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BROWNING STUDIES 
 
 SELECT PAPERS BY MEMBERS 
 
 BROWNING SOCIETY 
 
 EDITED, WITH AN INTRODUCTION 
 
 BY 
 
 EDWARD BERDOE, M.R.C.S., &c. 
 
 AUTHOR OF "the BROWNING CYCLOPEDIA," " BROWNING'S MESSAGE TO HIS TIME," &C., &C. 
 
 LONDON 
 GEORGE ALLEN, 156, CHARING CROSS ROAD 
 
 1895 
 \All rights reserved] 
 
Richard Clay and Sons, Limited, 
 
 LONDON and BUNGAY. 
 
 LOAN STACK 
 
 V^sjifSi. 
 
 (X^ '- -v ,-| 
 
 1,1.:^ n 
 

 INTEODUCTION, 
 
 When the Browning Society was founded fourteen years ago, 
 the works of the great poet were read by comparatively few general 
 readers in England, although they had long been familiar to the 
 American public and had secured a great number of earnest students 
 who united themselves into societies and reading clubs for the discus- 
 sion of a literature which even then was voluminous. At that time it 
 was considered in England an affectation of erudition to pretend to 
 any wider acquaintance with Browning's works than was involved in 
 knowing the Pied Piper of Hamelin, How they Brought the Good News 
 from Ghent to Aix, and having a nodding acquaintance with Rahbi 
 Ben Ezra. 
 
 To have owned to familiarity with Paracelsus or The Ring and 
 the Book subjected one to the gibes and sneers of smart people, who 
 thought it clever to call Pacchiarotto a "pack o' rot." To confess 
 that Sordello interested and even delighted one entailed the certainty 
 of having to listen to the ancient wheeze about Douglas Jerrold, who 
 once essayed to read the poem, and having done so took medical 
 opinion about the state of his reason. Everybody had a cheap joke 
 about Browning, and if people knew nothing else of the poet, they 
 could at least raise a laugh against those who pretended to know him. 
 
 Reviewers, in the intervals between criticising a society novel 
 and a volume of minor poetry, knocked off a column or so on 
 Browning, and conclusively settled that he could write neither 
 grammatically nor intelligibly, and that having no " form " his works 
 could not possibly be poetry. 
 
 There is no more remarkable fact in the history of literature, and 
 no greater disgrace to English criticism, than the treatment meted 
 out to Robert Browning for half a century. Here was the greatest 
 
 488 
 
VI INTRODUCTION. 
 
 English poet since Shakespeare living amongst us, pouring out treas- 
 ures of thought and disseminating germs of " wholesome ferment " 
 for other minds, as Mr. Lowell has happily said, and England would 
 have none of him. 
 
 " Ye British Public who like me not " 
 
 he complained, after writing for thirty-five years; after giving the 
 world Men and Women, Pip2)a Passes, Paracelsus, Christmas Eve and 
 Easter Day, and[other priceless literary treasures which will never die 
 while the English language affords them a home. The British Public 
 who unceasingly bragged of the Shakespeare of whom it knew little, 
 and the Spenser and Dry den and the rest of whom it knew practically 
 nothing, ridiculed the idea that Browning could be of the regal caste 
 of poets because he spoke a language that was not of the sort it was 
 accustomed to. Browning mixed no water with his ink, as Goethe 
 said our modern poets do ; there was often little music in his words, 
 and the sense was at times rather hard to grasp ; and so our strong, 
 robust, gloriously sane poet " came to his own and his own received 
 him not " ; he spoke vigorous, pregnant words warm from his great, 
 loving heart, and ' poured for us wine ' to brace our souls in the degen- 
 erate days when men were giving up God for the Unknowable, and 
 their faith in Christianity for belief in "something not ourselves 
 which makes for righteousness " ; he taught us a pure religion, 
 reasonable and manly, robust and in harmony with the science of 
 the age, and few would listen and fewer still would heed. Yet the 
 age had such need of him ! The cancer of salacity, the poison-germs 
 of impurity infected our literature, and were being disseminated as 
 never had been known before. The age was a frivolous, listless, 
 lackadaisical time, when such thought as could be tolerated by our 
 youth was growing daily more pessimistic, less reverent and earnest ; 
 well-educated, happily placed men and women began to ask if life 
 were worth living ; and for want of anything to stir their pulses 
 after exhausting their energies in devising new modes of breaking 
 the Ten Commandments one after another, bethought themselves of 
 importing a so-called Buddhism, and cultivating melancholy and 
 atheism. Christianity was declared to be " played out," and no 
 longer to be credited by men and women who had passed a science 
 examination or studied Huxley. 
 
 Just when such sentiments as these became popular, even with 
 
INTRODUCTION. Vlt 
 
 those who had no qualifications for any such difficult task, Browning 
 had reached the zenith of his glory, and a few lovers of the man and 
 his work decided upon the rather risky scheme of founding a society 
 in his honour, or rather for the promulgation of his teaching. It is 
 not to be understood, however, that all lovers of Browning are either 
 Christians or Theists. Some of the most able and esteemed founders 
 of the Browning Society had no sympathy with either his Theism 
 or Christian teaching. It was in the year 1881, on October 28th, 
 that the Browning Society was inaugurated at University College, 
 London, with the address by the Rev. J. Kirkman, M.A., " On the 
 Characteristics of Browning's Philosophy and Poetry," which occupies 
 the first place in this volume. The Vice-Presidents of the Society 
 were the Rev. H. R, Haweis, M.A., Miss Anna Swanwick, and 
 Lady Mount-Temple. The Committee consisted of Mr. Sidney Ball, 
 M. A., Oxford ; Professor Corson, M.A., Cornell ; Mr. F. J. Furnivall, 
 M.A., Cambridge; Rev. Professor E. Johnson, M.A., London; Rev. 
 J. Kirkman, M.A., Cambridge ; Miss Mary A. Lewis, Miss Elinor 
 M. Lewis, Mr. J. T. ISTettleship, Mr. Hume C. Piment, M.A., Cam- 
 bridge, and Mr. James Thomson ; with Miss E. H. Hickey as 
 Honorary Secretary. The object of the Society, as declared in the 
 Founders' prospectus dated July, 1881, was set forth as follows : — 
 
 " This Society is founded to gather together some, at least, of the 
 many admirers of Robert Browning, for the study and discussion of 
 his works, and the publication of Papers on them, and extracts from 
 works illustrating them. The Society will also encourage the form- 
 ation of Browning Reading Clubs, the acting of Browning's dramas 
 by amateur companies, the writing of a Browning Primer, the com- 
 pilation of a Browning Concordance or Lexicon, and generally the 
 extension of the study and influence of the poet. 
 
 " Without entering on the vext question of who is the greatest 
 living poet, Mr. Browning's admirers are content to accept the 
 general verdict that he is both one of the greatest, and the most 
 thought-full. They find as his leading note that which Prof. 
 Spalding declared was Shakspere's : 
 
 * ' The presence of a spirit of active and inquiring thought through every page 
 of his writings, is too evident to require any proof. It is exerted on every object 
 which conies under his notice ; it is serious when its theme is lofty ; and when 
 the subject is familiar, it is content to be shrewd. He has impressed no other of 
 his own mental qualities on all his characters ; this quality colours every one of 
 them. . . . Imagination is active, powerfully and unceasingly, but she is rebuked 
 
VIU IKTEODUCTION. 
 
 by the presence of a mightier influence ; she is but the handmaid of the active and 
 piercing understanding ; and the images which are her offspring serve but as 
 the breeze to the river, which stirs and ripples its surface, but is not the power 
 which impels its water to sea." — Letter on the AutJwrship of the "Two NdbU 
 Kinsmen." 1833, p. 20-1. (N. Sh. Soc. reprint.) 
 
 " That this very fullness of thought in Mr, Browning, with its 
 lightning darts, abrupt transitions, is hard to take in, difficult to 
 follow, is matter of course. That the thought is more worthf ul to 
 him than its expression, the heart of oak than its bark, has made 
 some men refuse to try and penetrate through the rough covering to 
 the strength beneath. But ^schylus is often obscure; some pas- 
 sages in Shakspere still puzzle the best critics. Browning's themes 
 are the development of Souls, the analysis of Minds, Art, Religion, 
 Love, the relation of Man and Nature to God, of Man to Man and 
 Woman, the Life past, present, and to come. If on some of these 
 great themes Browning's thoughts have not been easily apprehended, 
 may this not come from want of faithful study, default of deadened 
 minds ] At any rate the Browning student will seek the short- 
 coming in himself rather than in his master. He will wish, by 
 conference with other students, by recourse to older scholars, to 
 learn more of the meaning of the poet's utterances; and then, 
 having gladly learnt, * gladly wol he teche,' and bring others under 
 the same influence that has benefited himself. To this end The 
 Browning Society has been founded. 
 
 " The Society will consist of all Subscribers of 21-5. a year. It will 
 meet once a month from October to June (except in December), on 
 the 4th Friday of every such month, at 8 p.m., at University 
 College, Gower Street, W.C., for the hearing and discussion of a 
 Paper or Address on some of Browning's poems or his characteristics. 
 The Society's best Papers, and Reports of its Discussions, will be 
 printed either in full or in a Monthly Abstract sent to all members, as 
 funds allow. Till July 7, 1882, the Society will be managed by a 
 Committee of its Founders and Promoters. At that day's Meeting, 
 after the experience of the first Session, the Constitution of the 
 Society will be settled, and its Officers elected for the ensuing year. 
 
 " The Committee are anxious to appoint as Local Honorary Secre- 
 taries those students of Browning in or out of London who will under- 
 take either to get up Browning Beading Clubs in their respective 
 districts, — after the example of Professor Corson, who has directed 
 
INTRODUCTION, 
 
 one in his University (Cornell) for the last four years, — or otherwise 
 promote the study of Browning in their neighbourhood as oppor- 
 tunity offers. 
 
 "The Society may not be a large or permanent one. It appeals 
 only to thoughtful men and women willing to study Browning's 
 works. It exists, and will begin its Meetings next autumn. It has 
 promises of some Papers for its first Session, but desires more. Its 
 few present members hope that some, at least, of the many to whom 
 Browning's works have been a help and strength, will join them in 
 their endeavour to know him better, and bring more minds under 
 his influence. 
 
 " To remove misunderstandings that have arisen, the Committee 
 state that any one joining the Society is not in any way pledged to 
 indiscriminate admiration of Browning, but is only supposed to hold 
 that the poet is profound enough in thought, noble enough in character 
 and feeling, eloquent and interesting enough in expression, to deserve 
 more thorough study, and a far wider circle of readers, than he has yet 
 had. The Committee wish for frankness of expression in all Papers, 
 &c. ; and they give notice from the first, that every writer in the 
 Society's publications is to be held as speaking for himself or herself 
 alone, without any responsibility whatever on the Committee's part." 
 
 In the " Forewords " to " A Bibliography of Robert Browning, 
 1833-1881," by Dr. Furnivall, published in Part I. of the Browning 
 Society's Pa2)ers, 1881, the writer says that after the Alphabetical 
 List and the Chronological one of the poet's works in their order of 
 time, which he presented to the Society (including a number of most 
 valuable notes by Mr. Shepherd and Mr. Carson), it would be necessary 
 to have A Subject- Index to Browning^s Works, and a short statement of 
 the story and purpose of each of these works. He particularly 
 desired the publication of a Browning Primer. All these desirable 
 objects were achieved by the Browning Society in due order. It is 
 impossible to praise too highly the splendid work done by Dr. 
 Furnivall in his Bibliography of Browning, forming the whole of 
 Part I. and more than 50 pp. of Part II. of the Society's Papers. 
 This work is indispensable to the Browning student, and was a 
 purely literary labour of love on the author's part, as he candidly 
 stated in his Forewords that personally " he did not care for the 
 special Christian or doctrinal side of Browning's work, yet he felt 
 the worth of his teaching as a man and thinker, and admired his 
 
X INTRODUCTION. 
 
 imaginative power, his strength and subtlety." This was a peculiar and 
 interesting feature of the Browning Society, and one which endears it to 
 the recollections of those who were its most active members, that it was 
 a platform on which we could all meet — Christians, both Protestant and 
 Catholic, atheists, agnostics, and indifferents — and each find something 
 in Browning which appealed to the best that was in us, making us all 
 feel stronger, more earnest and real, and truer to our better selves. 
 Mr. James Thomson, the atheist, author of The City of Dreadful Night, 
 could recognise and reverence Browning's Christianity. In his paper 
 on the " Genius of Kobert Browning," read at the third meeting of the 
 Society, January 27, 1882, he said: "Finally, I must not fail to 
 note as one of the most remarkable characteristics of his genius, his 
 profound, passionate, living, triumphant faith in Christ, and in the 
 immortality and ultimate redemption of every human soul in and 
 through Christ. . . . Thoroughly familiar with all modern doubts and 
 disbeliefs, he tramples them all under foot, clinging to the Cross ; 
 and this with the full co-operation of his fearless reason, not in spite 
 of it, and by its absolute surrender or suppression." Mr. Cotter 
 Morrison, Mr. Moncure Conway, Miss Eleanor Marx, Bishop 
 Westcott, Canon Farrar, the Hon. Boden Noel, Miss Beale the dis- 
 tinguished Principal of the Ladies' College, Cheltenham, the Bev. 
 Mr. Haweis, Mr. Nettleship the painter, and a host of other leaders 
 of all shades of religious opinion, met with us and contributed to the 
 common store of Browning knowledge ; one and all, like wanderers 
 in a Brazilian forest, found something to delight him or her, and 
 though not every one chose the same precious or beautiful object, not 
 one was disappointed, not one but left the meeting the richer for some 
 treasure of high and pure thought. Surely never since Shakespeare's 
 days came amongst us English folk so potent a genius as Bobert 
 Browning, who could blend into one by the spell of his love and power 
 so many and so various shades of thought. Yet ours was no slavish 
 hero-worship, no uncritical compact to worship Browning at all 
 hazards ; we criticised him freely, expressed our opinions unmistakablj', 
 and, if report be true, greatly to the amusement and satisfaction of the 
 poet himself, who once having been asked to explain the meaning of 
 one of his dark sayings, bade the querist " Ask the Browning Society : 
 they could tell, he couldn't ! " Dean Church used to say that " Brown- 
 ing went into polite society in his shirt-sleeves and made faces at it." 
 We often felt that was so, and very often, no doubt, when we had 
 
INTRODUCTION. XI 
 
 been hotly debating to whose side some particular arrow was 
 directed, the poet was chuckling his Be te fahula. We only quarrel- 
 led in the Society when certain folk of one or other party tried to 
 monopolise Browning all to themselves, to stow away the master 
 into their own little pocket and walk off with him. It was quite 
 a natural thing to do, for we were for the most part very ordinary 
 folk, and few of us had the warm generosity of Mr. Thomson to 
 i-everence and admire what we did not happen to believe ; but after 
 a little reflection we yielded to Browning's loftier spirit, and felt 
 very much ashamed of being so little in the presence of one so great. 
 I think we must have been useful to one another. The unbeliever 
 must have felt that there was something in Christianity after all, 
 when such a genius as that of Browning could accept it as devoutly 
 as a mediaeval saint ; and the Christian no doubt often felt that the 
 all-embracing love of the poet was a good deal wider and much 
 more divine than the narrow bounds of some of our creeds. 
 
 But we were not by any means all theological in our meetings. 
 "We talked and thought of Browning as a musician ; as a landscape 
 painter ; as an interpreter of Greek life and character ; as a poet of 
 science ; as a dramatist ; as an historian ; as a philosopher ; as a 
 lover. Yet in the twelve years of our existence we had but entered 
 the borders of the Browning-land, and when we broke up the Society in 
 1893, although we had done so much, we felt that had time and means 
 permitted, we could have carried on our work profitably and pleasantly 
 for another decade or two. We accomplished however all we set out 
 to do. We had acted all the really actable plays, had published 
 thirteen volumes of papers and discussions, with many beautiful 
 photographs of pictures referred to in the poems. Mrs. Sutherland 
 Orr had published her useful Handbook to the works of the 
 poet; Mr. Nettleship had written his invaluable Essays; Miss Hickey 
 had contributed her " Notes on Strafford " ; Mr. Arthur Symonds had 
 given us his "Introduction to the Study of Browning" ; Miss Wilson 
 and Miss Defries had each published her " Primer of Browning " and 
 the present writer his " Browning Cyclopsedia," and written the " Bio- 
 graphical and Historical Notes " to the poet's complete works ; all this 
 was the direct outcome of the Society's activity. But beyond this, as 
 due chiefly to the interest awakened in Browning's works by our efforts, 
 an enormously increased demand arose for the poems themselves. Many 
 volumes of essays and other explanatory works had helped to spread 
 
XU INTRODUCTION, 
 
 the liglit and set thousands studying a poet now no longer neglected 
 nor unloved by English people. All this would have come in time, 
 Society or no Society ; but it is certain that the time was greatly 
 hastened in the twelve years of its existence. 
 
 Although the poet never wrote for profit, and never craved for 
 praise from the unthinking and unappreciative world, he could have 
 been no other than solaced and gratified by the recognition of his 
 efforts for the pleasure and instruction of the world ; and when the 
 time came, when all too soon he left us, it must have cheered him to 
 know that no longer could he complain that "the British Public 
 liked him not," and in his own last words he could "greet the 
 unseen with a cheer." 
 
 His work was done, the clouds had broken ; " right was not 
 worsted, nor did wrong triumph." 
 
 As the publications of the Browning Society are now for the most 
 part out of print, it has been thought advisable to offer to the public 
 this volume of Selected Papers by authors whose reputation suffi- 
 ciently guarantees their importance, and whose treatment of their 
 special subjects largely contributed to the success of the Society for 
 whose benefit they were written. Should the general appreciation 
 of these Selected Papers warrant it, a second series will follow in 
 due course. 
 
 Edward Berdoe, 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 INTEODtrCTION, BY EDWAER BEEDOE 
 
 INTEODTJCTOEY ADDEESS TO THE BROWNING SOCIETY, BY THE REV. J. 
 
 KIRKMAN, M.A 1 
 
 ON "PIETRO 0FABAN0"AND THE LEADING IDEAS OF " DEAMATIC IDYLS," 
 
 SECOND SEEIES 1880, BY THE EEV, J. SHAEPE, M.A 21 
 
 BEOWNING's PHILOSOPHY, BY JOHN BURY 28 
 
 THE IDEA OF PEESONALITY AS EMBODIED IN EOBEET BROWNING'S POETEY, 
 
 BY HIRAM CORSON, LL.D 47 
 
 THE RELIGIOUS TEACHING OF BROWNING, BY DOROTHEA BEALE 76 
 
 ON SOME POINTS IN BEOWNING's VIEW OF LIFE, BY THE EEV. PEOF. B. F. 
 
 WESTCOTT, D.D 92 
 
 ONE ASPECT OF BEOWNING'S VILLAINS, BY MISS E. D. WEST 106 
 
 JAMES lee's wife, BY EEV, J, H. BULKELEY . . .' 130 
 
 ABT VOGLER, BY MRS. TURNBULL 143 
 
 ANDREA DEL SARTO AND ABT VOGLER, BY HELEN J. ORMEROD 151 
 
 lA SAISIAZ, BY THE REV. W. ROBERTSON 166 
 
 ON "A TOCCATA OF GALUPPl's," BY MRS, ALEXANDER IRELAND 187 
 
 NUMPHOLEPTOS AND BROWNING'S WOMEN, BY MRS, GLAZEBROOK 195 
 
 THE WIFE-LOVE AND FEIEND-LOYE OF ROBERT BROWNING, BY THE REV, J. 
 
 J. 6. GRAHAM, M.A. OXON 204 
 
PAGE 
 
 "A DEATH IN THE DESERT," BY MRS. M. G. GLAZEBROOK 225 
 
 SOME NOTES ON EROWNING's POEMS REFERRING TO MUSIC, BY HELEN J. 
 
 ORMEROD 237 
 
 browning's jews and Shakespeare's jew, by professor barnett . . 253 
 
 abt vogler, the man, by helen j, ormerod 267 
 
 browning as a teacher of the nineteenth century, by miss c. m. 
 
 whitehead 283 
 
 "saul," by anna m, stoddart 310 
 
 ON browning's POEM " CRISTINA AND MONALDESCHI," BY MRS. ALEXANDER 
 
 IRELAND 321 
 
INTRODUCTORY ADDRESS TO THE BROWNING 
 SOCIETY. 
 
 BY THE REV. J. KIRKMAN, M.A., QUEEn's COLL., CAMBRIDGE. 
 
 Friday, October 28, 1881, at University College, London, 
 
 Among the honours and penalties to which the higher order of genius 
 is doomed may be reckoned reverential students, enthusiastic advocates, 
 purblind detractors ; then reviews and volumes of criticism ; lastly, a 
 Society for the special study of a man's works. To all this has Mr. 
 Browniug now come. "We do ourselves the honour of meeting to-night 
 to inaugurate the Broiming Society. The words have been already 
 printed, " It exists." And I call to mind some words of the other great 
 Poet of our Golden Age, singing of Nature and considering everywhere 
 her secret meaning in her deeds, and 
 
 " Finding that of fifty seeds 
 She often brings but one to bear." 
 
 "What might some infant have been ! "What might it not have been ! 
 Of the infants cast up on the shore of the living, Blake says, 
 
 " Some are born to sweet delight : 
 Some are born to endless night." 
 
 The possibiHty of a child 
 
 " Whose exterior semblance doth belie its soul's immensity," 
 as "Wordsworth says, might have developed into a critic to save poets 
 from a short mortality of fame, or a curse to deluge mountain-tops in the 
 region of mind with merciless floods of words. Thus this Society, while 
 hitherto in ovo, has already undergone ridicule and the killiag frost of 
 indifference. N"evertheless it makes an attempt to he; and possibly 
 may develop into a worthy successor of the Lyncosi of the sixteenth 
 century. "When its requiem shall be sung, after a long or short life, 
 that life will have been one of noble intentions and efforts, at least in 
 full harmony with the merits and requirements of the case, and suited 
 to the customs of the age in which we eclectic ones live both to learn 
 and teach. Let us unanimously resolve that it shall not exist in vain ; 
 but shall deserve both guineas and gratitude for the benefits it shall 
 
2 MR. KIRKMAN, BROWNING NEAREST TO SHAKESPEARE. 
 
 dispense. Although we cannot and would not shoulder Browning up 
 into a factitious popularity that would be sure to become extinct like 
 fireworks, we may be instrumental in organizing, developing, and culti- 
 vating, the recognition, which is the first element in our raison d'etre, 
 that Browning is undoubtedly the profoundest intellect, with widest 
 range of sympathies, and with universal knowledge of men and things, 
 that has arisen as a poet since Shakespeare. In knowledge of many 
 things he is necessarily superior to Shakespeare, as being the all-receptive 
 child of the century of science and travel. In carefulness of con- 
 struction, and especially in the genius of constructing drama, he claims 
 not comparison with Shakespeare. But. his truly Shakespearian genius 
 pre-eminently shines in his power to throw his whole intellect and 
 sympathies into the most diverse individualities ; to think and feel as 
 one of them would, although undoubtedly glorified by Browning's 
 genius within. Goethe's canon is, " The Poet should seize the particular, 
 and he should, if there be anything sound, thus represent the universal." 
 In this Browning is infallible : but he is, as Shakespeare often is, per- 
 ceptible through the visor of his assumed individuality. I^otice the great 
 number of persons, the wide range of characters and specialities, through 
 which he speaks. Browning rightly and proudly enough scorns the 
 interpretation of being made to speak his own soul when he utters the 
 soul of another. " With this same key Shakespeare unlocked his heart. 
 Did Shakespeare 1 If so, the less Shakespeare he," (Pacchiarotto volume, 
 p. 63.) The fullest poem in which his chief characteristics of throwing 
 himself into the individuality of another, of unfolding the history of a 
 human soul, and of making the human subjective modes called time and 
 eternity inseparable, so that the struggling and emotions and efi'orts or 
 desh-es of a life, or a day, or a thought, for any mind, prove it like " a 
 pin-point rock " founded in earth but pointing heavenwards, is Bordello. 
 In lesser degrees of detailed unfolding, most of his poems are acts or 
 scenes in some "soul's development." I said, his profound acquaint- 
 ance with men and things was Shakespearian. I should have emphatic- 
 ally said, with men, women, and things. Browning's women are as 
 wonderful a class almost as Shakespeare's. He understands women 
 with perfecter intuition and less uniform rose-colour than Richter, of 
 whom Browning often reminds us, Anthony can no more say of any 
 woman, « g^^ j^ cunning past man's thought." {A. # C. i. 2.) 
 
 I do not attempt to attract the notice of the Eumenides by specially 
 referring to Browning's women now. 
 
 Browning is our nearest to Shakespeare. Comparisons may flit and 
 pass : but we take him on his indisputable merits, not blindly, but 
 
BROWNING MADE EASY. APPEAL TO THE INDIFFERENT. 3 
 
 proudly and gratefully. Some one told Goethe that the Germans dis- 
 puted whether he or his contemporary Schiller were the greater poet. 
 His worthy reply was, " They ought to be very thankful that they have 
 two such fellows to dispute about." But let me add what De Quincey 
 says on resembling Shakespeare, when he pays that tribute to Eichter : 
 " If a man could reach Venus or Mercury, we should not say he has 
 advanced to a great distance from the earth : we should say he is very 
 near to the Sun. So also, if in anything a man approaches Shakespeare, 
 or does but remind us of him, all other honours are swallowed up in 
 that : a relation of inferiority to him is a more enviable distinction 
 than all degrees of superiority to others ; the rear of his splendours a 
 more eminent post than the supreme station in the van of all others." 
 (De Quincey, ' On Eichter.' Vol. xiii. 119, 120.) 
 
 We have to consider to-night both Browning and the Broioning 
 Society as correlative, but not as coincident. For the keynote has 
 been given to me of " Characteristics of Browning's Poetry and Philo- 
 sophy." But this is too ambitious. We cannot scamper over the whole 
 field of Browning's works, with the rapidity of him who brought the 
 good news from Ghent to Aix. It is only an open question for some of 
 us, as yet, how far these characteristics conceal or reveal the Poetry and 
 Philosophy : as bees, when they are too numerous, swarm all over the 
 hive, while the regular work of honey-making is in abeyance. I 
 wished more modestly to have taken for title, '^Broioning made easy." 
 I am still somewhat fondly of opinion that that title would have been 
 suitable. A friend said to me, " If you could manage that, you would 
 have a tremendous following. A man ought to be horn with a faculty 
 for understanding Browning : so, if he is not, you must try to create it." 
 Another said that title would be undignified. But it raises the question, 
 on which I hope there will be some discussion, whether we are more to 
 address ourselves to the select circle of ourselves who do already love 
 and value Browning far beyond the measure of conventional acknowledg- 
 ment, and desire to help each other to study him more and know him 
 better ; or whether we are not rather to appeal to the far larger circle of 
 those who may Avisely be attracted to discover and appreciate him for 
 themselves. I venture to suggest that, for various reasons the latter 
 attempt will secure a measure of the former, rather than vice versa. Por 
 the two chief notorious facts that we can never lose sight of, are : 1st, 
 the intense devotedness, the intellectual reverence, and profound per- 
 sonal indebtedness, of Browning's admirers ; and 2nd, the vast preva- 
 lence of indifference, dislike or depreciation, which prevents him from 
 being the popular teacher he deserves to be to this generation, and 
 might be with infinite advantage. I hardly know a greater pain and 
 
 B 2 
 
4 ADMIRERS. ROUGH CLASSIFICATION OF POEMS. 
 
 bitterer disappointment caused by facts in the history of literature, than 
 that given by the acknowledgment registered in that sad and abhorred 
 line, which Milton's archangelic haughtiness would have made him 
 scorn to write : 
 
 " You, British public, you who love me not." 
 
 Let us, with Uncle Toby's recording angel, let fall a tear on that re- 
 peated line, as we have written it down, and blot it out for ever. The 
 regret over this, which is however by no means so fully the fact as he 
 may have been led to feel from isolated symptoms, is akin to that one 
 feels over Bacon and Jeremy Taylor ignoring the existence of their 
 greater contemporary and superior, Shakespeare. Yet, our special busi- 
 ness is with reference to this love and indifference, to help the light to 
 conquer more of the darkness, and the love to overcome the indifference. 
 If the unanswerable plea for the indifference to Browning be his extreme 
 obscurity, " dark with excess of light," and painfully rapid succession 
 of thoughts, and general difficulty in following thro' the involved tangle 
 of endless sentences, subtlety of perpetual suggestiveness, which can 
 only be overcome and turned into pleasure by very intellectual and 
 persevering readers ; this is a legitimate object for our Society to deal 
 with. And we may, with respect to it, gather hope to-night from 
 the pleasing paradox (if you will notice the list of Members, and 
 especially the four caryatides which support the entablature of this 
 Society), of the great proportion of clergymen and ladies! About 
 2 to 1 on the whole. The poet has no need to be ashamed of his 
 clients ; nor they of themselves, in the intellectual ranks likely to 
 influence lower mortals. Still, in the face of this, no one can fairly 
 reiterate the pretty old class slander that we (of those two species) 
 are emphatically those in whom emotion dominates over intellect and 
 judgment. Speaking for myself, probably also herein for my peers, 
 this suggests one of the most practical hints we have to offer ; that our 
 elective affinities are determined by a man's best works ; and are not 
 dissolved by those which are less worthy of his greatest self. 
 
 Wherefore, as the all-important subject of classification has already 
 been mentioned by the Chairman, we imist first divide Broioning''s works 
 into two great classes. I don't think either of the two volumes of Selections 
 has done this wisely. And I anticipate that probably my division may 
 be repudiated by some present, or counted unworthy and trivial. IsTever- 
 theless, it is possible that the lapse of time may only strengthen this 
 roughly reasonable classification. First, those works which may he 
 understood and enjoyed. Second, those tohich never toill he: such 
 as the involved narratives and subtle disquisitions, the store of head- 
 aches, and volumes of cobwebs strung with innumerable pearls glittering 
 
MR. KIRKMAN. ROUGH CLASSIFICATION OP POEMS. 5 
 
 in a light beyond our ordinary powers of vision. This division corre- 
 sponds loosely with, that between his earlier and later works ; although 
 by no means accurately or entirely, of course. With respect to such, a 
 rather daring distinction, I presume most humbly to suggest that blind 
 adulation and indiscriminate commendation of all that our great teacher 
 has writ, because he has writ it, is no rational allegiance to him on the 
 part of such sincere disciples as we are ; and in proportion as it should 
 threaten to prevail, must lower the standard of this Society. I believe 
 it was Coleridge who said, " The affections are monarchical, but the 
 intellect is democratic." N'or ought we to be embarrassed by the fact 
 that Browning is still alive. May he long live : on into his aftermath, 
 the 
 
 " rare afterbirth of peeping blooms sprinkled its wealth among," 
 
 similar to the glorious season of 40 or less years ago. "We can hardly 
 help feeling that if Browning would take out advice, we should " make 
 him all he ought to be." But at least we will study, while he laughs 
 kindly on us. 
 
 Now, I have claimed somewhat of the function of a foolometer to- 
 night • or, as Bacon said, to think with the learned and speak with the 
 vulgar : and in that capacity may state one case that represents 
 thousands. An intelligent man hears Browning praised. He finds 
 Red Cotton Night-Cap Country, or Prince Holienstiel-Schwangau or 
 Pacchiarotto within reach. He says, "I read it once and could not make 
 cap or queue of it. I thought I had read it too fast. I read it again, 
 with no more success, and thought I had read it too slowly. I read it a 
 third time aloud, dropped pieces of my broken teeth on the carpet in 
 the process, and gave up Browning in despair." There is great reason- 
 ableness in that. He hegan in the ivrong class. So is a well-disposed 
 convert lost. He had perhaps never heard of Rahhi Ben Ezra, or 
 Christinas Eve, or Saul. This case has been related, as you are aware, 
 in some Periodical ; and we have frequently met with such cases 
 ourselves. Moreover, it illustrates the fact of some one of the later 
 volumes lying near, while probably the three volumes of earlier compo- 
 sitions were returning unto dust on the book-shelf. If the cruel 
 difference between Christmas Eve and Easter Day, for instance, and 
 Pacchiarotto or P. Hohenstiel-Schicangau, does prevail to any reasonable 
 degree between the earlier and later works, therein is a mystery and a 
 titanic grief on which least shall be said and most felt. Some find 
 compensation in the theory that Browning has insisted on enlarging oujc 
 conception of what must be included under the designation of Poetry ; 
 and that he has, with the indisputable right oi genius acting by its own 
 instinctive laws^ created an expansion beyond the accepted manners of 
 
6 OBSCURITY AND RUGGEDNESS. DO ROSES STICK LIKE BURRS? 
 
 his predecessors, as the Natural School did beyond the mechanical 
 fonnahty of Pope. Then some new name is wanted. It is infinitely 
 too serious to be doggerel, in spite of all the wantonness and fun of 
 quaint rhyming and punning ; yet so often apparently deficient in the 
 conscientious elaborating and perfecting which he condescends to aflarm 
 in his short prefaces. It won't come under any definition that I know. 
 Where we cannot understand we must wonder. I believe that is the 
 philosophical attitude of spirit in any such emergency. The charge of 
 obscurity has been so admirably met by ]\Ir. Swinburne in the Bro^vIling 
 digression in his noble Introduction to George Chapman's Poems, that 
 there is no need to refute it further. But as to the cognate charge of 
 i-uggediiess, I am inclined, instead of blaming, to glory in Browning's 
 writings as a protest of the grandest kind against the popular demand 
 that everything is to be smooth and sweet now-a-days. Sweetness and 
 smoothness, the combination which now threatens to emasculate both 
 literary and rehgious productions, both writing, speech, and action, while 
 stm the serpents are gliding under the grass and the roses where there 
 ought to be some burr-thistles too, is no equivalent to Swift's " sweetness 
 and light." Even the polished poet-prophet Isaiah (c. xxx. 10) stoutly 
 resisted it. And Browning evidently shares this feeHng with us ; as he 
 has but too \'igorously perhaps asserted in Pacchiawtto, and so felicit- 
 ously shown in Date and Dabitur. It may be better in these oily days 
 of minds as well as railway-trains advancing without friction, to be 
 somewhat rugged with Browning, Isaiah, Carlyle, &c., than ever smooth 
 ^vith the more popular prophets of lies and delusions. 
 
 At this date it requires a downright efi'ort of the mind to realize that 
 Paracelsus was pubhshed 46 years ago, Sordello in 1840, Christmas Eve 
 and Easter Day in 1850 : and here we are now recommending them 
 and the earliest streams that flowed down to the level of our intelligence 
 from the simlit mountains of his. It was, in a great measure, through 
 omitting altogether Vol, iii. of the Dramatic Works, and taking only 
 the two volumes and Dramatis Personce, that we succeeded in Hamp- 
 stead in a course of Lectures fifteen years ago, and quickened a good 
 number to appreciate Browning, before he suddenly rose to more general 
 recognition, as he has since that time. This must still be more or less the 
 plan to be pursued. And plenty will remain to be done. But it is one 
 thing to give a lecture on some difficult work ; it is quite another thing 
 to get Browning's best works known, loved, enjoyed, and quoted as 
 household words of daily intellectual resource, Kke Tennyson. I would 
 rather take my chance with Sordello than with Tlie Ring and the Book. 
 "\Te were, at any rate, among the " few who must like " the incidents in 
 that development of a soul. Taking Soi'dello as the severest part of 
 
MR. KIRKMAN, BROWNING S CONCENTRATED WRITING. 7 
 
 our liappy task, we felt that it does not share so much of those features 
 which mark the poems published since 1868, at which I stand aghast 
 and bewildered, Sordello is far more quotable ; rhyme tends to make 
 the sentences shorter ; and they never run out as cable to the length of 
 a whole page or more, as in The Ring and the Book. I have not time 
 to speak especially upon Sordello, with its innumerable beauties, its 
 luxuriant excesses, as of vegetable and animal life in an American 
 forest. It comprises a wider grasp, deeper fathoming, and higher 
 scaling, in the development of a soul, than Paracelsus. But most of 
 Browning's poems might have the sub-title of Incident or Incidents iu 
 the development of a soul. The task laid upon our attention by fulness 
 and rapidity of thought is peculiarly in Sordello a stimulating difficulty to 
 be dealt with, and ends in satisfaction and enhanced degrees of pleasure. 
 Euskin says, in reference to The Bishop ordering his tomb in S. Fraxed's 
 Church, " The worst of it is that this kind of concentrated writing needs 
 so much solution before the readers can fairly get the good of it, that 
 people's patience fails them, and they give up the thing as insoluble : 
 though truly it ought to be to the current of common thought like 
 Saladin's talisman, dipped in clear water, not soluble altogether, but 
 making the element medicinal." (' M. P.' vol. iv. 379.) All that Euskin 
 has said on Browning ought to be quoted in full. There are, however, 
 other features besides concentration in Browning's later works about 
 which time would not allow me to speak otherwise than inadequately 
 now. Some one "udU have the delight of exhibiting his great gift of 
 humour, which is one that allies him so truly with Shakespeare ; and 
 which, inextricably interwoven with seriousness, Carlyle, in reference to 
 Eichter, describes as the last finish and perfection of the human faculties. 
 Often Browning reminds us of Eichter also in his sudden and surprising 
 illustrations. Let future speakers take a text for vindication of those 
 twenty years of personal rule that were the ruin of France ; or extract 
 the "pleasure" that is supposed to be an ingredient in reading poetry, 
 the gentleness and the sweetness, from Paccliiarotto : while some of us, 
 who cannot bear that Jupiter should frown so, or ApoUo gather such 
 black clouds around his glory, 
 
 " For fear creep into acorn-cups and hide us there," 
 lest there should be a ray or a shadow of allusion to such minds 
 as our own. Not only the later poems, however, but perhaps every 
 poem of Browning's "must be read three times to be understood." You 
 must always " image the whole, then execute the parts." Coleridge says 
 he read the * Pilgrim's Progress ' three times, first as a theologian, 
 secondly with devotional feelings, thirdly as a poet. (' Table Talk,' p. 89.) 
 Whether thrice or more, there is an order in which Browning must be 
 
8 POEMS IN ORDER OF INTELLIGIBILITY. BEGIN WITH R. BEN EZRA, 
 
 read by one who has to be charmed into appreciating him. The first 
 sign of that order is the separation already insisted on, between those 
 poems and extracts which may be read with pleasure and infinite 
 advantage, and those which I fear no power nor a score of Browning 
 Societies will ever make popular, or acceptable with ordinary minds 
 backed by only ordinary leisure in these rapid days, and an average 
 degree of perseverance. Albeit there is, even in our day, a higher merit 
 than popularity : although you cannot get more than one in a thousand 
 to own as much. 
 
 It may sound foolish to put poems in rank like modern sym- 
 metrical bouquets of flowers or buds : but it is an old philosophy, 
 still essential, to advance from the easy to the difficult, if poetry is 
 to be a serious and elevating enjoyment for the head and the heart. 
 We may even applaud the judgment of that selection which takes 
 From Ghent to Aix, and the Pied Piper as suitable for Penny Eeadings. 
 And I may add, Date and Dahitur is an admirable little gem for 
 children to learn by heart, and many children T am concerned with 
 know it well. But for adults, begin with Rabbi Ben Ezra, one of the 
 very noblest modern religious moral poems, swallowing up in light 
 that miserable shadow of the faithless coldness of the times cast in the 
 doubt, " Is life worth living ? " If a man does not value that, let 
 him alone : he is no better than one of the dolls Jean Paul made for his 
 children with a Sultana raisin put in for a soul. Why has not our 
 glorious poet given us more like that 1 Minerva leaps from the brain 
 Avith all the varieties of Proteus, as we pass to quite other poems. 
 They say, in our less classical times, poets have poems born, as ladies 
 have beautiful children ; and for inscrutable reasons the last may not be 
 as beautiful as the last-but-one. Rabbi Ben Ezra and Prospice are 
 as two guiding angels of subdued effulgence which conduct a man to 
 Childe Roland. This is such an absolutely unique effort of genius, 
 constructed every line and word even with such happy art, that I 
 won't speak about it now, as I am under the responsibility of giving it 
 a separate treatment as my favourite poem. Then Abt Vogler, for a 
 person having any music in his soul. And Caliban, the identical 
 Caliban of Shakespeare, the hauy ancestor of all theologians and philoso- 
 phers, with his keen eyes, perched on a rock's edge, of Sir i^Toel Paton ; 
 the Caliban in his speculating spirit into which Browning has thrown 
 liimself as completely as into Protus or Johannes Agricola, without a 
 single flash of thought incongruous to that undeveloped piece of 
 humanity, who gives us a treasury of the natural history in the island, 
 and of unconscious felicities as piercing as his own eyes, as well as of 
 that natural philosophy beyond which we ourselves could never have 
 
ADVANCE IX ENJOYMENT. THE POET OP MUSIC. 9 
 
 emei^ed, if such a guiding star had never risen on us as Tennyson's, that 
 
 " Nothing is which errs from law ; " 
 nor S. John's sunlight that " God is love." !N"o preacher ever gave 
 a grander sermon on a Scripture text than that is on Psalm 1. 21. 
 Following so reluctantly this idea of successive arrangement, or even 
 taking intelligihility as the great merit, yet if it be 
 
 " Weakness to be wroth with weakness," 
 take Christmas Eve, which is inteUigihle enough ; and if enjoyed on 
 Saturday, Dec. 24, by the time Lent-lilies are out the weaker brethren 
 might venture into Easter Day, which is more abstruse. Any one can 
 understand Saul, and the Arabian Pliysician, the Boy and the Angel, and 
 Holy Cross Day : and then Paracelsus, which is not at all difficult to 
 any one who can at all harmonize with Browning's marvellously versatile 
 genius in his striking selection of subjects, and can become accustomed 
 to his glorious plenitude of thought with lesser degrees of his abstruse- 
 ness. This is low ground indeed to take : but we must not forget that 
 the prejudice to be overcome is against the extreme difficulty of following 
 him without headaches, and with a chance of real enjoyment. Suppose 
 we offered ourselves as guides to Switzerland, with similarly graduated 
 guarantees that enjoyment may be had from flowers, forests, and valleys, 
 as well as intellectual elevation from sublime mountains and wondrous 
 glaciers ! These poems named above ought to convince any one (out of 
 Colney Hatch) that he is sitting at the feet of a wonderful poet, who 
 will richly repay all further efforts bestowed on a fuller acquaintance. 
 And we who have patiently to labour in teaching and raising others, 
 and cannot expect them at once to follow us in all our intellectual 
 soaring with eagles' wings (or Icarus-wings) must f orbearingly sympathize 
 with those limited abilities and pardonable aversions, that can never 
 appreciate (and more than a small minority of readers never will) such 
 poems as P. Hohenstiel-Schwangau and Pacchiarotto, or even Tlce Ring 
 and the Book, or Sordello. The thing to maintain is that such incom- 
 parable poetry as is steadily gaining its deserved popularity, or will 
 through the impetus of this Society, is not more widely different from 
 the other class, is not less in amount comparatively, or lower in 
 comparative excellence of artistic finish, than Wordsworth's ' Ode on 
 Immortality ' is compared with his wearisome drivelling pedlars, or the 
 valued and unvalued portions of many another poet's writings. 
 
 I will now conform to my title by drawing attention to three of the 
 greatest characteristics of Browning's poetry and philosophy, which have 
 hitherto received either utterly inadequate recognition or none at all. 
 Eirst, Music : second. Art : third, Christianity. 
 
 1. Take Mu.?ic First. He is a born musician, and a cultivated musician. 
 
10 BROWNING THE POET OF MUSIC. ABT VOGLER. 
 
 as to the history, the laws, and the compositions, of music. No other 
 poet has ever ventured to occupy such a position. 
 
 " His magic may not copied be : 
 For in that circle none durst walk but he." 
 
 The spiritual transcendentalism of music, the inscrutable relation be- 
 tween the seen and the eternal, of which music alone unlocks the gates by 
 inarticulate expression, has never had an articulate utterance from a poet 
 before Abf Vogler. This is of a higher order of composition, quite 
 nobler, than the merely fretful rebellion against the earthly condition 
 imposed here below upon heavenly things, seen in Master Hugues. In 
 that and other places, I am not sure that persons of musical attainment, 
 as distinguished from musical soul and sympathy, do not rather find a 
 professional gratification at the technicalities, as 
 
 "those lesser thirds so plaintive, 
 sixths diminished, sigh on sigh . . . 
 those commiserating sevenths . . ." 
 
 {A Toccata of GahippVs.) 
 
 as curiosities, and phenomena of music being reduced to words at all ; as 
 again the five parts of a fugue, 
 
 " What with affirming, denying, 
 Holding, risposting, subjoining, . . 
 So your fugue broadens and thickens 
 Greatens and deepens and lengthens. ." 
 
 (^Master Ungues.') 
 
 or the peculiarities of composers, &c., than get conducted to " the law 
 within the law." But in Aht Vogler, the understanding is spell-bound, 
 and carried on the wings of the emotions, as Ganymede in the soft 
 down of the eagle, into the world of spirit. Compare what any one 
 else has written on music. Cowper's 
 
 "With easy force it opens all the cells where memory slept." 
 Wordsworth's fiddling 
 
 " in the street that from Oxford has borrowed its name." 
 Dryden's Odes, so overpraised ; even the Poet Laureate's 
 
 " little sharps and trebles." 
 The beautiful utterances of Richter alone approach to the value of 
 Browning's on music. "Well does he deserve remembrance for the 
 remark, that " Music is the only language incapable of expressing any- 
 thing impure," and for many others. They all, comparatively, speak 
 from outside ; Browntug speaks from inside, as if an angel came to give 
 all the hints we could receive, 
 
 "of that imperial palace whence we came." 
 He speaks of music as Dante does of Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory, 
 
THE HERETICS TRAGEDY. MUSICAL SYMPATHIES. 11 
 
 because lie has been there. :^ Even the musical Milton, whose best 
 line is, 
 
 " In linked sweetness long drawn out." {V Allegro.) 
 
 whose best special treatment of music is in the occasional Poem, ' At a 
 solemn music,' has given us nothing of the nature of Aht Vogler. It 
 should be perfectly learnt by heart ; and it will be ever whispering 
 analogies to the soul in daily life. Because, of course, the mystery of 
 life and the mystery of music make one of the most fundamental tran- 
 scendental harmonies breathed into our being. "We may even correlate 
 Shakespeare here. For the 5th Act of ' M. of Venice,' which comes 
 nearest, gives us briefly the mighty secret, which is so marvellously 
 organised in Aht Vogler. This requires a treatment by itself, and a 
 sympathetic notice of all the " curiosa felicitas," the many revelations 
 subordinate to the one keynote, " It is aU triumphant art, but art in 
 obedience to laws." The Heretic's Tragedy has been but slightingly 
 noticed, and for ' the demoniac malignity of persecution ' generally con- 
 demned; less noticed in its ecclesiastical aspect, or its solemn moral retri- 
 bution, in such strange surprise reasserting its forgotten omnipotence in 
 the dead stagnation of corrupt ages : for its musical value quite unnoticed. 
 It deserves a Handel to compose fit music for it, as a most solemn 
 oratorio. Yet one Review placidly notices this, among the poems which 
 make the reader shudder, by the physical or moral horrors they set before 
 liim, as " culminating in the burning alive of a man before a slow fire." 
 "We might observe his equal sympathy with Hephzibah tune in the 
 little chapel, and the organ in S. Peter's at Eome swallowing up the 
 sense of time : 
 
 " Earth breaks up, time drops away ; 
 
 In flows heaven with its new day 
 
 Of endless life." (a ^. 10.) 
 
 A curious instance of his adopting classical mythology long seemed to 
 me a case of imagination at the expense of accuracy, until I hit upon 
 the explanation : 
 
 " Like some huge throbbing-stone, that poised a-joint 
 Sounds to affect on its basaltic bed, 
 Must sue in just one accent," &c., 10 lines. Sordello, li. 450-460. 
 
 I suppose the allusion is to the stone upon which Apollo laid his lyre 
 while he was at work rebuilding Megara ; and which was henceforth 
 capable of giving only a sound similar to that of the lyre. TJhland has a 
 sonnet on the legend. "While speaking of Browning's most musical genius 
 it sounds very paradoxical, when it is perpetually dinned into our ears 
 that he is not a master of rhythm. One discriminating Eeview (* B. Q.' 
 Nov. '47) says "he is neither a deep thinker nor a musical writer. He 
 is certainly not a born singer : he wants the melody and the grace of 
 
12 MR. KIRKMAN" BROWNIXG'S VERSATILITY OF RHYTHM. 
 
 which verse should be made. At the same time he occasionally pours 
 forth a strain of real melody. He is rather a thinker than a singer. . ." 
 Yet see the generosity of a reviewer who believes but feebly in the 
 existence of either Bells or Pomegranates, concluding his estimate of all 
 Browning's poetry by quoting the whole op Hoio they brought the good 
 neiDs from Ghent to Aix. I venture the opposite opinion, that however 
 reckless or defiant he may be in the elaboration of form, he has a far 
 wider and more commanding versatility of rhythm than Tennyson. The 
 rhythm of Ghent to Aix has admirably caught the rapidity of galloping 
 for very life. As I ride has just the wavy motion of a creature's 
 back. Euggedness is sometimes as essential to the subject as smooth- 
 ness at other times. I may allude to the gentle flowing of 
 " Thus the Mayne glideth, Where my love abideth ; " 
 at which soothing undertones Paracelsus' darkness passes 
 
 " Like some dark snake that force may not expel, 
 Which glideth out to music sweet and low." 
 
 The subdued tone of calm, so exquisitely pathetic, of that plaint, 
 
 " I hear a voice, perchance I heard. 
 Long ago but all too low. . ." {Paracelsus, p. 41,) 
 
 and the sweet melancholy deliberateness of the song there, where you 
 must obey the four beats of each line in order to read it properly, as 
 when there are only four words, or even three, in a line. 
 
 " Lost, I lost I yet*| come | • • . 
 
 " Ee- I proach | to | thee | " 
 This time-test also applies to the beautiful legend of TJie Boy and the 
 Angel. Or compare the three couplets descriptive of Hell, Purgatory, 
 and Heaven, so happily distinct : 
 
 " Dante, pacer of the shore 
 
 "Where glutted hell disgorgeth filthiest gloom, ) 
 
 Unbitten by its whirring sulphur-spume ; j 
 
 Or whence the grieved and obscure waters slope ) 
 
 Into a darkness quieted by hope ; ) 
 
 Plucker of amaranths grown beneath God's eye ) 
 
 In gracious twilights where His chosen lie." i Sordello, i. 366-372. 
 
 The cortege of i\iQ Grammarian' s Funeral steps to the tune of that noble 
 requiem of a Scaliger or some Prince of bookworms, as much as the 
 iambic lightness of the Pied Piper with its variations suits its own sub- 
 ject. Compare the two parts of Holy-Cross Day ; with the humour, the 
 scorn of the first, and the placid dignity of a sublime faith in Ben Ezra's 
 Song of Death. This poem, on other grounds, has been most blindly 
 depreciated. It is a capital test-poem of a gift which little minds emi- 
 nently lack, but which is very characteristic of genius (and its brother 
 madness), the ability for sudden transitions. Some persons have no con- 
 
MR. KIRKMAN. TIME-BEATS. LANGUAGE A MAKE-SHIPT. 13 
 
 ception of the natural ability to laugh one moment, and to be perfectly- 
 solemn and reverential the next ; nor can they discern (e. g. ' C. Eev.' 
 Feb. '67 j the artistic power of the contrast given by 
 " the festering squalor of the Ghetto " 
 as background for the indestructible trust iu the ancient writings of the 
 Hebrew prophets. They shrink less from the facts than from the tragical 
 record of them. Browning may well retort in the language of Dryden 
 (Preface to Fables) : " Pno7' Icesit is justification sufficient in the civil 
 law " : or better still in Milton's paraphrase of Sophocles : 
 
 " 'Tis you that say it, not I. You do the deeds, 
 And your ungodly deeds find me the words." Mectra, 624-5. 
 
 "We may add to this branch of the subject such secondary marks of 
 rhythmical structure as fi?/ie-beats, with noble indifference, or freedom 
 of a bird's wings in the air, as to syllables in the ordinary five-feet lines. 
 Even the rhyme he has imposed on himself so unaccountably in the 
 long epic of Sordello is no fettering whatever. He simply revels in his 
 inexhaustible wealth of rhyming, one, two, or three-syllable rhymes. 
 Nevertheless we cannot help feeling a greater steadiness and measure 
 in the earlier compositions. Compare Paracelsus with any of the 
 more recent narratives wherein lines are the mere warp for the terribly 
 subtle woof of metaphysical analysis. Care rather marks the first 
 period, and recklessness the second. But for a poet who spurns the 
 thought of the number of syllables in a line, I presume to take exception 
 (salvd reverentid) to the irksome mannerism of i' and o' for in and of. 
 I counted, Colemo-YikQ, or FwiiivaU-like, the number of i' and o' cases 
 in The Ring and the Book, and other poems, but have mislaid my bag 
 of winnowed chaff. Why should we be ashamed of English preposi- 
 tions, more than of the enclitic le which ends a line the Scaligers might 
 object to even over their coffins 1 The breathless rapidity of the thought 
 for which little words shaken out of a pepper-box are rather a nuisance, 
 is no doubt the cause. 
 
 " Words have to come : and somehow words deflect 
 As the best cannon ever rifled do." H.-ScJiw. p. 147. 
 
 But aU words were perhaps rather a nuisance to Browning's angelic 
 velocity of thought, 
 
 "Until . . Language the makeshift grew 
 Into the bravest of expedients too." Sordello, li. 179. 
 
 Another peculiarity on which my fastidiousness stumbles, so that I can 
 hardly pick up myself in time for the sentence, the sense, or the line, is 
 the most strange and immoderate use of the — dash — . It is sometimes 
 equal to a parenthesis ; to a stop ; sometimes to apposition ; sometimes 
 silently suggestive that more might be said; sometimes I cannot gauge 
 
14 
 
 MR, KIRKMAN. BROWNING THE POET OF ART. 
 
 its value. I do not know its proper name, or recognized value, in 
 English Grammar ; in Browning it is but dust amidst gold. However, 
 it affronts one scores of times daily, in the outrageous, senseless pro- 
 fusion of employment, in books, in the daily press, in notice biUs, 
 before a name, after a complete sentence, anywhere, everywhere; a plague 
 that has worried me in correcting print till I have made a pact that it 
 shall not be used for me : fretting one sometimes, 
 
 " As its mates do, the midge and the nit, — 
 Through minuteness to wit. The gravamen's in that ! " Instans Tyranmis. 
 
 2. Art. It is an omission hitherto that no art-critic has given us a fit 
 notice of, or more than slight allusions to. Browning's poetry on Art. 
 Browning's Italian soul in his " myriad-minded " genius could not but 
 throw itself much into Art. And his Art-poems are as great contribu- 
 tions to our understanding of the moral principles, and the religious 
 principles, of Art, as Euskin's poetical-prose is. His business is, as Fra 
 Lippo says, " to paint the souls of men." Painting, Music, Verse, are 
 but three cognate languages, of which the last may even be sometimes 
 most inadequate to its high object. Art covers the three, 
 " Poet and painter are proud in the artist list enrolled." 
 In the sketch of the Florentine monk not only do we have most power- 
 fully conceived the religious obligations of art, and the desperate attempt 
 at compromise between the liighest efforts of genius and the irregularities 
 of the loAver nature, as if the one could pay off arrears with God for the 
 other, or as if every artist were a double personality, doomed to the 
 Mezentian punishment that S. Paul takes as the type of the two laws 
 striving within : but also, because of these features, one great inward 
 contradiction of spirit traces so sad an account of all that highly over- 
 strung humanity which includes so many bright names ; suns darkened 
 with sunspots on their discs ; Bacon, Turner, Byron, Handel ; painters, 
 musicians, poets, philosophers. I mention this, because the essential 
 Browning in the art-poems is not only, nor so much, the art-critic, but 
 the exponent of the religious aspect of art, the conscience in discord or 
 harmony, of the relation to God in his art as well as in his Ufe, in 
 Eafael, Giotto, Andrea del Sarto, and in the Florentine painters all, as 
 truly as in Paracelsus. As to judging of pictures, " Poets, and men of 
 strong feeling in general, are apt to be among the very worst judges 
 of painting. The slightest hint is enough for them. . . Thus "Words- 
 worth writes many sonnets to Sir G. Beaumont and Haydon, none to 
 Sir Joshua or to Turner." {Rushin. ' M. P.' iii. 138-9.) But "Browning 
 is unerring in every sentence he writes of the Middle Ages ; always vital, 
 right, and profound : so that in the matter of art, there is hardly a prin- 
 ciple connected with the mediaeval temper that he has not struck upon. 
 
ART IN RELATION TO RELIGION. ELABORATION. 15 
 
 in those seemingly careless and too rugged lines of his. (Quotation from 
 S. Praxed's Church.) I know no other piece of modern English, prose 
 or poetry, in which there is so much told, as in these lines, of the 
 Eenaissance spirit, — its worldliness, inconsistency, pride, hypocrisy, 
 ignorance of itself, love of art, of luxury, and of good Latin. It is nearly 
 aU that I said of the central Eenaissance in thirty pages of the ' Stones 
 of Venice' put into as many liues, Bro^vning's being also the ante- 
 cedent work." ('M. P.' iii. 377-379.) This subject, which is too technical 
 to be more than just touched now, is however of vital importance, as 
 lying at the root of our whole estimate of Browning. When we con- 
 sider that he is ever making incandescent, visible, and illuminating, as 
 by powerful electric current, the dark line of conscience running through 
 all the workings of genius, and asserting painting, music, and poetry to 
 be but three allied forms of one spirit, the Art of Expression or 
 Intimation from soul to soul : 
 
 (" Art was given for that : 
 
 God uses us to help each other so, 
 Lending our minds out. " Fra lAppi.) 
 
 how far are we authorized in applying the moral philosopher's test to his 
 own art ? Are we to consider all his poems finished works of art, each 
 in proportion to its ideal 1 Certainly not by the test of smoothness, or 
 finish as many would call it. For there is an art-canon in that capital 
 
 ^®^^®' " Grand rough old Martin Luther 
 
 Bloomed fables, flowers on furze : 
 The better the uncouther : 
 Do roses stick like burrs ? " 
 
 The poems already named, Ben Ezra, AM Vogler, Ghilde Roland, 
 Paracelsxis, Caliban, Holy Cross Day, The Heretic^s Tragedy, no one 
 could deny to be carefully- wrought works of art. There is further quite 
 a revelation, especially for the " pickers up of learning's crumbs," in the 
 numerous alterations, which must needs suggest carefulness of recon- 
 sideration, and elaboration, in some poems ; in the niceness which could 
 change lepidoptera to coleoptera in Easter Day, 6 ; and especially in 
 that industrious collection of changes made by the devotedness of Mr. 
 Furnivall and others from Sordello. But if, on this theory, which he 
 himself has gauged in the Dedication of Sordello, we are to consider all 
 the later works equally works of art, each according to its kind, free of 
 mere defiance of stupid criticism, free of entanglement in the webs of 
 his own extraordinary facilities : then, it may be, we have even yet 
 much to learn, as I have already hinted, about the elasticity, compre- 
 hensiveness, possible development and even generosity, to be allowed to 
 the word Poetry, adorning as it does the brows of gods and men, the 
 
16 BROWNING OUR GREATEST CHRISTIAN POET, 
 
 heads of chirping cicale and many drowsy insects secular and religious, 
 I would presume to deprecate as untrue rather than ungenerous Mr, 
 W. Bagehot's comparisons of grotesque with pure art and ornate. 
 Holy Cross Day is chosen, with Caliban, to ilkistrate "not the success 
 of grotesque art but the nature of it," Under which of the three 
 epithets are we to range criticism which concludes an estimate of 
 Browning with three-fourths of the Pied Piper as " the hest and most 
 satisfactory instance " ? Caliban is selected, to be called " not a normal 
 type but an abnormal specimen," I wish this were true. "Why, 
 Shakespeare's Caliban is a higher type of humanity, as possible to rise, 
 than Trinculo who has sunk into low habits as vile as the bog, I 
 fear there are whole tribes of Calibans, not only in still-vext Bermoothes. 
 There is a Caliban in each of us. Browning could not have painted 
 that picture without the touch of Caliban which makes the whole world 
 kin. Ask Mr. Charles Darwin about this ! 
 
 3. Christianity. I must claim for Browning the distinction of beiug 
 pre-eminently the greatest Christian poet we have ever had. Not 
 in a narrow dogmatic sense, but as the teacher who is as thrilled- 
 through with all Christian sympathies as with artistic or musical. 
 A man whose very genius is to identify himself, for the nonce, 
 with each human soul he enters, and makes to speak to us, must 
 necessarily find his profoundest, fullest harmony in souls alive with 
 Christian faith and experience, questions and conflicts, I hold very 
 light that solicitude to know and tabulate what his own system of truth 
 is, I cannot sympathize with the intrusive deduction as to what 
 Browning himself is. " The longer I live," says Jean Paxil, " the more I 
 find I have to determine to unlearn systems." " Je langer ich lebe, 
 desto mehr verlern' ich das Gelernte, namlich die Systeme." (December, 
 1820. ' Wahrheit aus J. P,'s Leben,' ii. 140.) He could not adopt a 
 character, and would not select it, unless he could become one with it by 
 inward affinity. How can you get at Shakespeare who is as truly 
 Falstaff as he is King Lear ; lago as much as Othello ? He is 
 humanity. So is Browning religion : with all forms of art, philosophy, 
 and experience as her ministers. It would be astounding to observe how 
 utterly ignored he is in this his deepest innermost being (as far as it is 
 revealed to us as his very self) were it not that we are fully, however 
 painfully, aware, of the petty antipathies, the poor miserable sufficiency 
 of intelligence, and the feeble reiterations of truisms or sentimentalities, 
 that myriads of sincere Christian people allow in their favourite rehgious 
 literature, "Well may M. Arnold say that poetry is a monument of a 
 nation's strength, religious poetry of a nation's weakness. What do the 
 childlike worshippers of Keble, Cowper, Dr. Watts, know of B7'oioning, or 
 
MR. KIRKMAN. BROWNING'S POWERS OF DESCRIPTION. 17 
 
 even of Blahe ? The Church never did know its most glorious sons, since 
 it first stoned the prophets, tiU now that it extols the vapid, thin, milk- 
 and-water runlets called religious poetry. How much might he hurnt 
 with impunity to make a light to read Christmas Eve and Easter Day 
 by] Browning himself, by-the-hye, speaks in that. The incomparable 
 sermon on the charity that dare not condemn any school of religious 
 thought, lest it lose eternal hold on the salvation of the Vest ; the 
 preference, worthy of the firmest believer in Christian doctrine, for Zion 
 Chapel or superstitious Eome over the negative vacuum of the learned 
 skeptic, and the splendid consummation of E. Day so closely resembling 
 the weU-known crisis in Faust : these are the grandest special tributes 
 poet ever brought to Christianity. 
 
 In this spiritual relation, and also for another reason, I may observe 
 here, we might arrange an impressive little selection of descriptive pieces ; 
 descriptive of objects in nature. First and foremost of these would be 
 the sublime description of the lunar rainbow {Ch. Eve, 6 and 7), although 
 the actual detail has been called in question of " the seven proper colours 
 chorded." I could hardly believe that so infallible an observer as he is 
 would run so flagrant a risk, if this were indeed beyond the bounds of 
 possibility. There, the transition from apparition to imagination, 
 
 " Whose foot shall I see emerge ? " 
 
 is worthy of Moses or Ezekiel. I have never seen it noticed how this 
 finally merges into what rather belongs to the aurora horealis. We 
 must have seen the pictures, many of us have seen the reality, " of the 
 sight. Of a sweepy garment vast and white, "With a hem that I could 
 recognize." This is most beautifully interwoven with the account of the 
 woman who touched the hem of Christ's garment ; and is retained as the 
 emblem of saving correspondence with heaven, throughout the poem, 
 and in several other places. It may be worth while to observe how 
 similarly Goethe employs the same emblem for Faust, as the corporeal 
 Helena vanishes and her clothes pass into clouds. (2 Part, Act iii. 
 Sc. 4.) Then the astonishingly graphic description of the sunset sky 
 with its black and ruddy ripples infinite over the whole dome of heaven, 
 in Easter Day, 15. How often have we seen that sky since, as not even 
 Ruskin had opened our eyes to observe ! 
 
 It is Paracelsus as alter Luther, who is unfolded, aspiring, failing, 
 attaining ; not the charlatan that any one may despise. However ut- 
 terly different from Tennyson's two sonnets on Lazarus in 'In Memoriam,' 
 the strange experience of the Arab Physician is no less magnificent a 
 monument in honour of John xi. The finely-introduced comparison 
 of the blue-flowering borage, and the involuntary dominance of that 
 
18 MR. KIRKMAN. DOMINION OF RELIGIOUS SYMPATHIES. 
 
 overwhelming thought which is like the moon heaving along the tide 
 before the sun rises in the morning as light : 
 
 " The very God ! think Abib : dost thou think? 
 So the All-great were the All-loving too I " 
 
 is of the very highest order both of meditation and of composition. 
 Closely resembling that is the dazzled bewilderment of Cleon in the 
 blaze of nobler truth than Athens ever taught, which he cannot reject 
 and yet cannot receive. These are two admirably pourtrayed instances 
 of the way in which. Christian truth wrought in the minds of the 
 intellectual, while it simply converted simpler minds to the faith. 
 Which of us ever preached such a sermon on doing God's will, as Tlie 
 Boy and the Angel ? It is having revealed to us the working of a 
 human soul to the truest advantage of our own, if we go with John to 
 the close of his century of a life of love, to that " thought extracted from 
 a world of thinking" [Bp. Gamhold), God is love; or listen to the 
 persiflage of B. Blougram ; or point the rebuke to the lust of gold with 
 the Legend of Pornic ; or arouse the listless indolence of dilettanti 
 professing Christians by the unexpected moral of The Statue and the 
 Bust. The most beautiful of all his lyrical romances is Saul. In a 
 word, the religious poetry, as I may perhaps caU it, as distinct from the 
 art-poetry and the metaphysical-narrative, ought to startle Christian 
 people into elevation and gratitude. It is a fact that cannot be slurred 
 over, that our two great poets maintain their dominion over the affections 
 of their countrymen, not by sheer power of thinking, mere granite depths 
 and height of mind ; but by the relation of their main convictions to 
 Christian truth, to holy and eternal emotions, to the moral workings of 
 the heart and conscience ; whether in Paracelsus, or the Artist, or 
 Fifine, or In Memoriam. Intellectual subtlety and pre-eminence, on 
 Shelley's ground of denial and antipathy, could not attain, not to say 
 retain, the hold they have upon us. It is the high priest of religious 
 life whose beautiful garment is fringed with Bells and Pomegranates 
 (Exod. xxviii. 33, 34). The emblem is first taken from Aaron's robe : 
 although I don't see that noticed anywhere. Take away the religious 
 tissue from Browning's tapestry, with its vast variety of figures, and 
 almost every one would be a caput mortuum. But lest the designation 
 Christian should seem too exclusive, we may say that his whole soul is 
 orbed round the central thought of God, and man's relation to God. 
 He is as suffused with the thought of God, as Spinoza was : or 
 " As saffron tinges flesh, blood, bones, and all." 
 Not only in Pope Theocrite, but in Installs Tyrannus, Andrea del 
 Sarto as much as Saul, The G-rammarian, and on to the arraign- 
 ment of the soul before the last judgment-seat in Easter Day, the 
 
SUGGESTED LABOURS OF THE BROWNING SOCIETY. 19 
 
 relation to God is the consummated impression left. And this is 
 
 the inmost secret of another element that has received more attention. 
 
 Because God is ever revealing and hiding Himself, beaming out 
 
 and withdra-wing behind impenetrable cloud, therefore all mental 
 
 workings are traced on towards eternity, never ending in to-day 
 
 and to-day's thought. Time and eternity are not " lumped together." 
 
 Only bunglers lug in eternity, and scatter the huge word about " like 
 
 lumps of marl on a barren moor, encumbering what it is not in their 
 
 power to fertilize." But they are interwoven, or so subtly interlinked, 
 
 that the soul's working is a sort of golden chain traced from its anchoring 
 
 in the hidden depths of the soul, onwards towards the throne of God. 
 
 It is intimated as running into the infinite, though not in all cases 
 
 tracked along the same distance thitherward. This is one chief secret 
 
 of Browning's being the poet not only of religious, but of thoughtful, 
 
 persons ; and of the intense sympathy we have with him ; and of his 
 
 being essentially an exponent of the best movements of English mind in 
 
 this age. Without that he could not be so. Shelley might have 
 
 become so, had he lived as Browning suggests ; but he did not. Still, 
 
 it is by no means necessary to agree with Browning's over-specialized 
 
 religious views. Certainly all here present cannot do so. 
 
 Finally : among the objects which I anticipate as of real value to us 
 
 who gratefully reverence Browning, because we feel so deeply indebted 
 
 to the 
 
 " Poet whose thoughts enrich the blood of the world," 
 
 and also to those whose mere ignorance of him without prejudice has 
 left them hitherto strangers to his wealth, are such as these : 
 
 A separate treatment of special poems which need a key; being 
 enigmatical, as Childe Roland ; or 
 
 "a pomegranate full of many kernels," 
 
 as Sordello ; or requiring a pilot through the metaphysical high 
 seas, as The Ring and the Book. Treatises on his humour : his attitude 
 towards science : the poems of a class, as Music, Painting, Art : or the 
 Love Poems, as Mr. Nettleship has already written. (Although, I can 
 almost wish sometimes Love had never been specialized for poets, or 
 cast her sun-suffused cloud around their clear minds ; were it not for 
 such glow as of that beautiful and touching invocation, Ring and Book, 
 Part I.) And next, short introductions to such poems as hardly require " 
 a separate treatment, giving the " Argument " as it is called. And then 
 a Lexicon of names, remote allusions, learned things fetched from some- 
 where in the universe where he has been, and other mortal foot hath 
 ne'er or rarely been. A devoted admirer of Jean Paul did that very 
 
 C 2 
 
20 BROWNING STILL LOFTIER THAN THE WORLD SUSPECTS. 
 
 inadequately for his writings ; and the explanations of English, allusions 
 are highly amusing. Then the organizing of readings, or courses of 
 lectures, with reasonably competent lecturers. And a digest of Bevieics, 
 Avhich are the queerest milestones along the course of Browning's popu- 
 larity that a traveller on his own Eosinante could pass or imagine. 
 These would be real helps, worthy of the dignity of a living poet free 
 of all that emasculating popularity which Carlyle so vigorously depre- 
 cates, worthy of ourselves, and worthy of the sensible practical object 
 we have in view. 
 
 There wiU stiU remain that which no such helps can impart, for 
 
 " Therein the patient must minister to himself ; " 
 
 the soul's own intense sympathy with his teacher ; his keen enjoyment 
 and noblest pleasure under " love's intellectual law ; " the enriching of 
 his memory and ennobling of his moral being, the survey of life, and 
 growth towards attaining the attitude of Prospice.' No one can read 
 Browning without being immensely benefited, both in his intellect and 
 his heart, Coleridge was not the last to complain, " The indisposition, 
 nay the angry aversion to think, even in persons who are most willing 
 to attend, is the fact that ever forces itself on my notice afresh . ." So, 
 after aU our efforts, there wUl still remain a large number to whom we 
 can wave the hand for farewell : 
 
 " Vex not thou the poet's mind 
 "With thy shallow wit : 
 Vex not thou the poet's mind, 
 For thou canst not fathom it." 
 
 But not he more than Milton need disdain the condition to which all 
 teachers a head taller than their fellows are subject, 
 
 '•And fit audience find though few." 
 
 Were he shallow instead of subtle, and had he dabbled in summer pools 
 instead of fathoming the depths of the soul and eternity, he would 
 have had the sickening incense of steaming popularity in his nostrils. 
 
 But 
 
 " I love him, on this side idolatry, as much as any ". 
 
 Or, to throw a last arrow feathered with his own words at him, we may 
 reverentially contemplate him as 
 
 " Still loftier than the world suspects, 
 living and dying." 
 

 
 Structure of tlie Poem. (Dram. I( 
 
 p- 
 
 63. 
 
 Part i. Stanzas 
 
 i— V. 
 
 p- 
 
 68. 
 
 „ ii. ,, 
 
 vi — xxii. 
 
 p- 
 
 82. 
 
 „ iii. scene (1) 
 
 xxiii — xxxiii. 
 
 p- 
 
 92. 
 
 scene (2) „ 
 
 xxxiv— xlv. 
 
 p- 
 
 102. 
 
 scene (3) „ 
 
 xlvi — li. 
 
 p- 
 
 107. 
 
 ,, iv. 
 
 Iii— liv. 
 
 
 
 Epilogue. ,, 
 
 Iv— Ivi. 
 
 21 
 
 ON "PIETRO' OF ABANO" 
 
 AND THE LEADING IDEAS OF "DRAMATIC IDYLS," SECOND 
 
 SEKIES 1880. 
 
 BY THE REV. J. SHARPE, M.A. 
 [Read at the 2nd Meethig of the Browning Society. Friday, Nov. 25, 1881.) 
 
 yls, II, p. 63—111.) 
 
 (first lines) 
 ' Now as on a certain evening.' 
 ' Presently the young man.' 
 ' Gone again — what, is he 1 ' 
 ' 'Tis my own soul soars now.' 
 ' What was changed ? ' 
 ' When these parts Tiberius,' 
 
 ' Peter of A^bano — Petrus de A'pono or Ajjonensls, or Petrus de Padua — was 
 an Italian physician and alchemist, born at Abano near Padua in 1246, died about 
 1320. He is said to have studied Greek at Constantinople, mathematics at Padua, 
 and to have been made Doctor of Medicine and Philosophy at Paris. He then 
 returnd to Padua, where he was Professor of medicine, and followed the Arabian 
 physicians, especially Averroes. He got a great reputation, and charged enormous 
 fees. He hated milk and cheese, and swoond at the sight of them. His enemies, 
 jealous of his renown and wealth, denounst him to the Inquisition as a magician. 
 They accused him of possessing the Philosopher's Stone, and of making, with the 
 Devil's help, all money spent by him come back to his purse, &c. His trial was 
 begun ; and had he not died naturally in time, he would have been burnt. The 
 Inquisitors orderd his corpse to be burnt ; and as a friend had taken that away, 
 they had his portrait publicly burnt by the executioner. In 1560 a Latin epitaph 
 in his memory was put up in the church of St. Augustin. The Duke of Urbino 
 set his statue among those of illustrious men ; and the Senate of Padua put one 
 on the gate of its palace, beside those of Livy, &c. His best known work is his 
 Conciliator differentiarutn qvcB inter pMlosophos et medicos versantur ; Mantua, 
 1472, and Venice, 1476, fol.. often reprinted. Other works are : 1. 'De venenis, 
 eorumqne remediis, tr. into French by L. Boet ; Lyons, 1593, 12mo ; 2. Geomantia ; 
 Venice, 1505, 1556, 8vo ; 3. Expositio prohlematvm Aristotelis ; Mantua, 1475, 
 4to ; 4. Hippocratis de medicorum astrologia Uhellus, in Gr. and Lat. ; Venice, 
 1485, 4to ; 5. Astrolahinm planum in tabnlis ascendens, continens qualilet hora 
 atque minutes (equationes domonim cmli, &c. ; Venice, 15C2, 4to ; 6. Diocnides, 
 digestvs alphabetico ordine ; Lyon, 1512, 4to; 7. Heptameron ; Paris, 1474, 4to ; 
 8. Textus Mesne,'! noviter emendatns, Sec. ; Venice, 1505, 8vo; 9. Pecisiones phy- 
 sionomicce, 1548, 8vo ; 10. Qncestiones de febribus ; Padua, 1482; 11. Galeni 
 tractatus varii a Petro Paduano, latinitate donati ; MS. in S. Mark's Library, 
 Venice ; 12. Les elements poitr operer dans les sciences magiques ; MS. in the 
 Arsenal Library, Pari? — Nouvelle Biographic Universelle. Paris, 1855, i. 29-31. 
 
