ;" and Mr. Browning's constructive power thus remains, as it were, diffused, till it culminates again in "The Ring and the Book:" at once his greatest constructive achievement, and the triumph of the monologue form. From this time onwards, the monologue will be his prevailing mode of expression, but each will often form an independent work. "The Ring and the Book" is thus our next object of interest.

Mr. Browning was strolling one day through a square in Florence, the Piazza San Lorenzo, which is a standing market for old clothes, old furniture, and old curiosities of every kind, when a parchment-covered book attracted his eye, from amidst the artistic or nondescript rubbish of one of the stalls. It was the record of a murder which had taken place in Rome, and bore inside it an inscription which Mr. Browning thus transcribes:—

The book proved, on examination, to contain the whole history of the case, as carried on in writing, after the fashion of those days: pleadings and counter-pleadings, the depositions of defendants and witnesses; manuscript letters announcing the execution of the murderer; and the "instrument of the Definitive Sentence" which established the perfect innocence of the murdered wife: these various documents having been collected and bound together by some person interested in the trial, possibly the very Cencini, friend of the Franceschini family, to whom the manuscript letters are addressed. Mr. Browning bought the whole for the value of eightpence, and it became the raw material of what appeared four years later as "The Ring and the Book."

This name is explained as follows:—The story of the Franceschini case, as Mr. Browning relates it, forms a circle of evidence to its one central truth; and this circle was constructed in the manner in which the worker in Etruscan gold prepares the ornamental circlet which will be worn as a ring. The pure metal is too soft to bear hammer or file; it must be mixed with alloy to gain the necessary power of resistance. The ring once formed and embossed, the alloy is disengaged, and a pure gold ornament remains. Mr. Browning's material was also inadequate to his purpose, though from a different cause. It was too hard. It was "pure crude fact," secreted from the fluid being of the men and women whose experience it had formed. In its existing state it would have broken up under the artistic attempt to weld and round it. He supplied an alloy, the alloy of fancy, or—as he also calls it—of one fact more: this fact being the echo of those past existences awakened within his own. He breathed into the dead record the breath of his own life; and when his ring of evidence had re-formed, first in elastic then in solid strength, here delicately incised, there broadly stamped with human thought and passion, he could cast fancy aside, and bid his readers recognize in what he set before them unadulterated human truth.

All this was not effected at once. The separate scenes of the Franceschini tragedy sprang to life in Mr. Browning's imagination within a few hours of his reading the book. He saw them re-enacted from his terrace at Casa Guidi on a sultry summer night—every place and person projected, as it seemed, against the thundery sky—but his mind did not yet weave them into a whole. The drama lay by him and in him till the unconscious inspiration was complete; and then, one day in London, he felt what he thus describes:—

and "The Ring and the Book" was born. All this is told in an introductory chapter, which bears the title of the whole work; and here also Mr. Browning reviews those broad facts of the Franceschini case which are beyond dispute, and which constitute, so far as they go, the crude metal of his ring. He has worked into this almost every incident which the chronicle supplies and his book requires no supplement. But the fragmentary view of its contents, which I am reduced to giving, can only be held together by a previous outline of the story.

There lived in Rome in 1679 Pietro and Violante Comparini, an elderly couple of the middle class, fond of show and good living, and who in spite of a fair income had run considerably into debt. They were, indeed at the period in question, in receipt of a papal bounty, employed in the relief of the needy who did not like to beg. Creditors were pressing, and only one expedient suggested itself: they must have a child; and thus enable themselves to draw on their capital, now tied up for the benefit of an unknown heir-at-law. The wife conceived this plan, and also carried it out, without taking her husband into her confidence. She secured beforehand the infant of a poor and not very reputable woman, announced her expectation, half miraculous at her past fifty years, and became, to all appearance, the mother of a girl, the Francesca Pompilia of the story.

When Pompilia had reached the age of thirteen, there was also in Rome Count Guido Franceschini, an impoverished nobleman of Arezzo, and the elder of three brothers, of whom the second, Abate Paolo, and the third, Canon Girolamo also play some part in the story. Count Guido himself belonged to the minor ranks of the priesthood, and had spent his best years in seeking preferment in it. Preferment had not come, and the only means of building up the family fortunes in his own person, was now a moneyed wife. He was poor, fifty years old, and personally unattractive. A contemporary chronicle describes him as short, thin, and pale, and with a projecting nose. He had nothing to offer but his rank; but in the case of a very obscure heiress, this might suffice, and such a one seemed to present herself in Pompilia Comparini. He heard of her at the local centre of gossip, the barber's shop; received an exaggerated estimate of her dowry; and made proposals for her hand; being supported in his suit by the Abate Paul. They did not, on their side, understate the advantages of the connection. They are, indeed, said to have given as their yearly income, a sum exceeding their capital, and Violante was soon dazzled into consenting to it. Old Pietro was more wary. He made inquiries as to the state of the Count's fortune, and declined, under plea of his daughter's extreme youth, to think of him as a son-in-law.

Violante pretended submission, secretly led Pompilia to a church, the very church of San Lorenzo in Lucina, where four years later the murdered bodies of all three were to be displayed, and brought her back as Count Guido's wife. Pietro could only accept the accomplished fact; and he so far resigned himself to it, that he paid down an instalment of his daughter's dowry, and made up the deficiency by transferring to the newly-married couple all that he actually possessed. This left him no choice but to live under their roof, and the four removed together to the Franceschini abode at Arezzo. The arrangement proved disastrous; and at the end of a few months Pietro and Violante were glad to return to Rome, though with empty pockets, and on money lent them for the journey by their son-in-law.

We have conflicting testimony as to the cause of this rupture. The Governor of Arezzo, writing to the Abate Paul in Rome, lays all the blame of it on the Comparini, whom he taxes with vulgar and aggressive behaviour; and Mr. Browning readily admits that at the beginning there may have been faults on their side. But popular judgment, as well as the balance of evidence, were in favour of the opposite view; and curious details are given by Pompilia and by a servant of the family, a sworn witness on Pompilia's trial, of the petty cruelties and privations to which both parents and child were subjected.

So much, at all events, was clear; Violante's sin had overtaken her; and it now occurred to her, apparently for the first time, to cast off its burden by confession. The moment was propitious, for the Pope had proclaimed a jubilee in honour of his eightieth year, and absolution was to be had for the asking. But the Church in this case made conditions. Absolution must be preceded by atonement. Violante must restore to her legal heirs that of which her pretended motherhood had defrauded them. The first step towards this was to reveal the fraud to her husband; and Pietro lost no time in making use of the revelation. He repudiated Pompilia, and with her all claims on her husband's part. The case was carried into court. The Court decreed a compromise. Pietro appealed from the decree, and the question remained unsettled.

The chief sufferer by these proceedings was Pompilia herself. She already had reason to dread her husband as a tyrant—he to dislike her as a victim; and his discovery of her base birth, with the threatened loss of the greater part of her dowry, could only result, with such a man, in increased aversion towards her. From this moment his one aim seems to have been to get rid of his wife, but in such a manner as not to forfeit any pecuniary advantage he might still derive from their union. This could only be done by convicting her of infielity; and he attacked her so furiously, and so persistently, on the subject of a certain Canon Giuseppe Caponsacchi, whom she barely knew, but whose attentions he declared her to have challenged, that at last she fled from Arezzo, with this very man.

She had appealed for protection against her husband's violence to the Archbishop and to the Governor. She had striven to enlist the aid of his brother-in-law, Conti. She had implored a priest in confession to write for her to her parents, and induce them to fetch her away. But the whole town was in the interest of the Franceschini, or in dread of them. Her prayers were useless, and Caponsacchi, whom she had heard of as a "resolute man," appeared her last resource. He was, as she knew, contemplating a journey to Rome; an opportunity presented itself for speaking to him from her window, or her balcony; and she persuaded him, though not without difficulty, to assist her escape, and conduct her to her old home. On a given night she slipped away from her husband's side, and joined the Canon where he awaited her with a carriage. They travelled day and night till they reached Castelnuovo, a village within four hours of the journey's end. There they were compelled to rest, and there also the husband overtook them. They were not together at the moment; but the fact of the elopement was patent; and if Franceschini had killed his wife there, in the supposed excitement of the discovery, the law might have dealt leniently with him. But it suited him best for the time being to let her live. He procured the arrest of the fugitives, and after a short confinement on the spot, they were conveyed to the New Prisons in Rome (Carceri Nuove) and tried on the charge of adultery.

It is impossible not to believe that Count Guido had been working towards this end. Pompilia's verbal communications with Caponsacchi had been supplemented by letters, now brought to him in her name, now thrown or let down from her window as he passed the house. They were written, as he said, on the subject of the flight, and as he also said, he burned them as soon as read, not doubting their authenticity. But Pompilia declared, on examination, that she could neither write nor read; and setting aside all presumption of her veracity, this was more than probable. The writer of the letters must therefore, have been the Count, or some one employed by him for the purpose. He now completed the intrigue by producing eighteen or twenty more of a very incriminating character, which he declared to have been left by the prisoners at Castelnuovo; and these were not only disclaimed with every appearance of sincerity by both the persons accused, but bore the marks of forgery within themselves.

Pompilia and Caponsacchi answered all the questions addressed to them simply and firmly; and though their statements did not always coincide, these were calculated on the whole to create a moral conviction of their innocence; the facts on which they disagreed being of little weight. But moral conviction was not legal proof; the question of false testimony does not seem to have been even raised; and the Court found itself in a dilemma, which it acknowledged in the following way: it was decreed that for his complicity in "the flight and deviation of Francesca Comparini," and too great intimacy with her, Caponsacchi should be banished for three years to Civita Vecchia; and that Pompilia, on her side, should be relegated, for the time being, to a convent. That is to say: the prisoners were pronounced guilty; and a merely nominal punishment was inflicted upon them.

The records of this trial contain almost everything of biographical or even dramatic interest in the original book. They are, so far as they go, the complete history of the case; and the result of the trial, ambiguous as it was, supplied the only argument on which an even formal defence of the subsequent murder could be based. The substance of these records appears in full in Mr. Browning's work; and his readers can judge for themselves whether the letters which were intended to substantiate Pompilia's guilt, could, even if she had possessed the power of writing, have been written by a woman so young and so uncultured as herself. They will also see that the Count's plot against his wife was still more deeply laid than the above-mentioned circumstances attest.

Count Guido was of course not satisfied. He wanted a divorce; and he continued to sue for it by means of his brother, the Abate Paul, then residing in Rome; but before long he received news which was destined to change his plans. Pompilia was about to become a mother; and in consideration of her state, she had been removed from the convent to her paternal home, where she was still to be ostensibly a prisoner. The Comparini then occupied a small villa outside one of the city gates. A few months later, in this secluded spot, the Countess Franceschini gave birth to a son, whom her parents lost no time in conveying to a place of concealment and safety. The murder took place a fortnight after this event. I give the rest of the story in an almost literal translation from a contemporary narrative, which was published, immediately after the Count's execution, in the form of a pamphlet^[22]—the then current substitute for a newspaper.

"Being oppressed by various feelings, and stimulated to revenge, now by honour, now by self-interest, yielding to his wicked thoughts, he (Count Guido) devised a plan for killing his wife and her nominal parents; and having enlisted in his enterprise four other ruffians,"—labourers on his property, "started with them from Arezzo, and on Christmas-eve arrived in Rome, and took up his abode at Ponte Milvio, where there was a villa belonging to his brother, and where he concealed himself with his followers till the fitting moment for the execution of his design had arrived. Having therefore watched from thence all the movements of the Comparini family, he proceeded on Thursday, the 2nd of January, at one o'clock of the night,^[23] with his companions to the Comparini's house; and having left Biagio Agostinelli and Domenico Gambasini at the gate, he instructed one of the others to knock at the house-door, which was opened to him on his declaring that he brought a letter from Canon Caponsacchi at Civita Vecchia. The wicked Franceschini, supported by two other of his assassins, instantly threw himself on Violante Comparini, who had opened the door, and flung her dead upon the ground. Pompilia, in this extremity, extinguished the light, thinking thus to elude her assassins, and made for the door of a neighbouring blacksmith, crying for help. Seeing Franceschini provided with a lantern, she ran and hid herself under the bed, but being dragged from under it, the unhappy woman was barbarously put to death by twenty-two wounds from the hand of her husband, who, not content with this, dragged her to the feet of Comparini, who, being similarly wounded by another of the assassins, was crying, 'confession.'"

"At the noise of this horrible massacre people rushed to the spot; but the villains succeeded in flying, leaving behind, however, in their haste, one his cloak, and Franceschini his cap, which was the means of betraying them. The unfortunate Francesca Pompilia, in spite of all the wounds with which she had been mangled, having implored of the Holy Virgin the grace of being allowed to confess, obtained it, since she was able to survive for a short time and describe the horrible attack. She also related that after the deed, her husband asked the assassin who had helped him to murder her if she were really dead; and being assured that she was, quickly rejoined, let us lose no time, but return to the vineyard;^[24] and so they escaped. Meanwhile the police (Forza) having been called, it arrived with its chief officer (Bargello), and a confessor was soon procured, together with a surgeon, who devoted himself to the treatment of the unfortunate girl."

"Monsignore, the Governor, being informed of the event, immediately despatched Captain Patrizj to arrest the culprits; but on reaching the vineyard the police officers discovered that they were no longer there, but had gone towards the high road an hour before. Patrizj pursued his journey without rest, and having arrived at the inn, was told by the landlord that Franceschini had insisted upon obtaining horses, which were refused to him because he was not supplied with the necessary order; and had proceeded therefore on foot with his companions towards Baccano. Continuing his march, and taking the necessary precautions, he arrived at the Merluzza inn, and there discovered the assassins, who were speedily arrested; their knives still stained with blood, a hundred and fifty scudi in coin being also found on Franceschini's person. The arrest, however, cost Patrizj his life, for he had heated himself too much, and having received a slight wound, died in a few days."

"The knife of Franceschini was on the Genoese pattern, and triangular; and was notched at the edge, so that it could not be withdrawn from the wounded flesh without lacerating it in such a manner as to render the wound incurable."

"The criminals being taken to Ponte Milvio, they went through a first examination at the inn there at the hands of the notaries and judges sent thither for the purpose, and the chief points of a confession were obtained from them."

"When the capture of the delinquents was known in Rome, a multitude of the people hastened to see them as they were conveyed bound on horses into the city. It is related that Franceschini having asked one of the police officers in the course of the journey how ever the crime had been discovered, and being told that it had been revealed by his wife, whom they had found still living, was almost stupefied by the intelligence. Towards twenty-three o'clock (the last hour before sunset) they arrived at the prisons. A certain Francesco Pasquini, of Città di Castello, and Allessandro Baldeschi, of the same town, both twenty-two years of age, were the assistants of Guido Franceschini in the murder of the Comparini; and Gambasini and Agostinelli were those who stood on guard at the gate."

"Meanwhile the corpses of the assassinated Comparini were exposed at San Lorenzo, in Lucina, but so disfigured, and especially Franceschini's wife, by their wounds in the face, that they were no longer recognizable. The unhappy Francesca, after taking the sacrament, forgiving her murderers, under seventeen years of age, and after having made her will, died on the sixth day of the month, which was that of the Epiphany; and was able to clear herself of all the calumnies which her husband had brought against her. The surprise of the people in seeing these corpses was great, from the atrocity of the deed, which made one really shudder, seeing two septuagenarians and a girl of seventeen so miserably put to death."

"The trial proceeding meanwhile, many papers were drawn up on the subject, bringing forward all the most incriminating circumstances of this horrible massacre; and others also were written for the defence with much erudition, especially by the advocate of the poor, a certain Monsignor Spreti, which had the effect of postponing the sentence; also because Baldeschi persisted in denial, though he was tortured with the rope, and twice fainted under it. At last he confessed, and so did the others, who also revealed the fact that they had intended in due time to murder Franceschini himself, and take his money, because he had not kept his promise of paying them the moment they should have left Rome."

"On the twenty-second of February there appeared on the Piazza del Popolo a large platform with a guillotine and two gibbets, on which the culprits were to be executed. Many stands were constructed for the convenience of those who were curious to witness such a terrible act of justice; and the concourse was so great that some windows fetched as much as six dollars each. At eight o'clock Franceschini and his companions were summoned to their death, and having been placed in the Consorteria, and there assisted by the Abate Panciatici and the Cardinal Acciajuoli, forthwith disposed themselves to die well. At twenty o'clock the Company of Death and the Misericordia reached the dungeons, and the condemned were let down, placed on separate carts, and conveyed to the place of execution."

It is farther stated that Franceschini showed the most intrepidity and cold blood of them all, and that he died with the name of Jesus on his lips. He wore the same clothes in which he had committed the crime: a close-fitting garment (juste-au-corps) of grey cloth, a loose black shirt (camiciuola), a goat's hair cloak, a white hat, and a cotton cap.

The attempt made by him to defraud his accomplices, poor and helpless as they were, has been accepted by Mr. Browning as an indication of character which forbade any lenient interpretation of his previous acts. Pompilia, on the other hand, is absolved, by all the circumstances of her protracted death, from any doubt of her innocence which previous evidence might have raised. Ten different persons attest, not only her denial of any offence against her husband, but, what is of far more value, her Christian gentleness, and absolute maiden modesty, under the sufferings of her last days, and the medical treatment to which they subjected her. Among the witnesses are a doctor of theology (Abate Liberate Barberito), the apothecary and his assistant, and a number of monks or priests; the first and most circumstantial deposition being that of an Augustine, Frà Celestino Angelo di Sant' Anna, and concluding with these words: "I do not say more, for fear of being taxed with partiality. I know well that God alone can examine the heart. But I know also that from the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks; and that my great St. Augustine says: 'As the life was, so is its end.'"

It needed all the evidence in Pompilia's favour to secure the full punishment of her murderer, strengthened, as he was, by social and ecclesiastical position, and by the acknowledged rights of marital jealousy. We find curious proof of the sympathies which might have prejudiced his wife's cause, in the marginal notes appended to her depositions, and which repeatedly introduce them as lies.

"F. Lie concerning the arrival at Castelnuovo."

"H. New lies to the effect that she did not receive the lover's letters, and does not know how to write," &c., &c.^[25]

The significant question, "Whether and when a husband may kill his unfaithful wife," was in the present case not thought to be finally answered, till an appeal had been made from the ecclesiastical tribunal to the Pope himself. It was Innocent XII. who virtually sentenced Count Franceschini and his four accomplices to death.

When Mr. Browning wrote "The Ring and the Book," his mind was made up on the merits of the Franceschini case; and the unity of purpose which has impressed itself upon his work contributes largely to its power. But he also knew that contemporary opinion would be divided upon it; and he has given the divergent views it was certain to create, as constituting a part of its history. He reminds us that two sets of persons equally acquainted with the facts, equally free from any wish to distort them, might be led into opposite judgments through the mere action of some impalpable bias in one direction or the other, which third, more critical or more indifferent, would adopt a compromise between the two; and he closes his introductory chapter with a tribute to that mystery of human motive and character which so often renders more conclusive judgments impossible.

The three forms of opinion here indicated appear in the three following chapters as the respective utterance of "HALF-ROME," "THE OTHER HALF-ROME," and "TERTIUM QUID."

HALF-ROME has an instinctive sympathy with the husband who has been made ridiculous, and the nobleman who is threatened with an ignominious death; and is disposed throughout to regard him as more sinned against than sinning. "Count Guido has been unfortunate in everything. He is one of those proud and sensitive men who make few friends, and who meet reverses half-way. He has waited thirty years for advancement in the church, is sick of hope deferred, and is on the point of returning home to end his days, as he thinks, in frugality and peace, when a pretty girl is thrown in his way. Visions of domestic cheerfulness and comfort rise up before him. He is entrapped into marriage before he has had time to consider what he is doing, and discovers when it is too late that the parents reputed wealthy have little left but debts; and that in exchange for their daughter's dowry, present and prospective, he must virtually maintain them as well as her."

"He is far from rich, but he makes the best of a bad bargain—takes the three with him to Arezzo, and lodges them with his mother and his youngest brother, in the old family house. He is repaid with howls of disappointment. Pietro and Violante want splendour and good-living. They haven't married their daughter to a nobleman and gone to live in his palace, to be duller than they were at home, and have less to eat and drink. They abuse the mother, who won't give up her place in the household, and try to sneer the young brother-priest out of his respect for old-fashioned ways. They go back to Rome, trumpeting their wrongs: and, once there, spring a mine upon the luckless Count. They refuse to pay the remainder of Pompilia's dowry, on the ground that she is not their child. Violante Comparini has cheated her husband into accepting a base-born girl as his own, and a well-born gentleman into marrying her, but was ready to have qualms of conscience as soon as it should be convenient to tell the truth; and now the moment has come."

"Count Guido, left alone with his nameless and penniless wife, still hopes for the best. Pompilia is not guilty of her mock parents' sins. She has been honest enough to take part against them when writing to her brother-in-law in Rome.^[26] He and she may still live in peace together. But now the old story begins again—that of the elderly husband and the young wife. Canon Caponsacchi throws comfits at Pompilia in the theatre; brushes against her in the street; has constantly occasion to pass under her window, or to talk to some one opposite to it. He, of course, looks up; Pompilia looks down; the neighbours say, 'What of that?' The Count is uncomfortable, but he is only laughed at for his pains; the fox prowls round the hen-roost undisturbed. He wakes one morning, after a drugged sleep, to find the house ransacked, and Pompilia gone, and everyone able to inform him that she has gone with Caponsacchi, and to Rome. He pursues them, and overtakes them where they have spent the night together. She brazens the matter out, covers her husband with invective, and threatens him with his own sword. He gives both in charge, and follows them to Rome, where he seeks redress from the law. But he does not obtain redress, though the couple's guilt is made as clear as day by a packet of love letters which they had left behind them. They swear that they did not write the letters, and the Court believes them. 'They have done wrong, of course, but there is no proof of crime;' and they are let off with a mere show of punishment."

"The Count returns to Arezzo to find the whole story known, and himself the laughing-stock of everybody. He is complimented on his patience under his wife's attack—congratulated on having come out of it with a whole skin. He pushes his claim for a divorce on the obvious ground of infidelity! is met by a counter-claim on the ground of—cruelty! One exasperating circumstance fellows another. At last he hears of the birth of a child, which will be falsely represented as his heir; and then the pent-up passion breaks forth, and in one great avenging wave it washes his name clear."

"Yet he gives the guilty one a last chance. He utters the name of Caponsacchi at her door. If she regrets her offence, that name will bar it. It proves a talisman at which the door flies open. The Count and his assistants must be tried for form's sake. But if they are condemned, there is no justice left in Rome. If he had taken his wife's life at the moment of provocation, he would have been praised for the act. But he called in the law to do what he was bound to do for himself; and the law has assessed his honour at what seemed to be his own price. The vengeance, too long delayed, has been excessive in consequence. It was clumsy into the bargain, since the Canon has escaped alive. Well, if harm comes, husbands who are disposed to take the new way instead of the old will have had a lesson; and the Count has only himself to thank."

THE OTHER HALF-ROME is chiefly impressed by the spectacle of a young wife and mother butchered by her husband in cold blood: and can only think of her as having been throughout a victim. It does not absolve Violante, but it allows something for honest parental feeling in the old couple's desire for a child; and something for the good done to this human waif by its adoption into a decent home. According to this version, it is the Count and his brother who lay the matrimonial trap, and the Comparini parents and child who fall into it. "The grim Guido is at first kept in the background. Abate Paolo makes the proposal. He is oily and deferential, and flatters poor foolish Violante, and dazzles her at the same time. 'His elder brother,' he says, 'is longing to escape from Rome and its pomps and glare. He wants his empty old palace at Arezzo, and his breezy villa among the vines,'—and here the emptiness of both is described so as to sound like wealth. 'Poor Guido! he is always harping upon his home. But he wants a wife to take there—a wife not quite empty-handed, since he is not rich for his rank—but above all, with a true tender heart and an innocent soul—one who will be a child to his mother, and fall into his own ways. Many a parent would be glad to welcome him as a son-in-law, but report tells him that Violante's daughter is just the girl he wants.'"

"The marriage takes place. Foolish Pietro is talked over and strips himself of everything he has. He and his wife have no choice but to go and live with their son-in-law and his mother and brother. They meet with nothing under his roof but starvation, insult, and cruelty, and return home after a few months, duped and beggared, to ask hospitality of those whom they had once entertained. Violante, overwhelmed by these misfortunes, confesses that Pompilia is not her child, and Pietro proclaims the fact; not that he wishes to leave Pompilia in the lurch, but because he thinks this a sure way of getting her back.—Count Guido is clearly not the man to wish to retain as his wife a base-born girl without a dowry, and whom he has never loved.—But the case must be settled by law, the law pronounces in Count Guido's favour so far as the actual marriage portion is concerned; and Count Guido clearly lays his plans so as to half-drive and half-tempt his wife into the kind of misconduct which will rid him of her without prejudicing his right to what she has brought him."

This half of Rome accepts Pompilia's story of all that led to her flight, and Caponsacchi's statement that he assisted in it simply to save her life. It thinks the husband's intrigues sufficiently proved by the fact that the Canon owns to having received letters which the wife denies having written, and which must, therefore, have been forged. Count Guido, it declares, has had no wrongs to avenge, and supposing he had wrongs, he has adopted too convenient a mode of avenging them. "He demands protection from the law, and the moment its balance trembles against him he flies out of court, declaring that wounded honour can only be cured by the sword. At all events he has given the law plenty to do: three courts at work for him, and an appeal to the Pope besides. If any law is binding on mankind it is that such as he shall be made an end of. He is the common enemy of his fellow-men."

TERTIUM QUID sees no reason for assuming that the wrong is altogether on either side, and reviews the circumstances in such a manner as to show that there is probably right on both. He lays stress on the expediency of judging the Comparini by the morals of their class, and Count Guido by the peculiarities of his own nature; admits the punishment of the wife and parents to have been excessive, and cannot admit it to have been unprovoked; does not pretend to decide between the conflicting statements, and does not consider that Pompilia's dying confession throws much light upon them; seeing that it may be equally true, or false, or neutralized by another reserved for the priest's ear. Does not regard putting the Count to the torture as the right mode of eliciting the truth: because he may be innocent. But declares that if he does not deserve to undergo the torture, no one ever did or will. Tertium Quid is sometimes flippant in tone, and his neutral attitude seems chiefly the result of indifference or of caution. He is addressing himself to a Highness and an Excellency, and is careful not to shock the prejudices of either. Still, his statement is the nearest approach to a judicial summing up of which the nature of the work admits.

Mr. Browning now enters on the constructive part of his work. He puts the personages of the drama themselves before us, allowing each to plead his or her own cause. The imaginary occasion is that of Count Guido's trial; and all the depositions which were made on the previous one are transferred to this. The author has been obliged in every case to build up the character from the evidence, and to re-mould and expand the evidence in conformity with the character. The motive, feeling, and circumstance set forth by each separate speaker are thus in some degree fictitious; but they are always founded upon fact; and the literal truth of a vast number of details is self-evident. We first hear:

COUNT GUIDO FRANCESCHINI. He has been caught red-handed from the murder of his wife. His crime is patent. He has himself confessed it under torture. His only hope of reprieve lies in the colour which he may be able to impart to it; and his speech is cunningly adapted to the nature of the Court, and to the moral and mental constitution of those of whom it is composed. His judges are churchmen: neutral on the subject of marriage; rather coarsely masculine in their idea of the destiny of women. He does not profess to have entertained any affection for his wife. He derides the idea of having ill-used her, and thinks she might have liked him better if he had done so, instead of threatening her into good behaviour like a naughty child, with hair powder for poison, and a wooden toy for a sword; has no doubt that, if she had cared to warm his heart, some smouldering embers within it might still have burst into flame; but admits once for all that there was no question of feeling in the case; it was a bargain on both sides, and a fair one as far as he was concerned.

Paternity, however, is a condition with which his hearers may be supposed to sympathize; and he is absolutely eloquent, when he describes the desire he has cherished for a son, and the burning pain which filled him when he knew that it had been defrauded. He tells the story of his wife's intrigue and flight, much as the opinion of Half-Rome has reflected it; but he laces the question of his child's legitimacy in such a manner as to extract an equal advantage from either view. In either case it was Pompilia's crowning iniquity that she gave birth to a child, and placed it beyond his reach; and in either case it was the outraged paternal feeling which inspired his act.

The whole monologue is leavened by a spirit of mock deference for religion, for the Church, and for the law which represents the Church. Count Guido is led in from the torture, a mass of mock-patient suffering: wincing as he speaks, but quite in spite of himself—grateful that his pains are not worse—begging his judges not to be too much concerned about him; "since, thanks to his age and shaken health, a fainting fit soon came to his relief—indeed, torture itself is a kind of relief from the moral agonies he has undergone." He reminds his judges that the Church was his only mistress for thirty years. He would have served her, he declares, to the end of his life, but that his fidelity had been so long ignored. He trusted to the law—in other words to the Church—to avenge his honour when he ought to have done so himself. She deceived his trust, and still he hoped and endured. When he came to Rome, in his last frenzy of just revenge, he still stayed his hand, because the Feast of the Nativity had begun: it was the period at which the Church enjoins peace and good-will towards men. The face of the heavenly infant looked down upon him; he prayed that he might not enter into temptation. But the days went by, and the Face withered and waned, and the cross alone confronted him. Then he felt that the hour had come, and he found his way to his wife's retreat.

The door opened to the name of Caponsacchi. His worst fears were thus confirmed. Even so, had he been admitted by Pompilia, weak from her recent sufferings, he might have paused in pity—by Pietro, he might have paused in contempt; but it was the hag Violante who opened to him: the cheat, the mock-mother, the source of all his wrongs. The impulse to stamp out that one detested life involved all three. And now he triumphs in the deed. He has cast a foul burden from his life. He can look his fellow-men in the face again. Far from admitting that he deserves punishment, he claims the sympathy and the approval of those who have met to judge him: for he has done their work—the work of Divine justice and of natural law. In a final burst of rhetoric he challenges his judges to restore to him his life, his name, his civil rights, and best of all, his son; and together, he declares, they will rebuild the family honour, and revive the old forgotten tradition of domestic purity and peace. And if one day the son, about to kiss his hand, starts at the marks of violence upon it, he will smile and say, "it was only an accident—

GIUSEPPE CAPONSACCHI next tells his story. It includes some details of his earlier life, which throw light on what will follow. He is not a priest from choice. He had interest in the Church, and grew up in the expectation of entering it. But when the time came for taking his vows, he recoiled from the sacrifice which they involved, and yielded only to the Bishop's assurance that he need make no sacrifice; there were two ways of interpreting such vows, and he need not select the harder; a man of polish and accomplishments was as valuable to the Church as a scholar or an ascetic. Her structure stood firm, and no one need now-a-days break his back in the effort to hold her up. Let him write his madrigals (he had a turn for verse-making) and not become a fixture in his seat in the choir through too close an attendance there. The terms were easy, and Caponsacchi became a priest, no worse and no better than he was expected to be; but with the feelings and purposes of a truer manhood lying dormant within him. These Pompilia was destined to arouse.

He relates that he first saw her at the theatre. His attention was attracted by her strange sad beauty: and a friend who sat by him, and was a connection of the husband's, threw comfits at her to make her return his gaze, warning him at the same time to do nothing which could compromise her. He accepted the warning, but could not forget the face. He felt a sudden disgust for the light women and the light pleasures which were alone within his reach, and determined to change his mode of life, and leave Arezzo for Rome.

At this juncture a love-letter was brought to him. It purported to come from the lady at whom he had flung the comfits;^[27] offered him her heart, and begged an interview with him. The bearer was a masked woman, who owned to an equivocal position in Count Guido's household. Caponsacchi saw through the trick, declined the proposed interview on the ground of his priesthood, and completed his answer with an allusion to the husband, which would punish him in the probable case of its passing directly into his hands. The next day the same messenger appeared with a second letter, reproaching him for his cruelty; he answered in the same strain. But the letters continued, now dropped into his prayer-book, now flung down to him from a window. At length they changed their tone. He had been begged to come: he was now entreated to stay away. The husband, before absent, had returned: indifferent, had become jealous. His vengeance was aroused; and the sooner Caponsacchi escaped to Rome, the better. This challenge to his courage had the intended effect. He wrote word that the street was public if the house was not, and he would be under the lady's window that evening.

He went. She was standing there, lamp in hand, like Our Lady of Sorrows on her altar. She vanished, reappeared on a terrace close above his head, and spoke to him. He had sent her letters, she said, which she could not read; but she had been told that they spoke of love. She thought at first that he must be wicked, and then she felt that he could not be so wicked as to have meant what that woman said; and now that she saw his face she knew he did not write it. Still, he meant her well when no one else did. Her need was sore; he alone in the world could help her; she had determined to call to him. If he had some feverish fancy for what was not her's to give, he would be cured of it so soon as he knew all. She told him her story, and entreated him to take her to Rome, and consign her to her parents' care. He promised, and then his heart misgave him. Would it be right in him? Would it be good for her? He passed two days in a ceaseless internal conflict, and then determined to see her once more, but only to comfort and advise.

She stood again awaiting him at her window. Again she spoke, reproaching him for the suspense she had undergone. Her manner dispelled all doubt, and he did for her what she desired. The journey, which he describes in detail, was to him one spontaneous and continued revelation of her purity and truth. Then came the trial and his banishment. He was compelled to leave her to the protection of the law; to the good offices of the Court which confronts him now—of the men who, as he reminds them, laughed in their sleeve at the young priest's escapade, and at the transparent excuses with which he had taxed their credulity,—of the men who, in consideration for his youth, merely sent him to disport himself elsewhere, leaving the woman he had striven to protect, to the husband who was to murder her.

The news which summons him from Civita Vecchia has fallen on him like a thunderbolt. His being is shaken to its foundations. He strives to contain himself in outward deference to the Court, but a storm of suppressed sorrow and indignation rages beneath all his words: now uttering itself in pitying tender reverence for Pompilia's memory; now in scorn of those who would defame her; now in anger at himself, who is casting suspicion on her innocence by the very passion with which he defends it, now in defiance of those who choose to call the passion by the vulgar name of love. He tears up the flimsy calumnies which have been launched against her and himself; flinging them back in short, contemptuous utterances in the teeth of whosoever may believe them; begs his judges to forget his violence; and makes a last attempt to convince himself and them that no selfish desire underlies it. Pompilia is dying: he too is dead—to the world. What can she be to him but a dream—a thinker's dream—of a life not consecrated to the Church, but spent, as with her, in one constant domestic revelation of the eternal goodness and truth—a dream from which he will pass content.... And here the whole edifice of self-control and self-deception breaks down, and the agonized heart sends forth its cry:—

The third speaker is POMPILIA. Her evidence is the story of her life. It is given from her deathbed; and its half-dreamy reminiscences are uttered with the childlike simplicity with which she may have opened her heart to her priest. She is full of strange pathetic wonder at the mystery of existence; at the manner in which the thing we seem to grasp eludes us, and the seemingly impossible comes to pass. "Husbands are supposed to love their wives and guard them. See how it has been with her! That other man—that friend—they say he loves her; his kindness was all love! She is a wife and he a priest, and yet they go on saying it! Her boy, she imagined, would be hers for life: and he is taken from her. He, too, becomes a dream; and in that dream she sees him grown tall and strong, and tutoring his mother as an imprudent child, for venturing out of the safe street into the lonely house where no help could reach her. It all reminds her of the day when she and a child-friend played at finding each other out in the figures on the tapestry; and Tisbe recognized her in a tree with a rough trunk for body, and her five fingers blossoming into leaves. Things are, and are not at the same time."

One thing, however, is real amidst the unreality: her joy and pride in finding herself a mother. The event proved that when she left Arezzo the hope of maternity was already dawning upon her; and Mr. Browning has combined this fact with the latent maternal sentiment of all true women, and read it into every impulse of her remaining life. She was wretched. She had vainly sought for help. She had resigned herself to the inevitable. She had lain down at night with the old thought—

From this moment, as she tells us, everything was transformed. For days, for weeks, Caponsacchi's name had been ringing in her ears: in jealous explosions on her husband's part; in corrupting advice on the part of the waiting-woman who brought letters supposed to be sent to her by him; in declarations of love which her first glance at his face told her he could not have written. This, too, has all seemed a grotesquely painful dream. But when she awoke on the April morning in that bounding of the spirit towards an unknown joy, the name assumed a new meaning for her, and she said, "Let Caponsacchi come."

She remembers little after that, but the enfolding tenderness which secured the fulfilment of her hope. She describes nothing after the "tap" at the door, which was the beginning of the end. She has attained the crown of her woman's existence, and she can bear no resentment towards him whose cruelty embittered, and whose vengeance has cut it short. The motherly heart in her goes out to the wicked husband who was also once a child, and strives to palliate what he has done. "He was sinned against as well as sinning. Her poor parents were blind and unjust in their mode of retaliating upon him. She was blind and foolish in doing nothing to heal the breach. Her earthly goods have been a snare to Guido; she herself was an importunate presence to him. By God's grace he will be the better for having swept her from his path. She thanks him for destroying in her that bodily life which was his to pollute, and for leaving her soul free. Her infant shall have been born of no earthly father. It is the child of its mother's love."

And this love for her child overflows in gratitude to him who saved her for it—a gratitude which is also something more. She has recoiled from the idea of being united to a priest by any bond of earthly affection; but the knowledge is growing upon her that her bond to Caponsacchi is love, though it assumes an ideal character in her innocence, her ignorance, and the exaltation of feeling which denotes her approaching death. She has recalled the incidents of her flight, but only to bear witness to Caponsacchi's virtues: his watchful kindness, his chivalrous courage, the unselfishness which could risk life and honour without thought of reward, the priestly dignity which he never set aside. Her last words contain an invocation to himself which has all the passion of earthly tenderness, and all the solemnity of a prayer. She addresses him as her soldier-saint—as the friend "her only, all her own," who is closest to her now on her final journey; whose love shall sustain, whose strong hand shall guide her, on the unknown path she is about to tread. She thinks he would not marry if he could. True marriage is in heaven, where there is no making of contracts, with gold on one side, power or youth or beauty on the other, but one is "man and wife at once when the true time is." Would either of them wish the past undone? Her soul says "No."

We have now the written pleadings of two advocates who figure largely in the records of the case; the one enlisted on the Count's side, the other on Pompilia's They are

DOMINUS HYACINTHUS DE ARCHANGELIS (procurator of the poor)

JURIS DOCTOR JOHANNES BAPTISTA BOTTINIUS (fisc, or public prosecutor).

The subject of these pleadings is the possible justification of the crime for which Count Franceschini is on trial, but not otherwise the crime itself; for he has owned to its commission; and though the avowal has been drawn from him by torture, it is justly accepted as decisive. All the arguments for and against him hinge therefore on the evidence of Pompilia's guilt or innocence as established by the previous enquiry; and as we have seen, the formal result of this enquiry was unfavourable to her. The Count obtained his verdict, though the subsequent treatment of the offenders made it almost nugatory; and de Archangelis rings the changes on the stock arguments of his client's outraged honour, and his natural if not legal right to avenge it.

Bottinius, on the other hand, does not admit that the husband's honour has been attacked; but he defends the wife's conduct, more by extenuating the acts of which she is accused, than by denying them. His denials are generally parenthetic: and imply that the whether she did certain things is much less important than the why and the how; and though he professes to present her as a pearl of purity, he shows his standard of female purity to be very low.

Mr. Browning might easily have composed a more genuine defence from the known facts of the case; but he represents these quibblings and counter-quibblings as equally beside the mark. The question of the murderer's guilt was being judged on broader grounds; and the supposed talkers on either side are aware of this. De Archangelis and Bottinius both know that their cleverness will benefit no one but themselves, and for this reason they are as much concerned to show how good a case they can make out of a doubtful one, as to prove that their case is in itself good. Each is thinking of his opponent, and how best to parry his attack; and their arguments are relieved by a brisk exchange of personalities, in which "de Archangelis" includes his subordinate "Spreti"—"advocate of the poor"—whose learned contribution to this paper warfare has probably aroused his jealousy.

Mr. Browning has also displayed the hollowness of the proceedings by making "de Archangelis" the very opposite of his saturnine and blood-thirsty client: the last person we could think of as in sympathy with him. He is a coarse good-natured paterfamilias, whose ambitions are all centred on an eight-year-old son, whose birthday it is; and his defence of the murder is concocted under frequent interruptions, from the thought of Cinuncino (little Giacinto, or Hyacinth), and the fried liver and herbs which are to form part of his birthday feast. Bottinius is a vain man, occupied only with himself, and regretting nothing so much as that he may not display his rhetorical powers, by delivering his speech instead of writing it.

Count Guido, with his accomplices, has been condemned to death. His friends have appealed from the verdict, on the ground of his being, though in a minor degree, a priest. The answer to this appeal rests with the head of the Church. The next monologue is therefore that of

THE POPE. The reflections here imagined grow out of a double fact. Innocent the Twelfth refused to shelter Count Franceschini with his accomplices from the judgment of the law, and thus assumed the responsibility of his death. He had reached an age at which so heavy a responsibility could not be otherwise than painful. As Mr. Browning depicts him, his decision is made. From dawn to dark he has been studying the case, piecing together its fragmentary truths, trying its merits with "true sweat of soul." There is no doubt in his mind that Guido deserves to die. But he has to nerve himself afresh before he gives the one stroke of his pen, the one touch to his bell, which shall send this soul into eternity; and that is what we see him doing.

As he says to himself, he is weighed down by years. He lifts the cares of the whole world on a "loaded branch" for which a bird's nest were a "superfluous burthen." Yet this strong man cries to him for life: and he alone has the power to grant it. How easy to reprieve! How hard to deny to this trembling sinner the moment's respite which may save his soul. He wants precedent for such a deed; and he seeks it in the records of the Papacy. It is from the Popes his predecessors that he must learn how to dare, to suffer, and—to judge. But these records tell him how Stephen cursed Formosus; how Romanus and Theodore reinstated the sanctity of Formosus and cursed Stephen; and how John reinstated Stephen and cursed Formosus. They could not all be right. There is no guarantee for infallibility—no test of justice—to be found here.

How, then, would he defend his condemnation of Guido if he himself were now summoned to the judgment-seat? The question is self-answered: no defence would be needed; for God sees into the heart. He appraises the seed of act, which is its motive; not "leafage and branchage, vulgar eyes admire." The Pope knows that his motives will stand the scrutiny of God. How, finally, could he plead his cause with a man like himself: with the man Antonio Pignatelli, his very self? He must, once for all, marshal the facts, and let them plead for him.

Next follows the Pope's version of the story, which differs from those preceding it, in being the summing up of a spiritual judge, who deals not only with facts but with conditions, and who looks at the thing done, in its special reference to the person who did it. As seen in this light, the blacks of the picture are blacker, the whites, whiter, than they appear from the ordinary point of view. Guido has been doubly wicked because his birth, his breeding, and his connection with the Church, had surrounded him with incitements to good, and with opportunities for it. Pompilia is doubly virtuous because she is a mere "chance-sown," "cleft-nurtured" human weed, owing all her goodness to herself. With Guido, the bad end is secured by the worst means. Not satisfied to murder his wife, he must use a jagged instrument with which to torture her flesh. Not satisfied to torment her in the body, he must imperil her soul by placing desperate temptation in her way. With Pompilia the right virtue is always employed for the good end. She is submissive where only her own life is at stake; brave, when a life within her own calls on her for protection. Guido's accomplices: his brothers, his mother, the four youths who helped him to kill his wife: the Governor, and the Archbishop, who abetted his ill-treatment of her, have alike sinned against their age, their character, or their associations.

Caponsacchi has not been faultless. He has failed somewhat in the dignity of his office, somewhat in its decorum; his mode of rescuing the oppressed has had too much the character of an escapade. But the more disciplined soldier of the Church would have erred in the opposite direction. The ear which listens only for the voice of authority becomes obtuse to the cry of suffering. The spirit which only moves to command becomes unfit for spontaneous work. Caponsacchi, standing aloof like a man of pleasure, has proved himself the very champion of God, ready to spring into the arena, at the first thud of the false knight's glove upon the ground. He has shown himself possessed of the true courage which does not shrink from temptation, and does not succumb to it. Such transgressions as his reflect rather on the limits imposed than on the impatience which transgressed them. He must submit to a slight punishment. He must work—be unhappy—bear life. But he ranks next in grace to Pompilia—the "rose" which the old Pope "gathers for the breast of God." Of Count Guido's other victims, Pietro and Violante, the worst that can be said is this: they have halted between good and evil; and, as the way of the world is, suffered through both. The balance of justice once more confirms the Pope's decree.

Yet at this very moment his will relaxes. A sudden dread is upon him—a chill such as comes with the sudden clouding of a long clear sky. The ordeal of a deeper and stranger doubt is yet to be faced. He has judged, as he believed, by the light of Divine truth. Has he been mistaken?

Step by step he tests and reconstructs his belief, tracing it back to its beginning. God, the Infinite, exists. Man, the atom, comprehends him as the conditions of his intelligence permit, but so far truly. Man's mind, like a convex glass, reflects him, in an image, smaller or less small, adequate so far as it goes. As revealed in the order of nature, God is perfect in intelligence and in power; but not so in love; and there has come into the mouths and hearts of men, a tale and miracle of Divine love which makes the evidence of his perfection complete. The Pope believes that tale, whether true in itself, or like man's conception of the infinite, true only for the human mind. He accepts its enigmas as a test of faith: as a sign that life is meant for a training and a passage: as a guarantee of our moral growth, and of the good which evil may produce.

Christianity stands firm. And yet his heart misgives him; for it is not justified by its results. It is not that the sceptical deny its value: that those bent on earthly good reject it with open eyes. The surprise and terror is this: that those who have found the pearl of price—who have named and known it—will still grovel after the lower gain. Such the Aretine bishop who sent Pompilia back to her tormentor; the friar who refused to save her because he feared the world; the nuns who at first testified to her purity, and were ready to prove her one of dishonest life, when they learned that she possessed riches which by so doing they might confiscate to themselves.

Nor is the fault in humanity at large: for love and faith have leapt forth profusely in the olden time, at the summons of "unacknowledged," "uncommissioned" powers of good. Caponsacchi has shown that they do so still. Before Paul had spoken and Felix heard, Euripides had pronounced virtue the law of life, and, in his doctrine of hidden forces, foreshadowed the one God. Euripides felt his way in the darkness. He, the Pope, walking in the glare of noon, might ask support of him. Where does the fault lie? It lies in the excess of certainty—in the too great familiarity with the truth—in that encroachment of earthly natives on the heavenly, which is begotten by the security of belief. Between night and noonday there has been the dawn, with its searching illumination, its thrill of faith, the rapture of self-sacrifice in which anchorite and martyr foretasted the joys of heaven. Now Christianity is hard because it has become too easy; because of the "ignoble confidence," which will enjoy this world and yet count upon the next: the "shallow cowardice," which renders the old heroism impossible.

The Pope is discursive, as is the manner of his age; and his reflections have been, hitherto, rather suggested by the case before him than directly related to it. But he grasps it again in a burst of prophetic insight which these very reflections have produced. Heroism has become impossible,

What if earthquake be about to try the towers which lions dare no longer attack: if man be destined to live once more, in the new-born readiness for death? Is the time at hand, when the new faith shall be broken up as the old has been; when reported truth shall once more be compared with the actual truth—the portrait of the Divine with its reality? Is not perhaps the Molinist^[28] himself thus striving after the higher light?

The Pope's fancy conjures up the vision of that coming time. He sees the motley pageant of the Age of Reason pushing the churchly "masque" aside, impatient of the slowly-trailing garments, in which he, the last actor in it, is passing off the scene. He beholds the trials of that transition stage; the many whose crumbling faith will land them on the lower platform of the material life; the few, who from habit, will preserve the Christian level; the fewer still, who, like Pompilia, will do so in the inspired conviction of the truth. He sees two men, or rather types of men, both priests, frankly making the new experiment, and adopting nature as their law. Under her guidance, one, like Caponsacchi acts, in the main, well; the other, like Guido Franceschini, wallows in every crime.... The "first effects" of the "new cause" are apparent in those murdering five, and in their victims.

But the old law is not yet extinct. He (the Church) still occupies the stage, though his departure be close at hand: so, in a last act of allegiance to Him who placed him there, he smites with his whole strength once more,

Yet again his arm is stayed. Voices, whether of friend or foe, are sounding in his ear. They reiterate the sophistries which have been enlisted in the Count's defence: the credit of the Church, the proprieties of the domestic hearth; the educated sense of honour which is stronger than the moral law; the general relief which will greet the act of mercy. The Pope listens. For one moment we may fancy that he yields. "Pronounce then," the imaginary speakers have said. A swift answer follows:

and the death-warrant goes out.

A favourite theory of Mr. Browning's appears in this soliloquy, for the first time since he stated it in "Sordello," and in a somewhat different form: that of the inadequacy of words to convey the truth. The Pope declares (p. 78) that we need

and again (p. 79) that

The scene changes to the prison-cell where Count Guido has received his final sentence of death. Two former friends and fellow-Tuscans, Cardinal Acciajuoli and Abate Panciatichi, have come to prepare him for execution; but the one is listening awe-struck to the only kind of confession which they can obtain from him, while the other plies his beads in a desperate endeavour to exorcise the spiritual enemy, "ban" the diabolical influences, it is conjuring up. The speaker is no longer Count Guido Franceschini, but

GUIDO. He is indeed another man than he was in his first monologue, for he has thrown off the mask. His tone is at first conciliatory, even entreating: for his hearers are men of his own class, and he hopes to persuade them to one more intercession in his behalf. But it changes to one of scorn and defiance, as the hopelessness of his case lays hold of him, and rises, at the end, to a climax of ferocity which is all but grand.

"Repentance! if he repent for twelve hours, will he die the less on the thirteenth? He has broken the social law, and is about to pay for it. What has he to repent of but that he has made a mistake? Religion! who of them all believes in it? Not the Pope himself; for religion enjoins mercy; it is meant to temper the harshness of the law: and he destroys the life which the law has given over to him to save. What man of them all shows by his acts that he believes; or would be treated otherwise than as a lunatic if he did? Let those who will, halt between belief and unbelief. It has not been in him to do so. Give him the certainty of another world, and he would have lived for it. Owning no such certainty, he has lived for this one; he has sought its pleasures and avoided its pains. Only he has carried the thing too far. The world has decreed limits to every man's pleasure; it limits this for the good of all; and it has made unlawful the excess of pleasure which turns to someone else's pain. He has exceeded the lawful amount of pleasure, and he pays for it by an extra dose of pain."

"There the matter ends. But his judges want more—a few edifying lies wherewith to show that he did not die impenitent, and stop the mouth of anyone who may hint, the day after the execution, that old men are too fond of putting younger ones out of the way. They shall have his confession; but it must be the truth."

"He killed his wife because he hated her; because, whether it were her fault or not, she was a stumbling-block in his path. He had been outraged by her aversion, exasperated by her patience, maddened by her never putting herself in the wrong. While her parents were with her, she resisted and clamoured, and then her presence could be endured; but they were left alone together, and then everything was changed. Day by day, and all day, he was confronted by her automatic obedience, by her dumb despair. She rose up and lay down—she spoke or was silent at his bidding; neither a loosened hair, nor a crumple in the dress, giving token of resistance; he might have strangled her without her making a sign. She eloped from him, yet he could not surprise her in the commission of a sin: and he returned from his pursuit of her, ridiculous when he should have been triumphant. He took his revenge at last. And now that he might tell his story and find no one to controvert it—how he came to claim his wife and child, and found no child, but the lover by the wife's side; was attacked, defended himself, struck right and left, and thus did the deed—she survives, by miracle, to confute him, to condemn him, and worst of all, to forgive him."

"He has been ensnared by his opportunities from first to last. He failed to save himself from retribution, only because he was drunk with the sudden freedom from this hateful load. And Pompilia haunts him still. Her stupid purity will freeze him even in death. It will rob him of his hell—where the fiend in him would burn up in fiery rapture—where some Lucrezia might meet him as his fitting bride—where the wolf-nature frankly glutted would perhaps leave room for some return to human form. For she cannot hate. It would grieve her to know him there; and—if there be a hell—it will be barred to him in consideration for her."

"The Cardinal, the Abate, they too are petrifactions in their way! He may rave another twelve hours, and it will be useless." Yet he makes one more effort to move them. He reminds the Cardinal of the crimes he has committed—of the help he will need when a new Pope is to be elected; of the possible supporter who may then be in his grave. Then fiercely turning on them both; "the Cardinal have a chance indeed, when there is an Albano in the case! The Abate be alive a year hence, with that burning hollow cheek and that hacking cough!—Well, he will die bold and honest as he has lived."

At this juncture he becomes aware that the fatal moment has arrived. Steps and lights are on the stairs. The defiant spirit is quenched. "He has laughed and mocked and said no word of all he had to say." In wild terror he pleads for life—bare life. A final vindication of his wife's goodness bursts from him in the words,

The concluding part of the work reverses the idea of the first, and is entitled

THE BOOK AND THE RING. It completes the record of the Franceschini case, and gives the concluding touches to the circle of evidence which now assumes its final dramatic form. We have first an account of the execution, conveyed in a gossiping letter from a Venetian gentleman on a visit to Rome, and who reports it as the last news of the week, and the occasion of his having lost a bet. The writer also discusses the Pope's health, the relative merits of his present physician and a former one; the relative chances of various candidates for the Papacy; and the Pope's possible motives for setting aside "justice, prudence, and esprit de corps," in the manner testified by his recent condemnation of a man of rank. His political likes and dislikes are thrown into the scale, but his predilection for the mob is considered to have turned it. "He allows the people to question him when he takes his walks; and it is said that some of them asked him, on the occasion of his last, whether the privilege of murder was altogether reserved for noblemen." "The Austrian ambassador had done his best to avert bloodshed, and pleaded hard for the life of one whom, as he urged, he 'may have dined at table with!' and felt so aggrieved by the Pope's answer, that he all but refused to come to the execution, and would barely look at it when he came." Various details follow, some of which my readers already know.