•2 J THE REV. J. SHARPE ON " PIETRO OF ABAXO. 
 
 Part i^ stanzas i — v. Description of Peter. 
 
 Petrus Aponensis is a magician. He has boundless power and 
 knowledge ; he uses both for the good of men : yet he not only fails to 
 win gratitude, but is met with curses, insult, and persecution. If he 
 works under some disguise in the hope of earning gratitude, the moment 
 he is detected he is denounced as a wizard, and driven away by those 
 whom he has benefited. Why is it that a man at once so powerful, 
 wise, and beneficent, should yet fail to win in return even a little grati- 
 tude, not to say love 1 In the answer lies the idea which this poem is 
 intended to illustrate. 
 
 ' Si vis amari, ama,' said Hecaton. (Sen. Ep. i. 9.) Love is won only 
 by love, and love involves self-sacrifice. Men cannot love Peter, for they 
 see that he does not love them. Though his acts are beneficent, they 
 are no proofs of love, for they cost him nothing ; they are >vTought by 
 a word and by magic power, not by any sacrifice. Thus, as Democritus 
 said, 'he who loves none, will be loved by none.' 
 
 Part ii;, stanzas vi — sxii^ p. 68. ' Now as on a certain evening.' 
 The clever Greeh. 
 
 As Peter is entering his house he is stopped by a young man, a 
 Greek, clever, and imbued with the spirit of Greek philosophy. He 
 tells Peter that he does not believe the vulgar stories current concerning 
 him. He has a boon to beg, that Peter will gratify the purest of am- 
 bitions, to make him a great poet, so that he may make his kind wise, 
 free, and happy. This he purposes to do by fictions suited to the ignor- 
 ant crowd, by apparent truths which to them seem good ; by gratifying 
 their low aims, he will use them for his own ends. 
 
 He illustrates his meaning by reference to architecture. The king 
 who has the palace built seeks his own glory, the workmen seek merely 
 for wages, but the architect uses the low aims of both to display his 
 own power, and has in the end all the credit. Human fame, however, 
 is nothing compared with the consciousness of power ; nay, even perse- 
 cution is nothing to the sage who is conscious that he and he only is 
 the real ruler of the world. 
 
 The clever Greek anticipates an objection which Peter might raise : 
 ' If I grant your wish hoAV can I be sure that you will not tui-n out un- 
 grateful like the rest 1 ' He replies, ' The vulgar story that you cannot 
 touch milk means that you cannot win ' the milk of human kindness,' 
 human love : now touch my heart and love is yours ; the higher you 
 lift me the more I shall love you.' Peter replies that he has often been 
 deceived by such promises ; no one yet has ventured to risk anything 
 to save him from persecution. Still he will try again. He throws the 
 
THE REV. J. SHARPE ON " PIETRO OF ABANO." 23 
 
 Greek into a trance by magic art, and shows liini in three scenes what 
 the future would be, if he were to give the Greek the power he asks. 
 
 Peter evidently represents the wise man of the Platonic philosophy. 
 Plato omitted the benevolent affections from his psychological analysis, 
 and Peter has no love for the men whom he benefits. Plato said that 
 the just man will be scourged, racked, and finally crucified, and all be- 
 cause he preferred being to seeming. So Peter, who does not condescend 
 to disguise his want of feeling, is met with insult and persecution. The 
 clever Greek is the very opposite. He chooses to seem rather than to 
 be, and prospers accordingly. (See Plato, Republic, book i.) 
 
 The clever Greek addressed Peter on the ground of the Platonic 
 philosophy, ' dosed him with the fair and good.' He assumed a fund- 
 amental principle of Greek philosophy, viz. truth for the few wise, fiction 
 for the ignorant many. Greek philosophy was vicious at the core : it 
 was based upon pride ; self-love was its leading motive. In Peter, self- 
 love took the form of the pride of intellect and conscious power; his 
 reward was that he 'knew liimself the mighty man he was.' He is 
 satisfied with the judgment, ' admirationem incutit.' In the Greek, self- 
 love takes a coarser form. 
 
 In neither case is self-love inconsistent with benevolence. Peter 
 exempHfies this in a private station, the Greek in public life. (See 
 Butler, sermon xi.) But how different is his conduct from that of true 
 love. He would raise men by being raised above them ; true love sinks 
 that it may raise. He would make men happy by indulging their de- 
 lusions, while he uses them for his own ends ; true love imparts truth, 
 and raises others to its own level. 
 
 Part iii, stanzas xxiii — li, p. 82. 'Presently the young man.' 
 The Parasite, the Councillor, and the Pope. 
 
 In the visions, the Greek is seen in three stages of his upward- 
 downward career ; first he wins wealth, next political power, and lastly 
 spiritual power. At each stage Peter appears and asks for his reward, 
 gradually diminishing his demands. First he asks for a home with the 
 Greek ; next for a remote and hidden sanctuary ; lastly, that the Greek 
 will edit his literary remains. On the two former occasions the Greek 
 puts off his request upon the plea that his ambition is not yet fully 
 gratified, he acknowledges the debt ; but at last as Pope he can rise no 
 higher, and then he refuses to pay. As the Greek has risen higher in 
 the world, he has sunk morally lower ; when Peter has raised him to 
 the full height of his ambition, the very acknowledgment of a debt of 
 gratitude is withheld. 
 
 Thus the career of the Greek exemplifies the truth, that love is won 
 
24 THE REV. J. SHARPS ON " PIETRO OF ABANO." 
 
 only by love ; love is not won by tbe gratification of desires. What is 
 called ' cupboard love ' by children is no love, but selfishness disguised. 
 Peter has gratified every wish of the Greek, but failed to touch 
 liis heart. 
 
 In the first scene the Greek shows some regard to conscience, but 
 stifles it by reasoning. Poisons are often useful medicines ; so may evil 
 actions be beneficial. The wise man scorns riches and power ; yet no 
 one will believe this unless he first wins and then rejects them. He 
 feels therefore justified in the acquisition of wealth by the evil arts of 
 the parasite. 
 
 In the second scene the Greek's idea of vice betrays a lower moral 
 condition. As we put off silk to climb a tree, so must we lay aside 
 virtue if we would rise in the world. It is hopeless to try and reform 
 the masses, their vices should rather be used as helps by clever men. 
 A horse aUows a man to mount him by an ocular delusion, and goes all 
 the better for it ; so by making use of the delusions of the crowd the 
 clever man will seize the reins of government, yet greatly to the good of 
 his fellow men. 
 
 In the third scene the Greek has so far fallen that he puts forth no 
 excuses. He is cleverness without conscience, bare shameless selfishness, 
 gratifying its ambition in that sphere where love and humility 
 should reign. 
 
 Thus the small seed of selfishness which lay at the root of ancient 
 philosophy has developed its inevitable consequences. 
 
 Part iv, stanzas lii — liv, p. 107. 'What was changed.' 
 The Awakening. 
 When the Greek awakes from the vision his judgment is that at 
 length he knows cheese from chalk, i. e. being from seeming, true love 
 from self-love. Peter's ultimate fate was not martyrdom ; he had not 
 the love which is needed for self-sacrifice. The future of the Greek is 
 only hinted at ; cleverness uncurbed by conscience will give him aU that 
 earth can give, but there is no record of his gaining it. 
 
 The leading idea of the volume. 
 
 The introductory verses contrast the difficulty we find in assigning 
 the cause of bodily disease, with the assurance and positiveness with 
 which we pass judgment upon a human soul. In such a complicated 
 unity as the human soul, many motives are working at once, and actions 
 may be due to motives of a character exactly opposite to the character 
 of the action. 
 
 The idyls present us with six actions of this kind. 
 
THE REV. J. SHARPE ON DRAMATIC IDYLS, II. 25 
 
 Yet though the difficulty of fixing the motive is clearly recognized, 
 each idyl gives us the means of ascertaining the motive. 
 
 I. The first idyl deals with patriotic action. Miltiades and Themis- 
 tocles are recognized types of patriotism. We do not hesitate to ascribe 
 their conduct at Marathon and Salamis to pure love of the fatherland. 
 Eut can this be sustained in the light of subsequent history 1 In the 
 arttack on Paros, Miltiades used the power of his country to gratify liis 
 own vindictive feelings. Themistocles was guilty of Med ism, and lived 
 as a pensioner of his country's foe. How then can we be sure that at 
 Marathon they fought for pure Io\q of country, and not to gratify 
 ambition, to win power or wealth 1 The true patriot is Echetlos, who 
 refused to tarnish the lustre of his patriotism by any honour or reward ^ ; 
 but Echetlos is mythical, Miltiades and Themistocles are historical. 
 
 II. The second idyl deals with an act of courage. 
 
 As pure patriotism is found only in the mythical Echetlos, so pure 
 courage exists only in the imagination. 
 
 Clive dared certain death rather than tell a lie. Here was an act of 
 heroic courage. Clive faced death fearlessly ; but in that very moment 
 he felt a pang of fear, fear of disgrace if his enemy had spared his life. 
 In that case he would have been compelled to escape disgrace by suicide. 
 His friend replies that this woiild have been an act of courage, to dare 
 to confront God, Soon after, Clive committed suicide. "Was this due 
 to courage or to fear 1 
 
 As on the previous occasion Clive would have committed suicide to 
 escape disgrace, so it is probable his suicide was due to a desire to escape 
 the trouble and disgrace which clouded his latter days. The Clive of 
 the friend's imagination is pure courage ; the real Clive is also moved 
 by fear. Clive can charge a battery, but he cannot face a sneer ; he is 
 bold toward God, but a coward toward his fellow men. 
 
 Some passages of Aristotle's Ethics illustrate the courage and fear of 
 Clive (Eth. iii. 6). The courageous man fears disgrace. No man is more 
 able than he to endure terrible things, but death is the most terrible of 
 all things. The brave man, however, has to deal only with the most 
 honourable kinds of death, as in war. Suicide is an act of cowardice ; 
 for the suicide does not undergo death because it is honourable, but in 
 order to avoid evil. For the sake of what is honourable, the brave man 
 bears and performs those things which belong to courage. 
 
 There is a contrast between the bully and Clive. Clive fears man, 
 but not God ; the bully fears God, and not man. When the bully sees 
 Clive's resolute adherence to truth in the face of death, he thinks that 
 
 ' Compare Herve Eiel's refusal of any reward for saving the French fleet, 
 eaye a holiday to see his wife. — F. 
 
26 
 
 THE REV. J. SHARPE ON DRAMATIC IDYLS, II. 
 
 Clive would rather go to God's presence with truth upon his lips, than 
 save his life by a lie. Such trust in God and in retribution overpowers 
 him ; he dares disgrace among his fellows rather than face the judgment 
 of God. Clive the courageous had no such courage. Moral courage, 
 the special courage of the soldier of Christ, was wanting in the fearless 
 Clive. 
 
 We may note how Mr. Browning more suo sees the ' soul of goodness 
 in things evil.' This moral courage was displayed by a man who was 
 apparently an utter blackguard, and, like all bullies, a coward at heart. 
 
 Thus acts of moral courage are due to fear of God ; acts of physical 
 courage may be due to fear of man. 
 
 III. The third idyl deals with love for an animal. 
 
 Love produces the deeds of hate. Hoseyn is on the poiut of catch- 
 ing up Muleykeh, when he tells Duhl the secret of her speed, and loses 
 his mare. After refusing a high price, he gives the mare away for 
 nothing to a thief. What could have urged him to act so 1 Love for 
 his mare : he would rather lose her than have her surpassed ; the 
 animal's spirit would never be the same if once conquered ; her fame 
 as invincible would have perished. I^o one who really loved the mare 
 would keep her at such a cost. 
 
 (Cynics might say there was a touch of pride at being the owner of 
 an animal never beaten.) 
 
 rV. The fourth idyl deals with acts of benevolence not due to feel- 
 ings of benevolence. Both Peter and the Greek benefited mankind ; the 
 motive of both was seK-love, not love for others. Peter was moved by 
 pride, the Greek by ambition. Peter acts openly and is persecuted ; the 
 Greek dissembles and prospers. 
 
 " On the great theatre of public life ... it is much rather the astute 
 statesman, earnest about his ends but unscrupulous about his means, 
 equally free from the trammels of conscience and from the blindness of 
 zeal, who governs, because he partly yields to the passions and prejudices 
 of his time." (Lecky, Morals, i. 1.) 
 
 V. The fifth idyl deals with an act of love and power ; but the power 
 is that of hate, not love, and the motive is not the good of the sufferer 
 but the desire to annoy. It is written in Cant. viii. 6, that ' Love is 
 strong as death.' But the opposite of love, hate in its worst form, is 
 stronger than death. ' Corruptio optimi pessima.' Wedded love is 
 best. But Satan cannot love ; hence his married life produces the 
 deadliest hate. 
 
 VI. The sixth idyl deals with an act of love. Pan and Luna are 
 opposite extremes. Pan is half a brute ; Luna is purity and modesty. 
 
 Pan by a stratagem gets possession of Luna. Does she faint 1 Does 
 
V. THE REV. J. SHARPB ON DRAMATIC IDYLS, 11. 27 
 
 she flee ] JS'either ; she follows him, ' by no means spurning him.' To 
 what motive shall we attribute her conduct ? Certainly not to any want 
 of modesty. Eather to love. Love awakens love. Pan's feelings are 
 such as are described by Seneca, Ep. i. 9, ' Ipse per se amor, omnium 
 aliarum reruni negligens, animos in cupiditatem formae non sine spe 
 mutuae caritatis accendit.' Pan is not actuated by brute passion, but 
 by Luna's beauty, and the hope of mutual love. This wins her. The 
 godlike element dominates in Pan ; bristles and horns count for nothing. 
 In these idyls we have seen ambition work deeds of patriotism, fear 
 act like courage, love like hate ; self-love, ambition, and pride have 
 wrought deeds of benevolence ; hate has effected the work of mercy ; 
 purity has acted like immodesty. 
 
 Hence it is evident, that in judging of the quality of an action, we 
 must pay regard to the motive, and not merely to the outward character 
 of the act. Motive as weU as Intended Action is the proper subject of 
 moral intuition. (See Sidgwick, Method of Ethics, iii. 1.) 
 
 In the closing lines the poet rejects the foolish notion of some of his 
 admirers, that the variety of subjects treated in the idyls is due to the 
 fact that a poet naturally breaks forth into song upon any subject which 
 touches him. Eather his poems are like rocks, hard, forbidding, with 
 few flowers ; yet hidden in them is a seed of eternal truth, which time 
 will develop, and posterity will recognize. 
 
 One such pine seed I will point out : a living thought which lies hid 
 in the rugged mass of Pietro of Abano. 
 
 Students of Browning are aware that when he has illustrated a 
 principle by some apparently trivial example, his method is to apply the 
 principle in the highest sphere of thought. 
 
 If God were only Almighty, Allwise, Beneficent, that is, if He were 
 Peter upon an infinite scale. He would fail to win the love of mankind, 
 as Peter did. If God were to grant every wish of man, as Peter granted 
 every wish of the clever Greek, man would not feel even gratitude, 
 much less love Him ; just as the Greek failed to love Peter, and at last 
 even denied the debt. For love is won only by love ; and love involves 
 self-sacrifice. If God would win the love of man. He must sacrifice 
 Himself ; as in the Epistle of Karshish, * thou must love me who have 
 died for thee.' This is the Christian's faith, 'We love Him because He 
 first loved us.' Here, as so often in Browning, reason leads to the In- 
 carnation of God. 
 
BEOWNING'S PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 By JOHN BURY, Tein, Coll., Dublin. 
 
 (Bead at the 6th Meeting of the Broyvning Society, Friday, April 28, 1882.) 
 
 1 necessity of Falsehood and Evil, 
 
 p. 266. 
 V. Love and Knowledge compleinent- 
 ary, p. 268. 
 VI. Comparisons with Hegel, p. 270. 
 VII, Personal God : Christianity, In- 
 dividuals, p. 272. 
 VIII. Immortality, p. 275. 
 
 IntrodwctioJi, p. 259. 
 I. Br.^s point of view : individual, 
 
 p. 261. 
 II. Br.'s First Principle, or God, 
 p. 262. 
 
 III. Son) Love manifests itself in the 
 
 world: Power and Knowledge, 
 p. 263. 
 
 IV. The implication of opposites : 
 
 I START with the distinction which Browning has himself drawn in 
 his Essay on Shelley between the objective and the subjective poet. 
 The former is he who is impelled to embody his perceptions with refer- 
 ence to the many below ; the latter to embody them with reference to 
 the One above him, "the supreme Intelligence which apprehends all 
 things in their absolute truth, — an ultimate view ever aspired to, if but 
 partially attained, by the poet's own soul. ISTot what man sees, but 
 what God sees — the Ideas of Plato, seeds of creation lying burningly on 
 the Divine Hand — it is towards these that he struggles." 
 
 We are tempted to ask, Is Browning himself an objective or a sub- 
 jective poet? The dramatic form of such a large majority of his works 
 might induce some on superficial consideration to decide that he belongs 
 to the former class. But lovers of Browning who go beyond the 
 external form will recognize, along with his objectivity, that power ''to 
 lift his fellows, with their half-apprehensions, up to his own sphere, by 
 intensifying the import of details and rounding the universal meaning," 
 which marks the subjective poet. Whilst he supplies us with "the 
 fresh and living swathe," whilst he represents to us separately and 
 analytically the facts of experience, he is not carelessly content to be 
 ignorant of laws for recombining them, but seeks to bricg them under 
 a universal and harmonizing synthesis. In this view then he is at once 
 a subjective and objective poet ; he has in fact transcended the one-sided 
 standpoints of both classes, and if he does not succeed in striking the 
 highest notes of the greatest singers of either, yet he has attained to a 
 
browning's PHILOSOPHT, by J. BURY. INTRODUCTION. 29 
 
 fuller and more steadfast view of the universe and its problems, because 
 on tbe one side his objective faculty both moderates the extravagance 
 of spiritual intuition and gives it solid as well as airy material for its 
 use, and on the other side his subjective faculty supplies wings to soar 
 above the immediate world of experience and demonstrate its affinity to 
 something higher. And this is just the poet that men seemed to be in 
 need of. Considering that the poet's function is to find and show us 
 Truth, tlie objective poet tries to fulfil this function by presenting to us 
 in poetical dress nature and life as they immediately seem to be ; the 
 subjective poet by transcendent acts of insight apprehends transcendent 
 Truth, he rises as on the waves of Abt Yogler's music to heights which 
 many indeed of his hearers, borne along with him, may catch sight of for 
 a moment, but when they sink again to the common chord, and are 
 bereft of his assistance, they are liable to apprehensions that the vision 
 may have been an illusive dream. "We w^ant then a poet who will use 
 understanding as well as insight, and instead of taking a giant leap — a 
 lead which few can follow — from the objectivity of experience to an ab- 
 solute Truth like Plato's Ideas, will condescend to help those Jacobs not 
 endowed with his own wings of spiritual intuition up the several steps 
 of a ladder. This is what Browning does ; he supplies mediating links 
 between experience and the absolute Truth. It is this discursive reason- 
 ing element in Browning which makes us associate philosophy with him 
 more than with most poets, for they are content to see; he seeks to 
 explain. 
 
 The aim of this paper is to give in a connected form the general bear- 
 ings of his philosophical teaching. In the belief that the thoughts of a 
 philosopher often illustrate, and so help us to pierce more clearly, the 
 perceptions of a poet, I had intended to draw some parallels as I went 
 along between Browning and Hegel. But when I came to write, I found 
 that the compass of a single essay would not admit of it, and so I shall 
 merely indicate some general points of comparison with Hegel, after I 
 have first exliibited Browning's doctrines. 
 
 But, to begin, I must insist on the necessity of clearly comprehend- 
 ing Browning's theory, in order to understand what are the practical 
 conclusions which he draws : especially, does he believe in immortality 
 of the individual. And supposing such immortality to be the high 
 hope upon which he has fixed his eyes, and at the same time the 
 corner-stone on which he has raised the towers of philosophical optimism 
 over the turf of doubt, yet inasmuch as doubt is our lot as the 
 sparks fly upward, inasmuch as we are still of the turf turfy, we are 
 forced to pause and consider whether this corner-stone is firm and deeply 
 enough sunk to bear up the edifice, or whether it is but a turf-clod which, 
 
30 browning's philosophy, by J BURY. § 1. B. INDIVIDUAL, 
 
 chancing to be a little concreter and denser^ has presented the illusive 
 appearance of rock. When we have redescended the turrets that we have 
 mounted under Browning's guidance, and " stand on alien ground " ; 
 when we sink to the common chord of this life — sorrow that is hard to 
 bear, and doubt that is slow to cure — we cannot but question the 
 objective permanence of the heights that we " rolled from into the 
 deep " ; we feel sober acquiescence very difficult ; it is hard to find our 
 resting-place. Is the poet in possession of a point or peak that can fix 
 the wandering star of immortality ] has he found a real spark on earth 
 that reflects the ideal "ball of blaze" in heaven? Or, dropping meta- 
 phor, has he established a tenable basis for this great hope, if indeed he 
 holds it, without any aid from that unfortunate dogmatism which is so 
 often made to serve for reasoned truth 1 
 
 Such questions as these will seem of course irrelevant to orthodox 
 Christians, but it is not for " maw-crammed," " crop-full " Christians, 
 who never feel doubt, that Browning writes ; it is for men and women, 
 whom indeed he endeavours to make Christian in the widest sense of 
 the word, but not by forcing dogma down their throats by 
 
 " method abundantly convincing, I But scarce to be swallowed without 
 As I say, to those convinced before, | By the not-as-yet-convinced." [wincing 
 
 Let us try then to see Browning's " scheme of the weal and woe," that 
 we may, if we can, understand the hope of Caponsacchi, and see the 
 possibility of " worlds not a few " wherein our hopes shall be realized, 
 and their impersonations, our Evelyn Hopes, be revived for us. 
 
 I. browning's point of view : individual. 
 Philosophers, strictly so called, set themselves the problem of ex- 
 plaining the universe, the spheres of Abstract Thought, of !N"ature, and 
 of Spirit, whose inner bond they try to discover ; and this bond con- 
 stitutes the metaphysics of their system. But history tells us that every 
 system that has yet been elaborated has, in a generation or two, when 
 weighed in the balance, been found wanting, and been superseded by a 
 new system which its author in turn fancied was the " key to all the 
 knowledges " ; but soon gates were found with locks of too complicated 
 wards for it, and a new key must be forged. This is the natural con- 
 sequence of the growth and progress of the human spirit, its increase of 
 knowledge and civilization ; and new philosophical schemes must arise 
 till the end of things. But great world-schemes are universal, not indi- 
 vidual, and philosophers like Epictetus or Epicurus speak to individuals 
 more than Plato or Aristotle. Individuals, though they may grasp a 
 system with eagerness, as giving them a wide and satisfactory view of 
 the mysteries of mind and nature, must go back into the individual 
 
The world rolls witnessing around me 
 Only to leave me as it found me." 
 
 {Chr. Eve.) 
 
 browning's philosophy, by J. BURY. § 1. § 2. GOD. 31 
 
 again and ask, What is the meaning of this for me ? And this question 
 the universal systems do not solve ; and when they try, cannot solve 
 quite adequately or self-consistently : this is a question on which poets 
 give us deeper hintings, on which music gives us momentary revelations. 
 It were possible to class human souls in genera and species, classes 
 and varieties, yet none the less each individual soul is individual, and 
 life has a different meaning for each. No spiritual kernel can get free 
 of the nut-sheU it is bounded in, though it count itself a king of infinite 
 space. The coefficients of refraction vary with the media : the "natural 
 fog " of a good pastor's mind augments his truths to double their size, 
 and the pearl of price lies on a professor's table " dust and ashes 
 Ipvigable." It is from the individual that Browninfc starts : 
 " Meantime I can but testify 
 
 God's care for me — no more, can I- 
 I It is but for myself I know ; 
 
 As Mr. Arnold expresses it 
 
 ' " Thou hast been, shalt be, art alone." {Switzerland.') 
 
 The human world is a collection of units, each by himself and for him- 
 self ; and, because they coexist, externally dependent on one another : it 
 is like a sea studded with " pin-point rocks." Each man's mind is like a 
 
 " convex glass To reunite there, be our heaven on 
 Wherein are gathered all the scattered earth, 
 
 points Our known unknown, our God revealed 
 Picked out of the immensity of sky, to man." {Ring and Book, iv. 57.) 
 
 But there are two sides to an individual's Weltanschauung, the indi- 
 vidual and the universal. From the individual side he considers the 
 universe as his own world ; from the universal he looks upon himself as 
 a single unit of that world. Kow it is the individual side that comes 
 prominently forward in Browning ; but to understand it we must take it 
 in its context ; and as the universal side, being less obtrusive, is very 
 likely to escape notice, I shall occupy myself first and principally with 
 it, and afterwards take it in connection with the individual side. 
 
 II. browning's first principle, or god. 
 Browning's first principle or absolute Truth is Love : that which 
 abideth one and the same, the subject and substance of all change, the 
 permanence by which alone change is possible, whose sum ever " remains 
 what it was before," in short, God or Truth ; for, as he teUs us in Fifine, 
 " falsehood is change," and " truth is permanence." In the whole realm 
 of thought, including the laws of nature and the course of history, and 
 especially the lots of souls. Browning has essayed to pierce through the 
 phenomenal exterior, and the abiding reality that he reaches and brings 
 back tidings of is Love : Love is the Truth. 
 
32 browning's philosophy, by J. BURY. § 3. POWER & KNOWLEDGE. 
 
 It is naturally asked, How does Browning arrive at this first concrete 
 principle ? how does he support the claims of Love as that in terms of 
 which the universe is to be ultimately explained ] The answer is, he 
 derives it from experience. His poems are dramatic pictures of life 
 drawn in such a way as to let us detect Love as the permanent spiritual 
 unity underlying the manifold changing variety of circumstances, which 
 are merely the modes in which Love's power compels it to reveal itself. 
 Hence most of his works have two sides : (1) they contribute severally 
 to establish the great tenet of his teaching, that Love is God ; (2) they 
 at the same time exhibit conclusions deducible from this hypothesis ; 
 and thus (3) the doctrine itself may be looked upon as ttie pervading 
 and unifying fluid, which gives to all his poems, as a whole, an 
 organic life. 
 
 It is, perhaps, scarce necessary to remark that this procedure of 
 Browning is most strictly philosophical. Such an objection as that he 
 himself imports Love into the circumstances would tell as much or as 
 little against all science. Theory is as necessary to interpret facts as 
 facts are to support theory. 
 
 III. HOW LOVE MANIFESTS ITSELF IN THE WORLD : POWER AND 
 KNOWLEDGE. 
 
 Love is a mere verbal abstraction unless it be conscious of itself ; 
 and in order to be conscious of itself, it must reveal itself to itself. Its 
 very nature and essence is to manifest itself ; until it do so, it is only a 
 potential idea, not an actual reality. The conditions of its revelation, 
 Browning shows us, are given by its two modes. Power and Knowledge 
 (or Intellect). Power is the mode of Love's manifestation in Nature ; 
 Knowledge is Love's recognition of itself through the medium of Power. 
 But it is better to quote some of Browning's own expositions of these 
 principles from the individual point of view. 
 
 ' Man, therefore, stands on his own 
 
 stock 
 Of love and power as a pin-point rock, 
 And, looking to God who ordained 
 
 divorce [tinent, 
 
 Of the rock from his boundless con- 
 Sees, in his power made evident, 
 Only excess hy a million-fold 
 O'er the power God gave man in the 
 
 mould. 
 For, note : man's hand first formed 
 
 to carry 
 A few pounds' weight, when taught 
 
 to marry 
 Its strength with an engine's, lifts a 
 
 mountaio, 
 
 — Advancing in power by one degree ; 
 And why count steps through eternity ? 
 But love is the ever-springing fountain : 
 Man may enlarge or narrow his bed 
 For the waters play, but the water- 
 head — 
 How can he multiply or reduce it 1 
 As easy create it, as cause it to cease ; 
 He may profit by it, or abuse it, 
 But 'tis not a thing to bear increase 
 As power does : be love less or more 
 In the heart of man, he keeps it shut 
 Or opes it wide, as he pleases, but 
 Love's sum remains what it was before." 
 {_Chr. Eve.) 
 
Inextricably round about. 
 Love lay within it and without 
 To clasp thee." {Easter Day.) 
 
 BROWNING'a PHILOSOPHY, BY J. BURY. § 3. POWER k KNOWLEDGE. 33 
 
 Here is shown the function of Power : to it are due all apparent changes 
 
 and quantitative variations of Love. Though Knowledge is not in these 
 
 lines expressly mentioned, yet it is implied in man, who recognizes Love 
 
 and Power. Love being the substance, and therefore also the end and 
 
 purpose of life. Knowledge is the means whereby it perfects and fulfils 
 
 itself— „ . ,. 
 
 " why live 
 
 Except for love — how love unless they know ? " {R. S,- B., Pope.) 
 Truth and Beauty are merely Love revealed as an object to man's 
 Knowledge : 
 
 " all thou dost enumerate 
 Of power and beauty in the world, 
 The mightiness of love was curled 
 
 ° ' " the truth in God's breast 
 
 Lies trace for trace upon ours impressed," &c. {Chi'. Eve.) 
 
 But the fault in men is not to recognize that beauty and truth are 
 manifestations of Love. When Fra Lippo Lippi says — 
 
 ' ' Or say there's beauty with no soul at all — 
 (I never saw it — put the case the same — ) 
 If you get simple beauty and nought else, 
 You get about the best thing God invents : 
 That's somewhat : and you'll find the soul you have missed, 
 Within yourself, when you return him thanks " — 
 
 he means that beauty is always an apparition of Love ; for the soul is 
 the faculty of Love, as distinguished from mind the faculty of Know- 
 ledge, and from Power. And if any one, though loving the beauty, fail 
 consciously to detect a latent soul, yet the effect it works on his own 
 soul proves the secret presence of Love. 
 
 "When Love is once free and flowing, having set itself free by means 
 of Power, it manifests itself in advancing stages from " the extreme of 
 the minute" up to the mind of man "recognized at the height" — 
 progressive forms of Beauty. I can only refer — the passage is far too 
 long to quote — to the last speech of Paracelsus, wliich describes in mar- 
 vellously vivid poetry the evolution of God, through the stages of nature 
 and spirit. I entreat especial attention to this passage. 
 
 As power is thus the vesture, " the suits anu trappings " of Love, it 
 follows that Browning considers the natural world — space, our surround- 
 ings, our bodies, "this dance of plastic circumstance" — to possess its 
 significance as the sphere wherein Love shows itself and learns to know 
 itself, and which belongs most of all to man, who is the clearest " facet 
 of reflection of God " ; it is the stage on which he is to " love in turn 
 and be beloved," and be initiated in Godship ; it is " machinery just 
 meant to give thy soul its bent." 
 
 D 
 
34 browning's philosophy, by J. BUBY. § 3. POWEB & KNOWLEDGE. 
 
 ' Man appears at last. So far the seal 
 Ib put on life ; one stage of being 
 
 complete, 
 One scheme wound up : and from the 
 
 grand result 
 A supplementary reflux of light 
 Illustrates all the inferior grades, 
 
 explains 
 Each back step in the circle. Not 
 
 alone 
 
 For their possessor dawn those qualities. 
 But the new glory mixes with the heaven 
 And earth ; man, once descried, imprints 
 
 for ever 
 His presence on all lifeless things : the 
 
 winds 
 Are henceforth voices, wailing or a shout, 
 A querulous mutter or a quick gay laugh ; 
 Never a senseless gust, now man is 
 
 bom," &c. {Paracelsus.') 
 
 The lower forms of creation are perfect each in its place, each has its 
 " due facet of reflection " too, each is a mode of the life that God made 
 be, but their very perfection is due to their inferiority in the scale. It is 
 as if we conceive nature developing from an atom-point of force, like a 
 spiral cone which winds round and round in ever-\videning circles ; but 
 all except the last are shut in, fixed and confined in their positions; 
 the last alone has an end-point and room for further progress : man is 
 
 Creeps ever on from fancies to the fact, 
 
 ' Lower than God who knows all and 
 can all, 
 
 Higher than beasts which know and 
 can so far 
 
 As each beast's limit, perfect to an end, 
 
 Nor conscious that they know, nor 
 craving more ; 
 
 While man knows partly, but con- 
 ceives beside, 
 
 And in this stri't'ing, this converting air 
 Into a solid he may grasp and use, 
 Finds progress, man's distinctive mark 
 
 alone, 
 Not God's, and not the beasts' : God is, 
 
 they are, 
 Man partly is, and wholly hopes to be." 
 {Death in the Desert.) 
 
 This distinction is one of the striking features of Browning's teaching : 
 man's perfection consists in his imperfection, and his consciousness 
 thereof. He is not like a 
 
 " lark emballed by its own crystal song, 
 Or rose enmisted by that scent it makes ! " (Ar. Apol.') 
 
 These, indeed, God hath pronounced to be very good ; they are good in 
 their degree ; but there are degrees higher ; and the use of the lower 
 degrees is, that they are modes of Love for man's love to recognize. 
 Man realizes Love by knowledge ; by knowledge, for example, of what 
 "love can do in the leaf and stone." But the essence of his manhood 
 is " the passion that leaves the ground to lose itself in the sky." The 
 spark "that disturbs our clod" is the pledge of our divinity. The 
 beasts "partake" and "receive," but think not of the provider and 
 effecter : we indeed receive gifts too, we are confined in our cistern, we 
 are finite, we are dust as well as they ; but then we can, while they 
 cannot, look from the gift 
 
 " to the giver, 
 And from the cistern to the river. 
 And from the finite to infinity, 
 And from man's dust to God's divinity." 
 
browning's philosophy, by J. BURY, § 4. NECESSITY OF EVIL. 35 
 
 And so in Art, 
 
 "the incomplete 
 More than completion matches the immense." 
 
 Witness Michael Agnolo, -witness Andrea del Sarto. Giotto's Bell- 
 tower's incompletion constitutes its greatness. 
 
 As closely connected with this point of view, I pass to what I 
 consider another great feature of Browning's philosophy. 
 
 IV. THE IMPLICATION OF OPPOSITES : NECESSITY OP FALSEHOOD 
 AND EVIL. 
 
 The Truth of Love, in order to assert itself, requires a medium of 
 negation or falsehood, in contrast with which it may shine out and show 
 itself to be the Truth. If there were not falsehood or show, there would 
 he no means for Truth's revelation. For if Truth existed alone, pui-e 
 and unclouded, its end is already obtained, and there is no room for 
 process or progress ; in fact, there would be no meaning in the term 
 '' truth." As Jacob Bohme showed. Yes would have no meaning if there 
 were not the possibility of saying l!^o. Pure truth with no falsehood 
 we could not distinguish from pure falsehood with no truth. Sludge, 
 the Medium, was not altogether wrong when he said, 
 
 " Don't let truth's lump rot stagnant for the lack 
 Of a timely helpful lie to leaven it ! " 
 
 On the one hand, " everybody can, will, and does cheat ; " on the other, 
 "every cheat's inspired, and every lie quick with a germ of truth." 
 And Ogniben said, "There is truth in falsehood, falsehood in truth." 
 To use an illustration that is common to Hegel and Browning, it is as 
 little possible to see in absolute unlimited light as in absolute unlimited 
 darkness ; vision is only possible when one is tempered by the other : 
 " Clouds obscure — 
 But for which obscuration all -were bright ? 
 Too hastily concluded ! Sun-suffused, 
 A cloud may soothe the eye made blind by blaze, — 
 Better the very clarity of heaven." {R. ^ B,, Pope, p. 71.) 
 
 And in Aristoph. Apol., p. 90, we read : 
 
 " No sun makes proof of his whole potency, 
 For gold and purple in that orb we view ; 
 The apparent orb does little but leave blind 
 The audacious, and confused the worshiping. 
 But, close on orb's departure, must succeed 
 The serviceable cloud, — must intervene, 
 Induce expenditure of rose and blue, 
 Eeveal what lay in him, was lost to us." 
 
 Thus we have the raison cCetre of evil and falsehood and pain ; without 
 them, good and truth and pleasure were not possible. 
 
 D 2 
 
36 browning's philosophy, by J. BURY. § 4. NECESSITY OF EVIL. 
 
 " The evil is null and nought, silence implying sound." 
 
 " Why rushed the discords in, but that harmony should be prized ? " 
 
 Even a heaven cannot be conceived without at least the possibility of 
 pain and ill. 
 
 The virtue of a sheathed flower may be drawn forth by a " thundrous 
 midnight." Mistake for man is " midway help till he reach fact indeed," 
 and error is in the world in order that he may look above its scope and 
 " see the love." Care and doubt are symbols and pledges of the love 
 that is his soul, pledges of his alliance with Divinity : 
 
 " Irks care the cropful bird ? frets doubt the maw-crammed beast ? " 
 
 " For mankind springs salvation by each hindrance interposed." Hear 
 Paracelsus's regrets — 
 
 " In my own heart love had not been made wise 
 To trace love's faint beginnings in mankind. 
 To know, even hate is but a mask of love's, 
 To see a good in evil, and a hope 
 In ill-success ; to sympathize, be proud 
 Of their half-reasons, faint aspirings, dim 
 Struggles for truth, their poorest fallacies. 
 Their prejudice and fears and cares and doubts." 
 
 I may quote two out of many pertinent passages in Sordello • — 
 
 " Where the salt marshes stagnate, crystals branch ; 
 Blood dries to crimson ; Evil's beautified 
 In every shape. Thrust Beauty then aside 
 And banish Evil ! "Wherefore ? After all. 
 Is Evil a result less natural 
 Than Good ? " (Book 6.) 
 And— 
 
 " Venice seems a type 
 Of Life — 'twLxt blue and blue extends, a stripe, 
 As Life, the somewhat, hangs 'twist nought and nought : 
 'Tis Venice and 'tis Life : as good you sought 
 To spare me the Piazza's slippery stone 
 Or keep me to the unchoked canals alone, 
 As hinder Life the evil with the good 
 Which make up Living, rightly understood." (Book 3.) 
 
 I could fill pages more with quotations to the same effect. On the use 
 of doubt does Browning everywhere especially insist (cf. e. g. Rabbi 
 Ben Ezra). It is a kind of spiritual purgatorio for souls di farsi belle. 
 Even pessimism is not to be condemned without qualification ; for it 
 implies a high standard of good in the pessimist. 
 
 But it is in Fifine that far the longest and fullest exposition of this 
 principle is to be found. I refer particularly to the simUe of the 
 swimmer in the ocean, one of the very greatest of Browning's many 
 great similes. 
 
browning's philosophy, by J. BURY. § 5. LOVE & KNOWLEDGE. 37 
 
 Here I would make an observation on this poem, which is the sub- 
 ject of so much contention. The view that some hold that the arguments 
 in it are, most of them, sophisms, and some of them truths, seems to me 
 mistaken. The lesson of Fifine is really of the same kind, and taught 
 by the same method, as that of Blougram^s Apology. All that the 
 Bishop so brilliantly urges to show the utility of doubt, in fact its 
 indispensability as a moment in enlightened faith, is perfectly true ; the 
 falsehood consists in making it a maxim for conduct in a different sense 
 from its theoretical validity. Doubt is valuable, nay, necessary as a 
 MEANS to enlightened faith ; and this very statement confutes the 
 Bishop's indifferent life, because he is content to rest in doubt as if it 
 were an end. From God's point of view, doubt and evil are good as 
 means to good ; but from man's point of view — as practiser, not theorist 
 — doubt and evil in themselves must be always evil, because imperfect. 
 So in Fifine : all Don Juan's arguments are theoretical truths pro- 
 pounded clearly and splendidly ; we are taught to see that flirtation with 
 a Fifine and temporary inconstancy may be productive of good, may be 
 a " midway help " to a deeper-grounded and abiding constancy, an assist- 
 ance to finding reality in falsehood ; for certain natures it may perhaps 
 be the only road to truth and love. Bat the falsity consists in convert- 
 ing this theoretical optimism into a rule of life to excuse fickle affections. 
 Blougram and Don Juan fall into the same sophism through not recog- 
 nizing the true relations of theory and practice (cf. Butler, Analogy, 
 Pt. I. cap. vii.). 
 
 v. LOVE AND KNOWLEDGE COMPLEMENTARY. 
 
 Of every real fact of experience Love, Power, and Knowledge are 
 elements (cf. sect, iii, p. 263). Although one may be present in ap- 
 parently much larger proportion — so large as to monopolize the attention 
 — yet the others too must be there in some measure, for all three are 
 essential elements of reality, and mutually imply one another. (Power, 
 indeed, which is the negative element, need not be specially considered, 
 because either longing love or eager knowledge implies its presence in 
 equal amount.) 
 
 This consideration has brought Browning to most important results 
 in psychological analysis. It is the inharmonious blending of these 
 elements that puts souls out of tune. Excess of Love accompanied by 
 defect of Knowledge, and excess of Knowledge accompanied by defect of 
 Love, are equally disastrous. Aprile and Paracelsus failed through hold- 
 ing to these opposite abstractions. Aprile would love infinitely : the 
 failure of his life was due to leaping at the end without recognizing and 
 employing the indispensable means ; and an end pursued in ignorance 
 
38 browning's philosophy, by J. BURY. § 5. LOVE & KNOWLEDGE. 
 
 of, and abstraction from, the necessary means, is an imaginary and false 
 end. Paracelsus would know infinitely : the failure in bis life consisted 
 in mistaking the means for the end, in assuming knowledge to be the 
 throne, whereas it is but the steps. "We call the object of knowledge 
 Truth or Keality ; but since the only abiding True and Eeal behind its 
 show and appearance is Love, Truth and Love are ultimately identical. 
 Men go astray by separating these that are properly inseparable. Blind 
 desire pursues Love as if it were independent of Knowledge, and fails 
 to find it, like Aprile ; and Knowledge pursues Truth as if it were inde- 
 pendent of Love, and can find no Truth — except the truth of failure — 
 like Paracelsus. It may be observed that these two characters, the Italian 
 and the German, may be looked on as respectively the types of the 
 Komanic and German nations. 
 
 With slight variation of the point of view : — Knowledge is Love's 
 recognition of itself ; but if the human soul, the individual pin-point of 
 Love, does not recognize Love in its object, but calls it merely truth or 
 fact, then it does not know in the highest sense of the word, it has only 
 a half-truth; and half-truths, besides being defective, are false because 
 taken to be whole truths. Perfect love would be also perfect knowledge, 
 and perfect knowledge perfect love. This shows us the meaning of that 
 great line in Paracelsus, 
 
 " I, you and God, can comprehend each other," 
 
 where " I, you " are Aureole and AprUe, who have learned by failure, 
 and God is the ideal union of the two things which they had witlessly 
 separated ; he is the " perfect Poet," for poets are those who knowing 
 love, and loving know, with whom mind and soul are not, as in ordinary 
 men, separated energies, but are a harmonious unity. 
 
 But of the two. Love is the prior, the superior : a loving worm were 
 diviner than a loveless god. Goethe cries (in Werther), " Was ich weiss, 
 kann jeder wissen — mein Herz habe ich allein." (What I know, can 
 every one know : my Heart is mine alone.) 
 
 Let no one say that it must be a poor palette on which there are 
 only three colours ; for in different combinations and proportions they 
 produce infinite variety of shades. These three principles — Love, Know- 
 ledge, Power — are the fundamental chord of the universe, and Love is 
 the keynote ; each of these is " everywhere in the world — loud, soft, and 
 all is said." Man's problem is to harmonize them in his soul, which he 
 can do but incompletely until by the process of evolution he has become, 
 as God, a perfect musician ; in the mean time let him seize and hold as 
 earnests of ultimate everlasting music all passing revelations vouchsafed 
 to him — moonbeams made marble. 
 
browning's philosophy, by J. BURY. § 6. BROWNING & HEGEL. 39 
 VI. COMPARISONS WITH HEGEL. 
 
 Before proceeding to consider Browning's views on Christianity and 
 Immortality, and the significance of the Universe for the Individual, I 
 stop to draw some comparisons with Hegel. The philosopher finds a 
 first principle and a method of applying it wherewith he interprets the 
 universe ; the poet does not set himself directly to interpret tho universe, 
 but to interpret human souls ; yet inasmuch as they are part and parcel 
 of the whole, and must be studied by the light of the whole in which 
 they are set, their interpretation equally involves a theory of the universe. 
 Of course this is only applicable to poets like Browning, not equally 
 to those who, like Shakspere, give us characters and their accompanying 
 problems without interpreting or solving them. Browning mediates them 
 for us ; not only gives them to us reflected from a glass of his own, 
 but also supplies a light, which he had to take care should be of such 
 intensity and colour as would illuminate every variety — in short, he had 
 to metaphysicize. 
 
 The few glimpses in not very detailed outline of the universal side 
 of Browning's Weltanschauung, which we find in his poems, and which 
 I have here attempted to collect, brought me to think that if he was a 
 philosopher proper he would have been a Hegelian — at least the universal 
 side of his philosophy would have been Hegelian. 
 
 To begin with the idea of God or the Absolute. Both Hegel and 
 Browning show us that God is " over us, under, round us, every side," 
 at our gates, and no mystical intellectual or spiritual intuitions like those 
 of Schelling or Shelley are necessary to reach him. We have found 
 God when we have recognized and realized the identity of Being and 
 Thought, of Love and Knowledge. Power corresponds to Hegel's 
 principle of negation — the moving, difierentiating element in the world. 
 Knowledge (Thought) tends to integrate Love (Being), which Power 
 had diff'erentiated, and it is ever bringing back the manifold centrifugal 
 productions of Power to the centrality of Love, and thus progressing in 
 the realization of a unity in which Power, and the accompanying False- 
 hood and Evil, wiU be a suspended moment. 
 
 A great service that Hegel performed for philosophy was his method ; 
 and the spirit of this method pervades Browning's reasoning. It depends 
 on recognizing that when we think anything, we implicitly think what 
 it is not ; and when we think a definite quality, we implicitly think 
 its opposite — e. g. good and evil, bright and dark. Thus affirmation 
 involves negation, and identity involves difference. "We have already 
 called attention to the prominence of this truth in Browning : it is tho 
 essence of Hegel. 
 
40 browning's philosophy, by J. BURY. § 6. BROWNING & HEGEL. 
 
 Good is positive, and must be ultimately victorious, with Hegel 
 as with Browning. Hear Walt Whitman's lines on reading Hegel : 
 "Eoaming in thought over the Universe, I saw the Httle that is Good 
 steadily hastening towards immortality, And the vast all that is call'd 
 Evil I saw hastening to merge itself and become lost and dead." 
 
 The development of Hegel's pure, bare, undiluted Being through suc- 
 cessive stages up to the complicated forms of State, Eeligion, Philosophy, 
 is like the mounting of waves towering higher and higher, " one crowd 
 but with many a crest " ; and as the waves must fall in order to rise to 
 a greater height, so the march of the Idea is a series of self-negations in- 
 volving self-affirmations. But the poet has not to do, as the philosopher 
 has, with a systematic history of the progress of the Universal Principle. 
 By seeing into souls, Browning has obtained his notion of God, which 
 is accordingly of an ethical nature, not merely logical. With him the 
 absolute Idea is Love, which as a negative, self-revealing force 
 phenomenally in ^Nature is Power, and, becoming conscious of itself 
 in individuals as spirit, moves in a continually advancing process of 
 reconciliation of its absolute noumenal permanence (Love) with its 
 phenomenal mode of manifestation (Power). 
 
 An obvious objection (admitting of an obvious enough answer) that 
 might be made against Browning's principle may be noticed. It may 
 be said that Love has no meaning except as characterizing the relations 
 of sentient beings ; that to set it up seriously as a first universal prin- 
 ciple, not only supplies no explanation, but is unwarranted, — either 
 mystical or absurd ; that it can be analyzed into simpler elements — its 
 evolution traced back, for example, to Hegel's Being. This objection, 
 although if Browning were a pure philosopher it would apply so fax as 
 to demand from him definite explanation and logical analysis, is really 
 shallow. Bro'wnuig knows, like all philosophers, that Time is pheno- 
 menal, and that an absolute Principle by its very notion is independent 
 of Time, contains in itself the possibility of Time : 
 
 " Time's -wheel runs back or stops : Potter and clay endure." (JB. Ben Ezra.) 
 "Till earth's work stop and useless time run out." {Death in Desert.) 
 
 But the distinction between First and Final Cause depends on Time ; 
 and as the latter is a far fuller idea than the former, it is more adequate 
 to express God, who is indifferent to the distinction : consequently 
 Browning is strictly justified in conceiving God as Love, because he has 
 found in the world Love as an abiding reality, to whose perfection the 
 world's movement is tending as an End. But the proximate reason for 
 the form which his universal principle takes is his individual and ethical 
 (poetical), not universal and metaphysical (philosophical), standpoint. 
 
browning's philosophy, by J. BURY, § 7. A PERSONAL GOD. 41 
 
 A main point on which I wish throughout to insist is that Browning 
 realizes the defect and falseness of one-sidedness, and never halts at half- 
 truths : he always gives them their proper place in relation to each other 
 and a higher unity. This, as is well known, is a great characteristic 
 of Hegel. 
 
 VII. PERSONAL GOD : CHRISTIANITY : INDIVIDUALS. 
 
 Browning is generally spoken of as holding the doctrine of a personal 
 Ood : the orthodox are glad, and the unbelieving shrug their shoulders. 
 But it is plain that a personal God (in any meaning of the word " per- 
 sonal " that is inteUigible to us) is inconsistent with the tenor of Brown- 
 ing's teaching. For God is not lir^ited by time, as we have seen above, 
 nor by space (compare Ring and Book, Pope, 1. 1317, "There (which is 
 nowhere) speech must babble thus ! In the absolute immensity — "), 
 and thus personality applied to him in our sense has no meaning : per- 
 sonal is a completely inadequate and therefore misleading term — "speech 
 must babble thus ! " Even supposing — a supposition which seems to me 
 to have no basis, and to be due to superficial study — Browning does 
 teach a personal God, his God is at all events a Being of a glorious kind 
 whom we could feel glad to worship, far different from the diabolical 
 God or divine Devil whom many are still taught to praise and pray to. 
 
 This may enable us to comprehend his attitude to Christian Dogma, 
 of which there have also — even more so — been false ideas abroad. 
 
 If, as he holds. Love is God, then the greatest crisis in Love's con- 
 scious development as human spirit is when it first knows itself explicitly 
 as , Love, — that is, when man first recognizes that God, in whom he 
 lives, moves, and has his being, is Love. But this recognition is the soul 
 of Christianity ; this gives it a divinity different in kind and not merely 
 in degree from all other religions : its main dogma is true, though dis- 
 figured by so many false wraps. Historical questions about partheno- 
 genesis, resurrection, ascension, are quite irrelevant to this truth, and 
 owe all their significance to the false conception of a personal God. 
 Browning's view transcends and includes the one-sidedness of the 
 Churches and the Gottingen professor. Eelative historical falseness or 
 myth in the Christian creed is consistent with the absolute truth of the 
 dogma : the professor clung to the former and rejected the latter, and 
 thereby, to use an expressive German proverb, "schiittete das Kind mit 
 dem Bade aus "; the preachers holding the dogma insist on the historical 
 truth of the myth. 
 
 This view of Christianity is practically that of Hegel. But it is 
 his individualism J so to speak, that gives Browning's view its peculiar 
 character. Throughout the preceding remarks I have purposely dwelt 
 
42 browning's philosophy, by J. BUKY. § 7. A PERSONAL GOD. 
 
 more on his conceptions of the evolving world and mankind as a 
 collection of units, than on his view of the individual in himself and 
 for himself — purposely because, the latter being more prominent, readers 
 of Browning are much less likely to overlook it. We must now turn to 
 the individual side of his Weltanschauung. The tendency nowadays 
 among English scientific thinkers is to look on the human individual 
 as a passing accidental mode of the universal energy, who contributes 
 to the progress of humanity, but has no further significance. From an 
 empirical standpoint this is true ; but, like all empiricism, it is one- 
 sided, and Browning teaches us that the individual has a worth and 
 meaning in and for himself independent of his worth and meaning 
 for the world : he comes and goes, and serves the world while he 
 stays, but the world also serves him, is meant to try him and turn 
 him forth "sufficiently impressed": he is related to it indirectly as 
 a particular member of a multitude, but as an individual he is directly 
 related to the Absolute, and possesses universal value. He has a signifi- 
 cance in time and space, as a unit helping in the process of the universe ; 
 but he has also a primary significance for himself that is independent of 
 these limitations ; and since this latter significance, being absolute, is 
 superior and logically prior to the former, which is only relative, it must 
 legislate morality (cf. Statue and Bust, and monologue of Caponsacchi in 
 Ring and Book, 1. 1812, &c.). A man's highest boast is — 
 
 "not even while the whirl was worst, 
 Did I, — to the wheel of life, 
 With shapes and colours rife, 
 Bound dizzily, — mistalie my end, to slake thy thirst." 
 
 This would be the place to speak of — I can now only refer to — the 
 autonomy of the "Will, an important and often-noticed element in 
 Browning's teaching ; for the right of an individual wiU to autonomy 
 depends upon its universal value. 
 
 And here I must again caU attention to the incomplete and unsatis- 
 fying character of man's work, for to the individual this is a gauge of 
 his universality. His individuality goes out beyond its work, and is 
 like a space without bound which the work, at least in this cramped life, 
 can never fiU : the soul's " lone way " is limitless, and its home is 
 not here. 
 
 This union of individualism and universalism in Browning is perhaps 
 most strikingly set forth in Rahhi Ben Ezra, and in the Epilogue of 
 Three Speakers, which shows its bearing on Christianity, and is, I think, 
 the decisive passage as to Browning's view. The simple universalism of 
 David, who worships with the senses in a temple made with hands, and 
 the particularism of Eenan, who is sceptical because historical difficulties 
 
browning's philosophy, by J. BURY. § 7. A PERSONAL GOD, 43 
 
 give pause to the understanding, are superseded by the individualism 
 of the Third Speaker, -whose reason transcends the simple conviction 
 of David and the intellectual doubt of Eenan, by seeing that both 
 are reconcilable when transformed into parts of a higher view : as an 
 individual personality, Christ was God (self-conscious Love); as a 
 particular unit in the world he was man, subject to the laws of the 
 world's machinery. It is for the individual that his personality and 
 divinity have their significance : progressive humanity and scientific 
 history concern themselves only with the phenomenal effects produced 
 by his teaching independently of his personality. 
 
 And thus Browning's view is on the one side consistent with all 
 Herbert Spencer's philosophy, whose result is to show that egoism and 
 altruism (the interests of the individual and of society) are in gradual 
 process of conciliation ; but he gives prominence to another side also, in 
 which virtue and vice have an inward significance for the individual, 
 apart from the evolution of the world. 
 
 In Browning are the germs of a religion that transcends ecclesiastical 
 Christianity and Comte's Positivism, and includes the truth of both. 
 
 In connection with his individualism should be considered his 
 original views of the relations of men and women, which I can but 
 barely touch on. An individual's soul has two aides : the potential and 
 the actual, the divine and the human, reality and show. But the inner 
 side can be revealed to the object of sexual love, and so even in this 
 world to a certain extent actualize its divinity : 
 
 " Was there nought better than to enjoj 1 
 
 No feat which, done, would make time break, 
 
 And let us pent-up creatures through 
 Into eternity, our due ? 
 
 No forcing earth teach heaven's employ?" — Bis aliter visum. 
 
 Thus an individual receives a revelation of Love from another of opposite 
 sex (sex, it must not be forgotten, is only phenomenal), and this person 
 might be called a Personal God, as the vehicle of the revelation of the 
 Absolute God. It is this love alone that can reach to the inner pent-up 
 side of the soul, else unrevealed and " locked fast," but let loose by 
 "love for a key," Shelley reached this view by spiritual intuition 
 (witness EpipsycMdion), and Dante said of Beatrice, " Che lume fia 
 tra '1 yero e lo 'nteUetto " ; but Browning, combining the reason of the 
 philosopher with the instinct of a poet, first worked it consistently out. 
 See on this subject Fijine, Dramatic Lyrics passim, James Lee's Wife, 
 Tlie Worst of it, Dts aliter visum., Too Late, Youth and Art, Statue and 
 Bust, &c., but above all. One Woi'd More. This two-sidedness of souls 
 is the leading idea runnii^ through the Pacchiarotto volume. 
 
44 BEOWNING's philosophy, by J. BURY. § 8. IMMORTALITY. 
 
 VIII. IMMORTALITY. 
 
 As a consequence of liis individual pouit of view, Mr. Browning has 
 reached a higher standpoint than the vague pantheism of, for example, 
 Mr. Tennyson's In Memoriam, in the same way as the German Tran- 
 scendentalists, beginning with Kant, got beyond the pantheism of 
 Spinoza. The universe exists for the individual as much as the indi- 
 vidual for the universe : he is immortal. But immortality in Browning's 
 poems has a different significance from that which it ordinarily conveys. 
 {Personal immortality is as inadequate a term as personal God.) It does 
 not imply memory in the sense of an unbroken chain of consciousness — 
 which has significance only in time — nor yet an absorption into un- 
 consciousness : it implies a state inconceivable to us, limited as we are 
 by phenomenal conditions, — a state which may involve other manifest 
 ations in other worlds not a few. There is indeed one way, according 
 to Browning, in which it is possible for some to approximate to a con- 
 ception and gain a foretaste of this state which may be called heaven — 
 namely by music. Music, as Hegel says, frees from the limit of space — 
 and also partially suspends time. Past and future seem mixed into one 
 present ideal emotion : — " Presences plain in the place ; or, fresh from 
 the protoplast," " or else the wonderful Dead who have passed through 
 the body and gone " are not wanting " in the glare and glow." It is our 
 completest revelation of God : earth attains to heaven ; there is no more 
 near nor far. !Mr. Herbert Spencer has well spoken of cadences as the 
 comments of the emotion on the propositions of the intellect. Thus in 
 music ideas and emotions, love and knowledge, are fused in a perfect 
 mixture, that is, an anticipation of the absolute union of love and know- 
 ledge — the goal to which both the individual and the universe tend. 
 
 As I said before, while Shakspere sets us problems. Browning tries to 
 give us solutions, or at least grounds for hoping that there are solutions 
 that are not merely negative. Hamlet's last words are, "The rest is 
 silence"; Eomeo and Othello "look their last" and "die upon a kiss"; 
 but with Browning silence means sound, and in the hand of the dead 
 Evelyn Hope lies a leaf, earnest of a future. 
 
 To some this belief iu "silence implying sound" wOl appear very 
 consoling ; others will find more comfort in an eternal night in which 
 "silence is more than all tunes." But it is not consolation or pathos 
 that •Browning offers (and for this reason in certain moods we find Mr. 
 Swinburne's or Mr. Matthew Arnold's poems more solacing) : his mes- 
 sage to us is to remember that our aspirations, our ways of life and 
 manners of thought, our seeking after Love, and our love for Beauty, 
 are all so much gain for the individual soul, and have an eternal value 
 
BROWNING S PHILOSOPHY, BY J. BURY. POSTSCRIPT. 45 
 
 for it, quite beyond the passing delight or the good contributed thereby 
 to the world without. " There shall never be one lost good ! what was, 
 shall live as before." 
 
 " All we have willed or hoped or dreamed of good shall exist ; 
 Not its semblance, but itself," &c. 
 
 Take this in connection with Rahhi Ben Ezra, verses 23, 24, 25. 
 
 Thus each individual beauty or affection on earth has an import for 
 eternity through its influence on an individual's soul, 
 
 " a sunset-touch, 
 A fancy from a flower-bell, some one's death, 
 A chorus-ending from Euripides ; " 
 
 and with a chorus-ending from Euripides I conclude, as expressing a 
 truth that Browning has ever in view — the correlation of Love and 
 Beauty as of absolute significance : 
 
 o,rt KoXov (piXoy a el. 
 
 P.S. It has been objected that there is inconsistency in conceiving 
 God as concrete and self-conscious Love, and at the same time refusing 
 the predicate " personal." I think the question may be one of words 
 more than the objectors suspect. On the one hand, God is manifested 
 in the individual as Ms (the individual's) personality, and in this sense 
 God may be called personal ; on the other hand, as a universal, God is 
 impersonal : but these sides are mutually complementary, and each is as 
 inadequate as the other to express the Absolute, which, while it contains 
 in itself the conditions of both, is indifferent to the distinction, and so 
 neither of the adjectives (personal and impersonal) can accurately be 
 predicated of it, though of course personal is the higher conception of 
 the two^ as is indicated by the histories of Philosophy and Eeligion, 
 "We are not entitled to speak of the Absolute as personal because it con- 
 tains the conditions of personahty, just as its containing the conditions 
 of space does not entitle us to speak of it as extended. In short, to 
 arrive at the notion of God we must raise the notion of person to a uni- 
 versal : we thereby suspend the essence of person in a new and higher 
 notion, and thus not only is " personal " a wrong predicate to apply to 
 God, but universal person is a false description, because it sets the two 
 terms of the notion abstractly side by side, and so implies that they are 
 stUl contradictory and unreconciled, whereas in the concrete notion of 
 God (the Idea) they are suspended moments of a higher unity. (IS'ote : 
 the opposition of abstract and concrete must not be taken to imply such 
 a contrast, for example, as of Thought and Life ; it is the contrast — cf. 
 
46 browning's philosophy, by J. BURY. POSTSCRIPT. 
 
 sect. V. — of a one-sided witli a complete view, of the grasping of thought 
 which seizes but a part with the grasp which holds the whole. Thus in 
 the very example instanced, to look upon Life as concrete is an abstract 
 point of view, because Life expresses only one side of the whole of 
 Thought.) 
 
 JiTow I have tried to show that Browning, while insisting — as his 
 purposes demanded — chiefly on the individual side, nevertheless does 
 not neglect the universal side. He does not conceive Love as bound up 
 with personality (personality rather expresses the form in which Love 
 knows itself in the individual), but conceives it as the unity that under- 
 lies and forms the connecting bond of both sides, and it is consequently 
 Ms expression of God. It is not my object to criticize, but merely to 
 exhibit, what I consider to be Browning's teaching ; and the purpose of 
 this note is to defend my reading of Browning against the charge of 
 formal inconsistency. 
 
 I may add, as it is in the interests of ethics more than of meta- 
 physics, that the Personality of God is so obstinately clung to, that this 
 conception is even more plainly untenable from an ethical than from a 
 metaphysical standpoint ; for, thus viewed, " personal God " becomes a 
 contradiction in terms, since it expresses God as co-ordinated with other 
 persons, — superior indeed in degree, but qua person co-ordinate. Such 
 a personal Being may be a fine abstract ethical ideal, but is not God. 
 The Christian religion first obtains its true significance when this rem- 
 nant of anthropomorphism, the doctrine of a personal God, is laid aside. 
 
 In general such objections seem due to the respectable but unfounded 
 prejudice that it is blasphemy to deny personality of God. The retort 
 might be made, that it is they who blaspheme, in limiting God by the 
 category of personality. Mr. Herbert Spencer well speaks of the " erro- 
 neous assumption that the choice is between personality and something 
 lower than personality; whereas the choice is rather between personality 
 and something higher." 
 
47 
 
 THE IDEA OF PERSONALITY, 
 
 AS EMBODIED IN" ROBERT BROWNING'S POETRY 
 BY HIKAM CORSON, LL.D., 
 
 PEOFBSSOE IN IHB COENELL UNIVBESITT, U.S.A.' 
 
 (Read at the Sth Meeting of the Browning Society, June 23, 1882.) 
 
 Introduetion, p. 293—301, I. TJie Idea of Personality in Browning, p. 302-307 
 II, Art as an Intermediate Agency of Personality, p. 307-321. 
 
 " Subsists no law of Life outside of Life. 
 
 The Christ himself had been no Lawgiver, 
 Unless he had given the life, too, with the law." 
 
 The importance of Robert Browning's poetry, as embodying the 
 profoundest thought, the subtlest and most complex sentiment, and, 
 above all, the most quickening spirituality of the age, has, as yet, with 
 the exception of a few special and devoted students, received but a 
 niggardly recognition. There are, however, many indications in the 
 poetical criticism of the day, that upon it will finally be pronounced, 
 though late, the verdict which has so long been its due. And the 
 recent founding of a Society in England " to gather together some, at 
 least, of the many admirers of Robert Browning, for the study and 
 discussion of his works, and the publication of papers on them, and ex- 
 tracts from works illustrating them," is an earnest that something ere 
 long will be done towards paying, in part, at least, a long-standing debt. 
 
 Mr. Browning's earHest poem, Pauling (he calls it, in the Preface to 
 the reprint of it, in 1868, "a boyish work," though it exhibits the great 
 basal thought of all his subsequent poetry), was published in 1843, since 
 which time he has produced the largest body of poetry produced by any 
 one poet, in English literature ; and the range of thought and passion 
 which it exhibits is greater than that of any other poet, without a 
 single exception, since the days of Shakspere. And he is the most 
 like Shakspere in his deep interest in human nature, in all its varieties of 
 good and of eviL Though endowed with a powerful, subtle, and restless 
 intellect, he has, throughout his voluminous poetry, made the strongest 
 protest that has been made in these days, against mere intellect. And 
 
48 PROF. COESON ON THE IDEA OF PERSONALITY IN BROWNING. 
 
 his poetry has, therefore, a peculiar value in an age like the present — 
 an age exhibiting " a condition of humanity which has thrown itself 
 wholly on its intellect and its genius in physics, and has done marvels 
 in material science and invention, but at the expense of the interior 
 divinity." It is the human heart, that is, the intuitive, the non- 
 discursive side of man, with its hopes and its prophetic aspirations, as 
 opposed to the analytic, the discursive understanding, which is to him a 
 subject of the deepest and most scrutinizing interest. He knows that 
 its deepest depths are " deeper than did ever plummet sound ; " but he 
 also knows, that it is in these depths that life's greatest secrets must be 
 sought. The philosophies excogitated by the insulated intellect, help 
 nothing toward even a glimpse of these secrets. In one of his later 
 poems, that entitled Hotise, he has intimated, and forcibly intimated, 
 his sense of the impossibility of penetrating to the Holy of Holies 
 of this wondrous human heart, though assured as he is that aU our 
 hopes in regard to the soul's destiny are warmed and cherished by what 
 radiates thence. He quotes, in the last stanza of this poem, from 
 "Wordsworth's sonnet on the Sonnet, " "With this same key Shakspere 
 unlocked his heart," and then adds, "Did Shakspere] If so, the less 
 Shakspere he ! " 
 
 Mrs. Browning, in the Fifth Book of her Aurora Leigh, has given a 
 full and very forcible expression to the feeling which has caused the 
 highest dramatic genius of the present day to seek refuge in the poem 
 and the novel. " I will write no plays ; because the drama, less sublime 
 in this, makes lower appeals, defends more menially, adopts the standard 
 of the public taste to chalk its height on, wears a dog-chain round its 
 regal neck, and learns to carry and fetch the fashions of the day, to 
 please the day ; . . . 'Tis that, honouring to its worth the drama, I would 
 fear to keep it down %o the level of the footlights. . . . The growing 
 drama has outgrown such toys of simulated stature, face, and speech, it 
 also, peradventure, may outgrow the simulation of the painted scene, 
 boards, actors, prompters, gaslight, and costume ; and take for a worthier 
 stage, the soul itself, its shifting fancies and celestial lights, with all its 
 grand orchestral silences to keep tlie 2>ciuses of the rhythmic sounds." 
 
 Eobert Browning's poetry is, in these days, the fullest realization of 
 what is expressed in the concluding lines of this passage : he has taken 
 for a worthier stage, the soul itself, its shifting fancies and celestial- 
 lights, more than any other poet of the age. And he has worked with 
 a thought-and-passion capital greater than the combined thought-and- 
 passion capital of the richest of his poetical contemporaries. And he 
 has thought nobly of the soul, and has treated it as, in its essence, above 
 the fixed and law-bound system of things which we call nature ; in other 
 
PROF. CORSON ON THE IDEA OF PERSONALITY IN BROWNING. 49 
 
 words, he has treated it as supernatural. "Mind," he makes the Pope 
 say, m Tlie Ring and the Book, — and his poetry bears testimony to its 
 being his own conviction and doctrine, — " Mind is not matter, nor from 
 matter, but above." With every student of Browning, the recognition 
 and acceptance of this, must be his starting-point. Even that which 
 impelled the old dog, in his poem entitled Tray [Dramatic Dyrics, First 
 Series), to rescue the beggar child that fell into the river, and then to 
 dive after the child's doll, and bring it up, after a long stay under 
 water, the poet evidently distinguishes from matter, — regards as " not 
 matter nor from matter, but above : " 
 
 " And so, amid the laughter gay, 
 Trotted my hero off, — old Tray, — 
 Till somebody, prerogatived 
 With reason, reasoned : ' Why he dived, 
 His brain would show us, I should say. 
 
 John, go and catch — or, if needs be, 
 
 Purchase that animal for me ! 
 
 By vivisection, at expense 
 
 Of half-an-hour and eighteen pence, 
 
 How brain secretes dog's soul, we'll see ! ' " 
 
 In his poem entitled Halhert and Hob {Dramatic Lyrics, First Series),' 
 quoting from Shakspere's King Lear, " Is there a reason in nature for 
 these hard hearts 1 " the poet adds, " O Lear, That a reason out of 
 nature must turn them soft, seems clear ! " 
 
 Mind is, with Browning, supernatural, but linked with, and restrained, 
 and even enslaved by, the natural. The soul, in its education, that is, , 
 in its awakening, becomes more and more independent of the natural, 
 and, as a consequence, more responsive to higher souls and to the 
 Divine. All spirit is mutually attractive, and the degree of attractive- 
 ness results from the degree of freedom from the obstructions of the 
 material, or the natural. Loving the truth implies a greater or less 
 degree of that freedom of the spirit which brings it into sympathy with 
 the true. " If ye abide in My word," says Christ (and we must under- 
 stand by " word " His own concrete life, the word made flesh, and living 
 and breathing), " if ye abide in My word " (that is, continue to live My 
 life), " then are ye truly My disciples ; and ye shall know the truth, and 
 the truth shall make you free " (John viii. 32). 
 
 In regard to the soul's inherent possessions, its microcosmic poten- 
 tialities, Paracelsus is made to say (and this may be taken, too, as the 
 poet's own creed), " Truth is within ourselves ; it takes no rise from 
 outward things, whate'er you may believe ; there is an inmost centre in 
 us all, where truth abides in fullness ; and around, wall upon wall, the 
 gross flesh hems it in, this perfect, clear perception — which is truth.. 
 
50 PROF. CORSON ON THE IDEA OF PERSONALITY IN BROWNING. 
 
 A baffling and perverting carnal mesh bKnds it, and makes all error : 
 and, to knoto, rather consists in opening out a way whence the im- 
 prisoned splendour may escape, than in effecting entry for a light 
 supposed to be without." 
 
 All possible thought is implicit in tne mind, and waiting for release 
 — waiting to become explicit. " Seek within yourself," says Goethe, 
 "and you will find everything; and rejoice that, without, there lies a 
 Nature that says yea and amen to all you have discovered in yourself." 
 And Mrs. Browning, in the person of Aurora Leigh, writes : " The 
 cygnet finds the water ; but the man is born in ignorance of his element, 
 and feels but blind at first, disorganized by sin in the blood, — his spirit- 
 insight dulled and crossed by his sensations. Presently we feel it 
 quicken in the dark sometimes ; then mark, be reverent, be obedient, — 
 for those dumb motions of imperfect life are oracles of vital Deity 
 attesting the Hereafter. Let who says ' The soul's a clean white paper,' 
 rather say, a palimpsest, a prophet's holograph defiled, erased, and 
 covered by a monk's, — the Apocalypse by a Longus ! poring on which 
 obscure text, we may discern perhaps some fair, fine trace of what was 
 written once, some off-stroke of an alpha and omega expressing the 
 old Scripture." 
 
 This " fair, fine trace of what was written once," it was the mission 
 of Christ, it is the mission of all great personalities, of all the concrete 
 creations of Genius, to bring out into distinctness and vital glow. It is 
 not, and cannot be, brought out, — and this fact is emphasized in the 
 poetry of Browning, — it cannot be brought out, through what is born and 
 resides in the brain : it is brought out, either directly or indirectly, by 
 the attracting power of magnetic personalities, the ultimate, absolute 
 personality being the God-man, Christ, OearSpcoTros. 
 
 The human soul is regarded in Browning's poetry as a complexly 
 organized, individualized divine force, destined to gravitate towards the 
 Lafinite. How is this force, with its numberless checks and counter- 
 checks, its centripetal and centrifugal tendencies, best determined in 
 its necessarily oblique way ? How much earthly ballast must it carry, 
 to keep it sufficiently steady, and how little, that it may not be weighed 
 down with materialistic heaviness ? How much certainty must it have 
 of its course, and how much uncertainty, that it may shun the "torpor 
 of assurance," ^ and not lose the vigor which comes of a dubious 
 and obstructed road, " which who stands upon is apt to doubt if it's 
 indeed a road." ^ " Pure faith indeed," says Bishop Blougram, to 
 Gigadibs, the literary man, " you know not what you ask ! naked belief 
 
 ^ The Ring and the Book, The Pope, v. 1853. 
 ' Bishop Blottgravis Apology, vv. 198, 199. 
 
PROF. CORSON ON THE IDEA OP PERSONALITY IN BROWNING, 51 
 
 in God the Omnipotent, Omniscient, Omnipresent, sears too much the 
 sense of conscious creatures, to be borne. It were the seeing him, no 
 flesh shall dare. Some think, Creation's meant to show him forth : I 
 say, it's meant to hide him all it can, and that's what all the blessed 
 Evil's for. Its use in time is to environ us, our breath, our drop of 
 dew, with shield enough against that sight till we can bear its stress. 
 Under a vertical sun, the exposed brain and lidless eye and disim- 
 prisoned heart less certainly would wither up at once, than mind, 
 confronted with the truth of Him. But time and earth case-harden us 
 to live ; the feeblest sense is trusted most : the child feels God a 
 moment, ichors o'er the place, plays on and grows to be a man like us. 
 With me, faith means perpetual unbelief kept quiet like the snake 
 'neath Michael's foot, who stands calm just because he feels it writhe." ^ 
 
 There is a remarkable passage to the same effect in Paracelsiis, in 
 which Paracelsus expatiates on the "just so much of doubt as bade him 
 plant a surer foot upon the sun-road." 
 
 And in Easter Day : 
 
 " You must mix some uncertainty 
 With faith, if you would have faith he" 
 
 And the good Pope in The Ring and the Book, alluding to the absence 
 of true Christian soldiership, which is revealed by Pompilia's case,' 
 says : " Is it not this ignoble confidence, cowardly hardihood, that dulls 
 and damps, makes the old heroism impossible? Unless . . . what 
 whispers me of times to come % What if it be the mission of that age 
 my death will usher into life, to shake this torpor of assurance from our 
 creed, re-introduce the doubt discarded, bring the formidable danger back 
 we drove long ago to the distance and the dark?" 
 
 True healthy doubt means, in Browning, that the spiritual nature is 
 sufficiently quickened not to submit to the conclusions of the insulated 
 intellect. It will reach out beyond them, and assert itself, whatever be 
 the resistance offered by the intellect. Mere doubt, without any resist- 
 ance from the intuitive, non-discursive side of our nature, is the dry-rot 
 of the soul. The spiritual functions are "smothered in surmise." 
 Faith is not a matter of blind belief, of slavish assent and acceptance, 
 as many no-faith people seem to regard it. It is what Wordsworth 
 calls it, "a passionate intuition," and springs out of quickened and 
 refined sentiment, out of inborn instincts which are as cultivable as 
 are any other elements of our complex nature, and which, too, may be 
 blunted beyond a consciousness of their possession. And when one in 
 this latter state denies the reality of faith, he is not unlike one born 
 blind denying the reality of sight. 
 
 * Bishop Blovgram's Apology, vv, 650-671. 
 
52 PROF. CORSON ON THE IDEA OF PERSONALITY IN BROWNING. 
 
 A reiterated lesson in Browning's poetry, and one that results from 
 his spiritual theory, is, that the present life is a tabernacle-life, and that 
 it can be truly lived only as a tabernacle-life ; for only such a life is 
 compatible with the ever-continued aspiration and endeavour -which is a 
 condition of, and inseparable from, spiritual vitality. 
 
 Domizia, in the tragedy of Luria, is made to say, 
 
 " How inexhaustibly the spirit grows ! 
 One object, she seemed erewhile born to reach 
 With her whole energies and die content, — 
 So like a wall at the world's edge it stood, 
 With naught beyond to live for, — is that reached? — 
 Already are new undream'd energies 
 Outgrowing under, and extending farther 
 To a new object ; — there's another world ! " 
 
 The dying John in A Death in the Desert, says, 
 
 " I say that man was made to grow, not stop ; 
 That help he needed once, and needs no more, 
 Having grown up but an inch by, is withdi-awn : 
 For he hath new needs, and new helps to these. 
 This imports solely, man should mount on each 
 New height in view ; the help whereby he mounts. 
 The ladder-rung his foot has left, may fall. 
 Since all things suffer change save God the Truth. 
 Man apprehends him newly at each stage 
 Whereat earth's ladder drops, its service done ; 
 And nothing shall prove twice what once was proved." 
 
 Bro^^^ling has given varied and beautiful expressions to this idea, 
 throughout his poetry. 
 
 The soul must rest in nothing this side of the infinite. If it does 
 rest in anything, however relatively noble that thing may be, whether 
 art, or literature, or science, or theology, even, it declines in vitality — 
 it torpifies. However great a conquest the combatant may achieve in 
 any of these arenas, " striding away from the huge gratitude, his club 
 shouldered, lion-fleece roimd loin and flank," he must be *' bound on 
 the next new labour, height o'er height ever surmounting — destiny's 
 decree ! " ^ 
 
 But this tabernacle-Kfe, which should ever look ahead, has its claims 
 which must not be ignored, and its standards which must not be too 
 much above present conditions. Man must "fit to the finite his 
 infinity" (Sordello, p. 203). Life may be over-spiritual as well as 
 over-worldly. " Let us cry, ' All good things are ours, nor soul helps 
 flesh more, now, than flesh helps soul ! '" ^ The figure the poet employs 
 in the Ring and the Book to illustrate the art process, may be as aptly 
 applied to life itself — the greatest of all arts. The life-artist must know 
 1 Aristophanes' Apology, p. 35, American ed. * RabU Ben Lzra 
 
PROF, CORSON ON THE IDEA OF PERSONALITY IN BROWNING. 53 
 
 how to secure the proper degree of malleability in this mixture of flesh 
 and soul. He must mingle gold with gold's alloy, and duly tempering 
 both effect a manageable mass. There may be too little of alloy in 
 earth-life as well as too much — too little to work the gold and fashion 
 it, not into a ring, but ring-ward. "On the earth the broken arcs-; in 
 the heaven a perfect round" (AM Vogler). "Oh, if we draw a circle 
 premature, heedless of far gain, greedy for quick returns of profit, sure, 
 bad is our bargain" {A Grammarian^ s Funeral). 
 
 An Epistle containing the strange Medical Exjperiences of Karshish, 
 the Arab Physician, is one of Browning's most remarkable psychological 
 studies. It may be said to polarise the idea, so often presented in his 
 poetry, that doubt is a condition of the vitality of faith. In this 
 poem, the poet has treated a supposed case of a spiritual knowledge 
 " increased beyond the fleshly faculty — heaven opened to a soul while 
 yet on earth, earth forced on a soul's use while seeing heaven," a spiritual 
 state, less desirable and far less favourable to the true fulfilment of the 
 purposes of earth-life, than that expressed in the following lines from 
 Easter Day :— « a world of spirit as of sense 
 
 Was plain to him, yet not too plain, 
 
 Which he could traverse, not remain 
 
 A guest in : — else were permanent 
 
 Heaven on earth, which its gleams were meant 
 
 To sting with hunger for full light," etc. 
 
 The Epistle is a subtle representation of a soul conceived with 
 absolute spiritual standards, while obliged to live in a world where 
 all standards are relative and determined by the circumstances and 
 limitations of its situation. 
 
 The spiritual life has been too distinctly revealed for fulfilling aright 
 the purposes of earth-life, purposes which the soul, while in the flesh, 
 must not ignore, since, in the words of Eabbi Ben Ezra, "aU good 
 things are ours, nor soul helps flesh more, now, than flesh helps soul." 
 The poem may also be said to represent what is, or should be, the true 
 spirit of the man of science. In spite of what Karshish writes, 
 apologetically, he betrays his real attitude throughout, towards the 
 wonderful spiritual problem involved. 
 
 It is, as many of Browning's Monologues are, a double picture — one 
 direct, the other reflected, and the reflected one is as distinct as the 
 direct. The composition also bears testimony to Browning's own soul- 
 healthfulness. Though the spiritual bearing of things is the all-in-all, 
 in his poetry, the robustness of his nature, the fullness and splendid 
 equilibrium of his life, protect him against an inarticulate mysticism. 
 Browning is, in the widest and deepest sense of the word, the healthiest 
 of all living poets ; and in general constitution the most Shaksperian. 
 
54 PROF. CORSON ON THE IDEA OF PERSONALITY IN BROWNING. 
 
 Perhaps the most comprehensive passage in Browning's poetry, ex- 
 pressive of his ideal of a complete man under the conditions of earth- 
 life, is found in Colombe's Birthday, Act IV. Valence says of Prince 
 Berthold, 
 
 " He gathers earth's ivhole good into his arms, standing, as man, 
 now, stately, strong and wise — marching to fortune, not surprised by 
 her : one great aim, like a guiding star, above — which tasks strength, 
 wisdom, stateliness, to lift his manhood to the height that takes the 
 prize ; a prize not near — lest overlooking earth, he rashly spring to seize 
 it — nor remote, so that he rests upon his path content : but day by day, 
 while shimmering grows shine, and the faint circlet prophesies the orb, 
 he sees so much as, just evolving these, the stateliness, the wisdom and 
 the strength, to due completion, will suffice this life, and lead him at 
 his grandest to the grave." 
 
 Browning fully recognizes, to use an expression of his Fra Lippo 
 Lippi, fully recognizes "the value and significance of flesh." A healthy 
 and well-toned spiritual life is with him the furthest removed from 
 asceticism. To the passage from his Rahhi Ben Ezni already quoted, 
 " aU good things are ours, nor soul helps flesh more, now, than flesh 
 helps soul," should be added what David sings to Saul in the poem 
 entitled Saul. Was the full physical life ever more beautifully sung 1 
 
 " Oh ! our manhood's prime vigour ! no spirit feels waste, 
 Not a muscle is stopped in its playing, nor sinew unbraced. 
 Oh, the wild joys of living ! the leaping from rock up to rock, 
 The strong rending of boughs from the fir-tree, the cool silver shock 
 Of the plunge in a pool's living water, the hunt of the bear, 
 And the sultriness showing the lion is couched in his lair. 
 And the meal, the rich dates yellowed over with gold dust divine, 
 And the locust-flesh steeped in the pitcher, the full draught of wine, 
 And the sleep in the dried river-channel where bulrushes tell 
 That the water was wont to go warbling so softly and well. 
 How good is man's life, the mere living 1 how fit to employ 
 All the heart and the soul and the senses for ever in joy ! " 
 
 Though this is said in the person of the beautiful shepherd-boy, 
 David, whoever has lived any time with Browning, through his poetry, 
 must be assured that it is also an expression of the poet's own experience 
 of the glory of flesh. He has himseK been an expression of the fullest 
 physical life : and now, in his one and seventieth year, since the 7th 
 of last May, he preserves both mind and body in a magnificent vigour. 
 If his soul had been lodged in a sickly, rickety body, he could hardly 
 have written these lines from Said. !N"or could he have written Caliban 
 upon Setebos, especially the opening lines : " Will sprawl, now that the 
 heat of day is best, flat on his beUy in the pit's much mire, with 
 elbows wide, fists clenched to prop his chin. And, while he kicks both 
 
PROF. CORSON ON THE IDEA OF PERSONALITY IN BROWNING. 55 
 
 feet in the cool slush, and feels about his spine small eft-things course, 
 run in and out each arm, and make him laugh : and while above his 
 head a pompion-plant, coating the cave-top as a brow its eye, creeps 
 down to touch and tickle hair and beard, and now a flower drops with 
 a bee inside, and now a fruit to snap at, catch and crunch, — he looks 
 out o'er yon sea which sunbeams cross and recross till they weave a 
 spider-web (meshes of fire, some great fish breaks at times), and talks 
 to his own self, howe'er he please, touching that other, whom his dam 
 called God." 
 
 There's a grand passage in Balaustion^s Adventure : including a 
 transcript from Euripides, descriptive of Herakles as he returns, after 
 his conflict with Death, leading back Alkestis, which shows the poet's 
 sympathy with the physical. The passage is more valuable as revealing 
 that sympathy, from the fact that it's one of his additions to Euripides : 
 
 " there stood the strength, 
 Happy, as alwaj's ; something grave, perhaps ; 
 The great vein-cordage on the fret-worked brow, 
 Black-swollen, beaded yet with battle-drops 
 The yellow hair o' the hero ! — his big frame 
 A-quiver with each muscle sinking back 
 Into the sleepy smooth it leaped from late. 
 Under the great guard of one arm, there leant 
 A shrouded something, live and woman-like, 
 Propped by the heart-beats 'neath the lion-coat. 
 When he had finished his survey, it seemed, 
 The heavings of the heart began subside, 
 The helping bi-eath returned, and last the smile 
 Shone out, all Herakles was back again, 
 As the words followed the saluting hand." 
 
 It is not so much the glory of flesh which Euripides represents, in 
 Herakles, as the indulgence of appetite, at a time, too, when that 
 indulgence is made to appear the more culpable and gross. 
 
 This idea of " the value and significance of flesh," it is important to 
 note, along with the predominant spiritual bearing of Bro^vning's 
 poetry. It articulates everywhere the spiritual, so to speak — makes it 
 healthy and robust, and protects it against volatility and from running 
 into mysticism. 
 
 Shelley's poetry is wanting in this articulation. 
 
 This much I wished to say introductory to my special subject. 
 After reading closely all B.'s poetry, much of it many times over, I 
 asked myself the question, What great idea or ideas do I feel to be the 
 most strongly enforced in his Poetry? and the spontaneous reply to 
 myself was, The idea of Personality as a quickening, regenerating power, 
 and of Art as an intermediate agency of PersonaHty. These two ideas 
 I endeavour to set forth in this paper. 
 
56 PROF. CORSON ON THE IDEA OF PERSONALITY IN BROWNING. 
 
 I. The Idea of Personality as embodied in Broivning't 
 A cardinal idea in Browning's poetry is the regeneration of men 
 through a personality who brings fresh stuff for them to mould, 
 interpret, and prove right, — new feeling fresh from God — whose life 
 reteaches them what life should be, what faith is, loyalty and simple- 
 ness, all once revealed, but taught them so long since that they have 
 but mere tradition of the fact, — truth copied falteringly from copies 
 faint, the early traits all dropped away. (Luria.) The intellect plays a 
 secondary part. Its place is behind the instinctive, spiritual antennae 
 which conduct along their trembling lines, fresh stuff for the intellect 
 to stamp and keep — fresh instinct for it to translate into law. 
 
 " A people is but the attempt of many to rise to the completer life 
 of one." (A Soul's Tragedy.) 
 
 Only the man who supplies new feeling fresh from God, quickens 
 and regenerates the race, and sets it on the King's highway from which 
 it has wandered into byways — not the man of mere intellect, of 
 unkindled soul, that supplies only stark-naked thought. Through the 
 former, " God stooping shows sufl&cient of His light for those i' the dark 
 to rise by." {R. and B., Pompilia.) In him men discern "the dawn 
 of the next nature, the new man whose will they venture in the place 
 of theirs, and whom they trust to find them out new ways to the new 
 heights which yet he only sees." {Luria.) It is by reaching towards, 
 and doing fealty to, the greater spirit which attracts and absorbs their 
 own, that, "trace by trace old memories reappear, old truth returns, 
 their slow thought does its work, and all's re-known." {Luria.) 
 " Some existence like a pact 
 
 And protest against Chaos " {Sordello, p. 168). 
 
 ..." The fullest effluence of the finest mind, 
 
 All in degree, no way diverse in kind 
 
 From minds above it, minds which, more or less 
 
 Lofty or low, move seeking to impress 
 
 Themselves on somewhat ; but one mind haa climbed 
 
 Step after step, by just ascent sublimed. 
 
 Thought is the soul of act, and, stage by stage. 
 
 Is soul from body still to disengage, 
 
 As tending to a freedom which rejects 
 
 Such help, and incorporeally affects 
 
 The world, producing deeds but not by deeds, 
 
 Swaying, in others, frames itself exceeds, 
 
 Assigning them the simpler tasks it used 
 
 To patiently perform till Song produced 
 
 Acts, by thoughts only, for the mind : divest 
 
 Mind of e'en Thought, and, lo, God's unexpressed 
 
 Will dawns above us! " {Sordello, p. 168, 169). 
 
 A dangerous tendency of civilization is that towards crystallization — 
 towards hardened, inflexible conventionalisms which " refuse the soul 
 its way." 
 
PROF. CORSON ON THE IDEA OF PERSONALITY IN BROWNING. 57 
 
 Such crystallizatioD, such conventionalisms, yield only to the 
 dissolving power of the spiritual warmth of ILfe-fuU personalities. 
 
 The quickening, regenerating power of personality is everywhere 
 exhibited in Browning's poetry. It is emphasized in Luria, and in the 
 Monologues of the Canon Caponsacchi and Pompilia, in the Ring and 
 the Book; it shines out, or glints forth, in Colomhe^s Birthday, in 
 Saul, in Sordello, and in all the Love poems. I would say, en jpassant, 
 that Love is always treated by Browning as a spiritual claim ; while 
 duty may be only a worldly one. See especially the poem entitled 
 Bifurcation. In Balaustion's Adventure : including a transcript from 
 Euripides, the regenerating power of personality may be said to be the 
 leavening idea, which the poet has introduced into the Greek play. It 
 is entirely absent in the original. It baptizes, so to speak, the Greek 
 play, and converts it into a Christian poem. It is the "new truth" of 
 the poet's Christmas Eve. 
 
 After the mourning friends have spoken their words of consolation 
 to the bereaved husband, the last word being, "Dead, thy wife — 
 living, the love she left," Admetos " turned on the comfort, with no 
 tears, this time. He teas beginning to he like his wife. I told you of 
 that pressure to the point, word slow pursuing word in monotone, 
 Alkestis spoke with ; so Admetos, now, solemnly bore the burden of 
 the truth. And as the voice of him grew, gathered strength, and 
 groaned on, and persisted to the end, we felt how deep had been 
 descent in grief, and with what change he came up now to light, and left 
 behind such littleness as tears." 
 
 And when Alkestis was brought back by Herakles, " the hero twitched 
 the veil off : and there stood, with such fixed eyes and such slow smile, 
 Alkestis' silent self ! It was the crowning grace of that great heart to 
 keep back joy : procrastinate the truth until the wife, who had made 
 proof and foimd the husband wanting, might essay once more, hear, see, 
 and feel him renovated now — able to do, noio, all herself had done, risen 
 to the height of her: so, hand in hand, the two might go together, 
 live and die." (Compare with this the restoration of Hermione to her 
 husband, in The Winter's Tale, Act V.) 
 
 A good intellect has been characterized as the chorus of Divinity. 
 Substitute for "good intellect," "an exalted magnetic personality," and 
 the thought is deepened. An exalted magnetic personality is the 
 chorus of Divinity, which in the great Drama of Humanity, guides and 
 interprets the feelings and sympathies of other souls and thus adjusts 
 their attitudes toward the Divine. It is not the highest function of 
 such a personality to teach, but rather to inform, in the earlier and 
 deeper sense of the word. Whatever mere doctrine he may promulgate, 
 
58 PROF. CORSON ON THE IDEA OF PERSONALITY IN BROWNING. 
 
 is of inferior importance to the spontaneous action of his concrete life, in 
 which the True, the Beautiful, and the Good, breathe and live. What 
 is born in the brain dies there, it may be ; at best, it does not, and 
 cannot of itself, lead up to the full concrete life. It is only through 
 the spontaneous and unconscious fealty which an inferior does to a 
 superior soul (a fealty resulting from the responsiveness of spirit to 
 spirit), that the former is slowly and silently transformed into a more or 
 less approximate image of the latter. The stronger personality leads the 
 •weaker on by paths which the weaker knows not, upward he leads him, 
 though his steps be slow and vacillating. Humility, in the Christian 
 sense, means this fealty to the higher. It doesn't mean self-abasement, 
 self-depreciation, as it has been understood to mean, by both the Eomish 
 and the Protestant Church. Pride, in the Christian sense, is the closing 
 of the doors of the soul to a great magnetic guest. 
 
 Browning beautifully expresses the transmission of personality in 
 his Saul. But according to Browning's idea, personality cannot strictly 
 be said to be transmitted. Personality rather evokes its like from other 
 souls, which are "all in degree, no way diverse in kind." — Sordello. 
 p. 168. 
 
 David has reached an advanced stage, in his sjonbolic song to Saul. 
 He thinks, now, what next he shall urge " to sustain him where song 
 had restored himl — Song filled to the verge his cup with the wine of 
 this life, pressing all that it yields of mere fruitage, the strength and 
 the beauty : beyond, on what fields, glean a vintage more potent and 
 perfect to brighten the eye and bring blood to the lip, and commend 
 them the cup they put by]" So once more the strmg of the harp 
 makes response to his spirit, and he sings : 
 
 " In our flesh grows the branch of this life, in our soul it bears fruit. 
 Thou hast marked the slow rise of the tree, — how its stem trembled first 
 Till it passed the kid's lip, the stag's antler ; then safely outburst 
 The fan-branches all round ; and thou mindest when these, too, in turn 
 Broke a-bloom and the palm-tree seemed perfect ; yet more was to learn, 
 E'en the good that comes in with the palm fruit. Our dates shall we slight. 
 When their juice brings a cure for all sorrow? or care for the plight 
 Of the palm's self whose slow growth produced them? Not so ! stem and 
 
 branch 
 Shall decay, nor be known in their place, while the palm-wine shall staunch 
 Every wound of man's spirit in winter. I pour thee such wine. 
 Leave the flesh to the fate it was fit for 1 the spirit be thine ! 
 By the spirit, when age shall o'ercome thee, thou still shalt enjoy 
 More indeed, than at first when inconscious, the life of a boy. 
 Crush that life, and behold its wine running ! each deed thou hast done 
 Dies, revives, goes to work in the world : until e'en as the sun 
 Looking down on the earth, though clouds spoil him, though tempests efface. 
 Can find nothing his own deed produced not, must everywhere trace 
 The results of Lis past summer-prime, — so, each ray of thy will, 
 
PROF. CORSON ON THE IDEA OF PERSONALITY IN BROWNING. 59 
 
 Every flash of thy passion and prowess, long over, shall thrill 
 Thy whole people, the countless, with ardour, till they too give forth 
 A like cheer to their sons : who in turn, fill the South and the North 
 With the radiance thy deed was the germ of." 
 
 In the concluding lines is set forth what might be characterized as 
 the apostolic succession of a great personality — the succession of those 
 " who in turn fill the south and the north with the radiance his deed 
 was the germ of." 
 
 What follows in David's song gives expression to the other mode 
 of transmitting a great personality — that is, through records that "give 
 unborn generations their due and their part in his being," and also to 
 what those records owe their effectiveness, and are saved from becoming 
 a dead letter. 
 
 " Is Saul dead ? la the depth of the vale make his tomb — bid arise 
 A grey mountain of marble heaped four-square, till, built to the skies. 
 Let it mark where the great First King slumbers : whose fame would ye= 
 
 know ? 
 Up above see the rock's naked face, where the record shall go 
 In great characters cut by the scribe, — Such was Saul, so he did ; 
 With the sages directing the work, by the populace chid, — 
 For not half, they'll affirm, is comprised there ! Which fault to amend. 
 In the grove with his kind grows the cedar, whereon they shall spend 
 (See, in tablets 'tis level above them) their praise, and record 
 With the gold of the graver, Saul's story, — the statesman's great word 
 Side by side with the poet's sweet comment. The river's a-wave 
 With smooth paper-reeds grazing each other when prophet-winds rave : 
 So the pen gives unborn generations their due and their part 
 In thy being ! Then, first of the mighty, thank God that thou art ! " 
 
 What is said in this passage is applicable to the record we have of 
 Christ's life upon earth. Christianity has only to a very limitod extent 
 been perpetuated through the letter of the New Testament. It has 
 been perpetuated chiefly through transmissions of personalities, through 
 apostolic succession, in a general sense, and through embodiments of his 
 spirit in art and literature — "the stateman's great word," "the poet's 
 sweet comment." Were it not for this transmission of the quickening 
 power of personality, the New Testament would be, to a great extent, a 
 dead letter. It owe& its significance to the quickened spirit which is 
 brought to the reading of it. The personality of Christ could not be, 
 through a plastic sympathy, moulded out of the New Testament records 
 without the aid of intermediate personalities. 
 
 The Messianic idea was not peculiar to the Jewish race — the idea 
 of a Person, gathering up within himself, in an effective fullness and 
 harmony, the restorative elements of humanity, which have lost their 
 power through dispersion and consequent obscuration. There have 
 been Messiahs of various orders and ranks, in every age, — great pejson- 
 
60 PROF. CORSON ON THE IDEA OF PERSONALITY IN BROWNING. 
 
 alities that have realized to a greater or less extent (though there has 
 been but one, the God- Man, who fully realized), the spiritual potential- 
 ities in man, that have stood upon the sharpest heights as beacons to 
 their fellows. In the individual, the species has, as it were, been 
 gathered up, epitomized, and intensified, and he has thus been a 
 prophecy, and, to some extent, a fulfilment of human destiny. 
 
 " A poet must be earth's essential king," as Sordello asserts, and he 
 is that by virtue of his exerting or shedding the influence of, his 
 essential personality. " If caring not to exert the proper essence of his 
 royalty, he, the poet, trifle malapert with accidents instead — good things 
 assigned as heralds of a better thing behind " — he is " deposed from his 
 kingly throne, and his glory is taken from him." Of himself SordeUo 
 says : " The power he took most pride to test, whereby all forms of life 
 had been professed at pleasure, forms already on the earth, was but a 
 means of power beyond, whose birth should, in its novelty, be king- 
 ship's proof. 'Sowf, whether he came near or kept aloof the several 
 forms he longed to imitate, not there the kingship lay, he sees too 
 late. Those forms, unalterable first as last, proved him her copier, 
 not the protoplast of nature : what could come of being free by action 
 to exhibit tree for tree, bird, beast, for beast and bird, or prove earth 
 bore one veritable man or woman more ? Means to an end such proofs 
 are : what the end % " 
 
 The answer given involves the great Browning idea of the quicken- 
 ing power of personality : " Let essence, whatsoe'er it be, extend — never 
 contract ! " 
 
 By " essence " we must understand that which " constitutes man's 
 self, is what Is," as the dying John, in A Death in the Desert, expresses 
 it — that which backs the active powers and the conscious intellect, 
 " subsisting whether they assist or no." 
 
 " Let essence, whatsoe'er it be, extend — never contract ! " Sordello 
 says. " Already you include the multitude ; " that is, you gather 
 up, in yourself, in an efi'ective fullness and harmony, what lies scattered 
 and ineffective in the multitude ; "then let the multitude include your- 
 self ; " that is, be substantiated, essenced with yourself ; " and the result 
 were new : themselves before, the multitude turn you " (become your- 
 self). "This were to live and move and have, in them, your being, 
 and secure a diadem you should transmit (because no cycle yearns 
 beyond itself, but on itself returns) when the full sphere in wane, the 
 world o'erlaid long since with you, shall have in turn obeyed some orb 
 still prouder, some displayer, still more potent than the last, of human 
 will, and some new king depose the old." 
 
 This is a most important passage to get hold of in studying Browning. 
 
PROF. CORSON ON THE IDEA. OF PERSONALITY IN BROWNING. 61 
 
 It may almost be said to gather up Browning's philosophy of life in a 
 nutshell. 
 
 There's a passage to the same effect in Balaustion's Adventure, in 
 regard to the transmission of the poet's essence. The enthusiastic 
 Ehodian girl, Balaustion, after she has told the play of Euripides, years 
 after her adventure, to her four friends, Petale, Phullis, Charop^, and 
 Chrusion, says, 
 
 "I think I see how . . . you, I, or any one, might mould a new 
 Admetos, new Alkestis. Ah, that brave bounty of poets, the one 
 royal race that ever was, or will be, in this world ! They give no gift 
 that bounds itself, and ends i' the giving and the taking : theirs so 
 breeds i' the heart and soul of the taker, so transmutes the man who 
 only was a man before, that he grows god-like in his turn, can give — he 
 also : share the poet's privilege, bring forth new good, new beauty from 
 the old. As though the cup that gave the wine, gave too the god's 
 prolific giver of the grape, that vine, was wont to find out, fawn around 
 his footstep, springing still to bless the dearth, at bidding of a Mainad." 
 
 II. Art as an Intermediate Agency of Personality. 
 
 If Browning's idea of the quickening, the regeneration, the rectifica- 
 tion of personality, through a higher jDersonality, be fully comprehended, 
 his idea of the great function of Art, as an intermediate agency of per- 
 sonality, will become plain. To emphasize the latter idea may be said 
 to be the ultimate purpose of his masterpiece, The Ring and the Book. 
 
 The complexity of the circumstances involved in the Roman murder 
 case, adapts it admirably to the poet's purpose — namely, to exhibit the 
 swervings of human judgment in spite of itself, and the conditions 
 upon which the rectification of that judgment depends. 
 
 This must be taken, however, as only the articulation, the frame-work, 
 of the great poem. It is richer in materials, of the most varied character, 
 than any other long poem in existence. To notice one feature of the 
 numberless features of the poem, which might be noticed, Browning's 
 deep and subtle insight into the genius of the Romish Church is shown 
 in it more fully than in any other of his poems, — though special 
 phases of that genius are distinctly exhibited in numerous poems : a 
 remarkable one being Tlie Bishop orders his Tomb at St. Praxed's 
 Church. It is questionable whether any work of any kind has ever 
 exhibited that genius more fuUy and distinctly than The Ring and the 
 Book exhibits it. The reader breathes throughout the ecclesiastical 
 atmosphere of the Eternal City. 
 
 To return from this digression, the several monologues of which the 
 poem consists, with the exception of those of the Canon Caponsacchi, 
 
62 PROF. CORSON ON THE IDEA OF PERSONALITY IN BROWNING, 
 
 Pompilia, and the Pope, are eacli curious and subtle and varied ex- 
 ponents of the workings, without the guidance of instinct at the heart 
 (Sordello, p. 179), of the prepossessed, prejudiced intellect, and of the 
 sources of its swerving into error. What is said of the " feel after the 
 vanished truth" in the monologue entitled Half Rome — the speaker 
 being a jealous husband — will serve to characterize, in a general way, " the 
 feel after truth " exhibited in the other monologues : " honest enough, 
 as the way is : all the same, harbouring in the centre of its sense a hidden 
 germ of failure, shy but sure, should neutralize that honesty and leave 
 that feel for truth at fault, as the way is too. Some prepossession such 
 as starts amiss, by but a hair's-breadth at the shoulder-blade, the arm o' 
 the feeler, dip he ne'er so brave ; and so leads waveringly, lets fall wide 
 o' the mark his finger meant to find, and fix truth at the bottom, that 
 deceptive speck." 
 
 The poet could hardly have employed a more effective metaphor in 
 which to embody the idea of mental swerving. The several monologues 
 all going over the same ground, are artistically justified in their 
 exhibiting, each of them, a quite distinct form of this swerving. For 
 the ultimate purpose of the poet, it needed to be strongly emphasized. 
 The student of the poem is amazed, long before he gets over all these 
 monologues, at the Protean capabilities of the poet's own intellect. It 
 takes all conceivable attitudes toward the case, and each seems to be a 
 perfectly easy one. 
 
 These monologues all lead up to the great moral of the poem, which 
 is explicitly set forth At the end, namely, " that our human speech is 
 naught, our human testimony false, our fame and human estimation, 
 words and wind. Why take the artistic way to prove so much % Because, 
 it is the glory and good of Art, that Art remains the one way possible of 
 speaking truth, to mouths like mine, at least. How look a brother in 
 the face and say. Thy right is wrong, eyes hast thou yet art blind, thine 
 ears are stuped and stopped, despite their length : and, oh, the fooHsh- 
 ness thou countest faith ! Say this as silvery as tongue can troll — the 
 anger of the man may be endured, the shrug, the disappointed eyes of 
 him are not so bad to bear — but here's the plague, that all this trouble 
 comes of telling truth, which truth, by when it reaches him, looks false, 
 seems to be just the thing it would supplant, nor recognizable by whom 
 it left : while falsehood would have done the work of truth. But Art, 
 — wherein man nowise speaks to men, only to mankind, — Art may tell 
 a truth obliquely, do the €ilng shall breed the thought," that is, bring 
 what is implicit within the soul, into the right attitude to become exi)licit 
 — bring about a silent adjustment through sympathy induced by the 
 concrete ; in other Avords, prepare the way for the perception of the 
 
PROF, CORSON ON THE IDEA OF PERSONALITY IN BROWNIXa. 63 
 
 truth — " do the thing shall breed the thought, nor wrong the thought 
 missing the mediate word ; " meaning, that Art, so to speak, is the word 
 made flesh, — is the truth, and, as Art, has nothing directly to do with the 
 explicit. " So may you paint your picture, twice show truth, beyond 
 mere imagery on the wall, — so, note by note, bring music from your 
 mind, deeper than ever the Andante dived, — so write a book shall mean 
 beyond the facts, suffice the eye and save the soul beside." 
 
 And what is the inference the poet would have us draw from this 
 passage ] It is, that the life and efficacy of Ai't depends on the person- 
 ality of the artist, which " has informed, transpierced, thridded and so 
 thrown fast the facts else free, as right through ring and ring runs the 
 djereed and binds the loose, one bar without a break." ^ And it is 
 really this fusion of the artist's soul, which kindles, quickens, informs 
 those who contemplate, respond to, reproduce sympathetically within 
 themselves the greater spirit which attracts and absorbs their own. The 
 -work of Art is apocalyptic of the artist's own personality. It cannot be 
 impersonal. As is the temper of his spirit, so is, must be, the temper 
 of his Art product.^ Tittis Andronicus could not have been written by 
 Shakspere. Even if he had written it as a burlesque of such a play 
 as Marlow's Jeio of Malta, he could not have avoided some revelation of 
 that sense of moral proportion which is omnipresent in his Plays. But 
 there's no Shakspere in Titus Andronicus. Are we not certain of 
 what manner of man Shakspere was from his "Works (notwithstanding 
 that critics are ever asserting their impersonality) — far more certain 
 than if his biography had been written by one who knew him all his 
 life, and sustained to him the most intimate relations? "We know 
 Shakspere, or, he can be known, if the requisite conditions are met, 
 better, perhaps, than any other great author that ever lived — know, ic 
 the deepest sense of the word, in a sense other than that in which we 
 know Dr. Johnson, through Boswell's Biography. The moral propor- 
 tion which is so signal a characteristic of his Plays could not have been 
 imparted to them by the conscious intellect. It was shed from his 
 spiritual constitution. 
 
 By "speaking truth" in Art's way. Browning means, inducing a 
 right attitude toward, a full and free sympathy with, the True, which is 
 a far more important and effective way of speaking truth than deliver- 
 ing truth in re. A work of Art, worthy of the name, need not be true to 
 fact, but must be true in its spiritual attitude, and being thus true, it 
 will tend to induce a corresponding attitude in those who do fealty to 
 
 ' The Ring and the Book. 
 
 '"' ' And long it was not after, when I was confirmed in this opinion, that he 
 who would not be frustrate of his hope to write well hereafter in laudable things, 
 ought himself to be a true poem." — Milton's Apology for Smectyinnmis. 
 
64 PROF. CORSON ON THE IDEA. OF PERSONALITY IN BROWNING. 
 
 it It will have the iafluence, though in an inferior degree, it may be, 
 of a magnetic personality. Personality is the ultimate source of spiritual 
 quickeniag and adjustment. Literature and all forms of Art are but the 
 intermediate agencies of personalities. The artist cannot be separated 
 from his art. As is the artist so must be his art. The aura, so to- 
 speak, of a great work of Art, must come from the artist's own person- 
 ahty. The spiritual worth of Shakspere's Winter's Tale is not at all 
 impaired by the fact that Bohemia is made a maritime country, that 
 Whitsun pastorals and Christian burial, and numerous other features 
 of Shakspere's own age, are introduced into pagan times, that Queen 
 Hermione speaks of herself as a daughter of the Emperor of Russia, tha^ 
 her statue is represented as executed by Julio Eomano, an Italian painter 
 of the 16th century, that a puritan sings psalms to hornpipes, and, to 
 crown aU, that messengers are sent to consult the oracle of Apollo, at 
 Delphi, which is represented as an island ! All this jumble, this galli- 
 maufry, I say, does not impair the spiritual Avorth of the play. As 
 an Art-product, it invites a rectified attitude toward the True and 
 the Sweet. 
 
 If we look at the letter of the trial scene in Tlie Mercliant of Venice, 
 it borders on the absurd; but if we look at its spirit, we see the 
 Shaksperian attitude of soul wliich makes for righteousness, for the 
 righteousness Avhich is inherent in the moral constitution of the universe. 
 
 The inmost, secretest life of Shakspere's Plays came from the 
 personality, the inmost, secretest life, of the man Shakspere. We 
 might, with the most alert sagacity, note and tabulate and aggregate 
 his myriad phenomenal merits as a dramatic writer, but we might still 
 be very far from that somethiag back of them all, or rather that 
 immanent something, that mystery of personality, that microcosmos, 
 that "inmost centre, where truth abides in fuUness," as Browning 
 makes Paracelsus characterize it, "constituting man's self, is what Is," 
 as he makes the dying John characterize it, in A Death in the Desert, 
 that " innermost of the inmost, most interior of the interne," as Mrs. 
 Browning characterizes it, " the hidden Soul," as Dallas characterizes it, 
 which is projected into, and constitutes the soul of, the Plays, and which 
 is reached through an unconscious and mystic sympathy on the part 
 of him who habitually communes with and does fealty to them. That 
 personality, that living force, cooperated spontaneously and uncon- 
 sciously with the conscious powers, in the creative process ; and when 
 we enter into a sympathetic communion with the concrete result of 
 that creative process, our own mysterious personahties, being essentially 
 identical with, though less quickened than, Shakspere's, respond, 
 though it may be but feebly, to his. This response is the highest result 
 
PROF. CORSON ON THE IDEA OF PERSONALITY IN BROWNING. 65 
 
 of the study of Shakspere's works. The dramas are really means to 
 this end. 
 
 It is a significant fact that Shaksperian critics and editors, for 
 nearly two centuries, have been a genus irritabile, to which genus 
 Shakspere himself certainly did not belong. The explanation may 
 partly be, that they have been too much occupied with the letter, 
 and have fretted their nerves in angry dispute about readings and 
 interpretations ; as theologians have done in their study of the sacred 
 records, instead of endeavouring to reach, through the letter, the person- 
 ality of which the letter is but a manifestation more or less imperfect. 
 To Tcnoio a personality is, of course, a spiritual knowledge — the result 
 of sympathy, that is, spiritual responsiveness. Intellectually it is but 
 little more important to know one rather than another personality. The 
 highest worth of all great works of genius is due to the fact that they 
 are apocalyptic of great personalities. 
 
 Art says, as the Divine Person said, whose personality and the 
 personalities fashioned after it, have transformed and moulded the 
 ages, " Follow me ! " Deep was the meaning wrapt up in this com- 
 mand : it was, Do as I do, live as I live, not from an intellectual 
 perception of the principles involved in my life, but through a full 
 sympathy, through the awakening, vitalizing, actuating power of the 
 incarnate Word. 
 
 Art also says, as did the voice from the wilderness, inadequately 
 translated, " Rejoent ye, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand." 
 (M£ravo£tT£ f/yytce yap »/ BamXtta rwy ovpayQy.) Eather, be trans- 
 formed, or, as De Quincey puts it, "Wheel into a new centre your 
 spiritual system; geocentric has that system been up to this hour — 
 that is, having earth and the earthly for its starting-point ; henceforward 
 make it heliocentric (that is, with the sun, or the heavenly, for its 
 principle of motion)." 
 
 The poetry of Browning everywhere says this, and says it more 
 emphatically than that of any other poet in our literature. It says 
 everywhere, that not through knowledge, not through a sharpened 
 intellect, but through repentance, in the deeper sense to which I have 
 just alluded, through conversion, through wheeling into a new centre 
 its spiritual system, the soul attains to saving truth. Salvation with him 
 means that revelation of the soul to itself, that awakening, quickening, 
 actuating, attitude-adjusting, of the soul, which sets it gravitating toward 
 the Divine. 
 
 Browning's idea of Conversion is, perhaps, most distinctly expressed 
 in a passage in the Monologue of the Canon Caponsacchi, in TJie Ring 
 and the Booh, wherein he sets forth the circumstances under which his 
 
66 PRO* CORSON ON THE IDEA OF PERSONALITY IN BROWNING. 
 
 soul was wheeled into a new centre, after a life of dalliance and elegant 
 folly, and made aware of "the marvellous dower of the life it was gifted 
 and filled with." He has heen telling the judges, before whom he has 
 been summoned, the story of the letters forged by Guido to entrap him 
 and PompHia, and of his having seen "right through the thing that 
 tried to pass for truth and solid, not an empty lie." The conclusion 
 and the resolve he comes to, are expressed in the soliloquy which he 
 repeats to the judges, as having uttered at the time : " So, he not only 
 forged the words for her but words for me, made letters he called miue : 
 what I sent, he retained, gave these in place, all by the mistress 
 messenger ! As I recognized her, at potency of truth, so she, by the 
 crystaDine soul, knew me, never mistook the signs. Enough of this — 
 let the wraith go to nothingness again, here is the orb, have only thought 
 for her ! " What foUows admits us to the very heart of Browning's 
 poetry — admits us to the great Idea which is almost, in these days, 
 strange to say, peculiarly his — which no other poet, certainly, of this 
 intellectual, analytic, scientific age, with its " patent, truth-extracting 
 processes," has brought out with the same degree of distinctness — the 
 great Idea which may be variously characterized as that of soul-kindling, 
 soul- quickening, adjustment of soul-attitude, regeneration, conversion, 
 through personality — a kiudlmg, quickening, adjustment, regeneration, 
 conversion, in which thought is not even a coefficient. As expressed in 
 Sordello, " Divest mind of e'en thought, and, lo, God's unexpressed will 
 dawns above us!" (p. 169). " Thought 1" the Canon goes on to say, 
 '* Thought ? nay, Sirs, what shall follow was not thought : I have 
 thought sometimes, and thought long and hard. I have stood before, 
 gone round a serious thing, tasked my whole mind to touch and clasp it 
 close, . . . God and man, and what duty I owe both, — I dare to say I 
 have confronted these in thought : but no such faculty helped here. I 
 put forth no thought, — powerless, all that night I paced the city : it 
 was the first Spring. By the invasion I lay jjossive to, in rushed new 
 things, the old were rapt away ; alike abolished — the imprisonment of 
 the outside air, the inside weight o' the world that pulled me down. 
 Death meant, to spurn the ground, soar to the sky, — die well and you 
 do that. The very immolation made the bliss ; death was the heart of 
 life, and all the harm my foUy had crouched to avoid, now proved a veil 
 hiding all gain my wisdom strove to grasp. . . . Into another state, 
 under new rule I knew myself was passing swift and sure ; whereof the 
 initiatory pang approached, felicitous annoy, as bitter-sweet as when the 
 virgin band, the victors chaste, feel at the end the earthy garments drop, 
 and rise with something of a rosy shame into immortal nakedness : so I 
 lay, and let come the proper throe would thrill into the ecstasy and out- 
 
PROF. CORSON ON THE IDEA OF PERSONALITY IN BROWNING. 67 
 
 throb pain. I' the gray of the dawn it was I found myself facing the 
 pillared front o' the Pieve — mine, my church : it seemed to say for the 
 first time, ' But am not I the Bride, the mystic love o' the Lamb, who 
 took thy plighted troth, my priest, to fold thy warm heart on my heart 
 of stone and freeze thee nor unfasten any more? This is a fleshly 
 woman, — let the free bestow their life blood, thou art pulseless 
 now ! ' . . . N"ow, when I found out first that life and death are means 
 to an end, that passion uses both, indisputably mistress of the man 
 whose form of "worship is self-sacrifice — now, from the stone lungs 
 sighed the scrannel voice, ' Leave that live passion, come be dead with 
 me ! ' As if, i' the fabled garden, I had gone on great adventure, 
 plucked in ignorance hedge-fruit, and feasted to satiety, laughing at 
 such high fame for hips and haws, and scorned the achievement : then 
 come all at once o' the prize o' the place, the thing of perfect gold, the 
 apple's self : and, scarce my eye on that, was 'ware as well of the seven- 
 fold dragon's watch. Sirs, I obeyed.^ Obedience was too strange, — 
 this new thing that had been struck into me by the Took of the lady, — 
 to dare disobey the first authoritative word. 'Twas God's. I had been 
 lifted to the level of her, could take such sounds into my sense. I said, 
 ' We two are cognizant o' the Master now ; it is she bids me bow the 
 head : how true, I am a priest ! I see the function here ; I thought the 
 other way self-sacrifice : this is the true, seals up the perfect sum. I 
 pay it, sit down, silently obey. ' " 
 
 Numerous and varied expressions of the idea of conversion set forth 
 in this passage, occur in Browning's poetry, evidencing his deep sense 
 of this great and indispensable condition of soul-life, of being born anew 
 (or from above, as it should be rendered in the Gospel, avwdev, that is, 
 through the agency of a higher personality), in order to see the kingdom 
 of God — evidencing his conviction that "the kingdom of God cometh 
 not with observation ; for lo ! the kingdom of God is within you." 
 In the poem entitled Cristina, he says, or the speaker is made to say, 
 " Oh we're sunk enough here, God knows ! but not quite so sunk that moments, 
 Sure tho' seldom, are denied us, when the spirit's true endowments 
 Stand out plainly from its false ones, and apprise it if pursuing 
 Or the right way or the wrong way, to its triumph or undoing. 
 There are flashes struck from midnights, there are fire-flames noondays kindle, 
 "Whereby piled-up honours perish, whereby swollen ambitions dwindle, 
 "While just this or that poor impulse, which for once had play unstifled. 
 Seems the sole work of a life-time that away the rest have trifled." 
 And again, when the Pope in The Ring and the Book has come to 
 the decision to sign the death-warrant of Guido and his accomplices, he 
 ^ He means the entreaty of Pompilia, to rescue her from her husband. Count 
 Guido Franceschini, and take her to Eome, to the Comparini, her putative. 
 
 F 2 
 
68 PROF. CORSON ON THE IDEA OF PERSONALITY IN BROWNING. 
 
 Bays : "For the main criminal I have no hope except in such a sudden- 
 ness of fate. I stood at Naples once, a night so dark I could have 
 scarce conjectured there was earth anywhere, sky or sea or world at all : 
 but the night's black was burst through by a blaze — thunder struck blow 
 on blow, earth groaned and bore, through her whole length of mountain 
 visible : there lay the city thick and plain with spires, and, like a ghost 
 disshrouded, white the sea. So may the truth be flashed out by one 
 blow, and Guido see, one instant, and be saved. Else I avert my face, 
 nor follow him into that sad obscure sequestered state where God 
 unmakes but to remake the soul he else made first in vain ; which must 
 not be. Enough, for I may die this very night : and how should I dare 
 die, this man let live 1 Carry this forthwith to the Governor ! " 
 
 Browning is the most essentially Christian of living poets. Religion 
 with him is, indeed, the all-in-aU ; but not any particular form of it as 
 a finality. This is not a world for finalities of any kind, as he constantly 
 teaches us : it is a world of broken arcs, not of perfect rounds. Formu- 
 lations of some kind he would, no doubt, admit there must be, as in 
 everything else ; but with him all formulations and tabulations of 
 beliefs, especially such as " make square to a finite eye the circle of 
 infinity," ^ are, at the best, only provisional, and, at the worst, lead to 
 spiritual standstill, spiritual torpor, " a ghastly smooth life, dead at 
 heart." ^ The essential nature of Christianity is contrary to special 
 prescription, do this or do that, believe tliis or believe that. Christ 
 gave no recipes. Christianity is with Browning, and this he sets forth 
 again and again, a life, quickened and motived and nourished by the 
 Personality of Christ. And all that he says of this Personality can 
 be accepted by every Christian, whatever theological view he may 
 entertain of Christ. Christ's teachings he regards but as incidents of that 
 Personality, and the records we have of his sayings and doings, but a 
 fragment, a somewhat distorted one, it may be, out of which we must, 
 by a mystic and plastic sympathy, aided by the Christ spirit which is 
 immanent in the Christian world, mould the Personality, and do fealty 
 to it. The Christian must endeavour to be able to say, with the dying 
 John, in Browning's Death in the Desert, " To me that story, — ay, that 
 Life and Death of which I wrote ' it was ' — to me, it is." 
 
 If there were any elements in Christ's nature not potentially in our 
 own, those elements would not be of any service to us. Our own 
 natures can be quickened only by what is identical with them. 
 
 The poem entitled Christmas Eve contains the fullest and most explicit 
 expression, in Browning, of his idea of the personality of Christ as 
 being the all-in-all of Christianity. 
 
 ' Christmas JSce. * Easter Day, 17th v. from end. 
 
PROF. COESON ON THE IDEA OF PERSONALITY IN BROWNINO. 69 
 
 " the truth in God's breast 
 Lies trace for trace upon ours impressed : 
 Though He is so bright and we so dim, 
 We are made in His image to witness Him : 
 And were no eye in us to tell, 
 Instructed by no inner sense, 
 The light of Heaven from the dark of Hell, 
 That light would want its evidence, — 
 Though Justice, Good, and Ti-uth, were still 
 Divine, if, by some demon's will. 
 Hatred and wrong had been proclaimed 
 Law through the worlds, and Eight misnamed, 
 No mere exposition of morality 
 Made or in part or in totality, 
 Should win you to give it worship, therefore : 
 And if no better proof you will care for, 
 — Whom do you count the worst man upon earth ? 
 Be sure, he knows, in his conscience, more 
 Of what Right is, than arrives at birth 
 In the best man's acts that we bow before : 
 And thence I conclude that the real God-function 
 Is to furnish a motive and injunction 
 For practising what we know already. 
 And such an injunction and such a motive 
 As the God in Christ, do you waive, and ' heady. 
 High-minded,' hang your tablet votive 
 Outside the fane on a finger-post ? 
 Morality to the uttermost. 
 Supreme in Christ as we all confess, 
 Why need we prove would avail no jot 
 To make Him God, if God he were not ? 
 Where is the point where Himself lays stress ? 
 Does the precept run ' Believe in Good, 
 In Justice, Truth, now undei'stood 
 For the first time ' 1 — or ' Believe in Me, 
 Who lived and died, yet essentially 
 Am Lord of Life ' ? ' Whoever can take 
 The same to his heart and for mere love's sake 
 Conceive of the love, — that man obtains 
 A new truth ; no conviction gains 
 Of an old one only, made intense 
 By a fresh appeal to his faded sense." 
 
 If all Christendom could take this remarkable poem of Christmas 
 Eve to its heart, its tolerance, its Catholic spirit, and, more than all, the 
 fealty it exhibits to the Personality who essentially is Lord of Life, 
 what a revolution it would undergo ! and what a mass of dogmatic and 
 polemic theology would become utterly obsolete ! The most remarkable 
 thing, perhaps, about the vast body of Christian theology which has 
 ' " Subsists no law of life outside of life." 
 ***** 
 " The Christ himself had been no Lawgiver, 
 Unless he had given the V/e, too, with the law." 
 
 Mrs. Browning's Aurora Leigh. 
 
70 PROF, CORSON ON THE IDEA OF PERSONALITY IN BROWNING. 
 
 * een developed during the eighteen centuries which have elapsed since 
 Christ was in the flesh, is, that it is occupied so largely, it might almost 
 be said, exclusively, with what Christ and his disciples taught, and 
 with fierce discussions about the manifold meanings which have been 
 ingeniously extorted from the imperfect record of what he taught. 
 British museum libraries of polemics have been written in defence of 
 what Christ himself would have been indifferent to, and written with 
 an animosity towards opponents which has been crystallized in a phrase 
 now applied in a general way to any intense hate — Odium Theologicum. 
 If the significance of Christ's mission, or a large part of it, is to be 
 estimated by his teachings, from those teachings important deductions 
 must be made, as many of them had been delivered long before his 
 time. As a mere teacher or moralist, he could not have maintained any 
 important place in history. 
 
 Browning has something to say on this point, in this same poem 
 of Christmas Eve — 
 
 " Truth's atmosphere may grow mephitic 
 
 When Papist struggles with Dissenter, 
 
 Impregnating its pristine clarity, 
 
 — One, by his daily fare's vulgarity, 
 
 Its gust of broken meat and garlic ; 
 
 — One, by his soul's too-much presuming 
 
 To turn the frankincense's fuming 
 
 And vapors of the candle starlike 
 
 Into the cloud her wings she buoys on. 
 
 Each that thus sets the pure air seething, 
 
 May poison it for healthy breathing — 
 
 But the Critic leaves no air to poison ; 
 
 Pumps out by a ruthless ingenuity 
 
 Atom by atom, and leaves j'ou — vacuity. 
 
 Thus much of Christ, does he reject? 
 
 And what retain 1 His intellect ? 
 
 What is it I must reverence duly ? 
 
 Poor intellect for worship, truly. 
 
 Which tells me simply what was told 
 
 (If mere morality, bereft 
 
 Of the God in Christ, be all that's left) 
 
 Elsewhere by voices manifold ; 
 
 With this advantage, that the stater 
 
 Made nowise the important stumble 
 
 Of adding, he, the sage and humble. 
 
 Was also one with the Creator." 
 
 Browning's poetry is instinct with the essence of Christirjiity — the 
 life of Christ. There is no other poetry, there is no writing of any 
 form, in this age, which so emphasizes the fact (and it's the most 
 consoling of all facts connected with the Christian religion), that the 
 Personality, Jesus Christ, is the impregnable fortress of Christianity. 
 Whatever assaults and inroads may be made upon the original records 
 
PROF. CORSON ON THE IDEA OP PERSONALITY IN BROWNING. 71 
 
 by Gottingen professors, upon the august fabric of the Church, with its 
 creeds and dogmas, and formularies, and paraphernalia, this fortress 
 will stand forever, and mankind will forever seek and find refuge in it. 
 
 The poem entitled Gleon bears the intimation (there's nothing directly 
 expressed thereupon), that Christianity is something distinct from, and 
 beyond, whatever the highest civilization of the world, the civilization 
 of Greece, attained to before Christ. Through him the world obtained 
 " a new truth — no conviction gained of an old one merely, made intense 
 by a fresh appeal to the faded sense." 
 
 Cleon, the poet, writes to Protos in his Tyranny (that is, in the 
 Greek sense. Sovereignty). Cleon must be understood as representing 
 the ripe, composite result, as an individual, of what constituted the 
 glory of Greece — her poetry, sculpture, architecture, painting, and music, 
 and also her philosophy. He acknowledges the gifts which the King 
 has lavished upon him. By these gifts we are to understand the 
 munificent national patronage accorded to the arts. " The master of thy 
 galley still unlades gift after gift ; they block my court at last and 
 pile themselves along its portico royal with sunset, like a thought 
 of thee." 
 
 By the slave women that are among the gifts sent to Cleon, seems 
 to be indicated the degradation of the spiritual by its subjection to 
 earthly ideals, as were the ideals of Greek art. This is more par- 
 ticularly indicated by the one white she-slave, the lyric woman, whom 
 further on in his letter, Cleon promises the King he will make narrate 
 (in lyric song we must suppose) his fortunes, speak his great words, 
 and describe his royal face. 
 
 He continues, that in such an act of love, — the bestowal of princely 
 gifts upon him whose song gives life its joy, — men shall remark the 
 King's recognition of the use of life — that his spirit is equal to more 
 than merely to help on life in straight ways, broad enough for vulgar 
 souls, by ruling and the rest. He ascribes to the King, in the building 
 of his tower (and by this must be understood the building up of his 
 own selfhood), a higher motive than work for mere work's sake, — that 
 higher motive being, the luring hope of some eventual rest atop of it 
 (the tower), whence, all the tumult of the building hushed, the first of 
 men may look out to the east.i 
 
 ' Tennyson uses a similar figure in The Two Voices. The speaker, who is 
 meditating whether "to be or not to be," says: 
 
 " Were this not well, to bide mine hour, 
 Though watching from a ruined tower 
 How grows the day of human power." 
 The ruined tower is his OAvn dilapidated self -hood, whence he takes his outlook 
 ypoa the world. 
 
72 PROF. CORSON ON THE IDEA OF PERSONALITY IN BROWNINQ, 
 
 By the eventual rest atop of the tower, is indicated the aim of the 
 Greek civilization, to reach a calm within the finite, while the soul is 
 constituted and destined to gravitate forever towards the infinite — to 
 " force our straitened sphere . . . display completely here the mastery 
 another life should learn " (Sordello, p. 23). The eventual rest in this 
 world is not the Christian ideal. Earth-life, whatever its reach, and 
 whatever its grasp, is to the Christian a broken arc, not a perfect round. 
 
 Cleon goes on to recount his accomplishments in the arts, and what 
 he has done in philosophy, in reply to the first requirement of Protos's 
 letter, Protos, as it appears, having heard of, and wonderingly enumer- 
 ated, the great things Cleon has effected ; and he has written to know 
 the truth of the report. Cleon replies, that the epos on the King's 
 hundred plates of gold is his, and his the little chaunt so sure to rise 
 from every fishing-bark when, lights at prow, the seamen haul their 
 nets ; that the image of the sun-god on the light-house men turn from 
 the sun's self to see, is his ; that the Poecile, o'er-storied its whole 
 length with painting, is his, too ; that he knows the true proportions of 
 man and woman, not observed before ; that he has written three books 
 on the soul, proving absurd aU written hitherto, and putting us to 
 ignorance again ; that in music he has combined the moods, inventing 
 one ; that, in brief, all arts are his, and so known and recognized. At 
 this he writes the King to marvel not. We of these latter days, he 
 says, being more composite, appear not so great as our forerunners who, 
 in their simple way, were greater in a certain single direction, than we ; 
 but our composite way is greater. This life of men on earth, this 
 sequence of the soul's achievements here, he finds reason to believe, was 
 intended to be viewed eventually as a great whole, the individual soul 
 being only a factor toward the realization of this great whole — toward 
 spelling out, so to speak, Zeus's idea in the race. Those divine men of 
 old, he goes on to say, reached each at one point, the outside verge that 
 rounds our faculty, and where they reached, who could do more than 
 reach 1 I have not chanted, he says, verse like Homer's, nor swept string 
 like Terpander, nor carved and painted men like Phidias and Ms friend ; 
 I am not great as they are, point by point ; but I have entered into 
 sympathy with these four, running these into one soul, who, separate, 
 ignored each other's arts. The wild flower was the larger — I have 
 dashed rose-blood upon its petals, pricked its cup's honey with wine, and 
 driven its seed to fruit, and show a better flower, if not so large. 
 
 And now he comes to the important questions in the King's letter — 
 whether he, the poet, his soul thus in men's hearts, has not attained the 
 very crown and proper end of life — whether, now life closeth up, he 
 faces death with success in his right hand, — whether he fears death less 
 
PROP. CORSON ON THE IDEA OF PERSONALITY IN BROWNING. 7^ 
 
 than he, the King, does himself, the fortunate of men, who assigns the 
 reason for thinking that he does that he, the poet, leaves much behind, 
 his life stays in the poems men shall sing, the pictures men shall study , 
 ■while the King's life, complete and whole now in its power and joy, 
 dies altogether with his brain and arm, as he leaves not behind, as the 
 poet does, works of art embodying the essence of his life which, through 
 those works, will pass into the lives of men of all succeeding times. 
 Cleon replies that if in the morning of philosophy, the King, with the 
 light now in him, could have looked on aU earth's tenantry, from worm 
 to bird, ere man appeared, and if Zeus had questioned him whether he 
 would improve on it, do more for visible creatures than was done, he 
 would have answered, "Ay, by making each grow conscious in him- 
 self : all's perfect else, life's mechanics can no further go, and all this 
 joy in natural Kfe is put, like fire from off thy fingers into each, so 
 exquisitely perfect is the same. But 'tis pure fire — and they mere 
 matter are ; it has them, not they it : and so I choose, for man, that a 
 third thing shall stand apart from both, a quality arise within the 
 soul, which, intro-active, made to supervise and feel the force it has, 
 may view itself and so be happy. But it is this quality, Cleon con- 
 tinues, which makes man a failure. This sense of sense, this spirit 
 consciousness, grew the only life worth calling life, the pleasure-house, 
 watch-tower, and treasure-fortress of the soul, which whole surrounding 
 flats of natural life seemed only fit to yield subsistence to ; a tower that 
 crowns a country. But alas ! the soul now climbs it just to perish 
 there, for thence we have discovered that there's a world of capability 
 for joy, spread round about us, meant for us, inviting us ; and still the 
 soul craves all, and still the flesh replies, "Take no jot more than ere 
 you climbed the tower to look abroad ! Nay, so much less, as that 
 fatigue has brought deduction to it." After expatiating on this sad 
 state of man, he arrives at the same conclusion as the King in his 
 letter : " I agree in sum, King, with thy profound discouragement, 
 who seest the wider but to sigh the more. Most progress is most 
 failure ! thou sayest well." 
 
 And now he takes up the last point of the King's letter, that 
 he, the King, holds joy not impossible to one with artist-gifts, who 
 leaves behind living works. Looking over the sea, as he writes, 
 he says, "Yon rower with the moulded muscles there, lowering 
 the sail, is nearer it than I." He presents with clearness, and with 
 rigid logic, the dilemma of the growing soul ; shows the vanity of 
 living in works left behind, and in the memory of posterity, while he, 
 the feeling, thinking, acting man, shall sleep in his urn. The horror 
 of the thought makes him dare imagine at times some future state 
 
74 
 
 PROF. CORSON ON THE IDEA OF PERSONALITr IN BROWNING. 
 
 unlimited in capability for joy, as this is in desire for joy. But no ! 
 Zeus has not yet revealed such a state ; and alas ! he must have done so 
 were it possible ! 
 
 He concludes, " Live long and happy, and in that thought die, glad 
 for what was ! Farewell." And then, as a matter of minor importance, 
 he informs the King, in a postscript, that he cannot tell his messenger 
 aright where to deliver what he bears to one called Paulus. Protos, it 
 must be understood, having heard of the fame of Paul, and being per- 
 plexed in the extreme, has written the great apostle to know of his 
 doctrine. But Cleon writes that it is vain to suppose that a mere 
 barbarian Jew, one circumcised, hath access to a secret which is shut 
 from them, and that the King wrongs their philosophy in stooping to 
 inquire of such an one. " Oh, he finds adherents, who does not. Certain 
 slaves who touched on this same isle, preached him and Christ, and, as 
 he gathered from a bystander, their doctrines could be held by no 
 sane man." 
 
 There is a quiet beauty about this poem which must insinuate itself 
 into the feelings of every reader. In tone it resembles the Ejoistle of 
 KarsMsh, the Arab physician. The verse of both poems is very beautiful. 
 Xo one can read these two poems, and Bishop Blougram^s Apology, and 
 The Bishop orders his Tomh at St. Praxed's Church, and not admit 
 that Browning is a master of blank verse in its most difficult form — a 
 form far more difficult than that of the epic blank verse of Milton, or 
 the Idyllic blank verse of Tennyson, argumentative and freighted with 
 thought, and, at the same time, almost chatty, as it is, and bearing in 
 its course exquisitely poetical conceptions. The same may be said of 
 much of the verse of The Ring and the Book, especially that of the 
 monologues of the Canon Caponsacchi, Pompilia, the Pope, and Count 
 Guido Pranceschini. But this by the way. 
 
 Cleon belongs to a grand group of poems, in which Browning shows 
 himself to be, as I've said, the most essentially Christian of living poets 
 — the poet who, more emphatically than any of his contemporaries have 
 done, has enforced the importance, the indispensableness of a new birth, 
 the being born from above (avujdey) as the condition not only of soul 
 vitality and progress, but also of intellectual rectitude. In this group of 
 poems are embodied the profoundest principles of education — principles 
 which it behoves the present generation of educators to look well to. 
 The acquisition of knowledge is a good thing, the sharpening of the 
 intellect is a good thing, the cultivation of philosophy is a good thing ; 
 but there's something of infinitely more importance than all these — it 
 is, the rectification, the adjustment, through that mysterious operation 
 •we call sympathy, of the unconscious personality, the hidden soul, which 
 
PROF. CORSON ON THE IDEA OP PBRSONALITT IN BROWNING. 75 
 
 co-operates with the active powers, with the conscious intellect, and, 
 as this unconscious personality is rectified or unrectified, determines 
 the active powers, the conscious intellect, for righteousness or un- 
 righteousness. 
 
 The attentive reader of Browning's poetry must soon discover how 
 remarkably homogeneous it is in spirit. There are many authors, and 
 great authors too, the reading of whose collected works gives the im- 
 pression of their having " tried their hand " at many things. No such 
 impression is derivable from the voluminous poetry of Browning. Wide as 
 is its range, one great and homogeneous spirit pervades and animates it 
 all, from the earliest to the latest. No other living poet gives so decided 
 an assurance of having a burden to deliver. An appropriate general 
 title to his works would be, " The Burden of Eobert Browning to the 
 19th century." His earliest poems are the least articulate, but there can 
 be no question about their attitude. We know in what direction the 
 poet has set his face — what his philosophy of life is, what soul-life 
 means with him, what regeneration means, what edification means in its 
 deepest sense of building up within us the spiritual temple. And if he 
 had left this world after writing no more than those poems of his youth, 
 Pauline and Paracelsus, a very fair ex-pede-Herculem estimate might 
 have been made of the possibilities which he has since so grandly 
 realized. 
 
76 
 
 THE RELIGIOUS TEACHING OF BROWNING. 
 
 BY DOROTHEA BEALE. 
 
 (Bead at the 10th Meeting of the Browning Society, on Friday, October 27, 1882.) 
 
 There are those who judge others, as the world does, by their faults 
 and failures, who seem to think that in these the true character comes 
 out ; and there are those who, knowing that they have within themselves 
 a high ideal, of which they fail, believe that the true character comes 
 out in the best that we know of any one. 
 
 "What I aspired to be, 
 And was not, comforts me." 
 
 So they judge a thinker by his noblest works . Wordsworth by his 
 Ode to Duty rather than by The Idiot Boy ; Milton by his Areopagitica 
 rather than his Divorce tracts ; Shakspere by his Hamlet. Thus we 
 love Browning for his great thoughts, for his high enthusiasm, for his 
 faith in God, and man and woman. "We come to him for his philosophy, 
 and we care not to dwell upon the shortcomings, of which he is doubtless 
 more conscious than we are, upon the superficial faults, which every one 
 can see ; rather would we bring to light the hidden treasures. We thank 
 him for the comfort and strength he has given us. We know that he 
 has enriched our sympathies, cheered us under failure and disappoint- 
 ment, and helped us to understand the meaning of Kfe. But I think 
 what draws most of us to him is this : we are struggling with the waves 
 of doubt — storm-tost and ready to sink — and as we look at him, we 
 see him with a smile on his face, calmly floating, his head above the 
 waves, his body supported therein. He quietly tells us our safety is to 
 do the same. He^ teaches that to bury ourselves in the things of earth 
 is death ; to try to rise out of the conditions in which God has placed 
 us may end in a Soul's Tragedy ; to use the visible to sustain and teach, 
 this is our wisdom during our life here, ere the disembodied Psyche can 
 float up into more ethereal regions, and revel in the sunlight ; and so he 
 conciliates philosophy and religion. 
 
 He is ever cheerful and consoling, so that we turn to him in our 
 ' See Fifine. 
 
MISS BEALE ON THE EELIGIOUS TEACHING OF BROWNING. 77 
 
 trouble. Are -we oppressed with pessimism, discontented with all that 
 is 1 He tells us this is the witness to our own nobility, and to a future 
 immortality. 
 
 " Progress is man's distinctive mark alone, 
 Not God's, and not the beasts' : God is, they are, 
 Man partly is, and wholly hopes to be." (Death in tlie Desert.') 
 
 " 'Tis not what Man Does which exalts him, but what man Would do." (Saul.) 
 
 " for mankind springs 
 Salvation by each hindrance interposed ; 
 They climb." (Sordello.) 
 
 " They are perfect — how else ? they shall never change ; 
 We are faulty — why not ? we have time in store." (Pictures in Florence.) 
 
 " He said, ' What's time ? Leave Now for dogs and apes 1 
 Man has Forever.' " ( Grammarian'' s Funeral.) 
 
 Do we cry out that we are tired of battling with the waves, and 
 does it seem a weary quest ever to be following the light, never reaching 
 it 1 H« teUs us that gradual development is the condition of our spiritual 
 health, i. e. of life. 
 
 " this gift of truth 
 
 Once grasped, were this our soul's gain safe, and sure 
 To prosper as the body's gain is wont, — 
 Why man's probation would conclude." 
 
 Do we complain of error 1 He tells us this is partial truth, that the 
 imperfect must precede the perfect, that disaj)pointment and darkness 
 is an earnest of real success. 
 
 " God's gift was that man should conceive of truth 
 And yearn to gain it, catching at mistake." (Death in the Desert.) 
 
 " Imperfection means perfection hid, 
 Reserved in part, to grace the after time." (Clean.) 
 
 " And what is our failure here but a triumph's evidence 
 For the fulness of the days 1 Have we withered or agonized 1 
 Why else was the pause prolonged, but that singing might issue thence ? 
 Why rushed the discords in, but that harmony should be prized 1 " 
 
 (AM Vogler.) 
 " If I stoop 
 Into a dark tremendous sea of cloud. 
 It is but for a time ; I press God's lamp 
 Close to my breast ; its splendour soon or late 
 Will pierce the gloom." (Paracelsus.) 
 
 " Love, wrong, and pain, what see I else around 1 
 Yea, and the resurrection and uprise 
 To the right hand of the throne. 
 
 ****** 
 If ye demur, this judgment on your head — 
 Never to reach the ultimate, angels' law ; 
 There, where law, life, joy, impulse are one thing." 
 
 (Death in the Desert.) 
 
78 MISS BEALE ON THE RELIGIOUS TEACHING OF BROWNING. 
 
 Do we doubt the goodness of God when we see some hideous evil ? 
 He tells us that only through the contest with evil can man pass to 
 power and glory. 
 
 " Why comes temptation, but for man to meet 
 And master, and make crouch beneath his foot ; 
 And so be pedestalled in triumph ? Pray, 
 ' Lead us into no such temptations, Lord ' ? 
 Yea, but, O thou, whose servants are the bold. 
 Lead such temptations by the head and hair, 
 Reluctant dragons, up to who dares fight, 
 That so he may do battle, and have praise." 
 
 {riie Ring and the Booh) 
 
 Do we find in old age the sights and sounds by which the soul 
 learned truth fading in the darkness, the active powers failing 1 This is 
 an earnest not of death, but of life. God is taking away the earthly 
 sight that the "celestial light" may so much the more shine inward. 
 He is withdrawing us into some quiet retreat, that we may "ponder 
 on the entire past " ; the evening shades are gathering that we may sleep 
 and wake refreshed. 
 
 " Lie bare, to the universal prick of*light 1 
 
 Is it for nothing we grow old and weak, 
 
 "We whom God loves 1 " {Death in the Desert.) 
 " Ponder on the entire past 
 
 Laid together thus at last, 
 
 When the twilight helps to fuse 
 
 The first fresh with the faded hues, 
 
 And the outline of the whole, 
 
 As round eve's shades their framework roll, 
 
 Grandly fronts for once thy soul. 
 
 And then, as 'mid the dark, a gleam 
 
 Of yet another morning breaks, 
 
 And, like the hand which ends a dream, 
 
 Death, with the might of his sunbeam. 
 
 Touches the flesh, and the soul awakes. 
 
 Then ," {Fliglit of the Duchess.) 
 
 "So, still within this life, 
 Though lifted o'er its strife. 
 Let me discern, compare, pronounce at last. 
 
 ♦ *#*♦« 
 
 So, better, age, exempt 
 From strife, should know than tempt 
 Further. Thou waitedst age : wait death nor be afraid." 
 
 [Ralii Ben Ezra.) 
 
 "And stung by straitness of our life made strait 
 On purpose to make sweet the life at large, 
 Freed by the throbbing impulse we call death. 
 We burst there, as the worm into the fly, 
 Who, while a worm still, wants his wings." {Clean.) 
 
 The lovers of Browning's poetry wonder that any one can ask the 
 question, Is he a religious poetl True, he has not written religious epics 
 
MISS BEALE ON THE RELIGIOUS TEACHING OF BROWNING. 7^ 
 
 as Dante and Milton, and there are but few poems which are definitely 
 on religious subjects, but the unseen is ever present to him. He is ever 
 seeking to interpret the seen by the unseen, to justify the ways of God 
 to man. He is ever conscious of the double life, of a Divine presence, 
 
 " The spiritual life around the earthly life : 
 Which runs across some vast distracting orb 
 Of glory on either side that meagre thread." (An Epistle.) 
 
 ' ' God glows above 
 With scarce an intervention presses close 
 And palpitatingly His soul o'er ours ! 
 We feel Him, nor by painful reason know." (Luria.) 
 
 So we are never shut in by the visible universe ; it is to us the veil, 
 the sacrament of the invisible, the infinite, the icaXov KayaQbv. Yet is 
 the Infinite no mere pantheistic presence, but the Father of spirits, 
 manifested first and pre-eminently in the soul of man. His child, who, 
 because he is a son, is heir of all things. Thus does the Christian 
 teaching interpenetrate all his thoughts. Yet to the religious conscious- 
 ness of some Browning does not speak. There are childlike souls who 
 have ever looked up to God in simple loving faith, over whose being 
 the storms of doubt have never swept, who have not known what it 
 is to sit in the midst of a thick darkness, a darkness that may be felt ; 
 an unquestioning faith is theirs, and they have never had to wrestle 
 with the problems of life. To such Browning may appear non-religious, 
 yes, even irreligious, as did Job to his friends, because he cannot 
 receive truth from the outside ; it must be looked at from his deepest 
 consciousness, an external revelation is not enough; it is not put in 
 the forefront, because to him it is the outcome, the complement of that 
 which is known by the intuitions of the soul; for though we may 
 believe a person, we cannot believe in a person because some one tells 
 us he did wonderful works — we must be united by inward sympathies, 
 
 " Whereby truth, deadened of its absolute blaze, 
 Might need love's eye to pierce the o'erstretched doubt." 
 
 {Death in the Desert.) 
 
 We know the Divine through the Spirit bearing witness with our 
 spirit ; in other words, the kingdom of heaven is within. 
 
 Thus Browning seems to me a prophet whom God has given to 
 our storm-tost age, a pilot who has learnt by long experience the hidden 
 rocks and sandbanks on which the vessel of faith may be wrecked, now 
 that the old anchor chains are burst asunder. An infallible Church, an 
 infallible Book, an infallible Pope, all these have failed us — failed us that, 
 rejecting the stones of the desert, we may learn that man doth not live 
 by bread alone, but by the word of God doth man live. I will take a 
 few typical poems familiar to most of us, to establish my position. 
 
80 MISS BEALE ON THE RELIGIOUS TEACHING OF BROWNING. 
 
 His ideal of what a poet is called to be is given in liis pictnre of a 
 Contemporary. 
 
 " I only knew one poet in my life, 
 And this or something like it was his way." 
 
 And then we read of one who walked about in the haunts of men, 
 
 " Scenting the world, looking it full in face, 
 Trj'ing the mortar's temper 'tween the chinks." 
 
 "Watching common sights and common people, and seeing, not the 
 
 outside shows, but the real thing behind, and thus awakening the 
 
 conscience, and exercising a kingship by right Divine. Judging not 
 according to the appearance, but righteous judgment. 
 
 " My father, like the man of sense he was. 
 Would point him out to me a dozen times. 
 ' St, St,' he'd whisper, ' the Corregidor.' " 
 
 " If any beat a horse, you felt he saw ; 
 If any cm-sed a woman, he took note, 
 Yet stared at nobody — you stared at him. 
 And found, less to your pleasure than surprise, 
 He seemed to know you, and expect as much." 
 
 {How it strikes a Contemporary.) 
 His reward was to know he was 
 
 " Doing the king's work all the dim day long," 
 
 whilst the tongue of scandal was busy with his life — a life which the 
 low and sensual cannot believe in. At last dying on 
 " The neat low truckle bed " : 
 
 alone haply, as far as man could see, but waited on by unseen 
 
 And mark, though no audible voice spoke to the poet, though no 
 vision of glory appeared, yet he hieiv, he felt the king's approval 
 
 " But never word or sign that I could hear 
 Notified to this man about the street 
 The king's approval of those letters. 
 
 ***** 
 Was some such understanding 'twixt the two ? " 
 
 " Hereby we know that we know Him, because we love Him and 
 keep His commandments." 
 
 The consciousness of the priesthood of the true poet breathes through 
 the whole of Sordello ; his sin was that he was unfaithful almost unto 
 the end to the spirit within him, that he was content to enjoy, to 
 receive, when he was heir to the kingship over humanity, the crown of 
 which is a crown of thorns. His claim to the throne had to be made 
 good by the power of self-sacrifice, by dying to self, that he might find 
 a larger life in those for whom he lived, and this at last redeems 
 
MISS BEALE ON THE RELIGIOUS TEACHING OF BROWNING. 81 
 
 the erring one. What grander picture can be drawn of a poet than that 
 of the ideal Sordello, 
 
 " the complete Sordello, Man and Bard, 
 
 John's cloud-girt angel, this foot on the land, 
 
 That on the sea, with, open in his hand, 
 
 A bitter-sweetling of a book." 
 