Mr. Browning next speaks of the three manuscript letters bound into the original book; selects one of these, written by the Count's advocate, de Archangelis, and gives it, first, in its actual contents, and next, in an imaginary postscript which we are to think of as destined for the recipient's private ear. The letter itself is written for the Count's family and friends; and states, in a tone of solemn regret, that the justifications brought forward by his correspondent arrived too late; that the Pope thought it inexpedient to postpone the execution, or to accept the plea of youth urged in favour of the four accomplices; and that they all died that day. It declares that the Count suffered in an exemplary manner, amidst the commiseration and respect of all Rome, and that the honour of his house will lose nothing through the catastrophe.

The supplement is conceived in a very different spirit. The writer laughs at their "pleas" and "proofs," coming, like Pisan help, when the man is already dead—"not that twenty such vindications would have done any good—

Well, people enjoyed the show, but saw through it all the same; and meanwhile his (the writer's) superb defence goes for nothing; and though argument is solid and subsists

his hands and his pockets are empty. Ah well! little Cino will gain by it in the long run. He had been promised that if papa couldn't save the Count's head, he should go and see it chopped off: and when a patroness of his joked the child on his defeat, and on Bottini's ruling the roast, the clever rogue retorted that papa knew better than to baulk the Pope of his grudge, and could have argued Bottini's nose off if he had chosen. Doesn't the fop see that he (de Archangelis) can drive right and left horses with one hand? The Gomez case shall make it up to him."

The two other letters are in the same strain as the first. Both are written on the day of the execution. Both announce it in a condoling manner. Both allude to the justifications which arrived too late: and in one or both, the criminal is spoken of as "poor" Signor Guido. Mr. Browning has preferred, however, representing the other side; and the next which he gives is, like Don Hyacinth's supplement, only such as might have been written. It is supposed to be from Pompilia's advocate Bottinius (or Bottini), and is in keeping with the spirit of his defence. He is clearly jealous of not having had a worse case to plead. "He has won," he says. "How could he do otherwise? with the plain truth on his side, and the Pope ready to steady it on his legs again if he let it drop asleep. Arcangeli may crow over him, as it is, for having been kept by him a month at bay—though even this much was not his doing; the little dandiprat Spreti was the real man."

And this is not all. "Of course Rome must have its joke at the advocate with the case that proved itself: but here is a piece of impertinence he was not prepared for. The barefoot Augustinian, whose report of Pompilia's dying words took all the freshness out of the best points of his defence, has been preaching on the subject; and the sermon is flying about Rome in print." Next follows an extract from it. The friar warns his hearers not to trust to human powers of discovering the truth. "It is not the long trial which has revealed Pompilia's innocence; God from time to time puts forth His hand, and He has done so here. But earth is not heaven, nor all truth intended to prevail. One dove returned to the ark. How many were lost in the wave? One woman's purity has been rescued from the world. 'How many chaste and noble sister-fames' have lacked 'the extricating hand?' And we must wait God's time for such truth as is destined to appear. When Christians worshipped in the Catacomb, one man, no worse than the rest, though no less foolish, will have pointed to its mouth, and said, 'Obscene rites are practised in that darkness. The devotees of an execrable creed skulk there out of sight.' Not till the time was ripe, did lightning split the face of the rock, and lay bare a nook—

"And how does human law, in its 'inadequacy' and 'ineptitude' defend the just? How has it attempted to clear Pompilia's fame? By submitting, as its best resource, that wickedness was bred in her flesh and bone. For himself he cannot judge, unless by the assurance of Christ, if he have not lost much by renouncing the world: for he has lost love, and knowledge, and perhaps the means of bringing goodness from its ideal conception into the actual life of man. But the bubble, fame—worldly praise and appreciation—he has done well to set these aside."

"And what is all this preaching," resumes Bottinius, "but a way of courting fame? The inflation of it! and the spite! and the Molinism! As its first pleasant consequence, Gomez, who had intended to appeal from the absurd decision of the Court, declines to ask the lawyers for farther help.^[29] There is an end of that job and its fee. Nevertheless, his 'blatant brother' shall soon see if law is as inadequate, and advocacy as impotent, as he fancies. Providence is this time in their favour. Pompilia was consigned to the 'Convertite' (converted ones). She was therefore a sinner. Guido has been judged guilty: but there was no word as to the innocence of his wife. The sisterhood claims, therefore, the property which accrued to her through her parents' death, and which she has left in trust for her son. Who but himself—the Fisc—shall support the claim, and show the foul-mouthed friar that his dove was a raven after all." (He too can drive left and right horses on occasion.)

This he actually did. But once more the Pope intervened: and Mr. Browning proceeds to give the literal substance of the "Instrument" of justification as it lies before him. In this, Pompilia's "perfect fame" is restored, and her representative, Domenico Tighetti, secured against all molestations of her heir and his ward, which the Most Venerable Convent, etc. etc., may commit or threaten.

What became of that child, Gaetano, as he was called after the new-made saint? Did he live a true scion of the paternal stock, whose heraldic symbols Mr. Browning has described by Count Guido's mouth?—

This question Mr. Browning asks himself, but is unable to answer. He concludes his book by telling us its intended lesson, and explaining why he has chosen to present it in this artistic form. The lesson is that which we have already learned from his Pope's thoughts:—

Art, with its indirect processes, can alone raise up a living image of that truth which words distort in the stating.

And, lastly, he dedicates the completed work to the "Lyric Love," whose blessing on its performance he has invoked in a memorable passage at the close of his introductory chapter.

TRANSCRIPTS FROM THE GREEK, WITH "ARTEMIS PROLOGIZES."

Another group of works detaches itself from any possible scheme of classification: These are Mr. Browning's transcripts from the Greek.

The "Alkestis" of Euripides, imbedded in the dramatic romance called "Balaustion's Adventure." 1871.

The "Herakles" of Euripides, introduced into "Aristophanes' Apology." 1875.

The "Agamemnon" of Æschylus, published by itself. 1877.

They are even outside my subject because they are literal; and therefore show Mr. Browning as a scholar, but not otherwise as a poet than in the technical power and indirect poetic judgments involved in the work. All I need say about this is, that its literalness detracts in no way from the beauty and transparency of "Alkestis" or "Herakles," while it makes "Agamemnon" very hard to read; and that Mr. Browning has probably intended his readers to draw their own conclusion, which is so far his, as to the relative quality of the two great classics. Some critics contend that a less literal translation of the "Agamemnon" would have been not only more pleasing, but more true; but Mr. Browning clearly thought otherwise. Had he not, he would certainly have given his author the benefit of the larger interpretation; and his principal motive for this indirect defence of Euripides would have disappeared.

Mr. Browning has also given us an original fragment in the classic manner:—

"ARTEMIS PROLOGIZES." ("Men and Women,"^[30] published in "Dramatic Lyrics," in 1842.) This was suggested by the "Hippolytos" of Euripides; and destined to become part of a larger poem, which should continue its story. For, according to the legend, Hippolytos having perished through the anger of Aphrodité (Venus), was revived by Artemis (Diana), though only to disappoint her affection by falling in love with one of her nymphs, Aricia. Mr. Browning imagines that she has removed him in secret to her own forest retreat, and is nursing him back to life by the help of Asclepios; and the poem is a monologue in which she describes what has passed, from Phaedra's self-betrayal to the present time. Hippolytos still lies unconscious; but the power of the great healer has been brought to bear upon him, and the unconsciousness seems only that of sleep. Artemis is awaiting the event.

The ensuing chorus of nymphs, the awakening of Hippolytos, and with it the stir of the new passion within him, had already taken shape in Mr. Browning's mind. Unfortunately, something put the inspiration to flight, and it did not return.^[31]

FOOTNOTES:

CLASSIFIED GROUPS.

ARGUMENTATIVE POEMS. SPECIAL PLEADINGS.

The isolated monologues have a special significance, which is almost implied in their form, but is also distinct from it. Mr. Browning has made them the vehicle for most of the reasonings and reflections which make up so large a part of his imaginative life: whether presented in his own person, or, as is most often the case, in that of his men and women. As such, they are among those of his works which lend themselves to a rough kind of classification; and may be called "argumentative."

They divide themselves into two classes: those in which the speaker is defending a preconceived judgment, and an antagonist is implied; and those in which he is trying to form a judgment or to accept one: and the supposed listener, if there be such, is only a confidant. The first kind of argument or discussion is carried on—apparently—as much for victory as for truth; and employs the weapons of satire, or the tactics of special-pleading, as the case demands. The second is an often pathetic and always single-minded endeavour to get at the truth. Those monologues in which the human spirit is represented as communing with itself, contain some of Mr. Browning's noblest dramatic work; but those in which the militant attitude is more pronounced throw the strongest light on what I have indicated as his distinctive intellectual quality: the rejection of all general and dogmatic points of view. His casuistic utterances are often only a vindication of the personal, and therefore indefinite quality of human truth; and their apparent trifling with it is often only the seeking after a larger truth, in which all seeming contradictions are resolved. It was inevitable, however, that this mental quality should play into the hands of his dramatic imagination, and be sometimes carried away by it; so that when he means to tell us what a given person under given circumstances would be justified in saying, he sometimes finds himself including in the statement something which the given person so situated would be only likely to say.

The first of these classes, or groups, which we may distinguish as SPECIAL PLEADINGS, contains poems very different in length, and in literary character; and to avoid the appearance of confusion, I shall reverse the order of their publication, and place the most important first:—

• "Aristophanes' Apology;^[32] or The Last Adventure of Balaustion." (1875.)
• "Fifine at the Fair." (1872.)
• "Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau, Saviour of Society." (1871.)
• "Bishop Blougram's Apology" (Men and Women). (1855.)
• "Mr. Sludge, the Medium." (Dramatis Personæ.) (1864.)

"ARISTOPHANES' APOLOGY" is, as its second title shows, a sequel to "Balaustion's Adventure" (1871). Both turn on the historical fact that Euripides was reverenced far more by the non-Athenian Greeks than by the Athenians; and both contain a transcript from him. But the interest of "Aristophanes' Apology" is independent of its "Herakles," while that of "Balaustion's Adventure" is altogether bound up with its Alkestis; and in so far as the "adventure" places Balaustion herself before us, it will be best treated as an introduction to her appearance in the later and more important work.

Balaustion is a Rhodian girl, brought up in a worship for Euripides, which does not, however, exclude the appreciation of other great Greek poets. The Peloponnesian War has entered on its second stage. The Athenian fleet has been defeated at Syracuse. And Rhodes, resenting this disgrace, has determined to take part against Athens, and join the Peloponnesian league. But Balaustion will not forsake the mother-city, the life and light of her whole known world; and she persuades her kinsmen to migrate with her to it, and, with her, to share its fate. They accordingly take ship at Kaunus, a Carian sea-port belonging to Rhodes. But the wind turns them from their course, and when it abates, they find themselves in strange waters, pursued by a pirate bark. They fly before it towards what they hope will prove a friendly shore—Balaustion heartening the rowers by a song from Æschylus, which was sung at the battle of Salamis—and run straight into the hostile harbour of Syracuse, where shelter is denied them.

The captain pleads in vain that they are Kaunians, subjects of Rhodes, and that Rhodes is henceforward on Sparta's side. "Kaunian the ship may be: but Athenians are on board. All Athens echoed in that song from Æschylus which has been ringing across the sea. The voyagers may retire unhurt. But if ten pirate ships were pursuing them, they should not bring those memories of Salamis to the Athenian captives whom the defeat of Nicias has left in Syracusan hands." The case is desperate. The Rhodians turn to go.

Suddenly a voice cries, "Wait. Do they know any verses from Euripides?" "More than that, they answer, Balaustion can recite a whole play—that strangest, saddest, sweetest song—the 'Alkestis.' It does honour to Herakles, their god. Let them place her on the steps of their temple of Herakles, and she will recite it there." The Rhodians are brought in, amidst joyous loving laughter, among shouts of "Herakles" and "Euripides." The recital takes place;^[33] it is repeated a second day and a third; and Balaustion and her kinsmen are dismissed with good words and wishes, for, as she declares:

The story of Alkestis scarcely needs repeating. Apollo had incurred the anger of Jupiter by avenging the death of his son Æsculapius on the Cyclops whose thunder-bolt had slain him; and been condemned to play the part of a common mortal, and serve Admetus, King of Thessaly, as herdsman. The kind treatment of Admetus had made him his friend: and Apollo had deceived the Fate sisters into promising that whenever the king's life should become their due, they would renounce it on condition of some other person dying in his stead. When the play opens, the fatal moment has come. Alkestis, wife of Admetus, has offered herself to save him; and Admetus, though he does so with a heavy heart, has been weak enough to accept the sacrifice. Death enters the palace, from which even Apollo can no longer turn him away.

But just as Alkestis has breathed her last, Herakles appears; and his great cheery voice is heard on the threshold of the house of mourning, inquiring if the master be within. Admetus suppresses all signs of emotion, that he may receive him as hospitality demands; and Herakles, hearing what has happened from a servant of the house, is moved to gratitude and pity. He wrestles with Death; conquers him; and brings back Alkestis into her husband's presence, veiled, and in the guise of a second companion. Admetus will at first neither touch nor look at her. He has promised his dying wife to give her no successor; and her memory is even dearer to him than she herself has been. The god however reasons, persuades, and insists; and at length, very reluctantly, Admetus gives his hand to the stranger, whom he is then told to unveil. Herakles has delayed the recognition, that Alkestis might be enabled to probe her husband's fidelity, and convince herself that sorrow had made him worthier of her.

Balaustion half recites the play, half describes it, "as she has seen it at Kameiros this very year," occasionally compressing an unimportant scene, but always closely adhering to the original. She knows that she is open to the reproach of describing more than the masked faces of the actors could allow her to see; but she meets it in these words:—

The whole work is a vindication of the power of poetry, as exerted in itself, and as reproduced in those who have received its fruits (pages 110, 111); and Balaustion herself displays it in this secondary form, by suggesting a version of the story of Alkestis, more subtly, if less simply, beautiful than the original. She makes Love the conqueror of Death. According to her, the music made by Apollo among Admetus's flocks has tamed every selfish passion in the King's soul; and when the time comes for his wife to die, he refuses the sacrifice. "Zeus has decreed that their two lives shall be one; and if they must be severed, he must go who was the body, not she, who was the soul, of their joint existence." But Alkestis declares that the reality of that existence lies not in her but in him, and she bids him look at her once more before his decision is made. In this look, her soul enters into his; and, thus subduing him, she expires. But when she reaches the nether world she is rejected as a deceiver. "The death she brings to it is a mockery, since it doubles the life she has left behind." Proserpine sends her back to her husband's side; and the "lost eyes" re-open beneath his gaze, while it still embraces her.

Apollo smiles sadly at the ingenuousness of mortals, who thus imagine that the chain of eternal circumstance could snap in one human life; at their blindness to those seeds of pity and tenderness which the crushed promise of human happiness sets free. Yet he seems to think they lose nothing by either. "They do well to value their little hour. They do well to treasure the warm heart's blood, of which no outpouring could tinge the paleness or fill the blank of eternity, the power of love which transforms their earthly homes, their

"Balaustion" means wild pomegranate flower; and the girl has been so called on account of her lyric gifts. She recalls the pomegranate tree, because its leaves are cooling to the brow, its seed and blossom grateful to the sense, and because the nightingale is never distant from it. She will keep the name for life—so she tells her friends—and with it a better thing which her songs have gained her. One youth came daily to the temple-steps at Syracuse to hear her. He was at her side at Athens when she landed. They will be married at this next full moon.

"Alkestis" failed "to get the prize" when its author was competing with Sophocles. "But Euripides has had his reward: in the sympathies which he has stirred; in the genius which he has inspired. His crown came direct from Zeus."

We need not name the poetess whom Mr. Browning quotes at the close of this poem. The painter so generously eulogized is F. Leighton.

When we meet Balaustion again, in "Aristophanes' Apology," many things have happened. She has seen her poet in his retirement (this was mentioned in her "adventure"), kissed his hand, and received from it, together with other gifts, his tragedy of Herakles. Euripides has died; Athens has fallen; and Balaustion, with her memories in her heart, and her husband, Euthykles, by her side, is speeding back towards Rhodes. She is deeply shocked by the fate of her adoptive city, to which her fancy pays a tribute of impassioned reverence, too poetic to be given in any but Mr. Browning's words. Yet she has a growing belief that that fate was just. Sea and air and the blue expanse of heaven are full of suggestion of that spirit-life, with its larger struggles or its universal peace, which is above the world's crowd and noise. And she determines that sorrow for what is fleeting shall not gnaw at her heart.

But in order to overcome the sorrow, she must loosen it from her. The tragedy she has witnessed must enact itself once more for Euthykles and her, he writing as she dictates. It will have for prologue a second adventure of her own, which he also has witnessed; and this adventure will constitute the book. It is prefaced in its turn by a backward glance at the circumstances, (so different from the present) in which she related the first.

It was the night on which Athens received the news that Euripides was dead: Euthykles had brought this home to her from the theatre. They were pondering it gravely, but not sadly, for their poet was now at rest, in the companionship of Æschylus, safe from the petty spites which had frothed and fretted about his life. He had lived and worked, to the end, true to his own standard of right, heedless of the reproach that he was a man-hater and a recluse, without regard for civic duty, and with no object but his art. He had left it to Sophocles to play poet and commander at the same time, and be laughed at for the result. He had first taken the prize of "Contemplation" in his all but a hundred plays; then, grasping the one hand offered him which held a heart, had shown at the court of Archelaus of Macedon whether or not the power of active usefulness was in him. His last notes of music had also been struck for that one friend.

Even Athens did him justice now. The reaction had set in; one would have his statue erected in the theatre; another would have him buried in the Piræus; etc. etc. Not so Euthykles and Balaustion. His statue was in their hearts. Their concern was not with his mortal vesture, but with the liberated soul, which now watched over their world. They would hail this, they said, in the words of his own song, his "Herakles."

The reading was about to begin, when suddenly there was torch-light—a burst of comic singing—and a knocking at the door; Bacchus bade them open; they delayed. Then a name was uttered, of "authoritative" sound, of "immense significance;" and the door was opened to—Aristophanes. He was returning from the performance of his "Thesmophoriazusae,"^[34] last year a failure, but this time, thanks to some new and audacious touches, a brilliant success. His chorus trooped before him—himself no more sober than was his wont—crowned, triumphant, and drunk; a group of flute-boys and dancing-girls making up the scene. All these, however, slunk away before Balaustion's glance, Aristophanes alone confronting her. And, as she declares, it was "no ignoble presence." For the broad brow, the flushed cheek, the commanding features, the defiant attitude, all betokened a mind, wantoning among the lower passions, but yet master of them.

He addresses Balaustion in a tone of mock deference; banters her on her poetic name, her dignified mien, and the manner in which she has scared his chorus and its followers away; "not indeed that that matters, since the archon's economy and the world's squeamishness will soon abolish it altogether."^[35] Then struck by a passing thought, he stands grave, silent—another man in short—awaiting what she has to say.

In this sober moment, Balaustion welcomes him to her house. She welcomes him as the Good Genius: as genius of the kindly, though purifying humour, which, like summer lighting, illumines, but does not destroy. She knows and implies that he is not only this. But she greets the light, no matter to what darkness it be allied. She reverences the god who forms one half of him, so long as the monster which constitutes the other, remains out of sight; a poetic myth is made to illustrate this feeling. The gravity, however, is short-lived. The lower self in Aristophanes springs up again, and his "apology" begins.

"Aristophanes' APOLOGY" is a defence of comedy, as understood and practised by himself: that is, as a broad expression of the natural life, and a broad satire upon those who directly or indirectly condemn it. It is addressed to Euripides in the person of his disciple. It is at the same time an attack upon him; and in either capacity it covers a great deal of ground. For the dispute does not lie simply between comedy and tragedy—which latter, with the old tragedians, was often only the naturalism of comedy on a larger scale—but between naturalism and humanity, as more advanced thinkers understood it; between the old ideas of human and divine conveyed by tragedy and comedy alike, and the new ones which Euripides, the friend of Socrates, had imported into them; and the question at issue involved, therefore, not only art and morals, but the entire philosophy of life. The "Apology" derives farther interest and significance from the varied emotions by which it is inspired. The speaker (as is the case in "Fifine at the Fair") is answering not only his opponent, but his own conscience. How the conscience of Aristophanes has been aroused he presently tells: first struggling a little with the false shame which the experience has left behind. This is the scene which he describes.

A festive supper had followed the successful play. Jollity was at its height. The cup was being crowned to Aristophanes as the "Triumphant," when a knock came to the door: and there entered no "asker of questions," no casual passer-by, but the pale, majestic, heavily-draped figure of Sophocles himself. Slowly, solemnly, and with bent head, he passed up the hall, between two ranks of spectators as silent as himself; raised his eyes as he confronted the priest,^[36] and announced to him, that since Euripides was "dead to-day," and as a fitting spectacle for the god, his chorus would appear at the greater feast, next month, clothed in black and ungarlanded. Then silently, and amidst silence, he passed out again.

This, then, was the purport of the important news which was known to have arrived in port, but which every one had interpreted in his own way. Euripides was no more! But neither the news nor he who brought it could create more than a momentary stupor; and the tipsy fun soon renewed itself, at the expense of the living tragedian and the dead. Aristophanes alone remained grave. The value of the man whom he had aspersed and ridiculed stood out before him summed up by the hand of Death. He recalled the failure which had marked the now hopeless limitation of his own genius, and those last words addressed to him by Euripides which brought home its lesson.^[37] The archon, "Master of the Feast," judging that its "glow" was "extinct," had risen to conclude it by crowning the parting cup. He had crowned it with judicious reserve to the "Good Genius;" and Strattis (the comic poet) had burst forth in an eulogium of the Comic Muse which claimed the title of Good Genius for her—when yielding to this new and over-mastering impulse, he (Aristophanes) checked the coming applause, and demanded that the Tragic Muse and her ministrant Euripides should receive the libation instead; justifying the demand by a noble and pathetic tribute to the memory of the dead poet, and to the great humanities which only the tragic poet can represent.

But he found no response. The listeners mistook his seriousness for satire, and broke out afresh at the excellence of such a joke; and recovering his presence of mind as quickly as he had lost it, he changed his tone, thanked those alike who had laughed with him, and who had wept with the "Lord of Tears;" and desired that the cup be consecrated to that genius of complex poetry which is tragedy and comedy in one. It was sacrilege, he declared, to part these two; for to do so was to hack at the Hermai^[38]—to outrage the ideal union of the intellectual and the sensuous life in man. And from this new vantage-ground he launched another bolt at Euripides, whose coldness, he asserted, had belied this union, and made him guilty of a crime inexpiable in the sight of the gods.

Yet he could not dismiss him from his thoughts. He wanted to go over the old ground with him, and put himself in the right. Balaustion and her husband were in a manner representatives of the dead tragedian. That was why he had come. He was not sure that he expressed, or at the moment even felt, all that he had just repeated. "Drunk he was with the good Thasian, and drunk he probably had been." Nevertheless, the impulse he had thus obeyed sprang perhaps from some real, if hitherto undiscovered depths in his soul.

Up to this moment his defence has been carried on in a disjointed manner, and consists rather in defying attack than in resisting it: the defiant mood being only another aspect of the perturbed condition which has brought him to Balaustion's door. It finds its natural starting-point in the coarse treatment of things and persons which his "Thesmophoriazusae," with its "monkeying" of Euripides,^[39] has so recently displayed. But he reminds Balaustion that the art of comedy is young. It is only three generations since Susarion gave it birth. (He explains this more fully later on.) It began when he and his companions daubed their faces with wine lees, mounted a cart, and drove by night through the villages: crying from house to house, how this man starved his labourers, that other kissed his neighbour's wife, and so on. The first comedian battered with big stones. He, Aristophanes, is at the stage of the wooden club which he has taken pains to plane smooth, and inlay with shining studs. The mere polished steel will be for his successors.

"And is he approaching the age of steel?" Balaustion asks, well knowing that he is not. "His play failed last year. Was his triumph to-night due to a gentler tone? Is he teaching mankind that brute blows are not human fighting, still less the expression of godlike power; and that ignorance and folly are convicted by their opposites, not by themselves?"

"Not he, indeed," he replies; "he improves on his art: he does not turn it topsy-turvy. He does not work on abstractions. His power is not that of the recluse. He wants human beings with their approbation and their sympathy, and his Athens, to be pleased in her own way. He leaves the rest to Euripides. Real life is the grist to his mill. It is clear enough, however, that the times are against him. Every year more restrictions; Euripides with his priggishness; Socrates with his books and his moonshine, and his supercilious ways: never resenting his (Aristophanes') fun, nor seeming even to notice it^[40], not condescending to take exception to any but the 'tragedians;' as if he, the author of the 'Birds,' was a mere comic poet!" Then follows a tirade on the variety of his subjects; their depth, their significance, and the mawkishness and pedantry which they are intended to confute.

"Drunk! yes, he owns that he is." This in answer to a look from Balaustion, which has rebuked a too hazardous joke—"Drink is the proper inspiration. How else was he beaten in the 'Clouds,' his masterpiece, but that his opponent had inspired himself with drink, and he this time had not?^[41] Purity! he has learned what that is worth"—With more in the same strain. Now, however, that his adventure is told, the tumult of feeling in some degree subsides, and the more serious aspects of the apology will come into play.

Balaustion and her husband, seeing the sober mood return, once more welcome "the glory of Aristophanes" to their house, and bid him on his side share in their solemnity, and commemorate Euripides with them. This calls his attention to the portrait of the dead poet; those implements of his work which were his tokens of friendship to Balaustion; the papyrus leaf inscribed with the Herakles itself; and he cannot resist a sneer at this again unsuccessful play. His hostess rebukes him grandly for completing the long outrage on the living man by this petty attack on his "supreme calm;" and as supreme calmness means death, he begins musing on the immunities which death confers, and their injustice. "Give him only time and he will pulverize his opponents; he will show them whether this work of his is unintelligible, or that other will not live. But let them die; and they slink out of his reach with their malice, stupidity, and ignorance, while survivors croak 'respect the dead' over the hole in which they are laid. At all events, he retorts on them when he can—unwisely perhaps, since those he flings mud at are only immortalized by the process. Euripides knew better than to follow his example."

Again Balaustion has her answer. "He has volleyed mud at Euripides himself while pretending to defend the same cause: the cause of art, of knowledge, of justice, and of truth;" and she makes his cheek burn by reminding him of what petty and what ignoble witticisms that mud was made up. At last he begins in real earnest. "Balaustion, he understands, condemns comedy both in theory and in practice, from the calm and rational heights to which she, with her tragic friend, has attained. Here are his arguments in its favour."

"It claims respect as an institution, because as such it is coeval with liberty—born of the feast of Bacchus, and therefore of the good gifts of the earth—a mode of telling truth without punishment, and of chastising without doing harm. It claims respect by its advance from simple objects to more composite, from plain thumping to more searching modes of attack. The men who once exposed wrong-doing by shouting it before the wrong-doer's door, now expose it by representing its various forms. The comic poets denounce not only the thief, the fool, the miser, but the advocates of war, the flatterers of the populace, the sophists who set up Whirligig^[42] in the place of Zeus, the thin-blooded tragedian in league with the sophists, who preaches against the flesh. Where facts are insufficient he has recourse to fancy, and exaggerates the wronged truth the more strongly to enforce it (here follows a characteristic illustration.) To those who call Saperdion the Empousa, he shows her in a Kimberic robe;^[43] in other words, he exposes her charms more fully than she does it herself, the better to convict those who malign them."

And here lies his grudge against Euripides. Euripides is one of those who call Saperdion a monster—who slander the world of sense with its beauties and its enjoyments, or who contemptuously set it aside. "Born on the day of Salamis—when heroes walked the earth; and gods were reverenced and not discussed—when Greeks guarded their home with its abundant joys, and left barbarian lands to their own starvation—he has lived to belie every tradition of that triumphant time. He has joined himself with a band of starved teachers and reformers to cut its very foundations away. He exalts death over life, misery over happiness; or, if he admits happiness, it is as an empty name."

"Moreover, he reasons away the gods; for they are, according to him, only forms of nature. Zeus is the atmosphere. Poseidon is the sea. Necessity rules the universe. Duty, once the will of the gods, is now a voice within ourselves bidding us renounce pleasure, and giving us no inducement to do so."

"He reasons away morality, for he shows there is neither right nor wrong, neither 'yours' nor 'mine,' nor natural privilege, nor natural subjection, that may not be argued equally for or against. Why be in such a hurry to pay one's debt, to attend one's mother, to bring a given sacrifice?"

"He reasons away social order, for he declares the slave as good as his master, woman equal to man, and even the people competent to govern itself. 'Why should not the tanner, the lampseller, or the mealman, who knows his own business so well, know that of the State too?'"

"He ignores the function of poetry, which is to see beauty, and to create it: for he places utility above grace, truth above all beauty. He drags human squalor on to the scene because he recognizes its existence. The world of the poet's fancy, that world into which he was born, does not exist for him. He spoils his art as well as his life, carving back to bull what another had carved into a sphinx."

"How are such proceedings to be dealt with? They appeal to the mob. The mob is not to be swayed by polished arguments or incidental hints. We don't scare sparrows with a Zeus' head, though the eagle may recognize it as his lord's. A big Priapus is the figure required."

"And this," so Aristophanes resumes his defence, "comedy supplies. Comedy is the fit instrument of popular conviction: and the wilder, the more effective: since it is the worship of life, of the originative power of nature; and since that power has lawlessness for its apparent law. Even Euripides, with his shirkings and his superiority, has been obliged to pay tribute to the real. He could not shake it off all at once. He tacked a Satyric play to some five of his fifty trilogies: and if this was grim enough at first, he threw off the mask in Alkestis, showing how one could be indecent in a decent way."^[44]

For the reasons above given, which he farther expands and illustrates, Aristophanes chooses the "meaner muse" for his exponent. "And who, after all, is the worse for it? Does he strangle the enemies of the truth? No. He simply doses them with comedy, i.e. with words. Those who offend in words he pays back in them, exaggerating a little, but only so as to emphasize what he means; just as love and hate use each other's terms, because those proper to themselves have grown unmeaning from constant use. And what is the ground of difference between Balaustion and himself? Slender enough, in all probability, as he could show her, if they were discussing the question for themselves alone. As it is, Euripides has attacked him in the sight of the mob. His defence is addressed to it: he uses the arguments it can understand. It does not follow that they convey a literal statement of his own views. Euripides is not the only man who is free from superstition. He too on occasion can show up the gods;" and he describes the manner in which he will do this in his next play. All that is serious in the Apology is given in the concluding passage. "Whomever else he is hard upon, he will level nothing worse than a harmless parody at Sophocles, for he has no grudge against him:—

And all his, Aristophanes', teaching is this:—

He has summed up his case. Euripides must own himself beaten. If Balaustion will not admit the defeat, let her summon her rosy strength, and do her worst against his opponent."

Balaustion pauses for a moment before relating her answer to this challenge: and gives us to understand that, in thus relieving her memory, she is reproducing not only this special experience, but a great deal of what she habitually thinks and feels; thus silencing any sense of the improbable, which so lengthened an argument accurately remembered, might create in the reader's mind.

Her tone is at first deprecating. "It is not for her, a mere mouse, to argue on a footing of equality with a forest monarch like himself. It is not for her to criticize the means by which his genius may attain its ends. She does not forget that the poet-class is that essentially which labours in the cause of human good. She does not forget that she is a woman, who may recoil from methods which a man is justified in employing. Lastly, she is a foreigner, and as such may blame many things simply because she does not understand them. She may yet have to learn that the tree stands firm at root, though its boughs dip and dance before the wind. She may yet have to learn that those who witness his plays have been previously braced to receive the good and reject the evil in them, like the freshly-bathed hand which passes unhurt through flame. She may judge falsely from what she sees."

"But," she continues,^[45] "let us imagine a remote future, and a far-away place—say the Cassiterides^[46]—and men and women, lonely and ignorant—strangers in very deed—but with feelings similar to our own. Let us suppose that some work of Zeuxis or Pheidias has been transported to their shores, and that they are compelled to acknowledge its excellence from its own point of view—its colouring true to nature, though not to their own type—its unveiled forms decorous, though not conforming to their own standard of decorum. Might they not still, and justly, tax it on its own ground with some flaw or incongruity, which proved the artist to have been human? And may not a stranger, judging you in the same way, recognize in you one part of peccant humanity, poet 'three parts divine' though you be?"

"You declare comedy to be a prescriptive rite, coeval in its birth with liberty. But the great days of Greek national life had been reached when comedy began. You declare also that you have refined on the early practice, and imported poetry into it. Comedy is therefore, as you defend it, not only a new invention, but your own. And, finally, you declare your practice of it inspired by a fixed purpose. You must stand or fall by the degree in which this purpose has been attained."

"You would, by means of comedy, discredit war. Do you stand alone in this endeavour?" And she quotes a beautiful passage from 'Cresphontes,' a play written by Euripides for the same end. "And how, respectively, have you sought your end? Euripides, by appealing to the nobler feelings which are outraged by war; you, by expatiating on the animal enjoyments which accompany peace. The 'Lysistrata' is your equivalent for 'Cresphontes.' Do you imagine that its obscene allurements will promote the cause of peace? Not till heroes have become mean voluptuaries, and Cleonymos,^[47] whom you yourself have derided, becomes their type."

"You would discredit vice and error, hypocrisy, sophistry and untruth. You expose the one in all its seductions, and the other in grotesque exaggerations, which are themselves a lie; showing yourself the worst of sophists—one who plays false to his own soul."

"You would improve on former methods of comedy. You have returned to its lowest form. For you profess to strike at folly, not at him who commits it: yet your tactics are precisely to belabour every act or opinion of which you disapprove, in the form of some one man. You pride yourself, in fact, on giving personal blows, instead of general and theoretical admonitions; and even here you seem incapable of hitting fair; you libel where you cannot honestly convict, and do not care how ignoble or how irrelevant the libel may be. Does the poet deserve criticism as such? Does he write bad verse, does he inculcate foul deeds? The cry is, 'he cannot read or write;' 'he is extravagant in buying fish;' 'he allows someone to help him with his verse, and make love to his wife in return;' 'his uncle deals in crockery;' 'his mother sold herbs' (one of his pet taunts against Euripides); 'he is a housebreaker, a footpad, or, worst of all, a stranger;'"—a term of contempt which, as Balaustion reminds him has been repeatedly bestowed upon himself.

"What have you done," she continues, "beyond devoting the gold of your genius to work, which dross, in the person of a dozen predecessors or contemporaries, has produced as well. Pun and parody, satire and invective, quaintness of fancy, and elegance, have each had its representative as successful as you. Your life-work, until this moment, has been the record of a genius increasingly untrue to its better self. Such satire as yours, however well intended, could advance no honest cause. Its exaggerations make it useless for either praise or blame. Its uselessness is proved by the result: your jokes have recoiled upon yourself. The statues still stand which your mud has stained; the lightning flash of truth can alone destroy them. War still continues, in spite of the seductions with which you have invested peace. Such improvements as are in progress take an opposite direction to that which you prescribe. Public sense and decency are only bent on cleansing your sty."

And now her tone changes. "Has Euripides succeeded any better? None can say; for he spoke to a dim future above and beyond the crowd. If he fail, you two will be fellows in adversity; and, meanwhile, I am convinced that your wish unites with his to waft the white sail on its way.^[48] Your nature, too, is kingly." She concludes with a tribute to the "Poet's Power," which is one with creative law, above and behind all potencies of heaven and earth; and to that inherent royalty of truth, in which alone she could venture to approach one so great as he. He too, as poet, must reign by truth, if he assert his proper sway.

Then she bids him "arise and go." Both have done homage to Euripides.

"Not so," he replies; "their discussion is not at an end. She has defended Euripides obliquely by attacking himself. Let her do it in a more direct fashion." This leads up to what seems to her the best defence possible: that reading of the "Herakles" which the entrance of Aristophanes had suspended. Its closing lines set Aristophanes musing. The chorus has said:

"Who," he asks, "has been Athens' best friend? He who attracted her by the charm of his art, or he who repelled her by its severity?" He answers this by describing the relative positions of himself and Euripides in an image suggested by the popular game of Cottabos.^[49] "The one was fixed within his 'globe;' the other adapted himself to its rotations. Euripides received his views of life through a single aperture, the one channel of 'High' and 'Right.' Aristophanes has welcomed also the opposite impressions of 'Low' and 'Wrong,' and reproduced all in their turn. Some poet of the future, born perhaps in those Cassiterides, may defy the mechanics of the case, and place himself in such a position as to see high and low at once—be Tragic and Comic at the same time. But he meanwhile has been Athens' best friend—her wisest also—since he has not challenged failure by attempting what he could not perform. He has not risked the fate of Thamyris, who was punished for having striven with the higher powers, as if his vision had been equal to their own."^[50] And he recites a fragment of song, which Mr. Browning unfortunately has not completed, describing the fiery rapture in which that poet marched, all unconscious, to his doom. Some laughing promise and prophecy ensues, and Aristophanes departs, in the 'rose-streaked morning grey,' bidding the couple farewell till the coming year.

That year has come and gone. Sophocles has died: and Aristophanes has attained his final triumph in the "Frogs"—a play flashing with every variety of his genius—as softly musical in the mystics' chorus as croaking in that of the frogs—in which Bacchus himself is ridiculed, and Euripides is more coarsely handled than ever. And once more the voice of Euripides has interposed between the Athenians and their doom.^[51] When Ægos Potamos had been fought, and Athens was in Spartan hands, Euthykles flung the "choric flower" of the "Electra" in the face of the foe, and

the city itself was spared. But when tragedy ceased, comedy was allowed its work, and it danced away the Piræan bulwarks, which were demolished, by Lysander's command, to the sound of the flute.

And now Euthykles and Balaustion are nearing Rhodes. Their master lies buried in the land to which they have bidden farewell; but the winds and waves of their island home bear witness to his immortality: for theirs seems the voice of nature, re-echoing the cry, "There are no gods, no gods!" his prophetic, if unconscious, tribute to the One God, "who saves" him.

Balaustion has no genuine historic personality. She is simply what Mr. Browning's purpose required: a large-souled woman, who could be supposed to echo his appreciation of these two opposite forms of genius, and express his judgments upon them. But the Euripides she depicts is entirely constructed from his works; while her portrait of Aristophanes shows him not only as his works reflect, but as contemporary criticism represented him; he is one of the most vivid of Mr. Browning's characters. The two transcripts from Euripides seem enough to prove that that poet was far more human than Aristophanes professed to think; but the belief of Aristophanes in the practical asceticism of his rival was in some degree justified by popular opinion, if not in itself just; and we can understand his feeling at once rebuked and irritated by a contempt for the natural life which carried with it so much religious and social change. Aristophanes was a believer in the value of conservative ideas, though not himself a slave to them. He was also a great poet, though often very false to his poetic self. Such a man might easily fancy that one like Euripides was untrue to the poetry, because untrue to the joyousness of existence; and that he shook even the foundations of morality by reasoning away the religious conceptions which were bound up with natural joys. The impression we receive from Aristophanes' Apology is that he is defending something which he believes to be true, though conscious of defending it by sophistical arguments, and of having enforced it by very doubtful deeds; and we also feel that from his point of view, and saving his apparent inconsistencies, Mr. Browning is in sympathy with him. At the same time, Balaustion's rejoinder is unanswerable, as it is meant to be; and the double monologue distinguishes itself from others of the same group, by being not only more dramatic and more emotional, but also more conclusive; it is the only one of them in which the question raised is not, in some degree, left open.

The poem bristles with local allusions and illustrations which puzzle the non-classical reader. I add an explanatory index to some names of things and persons which have not occurred in my brief outline of it.

Vol. xiii. p. 4. Koré. (Virgin.) Name given to Persephoneé. In Latin, Proserpina.

P. 6. Dikast and Heliast. Dicast=Judge, Heliast=Juryman, in Athens.

P. 7. 1. Kordax-step. 2. Propulaia. (Propylaia.) 1. An indecent dance. 2. Gateway of the Acropolis. 3. Pnux. (Pnyx.) 4. Bema. 3. Place for the Popular Assembly. 4. Place whence speeches were made.

P. 8 Makaria. Heroine in a play of Euripides, who killed herself for her country's sake.

P. 10. 1. Milesian smart-place. 2. Phrunikos. (Phrynicus.) 1. The painful remembrance of the capture of Miletus. 2. A dramatic poet, who made this capture the subject of a tragedy, "which, when performed (493), so painfully wrung the feelings of the Athenian audience that they burst into tears in the theatre, and the poet was condemned to pay a fine of 1,000 drachmai, as having recalled to them their own misfortunes."^[52] He is derided by Aristophanes in the "Frogs" for his method of introducing his characters.

P. 12. Amphitheos, Deity, and Dung. A character in the Acharnians of Aristophanes—"not a god, and yet immortal."

P. 14. 1. Diaulos. 2. Stade. 1. A double line of the Race-course. 2. The Stadium, on reaching which, the runner went back again.

P. 16. City of Gapers. Nickname of Athens, from the curiosity of its inhabitants.

P. 17. Koppa-marked. Race-horses of the best breed were marked with the old letter Koppa.

P. 18. Comic Platon. The comic writer of that name: author of plays and poems, not THE Plato.

P. 21. Salabaccho. Name of a courtesan.

P. 30. Cheek-band. Band worn by trumpeters to support the cheeks. Cuckoo-apple. Fruit so-called=fool-making food. Threttanelo, Neblaretai. Imitative sounds: 1. Of a harp-string. 2. Of any joyous cry. Three-days' salt-fish slice. Allowance of a soldier on an expedition. (It was supposed that at the end of this time he could forage for himself.)

P. 31. Goat's breakfast and other abuse. Indecent allusions, to be fancied, not explained.

P. 32. Sham Ambassadors. Characters in the Acharnians. Kudathenian. Famous Athenian. Pandionid. Descendant of Pandion, King of Athens. Goat-Song. Tragoedia—Tradegy. It was called goat-song because a goat-skin, probably filled with wine, was once given as a prize for it. The expression occurs in Shelley.

P. 33. Willow-Wicker Flask. Nickname of the poet it is applied to, a toper.

P. 36. Lyric Shell or Tragic Barbiton. Lesser and larger lyre.

P. 38. Sousarion. Susarion of Megara, inventor of Attic comedy. Chionides. His successor.

P. 39. Little-in-the-Fields. The Dionysian Feast; a lesser one than the City Dionysia.

P. 40. Ameipsias. A comic poet, contemporary with Aristophanes, whose two best plays he beat.

P. 42. Iostephanos. "Violet-crowned," name of Athens. Kleophon. A demagogue of bad character, attacked by Aristophanes as profligate, and an enemy of peace. Kleonumos. A similar character; also a big fellow, and great coward.

P. 43. Telekleides. Old comic poet, on the same side as Aristophanes. Mullos and Euetes. Comic poets who revived the art of comedy in Athens after Susarion.

P. 44. Morucheides. Son of Morychus—like his father, a comic poet and a glutton. Sourakosios. Another comic poet.

P. 46. Trilophos. Wearer of three crests on his helmet.

P. 47. Ruppapai. Word used by the crew in rowing—hence, the crew itself.

P. 49. Free dinner in the Prutaneion. (Prytaneion.) Such was accorded to certain privileged persons. Ariphrades. A man of infamous character, singer to the harp: persistently attacked by Aristophanes. Karkinos. Comic actor: had famous dancing sons.

P. 50. Exomis. A woman's garment. Parachoregema. Subordinate chorus, which sings in the absence of the principal one. Aristullos. Bad character satirized by Aristophanes, and used in one of his plays as a travesty of Plato. This incident, and Plato's amused indifference, are mentioned at p. 137 of the Apology.

P. 51. Murrhine, Akalantis. Female names in the Thesmophoriazusae. New Kalligeneia. Name given to Ceres, meaning, "bearer of lovely children." The Toxotes. A Syrian archer in the "Thesmophoriazusae." The Great King's Eye. Mock name given to an ambassador from Persia in the Acharnians. Kompolakuthes. Bully-boaster: with a play on the name of Lamachus.

P. 52. Silphion. A plant used as a relish. Kleon-Clapper. Corrector of Kleon.

P. 54. Trugaios. Epithet of Bacchus, "vintager;" here name of a person in the comedy of "Peace." Story of Simonides. Simonides, the lyric poet, sang an ode to his patron, Scopas, at a feast; and as he had introduced into it the praises of Castor and Pollux, Scopas declared that he would only pay his own half-share of the ode, and the Demi-gods might pay the remainder. Presently it was announced to Simonides that two youths desired to see him outside the palace; on going there he found nobody, but meanwhile the palace fell in, killing his patron. Thus was he paid.

P. 58. Maketis. Capital of Macedonia.

P. 60. Lamachos. General who fell at the siege of Syracuse; satirized by Aristophanes as a brave, but boastful man.

P. 67. Sophroniskos' Son. Socrates.

P. 74. Kephisophon. Actor, and friend of Euripides; enviously reported to help him in writing his plays.

P. 79. Palaistra. A wrestling-school, or place of exercise.

P. 82. San. Letter distinguishing race-horses. Thearion's Meal-Tub Politics. Politics of Thearion the baker. Pisthetarios. Character in the "Birds," alias "Mr. Persuasive." Strephsiades. Character in the "Clouds."

P. 83. Rocky ones. Epithet given to the Athenians.

P. 85. Promachos. Champion.

P. 86. The Boulé. State Council. Prodikos. Prodicus. A Sophist, satirized in the "Birds" and "Clouds."

P. 87. Choes. Festival at Athens. "The Pitchers."

P. 89. Plataian help. The Platæans sent a thousand well appointed warriors to help at Marathon. The term stands for timely help.

P. 94. Plethron square. 100 feet square.

P. 98. Palaistra tool. Tool used at the Palaistra, or wrestling school: in this case the strigil.

P. 99. Phales. Iacchos. Two epithets of Bacchus—the former indecent.

P. 112. Kinesias. According to Aristophanes, a bad profligate lyric poet, notable for his leanness.

P. 113. Rattei. Like "Neblaretai," an imitative or gibberish word expressing joyous excitement. Aristonumos. Sannurion. Two comic poets, the latter ridiculed by Aristophanes for his leanness.

P. 124. Parabasis. Movement of the chorus, wherein the Coryphoeus came forward and spoke in the poet's name.

P. 128. Skiadeion. Sunshade. Parasol.

P. 129. Theoria. Opora. Characters in the Eirené or "Peace:" the first personifying games, spectacles, sights; the second, plenty, fruitful autumn, and so on.

P. 133. Philokleon. Lover of Kleon. (Cleon.) Bdelukleon. Reviler of Kleon.

P. 135. Logeion. Front of the stage occupied by the actors.

P. 137. Kukloboros-roaring. Roaring like the torrent Cycloborus (in Attica).

P. 140. Konnos. The play by Ameipsias which beat the "Clouds." Euthumenes. One who refused the pay of the comic writers, while he tripled that of those who attended at the Assembly. Argurrhios. As before. Kinesias. As before.

P. 144. Triballos. A supposed country and clownish god.

P. 172. Propula. (Propyla.) Gateway to the Acropolis.

P. 248. Elaphebolion month. The "Stag-striking" month.

P. 249. Bakis prophecy. Foolish prophecies attributed to one Bacis, rife at that time; a collective name for all such.

P. 255. Kommos. General weeping—by the chorus and an actor.

"FIFINE AT THE FAIR."

"Fifine at the Fair" is a defence of inconstancy, or of the right of experiment in love; and is addressed by a husband to his wife, whose supposed and very natural comments the monologue reflects. The speaker's implied name of Don Juan sufficiently tells us what we are meant to think of his arguments; and they also convict themselves by landing him in an act of immorality, which brings its own punishment. This character is nevertheless a standing puzzle to Mr. Browning's readers, because that which he condemns in it, and that which he does not, are not to be distinguished from each other. It is impossible to see where Mr. Browning ends and where Don Juan begins. The reasoning is scarcely ever that of a heartless or profligate person, though it very often betrays an unconsciously selfish one. It treats love as an education still more than as a pleasure; and if it lowers the standard of love, or defends too free an indulgence in it, it does so by asserting what is true for imaginative persons, though not for the commonplace: that whatever stirs even a sensuous admiration appeals also to the artistic, the moral, and even the religious nature. Its obvious sophistries are mixed up with the profoundest truths, and the speaker's tone has often the tenderness of one who, with all his inconstancy, has loved deeply and long. We can only solve the problem by referring to the circumstances in which the idea of the poem arose.

Mr. Browning was, with his family, at Pornic many years ago, and there saw the gipsy who is the original of Fifine. His fancy was evidently sent 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, thinking in some degree his thoughts, using in some degree his language, and only standing out as a distinctive character at the end of the poem. The higher type of womanhood must appear in the story, at the same time as the lower which is represented by Fifine; and Mr. Browning would instinctively clothe it in the form which first suggested or emphasized the contrast. He would soon, however, feel that the vision was desecrated by the part it was called upon to play. He would disguise or ward it off when possible: now addressing Elvire by her husband's mouth, in the terms of an ideal companionship, now again reducing her to the level of an every-day injured wife; and when the dramatic Don Juan was about to throw off the mask, the flickering wifely personality would be extinguished altogether, and the unfaithful husband left face to face with the mere phantom of conscience which, in one sense, Elvire is always felt to be. This is what actually occurs; and only from this point of view can we account for the perpetual encroaching of the imaginary on the real, the real on the imaginary, which characterizes the work.

A fanciful prologue, "Amphibian," strikes its key-note. The writer imagines himself floating on the sea, pleasantly conscious of his bodily existence, yet feeling unfettered by it. A strange beautiful butterfly floats past him in the air; her radiant wings can be only those of a soul; and it strikes him that while the waves are his property, and the air is hers, hers is true freedom, his only the mimicry of it. He sees little to regret in this, since imagination is as good as reality; and Heaven itself can only be made up of such things as poets dream. Yet he knows that his swimming seems but a foolish compromise between the flight to which he cannot attain, and the more grovelling mode of being which he has no real wish to renounce; and he wonders whether she, the already released, who is upborne by those sunlit wings, does not look down with pity and wonder upon him. So also will Elvire, though less dispassionately, watch the intellectual vagaries of her Don Juan, which embrace the heavens, but are always centred in earth. This prologue is preceded by a quotation from Molière's "Don Juan," in which Elvire satirically prescribes to her lover the kind of self-defence—or something not unlike it—which Mr. Browning's hero will adopt.

Don Juan invites his wife to walk with him through the fair: and as he points out its sights to her, he expatiates on the pleasures of vagrancy, and declares that the red pennon waving on the top of the principal booth sends an answering thrill of restlessness through his own frame. He then passes to a glowing eulogium on the charms of the dark-skinned rope-dancer, Fifine, who forms part of the itinerant show.

Elvire gives tokens of perturbation, and her husband frankly owns that as far as Fifine is concerned, he cannot defend his taste: he can scarcely account for it. "Beautiful she is, in her feminine grace and strength, set forth by her boyish dress; but with probably no more feeling than a sprite, and no more conscience than a flower. It is likely enough that her antecedents have been execrable, and that her life is in harmony with them." Still, he does not wish it supposed that he admires a body without a soul: and he tries to convince himself that Fifine, after all, is not quite without one. "There is no grain of sand on the sea-shore which may not, once in a century, be the first to flash back the rising sun; there can be no human spirit which does not in the course of its existence greet the Divine light with one answering ray."

But no heavenly spark can be detected in Fifine; and he is reduced to seeking a virtue for her, a justification for himself, in that very fact. If she has no virtue, she also pretends to none. If she gives nothing to society, she asks nothing of it. His fancy raises up a procession of such women as the world has crowned: a Helen, a Cleopatra, some Christian saint; he bids Elvire see herself as part of it—as the true Helen, who, according to the legend, never quitted Greece, contemplated her own phantom within the walls of Troy—and be satisfied that she is "best" of all. "All alike are wanting in one grace which Fifine possesses: that of self-effacement. Helen and Cleopatra demand unquestioning homage for their own mental as well as bodily charms; the saint demands it for the principle she sets forth. His love demands that he shall see into her heart; his wife that he shall believe the impossible as regards her own powers of devotion. Fifine says,'You come to look at my outside, my foreign face and figure my outlandish limbs. Pay for the sight if it has pleased you, and give me credit for nothing beyond what you see.' So simply honest an appeal must touch his heart."

Don Juan well knows what his wife thinks of all this, and he says it for her. "Fifine attracts him for no such out of the way reason. Her charm is that she is something new, and something which does not belong to him. He is the soul of inconstancy; and if he had the sun for his own, he would hanker after other light, were it that of a tallow-candle or a squib." But he assures her that this reasoning is unsound, and his amusing himself with a lower thing does not prove that he has become indifferent to the higher. He shows this by reminding her of a picture of Raphael's, which he was mad to possess; which now that he possesses it, he often neglects for a picture-book of Doré's; but which, if threatened with destruction, he would save at the sacrifice of a million Dorés, perhaps of his own life. And now he turns back to her phantom self, as present in his own mind; describes it in terms of exquisite grace and purity; and declares hers the one face which fits into his heart, and makes whole what would be half without it.

Elvire is conciliated; but her husband will not leave well alone. He has established her full claim to his admiration: but he is going to prove that so far as her physical charms are concerned, she owes it to his very attachment: "for those charms are not attested by her looking-glass. He discovers them by the eye of love—in other words—by the artist soul within him."