 In the consciousness of an unseen presence then, in the faith that 
 there is a reality behind the shows of earth, a meaning in this wondrous 
 kosmos, and that each lives and dies nobly who faces the sphinx and 
 gives an answer to the riddle of life ; in the faith that though here we 
 know in part, we shall one day truly know, Browning addresses himself 
 to his task. 
 
 And what is it which calls out first in us the sense of poetry 1 Ask 
 the great poets of the world. It is the sight of suffering. The real must 
 be unsatisfying ere we seek for the ideal. The great epics and dramas 
 have all been tragic ; each has his own vision of Prometheus, agonizing 
 humanity. If there is one poem into which Browning has thrown aU his 
 artistic power, I think it is Saul. How grand is the stage on which we see 
 the suffering Titan ! the black tent in the midst of the sand " burnt to 
 powder " ; the blinding glare without, darkness within. There he endures 
 in the desert, through which flow no refreshing streams to quench the 
 thirst of his soul ; he who once had " heard the words of God, had seen 
 the vision of the Almighty," is now blinded by the glory, and he knows 
 not the love which his own heart has cast out. There he hangs, upon 
 his cross. 
 
 " He stood, as erect as the tent-prop, both arms stretched out wide, 
 On the great cross-support in the centre that goes to each side. 
 He relaxed not a muscle, but hung there, as caught in his pangs. 
 And waiting his change, the king-serpent all heavily hangs 
 Far away from his kind, in the pine, till deliverance come 
 With the spring-time ; — so agonized Saul, drear and stark, blind and dumb." 
 
 To him, doubly shut out from the Light of heaven, comes youth and 
 beauty and innocence personified in David. He comes Hke a ministering 
 angel, the dew of heaven in his " gracious gold hair," -with bright lilies 
 telling of life and hope — 
 
 " Just broken to twine round thy harp-strings, as if no wild heat 
 Were now raging to torture the desert." 
 
 Then he sings the simple songs of the shepherd lad, the beauty and 
 peace of nature, the felt harmony and love in all things. 
 
 " God made all the creatures, and gave them our love and our fear. 
 To give sign we and they are His children, one family here." 
 
 iN'ext he passes on to the tale of human joys and sorrows ; but there 
 is no response till he comes to that which gives to man's life a meaning,, 
 the consciousness of a glory beyond. 
 
82 MISS BEALE ON THE RELIGIOUS TEACHING OF BROWNING. 
 
 "Then here in the darkness Saul groaned, 
 And I paused, held my breath in such silence, and listened apart ; 
 And the tent shook, for mighty Saul shuddered, and sparkles 'gan dart 
 From the jewels that woke in his turban at once with a start 
 All its lordly male-sapphires and rubies, courageous at heart ; 
 So the head ; but the body still moved not, stUl hung there erect." 
 
 He tries another theme. He tells of the joyous sense of life and 
 vigour, once felt by the -warrior king ; bids him follow again the story 
 of the past, and thence believe in the love of God. 
 
 " Let one more attest 
 I have lived, seen God's hand thro' a lifetime, and all was for best." 
 
 Then he shows him in the lives of others the ennobling of the soul 
 through suffering. 
 
 " Such result as, from seething grape-bundles, the spirit-strained true." 
 
 From the vantage-ground of the past he would have him contemplate 
 the present sufifering ; through sorrow he had been crowned. 
 
 " Then Saul, who hung propped 
 By the tent's cross-support in the centre, was struck by his name. 
 
 One long shudder thrilled 
 All the tent till the very air tingled, then sank, and was stilled 
 At the king's self, left standing before me, released and aware." 
 
 But this only awakens the king to consciousness, it cannot restore 
 him. Can he live by the thought that his life may enter into the 
 being of humanity, that though he perish he may pour out palm wine 
 for the life of posterity; can he be sustained by the enthusiasm of 
 humanity 1 E'o ! the wretched despise themselves ; only in the con- 
 sciousness of a larger life and love, sustaining, fulfilling them, can they 
 hope to bless others. They must be conscious of a love, not small 
 enough for them to possess, but large enough to possess them ; of an 
 ocean in which they and aU may be baptized, of a boundless love in 
 which we may all live and move ; a spiritual presence, which, brooding 
 over the dead soul, awakens it to a responsive life. And it is upon 
 the revelation of the Divine love first revealed within the soul that 
 our poet rests the salvation of humanity. The love which David feels 
 kindling, glowing, burning in himself towards this sufferer, what is it 
 but the Spirit bearing witness with his spirit to the deeper depths of the 
 Divine love 1 
 
 " Shall the creature surpass the Creator, — the end, what began ? 
 Would I fain, in my impotent yearning, do all for this man. 
 And dare doubt. He alone shall not do it, who yet alone can." 
 
 As man's love yearns to utter itself, though it cannot, so must the 
 Divine love, and God can. Man cannot utter through the feeble body, 
 in the bonds of time, the infinite love which he yet feels within, but the 
 Infinite, the Eternal, God is uttering it in aU creation, in every soul of 
 
MISS BEALE ON THE RELIGIOUS TEACHING OF BROWNING. 83 
 
 man who feels and responds to the music of heaven. This it is which 
 restores life to the dying soul, whilst to the prophet, the Divine incar- 
 nation becomes a fact realized in the inner consciousness ; it is a truth 
 antecedent to and resting upon a deeper foundation than any external 
 evidence, it is a truth in Plato's sense ; it is a Divine, an eternal idea, 
 which must be realized in time, be one day revealed to redeem the world. 
 So he passes on from the inust he to the shall he ; this was the argument 
 of the risen Lord, ehi Tradtlv tov ■xpi.aTov. 
 
 " Then the truth came upon me. No harp more — no song more I outbroke 
 ******* 
 
 I believe it 1 'Tis thou, God, that givest, 'tis I who receive. 
 
 ******* 
 
 Would I suffer for him that I love? So wouldst thou — so wilt thou! 
 
 So shall crown thee the topmost, ineffablest, uttermost crown, 
 
 And thy love fill infinitude wholly, nor leave up nor down 
 
 One spot for the creature to stand in 1 
 
 He who did most shall bear most ; the strongest shall stand the most weak. 
 
 'Tis the weakness in strength that I cry for I my flesh that I seek 
 
 In the Godhead ! I seek and I find it. O Saul, it shall be 
 
 A Face like my face that receives thee : a Man like to me, 
 
 Thou shalt love and be loved by, for ever : a Hand like this hand 
 
 Shall throw open the gates of new life to thee ! See the Christ stand." 
 
 And in the consciousness of this Divine presence, the Divine love 
 comes in like a flood upon his soul, it overflows into creation, all 
 vibrates to the music of heaven, and trembles in the glow of its surpass- 
 ing glory ; the earth is transformed, there seems no longer an inanimate, 
 for the life of God Himself breathes through all. 
 
 " And the stars of night beat with emotion and tingled and shot 
 Out in fire the strong pain of pent knowledge : but I fainted not, 
 For the Hand still impelled me at once and supported, suppressed 
 All the tumult, and quenched it with quiet and holy behest. 
 Till the rapture was shut in itself and the earth sank to rest.'' 
 
 And as we read we feel the poet has given us a higher idea of in- 
 spiration ; no outside voice is heard now ; the revelation is not by the 
 voice of nature through sense and understanding, but through the 
 heart; the love of God possesses the soul, the heart of God is felt 
 beating with the heart of man ; it is a moral revelation. In the depths 
 of man's being is felt the quickening spirit, the true enthusiasm, and 
 he rises to a new life ; there is the revelation to the human conscious- 
 ness of the Divine in man, — the central truth of Christianity. 
 
 But the pessimist may turn to the reverse ; it may be said, if the 
 intuitions of the noble tell of self-sacrifice and love, what about the 
 degraded creeds that men have held ? are not these all the outcome, the 
 utterances of humanity too, though on a lower plane ? Mr. Browning has 
 not shrunk from facing this question. As in the poem of Saul we have 
 
 G 2 
 
84 MISS BEALE ON THE RELIGIOUS TEACHING OF BROWNING. 
 
 intuitions, wliicli enable us to grasp Divine truth, in Caliban we have 
 a teaching from the text, "Thou thoughtest that I was altogether 
 such an one as thyself." He refuses to recognize as man, one without 
 moral consciousness. He does not believe that there is any such mon- 
 ster born of woman, or, if such lives, he has descended from the human 
 to the animal kingdom, by starving or poisoning the spirit. His creed ^ 
 derived from the experience of his own wickedness, needs but to be 
 expressed to be rejected. Caliban is a monster, for he is not a man who 
 has no aspirations, who is content to lie and kick in the mud, who is a 
 slave of impulse. His god, Setebos, is only a monstrous Caliban. 
 
 In these two poems I think Browning has sought to illustrate the 
 deep truth that according to our moral standard are we able to receive 
 Divine light and truth into our being. Let him not, however, be mis- 
 understood. It is not historical propositions about Divine truth with 
 which he is dealing — these, as St. James says, devils may believe — but 
 the faith which lifts us out of the region of the phenomenal and transi- 
 tory and imperfect into the real, the eternal, the inwardly true. 
 
 But it may be said, if God be indeed love, if man's utmost joy is to 
 enter into the full recognition of that love (which is eternal life), why 
 are we left to grope our way in the dim light ? why does God not open 
 for us the portals of the grave, let us look beyond, and then, with 
 light and truth in our minds, return to lead our Hfe here. 
 
 Bearing in mind the neo-platonic psychology which underlies 
 Browning's thought, and is fuUy expressed in the Death in the Desert, 
 we may say that as in Saul we have the truly human, the man in whom 
 the soul predominates, and in Caliban the bestial type, so in the 
 Epistle of Karshish we have the spiritual, the supernatui'al man, and 
 his theology. 
 
 The scene of the drama is a land desolated by war, dangerous from 
 robbers and beasts of prey, barren and dreary, as it seems ; yet in it are 
 content to journey, or to live, two men— one to whom the soul's life 
 perishes with the body, who therefore spends his time in studying how 
 best 
 
 " To coop up and keep down on earth a space 
 That puff of vapour from God's mouth, man's soul ; " 
 
 the other, to whom this life is but a shadow of the true. 
 
 We have in Lazarus the study of a soul that has seen things as they 
 are, whose life has therefore passed out of the sphere of the phenomenal 
 into that of the real. He has seen the " consuming fire " of the Divine 
 glory, and " the elements have melted with fervent heat." Sensitive 
 only to that transcendent light, the things of earth seem but as shadows, 
 and the path of life a 
 
MISS BEALE ON THE EELIGIOUS TEACHING OP BROWNING. 85 
 
 " meagre thread 
 Which runs across some vast, distracting orb 
 Of glory." 
 
 Faith has passed into sight, and the human will is effaced in the Divine. 
 
 " Indeed the special marking of the man, 
 Is prone submission to the heavenly will — 
 Seeing it, what it is, and why it is." 
 
 But therefore is the moral discipline of life over for him ; he can 
 will only God's will. But in the order of God's education it is neces- 
 sary we should walk first by faith, afterwards by sight ; should work 
 out the moral law ere we recognize it as Divine, else we could not know 
 God as good, and there could be no personal life, only the absorption 
 of the human will in the infinite. Virtue can take root only in the 
 darkness ; we need to live in a world opaque for us. If, whilst enduring 
 the agony, we could see the joy set before us, how could our spiritual 
 nature attain its full growth ! No ; we must utter the cry " lama 
 sabachthani" ere we can say, "It is finished." "Clouds and darkness 
 must be round about Him," that we may learn that " righteousness 
 and judgment are the habitation of His seat." "We must do right not 
 only because we know God wills it, but we must know that God wills 
 it because it is right. We are to yield not a " prone submission," a 
 satisfied assent, but the gladness of a full consent. There may be 
 submission to the Almighty, but there can be concord only with the 
 All-good. 
 
 And it seems that Lazarus has lost his characteristics as a man, 
 because for him the work of this life is over ; he has anticipated the 
 next stage of existence ere he has entered on it, and so there is discord. 
 
 " The law of that is known to him as this, 
 His heart and brain move there, his feet stay here, 
 So is the man perplext. 
 
 ***** 
 ' It should be ' baulked by ' here it cannot be.' " 
 
 This life, too, has lost with its educative power its interest ; for to 
 enjoy we must ever be seeking the unattained, ever advancing. 
 
 " He listened not, except I spoke to him, 
 But folded his two hands, and let them talk, 
 Watching the flies that buzzed. 
 
 * * * * 
 
 Sayeth he will wait patient to the last 
 For that same death, which must restore his being 
 To equilibrium, body loosening soul, 
 Divorced even now by premature full growth." 
 
 And he is no longer able to help others. We must feel their diflGl- 
 culties ere we can meet them ; there must be a measure of stupidity in 
 
86 MISS BEALB ON THE RELIGIOUS TEACHING OP BROWNING. 
 
 US ; one may be too clever to be a teacher. He despairs of unfolding 
 spiritual realities, as we of explaining sight to the blind. 
 
 " How can he give his neighbour the real ground, 
 
 His own conviction." 
 " Hence I perceive not he affects to preach 
 
 The doctrine of his sect." 
 
 In conclusion the poet leads us to feel that we must learn by 
 degrees to use the heavenly treasure, not demand our inheritance ere 
 we have attained our majority ; that the all-sufficient gospel is this — to 
 know that the heart of God beats in sympathy with the heart of man. 
 
 " So All-great were the All-loving too — 
 So, through the thunder comes a human voice, 
 Saying, ' heart I made, a heart heats here 1 
 Face My hands fashioned, see it in Myself ! 
 Thou hast no power, nor may'st conceive of Mine : 
 But love I gave thee, with Myself to love. 
 And thou must love Me who have died for thee ! ' " 
 
 We have said that Browning deals especially with the problems 
 which force themselves most upon our age, and answers them as a poet, 
 by appealing to our deepest consciousness, to our sense of what must be, 
 to our moral intuitions. 
 
 Perhaps in none are we made more conscious of his deep spiritual 
 sympathies than in the companion poems, Eastei' Day and Christmas 
 Eve. Browning knows people better than they know themselves. 
 Which of us has not at some time professed to hold a creed, and 
 thought perhaps we did believe, what in the depths of our hearts we 
 abhorred] So he faces the superficial thinker, and makes him know 
 himself. Does the agnostic approach with a smiling countenance, 
 saying, " I am content with this world's beauty, with science and art 
 and law ; " Browning leads him to an earthly paradise, where no voice of 
 God is heard among the trees of the garden ; he casts at his feet all the 
 gifts of beauty, but they are gifts from no one ; he places him in a 
 tabernacle vast and glorious, and it becomes to him a prison-house, 
 because there is no escape from it into a larger life ; and as for human 
 love, this too dies in the desert, it has no root, it is cut off from all that 
 can feed its life ; and at last the soul is made to feel the utter desolation 
 of a life without God, to know what is eternal death, to understand 
 that deepest utterance of man's heart, " This is life eternal, to know 
 Thee ; " to understand that the resurrection for man is this — to come into 
 the full consciousness of union with God. Without it we pine and die 
 amidst all the earth has to give ; but, if we know it, streams water the 
 desert, it rejoices and blossoms as the rose, the moimtains and hills 
 break forth into singing, and everything that hath breath praises God. 
 And Christmas Eve is complementary to Easter Day. That has dealt 
 
MISS BEALE ON THE EELIGI0U3 TEACHING OF BROWNING. 87 
 
 most with the relation of the individual soul to the source of its life — to 
 the centre of the universe, — realized within. This deals with the relation 
 of the soul to the life of God manifested in others ; it teaches us that 
 when we can say only My Father, not Our Father, we cannot enter into 
 the mind of God, nor pray aright ; that if we are not quite in darkness, 
 we are only in the moonlight ; if we are touching the hem of Christ's 
 garment, we have not entered with Him the transfiguring cloud ; we are 
 not wrapt in that glory, we are only on the verge of light. And as in 
 Easter Day, he forces us to face the thoughts, and see whether we really 
 feel what we supposed we did, he shows us we cannot do without God ; 
 as we found in the one, that the love of God glorifies nature, and alone 
 draws us into loving sympathy ; so in Christmas Eve we find that same 
 love it is, which, being shed abroad in our hearts, enables us to love 
 man, to lose sight of what is merely phenomenal and faulty, and to go 
 down to those deeper depths, where we meet in truest sympathy in the 
 sense of a common need, a common aspiration, a common love. We 
 have been sentimentalizing perhaps about love, bestowing our charity in 
 inverse proportion to people's nearness to us. Browning brings us, as it 
 were, face to face with our complacent religious selves, and he bids us 
 then follow, cling to Christ, say with our hearts, "Where Thou goest, I 
 will go," Then we listen to those words, " Where two or three are 
 gathered together, there am I" — present, with infinite compassion and 
 love ; not with the refined and cultivated and aesthetic, but with those 
 who are in your eyes ugly and ignorant and narrow ; in that miserable 
 little Bethel, out of which you have dashed with contempt ; present, 
 because their souls are seeking Me, and longing for the light, and are 
 therefore growing up into it, though their life does seem so dreary and 
 dark to you ; present with those you despise for utter want of aesthetic 
 sense. Present in the great cathedral, with those too whom you regard 
 as superstitious, because the emotions of their souls are expressed 
 in the ascending incense, the thrilling music, the pictured forms. Yes, 
 even with him who knows Me not as a living Presence, but desires 
 truth ; who has with toilsome steps climbed the momitain-tops, that he 
 might dwell in a region of pure light, and who is starving amidst the 
 snows ; even to him I come breathing warmth and love, and therefore 
 life. IN'one are cast out of My Presence ; if you cast out from your love 
 any human soul, you must let go then of the hem of that garment from 
 whence virtue goes out to all suffering humanity. 
 
 There is a musical trilogy which corresponds with the three poems 
 on which I have previously dwelt. ' And here I may perhaps remark 
 that I know of no modern poet at least, in whom art is so unified as in 
 Browning ; the scenery and sound so harmonized with the thought. He 
 
88 MISS BEALB ON THE RELIGIOUS TEACHING OP BROWNING. 
 
 owes his excellence in this partly to his familiarity with Greek drama, 
 especially with ^schylus. Comparing the three poems, we may say 
 Saul corresponds to Hugues of Saxe-Gotha ; Galihan, the dehased, the 
 bestial, to the Toccata of Galuppi ; AM Vogler to Lazarus, the glorified, 
 spiritualized man. 
 
 The central poem, Master Hugues of Saxe-Gotha, represents the 
 truly human, the soul seeking to interpret the perplexed music of earth, 
 arguing, disputing, contending, in the faith that there is a meaning in 
 all, though the final answer is delayed. The very sound is given of the 
 perplexed intricate fugue, with its many melodies, crossing, interpene- 
 trating, and moving on together. 
 
 " One says his say with a difference ; 
 More of expounding, explaining ; 
 All now is wrangle, abuse, and vociference ; 
 Now there's a truce, all's subdued, self-restraining, 
 Five, though, stands out all the stiffer hence. 
 
 Est fuga, volvitur rota, 
 
 On we drift : where looms the dim port ? 
 
 One, Two, Three, Four, Five, contribute their quota ; 
 
 Something is gained, if one caught but the import — 
 
 Show it us, Hugues of Saxe Gotha. 
 
 So your fugue broadens and thickens, 
 Greatens and deepens and lengthens." 
 
 And the same thought of the perplexities of life is repeated to the 
 sight in the intricate mouldings of the roof. Our scene is a mediaeval 
 church, in which the musician lingers ; the dim lights are growing 
 dimmer as the sexton extinguishes one after another, and the golden 
 cherubs which reflect some of that feeble light are partly hidden by the 
 cobwebs. 
 
 " There ! see our roof, its gilt moulding and groining 
 Under those spider-webs lying. 
 
 * * * * 
 
 Is it your moral of Life ? 
 Such a web, simple and subtle." 
 
 The answer does not come, the meaning cannot be evolved, the 
 vision of glory is only dimly seen through the symbols of earth. 
 
 " So we o'ershroud stars and roses, 
 Cherub and trophy and garland ; 
 Nothings grow somethings which quietly closes 
 Heaven's earnest eye ; not a glimpse of the far land 
 Gets through our comments and glozes." 
 
 And as the last candle by which he had been able to interpret the 
 music, sinks in its socket, he stumbles down the dangerous staircase, out 
 of the dark church into the moonlight sUence, whither we cannot foUow ; 
 the lights of earth extinguished for him, the restless questioning over. 
 
MISS BEALE ON THE RELIGIOUS TEACHING OF BROWNING. 89 
 
 A Toccata of Galuppi's corresponds with Caliban. Here we have the 
 low, sensuous, the fleshly school, with no outlook beyond the amusements 
 of the immediate present ; the scene, a ball-room in Venice. We hear 
 the light foolish talk, scarcely lulled as the musician begins. 
 
 " I can always leave o£E talking when I hear a master play 1 " 
 
 For the roar of the fugue we have a music like the thin chirp of a 
 cricket, wonderfully imitated in the monosyllabic verse, a sort of grown- 
 up baby language, full of affectations ; a silly, inane music which brings 
 before us a ghastly vision of dead men and women, for whom life had 
 no meaning at all. 
 
 " Did young people take their pleasure, when the sea was warm in May 1 
 Balls and masks begun at midnight, burning ever to midday, 
 When they made up fresh adventures for the morrow, do you say ? 
 
 • *#«*»♦ 
 
 Then they left you for their pleasure, till in due time, one by one, 
 Some with lives that came to nothing, some with deeds as well undone, 
 Death stepped tacitly and took them, where they never see the sun." 
 
 And lastly there is Alt Vogler, the music of faith grand and mighty, 
 which evokes the sense of spiritual presences, 
 
 " Claiming each slave of the sound at a touch, as when Solomon willed 
 Armies of angels that soar, legions of demons that lurk," 
 
 building up a world of real harmony — a world true because ideal. 
 " Ah, one and all how they helped, would dispart now, and now combine, 
 Zealous to hasten the work, heighten their master his praise." 
 
 "We are no longer shut in, as at Saxe-Gotha, in a church in which the 
 lights are dying out one by one. We are watching a glorious cathedral 
 grow before our eyes, and the glory is ever spreading, and the light is ever 
 increasing, ascending higher and higher, until earth and heaven become 
 one, and the bounds of space and time are lost in an eternal present. 
 
 " For higher still and higher (as a runner tips with fire 
 When a great illumination surprises a festal night). 
 Outlining round and round Rome's dome from space to spire 
 Up, the pinnacled glory reached, and the pride of my soul was in sight." 
 
 The lights are climbing from earth to the sky ; we see terrace above 
 terrace shine forth, and the lights are spirits ascending heavenward, 
 even as in Jacob's vision of the angels, ascending ere they descended, 
 and forming, as they lose themselves in the sky, a vision of a Church 
 triumphant, such as Dante beheld in Paradise. 
 
 " And another would mount and march like the excellent minion he was, 
 Ay, another and yet another, one crowd but with many a crest. 
 Raising my rampired walls of gold as transparent as glass, 
 Eager to do and die, yield each his place to the rest." 
 
 And the music ascends up and up, until the sense of effort is gone, 
 for the highest pinnacle of earthly endeavour is reached, and then the 
 
90 MISS BBALE ON THE RELIGIOUS TEACHING OP BROWNING. 
 
 soui sinks into tlie infinite and is lost, yet lives in the life and light of 
 
 heaven. 
 
 " The emulous heaven yearned down, made effort to reach the earth, 
 As the earth had done her best, in my passion to scale the sky : 
 For earth had attained to heaven, there was no more near nor far." 
 
 All is then seen not as it is to sense, but as it exists truly in the 
 Divine idea, one day to come forth from the region of being to the 
 region of consciousness. All the possibilities, which to us are not^ but 
 which truly are, the Divine ideas, one day to become existent in the 
 visible. 
 
 " Nay more ; for there wanted not who walked in the glare and glow, 
 Presences plain in the place ; or fresh from the Protoplast, 
 Furnished for ages to come, when a kindlier wind should blow, 
 Lured now to begin and live." 
 
 All that too is seen as existing, which to us was, and is not, but whicli 
 truly is. 
 
 " Or else the wonderful dead who have passed through the body and gone. 
 But were back once more to breathe in an old world worth their new." 
 
 And as the vision of the Infinite opens aroimd, it becomes clear that 
 no energy is lost, no true effort vain, for all life and energy are Divine, 
 "evil is null, is nought, is silence implying sound." 
 
 The music of a holy life may die out on earth, but it exists for ever 
 in the Eternal, the Unchanging, because it is the Divine idea. 
 
 " All we have willed or hoped or dreamed of good shall exist ; 
 Not its semblance, but itself ; no beauty, nor good, nor power 
 Whose voice has gone forth, but each survives for the melodist, 
 When eternity affirms the conception of an hour ; 
 The high that proved too high, the heroic for earth too hard, 
 The passion that left the ground, to lose itself in the sky, 
 Are music sent up to God by the lover and the bard ; 
 Enough that he heard it once : we shall hear it by and by." 
 
 But is it true, as some say, that the teaching of these earlier poems 
 is superseded by that of the later, and so the poet has destroyed his 
 own work? To me it seems that in the later poems there is a more 
 restful faith than in the earlier ; a belief less vehement, and therefore 
 less struggling. Is there not a deep significance in the beautiful story 
 of Alcestis (Balaustioii's Adventure) ; a real consciousness which needs 
 not proof in Prospice, in some passages of the Ring and the Book, in 
 A Wall, and in the beautiful prologue and epilogue of Fifine. The 
 vehement questionings of La Saisiaz, what are they but the cries of a 
 present grief, which we all utter, as we see some loved friend pass out 
 of sight. "We cry to the whirlwind, " Wherefore ? -whereto ? " JS"o 
 answer comes, but the heart replies. 
 
 " Traversed heart must tel) its story uncommented on : no le&s 
 Mine results in ' Only grant a second life, I acquiesce 
 
MISS BEALE ON THE RELIGIOUS TEACHING OP BROWNING. 91 
 
 la this present life as failure, count misfortune's worst assaults 
 Triumph, not defeat ; assured that loss so much the more exalts 
 Gain about to be. For at that moment did I so advance 
 Near to knowledge, as when frustrate of escape from ignorance ? 
 Did not beauty prove most precious when its opposite obtained 
 Kule, and truth seem more than ever potent because falsehood reigned ? 
 While for love — Oh how but, losing love, does whoso loves succeed 
 By the death-pang to the birth-throe — learning what is love indeed ? 
 Only grant my soul may carry high through death her cup unspilled, 
 Brimming though it be with knowledge, life's loss drop by drop distilled, 
 I shall boast it mine — the balsam, bless each kindly wrench that wrung 
 From life's tree its inmost virtue, tapped the root whence pleasure sprung. 
 Barked the bole, and broke the bough, and bruised the berry, left all grace 
 Ashes in death's stern alembic, loosed elixir in its place !" 
 
 I grant that in the later poems he cares less to formulate. As we 
 climb higher and our vision widens, that which once seemed the whole 
 truth now takes its place as part only of a larger, more embracing unity. 
 In our individual lives, as in the world's history, we follow the sun. in 
 his course ; but horizons change, and we never reach the land of light ; 
 truth recedes, but it is to tempt us onward ; the crystal spheres of the 
 world's childhood are broken, and if for a moment the soul flutters 
 down and stands panting upon some solid cliff, she rises thence having 
 plumed her pinions for a longer flight ; she returns again and again only 
 to renew her strength, and at last, in all the might of a great trust in 
 the All-good, she wings her flight into the infinite unknown. This 
 utter trust is proved only when we can go forth, as the faithful of old^ 
 not knowing whither we go. 
 
 " truth is truth in each degree ; 
 Thtmderpealed by God to nature, whispered by my soul to me. 
 Nay, the weakness turns to strength and triumphs in a strength beyond : 
 ' Mine is but man's truest answer — how were it did God respond ? ' 
 I shall no more dare to mimic such response in futile speech, 
 Pass off human lisp as echo of the sphere-song out of reach." 
 " Only a learner, 
 
 Quick one or slow one. 
 Just a discerner, 
 
 I would teach no one," {Pisgali Sights.) 
 
 The lesson taught in the earlier poem of Saul is repeated in the 
 latest, that the Divine love shed abroad in our hearts is the witness for 
 a Divine love which we can trust for ever and ever; and it is the 
 strength of this inner consciousness, the witness of the Spirit, that has 
 enabled the poet-seers of all ages to sing loud above the storm-waves 
 their Gloria in excelsis. 
 
 " Soul that canst soar ! I " Waft of soul's wing ! 
 
 Body may slumber. What lies above ? 
 
 Body shall cumber ! Sunshine and love." 
 
 Soul-flight no more. ' {Pisgah Slglits.y 
 
92 
 
 ON SOME POINTS IN 
 
 BROWNING'S VIEW OF LIFE. 
 
 BY THE KEY. PROF. B. F. WESTCOTT, D.D. 
 
 (A Paper read before tlte Camhridge Browning Society, Nov. 1882.) 
 
 [In the following Paper I have endeavoured to bring together what 
 appear to me to be Browning's most characteristic teachings on some of 
 the widest problems of life. My object will be fully gained if I can 
 encourage others to study a poet whose works require and repay patient 
 thought ; and at least I have had the pleasure of acknowledging my own 
 debt to one who sees and shows " the infinite in things."] 
 
 In my undergraduate days, if I remember rightly, I came across the 
 •description of a poet which speaks of him as one " who sees the infinite 
 in things." The thought has been to me from that time forward a great 
 help in studying the noblest poetry. The true poet does, I believe, of 
 necessity, see the infinite in his subject; and he so presents his vision to 
 liis readers that they too, if their eyes are open, are enabled in some 
 degree to share in its lessons. 
 
 The same gift belongs in a certain degree to the artist. But the 
 range of the poet is unlimited ; while the artist's choice of subject is 
 conditioned by the requirement that its treatment shall come within the 
 domain of the beautiful. The ground of this difference obviously lies in 
 the different means which the poet and the artist use to express what 
 they see with the eyes of the soul. The mode in which words and the 
 melody of words (not to speak now of music) affect us is different in 
 kind from the action of form and colour. 
 
 All life, aU nature, is therefore the legitimate field of the poet, 
 as prophet. There is an infinite, an eternal, meaning in all ; and it is 
 his office to make this intelligible to his students. No modern poet has 
 more boldly claimed the fulness of his heritage of life than Browning. 
 He has dared to look on the darkest and meanest forms of action and 
 passion, from which we commonly and rightly turn our eyes, and he has 
 brought back for us from this universal survey a conviction of hope. 
 
REV, PROF. WESTCOTT ON BROWNING's VIEW OF LIFE. 93 
 
 He has laid bare what there is in man of sordid, selfish, impure, corrupt, 
 brutish, and he proclaims in spite of every disappointment and every 
 wound, that he still finds a spiritual power in him, answering to a 
 spiritual power without him, which restores assurance as to the destiny 
 of creation. 
 
 Such a survey and such a conviction command careful study ; and I 
 wish to indicate a few points in Browning's view of human life which 
 have especially struck me — we can each see only a little of the poet's 
 teaching — but before doing this it is necessary to emphasize this fact, 
 that it is personal human life with which he characteristically deals by 
 deliberate choice. " Little else," he tells us, " is worth study [than the 
 development of a soul]. I at least, always thought so."^ He recognizes 
 rarely, and, as it were, at a distance, the larger life of humanity ;2 but 
 the single soul in its discij)line, its progress, its aspirations, its failures, 
 is the main object of his study, analysis, and portraiture. It has been 
 so from first to last, in Paracelsus, in Sordello, and in the latest 
 Dramatic Idylls. 
 
 By this choice, as has been well pointed out,^ Browning occupies a 
 position complementary to that of "Wordsworth. He looks for the 
 revelation of the Divine as coming through the spiritual struggles of 
 man and not through Nature. Both poets, however, agree in this, that 
 they assert the sovereignty of feeling over knowledge, of that within us 
 which they hold to have affinity with the heavenly and eternal, over 
 that which must be earthly and temporal.^ But Browning justifies the 
 position with the fullest detail of illustration, as was natural from the 
 current of contemporary thought which he has encountered. He never 
 wearies of dwelling on the relativity of physical knowledge, on its 
 inadequacy to satisfy man, on its subordinate action in the crises of 
 moral growth. The key-note of his teaching, in a word, is not know- 
 ledge, but love. 
 
 A single passage in which he lays down the relation of love to life 
 will serve as an introduction to the thoughts which follow : 
 
 "... Life, with all it yields of joy and woe, 
 And hope and fear, . . . 
 
 Is just our chance o' the prize of learning love 
 How love might be, hath been indeed, and is."^ 
 
 ^ Dedication to Sordello. 
 
 2 By the Fireside, L " Each of the many helps to recruit 
 
 The life of the race by a general plan ; 
 
 Each living his own, to boot." 
 This thought lives in Tlie Boy and the Angel. 
 
 2 Particularly in a paper by M. A. Lewis in Macmillan for June, 1882. 
 
 * The Ring and Book, Tlie Pope, 1003 £f. ^ A Death in the Desert, p. 101. 
 
94 EEV. PROF. WESTCOTT OX BROWKING's VIEW OF LIFE, 
 
 This learning of love, this acquisition of the power of self-sacrifice, 
 involves a long and painful discipline : 
 
 "Life is probation, and this earth no goal, 
 But starting point of man. . . . 
 
 ***** 
 To try man's foot, if it will creep or climb, 
 ' Mid obstacles in seeming, points that prove 
 Advantage for who vaults from low to high, 
 And makes the stumbling-block a stepping-stone. 
 
 ***** 
 Why comes temptation but for man to meet 
 And master, and make crouch beneath his foot, 
 And so be pedestalled in triumph ? " ^ 
 
 As Browning presents the great drama of the soul, thus significantly 
 foreshadowed, several truths seem to me to come into prominence 
 which I may call briefly the unity of life, the discipline of life, the 
 continuity of life, the assurance of life. In other words, the poet 
 teaches that life now must be treated as a -whole ; that learning comes 
 through suffering ; that every failure felt to be failure points to final 
 achievement ; that the visible present is but one scene in an illimitable 
 growth. These then are the points to which I wish to call attention. 
 
 I. 
 
 Our present life is to be taken in its entirety. The discipHne 
 of man is to be fulfilled, the progress of man is to be secured, under the 
 conditions of our complex earthly being. These lets and limitations are 
 not to be disparaged or overborne, but accepted and used in due order. 
 No attempt must be made either to retain that which has been or to 
 anticipate that which will be. Each element in human nature is to be 
 allowed its proper office. Each season brings its own work and its own 
 means. This conception is wrought out in many-sided completeness in 
 Rahbi Ben Ezra, which is, in epitome, a philosophy of life. To quote 
 a few lines is to do injury to the perfect structure of the whole ; but at 
 least they will attract not only to the reading but to the study of it. 
 Here are the lessons of advancing years : 
 " Let us not always say, 
 ' Spite of this flesh to-day, 
 I strove, made head, gained ground upon the whole ! ' 
 As the bird wings and sings. 
 Let us cry, ' All good things 
 Are ours, nor soul helps flesh more now, than flesh helps soul 1 ' 
 ***** 
 Grow old along with me ! 
 The best is yet to be, 
 The last of life, for which the first was made : 
 
 1 The Poj}e, 1435 f. ; 409 fif. ; 1184 S. 
 
EEV. PROF. WESTCOTT ON BROWNING's VIEW OF LIFE. 95 
 
 Our times are in His hand 
 
 Who saith, ' A whole I planned, 
 Youth shows but half ; trust God ; see all, nor be afraid.* 
 
 ***** 
 
 So take and use thy work 1 
 
 Amend what flaws may lurk. 
 What strain o' the stuff, what warpings past the aim I 
 
 My times be in Thy hand ! 
 
 Perfect the cup as planned ! 
 Let age approve of youth, and death complete the same."i 
 
 The capacity for moral progress, thus recognized in the law of 
 outward growth and decay, is indeed laid down by Browning to be the 
 essential characteristic of man : 
 "... Man . . . 
 Creeps ever on from fancies to the fact, 
 And in this striving . . . 
 Finds progress, man's distinctive mark alone, 
 Not God's, and not the beast's : God is, they are, 
 Man partly is and wholly hopes to be , . . 
 
 ***** 
 Getting increase of knowledge, since he learns 
 Because he lives, which is to be a man, 
 Set to instruct himself by his past self." 2 
 
 Hence the mutability of things may become a help to his growth : 
 
 " Kejoice that man is hurled 
 From change to change unceasingly, 
 His soul's wings never furled. 
 
 There's life's pact. 
 
 Perhaps probation — do I know ? 
 
 God does : endure His act ! " ^ 
 
 The very infirmities of later years, incapacity to receive new impres- 
 sions, dulness of sight by which far and near are blended together, have 
 their peculiar office in revealing the lessons of life. Thus the weird 
 visitor, who has laid before the Duchess the trials and triumphs of the 
 life to which she invites her, a life wholly given up that it may be 
 received again in richer fulness, concludes : 
 
 " So at the last shall come old age. 
 Decrepit as befits that stage : 
 How else would'st thou retire apart 
 With the hoarded memories of thy heart. 
 And gather all to the very least 
 Of the fragments of life's earlier feast, 
 Let fall thro' eagerness to find 
 The crowning dainties yet behind ? 
 Ponder on the entire Past 
 Laid together thus at last, 
 
 1 Rabhi Ben Ezra, 12, 1, 32. 2 j^ Death in the Desert, p. 115. 
 
 3 James Lee, vi. 14 f. 
 
yb REV. PROF. WESTCOTT ON BROWNING S VIEW OP LIFE. 
 
 When the twilight helps to fuse 
 
 The first fresh with the faded hues, 
 
 And the outline of the whole, 
 
 As round eve's shades their framework roll, 
 
 Grandly fronts for once thy soul. 
 
 And then as, 'mid the dark, a gleam 
 
 Of yet another morning breaks, 
 
 And like the hand which ends a dream. 
 
 Death, with the might of his sunbeam, 
 
 Touches the flesh and the soul awakes. 
 
 Then " 1 
 
 The true human life will therefore present a just balance of powers 
 in the course of its varied progress. To make this truth more impressive 
 by contrast, Browning has worked it out in two pairs of characters, each 
 stamped wdth a real nobility and yet seen to be essentially imperfect, 
 Aprile and Paracelsus, Lazarus and Cleon. 
 
 The complementary aspirations and failures of Aprile and Paracelsus 
 — the absorbing undisciplined desire to love, on the one hand, and to 
 know, on the other — are plainly and fully portrayed by the poet himself, 
 and it is sufficient to' refer to the poem of Paracelsus. The corre- 
 spondences between Lazarus and Cleon are less obvious. 
 
 In the strangely fascinating Epistle of KarsMsh Browning has 
 drawn the portraiture of one to whom the eternal is sensibly present, 
 whose spirit has gained prematurely absolute predominance : 
 
 " Heaven opened to a soul while yet on earth, 
 Earth forced on a soul's use while seeing Heaven : " ^ 
 
 and the result is not a man but a sign ; a being 
 
 " Professedly the faultier that he knows 
 God's secret, while he holds the thread of life."^ 
 
 Lazarus therefore, while he moves in the world, has lost aU sense 
 of proportion in things about him, all measure of and faculty of dealing 
 with that which sways his fellows. He has no power or will to win 
 them to his faith, but he simply stands among men as a patient witness 
 of the overwhelming reality of the divine : a witness whose authority is 
 confessed, even against his inclination, by the student of nature, who 
 turns again and again to the phenomenon which he affects to disparage. 
 In this crucial example Browning shows how the exclusive domin- 
 ance of the spirit destroys the fulness of human life, its uses and 
 powers, while it leaves a passive life, crowned with an unearthly 
 beauty. On the other hand, he shows in his study of Cleon that the 
 richest results of earth in art and speculation, and pleasure and power, 
 are unable to remove from life the desolation of final gloom. Thus, 
 
 1 The Flight of the Duchess, i. 270 (compare Transcendentalism, i. p. 322). 
 2 An Epistle, i. 337. 3 /^. 339. 
 
REV. PROF. WESTCOTT ON BROWNING'S VIEW OF LIFE. 07 
 
 over against the picture of Lazarus is placed that of the poet, who by- 
 happy circumstance has been enabled to gather to himself all that 
 is highest in the civilization of Greece. Cleon enjoys every prize 
 of present success, the homage of king and fisherman, the glory of artist 
 and philosopher ; and over all there is the oppressive shadow of an 
 inevitable loss. Writing " to Protus in his tyranny," his judgment is, 
 that he dare not accept the view 
 
 " Tliat imperfection means perfection hid, 
 Reserved in part, to grace the after-time." ^ 
 
 The wealth of man's endowment, which is understood too late for use, 
 seems to him to be rather a curse than a blessing, nourishing vain hopes, 
 and showing what joy man is capable of feeling, and never can feel, 
 
 "The consummation coming past escape, 
 When [he] shall know most and yet least enjoy."- 
 
 The contrast is of the deepest significance. The Je"ndsh peasant 
 endures earth, being in possession of heaven : the Greek poet, in 
 possession of earth, feels that heaven, some future state, 
 " Unlimited in capability 
 For joy, as this is in desire for joy," 
 
 is a necessity for man ; but no, 
 
 " Zeus has not yet revealed it ; and alas, 
 He must have done so, were it possible 1 " 
 
 But we must not pause to follow out the contrast into details. It is 
 enough to see broadly that flesh and spirit each claim recognition in 
 connexion with their proper spheres, in order that the present life may 
 bear its true result. 
 
 We must then, in other words, that we may live human lives, 
 loyally yield ourselves to, and yet master the circumstances in which we 
 are placed. This is an arduous task, but it is fruitful : " when pain 
 ends gain ends too."^ And the principle holds good not only in regard 
 to the physical, but also in regard to the intellectual difficulties by 
 which we are beset. For doubt, rightly understood, is just that 
 vivid, personal questioning of phenomena, which breaks " the torpor of 
 assurance,"'^ and gives a living value to decision. In this sense, and not 
 as if doubt were an absolution from the duty of endeavour, we can 
 each say, 
 
 " I prize the doubt, 
 Low kinds exist without, 
 Finished and finite clods, untroubled by a sparli."^ 
 
 1 Clean, i. p. 417. - Id. p. 422. 
 
 ^ A Death in the Desert, p. 99. * The Pope, 1853. 
 
 5 Rabbi Ben Ezra, 3; compare Dj^. Blougram's Apology, pp. 381, 397; 
 Paracelsus, iii. p. 143 ; Easter Day, § iv. 
 
98 REV PROF. WESTCOTT ON BROWNIXG's VIEW OF LIFE. 
 
 I^or is it diificult to understand that the circumstances which make 
 doubt possible answer to the necessities of our nature : 
 
 " Sun-sufEused 
 
 A cloud may soothe the eye made blind by blaze — 
 
 Better the very clarity of heaven : 
 
 The soft streaks are the beautiful and dear. 
 
 What but the weakness in a faith supplies 
 
 The incentive to humanity, no strength 
 
 Absolute, irresistible, comports? 
 
 How can man love but what he yearns to help ? "^ 
 
 II. 
 
 In such a view of life, as is thus outlined, no room is left for 
 indifference or neutrality. There is no surrender to an idle optimism, 
 A part must be taken and maintained. The spirit in which Luther said 
 pecca fortiter finds a powerful expression in Tlie Statue and the Bust: 
 
 "Let a man contend to the uttermost 
 For his life's set prize, be it what it will ! 
 
 And the sin I impute to each frustrate ghost 
 Is, the unlit lamp and the ungirt loin."^ 
 
 And again in the concentrated and moving pathos of The Lost Leader : 
 
 " Best fight on well, for we taught him — strike gallantly. 
 Menace our heart ere we master his own ; 
 Then let him receive the new knowledge and wait us, 
 Pardoned in heaven, the first by the throne." ^ 
 
 The erring but generous adversary of the truth must be struck down 
 sooner or later ; and he who has chosen the right side will not escape 
 the severity of reverses. Such an one sums up his experience shortly : 
 
 (" And so) I live, (you see). 
 Go through the world, trj', prove, reject, 
 Prefer, still struggling to effect 
 My warfare ; happy that I can 
 Be crossed and thwarted as a man, 
 Not left in God's contempt apart, 
 With ghastly smooth life, dead at heart," * 
 
 Thus, in the midst of strenuous endeavour or of patient suffering, 
 the lesson of life, the lesson of love, is brought within man's reach. It 
 is finally taught perhaps by a sudden appeal of distress {CaponsaccM) ; 
 or by human companionship {Bi/ the Fireside) ; or by a message felt to 
 be divine (Easter Day). 
 
 There are also sharper ways of enforcing the lesson. One illus- 
 tration I cannot forbear quoting, for it brings out the basis of Browning's 
 hopefulness, and combines two passages which in different ways, for 
 grandeur of imagery and for spiritual insight, are unsurpassed in 
 Browning — I will venture to say in literature. 
 
 1 The Fojje, 1644 £f. 2 i. p. 309. 3 j, p, 5. i faster Bay, xxxiii. 
 
REV. PROF. WESTCOTT ON BROWxVING's VIEW OP LIFE. 99 
 
 I need not recall the character of Guide, whicli Browning haa 
 analyzed with exceptional power and evidently with the deepest 
 interest. This, at last, is the judgment which the Pope pronounces 
 on him : 
 
 " For the main criminal I have no hope 
 
 Except in such a suddenness of fate. 
 
 I stood at Naples once, a night so dark 
 
 I could have scarce conjectured there was earth 
 
 Anjnvhere, sky, or sea, or world at all ; 
 
 But the night's black was burst through by a blaze, 
 
 Thunder struck blow on blow, earth groaned and bore 
 
 Through her whole length of mountain visible : 
 
 There lay the city thick and plain with spires, 
 
 And, like a ghost disshrouded, white the sea. 
 
 So may the truth be flashed out by one blow, 
 
 And Guido see, one instant, and be saved." ^ 
 
 Degraded and debased, Guido is seen to be not past hope by the truo! 
 spiritual eye. And what is the issue 1 Up to the last, with fresh 
 ivindled passion, the great criminal reasserts his hate. He gathers his 
 strength to repeat his crime in wiU. I grow, he says, one gorge 
 
 " To loathingly reject Pompilia's pale 
 Poison my hasty hunger took for food." 
 
 So the end comes. The ministers of death claim him. In his agony 
 
 lie summons every helper whom he has known or heard of — 
 
 " Abate, Cardinal, Christ, Maria, God— " 
 and then the light breaks through the blackest gloom : 
 " Pompilia, will you let them murder me ? " ^ 
 In this supreme moment he has known what love is, and, knowing it, 
 has begim to feel it. The cry, like the intercession of the rich man in 
 Hades for his five brethren, is a promise of a far-ofif deliverance. 
 
 In this case the poet shows how we may take heart again in looking 
 on the tragedies of guilt. But there are wider and more general sorrows 
 in life. There is the failure, the falling from our ideal, of which we are 
 all conscious ; there is the incompleteness of opportunity, which leaves 
 noblest powers unused. Browning states the facts without reserve or 
 palliation : 
 
 " All labour, yet no less 
 
 Bear up beneath their uusuccess. 
 
 Look at the end of work, contrast 
 
 The petty Done, the Undone vast, 
 
 This Present of theirs with the hopeful Past 1 
 " What hand and brain went ever paired ? 
 
 What heart alike conceived and dared ? 
 
 What act proved all its thought had been 1 
 
 What will but felt the fleshy screen ? " ^ 
 
 1 The £>ope, 2116 fe. 2 Q^ido (2), ?425 t. s ^'Ae Last Ride together, v. vi. 
 
100 REV. PROF. WESTCOTT OX BROWNIXG'S VIEW OP LIFE. 
 
 " In this world, who can do a thing will not ; 
 And who would do it, cannot, I perceive : 
 Yet the will 's somewhat — somewhat, too, the power — 
 And thus we half -men struggle." ^ 
 
 In dealing -with the difficulties which are thus raised, Browning 
 offers what appears to me to be his most striking message. Acknow- 
 ledged failure is, he teaches, a promise of future attainment : unfruitful 
 preparation is the sign of the continuity of life. And these two prin- 
 ciples rest upon another : imperfection is the condition of growth : 
 " Let the mere star-fish in his vault 
 Crawl in a wash of weed, indeed, 
 Kose-jacynth to the finger-tips : 
 
 He, whole in body and soul, outstrips 
 Man, found with either in default. 
 " But what's whole can increase no more. 
 
 Is dwarfed and dies, since here's its sphere." " 
 
 And hence comes (as may be noticed parenthetically) the contrast 
 between works of art and living men : 
 
 " They are perfect — how else ? they shall never change : 
 We are faulty — why not ? we have time in store. 
 The artificer's hand is not arrested 
 
 With us — we are rough-hewn, nowise polished : 
 They stand for our copy, and once invested 
 
 With all they can teach, we shall see them abolished. 
 
 "'Tis a life-long toil till our lump be leaven, 
 
 The better ! what's come to perfection perishes." ^ 
 
 Perhaps we can all readily acquiesce in the fact of imperfection ; but 
 the consideration of failure is more complicated. Failure, as Browning 
 treats it, may come in two ways. It may come from what he does not 
 scruple to call " the corruption of man's heart," ^ or it may come from 
 the want of necessary external help. The first form of failure is in 
 various degrees universal. But as long as effort is directed to the 
 highest, that aim, though it is out of reach, is the standard of hope. 
 The existence of a capacity, cherished and quickened, is a pledge that it 
 will find scope. The punishment of the man who has fixed aU his 
 thoughts upon earth, a punishment felt on reflection to be overwhelming 
 in view of possibilities of humanity, is the completest gratification of 
 desires unworthily limited : 
 
 " Thou art shut 
 Out of the heaven of spirit ; glut 
 Thy sense upon the world ; 'tis thine 
 For ever — take it ! " ^ 
 
 On the other hand, the soul which has found in success not rest but 
 
 1 Andrea del Sarto, i. p. 364. ^ j)ig aliter visum, 28 f. 
 
 ' Old Pictures at Florence, svi. f. ^ A Legend of Pornic, 20. 
 
 " ±Jaster Day, xx. 
 
REV. PROF. WESTCOTT ON BROWNING's VIEW OF LIFE. 101 
 
 a starting-point, which refuses to see in the first-fruits of a partial 
 victory the fulness of its rightful triumph, has ever before it a sustain- 
 ing and elevating vision : 
 
 " What stops my despair ? 
 This : — 'tis not what man Does which exalts him, but what man Would do ! " ^ 
 " All I could never be, 
 All, men ignored in me. 
 This, I was worth to God, whose wheel the pitcher shaped. 
 Then welcome each rebuff 
 That turns earth's smoothness rough. 
 Each sting that bids nor sit nor stand but go 1 
 Be our joys three-parts pain ! 
 Strive, and hold cheap the strain ; 
 Learn, nor account the pang ; dare, never grudge the throe I 
 For thence — a paradox 
 Which comforts while it mocks — 
 Shall life succeed in that it seems to fail : 
 What I aspired to be, 
 And was not, comforts me ; 
 A brute I might have been, but would not sink i' the scale. " * 
 
 So far the cause of failure lies mainly in the man himself. He is 
 conscious of a potency, a promise unfulfilled, and he trusts to Him who 
 gave it for fulfilment. But the failure may lie in those for whom the 
 patriot, or the lover, or the poet works and suff'ers. Even so the 
 assurance is the same : 
 
 " * Paid by the World— what dost thou owe 
 Me ? ' God might question : now instead, 
 'Tis God shall repay 1 I am safer so. " ^ 
 " If you loved only what were worth your love, 
 Love were clear gain, and wholly well for you ; 
 Make the low nature better by your throes 1 
 Give earth yourself, go up for gain above I " * 
 " His [God's] clenched Hand shall unclose at last, 
 I know, and let out all the beauty ; 
 My poet holds the Future fast, 
 
 Accepts the coming ages' duty. 
 Their Present for this Past." ^ 
 
 Meanwhile the work, even as it has been accomplished, does not perish 
 from the earth. Of him who has striven faithfully, the words supposed 
 to be addressed by David to Saul are true in due measure : 
 
 " Each deed thou hast done 
 Dies, revives, goes to work in the world ... so, each ray of thy will, 
 Every flash of thy passion and prowess, long over, shall thrill 
 Thy whole people, the couiiiJess, with ardour, till they too give forth 
 A like cheer to their sons : who in turn fill the South and the North 
 With the radiance thy deed was the germ of." * 
 
 1 Saul, xviii. 2 RaWi Ben Ezra, 25, 6, 7. 3 The Patriot, vi, 
 -"> James Lee, vii. 2. ^ Popularity, iii. ^ gaul, xiii. Cf. Sordello, iii. p. 416. 
 
102 REV. PROF. WESTCOTT ON BROWNING'S VIEW OF LIFE, 
 
 III. 
 
 But while Browning recognizes the reality and the glory of this sub- 
 jective immortality, he has shown elsewhere, in Cleo7i, that it is wholly 
 inadequate to satisfy the heart of man. He assumes, therefore, in these 
 various studies of imperfection and failure, as prophetic of progress and 
 attainment, the continuity of personal life through death. In such a 
 continuity of being he also finds the assurance of the full use of powers 
 disciplined but not called into play on earth. 
 
 There is, perhaps, little in the literary history of the Eenaissance to 
 justify the picture which Browning has drawn, in The Graminarian' s 
 Funeral, of the perfect self-sacrifice of the scholar as realized then. But 
 the thoughts expressed in the poem find a partial embodiment at all 
 times, A large proportion of a student's labour must be in preparation 
 for tasks which he cannot accomplish. His material may remain for 
 others ; but the experience, the insight, the delicate tact, the accu- 
 mulated enthusiasm which he has gained in long years, pass away with 
 him. The example, indeed, abides for us ; but this is not all. There 
 will yet be, as we believe, a field for the exercise of every power which 
 has been trained and not called into service. What has been conse- 
 crated cannot be wasted : 
 
 " Yea, this in him was the peculiar grace 
 * * * * * 
 
 That before living he'd learn how to live — 
 
 No end to learning : 
 Earn the means first — God surely will contrive 
 
 Use for our earning, 
 Others mistrust and say, ' But time escapes ! 
 
 Live now or never ! ' 
 He said, ' What's time ? Leave Now for dogs and apes I 
 
 Man has Forever.' 
 Was it not great 1 did not he throw on God 
 
 (He loves the burthen) — 
 God's task to make the heavenly period 
 
 Perfect the earthen 1 
 Did not he magnify the mind, show clear 
 
 Just what it all meant ? 
 He would not discount life, as fools do here, 
 
 Paid by instalment." ^ 
 
 But the preparation and discipline of intellect is subordinate to the 
 preparation and discipline of feeling. The end of life is, as we have 
 seen, the learning love — the learning God — and that in a large degree 
 through human fellowship. Omne vivum ex vivo — "life is the one 
 source of life " — is an axiom true in the spiritual as in the physical 
 order. An intellectual result may be the occasion, but it cannot be the 
 
 1 A Crrammaria'i's Funeral, i. pp. 281 ff. 
 
REV. PnOF. WESTCUTT OM BROWNING'S VIEW OF LIFE. 103 
 
 source of a moral quickening. Man's spirit enters into communion with 
 the Spirit of God directly, or with the Spirit of God acting through 
 men. A soul meets the soul which its nature needs, and receives its 
 quickeniog influence ; and this is its confession : 
 
 " Life will just hold out the proving 
 
 Both our powers, alone and blended ; 
 And then, come the next life quickly ! 
 This world's use will have been ended." ^ 
 
 And so again in the enjoyment of a perfect sympathy the poet can say : 
 
 " My own, see where the years conduct ! 
 At first, 'twas something our two souls 
 Should mix as mists do ; each is sucked 
 
 In each now ; on, the new stream rolls, 
 "Whatever rocks obstruct." ^ 
 
 This happy issue, however, is not always gained. The soul may 
 recognize its need and also that which will satisfy it, and yet fail to 
 gain what is wanting. And what then? Is all the fruit of self- 
 questioning and self-devotion and self-surrender to be lostl Evelyn 
 Hope is the answer. The lover, by the side of the dead girl who could 
 not have known his love, replies for us : 
 
 " No, indeed I for God above 
 
 Is great to grant, as mighty to make. 
 And creates the love to reward the love : 
 
 I claim you still, for my own love's sake ! 
 Delayed it may be for more lives yet, 
 
 Through worlds I shall traverse not a few : 
 Much is to learn, much to forget 
 
 Ere the time be come for taking you. 
 
 " So hush, — I give you this leaf to keep — 
 See, I shut it inside the sweet, cold hand I 
 There, that is our secret ; go to sleep ! 
 
 You will wake, and remember and understand." ^ 
 
 IV. 
 
 Here we might well stop. We have followed in outline the 
 thoughts which Browning offers to us on the unity of life, the discipline 
 of life, the continuity of life, a unity which enables us to regard every 
 condition of labour as contributing to its efficiency, a discipline which, 
 through spiritual intercourse, fashions us to the Divine likeness, a con- 
 tinuity which abides through cycles of change passing all imagination. 
 The unity, the discipline, the continuity rest upon and express that 
 Divine Love, of which love in man is at once the offspring and the 
 evidence. So we rise to the highest : 
 
 ^ Cristina, viii. Compare v. 2 ^y fjig Fireside, sxvi. 
 
 3 Evelyn Hope, iv. vii. Contrast Too Late, D.P. 57 ff. 
 
104 REV. PROF. WESTCOTT OX BROWNING S VIEW OF LIFE. 
 
 " Do I find love so full in my nature, God's ultimate gift, 
 That I doubt His own love can compete with it ? here, the parts shift ? 
 Here, the creature surpass the Creator, — the end, what Began ? 
 
 ****** 
 I believe it! 't is Thou, God, that givest, 't is I who receive ; 
 In the first is the last, in Thy will is my power to believe. 
 
 ****** 
 Would I suffer for him that I love ? — so would'st thou— so wilt thou I 
 So shall crown thee the topmost, inefifablest, uttermost crown — 
 And thy love fill infinitude whollj^ nor leave up nor down 
 One spot for the creature to stand in." ^ 
 
 " So, through the thunder comes a human voice 
 Saying : ' heart I made, a heart beats here 1 
 Face, My hands fashioned, see it in Myself, 
 Thou hast no power, nor may'st conceive of Mine, 
 But love I gave thee, with Myself to love. 
 And thou must love Me who have died for thee I " ^ 
 
 And what does the poet say of the end? For that which is evil 
 there is judgment of utter destruction ; for that which is good, purify- 
 ing. So it is that chastisement is often seen to come through the 
 noblest part of a character otherwise mean, because in that there is 
 
 yet hope : 
 
 " You were punished in the very part 
 That looked most pure of speck, — the honest love 
 Betrayed you — did love seem most worthy pains, 
 Challenge such purging, as ordained survive 
 When all the rest of you was done with ? " ^ 
 
 And on the whole : 
 
 '' There shall never be one lost good ! What was shall live as before ; 
 The evil is null, is nought, is silence implying sound ; 
 What was good shall be good with, for evil, so much good more ; 
 On the earth the broken arcs ; in the heaven a perfect round. 
 
 " The high that proved too high, the heroic for earth too hard, 
 
 The passion that left the ground to lose itself in the sky, 
 Are music sent up to God by the lover and the bard ; 
 
 Enough that He heard it once ; we shall hear it by-and-by. 
 
 " And what is our failure here but a triumph's evidence 
 For the fulness of the days ? '' * 
 
 '' My own hope is, a sun will pierce 
 
 The thickest cloud earth ever stretched ; 
 That, after Last, returns the First, 
 
 Though a wide compass round be fetched ; 
 That what began best, can't end worst, 
 
 Nor what God blessed once, prove accurst." ^ 
 
 1 Saul, i. fe. 93. 2 ^,j EjMstle, i. .343. 3 27<e Poj>e, 1229 ff. 
 
 * Abt Volger, ix. ff. ^ Apparent Failure, vii. 
 
REV. PROF. WESTCOTT ON BROWNING's VIEW OF LIFE. 105 
 
 These thouglits, which I have endeavoured to set forth and not to 
 criticize, come to us in the words of our own time. They are clothed 
 in images which are familiar to our own experience. Our hearts in the 
 main, I believe, respond to them as interpreting the fulness of our lives, 
 our trials, and faUs, and aspirations ; as expressing our trust through 
 disappointment, and our ideal aims in spite of imperfection. And, as it 
 seems to me, they help us to understand better, that is, with a more 
 real and vital intelligence, some parts of our Faith in which alone, as far 
 as I can see, they find their solid foundation. 
 
106 
 
 ONE ASPECT OF BROWNING'S VILLAINS. 
 
 By miss e. d. west. 
 
 {Bead at the \Zth Meeting of the Browning Society, on Friday, Aiml 27, 1883.) 
 
 A. General Statement of View. 
 B. Application, thereof to Particulars. C. Epilogue. 
 
 A. GENERAL STATEMENT OF VIEW. 
 
 Amongst the most prominent characteristics of Mr. Browning's 
 mind and art, there are two which seem at first sight wholly unlike the 
 qualities which we might expect to find in any 07ie man's work. What 
 concord, we may ask, is there between these : a joyous, persistent faith 
 in Good being somehow the final significance of aU Creation ; and a 
 delight in the employing of artistic powers in the delineation of e vilest 
 aspects of Humanity 1 
 
 Should we not, beforehand, suppose that an optimistic thinker 
 would, if also a painter or poet, incline naturally to let his art dwell on 
 the pleasant and loveable features of the human world, averting his 
 regard from sights and sounds repugnant to his disposition ; and that, 
 conversely, an artist employing his powers frequently in depicting 
 subjects connected with moral evil, would be likely, as a thinker, 
 to lean towards a creed of pessimism, or some dark theology of terror 1 
 However, as we do, as a fact, find in the whole mass of the writings 
 which bear Mr. Browning's name, a mingling of these seemingly 
 discordant elements, it is natural that students of those writings should 
 wish to inquire into the matter more closely, questioning whether that 
 odd juxtaposition of mental traits is one of those accidents in character 
 which cannot be accounted for, or whether the apparent incongruity is, 
 after all, only apparent. 
 
 To me it seems that a closer consideration brings us very soon 
 to cease to see any want of harmony between these characteristics of 
 this poet ; brings us to discern a real connection between the optimism 
 of his way of thinking, and the peculiar success which he has achieved 
 in artistic portraiture of the psychology of human evil. 
 
ONE ASPKCT OF BROWNIXG'S VILLAINS. 107 
 
 With a view to tracing some of the lines of this connection, I want 
 to say something ahout Mr, Browning and his Villains this evening. 
 (I do not aim at anything like a thorough analysis of any one of the 
 characters I may name, but only at a glance at one especial aspect which 
 they present. I presuppose that all persons here are so famihar with Mr. 
 Browning's poetical portraits as to need only reference to, rather than 
 description of, any one of them which may concern our present subject.) 
 
 That the whole tone of Mr. Browning's " mind " is optimistic needs 
 here no proving. Other Papers read before your Society have dwelt on 
 that feature of his poetry. That character of it, indeed, while it has 
 gained for him the gratitude of those who can become disciples to his 
 philosophy, has detracted in other folk's estimate from the value of his 
 work. To some it makes all that (as a thinker) he has produced 
 appear only as the error of an enthusiast, recommended to their 
 intellectual mercy by its singular beauty and nobility, and by the pathos 
 of its contrast with the sternness of verifiable beliefs. 
 
 That Mr. Browning's Art, on the other hand, is very secure against 
 any charges of a blind amiability, and an ignoring of the darker side of 
 Nature, is what will be as readily admitted by most people. As a 
 matter of fact, a large class of minds are repelled from attempting to 
 penetrate into the thought of his poetry by the unloveliness of so many 
 of its artistic themes, an unloveliness more harshly developed in his 
 mature literary life than in his earlier. 
 
 If any of us have asked ourselves " In what department of Mr, 
 Browning's work does he seem to reach his highest level as artist ? " 
 1 should imagine that the answer would be, that it is in his dealing with 
 evil and repulsive aspects of humanity. 
 
 I do not speak here of his general attainments as jjoet (which word 
 inchides in one's meaning, commonly, all that a man is as thinker,, 
 feeler, and artist). A man's success as 2^oet cannot be determined by 
 any critics' tests. It lies in his power of affecting the readers' perceptions 
 on all sides of their natures ; and the part of this poet's work of most 
 value to us may be his portraying of " whatsoever things are pure, 
 whatsoever things are lovely," inasmuch as this is the part of it which 
 stimulates what is best in ourselves — that sense of " admiration, hope, 
 and love " by which Wordsworth says " we live." 
 
 What I mean is, that we find his artistic or technical genius attaining 
 in its dealing with things evil, a kind of perfection which seems forl)idden 
 to it elsewhere. In his dealings with the beautiful. Browning oftenest 
 seems to choose suggesting, rather than presenting, to the reader's 
 imagination the ideas which his own has in view, A voluntary restraint 
 of artistic force seems to be then exercised, and we receive the impres- 
 
108 ONE ASPECT OF BROWMNG's VILLAINS. 
 
 sion of its being subordinated to some superior poetical necessity. We 
 may admit this -svithout accounting it a defect ; nay, rather, this sort of 
 incompleteness in the art which in words communicates to us ideas of 
 things beautiful, ennobles it — making it seem as the vision of " one who, 
 on seeing Beauty in this lower world, being reminded of the True, begins 
 to recover his wings ; and, ha\dng recovered them, longs to soar aloft, 
 but, being unable to do so, looks upward like a bird."^ 
 
 In his artistic treatment of evil (that is, " evil " in the sense of to 
 alaxpoi', the opposite of to Ka\oi>) this tendency to avoidance of com- 
 pleteness seems to disappear. In minute elaboration of each detail of 
 his pictures of "horror, crime, remorse," we find him not inclined to 
 spare either his own energy or his reader's sensibility. He seems to 
 dwell with a keen satisfaction in his own workmanship, on his reproduc- 
 tion, not only of the aspects of large open crime, but of all forms of 
 secret motives base and unbeautiful in human hearts. 
 
 Browning's pictured world of humanity (unaccompanied by Brown- 
 ing's own comment of interpretation thereof), how far more remote does 
 it seem from conditions paradisaical, than the corresponding worlds of 
 "Wordsworth's, or even of Tennyson's art ! 
 
 In powerful portraying of evil another modern poet — the German 
 poet Kobert Hamerling — does perhaps in some respects surpass Brown- 
 ing (in the element of gruesomeness, for instance). But to find a 
 fondness for the artistic painting of evil does not surprise us when the 
 man in whom we find it grounds his poetry upon the philosophy of 
 Schopenhauer, as does Hamerling. 
 
 Amongst Browning's English contemporaries there are, as we know, 
 other painters of evil whose portraits of character are each in their own 
 style as powerful and as horribly realistic ; Dickens and Thackeray 
 having each his points of excellence in this, and George Ehot's work 
 being peculiarly remarkable for its dealing with not only the actual 
 presence and operation of evil in man, but its genesis and development 
 in them through diff'erent stages. But in this the writers here instanced 
 do not appear going against their own normal theory, inasmuch as the 
 two former do not definitely commit themselves to cmij theory of human 
 destiny, and that theory which George Eliot makes her own is one 
 which keeps to the facts of human life from birth merely to death — and 
 there stops. 
 
 What puzzles the student of Browning is the finding that the same 
 man who tells us so often in various forms of expression that finally 
 " evil is null, is nought" has done so much to aid our imagination in 
 realizing how much and how manifold is the evil that is present with 
 
 ^ Phadrus of Pliito. 
 
ONE ASPECT OF BROWNING S VILLAINS. 10i> 
 
 US. Now, in what way may we account for the prominence given in 
 Browning's writings to the portraiture of what is morally unbeautiful 1 
 
 In some measure we may attribute this to the natm-al indulgence of 
 one set of his faculties in work affording them exercise. Browning is at 
 once a mystic and a mental mechanic (however mutually exclusive 
 these characters may be considered as a general rule). He has needs, 
 not only to let perceptions of ideas float into him through the eye of the 
 soul, but also to handle mental things with the hands of a craftsman, 
 taking to pieces and putting together again. 
 
 One of these dispositions in him, the mystical, receives its satisfaction 
 in the mental sights of the Beautiful that reach it as " rays that shoot 
 in meteor-hght athwart our earth," ^ as "gleams that sting with hunger 
 for full light." 2 It is receptive of the ideas of Beauty that thus reach 
 it, and does not seek to dominate over them. 
 
 But the other disposition in him is a sort of Tuhal-Cain nature, which 
 this apprehending of things that are above us leaves unemployed ; it has 
 the faculty for dealing with things over which it is superior, and which, 
 not reverencing, it can use freely as its brass and iron, for its material to 
 Avork upon. To these mechanic's-propensities of his he can only give 
 the satisfaction of exercise by thus occupying them with things which, 
 being devoid of spiritual beauty, do not engage his mystical faculty. To 
 meet this requirement, he chooses sometimes the grotesque, sometimes 
 the morally ugly, for his subject matter. 
 
 This is only a passing suggestion of one consideration which in 
 some measure explains to us certain apparent incongruities in Robert 
 Browning's art. 
 
 I go on to a second consideration about the matter, which last is 
 what is intended to be the main theme of this Paper. And this is the 
 peculiar quality of his dealings with evil in his poetry, which seems 
 to indicate a real connection between his artistic work in that depart- 
 ment and his work as a speculative tliinker. 
 
 This quality is his recognition of the individuality of the soid in his 
 Avicked " dramatis personse," and all that, according to his creed, folio v.'s 
 upon that recognition. 
 
 I suppose many or most of us here this evening have, at some time 
 or other, read that strangely-vivid prose-poem of J. H. ISTewman's, his 
 sermon on " The Individuality of the Soul." If one chances, after a 
 reading of this, to open a volume of Browning at some story of crime 
 and malevolence, and the sayings and thoughts of the actors therein, 
 one's mind passes from the one book to the other without perceptible 
 break in its tone of mood. (I at least have found it so.) 
 ' Eaitcr-Bay. * Ibid. 
 
110 OKE ASPECT OF BROWXIXG'S VILLAINS. 
 
 This 1 mention merely to define the quality I mean better than any 
 words of mine could do. That the coincidence of tone in the two men 
 only extends a little way, one need hardly say. The point of resem- 
 blance is, that each brings his theories of mankind to bear upon his 
 ideas of individual men. 
 
 This quality, seeming as it does to be essential in Browning's treat- 
 ment of evil in his poetrj', is in Shakspere's accidental — sometimes 
 present, sometimes not. Though Shakspere does at all times recognize 
 good and e\aL as present in the whole mass of humanitj', and bases his 
 tragedies on the struggle between them, as opposed forces in the earth, 
 he does not care to strenuously pursue the idea into the personality of 
 the wicked characters whom his art creates. Some of these are not 
 realized by our imagination as persons who could conceivably have been 
 at all less wicked than we actually find them in the roles which respect- 
 ively they fill, in the tales where they are met with. Appearing upon 
 the scene as the agents required to bring about certain disastrous events 
 or complications in the plots, there is not discernible in them any 
 suggestiveness of irrelevant capacities. They seem as if their proper 
 function in the world were the being a part of its evil force. Their 
 wicked doings constitute their right to exist there, a right no less valid 
 than that of the noblest and loveliest of the other characters in the story. 
 If Cordelia, in being what she is, and doing what she does, perfects her 
 natural destiny, Goneril and Eegan, in their deeds and dispositions, 
 seem as fulfilling no less perfectly theirs. And lago seems, in Shak- 
 spere's view, a creature that has developed legitimately the powers that 
 were inherent in it ; a being hateful indeed, but not culpable, inasmuch 
 as it had only obeyed the natural laws of growth of its kind ; and so in 
 like maimer Eichard the Third. ilSTow, wherever this is the case in 
 Shakspere, the tragic interest of the stories stops short of the villain's 
 oicn character. Monsters such as these seem rather a part of the 
 machinery to produce the tragedy than in themselves tragic figures. 
 It is only when the dramatic character is presented to our imagination 
 as a human being turned to evil through misuse of potentialities for 
 good, that we can by an appropriation of the villain's ego (however 
 swift and transient such exchange of personality may be) have a " real 
 apprehension " of the character's individuality. If the villain in a tale 
 is not made in the likeness of us men, we can as indifferently witness 
 the spectacle of his wickedness as we could watch, for instance, the 
 destructiveness of the " dragons of the prime, who tare each other in 
 their sHme." Is it not so ? 
 
 lago and the horrible sisters in Lear are not tragic to us ^;e?' se. 
 The totality of the action in the plays where they are found represents 
 
ONE ASPECT OF BROWNINGS VILLAINS. Ill 
 
 indeed one aspect or another of the huge war going on in our world 
 between " evil " and " good," taking those words in their widest sense. 
 In this war these dramatis personm play their parts ; but it does not 
 enter within their own individual natures : their place in the drama 
 appertains to them by right of what they do, not what they are. Their 
 agency is required to effect the disasters necessary for the working out 
 of the plot. And accordingly, when the consequences of their villainy 
 have ensued, they, the agents, cease to be the objects on which our 
 attention is supposed to be engaged in the story. What remains as the 
 persistent idea, is the spectacle of the sorrows that have been brought 
 upon the other actors in the tale, and the noble or beautiful manifesta- 
 tions of character which their misfortunes have evoked from them. 
 
 As to what becomes of the doer of all this we are not led to inquire. 
 When once his fate has ceased to be connected with that of the persons 
 he has injured, it becomes of no account. Does some swift death over- 
 take him? Well, this is viewed rather as the world's riddance of a 
 noxious reptile or beast, than as a punishment judicial or remedial. Is 
 he left to live on unpunished ? Well, his subsequent life vanishes, we 
 know not whither, and we are not concerned to know. The ill that he 
 has wrought remains, and the feeling that lingers on in our minds is the 
 unending '■^ pity of it" and the pathos of its contrast with the happiness 
 which he has destroyed. 
 
 I^ot only in Shakspere's tragedies, but in his happy-ending plays, 
 do we find the same unconcern often for his villains as individual souls. 
 They interrupt temporarily the happiness of the good folk, and then, 
 when their machinations are frustrated, they are themselves made aM'ay 
 with somehow. The inner life and the destiny of Cymbeline's wicked 
 queen as an individual concerns us not, for instance, when once 
 Imogen and Posthumus have been reunited; one might multiply 
 examples of the like. 
 
 These observations are, it is true, inapplicable all round to Shak- 
 spere's villains (irrespective of his larger heroes of crime, like Lady 
 Macbeth, in whose personality the interest of the plots of course 
 centres). It is true that he shows us some who, being baleful forces 
 in the tale, are that and more besides ; who are per se subjects of 
 tragic interest ; who come before us as men of like passions with our- 
 selves, their lives being marred through guilt which we their brethren 
 have escaped. Their wickedness itself — I don't mean its punishment — • 
 has the pathos of failure rather than the triumph of a malign success. 
 Edmund in Lear is an instance of this. That there was in him a 
 "might-have-been" of good is discernible in that flash of conscience jusfc 
 before his death, his recognition of the justice of his doom, and forgive 
 
112 OXE ASPECT OF BROWXING's VILLAINS. 
 
 ness of Edgar, its instrument; and in the dimly-pathetic momentary 
 desire to be the object of a human love, evinced when he looks back 
 •with a sort of satisfaction on the horrible parody of it which the two 
 sisters, one of them murderess and suicide for his sake, had given him ; 
 and in the dying " I pant for life ! " — life that might leave space and 
 opportunity to " do some good despite mine own nature." 
 
 " It is," Hartley Coleridge says, " amazing how small a beam of light 
 redeems a soul from the condemnation of utter darkness." 
 