All beauty, Don Juan farther explains, is in the imagination of him who feels it, be he lover or artist; be the beauty he descries the attribute of a living face, of a portrait, or of some special arrangement of sound. The feeling is inspired by its outward objects, but it cannot be retraced to them. It is a fancy created by fact, as flame by fuel; no more identical with it. The fancy is not on that account a delusion. It is the vision of ideal truth: the recognition by an inner sense of that which does not exist for the outer. That is why hearts choose each other by help of the face, and why they choose so diversely. The eye of love, which again is the eye of art, reads soul into the features, however incomplete their expression of it may be. It reconstructs the ideal type which nature has failed to carry out.

He illustrates this by means of three faces roughly sketched in the sand. At first sight they are grotesque and unmeaning. Yet a few more strokes of the broken pipe which is serving him as a pencil, will give to two of these a predominating expression; convert the third into a likeness of Elvire.

"These completing touches represent the artist's action upon life. By this method Don Juan has been enabled on a former occasion, to complete a work of high art. A block of marble had come into his possession, half shaped by the hand of Michael Angelo.

Not death to him: for as he gazed on the rough-hewn block, a form emerged upon his mental sight—a form which he interpreted as that of the goddess Eidotheé.^[53] And as his soul received it from that of the dead master, his hand carried it out."

Mr. Browning's whole theory of artistic perception is contained in the foregoing lines; but he proceeds to enforce it in another way. "The life thus evoked from death, the beauty from ugliness, is the gain of each special soul—its permanent conquest over matter. The mode of effecting this is the special secret of every soul; and this Don Juan defines as its chemic secret, the law of its affinities, the law of its actions and reactions. Where one, he says, lights force, another draws forth pity; where one finds food for self-indulgence, another acquires strength for self-sacrifice. One blows life's ashes into rose-coloured flame, another into less heavenly hues. Love will have reached its height when the secret of each soul has become the knowledge of all; and the many-coloured rays of individual experience are fused in the white light of universal truth."

Here again Don Juan imagines a retort. Elvire makes short work of his poetic theories, and declares that this professed interest in souls is a mere pretext for the gratification of sense. "Whom in heaven's name is he trying to take in?" He entreats music to take his part. "It alone can pierce the mists of falsehood which intervene between the soul and truth. And now, as they stroll homewards in the light of the setting sun, all things seem charged with those deeper harmonies—with those vital truths of existence which words are powerless to convey. Elvire, however, has no soul for music, and her husband must have recourse to words."

The case between them may, he thinks, be stated in this question, "How do we rise from falseness into truth?" "We do so after the fashion of the swimmer who brings his nostrils to the level of the upper air, but leaves the rest of his body under water—by the act of self-immersion in the very element from which we wish to escape. Truth is to the aspiring soul as the upper air to the swimmer: the breath of life. But if the swimmer attempts to free his head and arms, he goes under more completely than before. If the soul strives to escape from the grosser atmosphere into the higher, she shares the same fate. Her truthward yearnings plunge her only deeper into falsehood. Body and soul must alike surrender themselves to an element in which they cannot breathe, for this element can alone sustain them. But through the act of plunging we float up again, with a deeper disgust at the briny taste we have brought back; with a deeper faith in the life above, and a deeper confidence in ourselves, whom the coarser element has proved unable to submerge."

"Suppose again, that as we paddle with our hands under water, we grasp at something which seems a soul. The piece of falsity slips through our fingers, but by the mechanical reaction just described, it sends us upwards into the realm of truth. This is precisely what Fifine has done. Of the earth earthy as she is, she has driven you and me into the realms of abstract truth. We have thus no right to despise her" This discourse is interrupted by a contemptuous allusion to a passage in "Childe Harold," (fourth canto), in which the human intelligence is challenged to humble itself before the ocean.

Elvire is still dissatisfied. The suspicious fact remains, that whatever experience her husband desires to gain, it is always a woman who must supply it. This he frankly admits; and he gives his reason. "Women lend themselves to experiment; men do not. Men are egotists, and absorb whatever comes in their way. Women, whether Fifines or Elvires, allow themselves to be absorbed. You master men only by reducing yourself to their level. You captivate women by showing yourself at your best. Their power of hero-worship is illustrated by the act of the dolphin, 'True woman creature,' which bore the ship-wrecked Arion to the Corinthian coast. Men are not only wanting in true love: their best powers are called forth by hate. They resemble the vine, first 'stung' into 'fertility' by the browsing goat, which nibbled away its tendrils, and gained the 'indignant wine' by the process. In their feminine characteristics Elvire stands far higher than Fifine; but Fifine is for that very reason more useful as a means of education; for Elvire may be trusted implicitly; Fifine teaches one to take care of himself. They are to each other as the strong ship and the little rotten bark." This comparison is suggested by a boatman whom they lately saw adventurously pushing his way through shoal and sandbank because he would not wait for the tide.

Don Juan begs leave to speak one word more in defence of Fifine and her masquerading tribe; it will recall his early eulogium on her frankness. "All men are actors: but these alone do not deceive. All you are expected to applaud in them is the excellence of the avowed sham."

Don Juan has thus developed his theory that soul is attainable through flesh, truth through falsehood, the real through what only seems; and, as he thinks, justified the conclusion that a man's spiritual life is advanced by every experience, moral or immoral, which comes in his way. He now relates a dream by which, as he says, those abstract reflections have been in part inspired; in reality, it continues, and in some degree refutes them. The dream came to him this morning when he had played himself to sleep with Schumann's Carnival; having chosen this piece because his brain was burdened with many thoughts and fancies which, better than any other, it would enable him to work off; and as he tells this, he enlarges on the faculty of music to register, as well as express, every passing emotion of the human soul. He notes also the constant recurrence of the same old themes, and the caprice of taste which strives as constantly to convert them into something new.

The dream carries him to Venice, and he awakes, in fancy, on some pinnacle above St. Mark's Square, overlooking the Carnival. Here his power of artistic divination—alias of human sympathy, is called into play; for the men and women below him all wear the semblance of some human deformity, of some animal type, or of some grotesque embodiment of human feeling or passion. He throws himself into their midst, and these monstrosities disappear. The human asserts itself; the brute-like becomes softened away; what imperfection remains creates pity rather than disgust. He finds that by shifting his point of view, he can see even necessary qualities in what otherwise struck him as faults.

Another change takes place: one felt more easily than defined; and he becomes aware that he is looking not on Venice, but on the world, and that what seemed her Carnival is in reality the masquerade of life. The change goes on. Halls and temples are transformed beneath his gaze. The systems which they represent: religions, philosophies, moralities, and theories of art, collapse before him, re-form and collapse again. He sees that the deepest truth can only build on sand, though itself is stationed on a rock; and can only assert its substance in the often changing forms of error. The vision seems to declare that change is the Law of Life.

"Not so," it was about to say. "That law is permanence." The scene has resembled the forming and reforming, the blending and melting asunder of a pile of sunset clouds. Like these, when the sun has set, it is subsiding into a fixed repose, a stern and colourless uniformity. Temple, tower, and dwelling-house assume the form of one solitary granite pile, a Druid monument. This monument, as Mr. Browning describes it,^[54] consists really of two, so standing or lying as to form part of each other. The one cross-shaped is supposed to have been sepulchral, or in some other way sacred to death. The latter, on which he mainly dwells, was, until lately, the centre of a rude nature-worship, and is therefore consecrated to life. It symbolizes life in its most active and most perennial form. It means the force which aspires to heaven, and the strength which is rooted in the earth. It means that impulse of all being towards something outside itself, which is constant amidst all change, uniform amidst all variety. It means the last word of the scheme of creation, and therefore also the first. It repeats and concludes the utterance already sounding in the spectator's ear:—

The condition of this monument, its history, the conjectures to which it has given rise, are described in a humorous spirit which belies its mystic significance; but that significance is imbedded in the very conception of the poem, and distinctly expressed in the author's subsequent words. The words which I have just quoted contain the whole philosophy of "Fifine at the Fair" as viewed on its metaphysical side. They declare the changing relations of the soul to some fixed eternal truth foreshadowed in the impulses of sense. They are the burden of Don Juan's argument even when he is defending what is wrong. They are the constantly recurring keynote of what the author has meant to say.

Don Juan draws also a new and more moral lesson from this final vision of his dream. "Inconstancy is not justified by natural law, for it means unripeness of soul. The ripe soul evolves the Infinite from a fixed point. It finds the many in the one. Elvire is the one who includes the many. Elvire is the ocean: while Fifine is but the foam-flake which the ocean can multiply at pleasure. Elvire shall henceforth suffice to him."

But here, as elsewhere, he makes a great mistake: that of confusing nature with the individual man. Her instability supplied him with no excuse for being inconstant, and her permanence gives him no motive for constancy; and he proves this in another moment by breaking bounds no longer in word only, but in deed. It turns out that he had put gold as well as silver into Fifine's tambourine. The result, intended or not, has been a letter slipped into his hand. He claims five minutes to go and "clear the matter up;" exceeds the time, and on returning finds his punishment in an empty home.

This at least, we seem intended to infer. For Elvire has already startled him by assuming the likeness of a phantom, and he gives her leave, in case he breaks his word, to vanish away altogether. The story ends here; but its epilogue "The Householder" depicts a widowed husband, grotesquely miserable, fetched home by his departed wife; and his identity with Don Juan seems unmistakable. This scene is more humorous than pathetic, as befits the dramatic spirit of the poem; but the most serious purport and most comprehensive meaning of "Fifine at the Fair" are summed up in its closing words. The "householder" is composing his epitaph, and his wife thus concludes it: "Love is all, and Death is nought."

"PRINCE HOHENSTIEL-SCHWANGAU, SAVIOUR OF SOCIETY."

"Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau" is a defence of the doctrine of expediency: and the monologue is supposed to be carried on by the late Emperor of the French, under this feigned name. Louis Napoleon is musing over past and present, and blending them with each other in a waking dream. He seems in exile again. But the events of his reign are all, or for the most part behind him, and they have earned for him the title of "inscrutable." A young lady of an adventurous type has crossed his path, in the appropriate region of Leicester Square. Some adroit flattery on her side has disposed him to confidence, and he is proving to her, over tea and cigars, that he is not so "inscrutable" after all; or, if he be, that the key to the enigma is a simple one. "This wearer of crinoline seems destined to play Oedipus to the Sphinx he is supposed to be;" or better still, as he gallantly adds, the "Lais" for whose sake he will unveil the mystery unasked. The situation he thus assumes is not dignified; but as Mr. Browning probably felt, his choice of a confidante suits the nature of what he has to tell, as well as the circumstances in which he tells it. Politically, he has lived from hand to mouth. So in a different way has she. A very trifling incident enables him to illustrate his confession, which will proceed without interruption on the listener's part.

They are sitting at a table with writing materials upon it. Among these lies a piece of waste-paper. Prince Hohenstiel descries upon it two blots, takes up a pen, and draws a line from one to the other. This simple, half-mechanical act is, as he declares, a type of his whole life; it contains the word of the enigma. His constant principle has been: not to strive at creating anything new; not to risk marring what already existed; but to adapt what he found half made and to continue it. In other words, he has been a sustainer or "saviour," not a reformer of society.

Many pages are devoted to the statement and vindication of this fact, and they contain everything that can be said, from a religious or practical point of view, in favour of taking the world as we find it. Prince Hohenstiel's first argument is: that he has not the genius of a reformer, and it is a man's first duty to his Creator to do that only which he can do best; his second: that sweeping reforms are in themselves opposed to the creative plan, because they sacrifice everything to one leading idea, and aim at reducing to one pattern those human activities which God has intended to be multiform; the third and strongest: that the scheme of existence with all its apparent evils is God's work, and no man can improve upon it. There have been, he admits, revolutions in the moral as well as the physical world; and inspired reformers, who were born to carry them on; but these men are rare and portentous as the physical agencies to which they correspond, and whether "dervish (desert-spectre), swordsman, saint, lawgiver," or "lyrist," appear only when the time is ripe for them. Meanwhile, the great machine advances by means of the minute springs, the revolving wheel-work, of individual lives. Let each of these be content with its limited sphere. God is with each and all.

And Prince Hohenstiel has another and still stronger reason for not desiring to tamper with the existing order of things. He finds it good. He loves existence as he knows it, with its mysteries and its beauties; its complex causes and incalculable effects; the good it extracts from evil; the virtue it evolves from suffering. He reveres that Temple of God's own building, from which deploys the ever varying procession of human life. If the temple be intricate in its internal construction, if its architectural fancies impede our passage; if they make us stumble or even fall; his invariable advice is this: "Throw light on the stumbling-blocks; fix your torch above them at such points as the architect approves. But do not burn them away." He considers himself therefore, not a very great man, but a useful one: one possessing on a small scale the patience of an Atlas, if not the showy courage of a Hercules: one whose small achievements pave the way for the great ones.

Thus far the imaginary speaker so resembles Mr. Browning himself, that we forget for the moment that we are not dealing with him; and his vicarious testimony to the value of human life lands him, at page 145, in a personal protest against the folly which under cover of poetry seeks to run it down. He lashes out against the "bard" who can rave about inanimate nature as something greater than man; and who talks of the "unutterable" impressions conveyed by the ocean, as greater than the intelligence and sympathy, the definite thoughts and feelings which can be uttered. The lines from "Childe Harold" which will be satirized in "Fifine at the Fair" are clearly haunting him here. But we shall now pass on to more historic ground.

It is a natural result of these opinions that Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau regards life as the one boon which contains every other; and that the material prosperity of his people has been the first object by which his "sustaining" policy was inspired. He does not deny that even within the limits thus imposed, some choice of cause or system seemed open to him. "It seemed open to him to choose between religion and free-thought, between monarchy and government by the people: and to throw his energies entirely into one scale or the other, instead of weighting one and the other by turns. It could justly have been urged that the simpler aim is included in the more complex, and that he would promote the interests of his subjects by serving them from the wider, rather than from the narrower point of view."

"But what is true in theory is not always so in practice. He has loved a cause, and believed in it—the cause of united Italy; and so long as he was free to express sympathy with this—so long, his critics say, as he was a mere voice, with air to float in, and no obstacle to bar his way—he expressed it from the bottom of his soul. But with the power to act—with the firm ground wheron to act—came also the responsibilities of action: the circumstance by which it must be controlled. He saw the wants of his people; the eyes which craved light alone, and the mouths which craved only bread. He felt that the ideal must yield to the real, the remote to what was near; and the work of Italian deliverance remained incomplete. It was his very devotion to the one principle which brought the reproach of vacillation upon him."

"He broke faith with his people too"—so his critics continue—"for he supplied food to their bodies; but withheld the promised liberties of speech and writing which would have brought nourishment to their souls."

And again he answers that he gave them what they wanted most. He gave them that which would enable them to acquire freedom of soul, and without which such freedom would have been useless.

He concedes something, however, to reformers by declaring, as his final excuse, that he would not have thus yielded to circumstances if the average life of man were a hundred years instead of twenty; for, given sufficient time, all adverse circumstance may be overcome. "The body dies if it be thwarted. Mind—in other words, intellectual truth—triumphs through opposition. Envy, hatred, and stupidity, are to it as the rocks which obstruct the descending stream, and toss it in jewelled spray above the chasm by which it is confined. Abstract thinkers have therefore their rights also; and it is well that those, in some respects, greater and better men than he, who are engaged in the improvement of the world, should find success enough to justify their hopes; failure enough to impose caution on their endeavours."

The Prince confesses once for all, that since improvement is so necessarily limited; since the higher life is incompatible with life in the flesh: he is content to wait for the higher life and make the best he can of the lower. But if anyone declares that this quiescent attitude means indolence or sleep, his judgment is on a par with that which was once passed on the famous statue of the Laocoon. Some artist had covered the accessories of the group, and left only the contorted central figure, with nothing to explain its contortions. One man said as he looked upon it,

Every other spectator pronounced the "gesture" a yawn.

Prince Hohenstiel gives us a second proof that he is not without belief in the ideal. He accepts the doctrine of evolution: though not in its scientific sense. He likes the idea of having felt his way up to humanity (as he now feels his way in it) through progressive forms of existence; he being always himself, and nowise the thing he dwelt in. He likes to account in this manner for the feeling of kinship which attracts him to all created things. It also completes his vision of mankind as fining off at the summit into isolated peaks, but held together at the base by its common natural life; and thus confirms him in the impression that the personal needs and mutual obligations of the natural life are paramount.

As he concludes this part of his harangue, an amused consciousness steals over him that he has been washing himself very white; and that his self-defence has been principally self-praise—at least, to his listener's ears. So he proceeds to show that his arguments were just, by showing how easily, being blamed for the one course of action, he might have been no less censured for the opposite. He imagines that his life has been written by some romancing historian of the Thiers and Victor Hugo type; and that in this version, practical wisdom, or SAGACITY, is made to suggest everything which he has really done, while he unwisely obeys the dictates of ideal virtue and does everything which he did not.

Hohenstiel-Schwangau (France) had made him her head-servant: president of the assembly which she had elected to serve her; and he knew that his fellow-servants were working for their own ends, while he alone was faithful to his bond. He, doubtless, had his dreams, conjured up by SAGACITY, of pouncing upon the unfaithful ones, denouncing them to his mistress, the State, and begging her to allow him to do their work as well as his own, till such time as the danger was past, and her desire for a more popular government could be fulfilled. But in so doing he would have deceived her, and he chose the truth. He knew that he had no right to substitute himself for the multitude, his knowledge for their ignorance, his will for theirs; since wise and foolish were alike of God's creating, and each had his own place and purpose in the general scheme. (Here and through the following pages, 176-7, the real and the imaginary Prince appear merged into each other.) He performed his strict duty, and left things to their natural course.

His position grew worse and worse. His fellow-servants made no secret of their plans—to be carried into execution when his time of service should have expired, and his controlling hand been removed from them. Each had his own mine of tyranny—whether Popedom, Socialism, or other—which he meant to spring on the people fancying itself free. The Head Servant was silent. They took fright at his silence. "It meant mischief." "It meant counterplot." "It meant some stroke of State." "He must be braved and bullied. His re-election must be prevented; the sword of office must be wrested from his grasp."

At length his time expired, and then he acted and spoke. He made no "stroke of State." He stepped down from his eminence; laid his authority in the people's hand; proved to it its danger, and proposed that Hohenstiel-Schwangau should give him the needful authority for protecting her. The proposal was unanimously accepted; and he justified his own judgment and that of his country by chastising every disturber of the public peace, and reducing alike knaves and fools to silence and submission. But now SAGACITY found fault: "he had not taken the evil in time; he might have nipped it in the bud, and saved life and liberty by so doing: he had waited till it was full grown, and the cost in life and liberty had been enormous." He replied that he had been checked by his allegiance to the law; and that rather than strain the law, however slightly, he was bound to see it broken.

And so, the record continues, he worked and acted to the end. He had received his authority from the people; he governed first for them. (Here again, and at the following page 184, we seem to recognize the real Hohenstiel or Louis Napoleon, rather than the imaginary.) He walked reverently—superstitiously, if spectators will—in the path marked out for him, ever fearing to imperil what was good in the existing order of things; but casting all fear aside when an obvious evil cried out for correction. Hohenstiel-Schwangau—herself a republic—had attacked the liberties of Rome, and destroyed them with siege and slaughter. On his accession to power, he found this "infamy triumphant."

SAGACITY suggested that he should leave it untouched. "It was no work of his; he was not answerable for its existence. It had its political advantages for his own country."

But he would not hear of such a course. There was a canker in the body politic, requiring to be cut out; and he cut it out: though the patient roared, the wound bled, and the operator was abused by friend and foe.

"Why so rough and precipitate?" again SAGACITY interposed, "though the right were on your side? Why not temporize, persuade, even threaten, before coming to blows?"

"Yes," was the reply, "and see the evil strengthen while you look on."

SAGACITY defended her advice on larger grounds; and here too he was at issue with her. Hohenstiel-Schwangau had a passion for fighting. She would fight for anything, or for nothing, merely to show that she knew how. Give her a year's peace after any war, and she was once more ready for the fray. Prince Hohenstiel and SAGACITY both agreed that this evil temper must be destroyed; but SAGACITY advised him to undermine—Prince Hohenstiel chose to combat it.

SAGACITY said, "Here is an interval of peace. Prolong it, make it delightful; but do so under cover of intending to cut it short. If you would induce a fierce mountain tribe to come down from its fortress and settle in the plain, you do not bid it destroy the fortress. You bid it enjoy life in the city, and remember that it runs no risk in doing so, because it has its fortress to fall back upon at the first hint of danger. And the time will come when it can hear with equanimity that the fortress has gone to ruin, and that fighting is no longer in fashion. The mountain tribe will have learned to love the fatness of the valley, while thinking of those mother ribs of its mountain fastness which are ever waiting to prop up its life. Just so put a wooden sword into the hand of the Hohenstieler, and let him brag of war, learning meanwhile the value of peace."

"Not so," the Prince replied; "my people shall not be cheated into virtue. Truth is the one good thing. I will tell them the truth. I will tell them that war, for war's sake, is damnable; that glory at its best is shame, since its image is a gilded bubble which a resolute hand might prick, but the breath of a foolish multitude buoys up beyond its reach." "And what," he asked, "is the glory, what the greatness, which this foolish nation seeks? That of making every other small; not that of holding its place among others which are themselves great. Shall such a thing be possible as that the nation which earth loves best—a people so aspiring, so endowed; so magnetic in its attraction for its fellow-men—shall think its primacy endangered because another selects a ruler it has not patronized, or chooses to sell steel untaxed?"

"But this does not mean that Hohenstiel is to relinquish the power of war. The aggressiveness which is damnable in herself is to be condemned in others, and to be punished in them. Therefore, for the sake of Austria who sins, of Italy who suffers, of Hohenstiel-Schwangau who has a duty to perform, the war which SAGACITY deprecates must be waged, and Austria smitten till Italy is free."

"At least," rejoins SAGACITY, "you secure some reward from the country you have freed; say, the cession of Nice and Savoy; something to satisfy those at home who doubt the market-value of right and truth."

"No," is the reply, "you may preach that to Metternich and remain with him." And so the Prince worked on; determined that neither fear, nor treachery, nor much less blundering, on his part, should imperil the precarious balance of the world's life.

Once more, and for the last time, SAGACITY lifts up her voice. "You were the fittest man to rule. Give solidity to your life's work by leaving a fit successor to carry it on. Secure yourself this successor in a son. The world is open to you for the choice of your bride."

And again the ideal Prince retorts on the suggestion. "The fit successor is not secured in this way. All experience proves it. The spark of genius is dropped where God will. It may find hereditary (hence accumulated) faculties ready to be ignited. It may fire the barren rock." And, changing the metaphor,

He ends by calling up the vision of an Italian wayside temple, in which, as the legend declares, succession was carried on after a very different principle. Each successive high priest has become so by murdering his predecessor, his qualification being found in that simple fact; or in the qualities of cunning or courage of which it has been the test.^[56]

And now the dream is lived through, and Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau awakens in his own palace: not much better pleased with his own plain speaking than with the imaginary heroics of Messrs. Hugo and Thiers. "One's case is so much stronger before it is put into words. Motives which seem sufficient in the semi-darkness of one's own consciousness, are so feeble in the light of day. When we reason with ourselves, we subordinate outward claims without appearing to do so: since the necessity of making the best of life for our own sake supplies unconsciously to ourselves the point of view from which all our reasonings proceed. When forced to think aloud, we stoop to what is probably an untruth. We say that our motives were—what they should have been; what perhaps we have fancied them to be."

These closing pages convey the author's comment on Prince Hohenstiel's defence. They present it, in his well-known manner, as what such a man might be tempted to say; rather than what this particular man was justified in saying. But he takes the Prince's part in the lines beginning,

for they farther declare that though we aim at truth, our words cannot always be trusted to hit it. The best cannon ever rifled will sometimes deflect. Words do this also. We recognize the conviction of the inadequacy of language which was so forcibly expressed in the Pope's soliloquy in "The Ring and the Book," but in what seems a more defined form.

"BISHOP BLOUGRAM'S APOLOGY."

"Bishop Blougram's Apology" is a defence of religious conformity in those cases in which the doctrines to which we conform exceed our powers of belief, but ate not throughout opposed to them; its point of view being that of a Roman Catholic churchman, who has secured his preferment by this kind of compromise. It is addressed to a semi-freethinker, who is supposed to have declared that a man who could thus identify himself with Romish superstitions must be despised as either knave or fool; and Bishop Blougram has undertaken to prove that he is not to be thus despised; and least of all by the person before him.

The argument is therefore special-pleading in the full sense of the word; and it is clear from a kind of editor's note with which the poem concludes, that we are meant to take it as such. But it is supposed to lie in the nature of the man who utters, as also in the circumstance in which it is uttered: for Bishop Blougram was suggested by Cardinal Wiseman;^[57] and the literary hack, Gigadibs, is the kind of critic by whom a Cardinal Wiseman is most likely to be assailed: a man young, shallow, and untried; unused to any but paper warfare; blind to the deeper issues of both conformity and dissent, and as much alive to the distinction of dining in a bishop's palace as Bishop Blougram himself. The monologue is spoken on such an occasion, and includes everything which Mr. Gigadibs says, or might say, on his own side of the question. We must therefore treat it as a conversation.

Mr. Gigadibs' reasoning resolves itself into this: "he does not believe in dogmas, and he says so. The Bishop cannot believe in them, but does not say so. He is true to his own convictions: the Bishop is not true to his." And the Bishop's defence is as follows.

"Mr. Gigadibs aims at living his own life: in other words, the ideal life. And this means that he is living no life at all. For a man, in order to live, must make the best of the world he is born in; he must adapt himself to its capabilities as a cabin-passenger to those of his cabin. He must not load himself with moral and intellectual fittings which the ship cannot carry, and which will therefore have to be thrown overboard. He (the Bishop) has chosen to live a real life; and has equipped himself accordingly."

"And, supposing he displays what Mr. Gigadibs considers the courage of his convictions, and flings his dogmas overboard,—what will he have gained? Simply that his uncertainty has changed sides. Believing, he had shocks of unbelief. Disbelieving, he will have shocks of belief (note a fine passage, vol. iv. p. 245): since no certainty in these matters is possible."

"But," says Gigadibs; "on that principle, your belief is worth no more than my unbelief."

"Yes," replies the Bishop, "it is worth much more in practice, if no more in theory. Life cannot be carried on by negations. Least of all will religious negations be tolerated by those we live with. And the more definite the religion affirmed, the better will the purposes of life be advanced by it."

"Not those of a noble life," argues Gigadibs, "nor in the judgment of the best men. You are debasing your standard by living for the many fools who cannot see through you, instead of the wiser few who can."

To which the Bishop replies that he lives according to the nature which God has given him, and which is not so ignoble after all; and that he succeeds with wise men as well as with fools, because they do not see through him either: because their judgment is kept in constant suspension as to whether he can believe what he professes or cannot; whether, in short, he is a knave or a fool. The proposition is vividly illustrated; and a few more obvious sophistries complete this portion of the argument.