 One must feel that the strife between good and evil is included in 
 Edmund, as well as including him. He is not extra-human; his ego 
 is the same in kind as ours ; his life is ruined because the good element 
 in him was too feeble to make its way agaiust those adverse circum- 
 stances of Ms bastardy which only a strong force of virtue could have 
 overcome. His existence contains for us (in Carlyle's phrase concerning 
 a historical character) "a poetic Tragedy, which is made up of Fate 
 and one's own deserviugs {Sclnclcsal und eigene Schidd), full of the 
 elements of pity and fear." 
 
 It seems to me that, broadly speaking, Browning's evil men and 
 women belong to a class from which Shakspere's treatment of his lago 
 and his Lear's elder daughters excludes them. That is to say, his 
 villains are not merely actors in a tragic drama, but witliin each of their 
 own existences a soul's tragedy is enacted. They are represented, not 
 as inherently evil, but as having become so, through failure to be other- 
 wise. Our poet sets them in the position of morally responsible beings, 
 whom he makes to incur from us, or from whoever lills the part of 
 Chorus in the drama, not merely abhorrence of their exil, but condemn- 
 ation of their guilt, — a condemnation mingled, it may be, with varying 
 degrees of pity. Inquiry, explicit or implied, is made into the circum- 
 stances of their criminal actions — distinguishing what therein is error 
 ,and what wickedness. 
 
 Granting the existence of this difference bet^veen the treatment of 
 Browning's and Shakspere's villains, which I have here roughly stated, 
 or rather suggested, we may ask ourselves, " Whence does it seem to 
 arise 1" "We may find answer, I think, in observing the difference 
 between the attitudes of mind of the two men towards questions lying 
 outside the range of mimdane experience. 
 
 Shakspere, innately a positivist, can let any phenomenon be to him 
 as an ultimate fact, which he does not care to go beyond. Browning, 
 born a speculator, cannot and will not forgo the attempt to get at what 
 lies behind the -sisible things of the world's order. For the positivist 
 artist, the spectacle of an lago can rest as it is, if only it seem to him a 
 true coimterf eit of nature mirrored in his art. He is under no obligation 
 
ONE ASPECT OF BROWNING'S VILLAINS. 113 
 
 to suggest any future destiny of the monster ; or to ask himself under 
 what law the existence of such is permitted ; or how it is reconciled 
 with other facts terrestrial. 
 
 That this agnostic attitude of Shakspere's mind, content to admit, 
 without questioning, appearances which he received as facts, whether in 
 harmony with or discordant with each other, is an attitude of a peculiar 
 dignity and beauty, moral and artistic, is of course to be fuUy acknow- 
 ledged. But it seems to me to be no less true, that from the opposite 
 tendency in Browning's mind, which precludes him from such an atti- 
 tude of thought, there results one distinct gain to his art, a gain not at 
 all affected by the question as to whether his speculations into matters 
 extra-mundane arrive at facts or fancies. Either way, the result of his 
 attaining by his half-intellectual, half-emotional process to the faith that 
 good wiU be, at the last, the issue of all that we see in the world around 
 us, is, that this creed which (unproven though it be to him) he adopts 
 as a working hypothesis, drives him into a region of deeper, more 
 recondite psychology in his character-drawing. 
 
 In art, as well as iu science, the starting with a hypothesis «and 
 patiently trying whether experience will tally with it, is a method con- 
 ducive to thoroughness of observation, and likely also to lead to 
 unlooked-for gains. 
 
 Bound by theoretical faith to maintain a creed of limitless hope for 
 humanity (which faith finds utterance so exultantly in Abt Vogler's 
 words, and in other poems), and bound at the same time by his habits 
 of shrewd unvisionary insight into matters of fact, to take account of 
 all blemishes and deficiencies in its present aspects. Browning becomes 
 forced into a more thorough analysis of those repulsive appearances, by 
 the necessity to find warrant for the holding of his optimistic beliefs. 
 Iu dealing with the wicked souls in his art-world, he must leave no 
 dark corner of them unsearched out, where, possibly, amongst the motives 
 underlying their action, something might be discovered which could 
 give them a conceivable place in the world of a God, whose "care 
 subsisteth ever," who 
 
 " By God's own ways occult 
 May, doth I will believe, bring back 
 All wanderers to a single track." ' 
 "Whose 
 
 " Mercy every way 
 Is infinite." * 
 
 In this thorough analyzing of evil appearances in humanity, tne two 
 Browning natures, the ethical and the artistic, co-operate. The same 
 
 ' Christmas Eve. ' Eatter Bay. 
 
114 ONE ASPECT OF BROWXING's VILLAINS. 
 
 methods work towards the ends of both. To place the character dealt 
 with in a story in some imagined circumstances which stir it to its 
 foundations, and by some violent disturbances upturn things in it which 
 the ordinary conditions of life leave buried far below the surface ; this 
 method obtains for the Artist the staff which he delights to deal with — 
 staff of psychological phenomena, subtle, rare, and precious ; and for 
 the Thinker, the traces of imdeveloped good, which, however slight, 
 serve in some degree as confirmatory of his creed of hope. 
 
 A former paper of your Society has noted how very remarkably the 
 characteristic of Personality makes itself felt in Browning's dramatic 
 figures. 
 
 That his work as a dramatist does produce this effect on our minds^ 
 seems to me to be due, in a measure, to the prevalence in it of the idea 
 of some indication of good — potential at least — being discoverable in 
 each and all of its dramatic characters, that is, wherever these characters 
 are at all fully portrayed. 
 
 Is it possible for us, with our human faculties, to make re.al to our 
 minds any clear image of Personality wholly dissociated from good? 
 (that is, good, in the sense of some quality either claiming in some way 
 our admiration, or mitigating our aversion). I doubt if ever men have 
 found it so. It is noteworthy, with regard to this point, that the two 
 great poets who have chiefly impressed upon the public imagination 
 their conceptions of the Devil, have been apparently under necessity of 
 choice between giving to their artistic idea of him the attribute of pure 
 evil or the attribute of Personality (by the latter phrase I mean making 
 us feel the character to be an /). 
 
 Milton elected to make his Satan a Being of very marked Person- 
 ality ; the most salient characteristic of him is his seeming an ego to us ; 
 and (what falls in with this theory) Milton did not attempt to make him 
 purely evil to our imagination. His fallen archangel claims some sort of 
 admiration from us by reason of his loftiness and dignity in rebellion. 
 Goethe chose to let Ms Devil be essential evil; and accordingly we 
 find that ]\Iephistopheles is to us an impersonal presence, whose ego we 
 cannot grasp by our imagination ; the very triumph of Goethe's art 
 being of course here, his thus making this manifestation of the Evil- 
 Principle a thing impalpable, and therefore aU the more horrible, as a 
 sort of wind, only to be perceived by its effects. 
 
 A. H. Clough followed on Goethe's lines in the Devil of his poem 
 of Dipsyclius. Byron's " Lucifer " claims kindred with the Satan of the 
 Paradise Lost, in appearing before us with a distinct Personality, and 
 being not without a certain ^tya.\o^^v')^ia (greatness of soul) in his 
 demeanour. 
 
ONE ASPECT OF BROWNING's VILLAINS. 115 
 
 It is not a mere idle speculation to ask oneself, "What would 
 Browning's treatment have been of a character whose external acts 
 should be precisely those of lago 1 " The probability is, that without at 
 all lessening the amount of the active evil in the man, or the terrible 
 efficaciousness of his malice. Browning would have dug and dug into the 
 lower strata of his motives, conscious and unconscious, until, underlying 
 the whole character, something should be got at which could link the 
 apparent fiend on to Humanity, and bring him within the scope of our 
 dramatic sympathy. 
 
 The lago known to us is viewed from wWiout ; and nobody feels as 
 if he were really known to us. Browning could not but have somehow 
 got within him, and have looked from Ids evil soul's stand-point out- 
 wards. And it might be that then this villain's spiritual debasement 
 might be felt by us to be a sadder tragedy than even the ruin wrought 
 by him in the temporal lives of the Moor and Desdemona. 
 
 B. APPLICATION OF THE GENERAL VIEW TO THE PARTICULAR. 
 
 Let us see now if a glance at some few of Mr. Browning's wicked 
 folk may verify, so far as it goes, the foregoing generalization. In a 
 complete survey of his evil characters (which, however, this Paper does 
 not at aU pretend to be) they might be classified thus : — 
 
 1st. Those in whom the actual operation of good overcoming in 
 some manner this or that force of evil in the soul, is made the theme of 
 the narrative (as, for instance, " Halbert and Hob," " l^ed Bratts," &c.). 
 
 Then 2ndly, Those in whom there are shown to us potentialities of 
 good, warped or unused, or only so faintly or transiently in operation 
 as barely to indicate to us their existence. 
 
 And 3rdly, Those in whom we (owing to the character's position 
 amongst the dramatic figures in the poem, or other causes) miss the 
 traces of that care for the destiny of the individual soul which com- 
 monly shows itself in Browning's dealings with it. 
 
 On the confines of these classes would be the mixed multitude of 
 non-criminal characters who are more or less swayed by unworthy 
 motives. 
 
 This classification of course should be looked upon only as arbitrary, 
 for convenience- of one's thinking. In Browning's art-world, as in real 
 life, there are not hard and fast distinctions always traceable between 
 varieties of sinners. 
 
 Concerning the first of these classes, there is small need for much 
 expounding of the ethical significance. On the face of the story it is 
 sufficiently plain for any reader to see-, 
 
 I 2 
 
116 ONE ASPECT OF BROWNINg's VILLAINS. 
 
 Passing on to the second of the classes, we should find there 
 Browning's two principal villains : Count Guido Franceschini of the 
 Ring and the Book, and the devil-like " elder man " of the Inn Album, 
 together with others. 
 
 What position do these here named occupy in the respective poems 
 where we meet with them 1 It is primarily true to say that each of 
 them is the agent through whom the tale becomes a tragedy. Subtract 
 their operation from it, and very smooth and unheroic would be the 
 course of all the other folks' lives therein. Without Guido, Capon- 
 sacchi would have remained to the end the gay, mundane ecclesiastic, 
 undisturbed by thought or emotion ; and Pompilia would have ex- 
 panded from gentle, ignorant girlhood to commonplace womanhood. 
 The parson's beautiful daughter (in the Inn Album) would, without 
 the advent of her seducer, have "vegetated on, lily-like," through 
 some ordinary lot of life, never attaining to the sorrowful grandeur 
 of soul to which the ruin of her peace raised her. But, in the 
 characters of these two workers of evil as presented to us by Browning, 
 is there not significance beyond the actual parts lohich they inlay in the 
 dramas ? Does there not seem to be about them the same sort of 
 inconsistency in evil which we find in veritable human beings ? Does 
 not Browning suggest to us all along that these villains' personality 
 and their wickedness which is made known to us, are not co- 
 extensive. 
 
 I am not disposed to attempt any whitewashing of these very black 
 characters ; it is more to the purpose of anything I have been saying to 
 accept them as intended by the man who created them for types of 
 extreme human depravity. They are not the sort of sinners whom 
 ordinary story- writers would select to invest with moral interest for a 
 reader. There are waverings and balancings in human natures between 
 good and evil of such a kind that the situation is easy enough to enter 
 into by our ethical sympathy when it is presented to us in fiction ; and 
 demands of this sort upon our sympathy are made by writers many of 
 prose and verse. But to put forth demands so facile to respond to is 
 precisely what Browning does not ever care to do. He requires in his 
 readers qualities the same in kind as his own. They must be ready to 
 grapple with not only intellectual difficulties, but with moral. 
 
 Here, in these two characters, he sets before us evil of the most 
 repulsive sort, wholly unadorned by any of the, so to speak, heroic 
 characteristics of crime. Greed of money, cold, deliberate lust, refine- 
 ments in hatred and cruelty towards things weaker in any way than 
 themselves — these are the traits which distinguish them ; the Inn 
 Album scoundrel being, in his Mephistophilean polish and exquisite 
 
ONE ASPECT OF BROWNING's VILLAINS. 117 
 
 sapience in the social world's ways, even more revolting than the rougher 
 Guido Franceschini. 
 
 Truly, if Browning maintains his hopeful theory about humanity, 
 nobody can say that he shirks putting it to a very severe test. The 
 adjective " shallow," which so currently affixes itself now to the noun 
 " optimism," is hardly applicable to the theory as held by the thinker 
 who admits thus the obligation to find room in it for the fact that 
 humanity comprises existences so hateful as these. 
 
 The question cannot be evaded, and he shows no desire to evade it : 
 "Is there in human nature, in these its concrete forms, potentiaKty of 
 final deliverance from the evil in it, given only time enough for the 
 work 1 " To this question his answer is affirmative ; expressed, indeed, 
 in no definite formula, but discoverable in and through his art, if we 
 care to look for it there. 
 
 Do not understand me to view Browning in any way as a doctrinaire 
 writer, using here his poetical work as a vehicle for his particular 
 opinions on eschatology. It goes without saying that it is not the wont 
 of the larger race of dramatists or novelists to make their art serve to 
 "point their moral," after the manner of story-writers in temperance 
 magazines, for instance. But, nevertheless, may not the matter stand 
 thus — that while for each true artist the world, or portion of the world 
 depicted by him in his books, is created for him by the involuntary 
 operation of his genius, that art-world is to himself as the real world, 
 full of problems which he may, if his tendencies so dispose him, set 
 himself to investigate as directly as one would the problems arising out 
 of the facts of real life 1 It is enough to say that Browning, as dramatic 
 artist, creates his mimic world of humanity, and as thinker, analyzes it. 
 We need not try to assign too precise chronological order to the two 
 acts. ISTor need we care to distinguish too rigidly between his art and 
 his thought. 
 
 And what then does Browning say to us about, not Guido's deeds, 
 but Guido's self, — that self which underlies the life 1 He first gives us 
 the various superficial judgments of the character which the different 
 speakers in the poem have from their respective stand-points formed, 
 "Half Eome" pronounces one of these surface judgments ; the " other 
 half Eome " another. " Tertium quid " doesn't get any deeper down. The 
 two lawyers are little concerned with the inner soul of the prisoner for 
 and against whom they are to plead. Caponsacchi sees in Franceschini 
 only the murderer of Pompilia. Pompilia herself, so near to death that 
 she almost counts as one of those who (in Tennyson's phrase) can 
 
 " Look us through and through, 
 With larger other eyes than ours, 
 To make allowance for us all," 
 
118 ONE ASPECT OF BROWNING's VILLAINS. 
 
 she sees in lier hateful husband one whom his mother had loved even as 
 she loves her babe. She looks forward to the possibility of good for 
 him through the touch of " God's shadow," wherein there " is healing." 
 It is the old Pope alone who (as vicegerent of the Searcher of hearts) is 
 represented as penetrating into the dark mine of this human soul, flash- 
 ing into its recesses the lamp of his own living conscience. 
 
 Pope Innocent's utterances are of course dramatic in the first instance. 
 Being the speech of a very old man, they are characterized by that 
 leisurely long-windedness of discourse, that meditative slowness in the 
 wielding of weighty arguments, which (by the way) is the mark of 
 senility by which Browning also characterizes the utterances of the 
 aged St. John in the Death in the Desert. But though thus dramatic, 
 we may take it that Pope Innocent's estimate of the matter represents, 
 on the whole, that view which Browning himself, as a philosophic 
 thinker, accepts, about this Guido Franceschini, whose position in 
 Nature is one of the problems which his " art " has proposed to his 
 " mind " to solve. 
 
 There seems substantial agreement between the Pope's impression of 
 Guide's character and the impression which that character, when 
 judged out of the sinner's own lying mouth, is skilfully so contrived as 
 to make upon us. Guido the Pope views as a being morally respon- 
 sible, who might have been unlike what he now is if he had chosen. 
 His life is termed 
 
 " a man's immense mistake, 
 Who, fashioned to use feet and walk, deigns crawl." 
 
 He is found " reprobate," inasmuch as there had been in his outward 
 condition so much to make goodness easy to him that the feebleness of 
 the moral sense in him when 
 
 " furnished forth for his career 
 When starting for his life-chance in our world," 
 
 was only adjusted fairly, so as to afford him that requisite amount of 
 difficulty in right doing which could constitute it virtue. 
 
 The Pope notes how Guido's probation had been life-long, how oppor- 
 tunities had been open to him of retrieving that immense mistake ; how, 
 even after attempted crime, he might have been " saved so as by fire," 
 could he have known the " mercy of a minute's fiery purge, by the 
 furnace-coals of public scorn and private remorse refining away from his 
 soul its baser part, the alloy of force and guile." Saved thus, or saved 
 not by fire, but by the recognition of Divine Love — at the birth of his 
 infant, Pompilia's son — had he only so chosen. 
 
 To another of these unaocepted opportunities of deliverance from 
 the evil in him, Guido himself adverts (in a very remarkable passage 
 
ONE ASPECT OF BROWNING'S VILLAINS. 119 
 
 occurring in the first of his own monologues). He teUs how there swept 
 over him a strange wave of good impulse when he — after liis journey of 
 murderous intent — arrived at Eome during the festival of the birth of 
 Christ : 
 
 " Festive bells. Everywhere the Feast o' the Babe, 
 Joy upon earth, peace and good will to man ! 
 I am baptized. I started and let drop 
 The dagger. " Where is it, His promised peace ? " 
 Nine days o' the Birth-Feast did I pause and pray 
 To enter into no temptation more. 
 I bore the hateful house, my brother's once. 
 Deserted, — let the ghost of social joy 
 Mock and make mouths at me from empty room 
 And idle door that missed the master's step — 
 Bore the frank wonder of incredulous eyes, 
 As my own people watched without a word, 
 Waited, from where they huddled round the hearth 
 Black like all else, that nod so slow to come — 
 I stopped my ears even to the inner call 
 Of the dread duty, heard only the song 
 " Peace upon earth," saw nothing but the face 
 O' the Holy Infant and the halo there 
 Able to cover yet another face 
 Behind it, Satan's which I else should see." 
 
 In this account of the strange, and to him unwonted, experience 
 that thus visited him, Guido seems to be, for once, speaking direct 
 truth, though so large a proportion of his copious utterances are only the 
 sophistries by which he essays to defend his wretched cause. The 
 tissue of curiously interwoven cowardice and audacious cunning of 
 which the monologue consists is here crossed by a thread of plain truth. 
 His statement here may count as simply historical. 
 
 [This is an instance of the gain which in artistic respects results to 
 Browning's poetical conception of such a character as Guide's, from his 
 acceptance of the necessity to let it rank under a general "working 
 together for good ; " for hereby we find produced by him a character, 
 not a mere piece of mechanism calculated to produce certain evil results 
 in the dramatic story, but an entity whose spiritual incongruities and 
 unexpected turns of disposition make it seem more alive. 
 
 Browning's villains being under the operation of two natures, we 
 cannot calculate beforehand what they will do any more than we can 
 calculate on the course of action of the human beings in real life.] 
 
 For that brief nine days' space only was this evil soul covered by the 
 overwhelming wave of good ; but the fact of its baptism therein remains 
 uneffaceable. There was thereby established as true that there was in 
 the man susceptibility to righteousness, that he was not mere devil or 
 conscienceless brute. 
 
120 ONE ASPECT OF BROWNING'S VILLAINS. 
 
 Let us note here how Bro^vnmg places this transient manifestation 
 of Guido's better self just in the period of time immediately following 
 that at which he had left behind his ordinary mental condition of dull, 
 passionless cruelty, and the sluggishness that sought pleasurable excite- 
 ment in devising ingenious daily tortures for his wife's heart, and had 
 broken out into a mood of violent and murderous anger. The man had 
 " risen up like fire, and fire-like roared," and then in the flame and 
 smoke of this great cloud of wrath and jealousy had journeyed, rushing 
 blindly, Eome-wards. In Browring's view of human nature vehement 
 passion of any sort tends to rouse, in the general whirl and tumult caused 
 by it in a man's consciousness, the dormant forces of good that may be 
 in him, bringing him thus nearer to better possibilities. You remem- 
 ber the passage in the Two Poets of Croisic, where he says his " hope " 
 is "in the vivid Iwrse" rather than " the steer sluggish and safe" ? 
 
 That there icere forces in Guido's nature originally not evil is not 
 belied by the general impression left by the second of his monologues. 
 Notwithstanding all the arrant cowardice and miserable clinging to life 
 shown by a bold sinner at the last extremity, which the Count utters in 
 words ranging through aU varieties of violence and guile till they reach 
 the final shriek of 
 
 "Abate, Cardinal, Christ, Maria, God, . . . 
 Pompilia, will you let them murder me 1 " 
 
 there is yet throughout the earlier portions of his speech evidence dis- 
 cernible of qualities which make it conceivable that this soul, if "remade " 
 by God hereafter, might yet retain its personal identity ; that a residuum 
 of it might, after a3ons of purgatorial influences should have refined 
 away its mass of base material, become the centre of a new and yet con- 
 tinuous self. In the fact that Guido's original vitality and strength 
 have, by the combined action of forces without and within him, sunk 
 under the power of evil so vile, lies the tragic interest of his character. 
 By Browning the tragedy of a human history is viewed as lying in the 
 soul's waste or misuse of opportunities in its probation, long or short 
 earthly life meaning only longer or shorter probation ; all the accidents 
 of the outer condition are only accessory to the interests of moral and 
 spiritual life in each man. 
 
 Guido's earthly life was a total failure. But the Pope, in finally 
 pronouncing on him the doom of death, speaks, not in the spirit of a 
 judge who would banish a felon from the world of the living lest he 
 should do more harm to folks there, but rather in that of a physician, 
 who, seeing that the man's ill is past this world's cure, relegates him to 
 the chances of another condition. 
 
ONE ASPECT OP BROWNING'S VILLAINS. 121 
 
 For him, he says — 
 
 " I have no hope, 
 Except in such a suddenness of fate." 
 
 He speaks here of the moment of his execution : — 
 
 " I stood at Naples once — a night so dark 
 I could have scarce conjectured there was earth 
 Anywhere ; sky or sea or world at all. 
 But the night's black was burst through by a blaze : 
 Thunder struck blow on blow ; earth groaned and bore 
 Through her whole length of mountain visible. 
 There lay the city, thick and white with spires, 
 And like a ghost disshrouded, white the sea. 
 So may the truth be flashed out by one blow, 
 And Guido see one instant and be saved. 
 Else I avert my face, nor follow him 
 Into that sad, obscure, sequestered state 
 Where God unmakes but to remake the soul 
 He else had made in vain — ivhich must not he." 
 
 There is in this passage so much that hardly is needed for the 
 dramatic exigencies of a seventeenth-century Pope, that one cannot but 
 feel that it is the later thinker who approaches the question himself, 
 about one of his representative villains. 
 
 In the hateful " elder man " of the Inn Album there are indications 
 (in some ways more tangible than in Count Guido) of the unused better 
 self. This man has keen intellectual perceptions of moral distinctions ; 
 he nowhere calls evil good. He has subtle discernment of the quality 
 of the earthly blessings he has forfeited. Just herein does the tragedy 
 of his life lie ; in his clear vision of the heaven of noble human love, 
 between which and himself a great gulf has, by his own act, been set. 
 His heart has become bound in coils and coils of guileful motives, 
 yet it asserts itseK in a direct sincerity for once, when he says, in 
 reverting to that moment of his past experience, when a flash of humaa 
 passion revealed truth to him, — when, 
 
 "Either I lost — or, if it please you, found 
 My senses — 
 
 I see. Slowly, surely creeps, 
 Day by day, o'er me the conviction — here 
 Was life's prize grasped at, gained, and then let go. 
 That with her, maybe for her, I had felt 
 Ice in me melt, grow stream, drive to effect 
 Any or all of the fancies sluggish here 
 I' the head that needs the hand she would not take, 
 And I shall never lift now." 
 If e sees 
 
 " Her visionary presence on each goal 
 I might have gained had we kept side by side." 
 
122 ONE ASPECT OF BROWNINO's VILLAINS. 
 
 And later on, the passionate appeal to the woman from whose love 
 he had shut himself out by his grievous wronging of her, has a strange 
 sort of p»t;hos hy reason of its being prompted by complicated impulses 
 of a twofold nature, only one part base. We, the readers, are given 
 insight into the half-genuineness of his transient feeling; while she, his 
 former victim, is seen by us as discerning in his entreaty only the latest 
 device of his guile. She does not perceive that this appeal made thus 
 to her by the world-hardened man is not wholly the utterance of a mere 
 lustful desire to lure her to a life of sin with him, but is in some 
 measure also the last despairing gasp after a heaven of good made by a 
 soul as it sinks down into an earthly hell of vUeness. She is, in his eyes, 
 symbol of the better life that he might have attained to, and has missed. 
 
 That he is still capable of thus feeling, — that, even perverted, the 
 desire of self-surrender to a nature which has seemed to him to represent 
 what is " highest and best and most real," finds even a temporary place 
 in his heart, is an evidence of his being not wholly dead in sin. 
 
 There is true tragedy here in the antitliesis of the man's passionate 
 mood (a mood in him so rare, so transient), over against the steady 
 uniform cynicism and malice that have grown to be habitual with him. 
 
 Perhaps nothing elsewhere in Browning's poetry surpasses in artistic 
 effect his representation here of rapid transition from one mood to its 
 opposite. "We feel as if we had witnessed a burst of sun-warmth iind 
 its way for an instant through enveloping clouds, only to be caught back 
 into them again. 
 
 One aspect of Browning's villains is all that we are now considering. 
 I need hardly say that though classed together under this aspect, the 
 two dramatis 2)ersonce of which we have just spoken have little in their 
 whole complexion in common. One broad distinction between them is 
 this, that while Count Guido is represented as singularly devoid of wit 
 or humour of any sort (the solemn seriousness of his cunning being 
 never relieved by any play of double consciousness), the acute old rascal 
 of the Inn Album, on the other hand, is thoroughly alive to a sense of 
 the ludicrous. The devil that inspires him is " der Schalk," Mephis- 
 topheles. We see him finding a source of exquisite amusement in the 
 wielding of his power over his simple-minded comrade, and amusement 
 too in his cynical self-analysis. 
 
 Let me note here the fact that the Ring and the Book contains two 
 other wretches, yea three, besides Count Guido (his brothers Paolo 
 and Girolamo, and the Archbishop), of whose individual souls Browning 
 takes no account. 1 do not, however, tlxink that by this fact anything 
 we have said here is at all invalidated. These other villains are not 
 brought amongst the actors in the drama, they never speak in propria 
 
ONE ASPECT OF BKOWNIN'G's VILLAINS. 123 
 
 jpersond. We are not supposed to come directly into contact with them 
 in imagination. They are, as it were, " out of focus " in the group ; and 
 it would distort the proportion of the picture, and be incorrect as art, to 
 in any way engage too definitely the attention of the reader on their 
 personality and the problems relating thereto. Browning is thoroughly 
 a painter, and never for ethical purposes breaks through the rules of his 
 art. To remember this explains a good many apparent inconsistencies 
 in his poetry. 
 
 Using the word " villains " to mean the human evil agents in 
 a story, tAvo noticeably come before our view in the diorama of Pippa 
 
 The ceaseless antagonism going on between forces of good and evU 
 in IS'ature, is in none of Browning's poems more strongly set forth than 
 in this : the girl Pippa being for the time the unconscious, or only very 
 dimly conscious, medium through which the good force in the world — 
 the " not -ourselves -that makes- for -Eighteousness" — acts, and the 
 antitheses to her, being the human agents who energize on the side of 
 " der Kraft die sfets das Base tcill," in tempting their fellow-men to 
 evil. These latter are prominently here, " Ottima " and the " Intendant " 
 of the Bishop, Uguccio Stefano. 
 
 It is noteworthy concerning one of these, how Mr. Browning 
 achieves by one line of verse — some five or six words in it — the 
 investing with a spiritual interest for us a dramatic figure which other- 
 wise would stand only as a type of morally loathsome corporeal beauty — 
 Ottima, the " great white queen : magnificent in sin," in whose " great 
 round full-orbed face not an angle broke the delicious indolence." 
 In her, even, we are bidden to discern a significance of character beyond 
 what belongs to her actual deeds. Browning indicates in her the un- 
 limitedness of a human personality. Temptress of her weaker paramour, 
 whom her hot sensualitj'- has dragged Avith herself into foul murder, made 
 still fouler by ingratitude, she has, nevertheless, potentialities not included 
 in this sequence of criminal acts. We are shown a germ of good in her, 
 which might conceivably grow to cast out the mass of crael-heartedness 
 and impurity. We see how in her, just at the moment of death, passion 
 liberates itself from its baser elements of selfishness. Though she has 
 become instinctively aware that she herself has nothing more to gain from 
 Sebald, whom the sounds of Pippa's pure voice (singing as she passes of 
 "God in His heaven") have suddenly fiUed with loathing for his sin, 
 and for her who sinned with him, yet in this supreme crisis of her life's 
 probation Ottima's feeling leaps for one moment to the height of 
 a self-abnegating love. The egoistic and sensual elements in her passion 
 are left behind ; it attains the womanliness that " means only mother- 
 
124 ONE ASPECT OF BROWNlNO's VILLAINS. 
 
 hood." She utters the " Not me — to him, God, be merciful J " She 
 desires to shield liis life with hers. She -would take upon herself alone 
 God's punishment of their joint guilt, if only so Sebald might escape it. 
 This is one of the most striking passages where Browning's ethics and 
 art join. For his pictorial effects he depends very much on his 
 arrangements of contrasts of light and shade; and here the moral 
 darkness of the rest of the picture is deepened to us by the introduction 
 of this single streak of moral light across one part of the canvas. It 
 is as a bit of Eembrandt. How characteristic, too, of Browning is his 
 thus making passion seem to purify itself by its very intensity ! 
 
 An exception to the rule that Browning finds a soul of good in 
 things evil, apparently presents itself in the Intendant with whom we 
 find the Bishop in discourse in Scene iv. of Pippa Passes. 
 
 In all that we are shown of him, there seems no redeeming trait of 
 humanity. When he himself suggests to " Monsignor " the two possible 
 reasons, either of which may have induced him to spare the life of the 
 infant whom he had been engaged to murder by the brother of the 
 prelate, — the "either the child smiles in his face, or most likely he is 
 not fool enough to put himself in the employer's power so thoroughly. 
 The child is always ready to produce, as you say, howsoever, whenso- 
 ever," — we feel perfectly in agreement with him as to the second reason 
 being the more lihely one (even though the villain's immediate motive 
 for saying so is his desire to frighten the Bishop out of any disposition 
 to bring his evil deeds to justice). " I always intended to make your life 
 a plague to you with her," — so he says, and so the truth of the matter lay. 
 And now that he sees that it is all up with the game he had been 
 plajdng, there is not a particle of human mercy in his mood, when, as his 
 last chance of getting out of the business with his life whole, and some 
 of his ill-gotten gains into the bargain, he makes his vile proposal to the 
 Bishop, of " making away " with the girl for him by a method which is 
 "not the stupid, obvious kind of killing." 
 
 Must we say that Browning's representation of this character is out 
 of keeping with the general scope of his teaching? I do not think 
 it appears so, when we accept this scene in the poem, not as a dramatic 
 portraiture of two characters, but as a " study " of a phase of temptation 
 presented to a soul, and its deliverance therefrom. The emphasized 
 point in the story is not, who and what the tempter was, but what sort 
 of offer did he make to the person who underwent the probation ; and 
 how did that person fare under the trial 1 
 
 To the temptation to a dastardly acquiescence in the villainy of the 
 Intendant Maffeo, the Bishop is just on the point of yielding, when he 
 is suddenly caught back by a force of good that acts upon him through 
 
ONE ASPECT OF BROWNING S VILLAINS. 125 
 
 the clear, fresh sounds of Pippa's singing as she goes by ; and this gives 
 him courage to bring the villain to justice, regardless of consequences to 
 himself. It is on the personality of the Bishop that attention is 
 directed in this group. As to what a more direct view of the odious 
 Intendant's individual character might reveal to us, remains an open 
 question, which Browning chooses to leave so. 
 
 The vagabond Bluphocks is shown to us rather as a tool in the 
 hands of a wicked man, than as a villain prompted by any evil motives 
 of his own. "No moral sense in him appears to be awake. The broad 
 fact of this world being patent before him, that the sun does " rise on 
 the evil and the good, and the rain faU on the just and the unjust," 
 he feels no need to concern himself with any differences between them. 
 Knocking about in the world, he must make a livelihood somehow ; he 
 is as uJimoTal as a professional London thief might be. His pocket-full 
 of zwanzigers, the payment given by the Intendant of the Bishop for 
 the innocent Pippa's intended ruin, are to Bluphocks not the price of 
 blood, but simply zwanzigers, — coins which will keep him afloat and in 
 the ease of carelessness as long as they last ; and then some other like 
 bit of lucky chance may come to him. 
 
 There are some of Mr. Browning's pictures of evil that explain 
 themselves to us better if accepted as mere studies of this or that atti- 
 tude of feeling rather than as portraits of character. To seek in these 
 for any traces of good in evil would be not to the point. 
 
 An instance of this is the highly-finished study of one phase of 
 human hatred — the hatred felt not for any definite injury done, but on 
 account of the groundless antipathy (of which probably most people 
 have had some slight experience), intensified by the compulsory com- 
 radeship in the oppressive monotony of the conventual life. I refer of 
 course to the soliloquy of that Spanish monk who is shown to us as 
 looking on with a hideous snarl of "g-r-r-r !" at the inoffensive garden- 
 ing operations of the obnoxious "Brother Lawrence," whose melon- 
 flowers of the "fruit-sort" he had been at the trouble to "keep close 
 nipped on the sly." 
 
 Here we have simply a study of a morbid mental condition, result- 
 ing from the unhealthy inactivity of the cloister routine; and as to 
 what the real nature of this very unamiable monk would have been 
 had his energies found legitimate scope in the outer world. Browning 
 does not, of course, undertake to say. Probably, since his cloistered 
 feelings were anything but languid, even in the midst of the sluggishly- 
 peaceful influences surrounding him, there may have been in him a 
 good deal of force of character, which he might have turned to better 
 account under luckier circumstances. 
 
126 ONE ASPECT OP BROWNIXG's VILLAINS. 
 
 Let us accept the picture as we find it. 
 
 Of other studies of evil attitudes of feeling which Browning has 
 given us, we may say the like — that as they are not representations of 
 a character, but of one mental attitude of human feeling, they are not 
 contradictory (though of course not directly confirmatory) of his faith 
 in human possibilities. But of these time does not now allow examina- 
 tion. As studies of criminal act not prompted by criminal motive, but 
 by some curious twist in the conscience and instincts, we might select 
 the pictures of two murderers, Poiyliyrias lover, and the husband in 
 A Forgiveness; the first of these pictures containing only the single 
 feeling in which the deed originated ; the other tracing, through a com- 
 plex history of mental condition, the conscience's reasons for the act of 
 bloodshed. 
 
 One character we do find in his books which cannot be made to fit 
 in with his creed of universal hope — the mother in Ivan Ivanovitch. 
 She is perhaps Browning's solitary unredeemable human being. There 
 is discernible in her no soul which could be cleansed from guilt by any 
 purgatorial process — no passion which might be transmuted from force 
 of evil to force of good. To such a creature Ivan's axe brings simple 
 annihilation ; nothing of her survives to be consigned to future reclaim- 
 ing discipline. Her fault had not been moral, had not been sin, to be 
 punished by pain inflicted on the soul ; it was merely the uncounteracted 
 primary instinct of self-preservation, and as such it is fitliest dealt with 
 by the simple depriving her, without further penalty, of the very life 
 which she had secured for herself at so horrible a cost. It is not as if 
 any mother-instinct in her had striven with the self-preserving instinct, 
 and had been overborne by it in a moment of frenzied fear. No ; no 
 revulsion of impulse occurs when she arrives alone at the village ; no 
 wish that she had been sacrificed for her children, or that she had 
 shared their fate. In the complacent sense of peace and satisfaction 
 with which she views her own sole and single safety, what hope is there 
 of any regeneration for her, by any conceivable process 1 The impres- 
 sion left with us at the last is, that this thing in the semblance of 
 woman is a bit of creation lower in the scale of existence than the 
 brutes, and has no lot or part in the destiny of humanity. "We are 
 satisfied to think that the headless body and severed head are all that 
 remain of "Louscha" when the strong-armed carpenter has dealt his 
 righteous blow. And we feel that the dramatist is content thus to 
 leave her. 
 
 I reserve for the last of Browning's dramatic figures at which time 
 now allows us to look, the " Chiappino " (unstable, rather than actively 
 bad man), of whose life the poetry and prose is set forth in A Soul's 
 
ONE ASPECT OF BROWNING'S VILLAINS. 127 
 
 Tragedy ; because that poem contains one passage which seems to 
 strike the keynote of all Browning's thought about, and artistic dealings 
 with, his sinful characters. 
 
 " I judge people hy what they might he, not hy ivhat they are, nor 
 loill he," the Papal legate says in a speech in which his tone, playfully 
 ironical on the surface, is grave with meaning underneath. What he 
 there says is directly regarding the individual character of Chiappino. 
 (You reraember, of course, how there is one noble moment in his life, 
 when he constrains his friend Luitolfo to escape in the disguise of his 
 garments, and remains in his stead to meet well-nigh certain death, 
 rewarded by Eulalia's approval ; and how there comes afterwards a 
 falling away from this altitude into a range of base motives and acts.) 
 
 " Judge of men by their profession, for though the bright moment of 
 promising is but a moment, and cannot be prolonged, yet if sincere in 
 its moment's extravagant goodness, why, trust and know the man by it, 
 I say, not hy his performance, which is half the world's work, interfere 
 as the world needs must with its accidents and circumstances. The 
 profession was purely the man's own. / judge people hy ivhat they 
 might he, not are, nor will he." 
 
 Judgment, the same in 7ci7id, extends to other characters (in Brown- 
 ing's view) in whom evil is more pronounced than it is in poor Chiappino. 
 Even with regard to the worst, he holds that 
 " Not on the vulgar mass 
 Called ' work ' must sentence pass," 
 but on 
 
 " All instincts immature, 
 All purposes unsure, 
 That weighed not as his ' work,' yet swelled the man s account. 
 
 All [they] covld never be, 
 This they mere worth to God." ' 
 
 C. EPILOGUE. 
 
 Objection may very possibly be felt to the attempt made in thi 
 Paper to make certain things in Browning's poetry square with each 
 other. It may be asked. Why need we try to reconcile the philo- 
 sophic and moral doctrines of the one part of his work with the 
 purely artistic part, the portraits of human character, which we meet 
 with elsewhere in it 1 Why cannot we leave him a poet's privilege of 
 inconsistency 1 If each of his utterances seem to us to manifest some 
 quality of beauty or interest, may we not be content to accept each as 
 the natural outgoing of one mood or another, and to find its justification 
 in its truthful expression of that particular mood 1 
 ' liahbi Ben Ezra. 
 
128 ONE ASPECT OF BROWNING S VILLAINS. 
 
 To tliis one can only reply, that this privilege of inconsistency in 
 their writings seems to be only the right of the lesser order of poets, 
 those in whom their receptivity (being greater than their original force) 
 brings them by turns under the various surrounding influences. For 
 such it is allowable to record accurately, with whatever beauty of 
 expression may be, the variations of their mental conditions. Let, 
 to-day, optimistic views of life, individual and collective, prevail with 
 them over other theories ; let pessimistic be uppermost to-morrow (the 
 all-important change of philosophic creed being possibly due to some 
 change in the w^eather, or to some small occurrence in their private mental 
 history). The more of these inconsistencies there are to be found in 
 their work, the better ; for on this variegatedness does the charm of their 
 poetry depend. That there is, in the poetry of moods unfettered by any 
 consistency of purpose, a peculiar charm, is undoubted ; but it is a 
 grace of art which no real student of Browning's poetry would desire 
 to claim for it. IVIr. E. H. Hutton says, "Browning has no moods." 
 If I recollect rightly what he says in an essay of his, which I have not 
 read for many years, he speaks of this as if it were a defect. The state- 
 ment itself I accept as quite true ; but I cannot find therein any indi- 
 cation of inferiority to the mood-poets, but rather an indication of 
 attainment in a branch of art distinct from theirs, and, shall we not say, 
 higher ? I prefer looking upon Eobert Browning not as the maker of 
 a number of poems which we may criticize separately, taking for our 
 approval whatever suits our fancy ; but rather as the maker of a poem 
 (extending from Pauline to the Jocoseria ^''olume) in which the com- 
 ponent parts all viust bear relation to each other; any want of agreement 
 between the parts being destructive of the significance of the whole. I 
 look upon him as an architect, designer of a building which in its 
 purpose is an ideal philosophy of the Good and Beautiful : in which " evil 
 is null, is nought, is silence implying sound ; " and it seems to me that if 
 we are to approve the plan of the architect, we must, in our mind's eye, 
 bring together all the parts of the building, comparing one with another, 
 in order to find that they do really support each other. In Browning's 
 architecture the first patent fact is, that it follows the law of variety. A 
 longer acquaintance with it shows us that it is also obedient to the law 
 of unity ; just as at first sight the law of variety seems to prevail in a 
 Gothic cathedral, in which all the while the law of unity is really 
 operant, all the parts of the building having reference to and converging 
 towards the altar, and so forming a whole. And the unity of the 
 structure is not at all destroyed by the fact that in the different parts 
 of the whole, which are the accretions of centuries, there are manifold 
 varieties of material and of workmanship. 
 
ONE ASPECT OP BROWNING's VILLAINS. 129 
 
 In that queer jingle of rhyme with which Browning concludes his 
 latest volume, he insists on the unity of his life-work. He savs that 
 " darkling I heep my sunrise aim ; " and implies, moreover, in the " I 
 look to my ways" that there is a dominant purpose extending 
 through the whole course of his art. 
 
 Because of this imity of Browning's ethical purpose throughout his 
 score (and more !) of volumes (whose extent has become so incon- 
 veniently long on one's book-shelves), I have not thought that there 
 would be any gain in arranging in chronological order his portraits of 
 character which we have glanced at this evening, — though in some 
 aspects of his poetry one must pay attention to tho dates of the writings. 
 
 With regard to his thought and theories of life, it is true, indeed, 
 that the supernatural optimism which his earlier books affirmed with the 
 ease of confident assurance, is maintained in some of the later, e. g. 
 La Saisiaz, with the effort of militant faith ; nevertheless, it is on that 
 theory that the poetry of his poems rests. With Mr. Browning's per- 
 sonal beliefs let no critic meddle, of course : but the working-hypothesis 
 of his art seems to be certain notions of good and evil, — the same 
 through the five decades of his literary work. 
 
 If I have suggested to any Browning-student a further examination 
 than I have been here able to attempt of those apparent anomalies in 
 his wiitiags, which to my mind do seem to resolve themselves into 
 law, I shall have done what I aimed at doing in this Paper. In aU 
 literary criticism, even true views of one aspect of a writer's work 
 require the corrective of counterpart views of truth. 
 
 E. D. W. 
 
 April 17 th. 
 
130 
 
 JAMES lEE'S WIFE. 
 
 By Kev. J. H. BULKELET. 
 {Bead, at the \Uh Meeting of the Browning Society, Friday, May 25, 1883.) 
 
 Let me be a little personal in my preface. I remember well one 
 bright Sunday morning, in Cambridge, in 1864, wliich I and a friend 
 spent in reading Dramatis PersoncB under an old mulberry-tree in 
 Queen's College garden, and from that time until last year I had 
 supposed that James Lee was stUl in existence, and was surprised to 
 find, when the printed list of lecture subjects was issued, that I had 
 unconsciously undertaken to write a paper on a poem called James 
 Lee's Wife. As a Browningite conservative, 1 protest against the 
 change of title and the addition to the poem. As Shakspere's Julius 
 Ccesar does not go by the name of those who conspired against him, but 
 the central personage, though we see very little of him, is allowed 
 rightly to give his name to the drama, because the characteristic action 
 of others centres in him ; as Maud is not called ' Maud's Lover ' ; or, to 
 bring an illustration from stUl nearer home, as Pauline is not called 
 ' Pauline's Lover,' so, it seems to me, there was no sufficient reason for 
 changing the title of this poem. The former title was as good, perhaps 
 better. 
 
 There are some alterations in punctuation in the edition of 1872, but 
 with, perhaps, the exception of the pronoun adjective relating to God, 
 in the line 
 
 " God does, endure his act," 
 
 having a small instead of a capital initial letter, and of the word' Love,' 
 
 in the line. 
 
 " Oh Love, Love, no, Love 1 not so indeed ! " 
 
 being spelt with a capital instead of a small I, the only alteration of real 
 importance is the long addition to the sixth poem, by which, according to 
 a recent critic,* " its difficulty is complicated." At any rate, this addition, 
 
 1 The Kev. H. C. Beeching, in Modern Tlwught, Nov. 1882. 
 
REV. H. J. BULKELET OX " JAMES LEE's WIFE." 131 
 
 made, or certainly published, eight years after the original publication, 
 seems to me, in its abruptness, its argumentativeness, and its com- 
 parative roughness of versification, to be out of keeping with the rest of 
 the special poem. It was written in another mood, and probably was 
 occasioned not by the flow of the thought, but by the supposed duty 
 of making things clearer to the British public. 
 
 No doubt it is right that badly-turned verses should sometimes be 
 rehammered on the anvil, that obscure poems should be made clearer, if 
 this can be done without sacrifice of their first tone, of their original 
 thought. But here the case is different. Here hammer and anvil have 
 been used not to alter what was there at first, but to weld on to it some- 
 thing of difi'erent metal, of almost incongruous workmanship. However, 
 we must with all loyalty, but a little grumbling, take the poem as it is. 
 
 James Lee!s Wife describes, not in detail, but by lyrical flashes, an 
 unhappy married life, as far as it has its efi'ect on the mood, and at last 
 on the critical conduct, of the wife. The husband we are meant to know 
 very little about, and we do not wish to know any more. He was not a 
 saint, and Miss West would not have included him among her villains. 
 He was no Tito, not even a drunkard, as far as we are told, like poor 
 Agnes Bronte's copy of her brother ; and, on the other hand, he was no 
 selfish pedant like Dorothea's infatuated choice, no absorbed genius like 
 • — the popular idea of Thomas Carlyle. What, then, made their married 
 life so out of joint, that ' On Deck ' came to be the end of it % For one 
 thing, lack or decay of beauty in the wife, but, for the most part, just 
 incompatibility of temperament, of character, of aim — what in John 
 Milton's divorce court would have given " ample room and verge 
 enough " for an absolute divorce or a prudent separation. 
 
 She was a poet, an artist, fond of reveries, fancies, feelings ; liking 
 the idea of love in a cottage ; wishing to give and to receive endear- 
 ments of devotion. Now he would have told you that he was not •'' one 
 of that sort." So far from the wind or Leonardo da Vinci having said 
 what some poet or his wife made them say, he did not believe one 
 word of it, indeed he was quite sure that the wind never spoke at all. 
 As Lady Scott is once said to have remarked to Sir Walter, when he was 
 expressing his admiration of a flock of sheep in a picturesque position, 
 that she always liked them best at dinner, so James Lee had no sym- 
 pathy with his wife's poetic tendencies, and, no doubt, showed his 
 growing dislike of being cooped up with her, in cold weather, in a 
 foreign country, in a house of four rooms. She took her pleasure in 
 copying casts and writing verses on the sea-shore. He took his in some 
 other way. And to a great extent, in consequence of this, and because 
 it was not in him, he could not lavish endearments on her, and her 
 
 K 2 
 
132 REV. H. J, BULKELEY ON " JAMES LEES WIFE. 
 
 watchmg and waiting, and beseeching piteous looks, very naturally 
 "turns now to a fault," And so the little domestic tragedy drew to 
 its fated close, more real and pathetic than if it had been terminated by 
 the dagger or the poisoned cup. 
 
 Lessons of endurance, of resignation and hope, from art, nature, 
 philosophy, and religion, if received into the soil of her thought, were 
 either not assimilated, or took their bent of sudden growth from her 
 characteristic tendencies. She found the situation impossible. She 
 knew, or fancied, that he no longer loved her at all, if indeed he had 
 ever loved her, had ever gone beyond wishing her to love him. 
 
 Without abandoning the broad shadow of a hope that somehow, 
 somewhere, Love might make him hers, as she was still wholly his, she 
 leaves him, and finds her life's work in some other sphere. She had 
 painfully felt and experienced what the old rabbi in JocoseHa had dis- 
 covered from his three months' dream of amatory experiment. 
 
 " Before me stood the phantasy ye style 
 
 Youth's love, the joy that shall not come to grief, 
 Borne to endure, eternal, unimpaired 
 By custom the accloyer, time the thief. 
 
 But now the dream 
 Fresh as from Paradise, alighting fared 
 
 As fares the pigeon, finding what may seem 
 Her nest's safe hollow holds a snake inside 
 
 Coiled to enclasp her. " 
 
 Let us now go through the series of poems somewhat in detail, 
 noticing their general connection, their special meaning, and, should it 
 be needed, their special difficulties. 
 
 AT THE WINDOW. 
 
 The wife, like Sisera's mother, is anxiously looking out of the 
 window for her husband, though James Lee was no Sisera. One day's 
 absence from him has caused the world to change. Will he change too ] 
 So the note of coming disaster is sharply struck, but is lost at once in 
 the rapture of approaching joy. 
 
 BY THE FIRESIDE. 
 
 The reunion has not realized her hopes, and as they sit together 
 by the fireside near some " bitter coast of France," she notes how the fire 
 is of " shipwreck wood," and this is to her an omen of the possible ship- 
 wreck of their married life. The sailors on the stormy sea may envy 
 the light and comfort of their home fire, but hearts at home may be 
 gnawed by worms and run to dust. She shudders as she imagines 
 
REV. H. J. BULKELEY ON " JAMES LEE's WIFE." 133 
 
 some "wife who once watched her husoand in that very house, and found 
 — oh, hell of ruin — that his love had gone. 
 
 The difference between the tone of these poems is very great indeed. 
 What time — probably not long — has elapsed we do not know, or what 
 special incidents. Much is left to the individual imagination. Personal 
 absence, even very temporary, with the consequent sharply-cut presence, 
 is often of great advantage in searching out the hearts. But the impres- 
 sion on the wife, thus expressed, is unmistakable. The bright allegro, 
 with scarce a note of doubt, has passed into this slow broken movement 
 of " doubt, hesitation, and pain." ^ The tragic mask is on. She may 
 struggle as she vnll. Facilis descensus Averni. "We know that the worst 
 must come. 
 
 IN THE DOORWAT. 
 
 She had looked for him from the window of their home. They had 
 sat by the fireside together. !N'ow she stands in the doorway and looks 
 back on him. Once more, in reality or fancy, lie will be by her side, no 
 more at home, but on the wild sea-shore ; and thence we are never to 
 think of them as again together in heart or thought, except perhaps in 
 the future of a quenchless hope. Now we find her in no brighter mood. 
 The swallows will soon be flown. The sea, the fig-tree, the vine, every- 
 thing is stricken with the coming winter. She feels a more chilling 
 winter in her own heart, turns her back on the too sympathetic land- 
 scape, and mentally expostulates with her husband. Is there no room for 
 love in their little house, their little barren field 1 Must they allow the 
 weather to dominate their hearts ? I^ay, God's spirit is in them, which 
 can make a happy world for itself. 
 
 " Then live and love worthily, bear and be bold." 
 
 ALONG THE BEACH. 
 
 It is of no use. *' There is a rapture on the lonely shore," but not 
 for her. Her thought is entirely introspective. Perhaps her husband 
 is smoking by her side, inwardly or outwardly cursing her sullen mood j 
 perhaps he has just left her, having " been lectured and blubbered over," 
 as he would describe it. At any rate this is not spoken to him face to 
 face ; all these poems are soliloquies, l^ow she had loved him, and loves 
 him stiU, not because he was great, or greatly good, though there was 
 a " little good grain too," but because she — loved him.^ 
 
 1 The Lost Leader. 
 
 2 " Do I wrong your weakness and call it worth ? 
 Oh, Love, Love, Love, not so indeed." 
 
 The appeal, the small ' 1 ' being changed to a capital, is to the principle of 
 love personified, not to James Lee himself, as might have been meant in the poem 
 as first published. 
 
134 REV. H. J. BULKEL£r ON " JA1IE3 LEE's WIFE." 
 
 How did such a "woman come to love such a maa 1 It is the old 
 question. 
 
 " Tell me, where is Fancy bred, 
 In the heart or in the head, 
 "Where begot, where nourished ? " 
 
 Xo, "we cannot give a round answer, motives and characters are so 
 varied ; but that women of poetry and sentiment have lavished and do 
 lavish their effluence of affection and passion on rcien with spiritual 
 qualities very inferior to theirs, this no one wdl deny. She had devoted 
 herself to him, very naturally to his weaknesses as well as to his good 
 points, 
 
 " His flowers to praise, or his weeds to blame, 
 But, either or both, to love." 
 
 But he had resented her watching, her educating, her critical expecta- 
 tions of the good that she hoped would come at last, when 
 
 •'' rivers of oil and wine 
 Would flow, as the Book assures." 
 
 He did not like this spying sort of love, as Byron did not like Lady 
 Byron setting herself the task of making him better. In spite of her 
 disappointment, she cannot help recognizing this working out of events 
 as " an old story," and bitterly she thinks how the world may turn such 
 an experience into a song about love, such as her husband's, flying away 
 because the suspicion of his being bound to her by marriage, or her 
 watching, cuts across his pride or liberty. Let him and the world with 
 him find their pleasure in one mere laughing eye after another. Why 
 should thefj look beyond, into the heart ? 
 
 OS THE CLIFF. 
 
 It is a relief to find her again gazing on the outside world. She 
 has thrown herself down on the turf, aU the greenness of it dried up by 
 the summer sun, and, as she looks towards the sea, her eyes rest on a 
 barren rock. In her pessimist mood she relishes the dreariness of the 
 barren turf and still more barren rock, 
 
 " Death's altar by the lone shore," 
 
 for they speak to her of herself, and of her husband's want of love. But 
 a bright, living grasshopper springs up from the dead grass, a butterfly 
 settles on the rock. 
 
 "No turf, no rock, in their ugly stead, 
 See, wonderful blue and red." 
 
REV. H. J. BULKELEY ON " JAMES LEe's WIFE." 135 
 
 Her soul receives a momentary ray of brightness. The minds of men, 
 such as her husband, may be " level and low, burnt and bare," but 
 love such as hers can surely beautify even them ! 
 
 READING A BOOK, UNDER THE CLIFF. 
 
 We know that the " some young man " of verse seven is Browning 
 himself, that he published the first six verses when he was twenty-six 
 years of age. They seem to me very beautiful. It is true that their flowv 
 and pathos is not in close keeping with the rest of this section, but they 
 are read from a book, and the feeling of discrepancy is thus obviated. 
 
 James Lee's wife has taken to reading to help her in her trouble, 
 and she comes across this passage in which the young poet apostrophizes 
 the wind, — in his next poem it may be the sea or the moon, — asking 
 whether it were expressing deep feeling, such as 
 
 " Love at last aware 
 Of scorn, hopes early blighted," 
 
 or just mocking human sighs, or suggesting a wishfulness to help 
 humanity, centred in him, the poet. 
 
 She shuts the book in disgust. Here is this imaginative, conceited 
 young man amusing himself by fancying what the wind says to liivi 
 — to him so certain of all he is, and is to be. He can weU afford to 
 make the wind say what he likes. But let him wait until he has grown 
 older and looked the facts of life in the face — 
 
 " And some midsummer morning, at the lull 
 
 Just about daybreak, as he looks across 
 A sparkling foreign country, wonderful 
 
 To the sea's edge for gloom and gloss, 
 Next minute must annul." 
 
 (It is in the morning as it is in the evening, 
 
 " For note, when evening shuts, 
 
 A certain moment cuts 
 The dead off, calls the glory from the grey." i) 
 
 " Then, when the wind begins among the vines, 
 So low, so low, what shall it mean but this ? 
 
 Here is the change beginning, here the lines 
 Circumscribe beauty, set to bliss 
 
 The limit time assigns." 
 
 Change, change, that is what the wind says. We cannot 
 
 " draw one beauty into our heart's core 
 And keep it changeless." 
 
 ^ Rabbi Ben Ezra. 
 
136 REV. H. J. BULKELET ON " JAMES LEES WIFE." 
 
 Then rejoice in change, rise in it. Perhaps it is God's way of edu- 
 cating us. That is all very well for God. He does not grow old or ugly, 
 He can afford to wait. " Only for man," only for James Lee's wife, 
 idealizing the last of " that little good grain too," 
 
 "Only for man, how bitter not to grave 
 On his soul's hands' palms ^ one fair good wise thing 
 Just as he grasped it." 
 
 AMONG THE ROCKS. 
 
 Again she turns to the shore, whence she had got more comfort, if 
 less teaching, than books had given her, and it does not fail her. What 
 great artist of, if harmonized, pagan and Christian sentiment will make this 
 poem into a picture for us 1 But he will make us laugh if he does not 
 do it very well. The old giant Earth lies on the sea-shore, and thrusts 
 out his rocky knees and feet. ]Mere brown old earth he may be, but he 
 smiles, for he knows that he is made beautiful by the rippling of the 
 tide on his feet, and at his ear the sea-lark twittering as she rests on one 
 of his own heaps of rough stones. Life is such, and always has been. 
 An easy love for an easy love gives and gets a satisfaction, but not the 
 eternal life. By self-denial, by reverent service for what is earth, you 
 give and also gain heaven. 
 
 '•■ He who loseth his life shall gain it" 
 
 BESIDE THE DRAWING BOARD. 
 
 The first four poems are, to some extent, mentally addressed to her 
 husband. Li the next four she does not speak to him, not directly of 
 him. She argues more abstractedly. The agony is not less deep, but 
 the personal thought is more restful, more reserved, steadying itself for 
 the great leap. It is not until she has left him that she returns to the 
 direct address. The weather is getting colder, her husband is off for the 
 day, and perhaps longer, to the nearest watering-place. "We find her 
 alone at her drawing, her and a peasant girl, who has come to sit as a 
 model. But she has a cast of a hand by Leonardo da Vinci, and so turns 
 from the coarse hand of flesh and blood, and instead copies the cast, in 
 her passionate longing for perfection, 
 
 " Laying the red chalk twixt my lips," 
 and so, 
 
 " With soul to help, if the mere lips failed, 
 
 Kissing out the lines of perfect beauty." 
 " As like as a Hand to another Hand." 
 
 1 Here, of course, there is an allusion to palmistry. 
 
REV. H. J. BULKELET ON " JAMES LEE'S WIFE." 137 
 
 How foolish to say so when one has such hands as these before one for 
 comparison and contrast. The cast tells its own tale to the imaginative 
 sympathizer. As I, the mere " worm," have tried passionately to draw 
 the cast, so He, the Divine master, the " god," tried to draw the real 
 dead hand from which the cast was taken — 
 
 " Looked and loved, learned and drew, 
 Drew and learned and loved again,' 
 
 It was in vain ; even his " pencil could not emulate " the beauty of 
 it. But the 
 
 " beauty mounted into his brain," 
 
 and produced the conceit which lives in the cast. See, on the wedding- 
 finger there is a ring, that, to fancy's eye — I repeat, to fancy's eye — was 
 placed there by Da Vinci on the finger which " outvied his art," 
 
 " In token of a marriage rare : 
 For him on earth, his art's despair, 
 For him in heaven, his soul's fit bride," 
 
 This last line, in connection with the fact of Leonardo da Vinci 
 having lived and died unmarried, cannot fail to remind many of us of 
 the leaf put inside the dead hand of Evelyn Hope by her living lover, 
 and the belief that she would, some day, 
 
 " wake, and remember, and understand." 
 
 The third section of this poem is written in a changed mood. Per- 
 haps the acute work of drawing and kissing out the delicate lines of 
 the hand, of imagining this origin of the ring on the finger, had ex- 
 hausted her. She feels less of the artist and more of the woman, and so 
 looks with pity on the poor peasant girl, whom she had turned from in 
 disgust, and who has been waiting all this time, wondering what the 
 English lady had meant by her antics, and looking disappointed at her 
 hand not being properly admired and copied. Then the artist too wakes 
 up to the real beauty, the use and beauty, of that " poor coarse hand," 
 from which she had turned to what now seems, in its way too, but a 
 "poor, clay cast," "Would Da Vinci himself have turned in disgust from 
 such a hand, 
 
 " Because he could not change the hue, 
 Mend the lines and make them true " ? 
 
 ^ot so have we read how he spent years in studying anatomy, not 
 so have we seen, from his wonderful drawings, anatomical and artistic, 
 how he made minute studies of parts before he painted a whole. Surely 
 he would have turned on her with a flash of indignation from under his 
 
138 REV. H. J. BULKELEY ON " JAMES LEe's WIFE." 
 
 bushy eyebrows, with an unrestrained and unrestrainable ' fool,' for de- 
 spising this rough peasant hand, because some merely ideal or perhaps 
 ouce realized conception of beauty in shape is not found here. Compare 
 this dull, lifeless clay cast with these 
 
 " Lines and hue of the outer sheath," 
 and, intimately connected with it, 
 
 " The flesh, and bone, and nerve beneath " ! 
 
 " Is not the poorest, coarsest human hand 
 An object worthy to be scanned 
 A whole life long," 
 
 because it was made, not to be loved and admired by aesthetic persons, 
 judging according to some fancy of what a hand should be, but to do? 
 The hand, the owner of a hand and brain, must look onwards, must not 
 long too much for love and admiration and personal satisfaction. Art 
 is long, life is short, and the art of Life is not less long than the art of 
 drawing. 
 
 " Shall earth and the cramped moment's space 
 
 Yield the heavenly crowning grace ? 
 
 Now the parts, and then the whole ! " 
 
 " On the earth the broken arc, in the heaven the perfect round ! " ^ 
 
 And thus she brings the lesson very home to herself. She, of ' ' stinted 
 soul and stunted body," she who had characteristically failed in sym- 
 pathy with her husband, in spite of all her art and intellect, and whom 
 this ineffectual life may narrow still more ; she who is not personally 
 beautiful, " faded " (as she calls herself in the next poem), " the harsh, 
 ill-favoured one," with her "coarse hanks of hair," and " skia like the 
 bark of a gnarled tree," why should she go on with her querulous plaint, 
 " I love," and therefore, insisting on the due reward, 
 
 " I must be beloved, or die " ? 
 
 What, is there, then, nothing to be done by a living hand, a living 
 woman 1 
 
 " Go, little girl, with the poor coarse hand ! 
 I have my lesson, can understand." 
 
 The lesson was, that she must leave this life of artistic idling, of want 
 of sympathy, of incongruity, of selfish, infatuated longing to grasp what 
 was fading from her eyes, of hopeless, impatient craving for her 
 husband's love. Perhaps her absence might work better than her 
 presence on his heart. At any rate, for her, her course had become clear, 
 — to go and do what she had to do in the world. 
 1 Abt Toiler. 
 
REV, H. J. BULKELEY ON " JAMES LEE's WIFE.'* 139 
 
 The die is cast, and in the next poem we find her — 
 
 There is no more abstract reasoning, no more getting lessons from 
 books, or rocks, or casts. She does not waver in her set purpose, her 
 clear duty ; not for an instant. But it is just because there is no more 
 hesitation, and she has set her face as a rock, that the " you," " you," 
 " you " returns to her lips ; that in impassioned, regretful, hopeful, 
 heavenly words she must pour her heart out at her absent husband's feet. 
 His love for her, if it ever existed, if it was ever more than a wish to be 
 loved by her, is now quite dead and gone. She knows it too well, but, 
 %vith a touch of irony, she asks him to " concede in turn," that 
 
 " Such things have been as a mutual flame." 
 
 Love is not always so entirely on one side. Her husband has a soul ; 
 love may let it loose some day, and he may come to look on her, as she 
 looks on him, as a second, a very self. Such assimilation may — oh, sweet 
 thought to dwell on ! — become possible for him. 
 He must have seen liow she had loved him. 
 
 " You may, or you must, set down to me 
 
 Love that was life, life that was love ; 
 A tenure of breath at your lips' decree, 
 
 A passion to stand as your thoughts approve, 
 A rapture to fall where your foot might be." 
 
 And if such an intense feeling for her should arise and conquer his 
 whole being at last, what to her would be the consequence % The 
 answer is given with sweet subtlety and sublime devotion in the last 
 two verses of the poem. 
 
 " But did one touch of such love for me 
 Come in a word or look of yours, 
 Whose words and looks will, circling, flee 
 
 Round me and round while life endures, — 
 Could I fancy ' As I feel, thus feels He ; 
 
 Why, fade you might to a thing like me, 
 
 And your hair grow these coarse hanks of hair, 
 
 And your skin, this bark of a gnarled tree, — 
 
 You might turn myself I Should I know or care, 
 
 When I should be dead of joy, James Lee." 
 
 This last poem may be compared with the last verse of Mary Woll- 
 stonecraft in Jocoseria, but compared for contrast as well as similarity. 
 
Lr^j 
 
 140 REV. H. J, BDLKELEY ON " JAMES LEe's WIFE." 
 
 " Strong and fierce in the heart, Dear, 
 
 With — more than a will — what seems a power 
 To pounce on my prey, love outbroke here 
 
 In flame devouring and to devour. 
 Such love has laboured its best and worst 
 To win me a lover ; yet, last as first, 
 
 I have not quickened his pulse one beat, 
 Fixed a moment's fancy, bitter or sweet, 
 
 Yet the strong fierce heart's love's labour's due. 
 Utterly lost, was — you I " 
 
 But James Lee, in his wife's thought, was not utterly lost to himself, 
 or to her. 
 
 Also it might be compared with Any Wife to any Hiisband, where, 
 in spite of married life having continued unbroken to death, and the 
 character of the husband being much higher than that of James Lee, 
 there is, partly because the wife is dying, not so much hopefulness as 
 in the concluding verses of this poem. 
 
 Did she do right 1 jSTo doubt this question wUl be asked and dis- 
 cussed, though, in a delicate work of art like this, published in a volume 
 that has the distinct title of Dramatis Personoe, it might well be left 
 alone. At any rate she did what she thought was right, and she knew 
 a good deal more about her husband than Mr. Browning has chosen to 
 tell us. She left him from no base motive, with increased rather than 
 abated affection, not without a high hope of his coming to love her at 
 last. 
 
 But if she was right, being what and where she very specially 
 was, it does not at all follow that ordinary women under ordinary cir- 
 cumstances should follow her example. ^Neither do I understand the 
 poet as suggesting any set philosophy of domestic life, certainly not as 
 teaching that married life cannot be happy unless the individual charac- 
 teristics of husband and wife are emotionally fused into one another, 
 and He and She become an hermaphroditic It. 
 
 James Lee's "Wife is a case by itself, in its various circumstances 
 artistically and vividly harmonious, but not a universal case by any 
 means. 
 
 A few notes in conclusion about the style of the poem. 
 
 Such a vulgar simile as 
 
 " We both should be like as pea and pea," 
 
 coming where it does, almost makes one's blood run cold ; and " real 
 fairy, ^oitll wings all right," of poem five, sounds rather out of place. 
 At least to a novice the sudden irruption of such exclamations as, 
 
REV. H. J. BULKELET ON " JAMES LEe's WIFE." 141 
 
 " Now, gnash your teeth," "Ah, the sting," "Fool !" must be rather 
 startling. In the new part the leaving of the line, 
 
 " One motive of the mechanism," 
 
 without a corresponding rhyme may have been intentional, and may 
 weU escape observation where the argument is of more importance than 
 the verse. 
 
 There are some remarkable lines, in their rhythm musically full of 
 special meaning. Here are instances. 
 
 " On the weather-side black, spotted white with the wind," 
 
 The little gusts of wind are there. 
 
 And note the intense statement, followed by the rapid question. 
 
 " And so I did, love, so I do ! 
 
 What has come of it all along ? " 
 
 And in these well-known four lines contrast the rocky, letter-sounding 
 jaggedness of the first three with the flow of the fourth. 
 
 " Oh, good gigantic smile o' the brown old earth 
 This Autumn morning 1 How he sets his bonea 
 To bask i' the sun ; and thrusts out knees and feet. 
 For the ripple to run over in its mirth." 
 
 And mark again, in the concluding verse of the sixth poem, how the 
 longing is expressed by the necessitated dwelling on the strong mono- 
 syllabic words, and their passing into a rush of three short sounds with 
 the clenching " grasp " at the end. 
 
 " Only for man, how bitter not to grave 
 On his soul's hands' palms one fair, good, wise thing. 
 Just as he grasped it." 
 
 I have already quoted two very similar lines from Mary Wollstone- 
 craft. 
 
 "Yet the strong, fierce, heart's love's labour's due, 
 Utterly lost, was — you." 
 
 And the different poems are as wholes well suited to the different moods 
 they express. I would not, however, thus speak of poem six, where 
 the metre, though appropriate for the flow of the early reverie, is not in 
 such accordance with the more abrupt style of some of the consequent 
 argument, and I have already said something about poem eight. But 
 some of the poems are exquisite in their rhythmical fitness. 
 
 For instance, compare the first and second poems. How, in the first, 
 the almost regular swing of anapaest and iambics carries us along with 
 
142 REV. H. J. BULKELBY ON " JAMES LEE's "WIFE." 
 
 it as the eagerly expectant wife rushes with open heart towards her 
 returning hushand ! How, in the second, the strong, broken beat of the 
 metre, with its dead stop at the end of each verse, lends its aid to the 
 expression of painful hesitating thought ! And, in the last poem, how 
 the metrical arrangement of dactyl, anapaest, iambic, spondee, trochee 
 is admirably adapted for the impassioned composite flow of strong regret 
 and perhaps stronger hope ; and yet, how the fixedness of purpose comes 
 out in the pause of the fifth line ! And mark how this rule of pause 
 is only once broken through, at the end of the last verse but one, when 
 even this barrier gives way, because the heart is so overflowing with 
 emotional thought that it must find the promptest utterance. 
 
 James Lee^s Wife is noteworthy as containing specimens of the 
 author's work of three different kinds and times — of 1836, 1864, and 
 1872. Also it is noteworthy as being the only poem of the kind that 
 he has written, and it might profitably be compared with Maud, The 
 Angel in the House, and other modern poems of the same kind, where 
 the events, in their series, are lyrically expressed as they impressed 
 themselves on the mind and moods of the chief agent or patient. 
 
 Without going into details, we may briefly observe that Maud and 
 The Angel in the House are much longer poems than this ; that while 
 The Angel in the House is a story of quiet domestic life, and in Maud 
 the leading incidents are sketched with sufiicient allusion for us to follow 
 them in their sequence, of James Lee's Wife it might truly be said, 
 
 " Story, God bless you, I have none to tell, sir." 
 
 Sometimes we hear a friend saying in a picture-gallery, that though this 
 or that picture be preferred by the newspaper critics or by the public, 
 yet that he would prefer his own special favourites for the walls of his 
 own study or drawing-room. So, if to a true lover of the suggestively 
 beautiful, some imperious deity were to say — " Xow you must read 
 through one of these three poems every month. Take your choice," 
 he might answer, " Not Tlie Angel in the House, it is too quiet, it would 
 not sufficiently raise me out of my humdrum life ; not Maud, for, with 
 all its enthusiasm and occasional beauty, it is much too tempestuous ; I 
 will take James Lee's Wife, not merely because it is the shortest, not 
 because I consider it a perfect poem, but because in it I recognize the 
 beloved master's hand, because it has in it much that is so true and 
 elevating, both of art and of heart." 
 
143 
 
 ABT YOGLER. 
 
 BY MRS. TURNBULL. 
 {Read at the \lth Meeting of the Browning Society, Friday, June 22, 1883.) 
 
 It would be an interesting, if a somewhat futile question, to ask what 
 are the causes which determine genius in its choice of a fitting mode of 
 expression — of the special art whereby to reveal its ideas to the world. 
 What inherent faculties, or what particular influences, operate to guide 
 it in its choice 1 Is it an affair of what we call chance, the circumstances 
 which happen to surround the man of genius in early life, or is it the 
 predominance of certain inborn faculties, which determines him without 
 hesitation or doubt to use poetry, music, painting, or sculpture as the 
 one natural, adequate vehicle of expression ? 
 
 When we read how those great minds Michel Angelo and Leonardo 
 da Yinci turned restlessly from one to the other, as if unable to find 
 the art which could all express the thoughts which burned within them ; 
 or when in later times we regard the efforts of men such as Blake and 
 Shelley, we are led to put these questions ; nay, to go further and ask, 
 "Does genius always find its right mode of expression? May not 
 occasionally a gigantic mistake be made ? " Perhaps Blake made one 
 when he recorded his tremendous visions in wild drawings and 
 incoherent verse, instead of putting them into music — the exponent of 
 that dim borderland where thought and feeling, ideas and emotion meet 
 and mingle into one — the special province, of Blake. 
 
 As it is, we feel that his imagination bursts the bounds of form, and 
 struggles in vain with the necessary limitations of realistic art. We 
 know he had also the gift of music, for he sang those other-world songs 
 of his to melodies of his own equally quaint and beautiful — surely 
 comparable only to nursery rhymes of child angels. If this gift had 
 been cultivated and the technical training acquired, we might have had 
 lyrics like those of Schubert, and symphonies grand as those of 
 Beethoven. 
 
144 MRS. TURNBUIX ON " ABT VOOLER." 
 
 Much the same might be said of Shelley. We cannot read his 
 verse, so exqiiisite and rhythmical in its music, and try to grasp its 
 meanings, so super-subtle and evanescent that they seem to elude us 
 and refuse to be translated into tangible language, without feeling that 
 music would have more fitly expressed them. 
 
 England could afford to spare one name from her muster-roll of poets, 
 to place it instead side by side with those of Mendelssohn and Beethoven. 
 But the determining cause was wanting, or the early musical training 
 and surroundings, or, what is more probable, the want of a great 
 national musical life as background. A Shakspere is the outcome of a 
 vigorous national intellectual life ; a Beethoven is the outcome of a great 
 musical one. 
 
 This co-operation of the time and the man has never yet been 
 possible in this country, therefore we still look for our great composer. 
 We have been led into this train of thought by reading that Browning, 
 in his early life, hesitated into which of the three channels — poetry, 
 painting, or music — he should direct his genius. 
 
 "What arrogance!" some one who has a superficial acquaintance 
 with our poet may exclaim ; but to those who have studied his work it 
 only appears natural. 
 
 When we read his poems on art — or indeed in every chance reference 
 to art scattered through his volumes — we are so much struck by the truth 
 and unerring rightness of both instinct and judgment, that we are tempted 
 to wish that this artist had painted us pictures ; or, again, when we turn 
 to his poems dealing specially with music, like this of Abt Vogler — 
 " Would that this man, with the ear and soul of a musician, had made 
 music for us," rises involuntarily to our lips; but when the vast 
 company of men and women which he has created pass before us, each 
 one revealing to us the secrets and lessons of his existence — St. John his 
 firm, simple faith in Love, — Luria his grand, unconquerable faith in 
 Humanity, — and RahU Ben Ezra chanting his triumphant song of faith in 
 Life and Death (three out of the host) — we can only say in humility and 
 gratitude, " Let us thank God for our great poet and teacher ! " 
 
 The Abbe Vogler, thanks to Miss Marx, is no stranger to us, but it 
 may be interesting to note why Browning chose to depict his feelings 
 instead of those of a more famous musician. 
 
 He is seldom heard of now except as being the master of Weber 
 and Meyerbeer, his compositions are neglected and forgotten, and his 
 wonderful improvisings on his beloved instrument have faded away for 
 ever into silence. 
 
 This is just what Browning wanted. He wished to fix our minds 
 specially on the fleeting nature of music, — its evanescence as compared 
 
MRS. TURNBULL ON " ABT VOGLBR." 145 
 
 with, the other arts, — heard once, and then gone past recall ; so it suited I 
 his purpose better to choose the grave and thoughtful priest, the 
 now almost forgotten Vogler, than a famous composer like Beethoven 
 and Mendelssohn, whose thoughts can never die, but live on in those 
 immortal tones 
 
 " Whose echoes roll 
 From soul to soul 
 And grow for ever and for ever." 
 
 Abt Vogler has been extemporizing on his instrument, pouring out 
 through it all his feelings of yearning and aspiration ; and now, waking 
 from his state of absorption, excited, and trembling with excess of 
 emotion, he breaks out into the wish, " Would it might tarry ! " In 
 verses one and two he compares the music he has made to a palace,^ 
 which Solomon (as legends of the Koran relate) summoned all creatures, 
 by the magic name on his ring, to raise for the princess he loved ; so all 
 the keys, joyfully submitting to the magic power of the master, combine 
 to aid him, the low notes rushing in like demons to give him the base 
 on which to build his airy structure, the high notes like angels throwing 
 decoration of carving and tracery on pinnacle and flying buttress, till in 
 verse three its outline, rising ever higher and higher, shows in the clouds 
 like St. Peter's dome, illuminated and towering into the vasty sky ; and 
 it seems as if his soul, upborne on the surging waves of music, had 
 reached its highest elevation. But no. Influences from without, 
 inexplicable, unexpected, join to enlaance his own attempts ; the heavens 
 themselves seem to bow down and to flash, forth inconceivable splendours 
 on his amazed spirit, tiU the limitations of time and space are gone — \ 
 " there is no more near nor far." 
 
 Music, Hegel says, frees us from the phenomena of time and 
 space, alone of all the arts shows us how these are not essentials, 
 but mere accidents of our present condition. Space has no existence in 
 music, and a harmonic chord as such is absolutely immeasurable by 
 time.2 Thus music overcomes for us what no other art can, and 
 herein lies its transcendental and supernatural quality. 
 
 In this strange fusion of near and far, of heaven and earth, presences 
 hover, spirits of those long dead or of those yet to be, lured by the power 
 of music to return to life, or to begin it. Figures are dimly descried 
 in the fervour and passion of music, even as of old in the glare and glow 
 of the fiery furnace. 
 
 ' Is there an affinity between music and architecture in so far as harmony and 
 proportion are essential elements of both ? Goethe called architecture " petrified 
 music," and adds, " the tone of mind produced by architecture approaches the 
 efifect of music." — Conversations, p. 378. 
 
 ' F. Hueffer. 
 
 L 
 
146 MRS. TUENBULL ON " ABT VOGLER." 
 
 Verses four and five are a bold attempt to describe the indescribable, 
 to shadow forth that strange state of clairvoyance when the soul shakes 
 itself free from aU external impressions, which Vogel tells us was the 
 case with Schubert, and which is true of all great composers — " whether 
 in the body or out of the body I cannot say." 
 
 In the sixth verse we come to a comparison of music with the other 
 arts. Poetry, painting, and sculpture deal with actual form, and the 
 tangible reahties of life. They are subject to laws, and we know how 
 they are produced ; can watch the painting grow beneath the artist's 
 touches, or the poem take shape line by line. 
 
 True, it needs the soul of the artist to combine and interfuse the 
 elements with which he works to create any true work of art, but music 
 ' is almost entirely independent of earthly element in which to clothe and 
 embody itself. It does not allow of a realistic conception, but without 
 ^termediate means is in a direct line from God, and enables us to 
 comprehend that Power which created all things out of nothing, with 
 whom to will and to do are one and the same. 
 
 Schopenhauer says, " There is no sound in Nature fit to serve 
 the musician as a model, or to supply him with more than an occasional 
 suggestion for his sublime purpose. He approaches the original sources 
 of existence more closely than aU other artists, nay, even than Nature 
 herself." 
 
 Heine has also noticed this element of miracle, which coincides 
 exactly with Browning's view expressed in the lines : 
 
 " Here is the finger of God, a flash of the will that can, 
 Existent behind all laws, that made them, and, lo, they are 1 " 
 
 Now, these seven verses contain the music of the poem ; in the remaining 
 ones we pass on to Browning's platonic philosophy. 
 
 In the eighth verse a sad thought of the vanished music obtrudes — 
 " never to be again." So wrapt was he in the emotions evoked, he had 
 no time to think of what tones called them up, and now all is past and 
 gone. His magic palace, unlike that of Solomon, has " melted into air, 
 into thin air," and, " like the baseless fabric of a vision," only the memory 
 of it is left. 
 
 *' Nothing can be as it has been before ; 
 Better, so call it, only not the same." ' 
 
 And, depressed by this saddest of human experiences, the same "Divine 
 despair " which oppresses us 
 
 " While looking on the happy autumn fields. 
 And thinking of the days that are no more," 
 
 James Lee's Wife, vi. 13. 
 
MRS. TURNBULL ON " ABT VOGLER." 147 
 
 he turns away impatient from the promise of more and better, to 
 demand from God the same — the very same. Browning with magnificent 
 assurance answers, " Yes, you shall have the same." 
 
 " Fool ! All that is at all, 
 Lasts ever, past recall," 
 
 "Ay, what was, shall be." 
 Swinburne has dared to arraign God for giving us the thirst for 
 love, which yet He never satisfies, but Browning believes that the 
 ineffable I^ame which built the palace of King Solomon, which builds 
 houses not made with hands — houses of flesh which souls inhabit, 
 craving for a heart and a love to fiU them, can and will satisfy their 
 longings ; 
 
 " For God above 
 Is great to grant, as mighty to make, 
 And creates the love to reward the love." 
 
 Altogether, I know no other words in the English language which com- 
 press into small compass such a body of high and inclusive thought as 
 verse nine. (1) God the sole changeless, to whom we turn with passionate 
 desire as the one Abiding-place, as we find how all things suffer loss and 
 change, ourselves, alas ! the greatest ; (2) His power and love able and 
 willing to satisfy the hearts of His creatures — the thought expatiated on 
 by St. Augustine and George Herbert here crystallized in one line : 
 ' ' Doubt that Thy power can fill the heart that Thy power expands ? " 
 (3) Then the magnificent declaration, 
 
 " There shall never be one lost good — " . 
 the eternal nature of goodness, while its opposite, evil (by which alone 
 goodness could be known), exists only as an accident, is merely the 
 reverse side of good, is a non-essential which shall one day pass away 
 entirely, and be swallowed up of good. Here we have the philosophical 
 truths regarding the nature and mystery of evil enunciated by Maimon- 
 ides, Spinoza, and Hegel — thoughts to engage one for a lifetime. 
 
 Now follows an announcement, as by tongue of prophet or seer, that 
 we shall at last find all our ideals complete in the mind of God, not put 
 forth timorously, but with triumphant knowledge — knowledge gained 
 by music whose creative power has for the moment revealed to us the 
 permanent existence of these ideals. 
 
 The sorrow, and pain, and failure which we are all called upon to 
 suffer here, and which to many are such stumbling-blocks, are seen to be 
 proofs and evidences of this great belief. Without the discords, how 
 should we learn to prize the harmony ] 
 
 Carried on the wings of music and high thought, we have ascended 
 one of those Delectable mountains— Pisgah-peaks from which 
 
 L 2 
 
148 MRS. TURNBULL ON " ABT VOGLER." 
 
 " Our souls have sight of that immortal sea 
 Which brought us hither ; " 
 
 and whence we can descry, however faintly, the land that is very far off 
 to which we travel, and we would fain linger, nay, abide, on the mount, 
 building there our tabernacles. 
 
 But it cannot be. That fine air is difficult to breathe long, and 
 life, with its rounds of custom and duty, recalls us. So we descend 
 with the musician, through varying harmonies and sUding modulations 
 akin to those of Bach's first prelude, deadening the poignancy of the 
 minor third in the more satisfying, reassuring chord of the dominant 
 ninth, which again finds its rest on the key-note — C major — the common 
 chord, so sober and uninteresting that it well symbolizes the common 
 level of life, the prosaic key-note to which unfortunately most of our 
 lives are set. 
 
 We return, however, strengthened and refreshed, braced to endure 
 the wrongs which we know shall be one day righted, to acquiesce in the 
 limited and imperfect conditions of earth, which we know shall be 
 merged at last in heaven's perfect round, and to accept with patience 
 the renunciation demanded of us here, knowing 
 
 "All we have willed, or hoped, or dreamed of good shall exist." 
 
 Thus we close this remarkable poem — one unique in the English 
 language. 
 
 The only one I can compare it with is Wordsworth's ' Ode on Inti- 
 mations of Immortality.' However dissimilar in some respects, both are 
 co-related by the " faith that looks through death " and change — the 
 strong grasp of spiritual realities which they both show. 
 
 In an age like the present, when the faith of many is drifting, 
 anchorless, when dull grey clouds of doubt have settled down on most 
 of our noblest intellects, have we not indeed cause for thankfulness that 
 Browning is among " the last who believe " ? He does not shrink from 
 plunging into the thickest, blackest clouds, his faith being fixed stead- 
 fastly on the Sun of Love beyond, which pierces through and suffuses 
 even the horror of darkness. 
 
 How bracing, invigorating, and full of hope is the philosophy of life 
 that he gives us ! Surely his scheme of the weal and woe is the best 
 antidote to that dreary fatal pessimism which threatens to sap alike the 
 faith, and virtue, and courage of tliis century. 
 
 As Browning's view of music may appear exaggerated and over- 
 drawn to some people, it may be well to examine a little more closely 
 into it. To do this we must cast a glance back on the treatment of music 
 in English literature, and we shall at once notice the marked importance 
 
XXIV. MRS. TURXBULL ON " ABT VOGLER." 149 
 
 which it assumes in the works of one school of writers, viz. the 'Neo- 
 platonists.i 
 
 Take Milton, who was a musician, and whose verse charms us as it 
 moves along grave and . stately as his own organ tones, and who has 
 Avritten beautifully on music in his ' Hymn on the IS'ativity,' and in his 
 ' Lines at Solemn Music ' has sung of 
 
 " That undisturbed song of pure consent 
 
 Aye sung before the sapphire-coloured throne." 
 
 Though he proves to us that he feels and has mastered the sensuous 
 beauty of music, yet he has not left a single line to show that he appre- 
 hended its spiritual significance, that by it he had transcended time and 
 space, or that to him it was the evidence of things unseen. 
 
 Neither has he given us one subtle touch like that of Shakespeare's 
 " I am never merry when I hear sweet music " ; indeed those few lines 
 in the ' Merchant of Venice ' are worth all that ]\Iilton has written on 
 music put together. 
 
 " Look how the floor of heaven ^ 
 
 Is thick inlaid with patines of bright gold. 
 
 There' s not the smallest orb which thou behold'st 
 
 But in his motion like an angel sings, 
 
 Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubins : 
 
 Such harmony is in immortal souls." 
 Or again : 
 
 " The man that hath not music in his sowZ." 
 
 Mark you, not in his ear, nor in his head, but in his soul. And this 
 because Shakespeare was a platonist and Milton was not. 
 
 To give the idea of music common to all the Neo-platonic school, and 
 which meets one constantly in the works of More, !N'orris, &c., I cannot 
 do better than quote the quaint prose of Sir Thomas Browne, which, 
 besides having a touch of sublimity of its own, remarkably indicates the 
 views since adopted by Schopenhauer and "Wagner, and which Browning 
 exemplifies in his poem. 
 
 " There is a music wherever there is a harmony and order or propor-i 
 tion ; and thus far we may maintain the music of the spheres, for those! 
 well-ordered motions and regular paces, though they give no sound tcj 
 the ear, yet to the understanding they strike a note most fuU of har^ 
 mony. Whatsoever is harmonically composed delights in harmony,' 
 which makes me much distrust those heads which declaim against all 
 church music. For myself, not only from my obedience, but my parti- 
 cular genius, I do embrace it ; for even that vulgar and tavern-music 
 which makes one man merry and another mad, strikes in me a deep fit 
 of devotion, and a profound contemplation of the first composer. There 
 
 ' When we read in the ' Timaus ' such words as these we do not wonder at it : 
 " He whose care it is to form his body rightly should exercise his soul in music." 
 " The soul reacts on the body, and by nothing so powerfully as by music." 
 
150 MRS. TURXBULL ON " ABT VOGLER." 
 
 IS sometliing in it of divinity more than the ear discovers ; it is an 
 
 hieroglyphical and shadowed lesson of the whole world and creatures of 
 
 ■: God — such a melody to the ear as the whole world, well understood, 
 
 ! would afford the understanding. In brief, it is a sensible fit of that 
 
 ' harmony which intellectually sounds in the ears of God." ^ 
 
 Here we have the truest and most adequate word on the philosophy 
 of music, and the right theory of its effect. Those who with Milton 
 consider it merely as a sensual pleasure, regard music as a sensation of 
 soimd, affording gratification to the ear ; but Sir T. Browne and Browning 
 along with him go deeper, and find in music an intellectual pleasure, con- 
 sisting not so much in the sensuous pleasure received through the ears, 
 but in the ideas, the harmony and proportion, which the mind only can 
 apprehend, " the soul itself contemplating the beauty and agreement of 
 it." 2 Thus the harmony that is in immortal souls must co-operate with 
 ithe external sound to be music in its highest sense. That it should 
 :open to us the unseen and spiritual, more than an ear for music, or a 
 imerely voluptuous enjoyment of melting sound, surely is necessary. 
 I Music, like all the other arts, is a revelation to us of truth, of the 
 eternal ideas which abide in the mind of God, and more than any other 
 art reveals these directly to us, without the aid of form and substantial 
 embodiment. It is the most super-sensuous and incorporeal of all the 
 arts, and therefore it requires a clear intelligence and an open soul ready 
 , to receive and vibrate to its pure and subtle influence. 
 
 Now, we are not all gifted with ears, but we can all, if we like, gain 
 this receptive attitude of spirit, open and wUling to hear what the 
 music may speak to us — whether simple dreams of childhood and youth, 
 or foretastes of the beatific vision. 
 
 But we need not expect to attain this if we regard music as an 
 agreeable noise, a pleasant accompaniment to talk, or the idle employ- 
 ' ment of an idle hour. We must remember that as the eye only sees 
 what it has the power to see, so the ear and the mind only hear and 
 apprehend what they bring with them the power to hear and apprehend, 
 and that " aU liigh things are difiicult of attainment as they are rare." ^ 
 
 ' ' Rcllgio Medici.' 
 
 * ' A Letter concerning Love and Musick,' by John Norris. Most interesting. 
 
 ^ Spinoza's ' Ethics.' 
 
151 
 
 ANDREA DEL SARTO AND ART VOGLER. 
 
 By HELEN J. ORMEROD. 
 
 Read at tlie Sixty-second Meeting of the Browning Society, 
 Friday, November 30, 1888. 
 
 From amongst Browning's poems on painters and musicians, the 
 two poems Andrea del Sarto and Aht Vogler stand out unrivalled — 
 both as literary works of art — abounding as they do in those *' purple 
 patches" of beauty, which in these instances clothe most luxuriantly 
 the sometimes rugged forms of the poet's genius — and as studies of 
 character, revealing to us on the one hand the lover and the man, as 
 well as the artist ; whilst, on the other hand, the musician alone is 
 considered. Should the stoi-y of Andrea's life, his outward success, 
 and deep inner sense of failure seem unduly lingered over in this 
 paper, it is only because the story of Abt Yogler's life, and his 
 apparent failure but hidden sense of artistic success have been 
 already dwelt upon in a recent paper. I would take this opportunity 
 to remark that the two characters are looked upon from Browning's 
 standpoint, and that in speaking of them I look on them as the artist 
 and musician whose characters are revealed to us in the poems. 
 
 Before proceeding to study Andrea's character it may be advisable 
 to recall the Florence of the early part of the sixteenth century, 
 noting, the while, the historical accuracy of the poet, and also the 
 effective dramatic background of the poem. 
 
 The opening years of the sixteenth century found Michael Angelo 
 chiselling his immortal David, the spirit of God breathing through 
 him on the unshapely mass of marble, and bringing beauty out of it ; 
 they found Raphael visiting Florence, and painting there some of his 
 loveliest pictures ; they found Leonardo himself in the beautiful city, 
 the very walls of which still echoed with the inspired utterances of 
 
152 HELEN J. ORMEROD. ANDREA DEL SARTO AND ABT VOGLEE. 
 
 the prophet-monk, who had but just put off his old San Marco dress 
 for the new red garb of martyrdom. And looking back into the years 
 of previous centuries, we see Dante and Beatrice amidst the haze of 
 the past, and Giotto planning out his Campanile, and Fra Angelico 
 with his angel companionship ; but time would fail to tell of all the 
 great and noble men whose names are associated with Florence. 
 
 "We find mention made, in the course of the poem, of George Vasari ; 
 painter, and author of The Lives of tlie Most Excellent Italian Painters, 
 SctdjJtors and Architects; and here there is too remarkable an instance 
 of Browning's accuracy in matters of history to be overlooked. Andrea 
 del Sarto died in 1530, and Vasari was born in 1512. The poem was 
 supposed to be spoken in 1525 — five years after the death of "that 
 famous youth the Urbinate " ; this would make Yasari only thirteen 
 years old, and yet Andrea in speaking of a painting is made to say, 
 " 'Tis copied. George Yasari brought it me." These dates would 
 startle us, but for the reassuring teachings of history. Yasari, from 
 his earliest years, showed unmistakable signs of artistic talent, and at 
 the age of twelve, in the year 1524, his father brought him to Florence, 
 and Andrea himself gave him lessons. 
 
 The scene of the poem — (the poem itself being suggested, we are 
 told by Mr. Fotheringham, by " a picture in the Pitti Palace .... 
 the painter and his wife are in talk over a letter which she holds .... 
 she is cold and masterful, he loving and submissive,") — is laid in 
 Andrea's studio in his house at Florence. The hour is that of twilight, 
 and the shades of evening are faDing on the sunny slopes of Fiesole. 
 The sweet twilight hour throws its spell over Andrea, and with true 
 artistic obsei-vation he notes " yonder sober pleasant Fiesole." Then 
 he observes how 
 
 " A common greyness silvers everything, — 
 All in a twilight, you and I alike." 
 
 And suddenly he draws attention to how 
 
 *' That length of convent wall across the way 
 Holds the trees safer, huddled more inside ; 
 The last monk leaves the garden ; days decrease, 
 And autumn grows, autumn in everything." 
 
 And later in the poem, in the midst of his love and reminiscences, he 
 exclaims 
 
 " See, it is settled dusk now ; there's a star ; 
 . Morello's gone, the watch lights show the wall, 
 The cue-owls speak the name we call them by." 
 
HELEN J. OEMEROD. ANDREA DEL SARTO AND AST VOGLER. 153 
 
 Browning invai-iably presupposes considerable knowledge, both 
 artistic and historic on the part of his readers, and it is often necessary 
 to refer to biography or history for the better understanding of his 
 poems. It may now be advisable to sketch in the rough outlines of 
 Andrea's life, as they would be found in any encyclopsedia, Andrea 
 Tannuchi (called del Sarto from the occupation of his father, a tailor) 
 was born at Florence, 1488, became a painter oi considerable note, 
 visited the French court, executed commissions for Francis I., 
 but on being recalled to Florence by his improvident wife, he 
 misappropriated a large sum of money entrusted to him by the French 
 King for the purchase of works of art for a museum. After this he 
 never returned to France, and was afterwards deserted by his profligate 
 wife (whom he had married with a knowledge of her character, and in 
 spite of the remonstrances of friends) ; he died of the plague in 1530. 
 Sucii are the bare facts of the man's life. Birth, life and death — 
 these are common to all ; but when once an individual rises to eminence, 
 how eagerly is his history scrutinized ; and it frequently happens that 
 the more we know of the personal and inner life of an artist, the 
 more readily can we understand his work. For instance, in Andrea's 
 paintings, why does the same type of female beauty constantly recur ? 
 and why are his paintings, though faultless, soul- less ? In answer, 
 however, to these, and other queries, we must let Browning's 
 wonderful poem speak for itself, coming, as it seems, with terrible 
 reality from the depths of the artist's unrequited love, and moral 
 degradation. 
 
 The problem of useless suffering, such as is described in this 
 poem ; the agony of spirit which came to no great end, is an almost 
 hopeless one to solve ; and for months remained obscure to me. Then, 
 as a revelation, came Mazzini's glorious thought " Remorse or 
 Martyrdom." There, for me at all events, was the solution, and I 
 should like to quote the sentences bearing on the subject — •" All the 
 sophisms of the wretched philosophy that seeks to substitute the 
 doctrine of I- know-not- what fatalism to the cry of our human 
 conscience, avail not to silence the two inevitable witnesses in favour 
 of human liberty — Remorse and Martyrdom ... all the martyrs of 
 Faith protest against the servile doctrine, and cry aloud unto you : 
 ' We also loved life, we also loved the beings who made that life dear, 
 and who implored us to yield. Every impulse of om* hearts cried 
 Live ! But, for the salvation of the generations to come, we chose 
 to die. 
 
 " From Cain down to the vulgar spy of the present day, all the 
 betrayers of their fellows, all the men who have chosen the path of 
 
154 HELEN J. ORMEROD. ANDREA DEL SARTO AND ABT VOGLER. 
 
 evil, have heard, and hear in the depths of their secret soul a voice of 
 blame, disgust, and reproof which says unto them : * Wherefort did 
 you forsake the right 'path ? ' " 
 
 Thus it is that remorse makes a hell of the soul ; while one touch 
 of the divine self-forgetfulness which culminates in martyrdom, can 
 draw a soul within the glory of heaven. 
 
 r^ndrea's first deviation from the right path was his marriage with 
 Lucrezia (known to be a woman of ill-fame) ; and it was followed by 
 dishonesty to the French King, and unfiHal neglect of his parents in 
 their old-age and poverty. 
 
 Judging from the following quotation one may infer that the 
 misappropriated gold was hateful to Andrea, just as certain silver 
 was to Judas Iscariot : 
 
 ' ' "When I look up from painting, eyes tired out, 
 The walls become illumined, brick from brick 
 Distinct, instead of mortar, fierce, bright gold, 
 That gold of his I did cement them with ! 
 Let us but love each other. " 
 
 In that last line we find the clue to the whole, for money was 
 chiefly valuable to Andrea, inasmuch as it pleased LucreziaT] 
 
 " That cousin here again ? . . . 
 More gaming debts to pay ? You smiled for this ? 
 "Well, let smiles buy me ! have you more to spend ? " 
 
 Towards the close of the poem Andi-ea thus reviews and sums up 
 his life's history : 
 
 " I took his ^ coin, was tempted and complied, ? 
 And built this house, and sinned, and all is said." 
 
 Referring to his parents, he thus speaks : 
 
 "My father and my mother died of want. 
 "Well, had I riches of my own ? you see 
 How one gets rich ! Let each one bear his lot. 
 They were born poor, lived poor, and poor they died ; 
 And I have laboured somewhat in my time 
 And not been paid profusely. Some good son 
 Paint my two hundred pictures — let him try 1 
 No doubt there's something strikes a balance." 
 
 And thus the gold of ill-gotten gains is weighed in the balance 
 against the glory of heaven, and found wanting. Let us for a 
 moment turn to Abt Yogler's balance. 
 
 1 Francis. 
 
HELEN J. ORMEEOD. ANUEEA DEL SAETO AND ABT VOGLER. 155 
 
 " All we have willed, or hoped, or dreamed of good shall exist ; 
 Not its semblance, but itself ; no beauty, nor good, nor power 
 Whose voice has gone forth, but each survives for the melodist. 
 When eternity affirms the conception of an hour. 
 The high that proved too high, the heroic for earth too hard, 
 The passion that left the ground to lose itself in the sky. 
 Are music sent up to God by the lover and the bard ; 
 Enough that he heard it once : we shall hear it by and by. " 
 
 A strangely distorted idea of compensation floats at times in 
 Andrea's brain ; thus he refers to his disgrace at the French court ; 
 
 " At the end, God, I conclude, compensates, punishes, 
 'Tis safer for me if the award be just 
 That I am somewhat under-rated here. 
 Poor this long while, despised ; to speak the truth, 
 I dare not, do you know, leave home all day 
 
 For fear of chancing on those Paris lords ; 
 The best is when they turn and look aside. 
 But they speak sometimes — I must bear it all," 
 
 It is evident that the extreme sensitiveness peculiar to the 
 artistic temperament was not lacking in Andrea, yet a strange 
 apathy — or, as he thinks, peace — comes on him at times. 
 
 " Love — we are in God's hands. 
 How strange now seems the life He makes us lead. 
 So free we seem, so fettered fast we are, 
 I feel He laid the fetter — let it lie ! " 
 
 Thus does Andrea set up his will in opposition to the will of God, 
 and then accepts the fetter, as one laid on him by God Himself ! 
 
 [^Mention is made at times of physical fatigue, fostered no doubt by 
 the constant remorse which preyed on him; and the woman who 
 ought to have tended him in his weakness, deserted him ; leaving 
 him a prey, first to remorse^nd then to the plague which raged in 
 Florence shortly afterwards. J 
 
 Regarding Andrea as an artist, it must be understood that I try 
 to view him, not only as he was, but also as what he felt he might 
 have been. The theme sounding throughout this twilight reverie is, 
 what he might have been without Lucrezia — Raphael, Leonardo, 
 Angelo, they " live for fame," they achieve the highest, but these 
 three are without a wife, so : 
 
 " still they overcome. 
 Because there's still Lucrezia, as I choose. " 
 
 Had Andrea taken advantage of the new start afforded him in 
 France (probably the flood in the tide of his affairs) he might have 
 
 £y 
 
156 HELEN J. ORMEROD, ANDREA DEL SARTO AND ABT VOGLER. 
 
 left behind him an honoured name, and glorious fame, but the baneful 
 influence of Lucrezia was paramount. 
 
 *• A good time was it not, my kingly days ? 
 And had you not grown restless . . . 
 Too live the life grew, golden and not grey . . . 
 You called me. and I came home to your heart," 
 
 He looked back with longing and regret to that 
 
 " long festal year at Fontainebleau, 
 I surely then could sometimes leave the ground, 
 Put on the glory, Rafael's daily wear." 
 
 But even then Lucrezia's face was seen in the background, 
 
 " To crown the issue with a last reward'' 
 
 — and her reward was dishonour and ignominy from without, infidelity 
 and desertion in his home. One's heart goes out in pity to Andrea — 
 to-ichly gifted, perfect in his craft, yet ever feeling that his work was 
 •nearer heaven than himself. It is strange that his thoughts so 
 frequently turned heavenwards, feeling as he did his unfitness for it, 
 yet making no effort after a higher life. In another of Browning's 
 poems on art, Pictor Ignotus, the painter shrinks from the thought of 
 heaven, and longs for a continuance of earth and earth's plaudits. 
 
 "Oh, thus to live ! I and my picture linked 
 With love about, and praise till life should end. 
 And then, not go to heaven, but linger here, 
 Here on my earth — earth's every man my friend — 
 The thought grew frightful, 'twas so wildly dear." 
 
 In Andrea's mind there was the ever-present desire to compare him- 
 self with Eaphael. It is said that on visiting Borne, he was at first much 
 depressed by the sight of Baphael's cartoons, realizing, as he did, the 
 inspiration of the young Urbinate, and almost resenting the difference 
 between it and his own more earthly art. The pictures painted on 
 ' canvas are poor indeed compared to those conceived in the mind of an 
 artist ; but Andrea could only conceive that which he could perfectly 
 execute. His delight is almost childish, when he detects a fault in 
 Baphael's drawing, which he can rectify. 
 
 " And indeed the arm is wrong ! 
 I hardly dare . . . yet only you to see, 
 Give the chalk here — quick, thus the line should go ! 
 Ay, but the soul ! he's Rafael's ! rub it out ! " 
 
 A field for conjecture opens before us, as the workings of the artist's 
 mind are unfolded. Had Andrea in him the genius of those great 
 
HELEN J. ORMEROD. ANDREA DEL SARTO AND ABT VOGLER. 157 
 
 ones, for equal companionship with whom he yearned, and was it 
 crushed by his heartless wife ? or must heaven have remained for ever 
 closed to him 1 that heaven into which men who were his inferiors 
 in their craft could enter. 
 
 " Their works drop groundwards, but themselves I know- 
 Reach many a time a heaven that's shut to me, 
 Enter and take their place there, sure enough, 
 Though they come back and cannot tell the world. 
 My works are nearer heaven, but I sit here." 
 
 Like Adam, he laid the blame on the woman, andlike Adam he too 
 was shut out of Paradise. It may be that had Andrea given up his 
 unworthy love, that deep saying of James Hinton's might have been 
 verified in his case — " Never be afraid of giving up your best, 
 because then God will give you His Better," The entry to that 
 heaven of the soul might have been God's " Better." There is a 
 touching anecdote told of Blake, when in his days of old age and 
 poverty, a little girl was taken to see him in his garret. He took 
 the child in his arms, and blessing her, prayed that she might find 
 life as beautiful as he had found it. Truly he had entered and taken 
 his " place there, sure enough " ! 
 
 Andrea now comes before us in his character of lover-husband. 
 The poem opens with a pathetic appeal to his wife " not to quarrel 
 any more " ; promising even to paint a picture for one of her lovers, 
 if she will but let him sit. 
 
 " Here by the window with your hand in mine, 
 And look a half hour forth on Fiesole, 
 Both of one mind, as married people use. 
 Quietly, quietly the evening through, 
 I might get up to-morrow to my work 
 Cheerful and fresh as ever. Let us try. " 
 
 The picture brings tears to the eyes of those who realize what the 
 life-long strain of vmrequited love meant to the artist. 
 
 " You turn your face, but does it bring your heart ? " 
 
 To make up for the waste of time and smiles involved by the wife 
 giving the husband her company in this sweet twilight hour, Andrea 
 adds : 
 
 "Don't count the time lost neither, you must serve 
 For each of the five pictures we require ; 
 It saves a model. So ! keep looking so ! " 
 
 That Andrea's was a finer nature than Lucrezia's may be gathered 
 from his consciousness of wrong-doing, which at once raises him to a 
 
158 HELEN J. ORMEROD. ANDREA DEL SARTO AND ABT VOGLEE. 
 
 higher level than his wife, of whom history fails to record a single 
 redeeming trait, except that of her beauty. If Andrea's paintings 
 did not testify to that we should be reminded of it in the poem, by 
 his expressions of lover-life admiration : 
 
 " Yom- soft hand is a woman of itself " 
 — and again : 
 
 Let my hands frame your face in your hair's gold, 
 You beautiful Lucrezia that are mine ! " 
 
 and then 
 
 '"My serpentining beauty, rounds on rounds, 
 How could you ever prick those perfect ears 
 Even to put the pearl there ? " 
 
 (Was a thought of Lilith in Browning's mind when the adjective 
 serpentining suggested itself to him 1) 
 
 " My face, my moon, my everybody's moon, 
 C-. ' "■' Which everybody looks on, and calls his, 
 
 ^■^' And, I suppose, is looked on by in turn, 
 
 WhQe she looks — no one's ; very dear, no leas. " 
 
 I cannot leave this passage without contrasting another with it, 
 spoken from the heart of the great poet who writes of Andrea's 
 unhappy love ; in each passage the moon is used as a figure. 
 
 '• This to you, j'ourself my moon of poets ! 
 Ah but that's the world's side, there's the wonder. 
 Thus they see you, praise you, think they know you ! 
 There, in turn, I stand with them, and praise you. 
 Out of my own self, I dare to phrase it. 
 But the best is when I glide from out them 
 Cross a step or two of dubious twilight. 
 Come out on the other side, the novel 
 Silent, silver lights and darks undreamed of. 
 Where I hush and bless myself with silence. ' 
 
 It would seem, from the following remark of Andrea's, 
 
 "You at the point of your first pride in me, 
 (That's gone you know !) " 
 
 that Lucrezia, when she became his wife, had a certain pride in, 
 though not love for him ; but even this had vanished. 
 
 And again 
 
 "You don't understand 
 Nor care to understand about my art. " 
 
 You don't know how the others strive 
 
 To paint a little thing like that you smeared 
 
 Carelessly passing with your robes afloat." 
 
HELEN J. OKMEROD. ANDREA DEL SARTO AND ABT VOGLER. 159 
 
 But nothing rouses her to interest ; and surely, of huruan ex- 
 periences it is amongst the saddest, when the being most beloved is 
 indifferent to the work and fame of the lover. Nothing chills like 
 indifterence ; sarcasm and censure may sting, even crush for a time, 
 but above the dead level of indifference only a heaven-taught spirit 
 can rise. 
 
 Most pathetic is the scene, when Andrea quotes words spoken by 
 Michael Angelo about himself, and burned into his very soul ; only 
 to find that Lucrezia had even forgotten who was the speaker. 
 
 " Do you forget already words like these ?" 
 
 Yet after all — 
 
 ' ' You smile indeed ! 
 This hour has been an hour ! another smile ? 
 If you would thus sit by me every night 
 I should work better — do you comprehend ? 
 I mean that I should earn more, give you more." 
 
 The poem ends as follows, the last line bringing before us with 
 sharp distinctness the profligacy of the wife and the infatuation of 
 the husband : 
 
 "You loved me quite enough it seems to-night, 
 This must suflBce me here. What would I have ? 
 In heaven perhaps new chances — one more chance. 
 Four great walls in the New Jenisalem 
 Meted on each side by the angel's reed 
 For Leonard, Eafael, Agnolo, and me 
 To cover ; the first three without a wife, 
 "While I have mine ! So, still they overcome 
 Because there's still Lucrezia, as I choose. 
 ,-u_ Again the Cousin's whistle. Go, my Love t " 
 
 l^Q turn from this picture of artist life, half reluctant to put down 
 the poem, because of its dramatic strength and because of its deep 
 undercurrent of remorse which gives it so intense a hiunan interest ^ 
 and yet glad to exchange the depths for the heights occupied by Abt 
 Vogler. But we will first leave the musician for a few words about 
 music. 
 
 To those who are not themselves musicians, it may be suggested 
 that in music, as in painting and poetry, there may be an art, 
 inferior possibly in execution, but distinguished by a touch of genius, 
 a mysterious something which no technical training can impart. 
 This extemporization by Abt Vogler on his own instrument was a 
 moment when inspiration was breathed upon him ; and it seems 
 almost like sacrilege to descend from the heights of art, to the 
 
 s 
 
160 HELEN J. ORMEROD. ANDREA DEL SARTO AND AST VOGLER. 
 
 dissection of the poem into musical parlance ; — however the attempt 
 must be made. Perhaps such an attempt cannot be better prefaced 
 than by giving a fragmentary conversation as it occurred ; the speakers 
 numbered three besides myself, a lady of Scotch extraction, troubled 
 in spirit because of her non-comprehension of the " star " simile in the 
 line — 
 
 "That out of three sounds he frame, not a fourth sound but a star" 
 
 — an artist, and a musician. 
 
 " But why did he say a star ? " persisted the lady, turning to me. 
 
 " "Why shouldn't he % a star is perfect and beautiful, and rays of 
 light come from it, and a poet must say something. Besides, he wanted 
 a rhyme to 'are '." 
 
 " It seems to me he might as well have said a si^ade but for the 
 rhyme." 
 
 " But because he was a poet he didn't. What do you think of the 
 line ? " I asked the artist. 
 
 " I have a glimmering of the sense, but I wouldn't undertake to 
 put it into words," he answered. 
 
 I then handed the book to the musician, who, after reading the 
 verse exclaimed, " But what does she want to know % Why ! it's all 
 there, and there's nothing to explain ! " 
 
 This is very much my own feeling, but having been asked to 
 explain a few musical phrases, I must endeavour to comply. 
 
 It may be remembered that the musical instrument of Abt 
 Yogler's invention was probably his orchesti-ion, ' in which he 
 embodied all the results of his simplification of organ systems, and 
 by which he attained superior effects of tone and power, with fewer 
 and shorter pipes. All this was founded on the theory of harmonics. 
 The great advantage of his orchestrion lay in the fact of it being 
 movable, and thus he could take his own instrument about with him 
 on his concert tours. 
 
 Having fixed his once imaginary instrument in a material form, 
 we find him in the poem, longing next to put his extemporization 
 into shape and form, but as ever before " the gone thing was to go." 
 
 I remember when a child hearing a lady ask an old, self-taught 
 Yorkshire organist, "What was that piece you played after 
 service yesterday morning ? " and the old man replied, " Eh, 
 mistress ! if you was to ax me from mornin' till neet, I couldn't 
 play t'same piece over again, for it came straight out o' my 'ed ! " 
 
 ^ Fatti is reported to have one, which cost her £4,000. 
 
HELEN J. ORMEROD. ANDREA DEL SARTO AND ABT VOGLEB. 161 
 
 So it is ; an extemporization is a passing thing ; perhaps with some 
 composers an occasional melody may come unsought, which lingers 
 in the memory and may be reproduced at leisure ; but the phantasy 
 as a whole vanishes as a sunrise mist. It is considered dangerous for 
 young musicians to indulge too freely in the delights of extemporiza- 
 tion ; for in the study of music it may be analogous to day-dreaming 
 in the study of literature, and Schumann warns students not to give 
 themselves up too often to this faculty. 
 
 We may suppose that Abt Yogler had carelessly struck a chord on 
 his orchestrion, or possibly, as I before suggested, on his simplified 
 organ at Darmstadt, and then all unexpectedly, as such impressions 
 always come, his soul was flooded with heavenly melodies and 
 harmonies, and for a time he lost himself in the exquisite phantasy. 
 When the ecstasy was passing he remembered the key in which he 
 began to improvise. 
 
 " I feel for the common chord again " 
 
 — and we may conclude that as he wished to end in C major, it was the 
 key in which he began. But he had wandered far away from the original 
 key. It would be impossible in the limits of this paper to enter 
 upon the subject of modulation as the musician slides by semitones, 
 tiU he suddenly finds himself on a neighbouring minor, possibly E flat, 
 he "blunts it into a ninth " (a ninth fi'om C would be D, one note above 
 the octave) ; here he surveys for a moment the flight his fancy had 
 taken, and the musical heights he so lately occupied. 
 
 "Which, hark, I have dared and done, for my resting-place is found, 
 The C major of this hfe : so now I will try to sleep. " 
 
 I was asked after my last paper to explain what *' C major " meant ! 
 I can only suggest that *' C major " is what may be called the natural 
 scale, having no sharps or flats in its signature. " A minor," with A (a 
 third below C) for its keynote, has the same signature, but sharps are 
 introduced for the formation of correct intervals. Pauer says that 
 minor keys are chosen for expressing " intense seriousness, soft 
 melancholy, longing, sadness, and passionate grief " ; whilst major 
 keys with sharps and flats in their signatures are said to have 
 distinctive qualities — perhaps Browning chose " C major " for the key, 
 as the one most allied to matters of everyday life, including rest and 
 
 Vogler's musical system was, as has been already remarked, based on 
 the teachings of the harmonic scale. Hence the accusation of writing. 
 
1 62 HELEN J. ORMEROD. ANDREA DEL SARTO AND ABT VOGLER. 
 
 books on arithmetic, rather than music ! If you strike a note sharply 
 on the piano, and hold it down, a series of scarcely audible sounds 
 will be distinguished as arising from it. Speaking generally, first the 
 octave is distinguished, then the fifth, then the keynote another octave 
 higher, then the third, &c. Here then is the foundation on which all 
 chords are built. The fifth and the third are the intervals of which 
 the common chord is formed. 
 
 There must be some present who have heard in Handel's Messiah 
 the fine bass solos, " Why do the nations so furiously rage together 1 ■ 
 and " The trumpet shall sound," or in Judas Maccabeus, " Arm, arm, 
 ye brave 1 " The opening notes of each of these solos are the notes 
 of the common chord, the keynote with its major third, fifth, and 
 octave treated as a melody : that is to say, as a sequence of sounds, 
 following each other. Treated harmonically, {that is to say, written 
 above each other, and sounded simultaneously either by sepai-ate 
 voices, or on an instrument) — there is the common chord ! Therefore 
 the common chord, as it is called, the keynote with its third and fifth, 
 contains the rudiments of all music. 
 
 *' And I know not if, save in this, sucli gift be allowed to man, 
 That out of three sounds he frame, not a fourth sound, but a star. 
 Consider it well ; each tone of our scale in itself is naught ; 
 It is everywhere in the world — loud, soft, and all is said ; 
 Give it to me to use ! I mix it with two in my thought, 
 And, there ! ye have heard and seen, consider and bow the head ! " 
 
 It has been suggested that a comparison between the arts of music 
 and painting might now be made ; but to look upon them as sister 
 arts, between whom comparison would be invidious, seems the more 
 congenial way. This much may be said, that painting has perhaps a 
 more calming influence than music, which is sometimes painfully 
 exciting ; I now speak more of executants, than spectators or listeners. 
 I was amongst the last pupils to whom Mr. Gastineau, the water- 
 colour painter, gave lessons ; we were speaking one day of music and 
 painting. " There will probably come a time," said the old artist, 
 ** when music will be too painfvd for you, and then you will find 
 painting will soothe you." And I remember answering with a school- 
 girl's wisdom of inexperience, " Painting could never comfort me, if 
 music failed," and he simply replied, '' You are very young now ! " 
 
 One of the joys of the musical in the future state may be the 
 hearing of music without the almost unbearable longing for the sound 
 of a silenced voice, or the painful yearning for a lost joy ; for the 
 voice will be heard again, and the joy fulfilled, or not desired. I 
 believe that it is given to music to create feelings of more intense 
 
HELEN J. ORMEROD. ANDREA DEL SARTO AND ABT VOGLER. 163 
 
 joy, and more acute pain, than to any other art, but Abt Vogler 
 reminds us of the i-ecompense for the pain. 
 
 ' ' Sorrow is hard to bea,r, and doubt is slow to clear, 
 Each sufferer says his say, his scheme of weal and woe ; 
 But God has a few of us whom He whispers in the ear ; 
 The rest may reason and welcome ; 'tis we musicians- know." 
 
 The calm born of contemplating nature is very great ; and yet re- 
 morse in the heart would be sufficient to give a feeling of avitumnal de- 
 pression to everything, such as we notice in Andrea's mood. I heard 
 the Eev. Hay Aitken say in the course of an impressive sermon, 
 " You must be at feud with nature, if you are out of peace with God." 
 
 Abt Vogler is often quoted as confirming (were confirmation 
 needed) Browning's belief in the immortality of the soul ; and 
 certainly in the poem there is no uncertain sound ; in reading it 
 through again I was reminded of a beautiful remark of Mrs, Owen's 
 that our "life is but an interruption of eternal life." And it would' 
 seem that the Musician's music, including all that is highest, most 
 heroic, and divinely self-forgetting, goes to be part of the music of 
 heaven. 
 
 I should like to draw attention to the different views of past, 
 present, and future presented to us by the two characters in the 
 poems. 
 
 " All we have willed, or hoped or dreamed of good sharll exist." 
 
 At first, as we saw, Abt Yogler's frame of mind was one of grief that 
 
 his beautiful thought was gone. *' Never to be again " ; this thought 
 
 grows until it yields to the nobler one, " There shall never be one lost 
 
 good " ; and this in turn to the belief that all will be perfected hereafter. 
 
 " On the earth, the broken arcs ; in the heaven, a perfect round." 
 
 The contrast with Andrea is indeed sharp and distinct. Andrea, 
 turning to his unworthy earthly love, only finds disappointment. 
 
 " Come from the window, love, — come in, at last 
 Inside the melancholy little house 
 We built to be so gay with." 
 
 In thinking ctf the future he says, " In heaven perhaps new 
 chances " — but even there he realizes that Lucrezia will prevent him 
 from standing with " Leonard, Eafael, Agnolo." Abt Vogler, as he sur- 
 veys his life-way from the heights, recognizes a purpose in everything. 
 
 " "Why else was the pause prolonged, but that singing might issue thence ? 
 Why rushed the discords in, but that harmony should be prized ? " 
 
 Andrea's retrospect view is full of Avhat might have been ; 
 realizing his opportunity at the court of Francis when he " surely then 
 
 M 2 
 
164 HELEN J. ORMEROD. ANDREA DEL SARTO AND ABT VOGLER. 
 
 could sometimes leave the gi'ound " ; but again his course was spoiled by 
 Lucrezia, who called to him to come back to her. 
 
 Thus gradually we are led to the subject of apparent failure ; and 
 I heard some disappointment was expressed after the reading of my 
 last paper on Abt Vogler, that I had not then dwelt on the subject. 
 It seems to me to rest entirely on the individual idea of success and 
 failure. Blake, in his gar-ret, would have seemed _ a doubtful object 
 for congratulation to the fashionable world, but would he have spoken 
 of failure? 
 
 I was reading Sir Julius Benedict's short life of "Weber the other 
 day, and will give a passing illustration fi-om it. When Weber was 
 alone in London — suffering, nay, dying — he, the gifted composer of Der 
 Freisclmtz, Oberon, and Euryanthe, gave a concert with a view to 
 pro\ading for his family after his death. The result makes one blush 
 for the leaders of the fashion of the day. A fashionable singing master 
 gave a concert on the same day in a nobleman's mansion. The 
 Signer's profits amounted to upwards of £400, whilst Weber's were 
 less than £100. But viewed from this distance, who succeeded, and 
 who failed ] And would Weber in his supreme hour of pain and 
 weakness ever believe otherwise, than that he was taught of heaven ? 
 
 In reading Dr. George MacDonald's story, Home Again, I was 
 struck with a remark of his bearing on the "apparent failure" 
 question. *'A man may fail to effect, or be unable to set hand to work 
 he would fain do, and judged as Browning says in his Saul, by what 
 he would have done if he couid. Only the loould must be as true as 
 a deed ; then it is a deed. The kingdom of heaven is for the dreamers 
 of true dreams only ! " 
 
 Let us for a moment look at the lines about the will in Andrea, 
 Alt Vogler, and Said. Andrea says : 
 
 " In this world, who can do a thing, will not, 
 And who would do it, cannot, I perceive ; 
 Yet the will's somewhat — somewhat, too, the power— 
 And thus we half-men struggle." 
 Abt Vogler speaks as we have already heard : 
 
 " All we have willed, or hoped, or dreamed of good shall exist." 
 And in Saul the lines run thus : 
 
 " "What stops my despair ? 
 This : — 'tis not what man Does which exalts him, but what man Would do. 
 See the king — I would help him but cannot, the wishes fall through, 
 Could I wi-estle to raise him from sorrow, grow poor to enrich, 
 To fill up his life, starve my own out, I would : knowing which, 
 I know that my service is perfect." 
 
HELEN J. OEMEROD. ANDKEA DEL SARTO AND ABT VOGLER. 165 
 
 The world in general seems too ready to praise men who are rich 
 in rank and this world's goods, and yet who in their secret hearts must 
 be ashamed of their Mammon-worship, and failure to attain to the 
 highest. Some of these would confess to success with a sigh, knowing 
 as they spoke that the spiritual life is the higher life, and the material, 
 the lower life. 
 
 Mr. Harry Quilter, in his admirable In Memoriam article on 
 Frank Holl in the Universal Review, spoke strongly on this subject ; 
 and I should like to quote one sentence : " Is there no help for it ? 
 Must all our great artists nowadays succumb to this devil in disguise 
 who whispers to them of social advancement, and an income of ten 
 thousand a year \ Believe me, such things are inimical to art, if not 
 inconsistent with it. The artist has one gi'eat advantage over all the 
 rest of mankind ; it is this, that his best pleasures cost — nothing ! 
 Think what that means. It means that his ten thousand a year, his 
 social position are in himself ; they can never be taken from him save 
 by his own act. But to preserve them he must live that straight- 
 forward, honest life in which alone they can flourish," &c. 
 
 What is the value of success, when it depends on the verdict of 
 the voice of the multitude 1 What matters failure, as viewed by the 
 outside world, when the soul has entered the Holiest of Holies ? 
 
 I noticed in a painting of mountain glory how the central and 
 loftiest peaks are most golden in the after sunset glow ; the successive 
 heights more or less in the glory, while the lower ranges fade from view, 
 or are hidden by sunset clouds and mists. Surely this is typical of those 
 who have truly succeeded. The nearer heaven, the greater the glory — 
 this glory being reserved alike for the conclusion of day and life. 
 What seems gi-eat to us in the mid-day glare may be hidden from 
 sight in sunset clouds ; while the highest mountains are often hidden 
 from view at noontide in a haze of white heat. 
 
 Looking backwards in history, how the glory centres on one pure 
 lofty peak ! And as we look again, we know that on that height 
 a thick darkness once rested 1800 years ago, as though to blot out 
 that scene of appai-ent failure, and the death on the Cross. But the 
 darkness passed away, and the light shone, and has glowed yet brighter 
 with every century, for the peak now so exalted was the once 
 despised hill of Calvary. 
 
 We are too ready to pass judgment on who succeed, and who fails. 
 Oh, if one could but remember that the ground whereon we tread may 
 be holy ground, that heaven may be about us ; and we too blind to 
 see, too ignorant to know. 
 
166 
 
 LA SAISIAZ. 
 
 By THE EEV. W. KOBERTSON, Spkoustox, Roxburghshire, 
 
 Read at the Sixty-third Meeting of the Browning Society, Friday, 
 January 25, 1889. 
 
 It is not surprising that Mr. Browning — the note of whose poetry 
 is the interest displayed in all that helps or hinders, stimulates or 
 depresses the individual soul in its moral development — should have 
 very frequently touched upon the question of immortality and defined 
 the influence which the acceptance or rejection of this doctrine has 
 on human life. Not merely has he directly discussed certain bearings 
 of the question in such poems as Easter Day, A Death in the Desert, 
 Rahhi Ben Ezra, Clean, and Karshish ; in numberless others, of which 
 In a Year, The Patriot, and The Grammarian's Funeral, may be named 
 as examples of varying importance, he has — as if in an incidental 
 manner — adverted to it as an ultimate conviction lying ready for use, 
 so to speak, in the background of consciousness. But in taking up 
 La Saisiaz as an expression of Mr. Browning's opinions we find cer- 
 tain features whicJi distinguish it from the poems I have named. 
 In the first place, it is the production of a considerably later period of 
 his life ; and the years which have intervened between the publication 
 of this poem and of those I have just referred to, have been years in 
 which all convictions have been shaken to their fouadations. No 
 man is so great as to be completely above and beyond the influences 
 of the spirit of his time, and we shall not be surprised if we find that 
 Mr. Browning's attitude in La Saisiaz towards the problem of the 
 Future Life bears the marks of this world-conflict. A second dis- 
 tinguishing feature of La Saisiaz is that here we have, for once at 
 least, a poem by Mr. Browning which is, in no sense of the word, 
 dramatic. Mr. Browning, we all know only too well, has been true 
 
REV. W. ROBERTSON. LA SAISIAZ. 167 
 
 to the determination which he must have early formed, not to " unlock 
 his heart with a sonnet-key." He has been exclusive : he has kept 
 the world at arm's-length : he has not worn his heart upon his sleeve. 
 We cannot, of course, for a moment admit that the reverent student 
 of Browning is to be for ever excluded from a knowledge of his mind ; 
 but as little can it be denied that the veil is not uplifted to the care- 
 less eye : tho secret is not yielded up to the hasty glance. He who 
 runs may not read. Mr. Browning has spoken words which the 
 children of wisdom justify ; but if it was his intention, as it would 
 appear to have been, to speak to the unthinking crowd in such 
 manner that, hearing, they might hear and not understand, we must 
 give him credit for having carried out his intention with singular 
 success. La Saisiaz, however, we are permitted to believe, is not 
 a dramatic poem. The writer speaks in his own person, and the 
 opinions expressed are Mr. Browning's opinions. 
 
 1. The introduction to La Saisiaz bulks somewhat largely when 
 compared with the main body of the poem, occupying twenty-two — 
 or, by another computation, thirty-two — pages out of eighty, and 
 ought not therefore to be passed by without reference. The fulness 
 of detail in these introductory pages would seem intended to prepaio 
 our minds for the impartiality and unflinching severity with which 
 popular beliefs in the succeeding pages are to be treated, and the 
 baldness of the question which is immediately to be asked and 
 answered — 
 
 "How much, how little, do I inwardly believe 
 True, that controverted doctrine 1 " 
 
 It is in no ordinary mood that he approaches the discussion. How- 
 ever coolly men may often take up the problem, for him it has become 
 a matter of intense personal interest. He means on this occasion to 
 grope his way back to the ultimate facts on which the conviction is 
 based, and he seeks to prepare our minds for the earnestness of the 
 discussion that is to follow by detailing the tragic circiunstances 
 which have forced the question upon him. With an artist's instinct, 
 therefore, he opens his poem by picturing himself as standing on the 
 height alone — 
 
 " Singly dared and done the climbing both of us were bound to do — " 
 
 with the added hint that in the ascent every sweet was touched with 
 bitter. He then works his way backward, not telling us the tale 
 with the directness of a mere reporter, but in the form of such a 
 soliloquy on recent events as might naturally occur to him at the 
 
168 BEV. W. ROBERTSON. LA SAISIAZ. 
 
 moment. His mind wanders back over these events, the prevailing 
 thought being his recollection how completely absent was all forebod- 
 ing of coming ill, and his sense of the profound gulf that now divides 
 him from his friend. Five days before he and she had determined to 
 ascend the mountain. He recalls the light and careless talk of the 
 evening preceding the day which had been fixed for their ascent — 
 every word so significant now from its very triviality, so oppressive 
 in its suggestion of human blindness and ignorance. Not thus would 
 friends converse if they foresaw with what appalling suddenness the 
 thick curtains of night were to fall and hide them from each other for 
 ever. He recalls the commonplace close of that day, the injunction 
 to remember to-morrow's engagement, the nothings of French politics 
 hardly worth repeating, the last dying sparks of adieus on the stair 
 landing — then all was dark. Next morning even there was still no 
 premonitory hint of the coming cloud as he went for his early plunge 
 in the pool. He returned, expecting everywhere to meet and greet 
 the tall white figure, and entered the house just in time to find that 
 death had, at that instant, "captiired her in cold forever — " her, the 
 full beauty of whose nature he alone had known, 
 
 '* an Alpine-rose which all beside named Edelweiss." 
 
 The friends bury her body in the quiet little churchyard, and, now 
 ill at ease in such a scene, they resolve to leave it ; but before depart- 
 ing, the poet performs, one loving duty in making the ascent " which 
 both of them were bound to do." We are thus brought naturally 
 round to the point from which we started — on the summit where the 
 poet stands alone with the question forced upon him in a manner that 
 cannot be evaded " Here I stand : but you — where 1 " 
 
 It would have been my wish, had I been able to accomplish it, to 
 have discoursed upon La Saisiaz as a work of art, and not merely 
 as a contribution to the study of a problem of philosophy. To neglect 
 the thought of Mr. Browning's poems, however, in order to devote our 
 attention to the form, is not always an easy task, and less easy with 
 regard to La Saisiaz than with most of his works : but before leaving 
 these introductory pages we may look back for a moment and note 
 some of their poetic features. Briefly then, it may be said, we ob- 
 serve many of the characteristic marks of Mr. Browning's style — 
 simplicity and directness of narration befitting the sad story ; sus- 
 tained vigour of thought, and picturesque force of language ; the 
 keenest observation of nature, and what we might call an almost 
 ruthless accuracy of description. As regards the much-talked-of 
 
KEY. W. ROBERTSON. LA SAISIAZ. 169 
 
 obscurity of Mr. Browning's writings — though its occurrence can 
 only be denied by the blind worshipper of his genius — it must be con- 
 cluded that he has been often charged with obscurity in passages 
 which are only marked by conciseness, or are found on examination 
 to be as simple and direct as the abstruse nature of his subject will 
 admit. No one, certainly, can bring against the introduction to 
 La Saisiaz the charge of needless obscurity. 
 
 Coleridge, you recollect, in speaking of some verses of Words- 
 worth's declares that if he had met them howling in the desert he 
 would have recognised their authorship. Similarly we might quote 
 many verses from this introduction which bear every mark of Mr. 
 Browning's peculiar genius. When we meet such lines as these 
 
 " Five short days, sufficient hardly to entice, from out its den 
 Splintered in the slab, this pink perfection of the cyclamen ; 
 Scarce enough to heal and coat with amber gmn the sloe tree's gash, 
 Bronze the clustered wilding apple, redden ripe the mountain-ash " : 
 
 we feel how keen is the insight here, how vivid is the picture which 
 is called up before us, and what a world of observation is condensed 
 into the words, each of which is as a scintillating point of light. 
 Such lines, in which he seems to take the first words that occur to 
 him without regard to their lack of poetic association if only they 
 are accurate, vivid, and forcible enough, could not be met with in 
 any desert without proclaiming their author. And again, in lines 
 such as these 
 
 *' Blanc, supreme above his earth-brood, needles red and white and green, 
 Horns of silver, fangs of crystal set on edge in his demesne " ; 
 
 or this, in which he describes how the rising sun transmutes to glory 
 the dark mass of Jura — 
 
 " Gay he hails her, and magnific, thrilled her black length burns to gold " ; 
 
 we have instances of Mr. Browning's characteristic power of passing 
 at one instant, in the midst of an ordinary narrative, to the heights 
 of imaginative expression. 
 
 2, At the close of these twenty- two pages of introduction we are 
 brought round once more, as I said, to the point from which we 
 started, but ten pages still intervene between us and the real com- 
 mencement of the argument of the poem. The question to be 
 answered — now so pressingly personal — is, " Does the soul survive 
 the body 1 " and he asks himself if he can bear to know the truth, 
 should the truth happen not to coincide with his wishes. He believes 
 
170 KEV. W. ROBERTSON. LA SAISIAZ. 
 
 he can. He is weak ; he can but weakly question, he can but weakly 
 answer; but 
 
 " Weakness never needs be falseness, truth is truth in each degree 
 Thunder-pealed by God in Nature, whispered by my soul to me. " 
 
 He cannot pretend to reproduce in Ms words the thunder of God's 
 reply. Still, weak human answers are sufficient for weak human 
 questions, and by questioning himself he can discover what the human 
 heart has to say in reply — remembering also that the thunder-peal 
 may be — " Mine is but man's truest answer — how were it did God 
 respond?" If then he could talk calmly with his friend on the 
 question of a future life when she was alive, he will not falter now 
 when the question to decide is, " Was ending ending once and always 
 when you diedT' What remains of his friend, dear and true ? He 
 casts his eye on the peaceful earth-bed where she was laid, and 
 asks was it only " a tribute to yon flowers and mossi " 
 
 He then bethinks himself that many have an answer ready for 
 him. " Not wholly a tribute to the earth," say they ; " there remains 
 a memory and an influence." Some, it appears, desire only, in George 
 Eliot's words, to 
 
 "... join the cliou- invisible 
 
 Of those immortal dead who live again 
 
 In minds made better by their presence. " 
 
 He takes up this answer of modern scepticism and weighs it in the 
 balance. Certainly a memory of her remains with me, he says, but 
 how inadequate a memory ! Had but fortune favoured, what beauty of 
 soul might have been developed from such promise ! Besides, what 
 heart knows another 1 His memory of her is only of what of her he 
 knew. Then he, treasuring this meagre recollection of her beauty, 
 lives his week or year and dies at last leaving an equally inadequate 
 memorial of himself in the heart of some friend, and finally both 
 memories perish and the only husk of comfort left is 
 
 * ' This — that somewhere new existence led by men and women new 
 Possibly attains perfection coveted by me and you." 
 
 They, owning life a burden and unhappy, fought and struggled : some 
 late generation may possibly enjoy what they so earnestly desired. 
 
 The bare statement of this creed seems sufiicient at once to weigh 
 it in the balance and to declare its vanity, for he immediately leaves 
 the subject. That we may not lightly pass over important words, 
 however, let us take up the ci-ucial thought of the passage — which is 
 not that of the unfulfilled life and the undeveloped soul, nor of the 
 inadequacy of the memory, nor even that both memories fade and 
 
REV. W. ROBERTSON. LA SAISIAZ. 171 
 
 vanish for ever from human knowledge — not these, significant though 
 they be — but this, that in some new existence a new generation of 
 men and women " possibly attains perfection coveted by me and 
 you." Possibli/ — this is the fatal word which pricks that hollow 
 bubble-substitute for immortality. Where is the certainty of this 
 perfection that some sanguine eyes foresee "? Who can tell whether 
 the human race is even on the road towards painlessness and happi- 
 ness 1 Can any one declare that he has grounds for the conviction 
 that such a destiny awaits the race of men ? Granted that the 
 English race, the Teutonic race, the Western races if you will, have 
 progressed during the last thousand years, thei-e is absolutely no 
 foundation for the belief that this progress will continue. Former 
 civilisations have vanished from the earth. " Assyria, Greece, Rome, 
 Carthage whei-e are they '? " One after another they caught up the 
 flaming torch of civilisation, bore it for a brief space, then allowed it 
 to drop from their weaiy hands, and finally retired from the contest. 
 What assui'ance have we that the same fate may not be in store for 
 us? And further, we can form no conception, of this distant and 
 perfected future, for history and science alike fail to forecast it. 
 Even if physical science had free scope and could work out its best, 
 if the time should ever come when there shall be no more hunger and 
 no more pain (and science would seem rather to predict the reverse, 
 that — in the increasing intensity of the struggle for existence — 
 these will augment rather than decrease) thei"e can notwithstanding 
 be no future however distant in which the ugly facts of decay, 
 separation, and death, shall not dominate human life, and these are 
 ills before which hunger and pain dwindle into insignificance. Then 
 ^'coveted by me and you" The happiness of some remote, much less 
 only possible future, cannot satisfy the longings of the present. An 
 ideal " for me and you " — the perfection, not of the race, but of 
 individual men and women, would be something worth living for : but 
 who can find satisfaction or stimulus in striving to produce a proble- 
 matical generation of Shakespeares in some remote seon] Would 
 such a product, even if it could be brought to birth, atone for the 
 sufferings and the pain with which each tedious inch was won by those 
 who went before % As well imagine that the misery and want of the 
 East End of London are satisfactorily balanced by the happiness and 
 luxury of the West. It is small comfort, to use a phrase of Professor 
 Huxley's somewhere — it is small comfort to the three-toed horse of 
 the Eocene, period to know that his fortunate descendant, a million of 
 years after, is to be the winner of the Derby. 
 
172 REV. W. EOBERTSON. LA SAISIAZ. 
 
 I. I pass now to the first of the two main divisions of the poem; 
 and, with Mrs. Sutherland Orr's invaluable volume in our hands, it is 
 unnecessary that I should follow, too closely, the course of the 
 argument. The poet starts by assuming the fact of his own individual 
 personality, and external to him of a power, not himself, that makes for 
 — he knows not what, any more than the rush knows whence the 
 stream comes that carries it, or whither it is carried. These two 
 facts he calls the Soul and God, both so certain as to be beyond 
 proof : he knows of nothing equally certain.^ He is now, that is 
 incontrovertible : will he also be 1 H-^ touches upon some of the 
 arguments usually given in answer to this question only to dismiss 
 them — God's goodness, God's power, man's desii'es. On these matters 
 he cannot speak : he will keep to the siu-e ground of personal ex- 
 perience. He knows "what to me is pain and pleasure." Beyond 
 this all is surmise. He will state then the results of his own ex- 
 perience, and his first judgment on life is that he cannot regard it as 
 the outcome of wisdom if he is debarred from assuming that this 
 world is a place of probation for man's soul. He must believe that 
 life is a training-school where men are educated. But he has no 
 sooner given expression to this judgment than he sees its inadequacy. 
 He is met by the inevitable question Crd bono ? What is the use of 
 training and perfecting a human soul ] Does the end justify the 
 means'? Can we accept it as a satisfactory explanation of all the 
 sorrows and trials of this world that they are imposed for the mere 
 purpose of teaching us half a dozen virtues 1 
 
 " Needs there groan a world in anguish just to teach us sympathy " ? 
 
 Must friends die only that we may fully know their love, and 
 flowers fade that we may merely learn to prize their beauty ? Was 
 there no way but this to teach, man how precious are love and beauty 1 
 In a word, can we accept it as a satisfactory explanation of this 
 woi'ld that it is 
 
 "Only a machine for teaching love and hate and hope and fear " ? 
 
 No, he replies, it is not satisfactory, and though he will bear it if 
 it is of necessity, he cannot regard it as the creation of a God " allgood, 
 allwise, allpotent." What then ? The " traversed heart " must tell 
 its story uncommented on. Grant a second life, he says, assume that 
 our present state is one of preparation for a life to follow, and that 
 
 1 Cf. Newman's conviction of the existence of "two, and two only, supreme 
 and luminously self-evident beings, myself and my Creator." 
 
REV. W. ROBERTSON. LA SAISIAZ. 173 
 
 instant our earthly experience becomes intelligible. In failure, mis- 
 fortune, defeat, he will now " acquiesce." Over all these things he 
 will be more than conqueror, for they will be seen to be essential 
 elements in the divine plan of education. Loss brings true gain, 
 knowledge rises from recognised ignorance, the preciousness of beauty 
 is discovered amid surrounding ugliness, truth amid falsehood, and 
 love through loss. 
 
 " Only grant my soul may carry high through death her cup unspilled, 
 
 Brimming though it be with knowledge 
 
 *' Grant me (once again) assurance we shall each meet each some day, 
 
 Walk — but with how bold a footstep ! on a way — but what a way ! 
 
 — "Worst were best, defeat were triumph, utter loss were utmost gain. 
 
 Can it be, and must, and will it ? " 
 
 Yes, can it be 1 He has stated his case, the grounds of his 
 "surmise." He presents us with a working hypothesis of life. 
 
 In attempting an amplification of this working hypothesis, I must 
 first of all point out that Mr. Browning is not (as has been some- 
 times stated) postulating immortality, in this poem at least, on the 
 ground that a future life is required to atone for the ills of the 
 present. This is to attribute to him a style of argumentation which, 
 in the poem, he explicitly rejects. It is not the injustice of life 
 that afflicts him, it is its unintelligibility. He is led to hope fo''' 
 immortality because without it he can find no rationality in life, no 
 explanation of its evils, and no motive for effort. He has found in 
 his experience that this world is a scene of education : grant that 
 such a fact was designed, and that some use is to be elsewhei^e 
 made of the developed soul, and immediately life becomes intelligible. 
 Eefuse to gi'ant it, and all the suffering and sacrifice of man, his 
 struggles after distant ideals, his crushing sense of failure, his 
 anguish and remorse, become unmeaning. 
 
 Mr. Browning designates his inference a " surmise " ; nevertheless 
 it is the real ground of his belief. It suggests an answer to the question : 
 What is the end or purpose of man's life ? "Why am I here ? Human 
 life is to be judged by the standard either of its utility for the world 
 or for the individual soul. The former alternative is, we have already 
 seen, rejected by Mr. Browning in the passage where he employs the 
 phrase, " Possibly attains perfection coveted by me and you." We 
 may further add that by the hypothesis of mortality, the value of the 
 world (in serving which the soul finds its utility) is deteriorated. If 
 men are but temporary and transient beings, their sufferings, when 
 past, are as unimportant and need concern us as lightly a& the fate of 
 
174 REV. W. ROBERTSON. LA SAISIAZ. 
 
 last year's leaves. If we are told to look to the future of the race 
 and find, in utility for that, an adequate explanation of the " problem 
 of our being here," and a sufficient motive for saci'ifice, we must 
 reply that we cannot work for a future which we do not know. We 
 can understand sacrifice for those we love, we can understand sacrifice 
 for those we do not love in obedience to the will of God, but we can- 
 not understand sacrifice for a generation of whose needs we can form 
 no conjecture, and whose very existence is to some extent contingent.^ 
 Ai'e we told that we shall become nobler through this pursuit, and 
 attain a higher degree of intellectual, moral, and spiritual develop- 
 ment 1 True, we shall ; and just at the moment when we " know 
 most " we shall " least enjoy " ; at the moment when we have 
 attained the noblest height we shall be snuffed out of existence. 
 
 Life judged by such standards Mr. Browning afiirms to be 
 incomplete and unintelligible. He adopts the Christian theory 
 which declares the final cause of life to lie in a good for the indi- 
 vidual. The highest altruism is enjoined in the Christian system no 
 less imperatively than in some anti-Christian systems ; but in the 
 Christian, altruism is never set up as the end of human life. The 
 end of my existence must be an end for me : my ideal of life an ideal 
 for me. Christianity declares sacrifice to be only a means, and the 
 end, the result, or, as it is sometimes called, the reward (though 
 Christian rewards, properly understood, do not minister to selfishness) 
 is perfection of cJiaracter. In and through self-sacrifice (though not 
 through self-sacrifice alone) is perfection attained, and only so con- 
 ceived, as it appears to me, does conscious and voluntai-y self-sacrifice 
 become rational. Altruism, pure and simple, and apart from any 
 personal ideal, is suicide pure and simple. Life, not death — self- 
 realization, not self-annihilation, is the goal proposed by Christianity. 
 If we are asked to keep the Commandments it is that we may enter 
 into life ; if to sacrifice ourselves, it is that we may realize ourselves. 
 The Christian maxim is not " die," but " die to live." Now, if I rightly 
 interpret Mr. Browning, his contention is that this educative pur- 
 pose in life is irrational if men are mortal — that if we find life to 
 be so regulated as to bring forth a moral result, character namely, 
 if the individual soul becomes nobler and purer, this end cannot be 
 designed in order merely to pi'esent a finer tribute to the flowers 
 and moss. 
 
 It may here be allowable to remark that the Christian theory, 
 which Mr. Browning accepts and expounds, has at least one merit— 
 
 ^ R. H lIuttoQ. 
 
REV. W. EOBERTSON. LA SAISIAZ. 175 
 
 it attempts to read a meaning in human existence, and to present a 
 solution of the problems of life. The Christian believes that a 
 purpose is expressed in human life. He does not believe that he 
 fully undei-stands this purpose. The existence of evil, moral and 
 physical, is, in its more terrible forms at least, in his creed as in 
 every other, the crowning difficulty, the ever-present fact which has 
 to be accounted for. He sees in instances here and there that pain 
 and suffering — in a word, evil — fills a useful function. God, he 
 affirms, has not chosen to make a perfect and completed world — such 
 a world would have been, to say the least, uninteresting. But He 
 has chosen to make a progressive world, and evil is one of the neces- 
 sary factors of progress. Hunger is a stimulus \ pain, a guide ; 
 sorrow, a purifier ; loss reveals the true value of precious things ; 
 effort strengthens man's character ; and peace is only won through 
 war. But these simple explanations are not universally applicable. 
 " Lo, these are parts of His ways : but how little a portion is heard 
 of Him " (R. V. — " Lo, these are but the outskirts of His ways : And 
 how small a whisper do we hear of Him "). They are but keys to 
 the mysterious and changing cipher in which the world is Avritten \ 
 and when, by these keys, we have, as we think, successfully inter- 
 preted a line of this world-hieroglyphic, we find at the next line that 
 our key has failed us. Much pain, and sorrow, and suffering seem 
 utterly disproportionate to the resulting good — sometimes no result 
 of good is perceptible at all. But the Christian holds firmly to so 
 much as he can understand, and so far as he does understand it, the 
 meaning seems to be that man is here to be educated. Man is not 
 here to work, but to be worked upon. The production of character 
 is, after all, the one result which never fails. Whether you are 
 ruling a kingdom, or sweeping a crossing, or lying on a sick bed, 
 character is ever being formed and built up. Every act, whether it 
 be a success or a failure, is a stone added to the edifice of character 
 which is being reared. If naked, man comes into this world, not 
 naked he goes hence, but loaded with this heavy burden of character 
 he departs elsewhere — if there be an elsewhere. 
 
 Such is the estimate of life, as it appears to me, on which Mr. 
 Browning bases his " surmise " tliat it will continue. 
 
 From the foregoing argument it is patent that we are far astray 
 if we imagine that Mr. Browning means to adduce " evidences " of 
 immortality. To have presented, as " proofs " of a future life, the 
 ordinary stock-in-trade of the apologetic theologian, would have been 
 mde of his purpose. His purpose is of quite another nature. As in 
 
176 EEV. W. ROBERTSON. LA SAISIAZ. 
 
 Cleon he reproduces the feelings of one who looks with horror on the 
 blank darkness of annihilation, and clings to this present life because 
 there is "no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom, in the 
 grave whither thou goest " ; so in La Saisiaz he adopts another and 
 more important Biblical precedent, and seeks to bring immortality to 
 light by first bringing " life " to light. He bases his belief in im- 
 mortality on his sense of the value of man's present existence. The 
 soul is worth training. Man's perfected soul is too fair a product to 
 be lost. Heaven and earth, pain and pleasure, love and hate, light 
 and darkness, promise and disappointment, success and failure, are all 
 at work, like a potter's wheel, moulding into finer shape this soul of 
 man. It is an agonizing process. But only grant that all this agony 
 is not meaningless and pm'poseless, that it has a significance for the 
 individual — only grant a second life, he says, and I acquiesce in every 
 hour of disciplinary pain, I rejoice in it, I triumph in it. 
 
 This is the argument of the poem so far as we have gone, and in 
 no sense of the word can it be called " proof." You can prove that 
 the world is round on evidence which compels conviction in every sane 
 mind, but Mr. Browning pauses in his discussion of immortality at a 
 point where belief in it is manifestly compatible with doubt. In what 
 remains of the poem he proceeds to account for this uncertainty in 
 which he finds the question involved. 
 
 II. The second main division of the poem is the lengthy dialogue 
 between Fancy and Reason which it is unnecessary I should analyse in 
 detail. I may summarise his argument briefly thus. He has found, 
 as I said, that the course of his argument has landed him only in 
 " surmise." This, at first sight, seems unsatisfactory, and he proceeds 
 to ask himself the question, What would be the effect on human Hfe 
 if immortality were no surmise, but a conviction so certain that a 
 man could not, in any mood, question it? He finds that such a 
 hypothesis would be fatal to his foregoing argument — that the effect 
 of such a conviction would be to destroy that probationary element 
 in life which he has declared to be the very basis of the belief. If 
 the next world were always and clearly known as the scene of certain 
 reward for obedience here, earth could no longer be " man's probation 
 place. '^ The immediate effect of certainty would be to destroy man's 
 freedom of choice. If evil could be seen to be inevitably followed by 
 punishment, and good as inevitably followed by reward, no man could 
 disobey laws so patent and importunat-e, there could be no merit in 
 obeying them, and obedience to them could not constitute a moral 
 discipline. The moral law is not so certain and palpable as to compel 
 
REV. W. ROBERTSON. LA SAISIAZ. 177 
 
 obedience. *' To know the good and yet the wrong pursue " is the 
 commonest of adages. There are laws so patent and palpable as to 
 necessitate immediate obedience ; but for such obedience man gets no 
 credit. The moral law man may evade, many laws he must obey : 
 " therefore," says Mr. Browning, 
 
 "... not without a purpose these man must, while those man may- 
 Keep and, for the keeping, haply gain approval and reward. " 
 
 The moral law is not subject to evasion through Divine impotence, 
 but of purpose that obedience may be disciplinary. Similarly, if the 
 fact of immortality, as a scene of rewards and punishments, lay in 
 the region of scientific and demonstrated truth, obedience to the 
 moral law would no longer be an affair of effort and struggle, and 
 the discipline of the soul would no longer be possible. Only from 
 the hypothesis that this life is a scene of probation can immortality 
 be inferred (such is the argument in the earlier portion of the poem) : 
 only by not holding this inference as a matter of demonstrated cer- 
 tainty can our present existence remain a scene of probation (such is 
 the argument in the later portion). 
 