Gigadibs still harps upon the fact that conformity cannot do the work of belief; and the Bishop now changes his ground. "He conforms to Christianity in the wish that it may be true; and he thinks that this wish has all the value of belief, and brings him as near to it as the Creator intends. The human mind cannot bear the full light of truth; and it is only in the struggle with doubt and error that its spiritual powers can be developed." He concedes, in short, that he is much more in earnest than he appeared; and the concession is confirmed when he goes on to declare that we live by our instincts and not by our beliefs. This is proved—he alleges—by such a man as Gigadibs, who has no warrant in his belief for living a moral life, and does so because his instincts compel it. Just so the Bishop's instincts compel a believing life. They demand for him a living, self-proving God (here the doctrine of expediency re-asserts itself), and they tell him that the good things which his position confers are the gift of that God, and intended by Him for his enjoyment. "You," he adds, "who live for something which never is, but always is to be, are like a traveller, who casts off, in every country he passes through, the covering that will be too warm for him in the next; and is comfortable nowhen and nowhere."

One of his latest arguments is the best. Gigadibs has said: "If you must hold a dogmatic faith, at all events reform it. Prune its excrescences away."

"And where," he retorts, "am I to stop, when once that process has begun? I put my knife to the liquefaction,^[58] and end, like Fichte, by slashing at God Himself. And meanwhile, we have to control a mass of ignorant persons whose obedience is linked to the farthest end of the chain (to the first superstition which I am called upon to lop off). We have here again a question of making the best of our cabin-fittings, the best of the opportunities which life places to our hand." In conclusion, he draws a contemptuous picture of the obscure and inconsequent existence which Gigadibs accepts, as the apostle without genius and without enthusiasm, of what is, if it be one at all, a non-working truth.

Gigadibs is silenced, and, as it proves, impressed; but the Bishop is too clever to be very proud of his victory; for he knows it has been a personal, much more than a real one. His strength has lain chiefly in the assumption (which only the entire monologue can justify or even convey) that his opponent would change places with him if he could; and he knows that in arguing from this point of view he has been only half sincere. His reasonings have been good enough for the occasion. That is the best he can say for them.

MR. SLUDGE, THE MEDIUM.

"Sludge, the Medium," is intended to show that even so ignoble a person as a sham medium may have something to say in his own defence; and so far as argument goes, Sludge defends himself successfully on two separate lines. But in the one case he excuses his imposture: in the other, he in great measure disproves it. And this second part of the monologue has been construed by some readers into a genuine plea for the theory and practice of "spiritualism." Nothing, however, could be more opposed to the general tenour of Mr. Browning's work. He is simply showing us what such a man might say in his own behalf, supposing that the credulity of others had tempted him into a cheat, or that his own credulity had made him a self-deceiver; or, what was equally possible, in even the present case, that both processes had gone on at the same time. The amount of abstract truth which the monologue is intended to convey is in itself small, and more diluted with exaggeration and falsehood than in any other poem of this group.

Sludge has been found cheating in the house of his principal patron and dupe. The raps indicating the presence of a departed mother have been distinctly traced to the medium's toes. There is no lying himself out of it this time, so he offers to confess, on condition that the means of leaving the country are secured to him. There is a little bargaining on this subject, and he then begins:—

"He never meant to cheat. It is the gentlefolk who have teased him into doing it; they would be taken in. If a poor boy like him tells a lie about money, or anything else in which they are 'up,' they are ready enough to thrash it out of him; but when it is something out of their way, like saying: he has had a vision—he has seen a ghost—it's 'Oh, how curious! Tell us all about it. Sit down, my boy. Don't be frightened, &c. &c.;' and so they lead him on. Presently he is obliged to invent. They have found out he is a medium. A medium he has got to be. 'Couldn't you hear this? Didn't you see that? Try again. Other mediums have done it, perhaps you may.' And, of course, the next night he sees and hears what is expected of him."

"He gets well into his work. He sees visions; peeps into the glass ball; makes spirits write and rap, and the rest of it. There is nothing to stop him. If he mixes up Bacon and Cromwell, it only proves that they are both trying to speak through him at once. If he makes Locke talk gibberish, and Beethoven play the Shakers' hymn, and a dozen other such things: 'Oh! the spirits are using him and suiting themselves out of his stock.' When he guesses right, it shows his truth. When he doesn't, it shows his honesty. A hit is good and a miss is better. When he boggles outright, 'he is confused with the phenomena.' And when this has gone on for weeks, and he has been clothed and cosseted, and his patrons have staked their penetration upon him; how is he to turn round and say he has been cheating all the time? 'I should like to see you do it!' It isn't that he wouldn't often have liked to be in the gutter again!"

This amusing account is diversified with expressions of Sludge's hearty contempt for all the men and women he has imposed upon: above all, for their absurd fancy that any scrap of unexpected information must have come to him in a supernatural way. "As if a man could hold his nose out of doors, and one smut out of the millions not stick to it; sit still for a whole day, and one atom of news not drift into his ear!" This idea recurs in various forms.

Well! he owns that he has cheated; and now that he has done so, he is not at all sure that it was all cheating, that there wasn't something real in it after all. "We are all taught to believe that there is another world; and the Bible shows that men have had dealings with it. We are told this can't happen now, because we are under another law. But I don't believe we are under another law. Some men 'see' and others don't, that's the only difference. I see a sign and a message in everything that happens to me; but I take a small message where you want a big one. I am the servant who comes at a tap of his master's knuckle on the wall; you are the servant who only comes when the bell rings. Of course I mistake the sign sometimes. But what does that matter if I sometimes don't mistake? You say: one fact doesn't establish a system. You are like the Indian who picked up a scrap of gold, and never dug for more. You pick up one sparkling fact, and let it go again. I pick up one such, then another and another, and let go the dirt which makes up the rest of life."

Sludge combats the probable objection that the heavenly powers are too great, and he is too small for the kind of services he expects of them. Everything, he delares, serves a small purpose as well as a great one. Moreover, nothing nowadays is small. It is at all events the lesser things and not the greater which are spoken of with awe. The simple creature which is only a sac is the nearest to the creative power; and since also man's filial relation to the Creator is that most insisted on, the more familiar and confiding attitude is the right one.

He lastly declares and illustrates his view that many a truth may stagnate for want of a lie to set it going, and thinks it likely enough that God allows him to imagine he is wielding a sham power, because he would die of fright if he knew it was a real one. He adds one or two somewhat irrelevant items to his defence; then finding his patron unconvinced, discharges on him a volley of abuse, and decides to try his luck elsewhere. "There must be plenty more fools in other parts of the world."

ARGUMENTATIVE POEMS CONTINUED.

(REFLECTIONS.)

To the second class of these poems, which are of the nature of reflections, belong—taking them in the order of their importance:—

• "Christmas-Eve and Easter-Day." (1850.)
• "La Saisiaz." (1878.)
• "Cleon." ("Men and Women.") (1855.)
• "An Epistle containing the strange medical experience of Karshish, the Arab physician."
•     ("Men and Women.") (1855.)
• "Caliban upon Setebos; or Natural Theology in the Island." (Dramatis Personæ.) (1864.)

CHRISTMAS-EVE AND EASTER-DAY are two distinct poems, printed under this one head: and each describing a spiritual experience appropriate to the day, and lived through in a vision of Christ. This vision presents itself to the reader as a probable or obvious hallucination, or even a simple dream; but its utterances are more or less dogmatic; they contain much which is in harmony with Mr. Browning's known views; and it is difficult at first sight to regard them in either case as proceeding from an imaginary person who is only feeling his way to the truth. This, however, they prove themselves to be.

The first poem is a narrative. Its various scenes are enacted on a stormy Christmas Eve; and it opens with a humorous description of a little dissenting chapel, supposed to stand at the edge of a common; and of the various types of squalid but self-satisfied humanity which find their spiritual pasture within its walls. The narrator has just "burst out" of it. He never meant to go in. But the rain had forced him to take shelter in its porch, as evening service was about to begin: and the defiant looks of the elect as they pushed past him one by one, had impelled him to assert his rights as a Christian, and push in too. The stupid ranting irreverence of the pastor, and the snuffling satisfaction of the flock, were soon, however, too much for him, and in a very short time he was again—where we find him—out in the fresh night air.

Free from the constraint of the chapel, he takes a more tolerant view of what he has seen and heard there. He gives the preacher credit for having said a great deal that was true, and in the manner most convincing to the already convinced who were assembled to hear him. For his own part, he declares, Nature is his church, as she has been his teacher; and he surrenders himself with a joyful sense of relief to the religious influences of the solitude and the night: his heart glowing with the consciousness of the unseen Love which everywhere appeals to him in the visible power of the Creator. Suddenly a mighty spectacle unfolds itself. The rain and wind have ceased. The barricade of cloud which veiled the moon's passage up the western sky has sunk riven at her feet. She herself shines forth in unbroken radiance, and a double lunar rainbow, in all its spectral grandeur, spans the vault of heaven. There is a sense as of a heavenly presence about to emerge upon the arc. Then the rapture overflows the spectator's brain, and the Master, arrayed in a serpentining garment, appears in the path before him.

But the Face is averted. "Has he despised the friends of Christ? and is this his punishment?" He prostrates himself before Him; grasps the hem of the garment; entreats forgiveness for what was only due to the reverence of his love, to his desire that his Lord should be worshipped in all spiritual beauty and truth.

The Face turns towards him in a flood of light. The vesture encloses him in its folds, and he is borne onwards till he finds himself at Rome, and in front of St. Peter's Church. He sees the interior without entering. It swarms with worshippers, packed into it as in the hollow of a hive. All there is breathless expectation, ecstatic awe; for the mystery of the mass is in process of consummation, and in another moment the tinkling of the silver bell will announce to the prostrate crowd the actual presence of their Lord; will open to them the vision of the coming heavenly day. Here, too, is faith, though obscured in a different manner. Here, too, is love: the love which in bygone days hurled intellect from its throne, and trampled on the glories of ancient art—which instructed its votaries to feel blindly for its new and all-sufficient life, as does the babe for its mother's breast—which consecrates even now the deepest workings of the heart and mind to the service of God. And Christ enters the Basilica, into which, after a momentary doubt, he himself follows Him.

They float onwards again, and again he is left alone but for the hem of the garment; for Christ has entered the lecture-hall of a rationalistic German professor, and into this He will not bid His disciple follow Him; but the interior of the building is open, as before, to the disciple's mental sight. The lecturer is refreshing his hearers' convictions by an inquiry into the origin of the Christian Myth and the foundation of fact on which it rests; and he arrives at the conclusion that Christ was a man, but whose work proved Him all but Divine; His Gospel quite other than those who heard it believed, but in value nearly the same.

The spectator begins musing on the anomalies of this view. "Christ, only a man, is to be reverenced as something more. On what ground?—The ground of intellect?—Yet he teaches us only what a hundred others have taught, without claiming to be worshipped on account of it—The ground of goodness?—But goodness is due from each man to his fellows; it is no title to sovereignty over them." And he thus sums up his own conviction. "He may be called a saint who best teaches us to keep our lives pure; he a poet whose insight dims that of his fellow-men. He is no less than this, though guided by an instinct no higher than that of the bat; no more, though inspired by God. All gifts are from God, and no multiplying of gifts can convert the creature into the Creator. Between Him who created goodness, and made it binding on the conscience of man: and him who reduces it to a system, of which the merits may be judged by man: lies the interval which separates Nature, who decrees the circulation of the blood, from the observer Harvey, who discovered it. One man is Christ, another Pilate; beyond their dust is the Divinity of God."

"And the 'God-function' with regard to virtue was first to impress its truths on every human breast; and secondly, to give a motive for carrying them out; and this motive could be given only by one, who, being life's Lord, died for the sake of men. Whoever conceives this love, and takes this proof to his heart, has found a new motive, and has also gained a truth."

But Christ lingers within the hall "Is there something after all in that lecture which finds an echo in the Christian soul? Yes, even there. There is the ghost of love, if nothing more, in the utterance of that virgin-minded man, with the 'wan, pure look,' and the frail life burning itself away in the striving after truth. For his critical tests have reduced the pearl of price to ashes, and yet left it, in his judgment, a pearl; and he bids his followers gather up their faith as an almost perfect whole; go home and venerate the myth on which he has experimented, adore the man whom he has proved to be one. And if his learning itself be loveless, it may claim our respect when a tricksy demon has let it loose on the Epistles of St. Paul, as it claims our gratitude when expended on secular things. It is at least better than the ignorance which hates the word of God, if it cannot wholly accept it; while these, his disciples, who renounce the earth, and chain up the natural man on a warrant no more divine than this, are by so much better than he who at this moment judges them. Let them carry the doctrine by which they think themselves carried, as does the child his toy-horse. He will not deride nor disturb them."

The subject of these experiences has reached a state of restful indifference. "He will adhere to his own belief, and be tolerant towards his neighbour's: since the two only differ as do two different refractions of a single ray of light. He will study, instead of criticizing, the different creeds which are fused into one before the universal Father's throne."

But this is not the lesson he has been intended to learn. The storm, breaking out afresh, catches up and dashes him to the ground, while the vesture, which he had let slip during his last musings, recedes swiftly from his sight. Then he knows that there is one "way," and he knows also that he may find it; and in this new conviction he regains his hold of the garment, and at one bound has reentered the little chapel, which he seems never indeed to have left. The sermon is ending, and he has heard it all. He still appreciates its faults of matter and manner; but he no longer rejects the draught of living water, because it comes to him with some taste of earth. What the draught can do is evidenced by those wrecks of humanity which are finding renewal there. There his choice shall rest; for, nowhere else, so he seems to conclude, is the message of Love so simply and so directly conveyed.

A great part of the narrative is written in a humorous tone, which shows itself, not only in thought and word, but in a jolting measure, and even grotesque rhymes. The speaker desires it to be understood that he is not the less in earnest for this apparent "levity;" and the levity is quite consistent with religious seriousness in such a person as the poem depicts. But, as I have shown, it is alone enough to prove that the author is not depicting himself. The poem reflects him more or less truly in the doctrine of Divine Love, the belief in personal guidance, and the half-contemptuous admiration with which the speaker regards those who will mortify the flesh in obedience to a Christ-man. But it belies the evidence of his whole work when, as in Section XVII., it represents moral truth as either innate to the human spirit, or directly revealed to it; and we shall presently notice a still greater discrepancy which it shares with its companion poem.^[59]

"Easter-Day"^[60] deals with the deeper issues of scepticism and faith; and opens with a dialogue in which the two opposite positions are maintained. Both speakers start from the belief in God, and the understanding that Christianity is unproved; but the one accepts it in faith: the other regards it as, for the time being, negatived.

The man of faith begins by exclaiming, how hard it is to be (practically) a Christian; and how disproportionate to our endeavour is our success in becoming so. The sceptic replies that to his mind the only difficulty is belief. "Let the least of God's commands be proved authentic: and only an idiot would shrink from martyrdom itself, with the certain bliss that would reward it." The man of faith, who is clearly the greater pessimist of the two, thinks the world too full of suffering to be placed, by any knowledge, beyond the reach of faith—beyond the necessity of being taken upon trust. And his adversary concedes that absolute knowledge would—where it was applicable—destroy its own end. In social life, for instance, it would do away with all those acts of faith, those instinctive judgments and feelings, which are the essence of life. But he thinks one may fairly desire a better touchstone for the purposes of God than human judgment or feeling; and that, if we cannot know them with scientific certainty, one must wish the balance of probability to lie clearly on one side.

The man of faith is of opinion that this much of proof exists for everyone who chooses to seek it. "The burning question is how we are to shape our lives. For himself he is impelled to follow the Christian precept, and renounce the world." The sceptic denies that God demands such a sacrifice, and sees only man's ingratitude in the impression that He does so. The man of faith admits that it would be hard to have made the sacrifice, and be rewarded only by death; while the many unbelievers who have virtually made it for one or other of the hobbies which he describes, have at least its success to repay them. But even so, he continues, he would have chosen the better part; for he would have chosen Hope,—the hope which aspires to a loftier end. "His opponent, it is true, hopes also; but his hopes are blind. They are not those of St. Paul, but those which, according to Æschylus, the Titan gave to men, to spice therewith the meal of life, and prevent their devouring it in too bitter haste; and if hope—or faith—is meant to be something more than a relish...!"

The opponent protests against this attack upon the "trusting ease" of his existence, and declares that his interlocutor is not doing as he would be done by. Whereupon the first speaker relates something which befell him on the Easter-Eve of three years ago, and which startled him out of precisely such a condition.

He was crossing the common, lately spoken of by their friend, and musing on life and the last judgment: when the following question occured to him: what would be his case if he died and were judged at that very moment? "From childhood," he continues, "I have always insisted on knowing the worst; and I now plunged straight into the recesses of my conscience, prepared for what spectre might be hidden there. But all I encountered was common sense, which did its best to assure me that I had nothing to fear: that, considering all the difficulties of life, I had kept my course through it as straight, and advanced as rapidly as could be expected." (More reflections, half serious half playful ensue.) "Suddenly I threw back my head, and saw the midnight sky on fire. It was a sea of fire, now writhing and surging; now sucked back into the darkness, now overflowing it till its rays poured downwards on to the earth. I felt that the Judgment Day had come. I felt also, in that supreme moment of consciousness, that I had chosen the world, and must take my stand upon the choice. I defended it with the courage of despair. 'God had framed me to appreciate the beauties of life; I could not put the cup untasted aside; He had not plainly commanded me to do so; He knew how I had struggled to resign myself to leaving it half full; Hell could be no just punishment for such a mood as that.'"

"Another burst of fire. A brief ecstasy which confounded earth and heaven. Then ashes everywhere. And amid the wreck—like the smoke pillared over Sodom—mantled in darkness as in a magnific pall which turned to grey the blackness of the night—pity mingled with judgment in the intense meditation in which his gaze was fixed—HE stood before me. I fell helpless at His feet. He spoke:

'The judgment is past; dispensed to every man as though he alone were its object. Thy sin has been the love of earth. Thou hast preferred the finite to the infinite—the fleshly joys to the spiritual. Be this choice thy punishment. Thou art shut out from the heaven of spirit. The earth is thine for ever.'"

"My first impulse was one of delighted gratitude. 'All the wonders—the treasures of the natural world, are mine?'"

"'Thine,' the Vision replied,'if such shows suffice thee; if thou wilt exchange eternity for the equivalent of a single rose, flung to thee over the barrier of that Eden from which thou art for ever excluded.'"

"'Not so,' I answered. 'If the beauties of nature are thus deceptive, my choice shall be with Art—art which imparts to nature the value of human life. I will seek man's impress in statuary, in painting....'"

"'Obtain that,' the Vision again rebuked me, 'the one form with its single act, the one face with its single look: the failure and the shame of all true artists who felt the whole while they could only reproduce the part.'"

And again the Vision expatiates on the limited nature of the earthly existence—the limited horizon which reduces man to the condition of the lizard pent up in a chamber in the rock—the destined shattering of the prison wall which will quicken the stagnant sense to the impressions of a hitherto unknown world—the spiritual hunger with which the saints, content in their earthly prison, still hail the certainty of deliverance.

"'Let me grasp at Mind,' I then entreated,—'whirl enraptured through its various spheres. Yet no. I know what thou wilt say. Mind, too, is of the earth; and all its higher inspirations proceed from another world—are recognized as doing so by those who receive them. I will catch no more at broken reeds. I will relinquish the world, and take Love for my portion. I will love on, though love too may deceive me, remembering its consolations in the past, struggling for its rewards in the future.'"

"'AT LAST,' the Vision exclaimed, 'thou choosest LOVE. And hast thou not seen that the mightiness of Love was curled inextricably about the power and the beauty which attached thee to the world—that through them it has vainly striven to clasp thee? Abide by thy choice. Take the show for the name's sake. Reject the reality as manifested in Him who created, and then died for thee. Reject that Tale, as more fitly invented by the sons of Cain—as proving too much love on the part of God.'"

"Terrified and despairing, I cowered before Him, imploring the remission of the sentence, praying that the old life might be restored to me, with its trials, its limitations; but with their accompanying hope that it might lead to the life everlasting."

"When I 'lived' again, the plain was silvered over with dew; the dawn had broken."

Looking back on this experience, the narrator is disposed to regard it as having been a dream. It has nevertheless been a turning-point in his existence; for it has taught him to hear in every blessing which attaches him to the earth, a voice which bids him renounce it. And though he still finds it hard to be a Christian, and is often discouraged by the fact, he welcomes his consciousness of this: since it proves that he is not spiritually stagnating—not cut off from the hope of heaven.

Mr. Browning is, for the time being, outside the discussion. His own feelings might equally have dictated some of the arguments on either side; and although he silences the second speaker, he does not mean to prove him in the wrong. He is at one with the first speaker, when he suggests that certainty in matters of belief is no more to be desired than to be attained; but that personage regards uncertainty as justifying presumptions of a dogmatic kind; while its value to Mr. Browning lies precisely in its right to exclude them. And, again; while the value of spiritual conflict is largely emphasized in his works, he disagrees with the man of faith in "Easter-Day" as with the dogmatic believer in "Christmas-Eve," as to the manner in which it is to be carried on. According to these the spirit fights against life: according to him it fights in, and by means of, its opportunities. From his point of view human experience is an education: from theirs it is a snare.

So much of personal truth as these poems contain will be found re-stated in "La Saisiaz," written twenty-eight years later, and which impresses on it the seal of maturer thought and more direct expression.

"LA SAISIAZ" (Savoyard for "The Sun") is the name of a villa among the mountains near Geneva, where Mr. Browning, with his sister and a friend of many years standing, spent part of the summer of 1877. The poem so christened is addressed to this friend, and was inspired by her death: which took place with appalling suddenness while they were there together. The shock of the event re-opened the great questions which had long before been solved by Mr. Browning's mind: and within sight of the new-made grave, he re-laid the foundations of his faith, that there is another life for the soul.

The argument is marked by a strong sense of the personal and therefore relative character of human experience and knowledge. It accepts the "subjective synthesis" of some non-theistic thinkers, though excluding, of course, the negations on which this rests; and its greater maturity is shown by the philosophic form in which the author's old religious doctrine of personal (or subjective) truth has been re-cast. He assumes here, it is true, that God and the soul exist. He considers their existence as given, in the double fact that there is something in us which thinks or perceives,^[61] and something outside and beyond us, which is perceived by it; and this subject and object, which he names the Soul and God, are to him beyond the necessity of farther proof, because beyond the reach of it. He might therefore challenge for his conclusions something more than an optional belief. He guards himself, nevertheless, against imposing the verdict of his own experience on any other man: and both the question and the answer into which the poem resolves itself begin for his own spirit and end so.

Mr. Browning knows himself a single point in the creative series of effect and cause: at the same moment one and the other: all behind and before him a blank. Or, more helpless still, he is the rush, floated by a current, of which the whence and whither are independent of it, and which may land it to strike root again, or cast it ashore a wreck. He asks himself, as he is whirled on his "brief, blind voyage" down the stream of life, which of these fates it has in store for him. Knowing this, that God and the soul exist—no less than this, and no more—he asks himself whether he is justified in believing that, because his present existence is beyond a doubt, its renewal is beyond doubt also: that the current, which has brought him thus far, will land him, not in destruction, but in another life.

"Everything," he declares, "in my experience—and I speak only of my own—testifies to the incompleteness of life, nay, even to its preponderating unhappiness. The strong body is found allied to a stunted soul. The soaring soul is chained by bodily weakness to the ground. Help turns to hindrance, or discloses itself too late in what we have taken for such. Every sweet brings its bitter, every light its shade; love is cut short by death:"—

"If we regard this life as final, we must relinquish our conception of the power of God: for His work is then open to human judgment, in the light of which it yields only imperfect results."

"But let us once assume that our present state is one of probation, intended by God as such: and every difficulty is solved. Evil is no longer a mark of failure in the execution of the Divine Scheme: it becomes essential to it; my experience indeed represents it as such. I cannot conceive evil as abolished without abrogation of the laws of life. For it is not only bound up with all the good of life; it is often its vehicle. Gain is enhanced by recent loss. Ignorance places us nearest to knowledge. Beauty is most precious, truth most potent, where ugliness and falsehood prevail; and what but the loss of Love teaches us what its true value has been?"

"May I then accept the conclusion that this life will be supplemented by a better one?"

Mr. Browning initiates his final inquiry by declaring that he will accept only the testimony of fact. He rejects surmise, he seeks no answer in the beauties or in the voices of nature; none in the minds of his fellow-men; none even in the depths of his sentient self with its "aspiration" and "reminiscence:" its plausible assurances that God would be "unjust," and man "wronged," if a second life were not granted to us.

And here he seems for a moment to deny, what he has elsewhere stated, and everywhere implied, in the poem: that his own spirit must be to him, despite its isolation and weakness, the one messenger of Divine truth.

But he is only saying the same thing in a different way. He rejects the spontaneous utterance of his own spirit; but relies on its conclusions. He rejects it as pleader; but constitutes it judge. And this distinction is carried out in a dialogue, in which Fancy speaks for the spontaneous self; Reason for the judicial—the one making its thrusts, and the other parrying them. The question at issue has, however, slightly shifted its ground; and we find ourselves asking: not, "is the Soul immortal?" but "what would be the consequence to life of its being proved so?"

FANCY. "The soul exists after death. I accept the surmise as certainty: and would see it put to use during life."

REASON. "The 'use' of it will be that the wise man will die at once: since death, in the absence of any supernatural law to the contrary, must be clear gain. The soul must fare better when it has ceased to be thwarted by the body; and we have no reason to suppose that the obstructions which have their purpose in this life would be renewed in a future one. Are we happy? death rescues our happiness from its otherwise certain decay. Are we sad? death cures the sadness. Is life simply for us a weary compromise between hope and fear, between failure and attainment? death is still the deliverer. It must come some day. Why not invoke it in a painless form when the first cloud appears upon our sky?"

FANCY. "Then I concede this much: the certainty of the future life shall be saddled with the injunction to live out the present, or accept a proportionate penalty."

REASON. "In that case the wise man will live. But whether the part he chooses in it be that of actor or of looker-on, he will endure his life with indifference. Relying on the promises of the future, he will take success or failure as it comes, and accept ignorance as a matter of course."

FANCY. "I concede more still. Man shall not only be compelled to live: he shall know the value of life. He shall know that every moment he spends in it is gain or loss for the life to come—that every act he performs involves reward or punishment in it."

REASON. "Then you abolish good and evil in their relation to man; for you abolish freedom of choice. No man is good because he obeys a law so obvious and so stringent as to leave him no choice; and such would be the moral law, if punishment were demonstrated as following upon the breach of it; reward on its fulfilment. Man is free, in his present state, to choose between good and evil—free therefore to be good; because he may believe, but has no demonstrated certainty, that his future welfare depends on it."

It is thus made clear that only in man's present state of limited knowledge is a life of probation conceivable; while only on the hypothesis that this life is one of probation, can that of a future existence be maintained. Mr. Browning ends where he began, with a hope, which is practically a belief, because to his mind the only thinkable approach to it.