 I need not do more at this point than remind you that in Karshisk 
 Mr. Browning has expressed the same opinion in a manner more 
 indirect, but on that very account perhaps more convincing. The 
 certain and immediate conception of the unseen world, possessed by 
 Lazarus, paralyses him, it injures his sense of the true proportion of 
 earthly things, and lifts him out the region of conflict and struggle 
 and therefore of probation. La Saisiaz closes with the judgment that 
 future life is, and can only fulfil its disciplinary function by remaining, 
 a hope — " a hope ; no less, no more ". 
 
 I may be allowed here, as previously, to pause, and attempt a 
 re-statement of the argument which I have thus briefly summarised. 
 And I purpose making use of the terminology of theological science, 
 because by so doing I may be able, perhaps, more accurately to define 
 the place in modern thought which Mr. Browning has here taken up. 
 
 By certain writers surprise has been expressed that Mr. Browning 
 should have declared the question of immortality to lie in the uncer- 
 tain region of " hope " ; and some have even attempted to infer that 
 his deliverance on the subject in 1877, when La Saisiaz was published, 
 expresses a less assured conviction than what was his when he wrote 
 A Death in the Desert or Rahhi Ben Ezra. Now, on the contrary, Mr. 
 Browning has taken up in this division of the subject no less than 
 in the others, as it appears to me, the purely Christian position. 
 
 In the earlier portion of the poem he afiirms that life has no 
 
 N 
 
178 EEV. W. ROBEKTSON. LA SAISIAZ. 
 
 meaning for him unless he is allowed to regard it as a scene of 
 probation or education. That this is the Christian position will be 
 granted. Is it also in harmony with Christianity to maintain that 
 future existence must present itself to us as a great " hope," and that 
 if it were a certainty it would interfere with our moral progress here ? 
 That it is so can, I think, be easily demonstrated. 
 
 The Christian position is that spiritual progress is gained through 
 walking by faith and not by sight. What do these two words mean 1 
 Sight means certain knowledge — knowledge based on scientific demon- 
 stration. (I cannot pause here to discuss the prior philosophical 
 question whether so-called scientific knowledge may not be based on 
 unproved assumptions. The phrase, of course, can only be employed 
 by those who imagine themselves possessed of some valid criterion of 
 knowledge.) We know by sight that fire burns, that water will 
 drown, that the world is round, that 2 + 2 = 4. For knowledge of 
 these facts we require only observation and a sane mind. Once proved 
 they are proved for ever : we do not require a second time to assure 
 ourselves of them. The knowledge of them depends, in no sense, on 
 our moral nature — only on the sanity of our intellect. We reach 
 these truths without moral struggle, and we hold them without 
 inward effort. We speak of our knowledge of these matters — not of 
 our belie/ in them. No man, who rightly employs the Queen's 
 English, ever says that he believes 2 + 2 = 4. He knows it. 
 
 Now what is faith 1 When the Christian says that he walks by 
 faith and not by sight or knowledge, he means that his life as a moral 
 being rests on certain convictions whose truth he may not at every 
 moment be able to demonstrate, but to whose intrinsic worth he pays 
 a homage which the things of sight are quite incapable of eliciting. 
 An act of faith is an act of surrender to the claims of quality rather 
 than of quantity. Faith is not, as is often popularly supposed, belief 
 on insufficient evidence. It is trust in a particular kind of evidence. 
 It is loyalty to certain instincts and intuitions of our nature — a 
 loyalty which could no doubt be defended on scientific grounds — but no 
 arguments which might be adduced in support of these instincts and 
 intuitions would account for the authority which they claim and the 
 homage which we yield them. The obligation of duty, or the voice of 
 conscience, is not so palpable and coercive as at all times to compel 
 obedience, but it never fails to draw from us a conviction of its 
 supremacy. To surrender ourselves to the unexplained command of 
 conscience is an act of faith. That part of our nature which accepts 
 the conclusions of proof we name sight; that which perceives the 
 
REV. W. ROBERTSON. LA SAISIAZ. 179 
 
 intrinsic worth, and acknowledges the authoritative supremacy of 
 conscience or the moral law we name faith. Our adherence to the 
 objects of faith — unlike our conviction of scientific truth — varies with 
 our spiritual state. It demands an inward conflict. Faith is thus an 
 act of suiTender in the dark to conscience. It is thus also nearly 
 synonymous with tmst — whose beauty as a human trait may be more 
 generally acknowledged. Now there is no room for trust except in 
 darkness. 
 
 According to the Christian system all religious convictions belong 
 to this order of beliefs. They rest not on the evidence of sight but 
 on instincts of loyalty and reverence. It is thus that the exercise of 
 faith, but not of sight, is disciplinary. 
 
 Now in thus explaining what is meant by faith and distinguishing 
 it from sight, I have explained what Mr. Browning means by " hope." 
 For faith and hope, as here employed, are identical in meaning, but 
 the latter word is used with reference to those objects of faith which 
 lie in the future time. The obligation of duty is a present object of 
 faith : the future life is an object of Christian hope. It follows that 
 the exercise of hope, in this sense, is disciplinary. Belief in 
 immortality, then, rests on certain moral adhesions which we require 
 a constant moral effort to maintain. It is this moral effort which 
 confers on hope its probationary value. 
 
 "We err then, it appears to me, if we imagine that when Mr. 
 Browning says " hope " he means hope in its ordinary and familiar 
 sense. I may "hope " that to-morrow may be a fine day ; but this is 
 a vain hope. It is hope based on insufficient evidence. I have no 
 ground for exjyecting a tine day. But when Mr. Browning " hopes " 
 for a second life, it is no groundless hope, it is an expectation based 
 on his working hypothesis, on his conception of the value of this 
 earthly life as he has known and experienced it. This life bears marks 
 of a meaning and a purpose ; Mr. Browning reads it as the scene of 
 probation and education : and from this again, judging by the 
 same standard, he infers a second life for which the present is a 
 preparation. 
 
 But it may be objected that Mr. Browning has made many of 
 his characters (who may be believed to speak, more or less directly, 
 his own thoughts) express the profoundest confidence in a life 
 beyond the grave. Let me very briefly point out what relation this 
 position of confidence holds to that of " hope " in La Saisiaz. 
 
 From the religious point of view, as we have seen, it is regarded 
 fts fatal to that conception of moral progress which alone sheds any 
 
 N 2 
 
180 REV. W. ROBERTSON. LA SAISIAZ. 
 
 intelligibility or rationality on life, that immortality should be a 
 matter of certainty and not of hope. Life would in its every 
 action become a sordid calculation of chances. It makes for 
 righteousness if truth is sought for its own sake, and right is followed 
 in scorn of consequence : it would not make for righteousness if at 
 every call to sacrifice we whispered to ourselves that present loss 
 would be future gain. Yet when the uttermost call is made — when 
 all, or all that makes life worth having, has to be renounced — when the 
 soul is in extremis, then on no rational principle can the surrender be 
 made if there be not the inward conviction that all is not lost, that 
 one day it will turn to us for a testimony. For this last supreme 
 surrender we require a justification, a sanction, and we find an 
 adequate one in our belief in immortality which we are allowed to 
 summon forth from the recesses of consciousness and implicitly to 
 trust. 
 
 Now every student of Mr. Browning knows that with him the 
 only thing worth study is a soul, and the study is significant in pro- 
 portion to the gravity of the crisis in which the soul is placed. His 
 subjects are being constantly presented to us in such critical hours 
 — hence the frequent reference to immortality in his works. Thus it 
 is at his last hour — his ultimate surrender — that " The Patriot " 
 
 exclaims : 
 
 '"Tis God shall repay — I am safer so." 
 
 The Grammarian *' threw himself on God, and, unperplexed, seeking 
 shall find Him." Abt Vogler rises from despair through the con- 
 solation of the thought " there shall never be one lost good — what 
 was shall live as before." The young wife of In a Year falls back 
 for ultimate help on the yearning, " What comes next 1 Is it God 1 " 
 David, in the agony of his need for some conception adequate to lift 
 off the morbid depression from the gloomy spirit of Saul, catches at 
 
 the same thought. 
 
 '« Saul, it shall be 
 
 A Face like my face that receives thee — a Man like to me 
 
 Thou shalt love and be loved by for ever." 
 Yet what does all this amount to but just this, that belief in 
 immortality is not to be held mechanically or as a mere matter of 
 course. It ought not to be allowed to enter among the motives of 
 our ordinary life. It is for use only in supreme moments. It should 
 be employed as a justification of sacrifice, not as a motive for it ; as 
 a sanction for giving up what is precious to us here, not as a reward 
 for oixr self-denial. This, we believe, is Mr. Browning's position, and 
 it is surely in harmony with Christianity. 
 
REV. W. ROBERTSON. LA SAISIAZ. 181 
 
 In Natural Religion Professor Seeley takes up precisely the 
 same position, as has been here expounded, on the use and abuse of 
 belief in a future life. One might almost say that the purpose of that 
 book is to enforce the maxim regarding immortality, " Believe it, and 
 then think as little about it as possible." 
 
 You will not desire, I fancy, that I should proceed to show how much 
 all that has been said is in harmony with the teaching of the Gospels. 
 I may only point out the striking fact that on not more than perhaps 
 three reported occasions did Christ ever speak of the life after death, 
 and on these occasions the reference was forced on Him by interroga- 
 tion from bystanders. He concerned Himself with the present ; if a 
 future is referred to, as it often is, it is not the future after death, 
 but a future on earth. Almost every phrase He uses — when stripped 
 of the wrappings in which the ages have encased it — is found to refer 
 to this present world. He spoke of no events that were not to take 
 place before His own generation had passed away. Those standing 
 by were not to see death till all these things were accomplished. 
 
 It does not follow from the views here expounded that to regard 
 this life as a preparation for another world will in any degree inter- 
 fere with the devotion and attention justly due to our present 
 existence. To look on this life as a dream and the future life alone 
 worthy of consideration is directly contrary to the spirit of 
 Christianity. Man's sole concern is with the present. But, as 
 Professor Seeley says, " To hope even with enthusiastic conviction for 
 a future life is one thing ; to be always brooding over it so as to 
 despise the present life in comparison with it is another — " a sentence 
 which is, I believe, in closest accordance with Mr. Browning's view, 
 and strictly illustrates the spirit in which this lecture has been 
 written. 
 
 To sum up. It is an error to say, as regards La Saisiaz, at least, 
 that Mr. Browning bases his belief in immortality on the conviction 
 that a second life is needed to atone for the ills of the present. He 
 does not judge the present world to be a scene of probation because 
 he believes in immortality j on the contrary, he believes in im- 
 mortality because, in his experience, he has found this present state 
 to be one of probation. It is neither the miseries nor the failures of 
 this present life that oppress him — it is its meaninglessness, and he 
 believes in immortality because in it alone does he find that which 
 confers rationality and intelligibility on life. 
 
 Again, if he rests content with finding immortality a hope, we 
 must remember that with him belief in a future life is expressed in 
 
182 REV. W. EOBERTSON. LA SAISIAZ. 
 
 forms of hope, precisely as belief in the existence of God is expressed 
 in the language of faith. In both cases the conviction rests, not on 
 exact or mechanical proof, but on the intimations and intuitions of 
 reverence, loyalty, and love. 
 
 Human life, it may be said, is like the child's toy, a heap of 
 letters, from which you may pick out what letters you like and frame 
 what words you choose, and with your words you may form some 
 ghastly tale of cruel oppression and blind and meaningless injustice 
 (like The Story of an African Farm) under which no mortal could 
 live, and yet learn that a Higher Power was leading him, firmly, yet 
 with pity and love, to finer issues. It cannot be said that Mr. 
 Browning picks out the letters that suit him. He takes this world 
 precisely as he finds it, and to him it presents itself as " probation- 
 place for man." Much is inexplicable, much problematical. In two 
 facts only does he find a firm basis : " He at least believed in soul — 
 was very sure of Gcd." 
 
 The instincts and intuitions of the race are strong, and, for the 
 most part, seek for no justification of themselves. As a rule they 
 fulfil their function without challenge, and ask no troublesome or 
 perplexing questions. Many are the deeds of heroism and sacrifice 
 "done at an instinct of the natural man." But man is self-conscious, 
 and he will sometimes paiise and turn in upon himself, and ask if 
 this marvellous existence of his has no meaning and no end. Is h'fe 
 merely a fruitless round, a barren rise and fall, where you sacrifice 
 yourself for me and I for you, and is the long-drawn ebb and flow of 
 human existence to end at last in blank extinction ] Such is man's 
 prospect if there be no second life. The race itself — man, Nature's 
 last work — 
 
 " Who seemed so fair, 
 
 Sucli splendid purpose in his eyes, 
 
 Who rolled the psalm to wintry skies, 
 And built him fanes of fruitless prayer," 
 
 will go down into the pit, and all his thoughts will perish. The 
 energies of our system " will decay, th^ glo^T of the sun will be 
 dimmed, and the earth, tideless and inert, will no longer tolerate the 
 race which has for a moment disturbed its solitude. The uneasy 
 consciousness, which in this obscure corner has for a brief space 
 broken the contented silence of the universe, will be at rest. Matter 
 will know itself no longer. Imperishable monuments and immortal 
 deeds, death itself and love stronger than death, will be as though 
 they had never been. Nor will anything that is be better or be 
 
REV. W. ROBERTSOX. LA SAISIAZ. 183 
 
 worse for all that the labour, genius, devotion, and suffering of man 
 have striven through countless generations to effect." ^ 
 
 Meanwhile there is no evidence that the modern world is willing 
 to resign itself with a good grace to such a prospect. Year by year 
 and century by century the race grows older, and no help comes when 
 it seems to want it most. The griefs of the earlier world, like those 
 of childhood, might find sudden and passionate expression, but they 
 were short-lived. Soon their tears were dried and their wounds 
 healed, for Nature, " the homely nurse," could quiet their hearts and 
 put them to sleep with the toys and sweets of the present and the 
 tangible. But the human race seems to grow more sensitive and 
 more self-conscious as it grows older — more thoughtful and more 
 perplexed. Pain smites it with a keener pang, love grows more intense 
 and more enduring, death now casts a deeper shadow. Like Cleon, 
 the age knows most when it can least enjoy ; it bears the burden of 
 the mystery more sadly as one after another of those simple ex- 
 planations of life which satisfied the past, fails it ; it feels most 
 acutely just when the last anodyne is losing its soothing influence. 
 If one poet of past time foresaw that a man must leave his lands, his 
 home, and his dear wife, he was yet ever ready to advise his friend 
 to brush the unwelcome, intruding thought aside, and relieve the 
 present pain with huger logs and deeper draughts of the red 
 Falernian wine. Another of a different age and race was not 
 displeased to think that 
 
 " We are no other than a moving row 
 Of magic shadow-shapes that come and go, 
 
 Round with the sun-illumined lantern held 
 In midnight by the Master of the show." 
 
 But it is a sadder note that sounds through modern literature. 
 When Rousseau gives casual expression to his expectation of meeting 
 again, in the other life, the woman who had loved him, and whom he 
 had wronged, you remember how Mr. John Morley thus comments 
 upon his words, the usual reserve and self-control of the philosophic 
 historian breaking down under the stress of his passionate revolt 
 against the bitterness of death — ' ' To pluck so gracious a flower of 
 hope on the edge of the sombre echoless gulf of nothingness into which 
 our friend has slid silently down, is a natural impulse of the sensitive 
 soul, numbing remorse and giving a moment's relief to the hunger and 
 thirst of a tenderness that has been robbed of its object ; " we should 
 realise " that we have none of this perfect companionable bliss to 
 
 » Tlie Religion of Humanity, by the Right Hon. A. J. Balfour. 
 
184 REV. W. ROBERTSON. LA SAISIAZ. 
 
 promise ourselves in other worlds, that the black and horrible grave 
 is indeed the end of our communion, and that we know one another 
 no more." 
 
 Tlie, Stwy of an African Farm is a book not undeserving of the 
 epithet which Matthew Arnold applied to Emily Bronte's Last Lines, 
 it is " too bold " ; yet its author appears to me to merit some of the 
 descriptive expressions that are applied in Arnold's poem to the author 
 of Wuthering Heights, inasmuch as among her contemporaries she 
 
 " Knows no fellow for might, 
 Passion, vehemence, grief. 
 Daring." 
 
 If, in this book, she flings from her, somewhat scornfully, the 
 " dreams " of men regarding immortality, she yet, as it is curious to 
 note, seems to seek and find a stony peace in what is not less an 
 empty dream, the thought of rest in the Universal Unity — forgetful 
 that this Unity is the creation of, and exists only for, the conscious 
 mind. 
 
 Mr. Browning, on the other hand, finds in life a ground of hope, 
 and his attitude in La Saisiaz towards the question of immortality, as 
 one of faith, trust and hope, is precisely the same as that expressed in 
 the more famous poem : 
 
 " Behold, we know not anything, 
 
 I can but trust that good shall fall 
 At last — far off — at last, to all, 
 And every winter change to spring." 
 
 ^'' 1 stretch lame hands of faith, and grope, 
 And gather dust and chaff, and call 
 To what I feel is Lord of all, 
 And faintly trust the larger hope." 
 
 I wish to add a few words on La Saisiaz considered as a work of 
 art. 
 
 1. Much of what I said about the introduction is applicable to 
 the poem as a whole — notably the reference to the sustained energy 
 of the writer's style and the ease with which, in the midst of a 
 philosophic argument, he can take instant flight on the wings of 
 his imagination, to the heights of poetic expression. Such a phrase 
 as "Hope the arrowy " in the connection in which it occurs illustrates 
 this, and many others could be quoted. 
 
 Then that " indescribable gusto " which Keats distinguished in 
 the elocution of Edmund Kean, appears to me a not improper phrase 
 
BEV. W. ROBERTSON. LA SAISIAZ. 185 
 
 to apply to some of Mr. Browning's verses, of which this line may 
 stand as an example 
 
 " Bronze the clustered wilding apple, redden ripe the mountain-ash." 
 The following remarks, however, I offer with much more diffidence. 
 
 2. When I turn to ask — In what does the argument of this poem 
 differ from that which might be met with in the work of a prose 
 writer 1 What has Mr. Browning as poet contributed to the discussion 
 of the question ? I find some difficulty in answering. The same 
 writer, it appears to me, could have stated his case with equal 
 power, effectiveness and attraction, in prose. Indeed there are large 
 portions of the poem which do not differ in any real manner from 
 brilliant prose. The leading thoughts could find full and adequate 
 expression in a philosophical treatise : they do not appear to me to 
 gain much by being expressed in the poetic form. Perhaps it might be 
 said that the poem suffers from its simple directness of purpose, from 
 its almost didactic aim. It suffers from the fact that Mr. Browning 
 is throughout speaking in his own person, and thus affords a justifi- 
 cation, if that were needed, of his resolution not to unlock his heart 
 with a sonnet-key. Other poems could be named, such as Bishop 
 Blougram^ s Apology, or Caliban upon Setehos, equally argumentative ; 
 but the reasoning in these is subservient to the revelation of character 
 which constitutes their main significance as poems. In La Saisiaz Mr. 
 Browning appears to me to subordinate, if not indeed to sacrifice, the 
 poetic and prophetic elements to the ratiocinative. 
 
 3. Again, La Saisiaz illustrates Mr. Browning's characteristic 
 lack, or at least neglect of, musical expression. We have only to 
 remember that this poem is written in the same measure as Locksley 
 Hall to recognise to the full in what respects it differs from the work 
 of a master-artist in melodious forms. Such lines as that which I 
 quoted 
 
 ' ' Scarce enough to heal and coat with amber gum the sloe-tree's gash " ; 
 
 or these — 
 
 "Gay earth drop her garlands shrivelled at the first infecting breath 
 Of the serpent pains which herald, swarming in, the dragon death " ; 
 
 or these — 
 
 " Barked the bole, and broke the bough, and bruised the berry, left all grace 
 Ashes in death's stern alembic, loosed elixir in its place ! " 
 
 are quite in Mr. Browning's manner, and typical examples of the 
 poem, and while we cannot fail to recognise their marvellous force, 
 brilliance and keenness of observation, we cannot call them musical. 
 
186 REV. W. ROBERTSON. LA SAISIAZ. 
 
 He seldom employs phrases that have a poetic flavour, that carry 
 with them any poetic associations. I do not of course deny that 
 musical lines are to be met with here, as in all Mr. Browning's 
 poems, but they occur only frequently enough to remind us " with a 
 shock of mild surprise " how seldom they occur. 
 
 4. Once more may I venture to remark that the poem appears to 
 me to illustrate Mr. Browning's characteristic lack of pathos. Whether 
 the absence of the pathetic element from his works is owing to his 
 determination to keep the world at a distance and allow no eye to 
 behold the heart in its weaker and tenderer moods, I cannot say. Its 
 absence from La Saisiaz is certainly not owing to the lack of oppor- 
 tunities of introducing it. The unfulfilled life, the appallingly sudden 
 death, the piteous work of interment, the lonely grave among the 
 mountains in the land of strangers, would have been, we may be sure, 
 in the hands of some other poets, more fully described and more 
 pathetically treated. Again I do not deny that pathetic lines might 
 be quoted from Mr. Browning's works, e.g. Mildred's words in A Blot 
 on the 'Scutcheon — 
 
 "I was so young — 
 
 I had no mother, and I loved him so " ; 
 
 biit in this matter, as in others, we must judge a poet's power — not by 
 a line here and there — but by the wealth and weight of his utter- 
 ance—by noting whether the mood descends frequently, readily, and 
 spontaneously upon him, and whether in the present instance it 
 comes naturally to him to touch the tender chords. Judging by 
 this standard we cannot say that the pathetic mood is characteristic 
 of Mr. Browning. It occurs so very seldom in the mass of his work. 
 We have only to note how characteristic, how spontaneous, how con- 
 stant is his flow of humour, to know what we might expect if pathos 
 had been equally ready to come at call. This is the more surprising as 
 humour and pathos are so frequently found combined in the same 
 writer. On this evening of the 25th of January many — not 
 Scotsmen merely — will meet over two hemispheres in order to give 
 expression to their love and admiration of one who was not inferior 
 to Mr. Browning in humour, in strength, in keen-eyed observation, in 
 sarcastic force, but with Robert Burns the pathetic mood was as 
 familiar and recurrent as the humorous or the witty. 
 
 These remarks may be mistaken, but the Browning Society seems 
 to me the proper place in which to vent them. Limitation of power 
 is a note of all human effort : to say that Mr. Browning has limitations 
 is only to say that he has what no man has ever been without. 
 
187 
 
 ON ''A TOCCATA OF GALUPPI'S." 
 
 By Mrs. ALEXANDER IRELAND. 
 
 Read at the Sixty-sixth Meeting of the Browning Society, 
 Friday, April 26, 1889. 
 
 To analyze the subtle, nameless charm of this poem would seem 
 as thankless a task as to resolve a woman's tear into its component 
 chemical elements — a task as barren of adequate result. Rejecting 
 the word analysis, to which A Toccata of Galuppis scarcely lends 
 itself, which, indeed, it almost sets at defiance, let me try to express 
 something of what the poem suggests to me. 
 
 And, first, let me read it. 
 
 ♦ «****»* 
 
 The haunting sweetness of these verses, with their deep under- 
 current of aching dissatisfaction, have led irresistibly to these 
 thoughts, born of a loving, if ineffectual study. 
 
 What may be called the " musical triptych " among Browning's 
 poems seems to consist of, first, Master Hugues of Saxe-Gotha, 
 which turns on the fugue, the eminently Protestant form of music 
 — it is intricate, theological, and hair-splitting ; second, Abt Vogler, 
 surely well-named the symphony, with all the world, with all the 
 human heart in it, truly Catholic in character ; and third, A Toccata 
 of Galuppis, music of the worldly type, slight, delicate, fascinating, 
 with echoes of the sigh and the sneer, a light ripple on the shore of 
 human life-passion, bearing, here and there, some deeper note of life's 
 pathos, its incompleteness, its hopeless longing, blent with monotony of 
 gay, light repetition. For the Toccata or " Touch-^iece," by its very 
 signification, does but toxich its theme rapidly, even superficially, for 
 the most part ; so that the interpolation of solemn chords and emotional 
 
188 MRS. ALEX, IRELAND. ON "A TOCCATA OF GALUPPI S. ' 
 
 phrases, inconsistent with its traditional character, may naturally, by 
 force of contrast, lead to some suggestion or recognition of the jarring 
 inequalities of life. 
 
 A Toccata of Galuppi's touches on deep subjects with a mere 
 feather-touch of light and capx-icious suggestiveness, interwoven with 
 the graver mood, with the heart-searching questionings of man's deep 
 nature and mysterious spirit. 
 
 The Toccata as a form of composition is not the measured, deliberate 
 working-out of some central musical thought, as is the Sonata or sound- 
 piece, where the trained ear can follow out the whole process to its 
 delightful and orderly consummation, where the student marks the 
 introduction and development of the subject, its extension, through 
 various forms, and its whole sequence of movement and meaning, to 
 its glorious rounding-off and culmination, spiritually noting each 
 stage of the climbing structure and acknowledging its perfection with 
 the inward silent verdict, " It is well." 
 
 The Toccata, in its early and pure form, possessed no decided sub- 
 ject, made such by repetition, but bore rather the form of a capricious 
 Improvisation or "Impromptu." It was a very flowing movement, 
 in notes of equal length, and a homophonous character, ihe 
 earliest examples of any importance being those by Gabrieli (1557 — 
 1613), and those by Merulo (1533 — 1604) ; while Galuppi, who was 
 born in 1706 and died in 1785, pi-oduced a further advanced develop- 
 ment of this particular form of musical composition, with chords freely 
 introduced and other important innovations. We feel assured that 
 the Toccata treated of in Browning's poem must have possessed con- 
 siderable light and shade, for while its joyous lightness conjured up 
 before the listener's mind the bewildering vision of festal scenes in 
 ancient Venice, while it drew around him the balmy night of May, 
 the intoxicating fragrance of roses and love and youth, the atmosphere 
 surcharged with fulness of sensuous life, there were yet thrilling 
 and tender cadences, surely some strains that had a " dying fall," 
 dissonances even, powerful enough to interpose, with obtrusiveness, 
 grim doubts in the very heart and core of the charmed moment — 
 doubts transient, quickly put aside or stifled, but ghastly in their 
 suggestion of impending change, doom, and death. 
 
 We learn that Baldassare Galuppi was born October 18, 1706, on 
 the island of Burano, near Venice, whence he was known as " II 
 Buranello," and that he fii'st learned music from his father, a barber, 
 who played the violin at the theatre. At sixteen, Baldassare came 
 to Venice and earned his bread by organ-playing. At this time, 
 
MRS. ALEX. IBELAND. ON "A TOCCATA OF GALUPPl's." 189 
 
 doubtless, he took irrevocably into his being the solemn harmonies 
 of Church music, which so twined themselves about his inmost spirit 
 as occasionally to startle us by their solemn presence in his lighter, 
 and more showy compositions. "Whilst thus struggling to earn a living 
 Galuppi came to know Marcello, then a student of music in the Con- 
 servatorio degli Incurabile, of which the eminent musician Lotti 
 was Director. Lotti was a remarkable man, and composed some 
 immortal music, notably a magnificent Miserere, still annually per- 
 formed in Yenice on Maunday Thursday, and strangely enough 
 there is among his works a madrigal, Spiritode Dio, which he com- 
 posed for that very ceremony alluded to in A Toccata of Galuppi s, 
 — namely, the espousal of the Adriatic by the Doges. Through 
 the intervention of Marcello, Galuppi obtained admission into 
 that musical school of which Lotti was the Director, that school 
 which produced so many eminent musicians. Lotti, besides his post 
 as Director of the Incurabile was also Maestro di Capella of San 
 Marco, and in both these appointments he was succeeded at his death 
 by his pupil Galuppi, who rapidly developed his remarkable powers. 
 I may just mention that in Hullah's " Part-Music," first edition, there 
 is a charming motet and madrigal by Lotti ; also, in Hullah's " Yocal 
 Scores and Part Music," second edition, a fine Credo by him. And 
 we remember with pleasure that this same Lotti, the instructor 
 of Galuppi, wrote that dainty little song, revived in modern days, 
 of which the ear never tires — ■ 
 
 " Pur dicesti, 0, bocca, bocca, bella ? " 
 
 Lotti died in 1740. 
 
 Like his great master, Galuppi composed many operas which were 
 performed with varying success throughout Italy. But though rich 
 in melody, always written with taste, and never overloaded, none of 
 them survived the revolution of Rossini, fatal to so many of Galuppi's 
 contemporaries. ' ' 
 
 Soon after 1762, he being then first organist at San Marco, and 
 also Director of the " Conservatorio degli Incurabile," Galuppi 
 gave up both posts in order to go to St. Petersburg, invited by the 
 Empress Catherine II. Having first improved and remodelled the 
 orchestra, no easy task in those days, he produced his Didone 
 Abhandonata, with extraordinary success. In 1768, Galuppi returned 
 to Yenice, were Dr. Burney found him in 1770, prosperous and 
 respected, still maestro of the Incurabile. Burney speaks of the fire 
 and imagination manifest in his compositions, and of the novelty. 
 
190 MRS. ALEX IRELAND. ON "A TOCCATA OF GALUPPl's." 
 
 spirit, and delicacy of his music. The autograph of his opera, 
 11 Vilano Geloso, which he composed conjointly with Garsmann, 
 Marcello, Scarlatti, Sacchini, and othei'S, is now in Vienna ; also a 
 grand Credo, Gloria, and other Church music still occasionally per- 
 formed there. Galuppi also wrote for the harpischord, and a sonata 
 of his, of rare beauty, is printed in the AU&'Clavier-Musik of 
 Pauer. He was most prolific in composition, since Fetis gives a list 
 of fifty-four operas of his, five of which were written in one year. 
 But the noble music of his which has survived outweighs much of 
 this youthful gush. And Galuppi must have possessed very remark- 
 able versatility. We can well believe that, as Browning tells us, he 
 was " good alike at grave and gay.'' We figure to ourselves that 
 very Toccata, with its traditional gaiety, broken now and again by 
 solemn passages and pathetic touches. According to Browning's 
 masterly description, we listen "with heart, not ear," to "those 
 lesser thirds so plaintive — sixths diminished — sigh on sigh ! " We 
 detect the human longing after a larger life and fuller happi- 
 ness, the thrilling note of life's incompleteness, its deep restless 
 doubt, its obscure, haunting recognition of death ! Then, " those 
 suspensions, those solutions," those relentless unfoldings of the inex- 
 orable, unlovable law of change, hint ominously at the impending 
 shadow, and wring from the hearts of the careless listeners the 
 question "Must v)e die ? " But again, " the commiserating sevenths" 
 give a hope. "Surely some pitying power will interpose on our 
 behalf, give us still the cup of living joy, still the unending round of 
 ball and masque, still the moonlit waters, the scent of many roses, 
 the rhythmic movement of fair women, the very delirium of sensuous 
 ecstasy." 
 
 " Life might last — we can but try ?" 
 
 Breathless with the dance, they have lingered a while, idly listening 
 to Galuppi's wondrous melodies, and lo ! the vibrations of that music 
 have touched and shaken within them those mystic fibres that bind 
 men and women to life ; there is a stirring in the deej) spiritual nature — 
 questionings, unwelcome and obstinate, press on their consciousness. 
 But they soon repel the chilling touch, and cling closer to the life of 
 their passionate love, to each other, and we hear, athwart Galuppi's 
 solemn strains, the kiss, the whispers, the tender caressing breath of 
 that perfect love-duet, — " Were you happy 1 " *' Yes ! " "And are 
 you still as happy 1 " "Yes! And you?" So far the music has 
 been in the region of the incomplete, the minor key, with the yearning 
 thrill of the half-satisfied soul. !Now it changes to the major key, the 
 
MRS. ALEX. IRELAND. ON "A TOCCATA OF GALUPPl's." 191 
 
 tone of decision, of imperative demand ; and the question " Must we 
 die?" strongly borne in on the consciousness, clamours for an answer. 
 So the " dominant's persistence," its exacting craving, repeated in 
 each harmonic combination, receives its reply — in the octave of the 
 tonic — the inevitable close, the foregone conclusion, which lifts the 
 dominant into fulness ! This certainty without appeal was no fitting 
 theme for an accompaniment of light, loving repartee, the note struck 
 was too jarring, and with careless words of praise, the youthful paii 
 stroll away from the too eloquent music, and are again lost in the 
 whirling dance. 
 
 As to the structure, the machinery of the poem, granting that 
 any such be cunningly concealed within its graceful lines, one can 
 enjoy the verses without any desire to disintegrate or individualize 
 its diverse voices, so sweetly discoursing ; but, once having essayed to 
 formulate its meanings, to assign to the supposed speaker each phrase 
 of its dialogue, once having sought the " raison d'etre " of A Toccata 
 of Gahtppi's, one finds considerable difficulty. The remark has been 
 made, I believe, that some Browning students are prone to attribute 
 to their author much that he never meant, that they evolve whole 
 schemes of thought and motive utterly foreign to the poet's inten- 
 tion, that they read subtle and complicated design where the poet has 
 " sung but as the linnet sings." Granted that in some cases it is 
 so — notably in these imperfect words of my own. Then let me 
 Suggest how interesting it would be to know what Shakespeare 
 might feel in conversation with — Dr. Edward Dowdei ! An extreme 
 case, I admit. 
 
 There is, of course, much verse extant which caut;es no controversy, 
 such as that well-known poem where the lines occur : — 
 
 " I take my little porringer 
 And eat my supper there. " 
 
 Here we note a delightful absence of all ambiguity. Again, in 
 a widely differing sphere, such a poem as Paradise Lost, grand and 
 mighty as it is, yet by its very title, gives the reader the master key 
 to its drift. N'ot so with the works of Browning. 
 
 But which is the most wonderful power — to present in finished 
 poetical form ideas more or less noble, with unmistakable clearness, 
 thus finite to a certain extent ; or to produce that which shall strike 
 out and compel, from other minds, such varied and strongly-conceived 
 plans of opposed motive and meaning, created in them by the living 
 force of a human spirit, and, right or wrong in their interpretations, 
 "oming nevertheless straight from the region of intellect and imagina- 
 
192 MRS. ALEX. IRELAND. ON " A TOCCATA OP GALUPPl'S." 
 
 tion 1 Not to US, perhaps, is it often given to guess aright at mysteries 
 behind the veil — still less, clearly to behold them ! "We wander vaguely 
 through the palace of the Master's thought, and we lose our way. 
 But some of us have caught a strain of distant music, a glimpse of a 
 flying figure, we seem to hear a dim echo as of multitudinous foot- 
 falls, we have seen a wondrous light stealing below massive portals. 
 Eagerly, blindly, we press on and on ! Differing minds see differing 
 aspects of the great design : in short, when the Master's hand 
 touches the strings there will come forth diverse melodies, according 
 to the nature and scope of the instrument. 
 
 The poem we are considering I find estremely diflacult as to the 
 cohesion of ideas and thoughts. Stanza xiii. I take to be ironical. 
 The voice suggests that, as the glow of life in tthe vitality of old 
 Venice is now dead, there may not be very much more life or hope 
 for a future to the student's joy in his scientific researches, though 
 these do appear of more serious concern than the old frivolities. There 
 is nothing in mere delight, whether of sex or science, that shall 
 guarantee its own permanence ; and the fateful cold hand may erase 
 the one as easily as the other, in the absence of some more solid claim 
 in the personality for a future ! And the poem closes with a 
 momentary admission that the warm brief beauty of gay Venice re- 
 presents at least one element in the complete life which is denied to 
 scientific research — namely, the human element. The life of mere 
 knowledge is partial and cold and chilly. It is no more immortal 
 by its severity than the other by its frivolity. There is still much 
 that remains enigmatical in the poem, but in its mere breadth of 
 suggestiveness it renders a noble service. 
 
 Let me conclude with the dream-picture given to my thought by 
 A Toccata of Galujypis. Imagine a modern scientist — I will not 
 invidiously specify his field of research ; one, however, unlikely to 
 expand the ideal side of human nature. He has overlaid the dreams 
 of youth with ponderous, impassable strata of exact knowledge — 
 statistics and the like. In him the subjective has long yielded its 
 place to the abstract, and impersonal. Let us call this man " Doctor 
 H."; suppose him to have passed "a stormy youth," to have been 
 ardent and imaginative, to have drunk deep of the cup of human 
 passion, to have been chilled by disillusion, to have had his bound- 
 ing life-pulses suddenly, permanently checked by some staggering 
 shock of Fate, to have fossilized gradually but almost totally ! 
 Circumstances have forced him into a path widely at variance with 
 his original bent — " Kein Temfcl, ohne Gottheit." His had been 
 
MRS. ALEX. IRELAND. OX "A TOCCATA OF GALUPPl's." 193 
 
 love and beauty, reading tlie eyes of fair women in the moonliglit — 
 now it is dry and dusty learning. He has become an advanced scientist, 
 with a following of admiring worshippers ; himself worshipping at no 
 shrine — merely possessed by a dogged desire for unearthing hidden 
 mysteries of science. Take our imaginary Dr. H. as the first 
 speaker in the poem, the man whose thoughts are revealed to 
 us, and suppose we can also hear the voices which speak to him — 
 to which his own spirit replies again. We cannot see these visions 
 with the outward eye, but "we see a cherub that sees them." 
 Doctor H., then, has retained in his half-congealed nature a true 
 artist's love of music. It was stifled, but not dead, for that loves 
 dies hard. He has been, we will say, at one of the Monday Popular 
 Concerts, and has heard a Toccata of Galuppi's. It wakes the 
 slumbering echoes, penetrates the dense layers of insensibility, dis- 
 solves a spell, and charms him back to a tender enthusiasm. Floating 
 before him, comes a vision of old Venetian life — deeply interwoven 
 with that latent passion for beauty, once his breath of being. 
 Though he says he was " never out of England," he must have been 
 an art-student, cultivated and advanced in music and painting alike. 
 For the lines " was a lady such a lady, &c.," clearly embody, in a 
 few telling phrases, the very marked type of beauty portrayed by 
 Giovanni Bellini, a Venetian painter who died in 1516, the most 
 eminent of a family of artists of that name, the teacher of 
 Giorgione and Titian. No one who has been privileged to look on 
 his heavenly conceptions of female beauty can fail to recognize the 
 type. Dr. H., then, despite his modest disclaimers, seems gifted with 
 the glorious dower of Mr. Browning's own rare artistic culture, 
 and speaks accordingly. 
 
 So he sits, dreaming to the music, rapt in spirit, calling up to 
 fancy the pageant of the festival — the whirling dance, the venerated 
 figure of the maes^j'o, " stately at. the clavichord." It does not seem 
 to me that Galuppi played the music for the dances, but that, in 
 some solemn lofty chamber apart, he gave his grand masterpices ; for 
 the lover is made to say as he listens, " I can always leave off talking 
 when I hear a master play," and I gather that the music thus 
 attracting him was obviously not the music of the whirling dance with- 
 out. The reflection comes to Dr. H., " How is it now with those poor 
 butterflies 1 where now are the lovers 1 in what vast unknown are 
 these vibrations of music spreading and losing themselves ? " He is 
 forced to the bitter conclusion that these lives are wasted and 
 unfruitful, if not positively harmful, and the thoughtless, happy, 
 
194 MRS. ALEX. IRELAXD. ON " A TOCCATA OF GALUPPl'S." 
 
 frivolous creatures annihilated and ended! "0, the pity of it." So 
 the man of science goes home to spend an hour in his laboratory 
 before retiring. He sits down to reason, to think himself back to the 
 mental stand-point of some thirty years ago. He takes up the learned 
 treatise on which he is engaged — a paper dealing with his latest 
 discovery, that in which truly he " triumphs o'er a secret wrung from 
 Nature's cold reserve " ! But his nerves are still thrilled by the weird 
 music — still the fatal refrain haunts him — the sum of it all, " Dust 
 and ashes — dead and done with." 
 
 "We see the solemn shade of Galuppi in the dusk of the dimly- 
 lighted room, we hear his mocking gibe. His music has lived indeed, 
 lived to breathe its message afresh to human ears and human hearts, 
 but not so with the gay pageants of Venice. We hear the hollow 
 taunting tone of the maestro as he accuses the hapless scholar of 
 taking " mathematics as a pastime," — a withering accusation, this. 
 Nor does the prospect of an eternity of " physics and geology," and even 
 that held out as a very doubtful matter, succeed in cheering the man 
 of science. The gray shadow clings to him — the chill of his loveless 
 age makes his nerves creep. He dimly suspects that it had perhaps been 
 better and lovelier to " bloom and drop ; " he doubts whether, after all, 
 his ideal of later life, his scientific research, be actually more worthy, 
 more noble, more fitted to enjoy immortal existence, than the life 
 of the senses, the warm night of May, the perfumed breeze, the kiss, 
 the whisper, the thrill of music and the mazy dance ! Ah ! those faces 
 of heavenly fairness peering out of the gloom, those rose-lips, those 
 shining eyes of fire, those thickly meshed braids of gold hair, those 
 soft caressing tones — all lost — all fled — all gone 1 " Qui sait oil s'en 
 vont les roses \ 
 
195 
 
 NUMPHOLEPTOS AND BROWNING'S WOMEN. 
 
 Ey Mrs. GLAZEBROOK. 
 
 Read at the Sixty-seventh Meeting of tlve Browning Society, 
 Friday, May 31, 1889. 
 
 It is a strange, weird allegory — not so noble as that very fine one in 
 I'aracelsus, beginning " Over the seas our galleys went," nor so vivid as 
 Childe Roland, nor so graceful as the story of the cricket which forms 
 the epilogue to the Two Poets of Croisic. I would, indeed, say at 
 once that I have not chosen this poem for special study because I 
 consider it very beautiful. On the contrary, I venture to think that 
 in point of form and style Mr. Browning has not done his best for us 
 in it. It is obscure, occasionally grotesque. Even when we know it 
 well, it is very difficult to form a clear mental picture of the poet's 
 conception. If we give it to a friend to read for the first time we 
 shall hardly fail in the result of our experiment — he begins cheerfully, 
 but after a few lines we see that he is already gi'oping in a Selva oscura 
 and his expression becomes more and more bewildered, until at the 
 end — if he does persevere to the end — he tells us that he has 
 not the remotest idea what it is all about. But, of course, this 
 very difficulty has a certain fascination for us, who have given our 
 friend the poem, and feel bound to find a meaning for it. It 
 belongs, also, to a very interesting volume — the volume containing 
 Pacchiarotto — which was written at a period when, although the 
 visitations of the " spirit of delight " may seem to have been rare, 
 Mr. Browning was in an unusually communicative and self-revealing 
 mood, and more willing to take the public into his confidence about 
 his methods and principles than at any other time. JV^umpholeptos 
 seems to me to resemble the majority of its companions in the volume 
 in its general characteristics — in its lack of beauty and finish, in a 
 
196 MRS. GLAZEBROOK. NU.MPHOLEPTOS AND BROWXIXg's WOMEN. 
 
 certain aggressiveness, a certain tendency to paradox, combined with 
 real, fundamental interest and importance of subject-matter. I may- 
 add that I was tempted to offer this short paper to the Society by a 
 remark of our Hon. Secretary at a recent meeting. His words were 
 to the effect that he wished members would more frequently make 
 short studies of single poems than discuss Browning at large. I had 
 puzzled over Numpholeptos a good deal, and had at last made out an 
 interpretation, which not only made the poem itself clear to me but also 
 threw light on that exti-emely interesting subject which is generally 
 spoken of comprehensively as " Browning's Women." And so, with 
 apologies to Mr. Slater, I must confess that I shall wander a little 
 into " Browning at large." But how can we help this 1 Surely no 
 other poet puts so much of himself into each one of his poems. Each 
 is characteristic, and yet impossible to be thoroughly understood by 
 itself. The more we study a single poem, the more we find how 
 much it, at once, needs explaining by, and helps in return to explain, 
 all the rest of the poet's work. 
 
 It will be well to begin our study of Xumpholeptos by recalling the 
 outlines of the allegory. 
 
 In the centre of a magic wheel of light stands a transcendently fair 
 and virtuous '* nymph." She is a perfect being, and her pui'ity is 
 typified by the absolute whiteness of the light in which she dwells. 
 Beyond the limits of the circle immediately surrounding her, the 
 light is broken up into its component rays — red, blue, yellow, " every 
 dye o' the bow born of the storm-cloud," — they stretch from centre 
 to circumference, and form the spokes of the luminous wheel. At 
 the feet of the nymph kneels her lover, the son of earth, who has 
 ventured to set his heart on this supernatural being. She has im- 
 posed on him various quests ; he has fulfilled her commands, and now 
 comes to implore her love in recompense of his obedience. One 
 coloured ray after the other he has, at her bidding, explored to the 
 end, and has returned with full experience of the path he has 
 pursued. But each time he is received, not with the golden glow of 
 love, but with " the sad, slow, silver smile " of "pity, pardon," which 
 even changes, as he persists in his prayer, until 
 
 "its sweet and soft grow harsh and hard — 
 Forbearance, then repulsion, then disdain. " 
 
 For she will only grant her love on condition that he comes back 
 unstained with the colour of the ray he has traversed. This he 
 cannot do. In the very ardour of his obedience he knows " no stay 
 nor stint," and becomes suff\ised in turn with yellow, or scarlet, or 
 
MRS. GLAZEBROOK. NUMPHOLEPTOS AND BROWNING's WOMEN. 197 
 
 purple. To her only the whiteness of perfect light is tolerable : she 
 beholds with aversion the deeply-dyed figure, " absurd as frightful," 
 who claims his reward. For a moment he revolts : 
 
 "No, I say, 
 No fresh adventure ! No more seeking love 
 At the end of toil, and finding, caLn above 
 My passion, the old statuesq^ue regard, 
 The sad petrific smile ! " 
 
 "Who is she to demand impossibilities of him 1 She attempts nothing, 
 achieves nothing ; she remains motionless while he spends his 
 strength in endeavours to do her bidding. Why does she presume to 
 dictate to him 1 
 
 But the rebellious outbui-st is soon over. He submits again, and 
 starts on a new journey — 
 
 "All the rest 
 Be resignation ! Forth at your behest 
 I fare. Who knows but this — the crimson-quest — 
 May deepen to a sunrise, not decay 
 To that cold sad sweet smile ? — which I obey." 
 
 It is obvious that the meaning of the allegory depends on the 
 interpretation we assign to the nymph. Who, or what, is she ? If 
 we know this the rest is plain enough. 
 
 Three alternatives suggest themselves. 
 
 She may be just some one individual woman, and the whole poem 
 a simple love story told in allegorical form. I reject this theory with 
 some diffidence because it has (so it seems) the sanction of so high an 
 authority as Mrs. Sutherland Orr, But the whole tone, style, and 
 effect of the poem, all its individuality and character, seem to me to 
 forbid this narrow interpretation. The story — a man striving in 
 vain to attain the high standard of service demanded by the woman 
 he adores — might very well have been chosen as a subject by Mr. 
 Browning, but he would not, I think, have told it in this way. He 
 tells stories of that kind simply, dramatically, circumstantially, j Here 
 we have a mystic scene ; a picture, as it were, half concealed by a 
 veil, with one corner only lifted, suggesting far-reaching vistas 
 beyond. Or, to change the metaphor, we hear in the poet's voice a 
 deeper tone than that of mere narration ; in the very difficulty and 
 irregularity of utterance there seems to be evidence of some im- 
 portant, universal truth which he is endeavouring to express. This 
 is, of course, only the personal impression made by the poem ; it can 
 hardly be explained or justified, and must be taken for what it is 
 worth. But it is in the sureness of such impressions that the 
 
198 MRS. GLAZEBEOOK. NUMPHOLEPTOS AND BROWNING'S WOMEN. 
 
 master of style reveals his mastery ; and we lose half the meaning 
 of poetry if we refuse to be susceptible to them. 
 
 Then, secondly, the nymph may be the personification of Philosophy. 
 And this I believe her to be, in part. Bub I think she is more. 
 There must be some good reason for that outburst at the end, which 
 makes so much of her being a woman — of her " she-intelligence," her 
 " pretence to match the male achievement 1 " her " thrice-superfine 
 Feminity of sense" — all this would be irrelevant, and rather absurd, 
 if applied to Philosophy or Knowledge, who might very well resent 
 the attribution of a sex which it never claimed, and which entailed 
 quite gratuitous abuse. 
 
 And so I am brought to the third alternative, which is the one I 
 hold. The nymph is the ideal woman — a modern Beatrice or Laura — 
 a being endowed with all beauty, all knowledge, all pui-ity and virtue, 
 who was born centuries ago, in the days of mediaeval chivalry, in 
 whose honour many songs have been sung, and many lances have been 
 broken. Dante describes her beautifully for us in the Vita Nuova, 
 the book which tells the story of his early love. She is " that most 
 gentle lady, the destroyer of all vices and the queen of all virtues," 
 in whose presence evil is abashed and all gracious sentiments are 
 aroused 5 who made her poor lover so unhappy by denying him 
 her salutation one day when she met him in the streets of 
 Florence. She does not seem to have done much — the woman the 
 great seer " loved so well, who mari'ied the other " ; her short life 
 was quiet, uneventful, untempted ; we may sometimes wonder a little 
 that Dante should have accepted so meekly her somewhat shrewish 
 rebukes in the Earthly Paradise. He might so well have replied that 
 it was easy for her, who had spent her days in the peaceful seclusion 
 of her father's or her husband's home, to find fault with him, who 
 had borne the heavy burden of government in the unruly city, and 
 had endured the pangs and weariness of exile. For him, indeed, it 
 was necessary to wash away his stains in the waters of Lethe, but 
 still he could show a nobler record of accomplished deeds than she, 
 who had kept her garments spotless. 
 
 She dwells — this nymph, this ideal woman — in a carefully-guarded 
 abode of peace and virtue, and the man goes forth to make his way in 
 some one of life's careers which she has chosen for him. Of course she 
 insists that he shall be pre-eminent in his profession. He must be the 
 bravest of soldiers, the most eloquent and devoted of clergymen, the 
 wisest of lawyers, the most imaginative, the most skilful of artists. 
 But she does not perceive that with the achievement must be the 
 
MRS. GLAZEBROOK. NUMPHOLEPTOS AND BROWNING's WOMEN. 199 
 
 inevitable shortcomings. There is not time in life for one man to 
 accomplish everything ; while he is doing one thing thoroughly he 
 must leave others undone. And even his character may be impaired. 
 For one good quality may be developed to excess, so that it passes the 
 mean of virtue, or it may be developed at the expense of others equally 
 good. With vigour and courage may be some failure in patience and 
 forbearance ; with subtlety, some lack of decision ; with eloquence, 
 some want of sincerity and reserve. It is one of the elements of 
 tragedy in life. Attainment is insepai-able from renunciation. 
 
 " Entbehren ^ sollst du ! sollst entbeliren ! " 
 This is the cry of a '' Welt-schmerz " which seems to have had its 
 tides in the world's history. It flowed in Virgil's time, it ebbed in 
 the days of the serener Shakspere ; it was rising when Goethe 
 wrote ; and now its flood beats hard against our nineteenth-century 
 shores. 
 
 The nymph in the allegory reproaches her lover with these " defects 
 of his qvmlities." The contemplation of her own well-balanced character 
 — no one virtue obtrusively large, nor another inconveniently deficient 
 — has made her fastidious ; her smoothness cannot endure his rough- 
 ness ; she desires victory, but not the stains and the scars of the 
 victor ; and so she refuses him her love. The poor man fails to attain 
 the prize for which he laboured. 
 
 Now we know how all Mr. Browning's sympathies are with that 
 struggling lover. He tells us, again and again, that man must not 
 expect to be perfect in this life, but that he must set his heart on 
 doing some one thing, and must be content not to do others. 
 
 " Let a man contend to the uttermost 
 For his life's set prize, be it what it will ! " 
 
 And the nymph is just what, according to him, a human being should 
 not be. She is "a perfect round," a "finished little piece," possess- 
 ing capabilities neither of growth nor attainment, and, as she stands 
 there in her self-complacency and conscious superiority, we can 
 scarcely wonder at the rebellious irritation which possesses her lover 
 for a time ; rather, indeed, does it surprise us that he returns to his 
 allegiance. 
 
 But then, Beatrice was dead and buried long ago. She did good in 
 her generation. She was the embodiment of beauty and order in a 
 rough and violent age. She was an element of gentleness, of ideality, 
 of striving after perfection in the life of men who sorely needed purity 
 
 ^ Miss, feel the want of. 
 
200 MRS. GLAZEBROOK. NUMPHOLEPTOS AND BROWNING's WOMEN. 
 
 and stimulus. As she was a mediaeval creation, so she satisfied a 
 craving of the mediaeval soul. She led Dante into Paradise. Is it 
 not somewhat ungracious of a modern poet to dig her up from her 
 grave, and throw the bright light of the present day on her pale 
 features'? Why should Mr. Browning spend his strength on this 
 old-fashioned nymph 1 
 
 For women, now, would surely repudiate that ideal, which repre- 
 sents them as so stationary, so untempted, so elevated above the trials 
 and vicissitudes of life. They cannot realize it, nor do they desire to 
 do so. Many have to go out into the world and get their own living, 
 and work as hard as men do. And others who stay at home do not 
 find life all repose and seclusion by any means. It is often diiEcult 
 for them to develop their own individuality and to live the " higher 
 life " in the midst of household anxieties and interruptions ; and not 
 seldom are they tempted to envy men who have regular hours for 
 work and regular hours for relaxation. And, as a matter of fact, 
 women hardly ever do complain of men's little roughnesses and sharp 
 corners. They are very tolerant towards the defects for the sake of 
 the qualities. Indeed, Mr. Browning himself repeatedly insists on 
 tbat faculty of women for taking men as they are, for loving in spite 
 of faults — on their constancy, in fine. 
 
 " The man was ni}' whole world, all the same, 
 "With his flowers to praise or his weeds to blame," 
 
 says James Lee's clear-sighted, intellectual wife. The whole theme 
 of that very pathetic poem, Aiiy Wife to any Husband, is the 
 superior constancy of the woman. 
 
 Thus it would seem that there is a certain anachronism in this 
 protest of Mr. Browning's — that he is fighting an enemy who no 
 longer exists. But it is not like him to make a mistake of this kind. 
 He maintains intimate communications with the " spirit of the age," 
 and seldom fails to discern its tendencies. That nymph of his must 
 be alive somewhere. 
 
 And in some pages of Mr. Buskin's we find her in all her vigour. 
 It would be presumptuous indeed to say that Mr. Browning had any 
 particvilar book in his mind when he wrote Numjthohptos, but it 
 is curious how completely we have in Sesame and Lilies a descrip- 
 tion of that, ideal against which he is protesting. '* She enters into no 
 contest, but infallibly adjudges the crown of contest. . . . The man, 
 in his rough work in open world, must encounter all peril and trial 
 . . . often he must be wounded, or subdued ; often misled ; and 
 always hardened. But he guards the woman from all this ; within 
 
MRS. GLAZEBROOK. NUMPHOLEPTOS AND BROWNING's WOMEN. 201 
 
 his house, as ruled by her, unless she herself has sought it, need 
 enter no danger, no temptation, no cause of error or offence." She 
 is to be taught — we must all know the beautiful, eloquent periods 
 almost by heart — to speak foreign languages, and to understand 
 history when she reads it, and to take interest in the newspapers, and 
 above all things not to presume to study theology, and then man is 
 to be " entirely subject " to her, receiving from her " not only . . . 
 the reward of all toil, but . , . the direction of all toil," 
 
 There she is, painted by a master-hand, tinted with all the delicate 
 colours of an artist's imagination, dangerously alluring in her beauty ; 
 but false to her age, stationaiy in the midst of progress, complete 
 while all the rest of the world is developing. She is an idol whom 
 Mr. Browning may well wish to destroy. 
 
 But at the end of Kumjyholeptos, we remember, the lover repents 
 of his short revolt, becomes obedient again, and starts on another 
 hopeless quest. This is probably one of those quick transitions, one 
 of those sudden returns upon himself, to which readers of Browning 
 have to become accustomed, and in which indeed much of his 
 characteristic humour and power of seeing two sides of a question 
 are to be found. He seems to say, " After all, I have not the heart 
 to destroy her. She is so beautiful, and has lived in the world so long 
 that we cannot do without her. I know that she demands impos 
 sibilities, and that she does not understand life and its limitations ; and 
 I am a much more practical and useful person than she is with all her 
 claims to superiority ; but, still, I will be her slave as the rest of 
 the world has been for so long, for I have no wdsh to be different from 
 my fellow creatures." 
 
 "We, however, in this protestation of allegiance, may hear the pro- 
 verbial true word spoken in jest. For Mr. Browning is indeed not 
 guiltless of idolizing that nymph. He is quite right in believing her 
 not to be dead. She is a very conspicuous personage in modern litera- 
 ture, and he helps to pi-olong her life. His own heroines are some 
 of her representatives. For what is the fatal defect with which he 
 reproaches the nymph 1 Is it not her ineffectiveness, her impotence, 
 her inability to achieve, develop, attain 1 And then consider the 
 heroines of his poems. Beautiful as they are — pathetic, intellectual, 
 sensitive — are they not, nearly all, ineffective? The majority are 
 either victims or failures. Pompilia is a gentle, innocent creature. 
 But what does she do ? Her only effect upon her husband is to pro- 
 voke him to increased cruelty, and finally to crime. It may be *urged 
 with justice that she developed much that was noble in the character 
 
202 ?JRS. GLAZEEROOK. NU.MPHOLEPTOS AND BROWXIXG's WOMEX. 
 
 of the priest, Caponsacchi, But that was a side issue. It can hardly 
 be called a sufficient purpose for her life. Then there is James Lee's 
 wife. She is a most interesting person, with deep affections and a 
 powerful, highly-trained mind. Yet she fails entirely. She makes 
 " the great refusal," gives up all hope of winning her husband's love 
 and leaves him. Several of the heroines fail in clearness of insight; 
 they make fatal mistakes or they are dupes — Anael, for instance, in 
 the Return of the Druses, the heroine of An Inn Alhitm, Constance in 
 In a Balcony. And Mildred in A Blot on the 'Scutcheon — whether we 
 call her a victim or by a severer name, certainly her life is a failure. 
 "We may feel pity for her, but not admiration. Guendolen has been 
 compared to Beatrice, but surely there is an immense difference, from 
 an artistic point of view, between one generous woman who succeeds 
 in saving an innocent friend, and another who fails to save a guilty 
 friend. Kow, of course no one would be so optimistic as to require all 
 heroines to succeed. That would be untrue to the facts of life. There 
 must be Cordelias, Desdemonas, Ophelias in the world. But there are 
 also the Portias, the Isabellas, the Hermiones — women who, in the 
 strength of their purity and their courage and their intelligence, 
 bi-ing saving help to mankind ; and I think we have a just cause of 
 complaint against our greatest living poet that he has given us no 
 heroines of this type. He will bequeath to posterity no woman's 
 character " cast in the heroic mould." Two of his women indeed do 
 exercise redeeming power. One is little Pippa, who does good all 
 unconsciously, and is more like a fairy or an angel than a himian 
 being ; the other is Balaustion, whose power is not in her womanli- 
 ness, but in the poet-nature which (to use a phrase often, to me 
 quite incomprehensibly, applied to Mr. Browning) " knows no sex 
 in souls." 
 
 How glad we should be if the poet, who has done so much for us 
 in the way of inspiration and enlightenment, would " add but another 
 grace," and setting aside for a time his subtleties and casuistries and 
 intellectual enigmas, would create for us some one fine womanly 
 character, a real human being, not perfect, but able to achieve her 
 purpose in life, and worthy to be a sister of the noble heroines of 
 Chaucer, Shakspere, and Scott. 
 
 But, indeed, it is no new creation that we are asking of Mr. 
 Browning. She is there already — that noble ideal woman — haunting 
 all his poetry. We feel her presence, though her form we only see in 
 glimpses now and then. Will he not show her to us once in the 
 fulness of her stature \ Hers are the " great brow And the spirit- 
 
LV. MRS. GLAZEBROOK. NUMPHOLEPTOS AND BROWNING'S WOUEN. 203 
 
 small hand propping it " ; slie is " the dearest poet he ever knew, 
 Dearest and greatest and best to him " [Paul. 223) ; she is his star 
 that has opened its soul to him, his " lyric Love, half-angel and half- 
 bird And all a wonder and a wild desire " to whom his work is 
 dedicated ; the " One word more " is for her ; in the supreme moment 
 of the vision of " Prospice " she stands ready to receive him. She is 
 like some beautiful, half-finished statue, still imprisoned and partly 
 concealed in the marble block; and we are reminded of stories of 
 sculptors who feared to complete their work lest it should fall short 
 of the ideal they had imagined. 
 
 ' ' "Who that one, you ask ? your heart instructs you. " 
 
 Do we hear Mr. Browning replying thus to us with reproachful 
 sadness ? Does he tell us that the marble is monumental, and the 
 silence is the silence of the grave ? Ah ! yes. We know who that 
 " lyric Love " is ; but the knowledge makes us more importunate. 
 For it is the noble daughters and wives and mothers of real life who 
 inspire the " fair women " of literature, and thus become 
 
 "the sweet presence of a good diffused, 
 And in diffusion ever more intense." 
 
204 
 
 THE WIFE-LOVE AND FRIEND-LOVE OF 
 ROBERT BROWNING. 
 
 By the Rev. J. J. G. GEAHAM, M.A. Oxon. 
 
 Read at the Sixty-eighth Meeting of the Brovming Society, 
 Friday, June 28th, 1889. 
 
 Our Poet's Wife-love and Friend-love, only so far as depicted by 
 himself, are the subject of my paper to-night ; and I fear it will afford 
 little scope for discussion, though much for your kind patience and 
 indulgence, but at any rate it will possess the merit of excluding the 
 odium theologicuni — a bold assertion when a paper on Saul last session 
 provoked a discussion on the Athanasian Creed. 
 
 I. Robert Browning at the age of thirty-four was married, 
 September 12th, 1846, to Elizabeth Barrett. " That woman was 
 for him the choice of God," as he for her, a " perfect pair ! each born 
 for the other-," proved by fifteen years of as perfect wedded happiness 
 as falls to the lot of few literary charactei's, who for the most part 
 contract unfortunate marriages. To this trite remark our poet 
 presents a noble and memorable exception. "What he thought of her, 
 we shall see from the passages hereafter cited ; what she thought of 
 him, may be seen from her so-called Sonnets from the Portuguese, 
 addressed to her husband before her marriage, from which she forth- 
 with gained fresh life and health. 
 
 " ' Guess now who holds thee ? ' — ' Death,' I said. But, there, 
 The silver answer rang, — 'Not Death, but Love.' " 
 
 The beautiful opening verses of Jocoseria are said, and I think, 
 correctly, to contain an allusion to his wife — 
 
 " Come then, complete incompletion, comer. 
 Pant through the blueness, perfect the summer ! " 
 
THE WIFE- LOVE AND FRIEND-LOVE OF ROBERT BROWNING. 205 
 
 At her advent the blank world is changed to both of them, and, in 
 her case, 
 
 " All that was death 
 Grows life, grows love, 
 Grows love ! " 
 
 Though no poet is less autobiographical than Browning, he pays 
 her again and again a tribute of affection in the following passages 
 which have been culled from his various and voluminous works : — 
 
 They are eight in all, at least so far as I have discovered — the first 
 three, extracted from By the Fireside, The Guardian Angel, and One 
 Word More, published, during the lifetime of his wife, in Men and 
 Women, in 1855 ; and the other five, after her death, between the dates 
 of 1864 and 1876. These are taken horn. Prosjnce, published in 1864; 
 The Ring and the Booh, its invocation at the end of Part I., 1868, its 
 dedication at the end of Part XII., 1869 ; Balaustion's Adventi(,re, 
 1871 ; and from the epilogue to Facchiarotto, with other Poems, 1876, 
 I will cite them in their chronological sequence. 
 
 1. The first allusion is found in the poem entitled, By the Fireside. 
 This poem tells us more than any other of the happy married life of 
 Browning, though we are bound to consider all but the personality in it 
 fictitious. It is now placed among the Dramatic Lyrics in the third of 
 the six volumes of his Poetical Works, published in 1867. In a note at 
 their commencement he expressly tells us, that these pieces are "always 
 dramatic in principle, and so many utterances of so many imaginary 
 persons not his; " therefore we feel bound, as I have said, to consider 
 the circumstances of this poem merely imaginary, while we are justified 
 in regarding the portraiture as that of Elizabeth Barrett Bi'owning ; 
 and as such, a personal reminiscence and utterance if any poet ever 
 made one. Not only is she described, "those dark grey eyes, that 
 hair so dark and dear," "that great brow, and the spirit-small hand 
 propping it ; " this he mentions twice ; and who that looks on her 
 portrait prefixed to the first volume of her poetical works can fail to 
 see the likeness % Not only this, but as we read we cannot but feel 
 that she, the friend, the lover, and the wife, must have been present 
 to hia mind's eye as he wrote ; nay, perhaps, sitting by his very side, 
 as he describes so minutely the scene and story of what might have 
 been their courtship — his avowal of his love — her prompt acceptance 
 — " leaning " on each other " and loving it over again " — all just as 
 it happened, or might have happened, by that ruined chapel, half-way 
 up in the Alpine gorge. As he sits, presumably in Florence^ by the 
 
206 THE WIFE-LOVE AND FRIEND-LOVE OF ROBERT BROWNING. 
 
 fireside, in 1855, nine years after his marriage, his wife too sitting 
 mutely musing or haply reading by his side, he recalls the happy 
 past, and thinks of the dark autumn evenings in life's November, and 
 what he means to do then. Only prose, not verse, will then engage 
 his attention; Greek literature, the Alcestis (1871), the Hercules 
 Furens (1875), the Agamemnon (1877), will still have their charm, 
 though his own muse may be silent, and his soul now all glowing 
 with love and happiness may have lost its " pleasant hue." These 
 were his thoughts then, but time has shown that he thought wrong ; 
 for in 1876, in life's November, he writes in the poem. At the Mermaid^ 
 speaking for Shakespeare and surely for himself too — 
 
 •" Have you found your life distasteful ? 
 
 My life did and does smack sweet. 
 Was your youth of pleasure wasteful ? 
 
 Mine I saved and hold complete. 
 Do your joys with age diminish ? 
 
 "When mine fail me, I'll complain. 
 Must in death your daylight finish ? 
 
 My sun sets to rise again. " 
 
 The hue of his life is still as pleasant as ever. Neither in 1887, in 
 life's December, are the voices of the music of his soul dumb, as 
 witness his last> published volume, Parleyings with Certain People. It 
 is at the twenty-first stanza the allusion to his own wife under the 
 fictitious name of " Leonor " begins, and continues to the end of the 
 poem. 
 
 *' My perfect wife, my Leonor, 
 
 Oh heart, my own, oh eyes, mine too, 
 Whom else could I dare look backward for, 
 
 With whom beside should I dare pursue 
 The path grey heads abhor ? " 
 
 With whom beside indeed ? Browning never had a second love ; he 
 is still a widower, though his wife died in 1861, twenty-eight years 
 ago. He seems to have said with Leontes in The Winter's Tale, " No 
 more such wives ; therefore no wife. I'll have no wife, Paulina." He 
 then goes on to say, surely in his oivn person, 
 
 " With me youth led . . .1 will speak now. 
 
 No longer watch you as you sit 
 Keading by fire-light, that great brow 
 
 And the spirit-small hand propping it, 
 Mutely, my heart knows how. 
 
THE WIFE-LOVE AND FRIEND-LOVE OF ROBERT BROWNING. 207 
 
 My own, confirm me ! If I tread 
 
 This path back, is it not in pride 
 To think how little I dreamed it led 
 
 To an age so blest that, by its side, 
 Youth seems the waste instead ? " 
 
 Alas, how little he knew of the future ! how little he then thought that 
 in six short years he would have to tread the long remaining path of 
 life " alone, aloof ! " This path of which he here speaks led only to 
 fifteen years of wedded bliss, in his "happy Tuscan home," not to a 
 blest old age, as he fondly thought. Forty-two years plight ! and may 
 many more be added thereto ! 
 
 ** My own, see where the years conduct ! 
 At first, 'twas something our two souls 
 Should mix as mists do ; each is sucked 
 
 In each now : on, the new stream rolls, 
 "Whatever rocks obstruct. 
 
 Think, when our one soul understands 
 
 The great "Word which makes all things new, 
 
 AVhen earth breaks up and heaven expands, 
 How will the change strike me and you 
 
 In the house not made with hands ? 
 
 Oh I must feel your brain prompt mine, 
 
 Your heart anticipate my heart, 
 You must be just before, in fine, 
 
 See and make me see, for your part, 
 New depths of the divine ! 
 
 Come back with me to the first of all, 
 
 Let us lean and love it over again, 
 Let us now forget and now recall, 
 
 Break the rosary in a pearly rain, 
 And gather what we let fall ! 
 
 Hither we walked then, side by side, 
 
 Ann in arm and cheek to cheek, 
 And still I questioned or replied, 
 
 "While my heart, convulsed to really speak, 
 Lay choking in its pride. " 
 
 Much of this, of course, is part of the imaginary framework of the 
 poem, but all would have actually occurred had he met Miss Barrett 
 in some romantic Alpine gorge. He then goes on to describe what 
 would inevitably have taken place, and what did take place some- 
 where else. 
 
 " "We two stood there with never a third, 
 But each by each, as each knew well : 
 Had she willed it, still had stood the screen 
 So slight, so sure, 'twixt my love and her. 
 
208 THE WIFE-LOVE AXD FRIEND- LOVE OF KOBEET BROWNING. 
 
 "Wortli how well those dark grej' eyes, 
 
 That hair so dark and dear . . . 
 You might have turned and tried a man, 
 
 Set him a space to weary and wear. 
 But you spared me this, like the heart you are, 
 
 And filled my empty heart at a word. 
 
 I am named and known by that moment's feat ; 
 
 There took my station and degree ; 
 So grew my own small life complete, 
 
 As nature obtained her best of me — 
 One born to love you, sweet ! 
 
 And to watch you sink by the fireside now 
 
 Back again, as you mutely sit 
 Musing by fire-light, that great brow 
 
 And the spirit-small hand propping it, 
 Yonder, my heart knows how ! " 
 
 When Mrs. Browning wrote Lady Geraldine^s Courtship, she was 
 unknown to her husband, and thus alludes to him — 
 
 " Or from Browning some 'Pomegranate' which, if cut down the middle. 
 Shows a heart within blood-ttnctuied, of a veined humanity. " 
 
 A correspondence soon followed, then love, health, marriage. 
 
 2, The next allusion to his wife occurs in The Guardian Angel. 
 Originally published in Men and Women, but now placed among 
 Dramatic Lyrics (Poetical "VYorks, vol. iii. p. 214). This picture was 
 painted by Guercino, and is now in St. Augustine's Church in Fano. 
 Browning relates to his friend, Mr. Alfred Domett ("Alfred, dear 
 friend ! '"), formerly Prime Minister of Kew Zealand, how he visited 
 this Church accompanied by his own Guardian Angel, his wife. 
 
 " Yv'e were at Fano, and three times we went 
 To sit and see him in his chapel there. 
 And drink his beauty to our soul's content 
 — My angel with me too. 
 
 My love is here. "Where are you, dear old friend ! 
 How rolls the "Wairoa at your world's far end ? 
 
 This is Ancona, yonder is the sea, " 
 
 3. The third allusion, in the poems he wrote during his wife's 
 lifetime, is indeed the whole, we may say, of that touching and ex- 
 quisite poem entitled. One Word More. To E. B. B., London, Sep- 
 tember, 1885. "We will extract such portions as sufficiently tell the 
 
THE WIFE-LOVE AND FRIEND-LOVE OF ROBERT BROWNING. 209 
 
 story of his deep and lasting love. It is the dedication to his wife 
 of the collection of poems called Men and Women. 
 
 *' There they are, my fifty men and women 
 Naming me the fifty poems finished ! 
 Take them, love, the book and me together : 
 "Where the heart lies, let the brain lie also. 
 
 Eafael made a century of sonnets. 
 
 Else he only used to draw Madonnas : 
 
 These the world might view — but one, the volume. 
 
 Who that one, you ask ? Your heart instructs you." 
 
 This was Rafael's mistress, La Fornarina. Love had turned him 
 into a poet. 
 
 " You and I would rather read that volume. 
 Would we not 1 than wonder at the Madonnas 
 Seen by us and all the world in circle. 
 You and I will never read that volume. 
 Suddenly, as rare things will, it vanished. 
 
 Dante once prepared to paint an angel : 
 Whom to please ? You whisper ' Beatrice.' 
 While he mused and traced it and retraced it, 
 Says he, ' Certain people of importance 
 Entered and would seize, forsooth, the poet.' 
 Says the poet, ' Then I stopped my painting.' 
 
 You and I would rather see that angel, 
 Painted by the tenderness of Da-nte, 
 AVould we not ? than read a fresh Inferno. 
 You and I will never see that picture. 
 We and Bice bear the loss for ever." 
 
 Unlike Eafael and Dante, Browning has only verse and nothing 
 else to offer his wife. 
 
 " I shall never, in the years remaining," 
 — alas, he knew not how few they were to be, only six — 
 
 ' ' Paint you pictures, no, nor carve your statues, 
 Make you music that should all-express me ; 
 So it seems : I stand on my attainment. 
 This of versa alone, one life allows me ; 
 Verse and nothing else have I to give you. 
 Other heights in other lives, God willing : 
 All the gifts from all the heights, your own, love ! 
 
210 THE WIFE-LOVE AND FKIEND-LOVE OF ROBERT BROWNING. 
 
 Which shall we admire most, Browning's religion or his wife- 
 love ? Both how deep-seated ! 
 
 " Yet a semblance of resource avails us — 
 Shade so finely touched, love's sense must sei^e it. 
 Take these lines, look lovingly and nearly, 
 Lines I write the first time and the last time. 
 He who writes, may write for once as I do. 
 Love, you saw me gather men and women. 
 Hardly shall I tell my joys and sorrows, 
 Hopes and fears, belief and disbelieving : 
 I am mine and yours — the rest be all men's, 
 Karshish, Cleon, Norbert and the fifty. 
 Let me speak this once in my true person. 
 Pray you, look on these my men and women, 
 Take and keep my fifty poems finished ; 
 Where my heart lies, let my brain lie also ! 
 Poor the speech ; be how I speak, for all things. 
 Not but that you know me ! Lo, the moon's self, 
 Here in London, yonder late in Plorence " 
 
 still presents always the same face to the world ; but a different one 
 to " the moon-struck mortal." " If that moon could love a mortal 
 ('tis the old sweet mythos) she would turn a new side to her mortal " 
 
 " Side unseen of herdsman, huntsman, steersman. 
 God be thanked, the meanest of his creatures 
 Boasts two soul-sides, one to face the world with, 
 One to show a woman when he loves her ! 
 
 This I say of me, but think of you. Love ! 
 
 This to you — yourself my moon of poets ! 
 
 Ah, but that's the world's side, there's the wonder. 
 
 Thus they see you, praise you, think they know you t 
 
 There, in turn I stand with them and praise you — 
 
 Out of my own self, I dare to phrase it. 
 
 But the best is when I glide from out them. 
 
 Cross a step or two of dubious twilight. 
 
 Come out on the other side, the novel 
 
 Silent silver lights and darks undreamed of, 
 
 Where I hush and bless myself with silence. 
 