A vivid description of the scenes amidst which the tragedy took place accompanies this discussion.

"CLEON" is a protest against the inadequacy of the earthly life; and the writer is supposed to be one of those Greek poets or thinkers to whom St. Paul alludes, in a line quoted from Aratus in the Acts, and which stands at the head of the poem. Cleon believes in Zeus under the attributes of the one God; but he sees nothing in his belief to warrant the hope of immortality; and his love of life is so intense and so untiring that this fact is very grievous to him.

He is stating his case to an imaginary king—Protus—his patron and friend; whose convictions are much the same as his own, but who thinks him in some degree removed from the common lot: since his achievements in philosophy and in art must procure him not only a more perfect existence, but in one sense a more lasting one. Cleon protests against this idea.

"He has," he admits, "done all which the King imputes to him. If he has not been a Homer, a Pheidias, or a Terpander, his creative sympathies have united all three; and in thus passing from the simple to the complex, he has obeyed the law of progress, though at the risk perhaps of appearing a smaller man."

"But his life has not been the more perfect on that account. Perfection exists only in those more mechanical grades of being, in which joy is unconscious, but also self-sufficing. To grow in consciousness is to grow in the capability and in the desire for joy; to decline rather than advance, in the physical power of attaining it. Man's soul expands; his 'physical recipiency' remains for ever bounded."

"Nor are his works a source of life to him either now or for the future. The conception of youth and strength and wisdom is not its reality: the knowing (and depicting) what joy is, is not the possession of it. And the surviving of his work, when he himself is dead, is but a mockery the more."

It is all so horrible that he sometimes imagines another life, as unlimited in capability, as this in the desire, for joy, and dreams that Zeus has revealed it. "But he has not revealed it, and therefore it will not be." St. Paul is preaching at this very time, and Protus sends a letter to be forwarded to him; but Cleon does not admit that knowledge can reside in a "barbarian Jew;" and gently rebukes his royal friend for inclining to such doctrine, which, as he has gathered from one who heard it, "can be held by no sane man."

Cleon constantly uses the word soul as antithesis to body: but he uses it in its ancient rather than its modern sense, as expressing the sentient life, not the spiritual; and this perhaps explains the anomaly of his believing that it is independent of the lower physical powers, and yet not destined to survive them.

The EPISTLE of Karshish is addressed to a certain Abib, the writer's master in the science of medicine. It is written from Bethany; and the "strange medical experience" of which it treats, is the case of Lazarus, whom Karshish has seen there. Lazarus, as he relates, has been the subject of a prolonged epileptic trance, and his reason impaired by a too sudden awakening from it. He labours under the fixed idea that he was raised from the dead; and that the Nazarene physician at whose command he rose (and who has since perished in a popular tumult) was no other than God: who for love's sake had taken human form, and worked and died for men. Karshish regards the madness of this idea as beyond rational doubt: but he is perplexed and haunted by its consistency: by the manner in which this supposed vision of the Heavenly life has transformed, even inverted the man's judgment of earthly things. He combats the impression as best he can: recounts his scientific discoveries—the new plants, minerals, sicknesses, or cures to which his travels in Judea have introduced him; half apologizes for his digression from these more important matters; tries to excuse the hold which Lazarus has taken upon him by the circumstances in which they met; and breaks out at last in this agitated appeal to Abib and the truth:—

The solitary sage alluded to is of course imaginary. Like the doubtful messenger to whom the letter will be entrusted, he helps to mark the incidental character with which Karshish strives to invest his "experience."

"CALIBAN UPON SETEBOS" carries us into an opposite sphere of thought. It has for its text these words from Psalm 50: Thou thoughtest that I was altogether such an one as thyself: and is the picture of an acute but half savage mind, building up the Deity on its own pattern. Caliban is much exercised by the government of the world, and by the probable nature of its ruler; and he has niched an hour from his tasks, on a summer noon, when Prospero and Miranda are taking his diligence upon trust, to go and sprawl full length in the mud of some cave, and talk the problem out. The attitude is described, as his reflections are carried on, in his own words; but he speaks as children do, in the third person.

Caliban worships Setebos, god of the Patagonians, as did his mother before him; but her creed was the higher of the two, because it included what his does not: the idea of a future life. He differs from her also in a more original way. For she held that a greater power than Setebos had made the world, leaving Setebos merely to "vex" it; while he contends that whoever made the world and its weakness, did so for the pleasure of vexing it himself; and that this greater power, the "Quiet," if it really exists, is above pain or pleasure, and had no motive for such a proceeding.

Setebos is thus, according to Caliban, a secondary divinity. He may have been created by the Quiet, or may have driven it off the field; but in either case his position is the same. He is one step nearer to the human nature which he cannot assume. He lives in the moon, Caliban thinks, and dislikes its "cold," while he cannot escape from it. To relieve his discomfort, half in impatience half in sport, he has made human beings; thus giving himself the pleasure of seeing others do what he cannot, and of mocking them as his playthings at the same time.

This theory of creation is derived from Caliban's own experience. In like manner, when he has got drunk on fermented fruits, and feels he would like to fly, he pinches up a clay bird, and sends it into the air; and if its leg snaps off, and it entreats him to stop the smarting, or make the leg grow again, he may give it two more, or he may break off the remaining one; just to show the thing that he can do with it what he likes.

He also presumes that Setebos is envious, because he is so; as for instance: if he made a pipe to catch birds with, and the pipe boasted: "I catch the birds. I make a cry which my maker can't make unless he blows through me," he would smash it on the spot.

For the rest he imagines that Setebos, like himself, is neither kind nor cruel, but simply acts on all possible occasions as his fancy prompts him. The one thing which would arouse his own hostility, and therefore that of Setebos, would be that any creature should think he is ever prompted by anything else; or that his adopting a certain course one day would be a reason for following it on the next.

Guided by these analogies—which he illustrates with much quaintness and variety—Caliban humours Setebos, always pretending to be envious of him, and never allowing himself to seem too happy. He moans in the sunlight, gets under holes to laugh, and only ventures to think aloud, when out of sight and hearing, as he is at the present moment. Thus sheltered, however, he makes too free with his tongue. He risks the expression of a hope that old age, or the Quiet, will some day make an end of his Creator, whom he loves none the better for being so like himself. And in another moment he is crouching in abject fear: for an awful thunderstorm has broken out. "That raven scudding away 'has told him all.'"

and will do anything to please him so that he escape this time.

The most impressive of the dramatic monologues, "A Death in the Desert," detaches itself from this double group. It is contemplative in tone, but inspired by a formed conviction, and, dramatically at least, by an instructive purpose; and thus becomes the centre of another small division of Mr. Browning's poems, which for want of a less ugly and hackneyed word we may call "didactic."

DIDACTIC POEMS.

The poems contained in this group are, taking them in the order of their importance,

• "A Death in the Desert." Dramatis Personæ. 1864.
• "Rabbi Ben Ezra." Dramatis Personæ. 1864.
• "Deaf and Dumb: a group by Woolner." Dramatis Personæ. 1864.
• "The Statue and the Bust." Dramatic Romances. Published in "Men and Women." 1855.

"A DEATH IN THE DESERT" is the record of an imaginary last scene in the life of St. John. It is conceived in perfect harmony with the facts of the case: the great age which the Evangelist attained: the mystery which shrouded his death: the persecutions which had overtaken the Church: the heresies which already threatened to disturb it; but Mr. Browning has given to St. John a foreknowledge of that age of philosophic doubt in which its very foundations would be shaken; and has made him the exponent of his own belief—already hinted in "Easter Eve" and "Bishop Blougram:" to be fully set forth in "The Ring and the Book" and "La Saisiaz"—that such doubt is ordained for the maturer mind, as the test of faith, and its preserver.

The supposed last words of the Evangelist, and the circumstances in which they were spoken, are reported by loving simplicity as by one who heard them, and who puts forward this evidence of St. John's death against the current belief that he lingers yet upon earth. The account, first spoken, then written, has passed apparently from hand to hand, as one disciple after the other died the martyr's death; and we find the MS. in the possession of an unnamed person, and prefaced by him with a descriptive note, in which religious reverence and bibliographical interest are touchingly blended with each other.

St. John is dying in the desert, concealed in an inmost chamber of the rock. Four grown disciples and a boy are with him. He lies as if in sleep. But, as the end approaches, faint signs of consciousness appear about the mouth and eyes, and the patient and loving ministrations of those about him nurse the flickering vital spark into a flame.

St. John returns to life, feeling, as it were, the retreating soul forced back upon the ashes of his brain, and taxing the flesh to one supreme exertion. But he lives again in a far off time when "John" is dead, and there is no one left who saw. And he lives in a sense as of decrepit age, seeking a "foot-hold through a blank profound;" grasping at facts which snap beneath his touch; in strange lands, and among people yet unborn, who ask,

and will believe nothing till the proof be proved.

This prophetic self-consciousness does not, however, displace the memory of his former self. John knows himself the man who heard and saw—receiving the words of Christ from His own mouth, and enduring those glories of apocalyptic vision which he marvels that he could bear, and live; seeing truths already plain grow of their own strength: and those he guessed as points expanding into stars. And the life-long faith regains its active power as the doubting future takes shape before him; as he sees its children

and he hears them questioning truths of deeper import than those of his own life and work.

The subsequent monologue is an earnest endeavour to answer those questionings, which he sets forth, in order that he may do so; his eloquence being perhaps the more pathetic, that in the depth of his own conviction—in his loving desire to impart it—he assumes a great deal of what he tries to prove. "He has seen it all—the miracle of that life and death; the need, and yet the transiency, of death and sin; the constant presence of the Divine love; those things which not only were to him, but are. And he is called upon to prove it to those who cannot see: whose spirit is darkened by the veil of fleshly strength, while his own lies all but bare to the contact of the Heavenly light. He must needs be as an optic-glass, bringing those things before them, not in confusing nearness, but at the right historic distance from the eye."

"Life," he admits, "is given to us that we may learn the truth. But the soul does not learn from it as the flesh does. For the flesh has little time to stay, and must gain its lesson once and for all. Man needs no second proof of the worth of fire: once found, he would not part with it for gold. But the highest spiritual certainty is not like our conviction of a bodily fact; and though we know the worth of Christ as we know the preciousness of fire, we may not in like manner grasp this truth, acknowledging it in our lives. He—John—in whose sight his Lord had been transfigured, had walked upon the waters, and raised the dead to life: he, too, forsook Him when the 'noise' and 'torchlight,' and the 'sudden Roman faces,' and the 'violent hands' were upon them...."

The doubter, he imagines, will argue thus, taking "John's" Gospel for his starting-point:—

(a) "Your story is proved inaccurate, if not untrue. The doctrine which rests upon it is therefore unproved, except in so far as it is attested by the human heart. And this proof again is invalid. For the doctrine is that of Divine love; and we, who believe in love, because we ourselves possess it, may read it into a record in which it has no place. Man, in his mental infancy, read his own emotions and his own will into the forces of nature, as he clothed their supposed personal existence in his own face and form. But his growing understanding discarded the idea of these material gods. It now replaces the idea of the one Divine intelligence by that of universal law. God is proved to us as law—'named,' but 'not known.' A divinity, which we can recognize by like attributes to our own, is disproved by them."

(b) "And granting that there is truth in your teaching: why is this allowed to mislead us? Why are we left to hit or miss the truth, according as our insight is weak or strong, instead of being plainly told this thing was, or it was not? Does 'John' proceed with us as did the heathen bard, who drew a fictitious picture of the manner in which fire had been given to man; and left his readers to discover that the fact was not the fable itself, but only contained in it?"

And John replies:

(a) "Man is made for progress, and receives therefore, step by step, such spiritual assistance as is proportionate to his strength. The testimony of miracles is granted when it is needed to assist faith. It is withdrawn so soon as it would compel it. He who rejects God's love in Christ because he has learned the need of love, is as the lamp which overswims with oil, the stomach which flags from excess of food: his mind is being starved by the very abundance of what was meant to nourish it. Man was spiritually living, when he shrank appalled from the spectacle of Nature, and needed to be assured that there was a might beyond its might. But when he says, 'Since Might is everywhere, there is no need of Will;' though he knows from his own experience how Might may combine with Will, then is he spiritually dead. And man is spiritually living, when he asks if there be love

But when he reasons: since love is everywhere, and we love and would be loved, we make the love which we recognize as Christ: and Christ was not; then is he spiritually dead. For the loss which comes through gain is death, and the sole death."

(b) The second objection he answers by reverting to his first statement. "Man is made for progress. He could not progress if his doubtings were at once changed to certainties, and all he struggles for at once found. He must yearn for truth, and grasp at error as a 'midway help' to it. He must learn and unlearn. He must creep from fancies on to fact; and correct to-day's facts by the light of to-morrow's knowledge. He must be as the sculptor, who evokes a life-like form from a lump of clay, ever seeing the reality in a series of false presentments; attaining it through them, God alone makes the live shape at a jet."

The tenderness which has underlain even John's remonstrances culminates in his closing words. "If there be a greater woe than this (the doubt) which he has lived to see, may he," he says, "be 'absent,' though it were for another hundred years, plucking the blind ones from the abyss."

The record has a postscript, written not by the same person, but in his name, confronting the opinions of St. John with those of Cerinthus, his noted opponent in belief, into whose hands the MS. is also supposed to have fallen. It is chiefly interesting as heightening the historical effect of the poem.^[62]

"RABBI BEN EZRA" is the expression of a religious philosophy which, being, from another point of view, Mr. Browning's own, has much in common with that which he has imputed to St. John; and, as "A Death in the Desert" only gave the words which the Evangelist might have spoken, so is "Rabbi Ben Ezra" only the possible utterance of that pious and learned Jew. But the Christian doctrine of the one poem brings into strong relief the pure Theism of the other; and the religious imagination in "Rabbi Ben Ezra" is strongly touched with the gorgeous and solemn realism which distinguishes the Old Testament from the new.

The most striking feature of Rabbi Ben Ezra's philosophy is his estimate of age. According to him the soul is eternal, but it completes the first stage of its experience in the earthly life; and the climax of the earthly life is attained, not in the middle of it, but at its close. Age is therefore a period, not only of rest, but of fruition.

"Spiritual conflict is appropriate to youth. It is well that youth should sigh for the impossible, and, if needs be, blunder in the endeavour to improve what is. He would be a brute whose body could keep pace with his soul. The highest test of man's bodily powers is the distance to which they can project the soul on the way which it must travel alone."

"But life in the flesh is good, showering gifts alike on sense and brain. It is right that at some period of its existence man's heart should beat in unison with it; that having seen God's power in the scheme of creation, he should also see the perfectness of His love; that he should thank Him for his manhood, for the power conferred on him to live and learn. And this boon must be granted by age, which gathers in the inheritance of youth."

"The inheritance is not one of earthly wisdom. Man learns to know the right and the good, but he does not learn how outwardly to apply the knowledge; for human judgments are formed to differ, and there is no one who can arbitrate between them. Man's failure or success must be sought in the unseen life—not in that which he has done, but in that which he has aspired to do."

"Nothing dies or changes which has truly BEEN. The flight of time is but the spinning of the potter's wheel to which we are as clay. This fleeing circumstance is but the machinery which stamps the soul (that vessel moulded for the Great Master's hand). And its latest impress is the best: though the base of the cup be adorned with laughing loves, while skull-like images constitute its rim."

"DEAF AND DUMB" conveys, in a single stanza, the crowning lesson of the life of Paracelsus, and indeed of every human life: for the sculptured figures to which it refers have supplied the poet with an example of the "glory" which may "arise" from "defect," the power from limitation. It needs, he says, the obstructing prism to set free the rainbow hues of the sunbeam. Only dumbness can give to love the full eloquence of the eyes; only deafness can impress love's yearnings on the movements of neck and face.

"THE STATUE AND THE BUST" is a warning against infirmity of purpose. Its lesson is embodied in a picturesque story, in which fact and fiction are combined.

In the piazza of the SS. Annunziata at Florence is an equestrian statue of the Grand Duke Ferdinand the First, representing him as riding away from the church, and with his head turned in the direction of the once Riccardi Palace, which occupies a corner of the square. Tradition asserts that he loved a lady whom her husband's jealousy kept a prisoner there, and whom he could only see at her window; and that he avenged his love by placing himself in effigy where his glance could always dwell upon her.

In Mr. Browning's expanded version, the love is returned, and the lovers determine to fly together. But each day brings fresh motives for postponing the flight, and each day they exchange glances with each other—he passing by on his horse, she looking down from her window—and comfort themselves with the thought of the morrow. And as the days slip by, their love grows cooler, and they learn to be content with expectation. They realize at last that the love has been a dream, and that they have spent their youth in dreaming it; and in order that the dream may continue, and the memory of their lost youth be preserved, they cause, he his statue to be cast, she her bust to be moulded, and each placed in the attitude in which they have daily looked upon each other. They feel the irony of the proceeding, though they find satisfaction in it. Their image will do all that the reality has done.

Mr. Browning blames these lovers for not carrying out their intention, whether or not it could be pronounced a good one. "Man should carry his best energies into the game of life, whether the stake he is playing for be good or bad—a reality or a sham. As a test of energy, the one has no value above the other."

He leaves the "bust" in the region of fancy, by stating that it no longer exists. But he tells us that it was executed in "della Robbia" ware, specimens of which, still, at the time he wrote, adorned the outer cornice of the palace. The statue is one of the finest works of John of Bologna.

The partial darkening of the Via Larga by the over-hanging mass of the Riccardi (formerly Medici) Palace^[63] is figuratively connected in the poem with the "crime" of two of its inmates: the "murder," by Cosimo dei Medici and his (grand) son Lorenzo, of the liberties of the Florentine Republic.

The smallness of this group, and its chiefly dramatic character, show how little direct teaching Mr. Browning's works contain. There is, however, direct instructiveness in another and larger group, which has too much in common with all three foregoing to be included in either, and will be best indicated by the term "critical." In certain respects, indeed, this applies to several, perhaps to most, of those which I have placed under other heads; and I use it rather to denote a lighter tone and more incidental treatment, than any radical difference of subject or intention.

CRITICAL POEMS.

The first and fourth of these are significant from the insight they give into Mr. Browning's conception of art. We must allow, in reading them, for the dramatic and therefore temporary mood in which they were written, and deduct certain utterances which seem inconsistent with the breadth of the author's views. But they reflect him truly in this essential fact, that he considers art as subordinate to life, and only valuable in so far as it expresses it. This means, not that his standard is realistic: but that it is entirely human; it could scarcely be otherwise in a mind so devoted to the study of human life; but these very poems display also, on Mr. Browning's part, a loving familiarity with the works of painters, sculptors, and musicians, and a practical understanding of them, which might easily have resulted in a partial acceptance of artistic standards as such, and of the policy of art for art; and it is only through the breadth and strength of his dramatic genius, that artistic sympathies in themselves so strong could be subjected to it.

In music, this position appears at first sight to be reversed; for Mr. Browning rejects the dramatic theory which would convert it into a direct expression of human thought. Here, however, the poet in him comes into play. He leaves the plastic arts to express what may be both felt and thought; and calls on music to express what may be felt but not thought. In this sense he accepts it as an independent science subject to its own ideals and to its own laws. But this only means that, in his opinion, the relation of music to human life is different from that of plastic art: the one revealing the unknown, while the other embodies what is known.

"OLD PICTURES IN FLORENCE" is a fanciful monologue, spoken as by one who is looking down upon Florence, through her magical atmosphere, from a villa on the neighbouring heights. The sight of her Campanile brings Giotto to his mind; and with Giotto comes a vision of all the dead Old Masters who mingle in spirit with her living men. He sees them each haunting the scene of his former labours in church or chapter-room, cloister or crypt; and he sees them grieving over the decay of their works, as these fade and moulder under the hand of time. He is also conscious that they do not grieve for themselves. Earthly praise or neglect cannot touch them more. But they have had a lesson to teach; and so long as the world has not learnt the lesson, their souls may not rest in heaven.

"Greek art had its lesson to teach, and it taught it. It reasserted the dignity of the human form. It re-stated the truth of the soul which informs the body, and the body which expresses it. Men saw in its creations their own qualities carried to perfection, and were content to know that such perfection was possible, and to renounce the hope of attaining it. In this experience the first stage was progress; the second was stagnation. Progress began again, when men looked on these images of themselves and said: "we are not inferior to these. We are greater than they. For what has come to perfection perishes, and we are imperfect because eternity is before us; because we were made to grow." The soul which has eternity within its grasp cannot express itself in a single glance; nor can its consciousness be petrified into an unchanging sorrow or joy. The painters who set aside Greek art undertook to vindicate the activity of the soul. They made its hopes and fears shine through the flesh, though the flesh they shone through were frayed and torn by the process. This was the work which they had to do; and which remains undone, while men speak of them as "Old Master" this, and "Early" the other, and do not dream that "Old" and "New" are fellows: "that all are links in the chain of the one progressive art life; the one spiritual revelation."

The speaker now relapses into the playful mood which his more serious reflections have scarcely interrupted. He thinks of the removable paintings which lie hidden in cloister or church, and which a sympathizing purchaser might rescue from decay; and he reproaches those melancholy ghosts for not guiding such purchasers to them. He, for instance, does not aspire to the works of the very great; but a number of lesser lights, whose name and quality he recites, might, he thinks, have lent themselves to the fulfilment of his artistic desires;^[64] and he declares himself particularly hurt by the conduct of his old friend Giotto, who has allowed some picture he had been hunting through every church in Florence to fall into other hands. He concludes with an invocation to a future time when the Grand Duke will have been pitched across the Alps, when art and the Republic will revive together, and when Giotto's Campanile will be completed—which glorious consummation, though he may not live to see, he considers himself the first to predict.

Mr. Browning alludes, in the course of this monologue, to the two opposite theories of human probation: one confining it to this life, the other extending it through a series of future existences; and without pronouncing on their relative truth, he owns himself in sympathy with the former. He is tired and likes to think of rest. The sentiment is, however, not in harmony with his general views, and belongs to the dramatic aspect of the poem.^[65]

MASTER HUGUES OF SAXE GOTHA, also a monologue, is christened after an imaginary composer; and consists of a running comment on one of his fugues, as performed by the organist of some unnamed church. The latter has just played it through: the scored brow and deep-set eyes of Master Hugues fixed on him, as he fancied, from the shade; and he now imagines he hears him say, "You have done justice to the notes of my piece, but you must grasp its meaning to understand where my merit lies;" so he plays the fugue again, listening for the meaning, and reading it as out of a book. From this literary or dramatic point of view, the impression received is as follows. Some one lays down a proposition, unimportant in itself, and not justly open to either praise or blame. Nevertheless a second person retorts on it, a third interposes, a fourth rejoins, and a fifth thrusts his nose into the matter. The five are fully launched into a quarrel. The quarrel grows broader and deeper. Number one restates his case somewhat differently. Number two takes it up on its new ground. Argument is followed by vociferation and abuse; a momentary self-restraint by a fresh outbreak of self-assertion. All tempers come into play, all modes of attack are employed, from pounding with a crowbar to pricking with a pin. And where all this time is music? Where is the gold of truth? Spun over and blackened by the tissue of jangling sounds, as is the ceiling of the old church by cobwebs.

The organist admires Master Hugues, and approaches his creations with an open mind; but he cannot help feeling that this mode of composition represents the tortuousness of existence, and that its "truth" spreads golden above and about us, whether we accept her or not. He ends by bidding Master Hugues and the five speakers clear the arena; and leave him to "unstop the full organ," and "blare out," in the "mode Palestrina," what another musician has had to say.

This scene in an organ loft has many humorous touches which would in any case forbid our taking it too seriously; and we must no more think of Mr. Browning as indifferent to the possible merits of a fugue than as indifferent to the beauties of a Greek statue. But the dramatic situation has in this, as in the foregoing case, a strong basis of personal truth.

Two more of these poems show the irony of circumstance as embodied in popular opinion.

"POPULARITY" is an expression of admiring tenderness for some person whom the supposed speaker knows and loves as a poet, though it is the coming, not the present age, which will bow to him as such. But the main idea of the poem is set forth in a comparison. The speaker "sees" his friend in the character of an ancient fisherman landing the Murex-fish on the Tyrian shore. "The 'murex' contains a dye of miraculous beauty; and this once extracted and bottled, Hobbs, Nobbs, and Co. may trade in it and feast; but the poet who (figuratively) brought the murex to land, and created its value, may, as Keats probably did, eat porridge all his life."

"HOW IT STRIKES A CONTEMPORARY" describes a poet whose personality was not ignored, but mistaken; and the irony of circumstance is displayed both in the extent of this mistake, and the colour which circumstance has given to it. This poet is a mysterious personage, who constantly wanders through the city, seeing everything without appearing to use his eyes. His clothing, though old and worn, has been of the fashion of the Court. He writes long letters, which are obviously addressed to "our Lord the King," and "which, no doubt, have had to do with the disappearance of A., and the fate of B." He can be, people think, no other than a spy. A spy, we must admit, might proceed in much the same manner. Mr. Browning does, however, full justice to the excesses of popular imagination, once directed into a given channel, in the parallel touches which depict the portentous luxury in which the spy is supposed to live: the poor though decent garret in which the poet dies.

"TRANSCENDENTALISM" is addressed to a young poet, who is accused of presenting his ideas "naked," instead of draping them, in poetic fashion, in sights and sounds: in other words, of talking across his harp instead of singing to it. He acts on the supposition that, if the young want imagery, older men want rational thoughts. And his critic is declaring this a mistake. "Youth, indeed, would be wasted in studying the transcendental Jacob Boehme for the deeper meaning of things which life gives it to see and feel; but when youth is past, we need all the more to be made to see and feel. It is not a thinker like Boehme who will compensate us for the lost summer of our life; but a magician like John of Halberstadt, who can, at any moment, conjure roses up."^[66]

There is a strong vein of humour in the argument, which gives the impression of being consciously overstated. It is neverthess a genuine piece of criticism.

"AT THE MERMAID" and the "EPILOGUE" deal with public opinion in its general estimate of poets and poetry; and they expose its fallacies in a combative spirit, which would exclude them from a more rigorous definition of the term "critical." In the first of these Mr. Browning speaks under the mask of Shakespeare, and gives vent to the natural irritation of any great dramatist who sees his various characters identified with himself. He repudiates the idea that the writings of a dramatic poet reveal him as a man, however voluminous they may be; and on this ground he even rejects the transcendent title to fame which his contemporaries have adjudged to him. They know him in his work. They cannot, he says, know him in his life. He has never given them the opportunity of doing so. He has allowed no one to slip inside his soul, and "label" and "catalogue" what he found there.

This is truer for Shakespeare than for Mr. Browning, who has often addressed his public with comparative directness, and would be grieved to have it thought that in the long course of his writings he has never spoken from his heart. He would also be the first to admit that, in the course of his writings, the poet must, indirectly, reveal the man. But he has too often had to defend himself against the impression that whatever he wrote as a poet must directly reflect him as a man. He has too often had to repeat, that poetry is an art which "makes" not one which merely records; and that the feelings it conveys are no more necessarily supplied by direct experience than are its facts by the Cyclopædia. And with the usual deduction for the dramatic mood, we may accept the retort as genuine.

I have departed in the case of this poem from the mere statement of contents, which is all that my plan admits of, or my readers usually can desire: because it expresses an indifference to general sympathy which belies the author's feeling in the matter. Mr. Browning speaks equally for himself and Shakespeare, when he derides another idea which he considers to be popular: that the fit condition of the poet is melancholy. "I," he declares, "have found life joyous, and I speak of it as such. Let those do otherwise who have wasted its opportunities, or been less richly endowed with them."

The "Epilogue" is a criticism on critics, and is spoken distinctly by Mr. Browning himself. He takes for his text a line from Mrs. Browning:^[67]

and denounces those consumers of the wine of poetry, who expect it to combine strength and sweetness in an impossible degree. Body and bouquet, he affirms, may be found on the label of a bottle, but not in the vat from which the bottle was filled. "Mighty" and "mellow" may be born at once; but the one is for now, the other only for after-time. The earth, he declares, is his vineyard; his grape, the loves, the hates, and the thoughts of man; his wine, what these have made it. Bouquet may, he admits, be artificially given. Flowers grow everywhere which will supplement the flavour of the grape; and his life holds flowers of memory, which blossom with every spring. But he denies that his brew would be the more popular if he stripped his meadow to make it so. How much do his public drink of that which they profess to approve? They declare Shakespeare and Milton fit beverage for man and boy. "Look into their cellars, and see how many barrels are unbroached of the one brand, what drippings content them of the other. He will be true to his task, and to Him who set it."

At the 18th stanza the figure is changed, and Mr. Browning speaks of his work (by implication) as a stretch of country which is moor above and mine below; and in which men will find—what they dig for.

"HOUSE" is written in much the same spirit as "At the Mermaid." It reminds us that the whole front of a dwelling must come down before the life within it can be gauged by the vulgar eye; however we may fancy that this or that poetic utterance has unlocked the door—that it opens to a "sonnet-key."^[68]

"SHOP" is a criticism on those writers, poets or otherwise, who are so disproportionately absorbed by the material cares of existence as to place the good of literature in its money-making power; and depicts such in the character of the shopman who makes the shop his home, instead of leaving it for some mansion or villa as soon as business hours are past. "The flesh must live, but why should not the spirit have its dues also?"

"RESPECTABILITY" is a comment on the price paid for social position. A pair of lovers have been enjoying a harmless escapade; and one remarks to the other that, if their relation had been recognized by the world, they might have wasted their youth in the midst of proprieties which they would never have learned the danger and the pleasure of infringing. The situation is barely sketched in; but the sentiment of the poem is well marked, and connects it with the foregoing group.

"A LIGHT WOMAN," "DÎS ALITER VISUM," and "BIFURCATION" raise questions of conduct.

A man desires to extricate his friend from the toils of "A LIGHT WOMAN;" and to this end he courts her himself. He is older and more renowned than her present victim, and trusts to her vanity to ensure his success. But his attentions arouse in her something more. He discovers too late that he has won her heart. He can only cast it away, and a question therefore arises: he knows how he appears to his friend; he knows how he will appear to the woman whom his friend loved; "how does he appear to himself?" In other words, did the end for which he has acted justify the means employed? He doubts it.

"DÎS ALITER VISUM" records the verdict of later days on a decision which recommended itself at the time: that is, to the person who formed it. A man and woman are attracted towards each other, though she is young and unformed; he, old in years and in experience; and he is, or seems to be, on the point of offering her his hand. But caution checks the impulse. They drift asunder. He forms a connection with an opera-dancer. She makes a loveless marriage. Ten years later they meet again; and she reminds him of what passed between them, and taxes him with the ruin of four souls. He has thought only of the drawbacks to present enjoyment, which the unequal union would have involved; he never thought or cared how its bitter-sweetness might quicken the striving for eternity.

This criticism reflects the woman's point of view, and was probably intended to justify it. It does not follow that the author would not, in another dramatic mood, have justified the man, in his more practical estimate of the situation. Mr. Browning's poetic self is, however, expressed in the woman's belief: that everything which disturbs the equal balance of human life gives a vital impulse to the soul. The stereotyped completeness of the lower existences supplies him here also with a warning.

The title of "BIFURCATION" refers to two paths in life, followed respectively by two lovers whom circumstances divide. The case is not unusual. The woman sacrifices love to duty, and expects her lover to content himself with her choice. Why not, she thinks? She will be constant to him; they will be united in the life to come. And meanwhile, she is choosing what for her is the smoother and safer path, while for him it is full of stumbling-blocks. Love's guidance is refused him, and he falls. Which of these two has been the sinner: he who sinned unwillingly, or she who caused the sin? We feel that Mr. Browning condemns the apparent saint.

"PISGAH SIGHTS. I." depicts life as it may seem to one who is leaving it; who is, as it were, "looking over the ball." As seen from this position, Good and Evil are reconciled, and even prove themselves indispensable to each other. The seer becomes aware that it is unwise to strive against the mixed nature of existence; vain to speculate on its cause. But the knowledge is bittersweet, for it comes too late.

"PISGAH SIGHTS. II." is a view of life as it might be, if the knowledge just described did not come too late; and shows that according to Mr. Browning's philosophy it would be no life at all. The speaker declares that if he had to live again, he would take everything as he found it. He would neither dive nor soar; he would strive neither to teach nor to reform. He would keep to the soft and shady paths; learn by quiet observation; and allow men of all kinds to pass him by, while he remained a fixture. He would gain the benefit of the distance with those below and above him, since he would be magnified for the one class, while seen from a softening point of view by the other. And so also he would admire the distant brightness, "the mightiness yonder," the more for keeping his own place. If seen too closely, the star might prove a glow-worm.

EMOTIONAL POEMS.

LOVE.

Those of Mr. Browning's poems which are directly prompted by thought have their counterpart in a large number which are specially inspired by emotion; and must be noticed as such. But this group will perhaps be the most artificial of all; for while thought is with him often uncoloured by feeling, he seldom expresses feeling as detached from thought. The majority, for instance, of his love poems are introduced by the title "dramatic," and describe love as bound up with such varieties of life and character, that questions of life and character are necessarily raised by them; the emotion thus conveyed being really more intense, because more individual, than could be given in any purely lyric effusion not warmed by the poet's own life. Some few, however, are genuine lyrics, whether regarded as personal utterances or not; and in the case of two or three of these, the personal utterance is unmistakable.

Under the head of LYRICAL LOVE POEMS must be placed

"ONE WORD MORE" is a message of love, as direct as it is beautiful; but as such it also expresses an idea which makes it a fitting object of study. Most men and women lay their highest gift at the feet of him or of her they love, and with it such honour as the world may render it. They value both, as making them more worthy of those they love, and for their sake rejoice in the possession. Mr. Browning feels otherwise. According to him the gifts by which we are known to the world have lost graciousness through its contact. Their exercise is marred by its remembered churlishness and ingratitude. Every artist, he declares, longs "once" and for "one only," to utter himself in a language distinct from his art; to "gain" in this manner, "the man's joy," while escaping "the artist's sorrow." So Raphael, the painter, wrote a volume of sonnets to be seen only by one. Dante, poet of the "Inferno," drew an angel in memory of the one (of Beatrice). He—Mr. Browning—has only his verse to offer. But as the fresco painter steals a camel's hair brush to paint flowerets on his lady's missal—as he who blows through bronze may also breathe through silver for the purpose of a serenade, so may he lend his talent to a different use. He has completed his volume of "Men" and "Women." He dedicates it to her to whom this poem is addressed. But his special offering to her is not the book itself, in which he speaks with the mouth of fifty other persons, but the word of dedication—the "One Word More"—in which he speaks to her from his own. The dramatic turns lyric poet for the one only.

And what he says of himself, he in some degree thinks of her. The moon, he reminds her, presents always the same surface to the world: whether new-born, waxing, or waning; whether, as they late saw her, radiant above the hills of Florence; or, as she now appears to them, palely hurrying to her death over London house-tops. But for the "moonstruck mortal" she holds another side, glorious or terrible as the case may be—unknown alike to herdsman and huntsman, philosopher and poet, among the rest of mankind. So she, who is his moon of poets, has also her world's side, which he can see and praise with the rest;

"PROSPICE" (look forward) is a challenge to spiritual conflict, exultant with the certainty of victory, glowing with the prospective joy of re-union with one whom death has sent before. We cannot doubt that this poem, like the preceding, came from the depths of the poet's own heart.

"NUMPHOLEPTOS" (caught by a nymph) is passionately earnest in tone, and must rank as lyrical in spite of the dramatic, at least fantastic, circumstance in which the feeling is clothed. It is the almost despairing cry of a human love, devoted to a being of superhuman purity; and who does not reject the love, but accepts it on an impossible condition: that the lover shall complete himself as a man by acquiring the fullest knowledge of life, and shall emerge unsullied from its experiences. This woman, more or less than mortal, belongs rather to the "fairyland of science" than to the realm of mythology. She stands, in passionless repose, at the starting-point of the various paths of earthly existence. These radiate from her, many-hued with passion and adventure, as light rays scattered by a prism; and, in the mocking hopes with which she invests their course, she seems herself the cold white light, of which their glow is born, and into which it will also die. She bids her worshipper travel down each red and yellow ray, bathe in its hues, and return to her "jewelled," but not smirched; and each time he returns, not jewelled, but smirched; always to appear monstrous in her sight; always to be dismissed with the same sad smile: so pitying that it promises love, so fixed that it bars its possibility. He rebels at last, but the rebellion is momentary. He renews his hopeless quest.

"PROLOGUE" is a fanciful expression of the ideas of impediment visible and invisible, which may be raised by the aspect of a brick wall; such a one, perhaps, as projects at a right angle to the window of Mr. Browning's study, and was before him when he wrote.

"NATURAL MAGIC" attests the power of love to bring, as by enchantment, summer with its warmth and blossoms, into a barren life.

"MAGICAL NATURE" is a tribute to the beauty of countenance which proceeds from the soul, and has therefore a charmed existence defying the hand of time.

The INTRODUCTION to the "TWO POETS OF CROISIC," (reprinted under the title of "Apparitions,") recalls the sentiment of "Natural Magic." The "TALE" with which it concludes is inspired by the same feeling. Its circumstance is ancient, and the reader is allowed to imagine that it exists in Latin or Greek; but it is simply a poetic and profound illustration of what love can do always and everywhere. A famous poet was singing to his lyre. One of its strings snapped. The melody would have been lost, had not a cricket (properly, cicada) flown on to the lyre and chirped the missing note. The note, thus sounded, was more beautiful than as produced by the instrument itself, and, to the song's end, the cricket remained to do the work of the broken string. The poet, in his gratitude, had a statue of himself made with the lyre in his hand, and the cricket perched on the point of it. They were thus immortalized together: she, whom he had enthroned, he, whom she had crowned.

Love is the cricket which repairs the broken harmonies of life.

The dramatic setting of the majority of the Love poems serves, as I have said, to bring out the vitality of Mr. Browning's conception of love; and though anything like labelling a poet's work brings with it a sense of anomaly, we shall only carry out the spirit of this particular group by connecting each member of it with the condition of thought or feeling it is made to illustrate.

It will be seen that the dramatic Lyrics and Dramatic Romances, which supply so many of the poems of the following and other groups, had been largely recruited from the first collection of "Men and Women;" having first, in several instances, contributed to that work.

DRAMATIC LOVE POEMS.

The two first of these are inspired by the belief in the distinctness and continuity of the soul's life; and represent love as a condition of the soul with which positive experience has very little to do; but in all the others it is treated as part of this experience, and subject for the time being to its laws. The situation sketched—for it is nothing more—in "CRISTINA" is that of a man and woman whom a glance has united, and who both have recognized in this union the predestined object of their life. The knowledge has only flashed on the woman's mind, to be extinguished by worldly ambitions and worldly honours; and for her, therefore, the union remains barren. But the existence of the man is enriched and perfected by it. She has spiritually lost him, but he has gained her; for though she has drifted away from him, he retains her soul. (This poetical paradox is the strong point of the poem.) It is henceforth his mission to test their blended powers; and when that has been accomplished, he will have done, he says, with this world.

"EVELYN HOPE" is the utterance of a love which has missed its fruition in this life, but confidently anticipates it for a life to come. The beloved is a young girl. The lover is three times her age, and was a stranger to her; she is lying dead. But God, he is convinced, creates love to reward love: and no matter what worlds must be traversed, what lives lived, what knowledge gained or lost, before that moment is reached, Evelyn Hope will, in the end, be given to him.

"LOVE AMONG THE RUINS" depicts a pastoral solitude in which are buried the remains of an ancient city, fabulous in magnificence and in strength. A ruined turret marks the site of a mighty tower, from which the king of that city overlooked his domains, or, with his court, watched the racing chariots as they encircled it in their course. In that turret, in the evening grey, amidst the tinkling of the sheep, a yellow-haired maiden is waiting for him she loves; and as they bury sight and speech in each other's arms, he bids the human heart shut in the centuries, with their triumphs and their follies, their glories and their sins, for "Love is best."

"A LOVER'S QUARREL" describes, not the quarrel itself, but the impression it leaves on him who has unwittingly provoked it: one of amazement as well as sorrow, that such a thing could have occurred. The speaker, apostrophizing his absent love, reminds her how happy they have been together, with no society but their own; no pleasures but those of sympathy; no amusements but those which their common fancy supplied; and he asks her if it be possible that so perfect a union can be destroyed by a hasty word with which his deeper self has had nothing to do. He believes this so little that he is sure she will, in some way, come back to him; and then they will part no more.

A vein of playfulness runs through this monologue, which represents the lovers before their quarrel as more like children enjoying a long holiday, than a man and a woman sharing the responsibilities of life. It conveys, nevertheless, a truth deeply rooted in the author's mind: that the foundation of a real love can never be shaken.

"BY THE FIRESIDE" is a retrospect, in which the speaker is carried from middle-age to youth, and from his, probably English, fireside to the little Alpine gorge in which he confessed his love; and he summons the wife who received and sanctioned the avowal to share with him the joy of its remembrance. He describes the scene of his declaration, the conflict of feeling which its risks involved, the generous frankness with which she cut the conflict short. He dwells on the blessings which their union has brought to him, and which make his youth seem barren by the richness of his maturer years; and he asks her if there exist another woman, with whom he could thus have retraced the descending path of life, and found nothing to regret in what he had left behind. He declares that their mutual love has been for him that crisis in the life of the soul to which all experience tends—the predestined test of its quality. It is his title to honour as well as his guarantee of everlasting joy.

The subtler realities of life and love are reflected throughout the poem in picturesque impressions often no less subtle, and the whole is dramatic, i.e., imaginary, as far as conception goes; but the obvious genuineness of the sentiment is confirmed by the allusion to the "perfect wife" who,

is known to all of us.

"ANY WIFE TO ANY HUSBAND" might be the lament of any woman about to die, who believes that her husband will remain true to her in heart, but will lack courage to be so in his life. She anticipates the excuses he will offer for seeking temporary solace in the society of other women; but these all, to her mind, resolve themselves into a confession of weakness; and it grieves her that such a confession should proceed from one, in all other respects, so much stronger than she. "Were she the survivor, it would be so easy to her to be faithful to the end!" Her grief is unselfish. The wrong she apprehends will be done to his spiritual dignity far more than to his love for her, though with a touch of feminine inconsistency she identifies the two; and she cannot resign herself to the idea that he whose earthly trial is "three parts" overcome will break down under this final test. She accepts it, however, as the inevitable.

"TWO IN THE CAMPAGNA." The sentiment of this poem can only be rendered in its concluding words:

For its pain is that of a heart both restless and weary: ever seeking to grasp the Infinite in the finite, and ever eluded by it. The sufferer is a man. He longs to rest in the affection of a woman who loves him, and whom he also loves; but whenever their union seems complete, his soul is spirited away, and he is adrift again. He asks the meaning of it all—where the fault lies, if fault there be; he begs her to help him to discover it. The Campagna is around them, with its "endless fleece of feathery grasses," its "everlasting wash of air;" its wide suggestions of passion and of peace. The clue to the enigma seems to glance across him, in the form of a gossamer thread. He traces it from point to point, by the objects on which it rests. But just as he calls his love to help him to hold it fast, it breaks off, and floats into the invisible. His doom is endless change. The tired, tantalized spirit must accept it.

"LOVE IN A LIFE" represents the lover as inhabiting the same house with his unseen love; and pursuing her in it ceaselessly from room to room, always catching the flutter of her retreating presence, always sure that the next moment he will overtake her.

"LIFE IN A LOVE" might be the utterance of the same person, when he has grasped the fact that the loved one is determined to elude him. She may baffle his pursuit, but he will never desist from it, though it absorb his whole life.

"THE LOST MISTRESS" is the farewell expression of a discarded love which has accepted the conditions of friendship. Its tone is full of manly self-restraint and of patient sadness.

"A WOMAN'S LAST WORD" is one of moral and intellectual self-surrender. She has been contending with her husband, and been silenced by the feeling, not that the truth is on his side, but that it was not worth the pain of such a contention. What, she seems to ask herself, is the value of truth, when it is false to her Divinity; or knowledge, when it costs her her Eden? She begs him whom she worships as well as loves, to mould her to himself; but she begs also the privilege of a few tears—a last tribute, perhaps, to her sacrificed conscience, and her lost liberty.

"A SERENADE AT THE VILLA" has a tinge of melancholy humour, which makes it the more pathetic. A lover has been serenading the lady of his affections through a sultry night, in which Earth seemed to turn painfully in her sleep, and the silent darkness was unbroken, except by an occasional flash of lightning, and a few drops of thundery rain. He wishes his music may have told her that whenever life is dark or difficult there will be one near to help and guide her: one whose patience will never tire, and who will serve her best when there are none to witness his devotion. But her villa looks very dark; its closed windows are very obdurate. The gate ground its teeth as it let him pass. And he fears she only said to herself, that if the silence of a thundery night was oppressive, such noise was a worse infliction.

"ONE WAY OF LOVE." This lover has strewn the roses of a month's gathering on his lady's path, only for the chance of her seeing them: as he has conquered the difficulties of the lute, only for the chance of her liking its sound; thrown his whole life into a love, which is hers to accept or reject. She cares for none of these things. So the roses may lie, the lute-string break. The lover can still say, "Blest is he who wins her."

"RUDEL TO THE LADY OF TRIPOLI" is a pathetic declaration, in which the lover compares himself to a sunflower, and proclaims it as his badge. The French poet Rudel loves the "Lady of Tripoli;"^[69] and she is dear to him as is the sun to that foolish flower, which by constant contemplation has grown into its very resemblance. And he bids a pilgrim tell her that, as bees bask on the sunflower, men are attracted by his song; but, as the sunflower looks ever towards the sun, so does he, disregarding men's applause, look towards the East, and her.

"IN THREE DAYS" is a note of joyful expectation, and doubtless a pure lyric, though classed as dramatic-lyrical. The lover will see his love in three days; and his complex sense of the delay, as meaning both all this time, and only this, is leavened by the joyful consciousness that the reunion will be as absolute as the union has been. He knows that life is full of chance and change. The possibilities of three days are a great deal to encounter, very little to have escaped. Unsuspected dangers may lurk in the coming year. But—he will see her in three days; and in that thought he can laugh all misgiving and all fear to scorn.

"IN A GONDOLA" is a love scene, beginning with a serenade from a gondola, and continued by the two lovers in it, after the Venetian fashion of the olden time. They are escaping, as they think, the vigilance of a certain "Three"—one of whom we may conjecture to be the lady's husband or father—and have already regained her home, and fixed the signal for to-morrow's meeting, when the lover is surprised and stabbed. As they glide through the canals of the city, by its dark or illuminated palaces, each concealing perhaps some drama of love or crime—the sense of danger never absent from them,—the tense emotion relieves itself in playful though impassioned fancies, in which the man and the woman vie with each other. But when the blow has fallen, the light tone gives way, on the lover's side, to one of solemn joy in the happiness which has been realized.

"PORPHYRIA'S LOVER" is an episode which, with one of the poems of "Men and Women," "Johannes Agricola in Meditation," first appeared under the head of "Madhouse Cells."^[70] Porphyria is deeply attached to her "lover," but has not courage to break the ties of an artificial world, and give herself to him; and when one night love prevails, and she proves it by a voluntary act of devotion, he murders her in the act, that her nobler and purer self may be preserved. Such a crime might be committed in a momentary aberration, or even intense excitement, of feeling. It is characterized here by a matter-of-fact simplicity, which is its sign of madness. The distinction, however, is subtle; and we can easily guess why this and its companion poem did not retain their title. A madness which is fit for dramatic treatment is not sufficiently removed from sanity.

"JAMES LEE'S WIFE" is the study of a female character developed by circumstances, and also impressing itself on them; the circumstances being those of an unfortunate marriage, in which the love has been mutual, but the constancy is all on the woman's side. "James Lee" is (as we understand) a man of shallow nature, whose wife's earnestness repels him when its novelty has ceased to charm. The "Wife" is keenly alive to his change of feeling towards her: and even anticipates it, in melancholy forebodings which probably hasten its course.

I.

JAMES LEE'S WIFE SPEAKS AT THE WINDOW.

Love carries already the seed of doubt. The wife addresses her husband, who is approaching from outside, in words of anxious tenderness. The season is changing; coming winter is in the air. Will his love change too?

II.

BY THE FIRESIDE.

The note of apprehension deepens. The fire they are sitting by is supplied by ship-wood. It suggests the dangers of the sea, the sailor's longing for land and home. "But the life in port has its dangers too. There are worms which gnaw the ship in harbour, as the heart in sleep. Did some woman before her, in this very house perhaps, begin love's voyage full sail, and then suddenly see the ship's planks start, and hell open beneath the man she loves?"

III.

IN THE DOORWAY.

She remonstrates with her fear. Winter is drawing nearer: nature becoming cold and bare. But they two have all the necessaries of life, and love besides. The human spirit (the spirit of love) was meant by God to resist change, to put its life into the darkness and the cold. It should fear neither.

IV.

ALONG THE BEACH.

The fear has become a certainty. The wife reasons with her husband as they walk together. "He wanted her love, and she gave it to him. He has it, and yet is not content. Why so? She is not blind to his faults, but she does not love him the less for them. She has taken him as he was, with the good seed in him and the bad, waiting patiently for the good to bring its harvest; enduring patiently when the harvest failed. Whether praiseworthy or blameworthy, he has been her world!"

"That is what condemns her in his eyes: she loves too well; she watches too patiently. His nature is impatient of bondage. Such devotion as hers is a bond."

V.

ON THE CLIFF.

She reflects on the power of love. A cricket and a butterfly settle down before her: one on a piece of burnt-up turf, one on the dark flat surface of a rock which the receding tide has left bare. The barren surfaces are transfigured by their brightness. Just so will love settle on the low or barren in life, and transform it.

VI.

READING A BOOK UNDER THE CLIFF.

She has reached the transition stage between struggle and resignation. She accepts change and its disappointments as the law of life. We discover this in her comment on the book in question, from which some verses are introduced.^[71] The author apostrophizes a moaning wind which appeals to him as a voice of woe more eloquent than any which is given to animal or man: and asks it what form of suffering, mental or bodily, its sighs are trying to convey. James Lee's wife regards the mood here expressed as characteristic of a youthful spirit, disposed to enlarge upon the evils of existence by its over-weening consciousness of power to understand, strength to escape or overcome them. Such a one, she says, can only learn by sad experience what the wind in its moaning means: that subtle change which arrests the course of happiness, as the same wind, stirring however softly in a summer dawn, may annul the promise of its beauty.

She who has learnt it, can only ask herself if this old world-sorrow be cause for rejoicing through the onward impulse ever forced upon the soul; if it be sent to us in probation. She cannot answer. God alone knows. The fully realized significance of such death in life gives an unutterable pathos to her concluding words.

VII.

AMONG THE ROCKS.

She accepts disappointment as also a purifier of love. A sunny autumn morning is exercising its genial influence, and the courage of self-effacement awakens in her. As earth blesses her smallest creatures with her smile, so should love devote itself to those less worthy beings who may be ennobled by it. Its rewards must be sought in heaven.

VIII.

BESIDE THE DRAWING-BOARD.

She accepts the duties of life as an equivalent for its happiness, i.e., for the happiness of love. She has been drawing from the cast of a hand—enraptured with its delicate beauty—thinking how the rapture must have risen into love in the artist who saw it living; when the coarse (laborious) hand of a little peasant girl reminds her that life, whether beautiful or not, is the artist's noblest study; and that, as the uses of a hand are independent of its beauty and will survive it, life with its obligations will survive love. "She has been a fool to think she must be loved or die."

IX.

ON DECK.

She makes the final sacrifice to her husband's happiness, and leaves him. But in so doing she pays a last tribute to the omnipotence of love. She knows there is nothing in her that will claim a place in his remembrance. She knows also that if he had loved her, it might be otherwise. Love could have transformed her in his sight as it has transfigured him in hers. Their positions might even have been reversed. If one touch of such a love as hers could ever come to her in a thought of his, he might turn into a being as ill-favoured as herself. She would neither know nor care, since joy would have killed her.

We learn from the two last monologues, especially the last, that James Lee's wife was a plain woman. This may throw some light on the situation.

"THE WORST OF IT" is the cry of anguish of a man whose wife has been false to him, and who sees in her transgression only the injury she has inflicted on herself, and his own indirect part in its infliction. The strain of suppressed personal suffering betrays itself in his very endeavour to prove that he has not been wronged: that it was his fault, not hers, if his love maddened her, and the vows by which he had bound her were such as she could not keep. But the burden of his lament—"the worst of it" all—is, that her purity was once his salvation, her past kindness has for ever glorified his life; that she is dishonoured, and through him, and that no gratitude of his, no power of his, can rescue her from that dishonour. In his passionate tenderness he strives to pacify her conscience, and again, as earnestly to arouse it. "Her account is not with him who absolves her, but with the world which does not; with her endangered womanhood, her jeopardized hope of Heaven." He implores her for her own sake to return to virtue though not to him. For himself he renounces her even in Paradise. He "will pass nor turn" his "face" if they meet there.

The pathos of "TOO LATE" is all conveyed in its title. The loved woman is dead. She was the wife of another man than he who mourns for her. But so long as there was life there was hope. The lover might, he feels, have learned to compromise with the obstacles to his happiness. Some shock of circumstance might have rolled them away. If the loved one spurned him once, he had of late been earning her friendship. She might in time have discovered that the so-called poet whom she had preferred to him was a mere lay-figure whom her fancy had draped. But all this is at an end. Hope and opportunity are alike gone. He remains to condemn his own quiescence in what was perhaps not inevitable; in what proved no more for her happiness than for his. The husband is probably writing her epitaph.

"Too Late" expresses an attachment as individual as it is complete. "Edith" was not considered a beauty. She was not one even in her lover's eyes. This fact, and the manner in which he shows it, give a characteristic force to the situation.

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