 Oh, their Kafael of the dear Madonnas, 
 Oh, their Dante, of the dread Inferno, 
 Wrote one song — and in my brain I sing it. 
 Drew one angel — borne, see, on my bosom ! " 
 
 4. I now come to the allusions found in his poems written after 
 the death of his wife. The first is from that entitled Prospice 
 (Poetical Works, vol. vi. p. 152, 1864). He had written in one of his 
 
THE WIFE-LOVE AND FBIEND-LOVE OF KOBEET BROWNING. 211 
 
 earliest poems, Faracelsus, eleven years before he found his own 
 " ministering life-angel " — 
 
 " 'Tis only when they spring to heaven that angels 
 Reveal themselves to you ; they sit all day 
 Beside you, and lie down at night by you, 
 "Who care not for their presence, muse or sleep ; 
 And all at once they leave you, and you know them ! " 
 
 He took good care that these words, too true of almost all of us, 
 should not be true of him. If any man ever loved his wife, and 
 knew her while living here to be an earthly angel, soon to be changed 
 into a heavenly one, that man was Eobert Browning. No need for 
 him to wait till death revealed the angel he had lost, from that 
 moment he looked forward to re-union. And why should he fear his 
 own death % " Fear death " % Not he. Three years after the sad blow, 
 as we call it, he writes thus cheerfully and manfully, Prospice, Look 
 forward. There is but " one fight more, the best and the last." Then 
 re-union for ever. 
 
 " For sudden the worst turns the best to the brave. 
 
 The black minute's at end, 
 And the elements' rage, the fiead-voices that rave, 
 
 ShaU dwindle, shall blend, 
 Shall change, shall become first a peace out of pain, 
 
 Then a light, then thy hreast, 
 thou soul of my soul ! I shall clasp tJiee again. 
 
 And with God be the rest." 
 
 Again I say, we must admire our poet's firm faith and piety, no 
 less than his strong deep wife-love. 
 
 5. The next tribute of affection, the gem of the whole collection, 
 is what he calls a "Posy " to the Ring with which he encircles his 
 wife's finger in the wonderful and beautiful dedication of his master- 
 piece, The Ring and the Book (Part I. 1. 1390—1446). A "Posy' 
 was a motto inscribed on a ring, and sometimes on a knife, in olden 
 times. Thus in Hamlet, Act iii. sc. 2 — 
 
 " Is this a prologue or the posy of a ring ? " 
 
 and in the Merchant of Venice : — 
 
 " A paltry ring 
 That she did give me ; whose posy was 
 For all the world like cutler's poetry 
 Upon a knife— Love me and leave me not." 
 
212 THE WIFK-LOVE AND FRIEND-LOVE OF ROBERT BROWNING, 
 
 And what a cluster of flowers too have we here ! 
 
 *' A ring without a posy, and that ring mine ? 
 Lyric Love, half angel and half bird, 
 And all a wonder and a wild desire, — 
 Boldest of hearts that ever braved the sun, 
 Took sanctuary within the holier blue, 
 And sang a kindred soul out to his face, — 
 Yet human at the red-ripe of the heart — 
 "When the first summons from the darkling earth 
 Eeached thee amid thy chambers, blanched their blue, 
 And bared them of the glory — to drop down, 
 To toil for man, to suffer or to die, — 
 This is the same voice : can thy soul know change ? 
 Hail then, and hearken from the realms of help ! 
 Never may I commence my song, my due 
 To God who best taught song by gift of thee. 
 Except with bent head and beseeching hand- 
 That still, despite the distance and the dark, 
 What was, again may be ; some interchange 
 Of gi-ace, some splendour once thy very thought. 
 Some benediction anciently thy smile : 
 — Never conclude, but raising hand and head 
 Thither where eyes, that cannot reach, yet yearn 
 For all hope, all sustainment, all reward, 
 Their utmost up and on — so blessing back 
 In those thy realms of help, that heaven thy home, 
 Some whiteness which, I judge, thy face makes proud, 
 Some wanness where, I think, thy foot may fall ! " 
 
 This, written probably some years before, was published seven 
 years after the death of his wife, called the Poet of Suffering, 
 from the weak state of her health. In 1839 she broke a blood- 
 vessel, and before her marriage only anticipated an early death. 
 Then all her thought was, 
 
 "if God choose, 
 I shall but love thee better after death." 
 
 But brighter days were now in store for her, and she exchanged her 
 " near sweet view of Heaven for earth with him." 
 
 " My own, my own. 
 Who earnest to me when the world was gone, 
 And I who looked for only God, found thee ! " 
 
 "Well may he call her " half -angel and half -bird and all a wonder 
 and a wild desire." She was the lark singing in the morning and 
 soaring to heaven ; she was the eagle, strong of wing, braving the 
 sun ; best of all she was " yet human at the red-ripe of the heart," 
 
THE WIFE-LOVE AND FRIEND-LOVE OF ROBEET BROWNING. 213 
 
 and was summoned by sickness "to drop down," like the lark from 
 the sky, like the eagle from its aerie, " to toil for man, to suffer," 
 and soon to die. Sickness and sorrow for the loss of her brother 
 darkened the chambers of her soul, " blanched their blue, and bared 
 them of the glory " — the glory of her verse : she was too ill and 
 too sad even to write her poetry. This was her lot on this " darkling 
 earth " ; still, it was amidst her sufferings, and in spite of her suffer- 
 ings, that her bold heart at times " braved the sun " — " took sanc- 
 tuary " for a brief moment *' within the holier blue " ; ever and anon 
 taking up her poet's pen, and singing her sunlike soul out at heaven's 
 very gate. The same voice, so loved on earth, now greets her in 
 heaven ; neither soul knows any change. The divine gift of song, 
 best taught by the divine gift of her, is all due, the poet feels, to 
 God : and he can never commence nor conclude his song without 
 .thinking of all he owes to her and God ; without praying her to 
 " hearken from the realms of help " ; without beseeching God, with 
 bent head and imploring hand, " that still, despite the distance and 
 the dark, what was once, again may be " — some sweet interchange of 
 thought, if not of speech, on her pai-t full of grace and splendour, on 
 his of benediction anciently her well-known smile. So causing her to 
 bless back to him on earth, some of her own whiteness, the idea of 
 which makes her face, he judges, even in heaven to shine with a 
 brighter and prouder joy ; some of her own wanness, which is excess 
 of whiteness,^ reflected on him from her realms of help, where on the 
 golden floor, he thinks, her foot may fall. 
 
 " IVJiiteness " is goodness, purity, innocence, guileless truth, unselfish 
 love — perfect in heaven, marred and stained on earth ; also it denotes 
 heavenly joy, delight, and gladness. " Wanness," the exaggeration of 
 whiteness, the excess of all this, angelic goodness, childlike, lamblike 
 innocence, perfect peerless truth and Godlike love. Wanness is " a 
 whiter hue than white"; "quintessential whiteness." The sun has a 
 wannish glare; the lightning flash is wan rather than white; white -heat 
 has a wan tinge ; so we may correctly describe the white-heat of intensity 
 as wan, whether of intense love or intense goodness, or intense feeling, 
 as the player in Hamlet, " from the working of his soul, all his visage 
 wann'd." We can but attain to some whiteness, some wanness here ; 
 but she is all whiteness, all wanness there. Our better thoughts, our 
 holier aspirations, our longings to be pure and wise and good and 
 gentle all too soon pass away; but still again and again recur, 
 
 ' " Whiten to wanness." Parleyings, p. 209. 
 
214 THE WIFE- LOVE AND FRIEND-LOVE OF ROBERT BROWNING. 
 
 flashes of heaven's own light, transient and intermittent, lighting up 
 the chambers of the soul, as the lightning fills the room with wanness 
 though but for a moment's space. 
 
 Di'. Furnivall interprets the "whiteness" to mean "the glorified 
 person of the Poetess," and "wanness," " Heaven's lucent floor." It 
 may be so. The colour of a star is yellowish-white, or wan, and 
 Keble has " Heaven's stor-sprinkled floor," 
 
 "Whether, however, the Poet meant all this or not, I believe 
 neither he nor I nor any one can say, but only that the words are 
 capable of bearing some such meaning. Not even the Poet himself 1 
 No — he speaks by a divine afflatus, by a true and real inspiration, 
 though not by such a direct revelation from heaven as inspired the 
 sacred writers ; but in both cases, I believe, they themselves did not 
 and do not understand the full meaning of all they write. More is 
 meant than meets the eye and ear. Even poets by the mere act of 
 writing, and perhaps by Heaven's decree, 
 
 " do attain 
 To sometliiDg like prophetic strain." 
 " As little children lisp, and tell of heaven, 
 So thoughts beyond their thought to those high bards were given." 
 
 And so it comes to pass that great bards are unable, even if we could 
 ask them, to interpret all the mystic words they have sung in " their 
 sage and solemn tunes " ; and we may lawfully find in their creative 
 work meanings which even they themselves never meant nor 
 intended. 
 
 6. I now pass on to the concluding lines of this wonderful 
 performance, at the end of the Twelfth Part of The Ring and the 
 Book — 
 
 •' If the rough ore be rounded to a ring, 
 Eender all duty which good ring should do, 
 And failing gi-ace, succeed in guardianship, — 
 Might mine but lay outside thine, Lyric Love, 
 Thy rare gold ring of verse (the poet praised) 
 Linking our England to his Italy ! " 
 
 In these words the Poet dedicates to his wife, whose blessing he had 
 invoked at the commencement, the whole work, and "rounds the 
 rough ore" which his poetic fancy supplied to a perfect ring of pure 
 gold. He begins and conclvxdes this, his longest poem, with thoughts of 
 her whom he had loved and lost. Keeping up the simile which gave its 
 name to the whole poem, he compares his work to the artistic work of 
 
THE WIFE-LOVE AND FRIEND-LOVE OF EGBERT BROWNING. 215 
 
 the Etruscan jeweller, who mixes an alloy with the pure gold that it 
 may bear the file and hammer, which alloy is dissolved by acids, and 
 the perfect ring " the shape remains." And now he desires to lay 
 his finished work by the side of his wife's ; and if it fail in " grace " 
 and favour, so that " the British public like it not," and few read it, 
 still it can serve the purpose of guarding and recommending hers, 
 fabricated in the same artistic way as his own — 
 
 *' Might mine but lie outside thine, Lyric Love, 
 Thy rare gold ring of verse (the poet praised) 
 Linking our England to his Italy ! " 
 
 Linking her English stories, Aurora Leigh and the rest, with the 
 Italian one here completed. 
 
 7. We are not surprised to find Browning, ten years after he had 
 lost 
 
 "the best of wives 
 That ever was toward husband in this world," 
 
 acceding at once to Lady Cowper's suggestion and request, that he 
 should make the Alcestis of Euripides the subject of a poem — " that 
 strangest, saddest, sweetest song " ; we can understand why he so 
 readily compHed, being touched with " its beauty, and the way it 
 makes you weep." He " embalms in the amber " of JBalaustion's 
 Adventure the story, and his translation of, in the main, the whole 
 play, which contains our next allusion. In this, Eui'ipides, Mrs. 
 Browning's favourite Greek poet, presents us with the beautiful 
 picture of a devoted woman saving the life of her husband by sacri- 
 ficing her own. Balaustion means in Greek ''wild-pomegranate- 
 flower," who is a Bhodian girl that saves her own life by reciting 
 this play to the Euripides-loving Syracusans, B.C. 413. This is her 
 adventure which she tells to her four girl-friends. The motto prefixed 
 to the poem is four lines taken from the twelfth stanza of Mrs. 
 Browning's Wine of Cyprus — 
 
 " Our Euripides, the human, 
 
 With his droppings of warm tears, 
 And his touches of things common 
 Till they rose to touch the spheres." 
 
 And the first two lines are twice quoted at the close of Balaustion^s 
 Adventure, as if their melody had some peculiar charm for our Poet. 
 
216 THE WIFE-LOVE AND FRIEXD-LOVE OF ROBERT BROWNING. 
 
 The second time he thus toiichingly alludes to his own best of wives, 
 his own Alcestis — 
 
 " I know the Poetess who graved in gold, 
 Among her glories that shall never fade, 
 This style and title of Euripides, 
 The human icith his droppings of loarm tears." 
 
 We must not omit the further allusion at the end of the poem to the 
 thrice-repeated stanza, and the picture of Sir Frederick Leighton on 
 the subject of Alcestis — 
 
 " And all came — glory of the golden verse. 
 And passion of the picture * * * 
 * * * of the play which gained no prize ! 
 "Why crown whom Zens has crowned in soul before ?" 
 
 8. The only other allusion to his wife which, after a careful and 
 loving perusal of the whole of his works, I have been able to detect, 
 occm's in the epilogue to Facchiarotto, with other Poems, published in 
 1876, fifteen years after her death. This "one woman in the world," 
 " the best — oh best by far of womankind," seems never to have been 
 forgotten, or a successor thought of. Like Admetus in the foregoing 
 poem. Browning says — 
 
 " Gone is she : no wife for Admetus more ! 
 And I shall bear for thee no year-long grief, 
 But grief that lasts while my own days last, love ! " 
 
 " ' The Poets pour us wine ' — 
 Said the dearest poet I ever knew, 
 Dearest and greatest and best to me." 
 
 The reference is again to Mrs. Browning's poem, Wine of Cyprus, 
 given to her by her blind old friend, H. S. Boyd, to whom the stanzas 
 are addressed — 
 
 •' Is it not right to remember 
 
 All your kindness, friend of mine, 
 "When we two sat in the chamber, 
 And the poets poured us wine." 
 
 They are the Greek poets, ^schylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Theocritus, 
 and Pindar, whom they studied together. " In grateful affection," 
 she inscribes this, and three sonnets at the end of vol. ii. of her 
 Poetical Works, to Hugh Stuart Boyd on his Blindness, his Death in 
 1848, and his three legacies to herself, an -^schylus, a Gregory 
 Nazianzen, and a clock. 
 
THE WIFE-LOVE AND FRIEND-LOVE OF ROBERT BROWNING. 217 
 
 These, then, are the several allusions to his wife scattered through- 
 out his voluminous works ; and I am thankful to find so many, and 
 to be able to quote his own words, without unjustifiably pi-ying into 
 his private life. Browning was the last man to " sonnet-sing " about 
 himself. He protests against this very strongly in the volume con- 
 taining our last allusion. He entirely dissents from Wordsworth's 
 dictum that — 
 
 " Shakespeare unlocked his heart with this same key." 
 " Did Shakespeare i If so, the less Shakespeare he ! " 
 
 Of course, every one would like to see the inside of our great Poet's 
 house — house of life and house in Kensington, but he says — 
 
 " No : thanking the mblic, I must decline. 
 A peep through the winclow, if folks prefer ; 
 
 But please you, no foot over threshold of mine ! " 
 
 " Whoso desires to penetrate 
 
 Deeper, must dive by the spirit-sense." 
 
 This I am attempting to do in this paper, and again thank him for 
 leaving his window so far open, and his " bosom's gate ever so little 
 ajar." 
 
 " Eeady to hear the rest ? How good you are ! " 
 
 II. Wei], then, having enjoyed this brief delightful glimpse of 
 Browning's wife-love through this partially open gate and window, I 
 will now a little prolong my gaze to notice the allusions to some of 
 his friends sparsely scattered through his works. 
 
 This strong love of one man for another, sometimes seen even 
 "passing the love of women" — friend-love, "wonderful, even pass- 
 ing " wife-love, as in the instance we read of in our Bibles — has again 
 and again been exemplified in the world's histoi-y. The soul of one 
 man knit with the soul of another man, so that they love each other 
 as their own souls was the love of Jonathan and David ; and how 
 touching the story : " They kissed one another, and wept one with 
 another, until David exceeded." Dear as a brother, dearer than a 
 wife, I can hardly say this of any of our poet's friends, after having 
 dwelt so long on his wife-love, almost amounting to wife-worship ; 
 but this warm heart finds its fellow-heart in one woman, while it 
 beats in unison with many friends. 
 
 " I love, am loved by 
 Some few honest to the core," 
 
218 THE WIFE-LOVE AND FRIEND-LOVE OF ROBERT BROWNING. 
 
 are his own words. He seems to have been, again to quote his own 
 words, 
 
 "the proper 
 Friend-making, everywhere friend-finding soul." 
 
 And I doubt not there are some amongst ourselves who know him 
 personally who can say, as Ben Jonson did of Shakespeare, " I loved the 
 man, and," what I hope they may be unable to add for many a year 
 to come, " do honour his memory, on this side idolatry, as much 
 as any," 
 
 And first I will take a peep through the window he has himself 
 left open by his own act and deed in his several dedications. 
 
 Here we meet with some great and well-known names in the 
 literary world — John Forster, William Macready, Sergeant Talfourd, 
 Bryan Waller Procter, Walter SSfVage Landor, Thomas Carlyle, and 
 Alfred Lord Tennyson. These, except the last one mentioned, are 
 all now dead. So truer are his words at this late period, than even 
 at the commencement of Sordello, where the poet himself addresses 
 his imaginary yet real audience — " few living, many dead," " friends 
 summoned together from the world's four ends," " there's a realm 
 wherein I have many lovers," this old word meaning, as in 
 Shakespeare, endeai-ed fi-iends of either sex. Amongst those whom 
 he regards with " affectionate friendship," " in all affectionate ad- 
 miration," " in grateful admiration," are Amedee de Ripert-Monclar, 
 to whom he dedicates Paracelsus, in 1837 ; William C. Macready, 
 Strafford, in 1837 ; the author of Ion, Pippa Passes, in 1841 ; and John 
 Kenyon, Dramatic Lyrics, in 1842, 1845, and 1855. 
 
 Still stronger language is found in the dedication prefi:xed to the 
 six volumes of Poetical Worhs published in 1863. 
 
 " I dedicate these volumes to my old friend, John Forster (else- 
 where he speaks of him as ' the writer whom I am proud to call my 
 friend '), glad and grateful that he who, from the first publication of 
 the various poems they include, has been their promptest and 
 staunchest helper, should seem even nearer to me now than almost 
 thirty years ago." 
 
 Perhaps a still warmer strain is used in that to Colo7nhe's Birth- 
 day, in 1841. 
 
 *• No one loves and honours Barry Cornwall more than 
 
 Does Robert Browning ; 
 
 "Who, having nothing better than this play to 
 
 Give him in proof of it, 
 
 Must say so." 
 
THE WIFE-LOVE AND FRIEND-LOVE OF ROBERT BROWNING. 219 
 
 How reciprocal was their affection may be read in that poet's 
 Familiar Epistle to Robert Browning, dated 1839 and 1846, in his 
 English Songs, p. xxv., where he so truly foretells that he will " win 
 a name of might." 
 
 But the warmest of all, inasmuch as the affection survives death, 
 is seen through the open window of the dedication to Sordello, 1863, 
 to M. Joseph Milsand, of Dijon. 
 
 " Dear Friend, — Let the next poem be introduced by your name, 
 therefore remembered along with one of the deepest of my affections, 
 and so repay all trouble it ever cost me. ... I trust to continue ever 
 yours, E,. B." 
 
 He is "the man of men" alluded to in Red Cotton Night-Cap 
 Country, vol. xii. p. 122, appropriately in that poem, as Browning 
 passed the summer of 1872 with his friend at St. Aubin, in Normandy, 
 and his full " heart relieves itself," 
 
 " Milsand, who makest warm my wintry world, 
 And wise my heaven, if there we consort too." 
 
 Nor is he forgotten in his latest work in 1887, Parleyings with 
 Certain People, 
 
 " In Memoriam 
 
 J. Milsand 
 
 Obiit iv. Sept. mdcccxxxvi 
 
 Absens abscntem auditque videtque." 
 
 The absent both hears and sees the absent. Their friendship is un- 
 impaired by death — though gone to " the realms of help," the absent 
 is present in spirit, and still sees and hears the absent in body. Even 
 had Milsand not been named, after reading that part of this dedication 
 which we have omitted, " the historical decoration was purposely of 
 no more importance than a background requires ; and my stress lay 
 on the incidents in the development of a soul : little else is worthy 
 study. I, at least, always thought so — you, with many known and 
 unknown to me, think so," we should have been at no loss to know 
 whom he referred to when he wrote 
 
 " That man will read you rightly head to foot, see into your soiol. 
 He knows more, and loves better, than the world 
 That never heard his name, and never may." 
 
 And surely a fortiori we may apply this " auditqvA videtque " to our 
 poet's absent deceased wife ; and if so there is a plain allusion to her 
 
220 THE WIFE-LOVE AND FRIEND-LOVE OF ROBERT BROWNING. 
 
 ■which we have omitted to notice in the Prologue to Fijine, written in 
 
 1872. She is the 
 
 " Certain soul 
 Which, early slipped its sheath, 
 And has for its home the whole of heaven, 
 What if it thus look beneath, 
 Thus watch one who in the woi'ld, 
 Both lives and likes life's way," 
 
 floating in his poetic sea of passion and thought, like the butterfly 
 in the air watching the swimmer in the sea. 
 
 " Does she look, pity, wonder 
 At one who mimics iiight. 
 Swims — heaven above, sea under. 
 Yet always earth in sight." 
 
 And now passing by the lady alluded to in Sorclello, iii, p. 109, 
 " My English Eyebright," in Greek, Eu<^pao-ia, Miss Haworth, which 
 Mrs. Orr tells us refers to one of Browning's oldest friends, the next 
 on our list is "Walter Savage Landor ; and it was largely owing to 
 Browning's considerate kindness and pecuniary assistance that 
 Landor was enabled to pass the last few years of his life in com- 
 parative ease and comfort. The open window and door ajar are in 
 Sordello and the dedication to Luria, which show the strong friendship 
 which existed between these two poets, or rather poet and prose-poet, 
 for when Browning styles him " a great tragic poet," he is referring 
 to his Imaginary Conversations, which are in prose. 
 
 Landor thus writes of his friend, 
 
 " Since Chaucer was alive and hale, 
 ITo man hath walked along our roads with steps 
 So active, so inquiring eye, or tongue 
 So varied in discourse. " 
 
 Our poet in the latter part of the third book of Sordello, where he is 
 60 delightfully personal, calls Landor 
 
 his "patron-friend. 
 Whose great verse blares unintermittent on 
 Like your own trumpeter at Marathon. 
 
 Friend, wear 
 
 A crest proud as desert while I declare 
 
 Had I a flawless ruby 
 
 I would, for that smile which went 
 
 To my heart, fling it in the sea, content. 
 Wearing your verse in place, an amulet 
 Sovereign against all passion, wear, and fret." 
 
THE WIFE-LOVE AND FRIEND-LOVE OF ROBERT BROWNING. 221 
 
 Such being his estimation of his friend we are not surprised at this 
 dedication to Luria. 
 
 " I dedicate 
 This last attempt for the present at dramatic poetry 
 
 To a great dramatic poet ; 
 
 ' "Wishing what I write may be read by his light : ' 
 
 If a phrase originally addressed, by not the least 
 
 "Worthy of his contemporaries, 
 
 To Shakespeare, 
 
 May be applied here, by one whose sole privilege is in 
 
 A grateful admiration, 
 
 To "Walter Savage Landor." 
 
 This is somewhat misleading as to the estimation in which Shakespeare 
 was held by his contemporaries. On referring to the preface of 
 Vittoria Corombona, by John Webster, where the phrase in question 
 occurs, we find that Shakespeare is classed with six other dramatists 
 with equal praise. Chapman, Jonson, Beaumont, Fletcher, Dekker, 
 and Heywood, and the words of Webster are — 
 
 " "Wishing what I write may be read by their light," 
 
 not singling out Shakespeare as eclipsing all others, as we all should 
 do now. 
 
 Browning seems to have been attracted to John Webster by his 
 laborious and obscure style, so like to his own, but his own is so 
 incomparably superior. J. A. Symonds, in his edition in the Mermaid 
 Series, says what he might with truth have said of Browning's poetry, 
 "owing to condensation of thought and compression of language 
 Webster's plays offer considerable difficulties to readers who approach 
 them for the first time." 
 
 Another friend was Miss Thackeray, now Mrs. Richmond Ritchie, 
 to whom he dedicates Bed Cotton Night-Ca]) Country, and with whom, 
 together with Joseph Milsand already mentioned, he spent the 
 summer of 1872 at St. Aubin, called in the poem, St. Rambert. 
 
 " Best loved of sea-coast-nook-ful Normandy ! " 
 
 To her he says, 
 
 " what eye like yours — • 
 The learned eye is still the loving one ! " 
 
 Milsand appears to have lodged with him, but Miss Thackeray lived 
 "some five miles farther down." She named the place and people too, 
 
222 THE WIFE-LOVE AND FRIEND-LOVE OF ROBERT BROWNING. 
 
 " White Cotton Night-Cap Country," and promised a novel under this 
 nomenclature, 
 
 " Normandy shown minute yet magnified 
 In one of those small books, the truly great 
 "We never know enough, yet know so well." 
 
 The book promised on the beach has never, I fear, been forthcoming. 
 How truly was she, "sweet mocking friend." 
 
 The dedication of selections, first series, in 1887, must not be 
 omitted, which for terseness and strength of friend-love has seldom 
 been surpassed. 
 
 " Dedicated to 
 
 Alfred Tennyson. 
 
 In poetry — illustrious and consummate. 
 
 In friendship — noble and sincere." 
 
 In the forewords to some earlier selections published 1865, in the 
 series of Moxon's Miniature Poets, Browning says of Tennyson : — 
 " This little gathering of the lightest of my poems contentedly looks 
 pale beside the wonderful flowei'-show of my illustrious predecessor — 
 dare I say 1 my dear friend ; who will take it, all except the love in 
 the gift, as a mere nosegay's worth." 
 
 Perhaps for equal terseness and neatness of expression we may 
 here quote the dedication to Pippa Passes. 
 
 •'I dedicate my best intentions, in this poem, 
 
 Admiringly to the author of 'Ion,' 
 
 Affectionately to Mr. Sergeant Talfoiu'd." 
 
 Ten years before he penned the dedication to Tennyson he thus 
 writes of his friend Carlyle, in the preface to his transcription of 
 Agamemnon. 
 
 Having called his own work an aKeXcuo-To? a/Aicr^os dotSa, he adds, 
 " No, neither ' vincommanded ' nor ' unrewarded ' : since it was com- 
 manded of me by my venerated friend, Thomas Carlyle, and rewarded 
 will it indeed become if I am permitted to dignify it by the prefatory 
 insertion of his dear and noble name." In an earher part of this 
 preface he makes a quotation from Matthew Arnold, and terms him 
 his " eloquent friend." 
 
 And now, passing by in sacred silence the name of another friend, 
 Anne Egerton Smith, with whom and his sister Browning was staying 
 at La Saisiaz, and whose sudden death there gave rise to the poem 
 thus entitled, we take our final peep through the open window of the 
 dedications in that very graceful and unique one to Balaustion's 
 
THE WIFE-LOVE AND FRIEND-LOVE OF ROBERT BROWNING. 223 
 
 Adventure, to the Countess Cowper, and in doing so we pronounce 
 our poet the very prince of dedicators. It is as follows : 
 
 " If I mention the simple truth : that this poem absolutely owes 
 its existence to you — who not only suggested, but imposed on me as 
 a task, what has proved the most delightful of May-month amuse- 
 ments — I shall seem honest, indeed, but hardly prudent, for how good 
 and beautiful ought such a poem to be ! 
 
 " Euripides might fear little ; but I, also, have an interest in the 
 performance ; and what wonder if I beg you to suffer that it make, in 
 another and far easier sense, its nearest possible approach to those 
 Greek qualities of goodness and beauty, by laying itself gratefully at 
 your feet ? " 
 
 Thus in spite of his own protest disclaiming all self-revelation, he 
 has by his own act and deed enabled us, as it were, to see inside his 
 house of life without any earthquake laying the frontage bare — to 
 slip as it were inside his breast, there to catalogue and label those 
 whom we may fairly suppose he loves best. 
 
 Other people have left their windows open for the unscrupulous 
 British public to peer through, and give us a glimpse of the friend-love 
 which they bear towards our poet. 
 
 1. Archdeacon Farrar's Early Days of Christianity, 1884. 
 
 "To 
 
 Robert Browning, Esq., 
 
 Author of A Death in the Desert, 
 
 And of many other poems of the deepest interest to all students of Scripture, 
 
 I dedicate 
 
 This volume 
 
 With sincere admiration and esteem. " 
 
 2. Alfred Tennyson's Tiresias and Other Poems, 1885. 
 
 "To my good friend 
 
 Robert Browning, 
 
 "Whose genius and geniality 
 
 Will best appreciate what is best, 
 
 And make allowance for what may be worst, 
 
 This volume 
 
 Is 
 
 Affectionately inscribed. " 
 
 3. W. G. Kingsland's Essay on Robert Browning, December 1886. 
 
 " strong-soiil'd singer of high themes and wide — 
 Thrice noble in thy work and life alike — 
 Thy genius glides upon a sea, whose tide 
 Heaves with a pain and passion infinite ! 
 
224 THE WIFE-LOYE AND FRIEND-LOVE OF ROBERT BROWNING. 
 
 Men's hearts laid bare beneath thy pitying touch ; 
 Strong words that comfort all o'erwearied much ; 
 Thoughts whose calm cadence moulds our spirit-life, 
 Gives strength to bravely bear amid world-strife ; 
 And one large hope, full orb'd as summer sun, 
 That souls shall surely meet when Life is won ! 
 
 So round thy heart our grateful thanks entwine ; 
 Men are the better for these songs of thine ! 
 At eve thy muse doth o'er us mellower swell. 
 Strong with the strength of life lived long and well." 
 
 "Will our President allow me to add his multum in parvo prefixed 
 to his Bibliography? 
 
 "To Robert Browning. 
 
 ' A man ' 
 
 True as steel, 
 
 A poet 
 
 Searcher of men's minds and souls." — F. J. F. 
 
 And now, leaving these open windows, there seems to have been 
 only one other friend, Alfred Domett, who could tempt Browning to 
 leave his " bosom gate " ever so little ajar. Through this the peering 
 eye sees nearly as far as through the window. The poem entitled 
 Tlie Guardian Angel is addressed to him. " Alfred, dear friend ! " 
 and again, 
 
 " Where are you, dear old friend ? 
 How rolls the "Wairoa at your world's far end ? " 
 
 A longer poem speaks of him under the name of Waring. 
 
 " Meantime, how much I loved him, 
 I find out now I've lost him ; 
 I who cared not if I moved him, 
 Who could so carelessly accost him. 
 Henceforth never shall get free 
 Of his ghostly company. 
 Oh, could I have him back once more, 
 This Waring, but one half-day more ! 
 Back, with the quiet face of yore, 
 So hungry for acknowledgment 
 Like mine ! I'd fool him to his bent t '*' 
 
 No more ! Alas, the window is shut, the blind drawn down, the bosom's 
 portal barred and bolted. 
 
225 
 
 "A DEATH IN THE DESEET." 
 
 BY MRS. M. G. GLAZEBROOK. 
 Read at the iSth Meeting of the Broioning Society, Fedruary 25th, 1887. 
 
 Among the dramatis personae, associated with characters so diverse 
 as James Lee's wife and Mr. Sludge, Rabbi Ben Ezra and Caliban, is 
 St. John. The substance of " A Death in the Desert " is the dying 
 speech of the most loved and the last surviving of Christ's disciples. 
 The poem is extremely characteristic of its author. The choice of 
 subject, the manner of presentation, the form of the intricate argu 
 ment, are all illustrative of Mr. Browning's peculiar genius. In one, 
 respect it is exceptional, for it is his only poem which is concerned 
 with Christian faith, as a product of history. " Christmas Eve " and 
 " Easter Day " are Christian in sentiment and tendency ; several 
 others — notably " La Saisiaz " — are inspired by Christian hopes and 
 enthusiasms ; one — the strangely interesting " Epistle " — has for its 
 subject an incident of the Gospel narrative ; but no other goes back 
 to the origins of Christianity and traces from them a systematic de- 
 velopment. Like most of Mr. Browning's poems, " A Death in the 
 Desert " can be only partly understood by itself. It must be studied 
 with its whole environment. The circumstances of its production 
 must be considered ; knowledge of the poet's principles and methods,, 
 acquired by study of his other works, must be brought to bear on it. 
 It needs that freedom of interpretation which he always seems to- 
 demand. For while he is lavish in suggestion, he is very chary of 
 information. Very rarely does he give his readers ready-made- 
 apinions. His teaching stimulates, it does not forestall, thought. He- 
 tainks it best, he expressly tells us so himself, to present his argu- 
 t>ents in dramatic form, 
 
 " By making speak, myself kept out of view, 
 The very man as he was wont to do, 
 And leaving you to say the rest of him ; '* 
 
226 MRS. M. G. GLAZEBROOK. " A DEATH IN THE DESERT. 
 
 and by this method he evades the burden of proof. A psychologist, 
 not a logician, he shows how men do, not how men ought to, believe 
 and think ; a poet not a moralist, he represents religion as a striving 
 after a beautiful ideal, rather than as obedience to the dictates of 
 duty. 
 
 The form of " A Death in the Desert " was determined by that 
 attack upon the historical bases of Christianity which was so vigor- 
 ously maintained in Germany in the beginning and middle of the 
 present century. "VVe know from the unattractive description he 
 gives of the professor in " Christmas Eve," that Mr, Browning had 
 little sympathy with the German theologians. Their destructiveness, 
 their scepticism, their disregard of the emotional and personal ele- 
 ments in religion, their finality, were not indeed likely to make them 
 acceptable to poets. To what was " simple, sensuous, passionate," 
 they seemed in direct opposition. In the too few recorded words of 
 another English poet, whose devout, earnest soul reflected much of the 
 religious disturbance of his time, we can note traces of the distress they 
 occasioned. Though Clough could not help admitting the truth of their 
 general conclusions, he did so with obvious repugnance to the methods 
 by which these were obtained, and with a strong conviction that they 
 were not final. The clouds and darkness which were enveloping the 
 new Sinai — the mount of law and knowledge — were, he felt, to be 
 dispelled in time by a new revelation : some prophet will arise 
 
 "To dare, sublimely meek, 
 Witliin the shroud, of blackest cloud, 
 The Deity to seek." 
 
 The discredit cast upon the authority of the evangelists filled him with 
 a sense almost of bereavement, 
 
 "lost, invisible and gone, 
 Are, say you, JIatthew, JIark and Luke and Holy John I 
 Lost, is it, lost, to be recovered never ? " 
 
 And something of this feeling, with less despondency, less painfulness, 
 seems to have been with Browning when he wrote the poem we are 
 considering. 
 
 In the critical examination of the evangelical records, the fourth 
 gospel suffered most. Strauss — in this instance following his early 
 master and later antagonist, Baur — denied that St. John had anything 
 to do with its composition. The author, he held, was neither St. John 
 nor any one else who had personally known Christ : nor, in accordance 
 •with a widely-accepted theory, did he believe it to be the work of a 
 
MRS. M. G, GLAZEBROOK. "A DEATH IN THE DESERT. 227 
 
 pupil of St. John, vrho, after the death of his master, related, from 
 memory or from fragmentary notes, traditions and sayings which had 
 been taught him, and made out of them a continuous history. Strauss 
 pronounced it to be a controversial work, written late in the second 
 century after Christ, by a profound theologian of the Greek Gnostic 
 and anti-Jewish school, whose design was not to add another to the 
 existing biographies of Christ, not to represent him as a real man, nor 
 to give an account of any human life, but to produce an elaborate 
 theological work in which, under the veil of allegory, the Neo-platonic 
 conception of Christ as the Logos, the realised Word of God, the 
 divme principle of light and life, should be developed. With this 
 purpose, the writer made a free selection from the sayings and doings 
 of Christ as recorded in the three Gospels already written, and as 
 freely invented others. All the events, all the words, of the Gospel 
 thus composed, are subordinate to the main design, which was worked 
 out by the author with an artistic completeness most ingeniously 
 traced by his German interpreters. Each miracle symbolises some 
 important dogma, and its narration must be understood to mean 
 that it embodies some deep spiritual truth, not, necessarily, that it 
 ever actually took place. The author manifests, throughout, 
 liis ignorance of Jewish customs, and his antagonism to Jewish 
 sentiments. 
 
 The whole subject is full of interest, but it forms a chapter in 
 Biblical criticism, and a detailed discussion of it would be out of 
 place here. The bases on which this elaborate theory is founded 
 consist in the whole character of the fourth gospel, and with this we 
 are all familiar. We recall at once its spirituality, its philosophy, its 
 subjectiveness ; and throughout, from the opening woi'ds, which con- 
 tain the essence of Neo-platonism, to the last long discoui'ses to the 
 disciples, we are conscious of the revelation of a dogmatic and mystic 
 religion ; we recognise a faith of which the realities are not material 
 miracles, acts of healing, violations of natural law, but the changes 
 worked in the soul by divine love, the regeneration effected by new 
 and higher desires, new and higher motives. 
 
 But, in his poem, Mr. Browning restores the St. John of orthodox 
 belief. We have again the loved and loving disciple who leant on his 
 Master's breast at supper, and in his old age continually bade his 
 '' little children, love one another." He is learned in Greek philosophy 
 and speculative, as the author of the Gospel called by his name must 
 have been ; mystical and visionary as became him who had received 
 the revelation of Patmos. He is full of the responsibility which 
 rests upon him as the last survivor of those who had seen and known 
 
228 MRS. M. G. GLAZEBROOK. "A DEATH IN THE DESERT." 
 
 Christ ; fearful, also, of the heresies and " anti-Christs " already 
 beginning to disturb the Church, of whom the Ebionites, or followers 
 of Cerinthus, who denied his Lord's divinity, give him cause for most 
 anxiety. 
 
 He is dying in a cave in the desert, whither he has fled for refuge 
 from his persecutors : his only attendants are four faithful disciples. 
 The situation is, presumably, of the poet's own creating, for tradition 
 is very vague as to the date and circumstances of St. John's death. 
 It is conceived with all Mr. Browning's dramatic vigour and ready 
 comprehension of appropriate detail. The introduction, with its 
 strange exactness, is meant to certify the authenticity of the manu- 
 script whence the record is taken. It is supposed to be a parchment, 
 written in Greek by Pamphylax, one of the four attendants, which 
 has come into the possession of a later disciple through Xanthus, 
 another of the witnesses. The narration is, therefore, that of 
 Pamphylax, and was written, as his concluding words tell us, on 
 the eve of his martyrdom. 
 
 Forced to fly, St. John, old and dying, has been concealed by his 
 followers in a cave. Por some time they had kept him in a dark and 
 secret recess, but now, aware that the end is near, they bring him to 
 an outer chamber of the grotto, into which the sun's rays can just pene- 
 trate, and there, in the dim light, they watch his lips and the fleeting 
 smiles which promise some parting words before the silence of death 
 overtakes him. Outside the cave, a Bactrian, an ignorant, half- 
 savage convert, guards them from surprise, ready, if need be, to 
 sacrifice his own life for the protection of the few remaining moments 
 of his master's. In vain, for some time, the four watchers within 
 try to rouse the dying man from his trance : they touch his lips with 
 wine, they bathe his forehead with cold water, they fill the cave with 
 strong, pungent perfume, and still he only turns and smiles in his 
 sleep, and does not wake. At last, one of them, " the Boy," 
 
 " Stmig by the splendour of a sudden thought," 
 
 fetches one of the leaden plates on which his master's gospel is 
 engraved, and, passing his fingers over the letters, reads aloud, " I am 
 the Resurrection and the Life." The words, which are the key-note 
 of his faith and teaching, restore St. John to consciousness : he opens 
 his eyes, he sits up and looks around, and in the stillness of the desert 
 noon-tide and the rapt attention of his listeners, he delivers his last 
 charge. 
 
 The clue to the discourse which follows is given in a parenthetical 
 note of the supposed narrator's, explaining one of St. John's special 
 
MRS. M. G. GLAZEBROOK. "A DEATH IN THE DESERT." 229 
 
 doctrines. He distinguished the soul of man, we are there told, into 
 three component souls. The first, and lowest, is that which has to do 
 with earth and corporeal things, the animal soul, which receives 
 primary sensations and is the immediate cause of action — " what 
 Does." The second is the intellect, and has its seat in the brain : it 
 is superior to the first, but dependent on it, since it receives as 
 material the actual experience which the animal soul supplies ; it is 
 the feeling, thinking, willing soul — " what Knows." The third, and 
 highest, is the spirit of man, the very principle of life, the divine 
 element in man linking him to God, which is self-subsistent and 
 therefore independent of sensation and knowledge, but nevertheless 
 makes use of them, and gives to them existence and energy — " what Is," 
 
 "What Does, what Knows, wliat Is; three souls, one man." 
 
 This doctrine supplies an explanation of the spiritual and sub- 
 jective character of St. John's faith. His personal intercourse with 
 Christ, his acquaintance with the human life of his Master on earth, 
 was actual experience acquired by the lowest soul — " lohat Does." To 
 him, now, this actual experience seems only the "very superficial 
 truth," and much inferior to the true, spiritual, informing knowledge 
 which succeeded it. At the time, it had so little aSected his whole 
 nature, he had so little comprehended its full significance, that when 
 it was all accomplished, and he knew the entire life of Christ, with 
 its marvels of healing, and its command of supernatural powers, when 
 he knew all that had been done by Him, 
 
 " Who trod the sea and brought the dead to life," 
 
 he could, nevertheless, with the other disciples, forsake Him in the 
 hour of danger. But, in time, actual experience completed its work, 
 and became material for the soul above — " ichat Knows " — by which 
 it was developed into knowledge, 
 
 " Ay, but my soul had gained its truth, could grow : " 
 
 and the fruit of that growth — ripened knowledge — he imparted to 
 others. On them, thus presented, it had a powerfully transforming 
 influence. Those who had never known Christ on earth believed in 
 Him, through the disciple's teaching, with a real, devoted faith. 
 
 " Another year or two, — what little child, 
 What tender woman that had seen no least 
 Of all my sights, but barely heard them told, 
 Who did not clasp the cross with a light laugh, 
 Or wrap the burning roba round, thanking God ? " 
 
230 MKS. M. G. GLAZEBROOK. "A DEATH IN THE DESERT. 
 
 But man's knowledge cannot be absolute : it is subject to change and 
 development. The knowledge imparted by St. John underwent change 
 in the minds of those whom he taught : it was questioned, dovibted, 
 it lost much of its power. More evidences were demanded, more 
 facts ; and patiently, again and again, St. John re-stated what he 
 knew. Already his own knowledge was becoming transformed. 
 
 " Of new significance and fresli result ; 
 
 "What first were guessed as i:)oints, I now knew stars, 
 And named them in the Gospel I have wi'it. 
 For men said, ' It is getting long ago : 
 Where is the promise of his coming ? ' — asked 
 These young ones in their strength (as loth to wait) 
 Of me who, when their sires were born, was old." 
 
 He wrote his gospel for them, and told them all he had heard and 
 seen of the life of Christ, and he thought that, in the main, they 
 believed ; and so, satisfied that he had fulfilled his mission, and that 
 
 "Though the whole earth should lie in wickedness 
 We had the truth, might leave the rest to God," 
 
 St. John fell sick, and was ready to die. 
 
 He sank peacefully into the sleep of death ; but, roused by his 
 
 attendants, he awakes with the startled, fearful anxiety of sudden 
 
 waking : 
 
 *' Yet now I wake in such decrepitude 
 As I had slidden down and fallen afar, 
 Past even the presence of my former self. 
 Grasping the while for stay at facts which snap. 
 Till I am found away from my own world, 
 Feeling for foot-hold through a blank profound, 
 Along with unborn people in strange lands. 
 Who saj' — I hear said or conceive they say — 
 ' Was John at all, and did he say he saw ? 
 Assure us, ere we ask what he might see ! ' " 
 
 It is at this point of the argument that the modern application — « 
 the reference to present forms of belief, the development suggested 
 by Strauss, yet here represented in opposition to Strauss — is intro- 
 duced. The transition is very ingeniously emphasized by the supposed 
 re-awakening of St. John. Our own times seem to be invoked with 
 those " unborn people in strange lands." With prophetic foresight 
 St, John imagines how future generations, when new lands are dis- 
 covered and old cities are laid waste, shall ask of his doctrine : 
 
 " I see you stand conversing, each new face. 
 Either in fields, of yellow summer eves, 
 On islets yet unnamed amid the sea ; 
 
MRS. M. G. GLAZEBROOK. "A DEATH IN THE DESERT." 231 
 
 Or pace for shelter 'neath a portico, 
 Out of the crowd in some enormous town, 
 Where now the larks sing in a solitude ; 
 Or muse upon blank heaps of stone and sand 
 Idly conjectured to be Ephesus." 
 
 He wants to make sure that' the -knowledge he imparted in his 
 gospel shall become in others the abiding faith it has become in him. 
 In his heart, Christ still lived, still died to sin, and rose again to 
 righteousness. He had fulfilled already the promise of His coming 
 again. But how was the spiritual resurrection to be accomplished in 
 less spiritual hearts 1 
 
 "Can they share, 
 They, who have flesh, a veil of youth and strength 
 About each spirit, that needs must bide its time, 
 Living and learning still as years assist 
 Which wear the thickness thin, and let men see— 
 With me, who hardly am withheld at all, 
 But shudderingly, scarce a shred between, 
 Lie bare to the universal prick of light." 
 
 To him, that life of Christ has become the one ever-present reality., 
 the principle of life, the power which raises man to communion with 
 God, which gives energy to experience and knowledge — in the only 
 true sense, " what Is " — 
 
 To me, that story, — ay, that Life and Death 
 
 Of which I wrote ' it was ' — to me, it .is ; 
 
 — Is, here and now ; I apprehend nought' else." 
 
 He sees the life of Christ, the manifestation of God's love on earthy 
 still being enacted wherever men are rescued from sin, and relieved 
 from pain : 
 
 " Is not God now i' the world His power first made ? 
 
 Is not His love at issue still with sin, 
 
 Visibly when a wrong is done on earth ? 
 
 Love, wrong, and pain, what see I else around ? " 
 
 And in these ever-repeated acts of redemption the resurrection seems 
 continually to take place again. Love is re-united to Power, salva- 
 tion springs triumphantly from the graves of sin and death : 
 
 " Yea, and the Resurrection and Uprise 
 To the right hand of the throne, — what is it beside. 
 When such truth, breaking bounds, o'erfloods my soul. 
 And, as I saw the sin and death, even so 
 See I the need yet transiency of both. 
 The good and glory consummated thence ? 
 I saw the power ; I see the Love, once weak. 
 
-232 MRS. M. G. GLAZEBROOK. *'A DEATH IN THE DESERT." 
 
 Resume the power : and in this word ' I see ' 
 Lo, there is recognised the Spirit of both 
 That moving o'er the spirit of man, unblinds 
 His eye and bids him look." 
 
 So strong, indeed, was this faith, that it became the absolute proof of 
 the reality of Christ's human life ; because he believed so firmly, he 
 was convinced of the truth of that actual experience, of which the 
 recollection was beginning to fade in the brighter lights of knowledge 
 ■of faith. Thus " what Is " became the real evidence of " what Does." 
 
 This argument he applies to the Pagan fable of Prometheus's gift 
 of fire to mortals. The fire was stolen from Jove and given to man- 
 kind by Prometheus — that was the original fact. The story of this 
 theft and gift was the historical knowledge gained. The existence of 
 fire is the abiding reality, and it is this which gave credibility to the 
 fable. Thus again ^' what Is" becomes the evidence of "what Does." 
 
 But we know now that the story of Prometheus is an invention. 
 Can it be that the story of Christ is an invention too 1 Did He exist 
 at all 1 Is He not the ideal Man created out of man's own concep- 
 tions of goodness and love 1 
 
 " One listens quietly nor scoffs, but pleads 
 ' Here is a tale of things done ages since ; 
 ' AVhat truth was ever told the second day ? 
 ' Wonders, that would prove doctrine, go for nought. 
 ' Remains the doctrine, love ; well, we must love, 
 • And what we love most, power and love in one, 
 ' Let us acknowledge on the record here, 
 ' Accepting these in Christ : must Christ then be ? 
 ' Has He been ? Did not we ourselves make Him ? 
 ' Our mind receives but what it holds, no more ! " 
 
 In the course of this argument, which St. John puts into the 
 mouth of an imaginary objector, the idea of God as the union of 
 perfect love and perfect knowledge — or power — prevails. This con- 
 ception is most fully illustrated in Paracelsus. In that poem, Mr. 
 Browning, according to his custom, works out a highly metaphysical 
 notion by "draping it in sights and sounds." Paracelsus fails, 
 because, in striving after the attainment of knowledge, he neglects 
 love : Api'ile fails because love engrosses him entirely, to the exclu- 
 sion of the desire for knowledge. They meet, and each sees his 
 error ; but Aprile dies at the moment of recognition, and Paracelsus 
 lives only to acknowledge on his death-bed that his aim has been 
 beyond human possibility : God alone combines^ in perfection, love 
 a,nd knowledge. 
 
MRS. M. G. GLAZEBROOK. "A DEATH IN THE DESERT." 233 
 
 St. John sees the manifestation of divine love in Christ's life on 
 earth : 
 
 ' ' Such ever was love's way : to rise, it stoops ; " 
 
 but he foretells that in later times it will be questioned whether 
 Christ be not rather the subjective personification of human love : 
 
 " We acknowledge Christ — 
 A proof we comprehend His love, a proof 
 We had such love already in ourselves, 
 Knew first what else we should not recognize 
 'Tis mere projection from man's inmost mind, 
 And, what he loves, thus falls reflected back. 
 Becomes accounted somewhat out of him ; 
 He throws it up in air, it drops down earth's, 
 With shape, name, story added, man's old way 
 How prove you Christ came otherwise, at least ? " 
 
 The manifestation of divine power or knowledge — for perfect 
 knowledge is absolute power — is the visible world. But how do we 
 know this ? All we know is, that there is a world governed by 
 certain laws. To the power which made and rules this world we 
 ascribe our own attributes, will and love ; and history says that in 
 past times these attributes were attested by evident tokens — miracles, 
 interruptions of the ordinary course of nature — of wrath and pleasure. 
 No miracles, however, take place now, though reward and punishment 
 are as urgently required : 
 
 •* Therefore it was mere passion and mistake. 
 Or erring zeal for right, which changed the truth, 
 Go back, far, farther to the birth of things : 
 Ever the will, the intelligence, the love, 
 Man's ! — which he gives, supposing he but finds." 
 
 So the ancients used to ascribe to their gods human bodies and human 
 passions. First the bodies, then the passions, were discarded ; and 
 in time the equally human attributes of will, power, and love, will be 
 discarded likewise. Only law will remain. 
 
 In reply, St. John shows how the soul of man is trained by degrees, 
 and how this process of gradual training is the whole purpose of life. 
 Help is given to man for each step in his ascent ; but, that step 
 reached, the help is withdrawn ; as new heights come in view, he has 
 " new needs and new helps." Through progressive truths he ap- 
 proaches the knowledge of God. In the early stages of his education 
 he needed sensible proofs of God's existence, and these were granted 
 to him by miracles ; but his belief in God once established, such 
 outward signs became superfluous and ceased. He advanced to a 
 
234 MRS. M. G. GLAZEBROOK. "A DEATH IN THE DESEKT." 
 
 higher faith, to the spiritual recognition of a divine power of purifi- 
 cation and wisdom within him, to the conviction of the existence of 
 an all- controlling providence which depended, for authority, on no 
 extraordinary manifestations. The enduring evidences of Christ's 
 divinity are the love and knowledge He left to mankind : His 
 miracles were but first appeals to hardened hearts. 
 
 And now, when man has gained such love and knowledge, will he 
 doubt their very source ? 
 
 *' Wouklst thou unprove this to re-prove the proved ? 
 In life's mere minute, with power to use that proof, 
 Leave knowledge, and revert to how it sprung ? 
 Thou hast it ; use it, and forthwith, or die ! " 
 
 For this looking back and this doubt endanger his very existence. If 
 he can recognise in the ruler of the universe a being without will or 
 love, a power to whom only law can with certainty be attributed, 
 then man, in whom will and love as well as power — in however 
 small degrees — are known to be combined, must be acknowledged 
 to be greater than his creator : 
 
 " He is as surely higher in the scale 
 Than any might with neither love nor will. 
 As life, apparent in the poorest midge, 
 (When the faint dust-speck flits, ye guess its wing) 
 Is marvellous heyond dead Atlas' self. 
 Given to the nobler midge for resting-place ! " 
 
 Thus, through his knowledge, he loses God, in seeking whom he 
 gained knowledge ; his progress is stopped, for he has found — and, 
 finding, has lost — the object of his progress : 
 
 " His life becomes impossible, which is death." 
 
 St. John's discourse concludes with words which are an epitome 
 of Mr. Browning's religious faith as we recognise it in many of his 
 other writings. ]Man's life consists in never-ceasing progress. The 
 god-like power is imparted to him gradually, and step by step he 
 approaches nearer to absolute truth — to divine perfection. But in 
 this mortal life the goal can never be attained : the ideal, which he 
 strives to realise here, exists only in heaven, and awaits him as a 
 reward of all his faithful eiiorts. For, should he cease to strive, and 
 renounce the divine ideals, he forfeits his right to life, and brings 
 upon himself the condemnation of death : 
 
 *' If ye demur, this judgment on your head. 
 Never to reach the ultimate, angels' law. 
 Indulging every instinct of the soul. 
 There where law, life, joy, impulse, are one thing ! '' 
 
MRS. M, G. GLAZEBROOK. "A DEATH IN THE DESERT." 235 
 
 Thus St. John's last messaj-e of enlightenment and warning is 
 delivered : with words of self-devotion yet lingering on his lips, he 
 dies. His disciples bury him at evening, and disperse their several 
 ways. 
 
 The general purport of the poem can scarcely be doubted, as we 
 look back upon it as a whole and consider its main conclusions. The 
 tendency of the argument is to diminish the importance of the original 
 events — historical or traditional — on which the Christian religion is 
 based. " It is not worth while," the writer seems to say to Strauss 
 and his followers, " to occupy ourselves with discussions about miracles 
 and events, which are said to have taken place a long time ago, and 
 can now neither be denied nor proved. What we are concerned with, 
 is, Christianity as it is now : as a religion which the human mind has,, 
 through many generations, developed, purified, spiritualised ; and which 
 has re-acted upon human nature and made it wiser and nobler. Shall 
 we give up this faith which has been so great a power for good in the 
 world, and which, its whole past history justifies us in concluding, 
 will continue its work of improvement, because our belief in certain 
 events is shaken or destroyed ] It would be vain, indeed, thus to 
 build our religion on a foundation so unstable as material evidence. 
 For human sensations are not infallible ; they very often deceive us ; 
 we think we see objects, which are really the illusions of our own 
 brain, others we see in part only, or distorted ; others we fail to 
 perceive at all. Our faith, essential as it is to the well-being of the 
 deepest parts of our nature, must not be dependent on such controlling 
 powers as these." 
 
 This last argument, it should be noticed, is suggested in the begin- 
 ning of the poem, where St. John, when he first wakes, says how 
 easily he could believe that he is living again his past life, how easily 
 he could even doubt his own identity : 
 
 " If a friend declared to me, 
 This my son Valens, this my other son, 
 "Were James and Peter — nay, dechxred as well 
 This lad was very John, — I could believe ! 
 Could, for a moment, doubtlessly believe." 
 
 And, again, in a later passage, he suggests that the very object& 
 surrounding them may not appear the same to him and his 
 attendants : 
 
 "What do I 
 See now, suppose you, there where you see rock 
 Round us ? " 
 
236 MRS. M. G. GLAZEBROOK. " A DEATH IN THE DESERT. 
 
 jjut it may, in return, very justly be asked if Mr. Browning can 
 really intend to advocate that something less than perfect truthful- 
 ness, which would be implied in the continued unquestioning accept- 
 ance of a dogmatic religion in its entirety, after the bases of many of 
 its doctrines have been impugned. Does he wish to condemn honest 
 research, and to put a check upon free enquiry ? Can he be so at 
 variance with the spirit of the age, as not to sympathise with that 
 desire to investigate the origin and growth of knowledge which gives 
 so high a scientific value to the best of contemporary work? A 
 hostile interpretation of the advice not to look back to the sources 
 whence our knowledge springs might represent it as a strong en- 
 couragement to insincerity and wilful self-delusion. 
 
 All that we know of Mr. Browning's candour and keenness of 
 perception forbids us to accept such a conclusion. But it is quite 
 consistent with his customary method to have put the case against 
 Strauss in this forcible, dramatic form. He was, we may suppose, 
 offended by Strauss's ruthless attack on much that mankind has held 
 sacred for ages. His religious sense was revolted by the assumption 
 that there was nothing in Christianity which could survive the 
 destruction of the miraculous and supernatural elements in its history. 
 He desired to represent Christianity as an entirely spiritual religion, 
 independent of external, material agencies. In order to make his 
 argument as powerful as possible, he chose for his mouth- piece one of 
 the personal followers of Christ, on whom, it might be supposed, the 
 actual human life of his master had made a permanent and lively 
 impression. With the details of Biblical criticism he had nothing to 
 do, his principles were unaffected by discussions about the authenti- 
 city of the various parts of gospels ; so, in defiance of Strauss, the 
 disciple he chose was that very John, whose personality, as recog- 
 nised by long tradition, had been so much discredited. He showed 
 how even in one of the disciples the recollection of wonders and signs 
 could be transcended, and at last obliterated, by a spiritual faith 
 which was sustained by the needs and faculties of the soul. The 
 poem is, in effect, an eloquent protest in defence of " the breath and 
 finer spirit of all knowledge." 
 
 There is no need to claim originality for the metaphysical con- 
 ceptions which the poem illustrates : nor, on the other hand, would 
 we endeavour to show how full of learning it is, by tracing its ideas 
 to the books of many philosophical writers. The true artistic value 
 of the poem consists in the lucidity with which a difficult argument 
 is developed, and the dramatic unity of purpose and vividness with 
 which it is invested. 
 
237 
 
 SOME NOTES ON 
 BROWNING'S POEMS REFERRING TO MUSIC. 
 
 By HELEN J. ORMEROD. 
 
 Read at the Fifty-first Meeting of the Browning Society, May 27, 1887- 
 
 These slight notes on a siibject of considerable interest, seem still 
 more inadequate, as in writing them, the many-sidedness of the poet 
 becomes more apparent. He is able, as we know, at will, (and this 
 regardless of centiiry or country) to create the artist, the lover, the 
 monk, the bishop, the courtier, the physician, the theologian, and 
 indeed who not % But now, for the moment, regarding Browning's poems 
 on music only, I am again impressed by the variety of character, and 
 diversity of knowledge found in them. Four poems claim our special 
 attention, as they teach us much of certain musicians and their music , 
 these, as will readily be guessed are A Toccata of Galupin^ s ; Master 
 Ungues of Saxe-Gotha ; Charles Avison ; and last, but being most 
 beloved, certainly not least, Alt Vogler. These then, are the four 
 poems of which I purpose to speak a little in detail. 
 
 Saul, with its grand prophetic utterances, is less strictly a poem on 
 music and of musicians, than a wonderful account of the conflict for 
 ever being waged in the heart of man between good and evil ; in this 
 instance the evil spirit being exorcised by the holy spirit of song 
 setting forth great religious truths. In many of Browning's poems 
 music is introduced as an accessory to general effect, as in The 
 Grammarian's Funeral, Serenade at a Villa, Up at a Villa — Down in th& 
 City. In the Heretic's Tragedy, the organ solemnly sounds the Plagal 
 
'23S SOME XOTES ON BROWNING's POEMS REFERRING TO MUSIC. 
 
 Cadence, one of the most impressive of ecclesiastic cadences, in which 
 the chord of the subdominant ^ precedes that of the tonic. 
 
 In Balaustion's Adventure we have a fine descriptive bit of musical 
 writing, alluding to an effect allowed in modern music — 
 
 " And, as some long last moan 
 Of a minor, suddenly is propped beneath 
 By note which, new-struck, turns the wail, that was. 
 Into a wonder and a triumph, so 
 Began Alkestis. ' Nay, thou art to hve ! ' " &c. 
 
 A fine example of this sudden change from a minor moan to major 
 rejoicing may be found in Beethoven's Mass in D ; when at the close 
 of the Andante in |- time in the opening chorus, the soft minor 
 chorus "Christie Eleison" is broken in upon by the major chord 
 of D, thus tm-ning "the wail that was. Into a wonder and a 
 triumph." 
 
 In Fifine at the Fair, we find allusions to Schumann's charming 
 Carnival. The hero of the poem lazily shifted the bm-then of his 
 thoughts, "to the back of some musician dead and gone," and found 
 Schumann's bright mvisic " chiming in exactly with the sounds and 
 sights of yestereve." He described how he " somehow-nohow played 
 the whole of the pretty piece," compared food for the body to food for 
 the soul, and remarked on 
 
 " Our Schumann's victories 
 Over the commonplace, how faded phrase grew finer 
 And palled perfection piqued, up-startled by the brine. 
 His pickle, bit the mouth and burnt the tongue aright." 
 
 A comparison worthy of the Don Juan who made it ! He next com- 
 ments on the sweet monotony of the successive flat keys, and on the 
 difficulties of such "unconscionable stretches" as "tenths and twelfths," 
 and finally dreams " gone off in company with music," and, let us hope, 
 profiting hereafter by the example of devotion and constancy set him 
 in this instance by the musician. 
 
 Youth and Art would claim more than a passing notice, were it not 
 that no poem could bear less directly on the subject of music itself; 
 for here we find the singer deliberately leaving her art for a title and 
 an income ; she marries the " rich old lord," and becomes herself " queen 
 at hals-par'e" 
 
 " Life's unfulfilled, you see ; 
 It hangs still, patchy and scrappy : 
 "We have not sighed deep, laughed free. 
 Starved, feasted, desj^aired, — been happy,' 
 
 ^ The subdominant is the fourth note of the scale, and as its name signifies is the 
 uole below the dominant. The touic is the key-note. 
 
SOME NOTES ON BROWNING's POEMS REFEBRING TO MUSIC. 239 
 
 Happiness in this case could have been but once — 
 "And we missed it, lost it for ever." 
 
 Let us close the page on this sad story of a spoiled life, spoiled by 
 the singer herself, because she chose to listen to the voice of the world 
 and fashion, rather than to God's whisper in her ear, and ttirn to the 
 contemplation of musical life in other phases, reaching complete- 
 ness as told in Aht Vogler. Life, as regards worldly affairs, well 
 described in the line just quoted — " Starved, feasted, despaired, been 
 HAPPY," — suffering keenly from rebuifs, censures and misunder- 
 standings from without; and yet, happy beyond measure in that 
 sense of nearness to the Divine, and in the possession of that hidden 
 well-spring of life, inspired only by Love and Art, perhaps known 
 only in all its fulness when Love and Music are at once the 
 inspiration. 
 
 I shall first take A Toccata of Galuppi's for a few minutes' 
 consideration. What a scene rises before us as Baldassaro Galuppi 
 plays his Toccata on the tinkling clavichord of the day, and with what 
 a master hand the poet sketches in for us, so to speak, the dramatic 
 background ! The beautiful Italian spring-weather, the sea warm in 
 the May sunshine, but then, as now, balls and masks proving more 
 attractive to the fashionable throng than the sweet spring-tide of 
 nature ; suddenly a couple of dancers are singled out from the crowd, 
 and we have a glimpse of a Venetian beauty — 
 
 " Cheeks so round and lips so red, — 
 On her neck the small face buoyant, like a bell-flower on its bed 
 O'er the breast's superb abundance, where a man might base his head," 
 
 and her cavalier, — 
 
 " He, to finger on his sword. 
 While you sat and played Toccatas, stately at the clavichord. 
 * m * * 
 
 * Brave Galuppi ! that was music ! good alike at grave and gay ! 
 I can always leave off talking when I hear a master play ! ' " 
 
 I cannot help wondering if manners were more highly cultivated 
 amongst the Venetians last century than they are now amongst the 
 English ; or if the old Italian favourite awed his listeners into silence 
 by the magic of his touch j but some mighty reason must have existed to 
 command silence in that gay throng, for the hearing of a Toccata ! 
 
 That minor predominated in this quaint old piece (Toccata by the 
 
240 SOME NOTES ON BEOWNING's POEMS REFERRING TO MUSIC. 
 
 way, means a Touch piece, and probably was written to display the 
 delicacy of the composer's touch) is evident from the mention of — 
 
 " Those lesser thirds so plaintive, sixths diminished, sigh on sigh, 
 Told them something ? Those susjjensions, those solutions, — ' Must we die ? ' 
 Those commiserating sevenths, — ' Life might last ! we can but try ! ' " 
 
 The interval of the third is one of the most important ; the signature 
 of a piece may mislead one, the same signature standing for a major 
 key and its relative minor ; but the third of the opening chord decides 
 the question, a lesser " plaintive " third (composed of a tone and a 
 semitone), showing the key to be minor ; "the greater third (composed 
 of two whole tones) showing the key to be major. Pauer tells that 
 " the minor third gives the idea of tenderness, grief and romantic 
 feeling." Next come the "diminished sixths," these are sixths 
 possessing a semitone less than a minor sixth ; for instance from C 
 sharp to A flat : this interval in a dilferent key would stand as a 
 perfect fifth. *' These suspensions, these solutions " — a suspension is 
 the stoppage of one or more parts for a moment, while the others 
 move on ; this produces a dissonance, which is only resolved by the 
 parts which produced it, moving on to the position which would have 
 been theirs, had the parts moved simultaneously. We can undei-- 
 stand that " these suspensions, these solutions," might teach the 
 Venetians, as they teach us, lessons of experience and hope ; light 
 after darkness, joy after sorrow, smiles after tears. "These 
 commiserating sevenths," of all dissonances, none is so pleasing to 
 the ear, or so attractive to musicians, as that of minor and diminished 
 sevenths, that of the major seventh being crude and harsh ; in fact 
 the minor seventh is so charming in its discord as to suggest concord ; 
 again to quote from Pauer — " It is the antithesis of discord and con- 
 cord which fascinates and charms the ear, it is the necessary 
 solution and return to unity which delights us." 
 
 After all this, the love-making begins again, but kisses are 
 interrupted by the " Dominant's ^ persistence till it must be answered 
 to ; " this seems to indicate the close of the piece, the dominant being 
 answered by an octave which suggests the perfect authentic cadence, in 
 which the chord of the dominant is followed by that of the tonic. 
 
 The Toccata is ended, and the gay gathering dispersed ; I cannot 
 help the thought that this old music of Galuppi's was more of the 
 head than the heart, more formal than fiery, suggestive rather of the 
 chill of death than the heat of passion. The temporary silence into 
 
 ^ The dominant is the fifth, and most characteristic note of the scale, called by 
 the Germans d&r herrschende Ton. 
 
SOME NOTES ON BROWNING's POEMS EEFERRING TO MUSIC. 241 
 
 which the dancers were surprised by the playing of the Maestro is over, 
 and the impressions caused by it are passed away, just as the 
 silence of death was to follow the warmth and brightness of the 
 glad Venetian life — 
 
 " Then they left you for their pleasure, till in due time, one by one, 
 Some with lives that came to nothing, some with deeds as well undone. 
 Death stepped tacitly and took them, where they never see the sun." 
 
 Vanitas vanitatum seems to me the moral of this poem — 
 
 " ' Dust and ashes ! ' so you creak it, and I want the heart to scold. 
 Dear dead women, with such hair too — what's become of all the gold 
 Used to hang and brush their bosoms ! I feel chilly and grown old." 
 
 . Let us leave Galuppi's old Toccata with its varied associations, and 
 hear what Master Hugues of Saxe-Gotha has to say to us through the 
 intricacies of his fugue, vainly summoned from the Silent Land as 
 he is by the organist. After looking through all obtainable works 
 on German musicians, I have come to the conclusion that Master 
 Hugues is a fictitious name, though I cannot believe him to be an 
 entirely fictitious character ; for I feel sure the poet must have had 
 some well-loved fugue sounding in his ears as he wrote, and if the 
 fugue was real, why not the composer ? 
 
 " Forth and be judged, Master Hugues ! 
 Answer the question I've put you so oft : 
 
 "What do you mean by your mountainous fugues ? 
 See, we're alone in the loft." 
 
 "What a world of memories, Master Hugues, are called up by this 
 description of your F minor fugue ! And although it may sound 
 involved, being written in five parts, yet it is in strict accordance with 
 musical law, for the greater the composer, the more he shows his 
 greatness by accepting and glorifying the fetters worn by his lesser 
 brethren. As I write, in fancy I hear one of Bach's majestic 
 fugues, thundered out from the fine organ of Upton Church, 
 Torquay, as one seldom hears them nowadays. There, in that 
 cool, quiet church near that southern sunny sea, I learned to know 
 and love those organ fugues as personal friends, each with its own 
 identity. 
 
 To return to the poem before us ; let me ask you to notice the 
 descriptive word mountainous — " What do you mean by your moun- 
 tainous fugues ] " The yfovdi fugue itself is from the Latin fugare, to 
 put to flight ; I suppose with the idea that one part chases another 
 throughout the piece ; but how much more is involved : in this 
 
 B 
 
242 SOME NOTES ON BROWNINg's POEMS EBFERRINa TO MUSIC. 
 
 descriptive term of Browning's 1 It was once my privilege to assist at 
 a rehearsal of Bach's Cantata, IIt/ spirit was in heaviness (a work 
 abounding in fugal choruses), under the leadership of the late Mr, 
 Edward Hecht, of Manchester ; in his desire to make each part intro- 
 duce the subject with due effect, he exclaimed : " Remember, ladies 
 and gentlemen, it is as though you were builders, adding stone after 
 stone, pinnacle after pinnacle, to an architectural pile, until you reach 
 the topmost stone of some gi'and cathedral ! " So here, the term moun- 
 tainous, as applied to this fugue, may have the same meaning ; range 
 after range, peak after peak rising in mountain glory, bringing before 
 my mind's eye those scenes of Himalayan grandeur, culminating in the 
 snowy crests of Everest and Kinchin jungo, so ably depicted by Alex. 
 Scott, of Darjeeling — as many visitors to " The Colonies " will 
 remember. To return to the fugue : " First you deliver your phrase ; " 
 the phrase is the subject, and " subject " is the accepted name of the 
 theme or phrase on which the whole fugue is based. To give a 
 familiar instance of a fugue, within the reach of all, I would refer you 
 to Handel's " Amen " choi-us in the Messiah. We now hear that 
 Master Hugues's subject is "answered no less, where no answer 
 needs be." The answer, or response, is the correlative of the 
 subject, and the subject and answer determine the character of the 
 fugue ; speaking in general terms, the answer is (as nearly as 
 possible) the subject transposed from the tonic to the dominant. 
 " Off start the two on their ways," " the Two " signifying subject and 
 answer : — 
 
 " Straight must a Third interpose, 
 Volunteer needlessly help ; 
 In strikes a Fourth, a Fifth thrusts in his nose, 
 
 So the cry's open, the kennel's a-yelp, 
 Argument's hot to the close." 
 
 It is so difficult to describe the fascination of a fugue to any one who 
 does not love to hear, play, sing, or -uT-ite them, as the case may be, 
 and my feeling about this poem is, that the writer of it knows 
 enough about the construction of a fugue to rejoice in it, and that he 
 (using the composer, Master Plugues, as his mouthpiece) is laughing 
 the while at the organist who, so far, has only mastered the mechanical 
 difficulties of the piece, and at that part of the world at large who 
 think it all " wrangle, abuse and vociferance." As the organist goes 
 on trying to disentangle the knotted skein, the truth enforces itself 
 on his mind that there's more in this confusion of sound than at first he 
 imagined — 
 
 *' Something is gained, if one caught but the import — 
 Show it us, Hugues of Saxe Gotha ! " 
 
SOME NOTES ON BROWNINo's POEMS REP^RRINO TO MUSIO. 243 
 
 It seems tc me that Browning must have meant, through the teach- 
 ings of Master Hugues, to show that out of chaos springs order ; out 
 of doubt comes belief ; out of great tribulation the kingdom of 
 Heaven. The organist, struggling to understand the difficult fugue 
 long since shelved by the younger folk, appealing to the composer 
 himself for elucidation of the mystery, is, to my thinking, no 
 inapt illustration of an upright, hard-thinking man, striving vainly 
 to solve the difficult problems of life around him, turning at last to 
 God Himself for help with the old cry, " Why— wherefore 1 " Then, 
 again : — 
 
 " Friend, your fugue taxes the finger ; 
 Learning it once, who would lose it ? " 
 
 Who would lose the teachings and experience of life, past bearing 
 though they seemed to us at times, taxing alike physical and mental 
 powers of endurance ; yet, who would lose them % 
 
 " Truth's golden o'er us, although we refuse it — 
 Nature, thro' cobwebs we string her." 
 
 These two lines are in allusion to the organist's sudden thought 
 of how the gilt mouldings of the roof, almost blotted out by 
 spiders' webs, may be like the hidden beauty of the fugue : — 
 
 "All's like . , . it's hke . . . for an instance I'm trying ... 
 
 There ! See our roof, its gilt moulding and groining 
 Under those spider-webs lying ! 
 
 * * « • • 
 
 So your fugue broadens and thickens, 
 
 Greatens and deepens and lengthens, 
 Till we exclaim — ' But where's music, the dickens ? 
 
 Blot ye the gold, while your spider-web strengthens 
 Blacked to the stoutest of tickens ? ' " 
 
 Yerse xxviii seemed to me a little difficult at first : — 
 
 " Hugues ! I advise med poend 
 
 (Counterpoint glares like a Gorgon) 
 Bid One, Two, Three, Four, Five clear the arena I 
 
 Say the word, straight I unstop the full-organ, 
 Blare out the mode Palestrina. " 
 
 The mode Palestrina seems to be an expression coined for the 
 moment by the poet (I suppose in reference to the Dorian, 
 Phrygian, and Lydian modes, tc). Palestrina was the great master of 
 the Polyphonic school. In true polyphony each voice sings an 
 interesting part of its own, at the same time not forgetting its 
 fellow voices, but answering and supplementing what they say, yet 
 
244 SOME NOTES ON BROWNING' S POEMS REFERRING TO MUSIC. 
 
 all in strict obedience to the laws of harmony. Hence the future 
 development of fugue, although I believe the first formal fugue was 
 not .written by Benevoli until about fifty years after Palestrina's 
 death. Our organist in the poem seems for a moment to be baflfled by 
 the five contending parts, and, "at his own risk," bids them "clear 
 the arena," probably intending to compare one of Palestrina's stately 
 and masterly compositions with the fugue ; his last word however as 
 an organist is lost, for the wick bui-ns down in the socket, and not 
 wishing to come to an untimely end on the dark " rat-riddled stairs," 
 and not carrying " the moon in his pocket," he calls for a light, and 
 the thread of his discourse is abruptly snapt. 
 
 .. It is Mr. E-uskin, I think, who makes the delightful assertion that 
 laughter is often a proof of love : we never laugh at those we dis- 
 like, but we often laugh — lovingly and tenderly — at those we love ; 
 and I am reminded of this throughout the account of this fugue, and 
 this is the reason why Browning holds up to friendly ridicule the 
 Subject and Answer, and One, Two, Three, Four and Five generally, 
 and gives to each part its separate identity. In Charles Avison 
 we find him turning -with loving memory to fugues : — 
 
 " Give me some great glad subject, glorious Bach, 
 "Where cannon-roar, not orgau-peal, we lack 1 " 
 
 And again — 
 
 " Such a Fugue would catch 
 Soul heavenwards up." 
 
 This reminds me that it is time to modulate to the next poem, 
 Charhs Avison ; so making " fugue " the leading note to the next key, 
 we find ourselves introduced to the almost forgotten organist of 
 St. Nicholas Church, Newcastle ; probably (until brought to light in 
 the Parleyings) only known to some as the composer of the once 
 popular air " Sound the loud Timbrel," now for ever to be associated 
 -with his " bold-stepping " C major March. There is something delight- 
 fully quaint and unexpected about this poem ; the black-cap tugging 
 at his prized cloth-shred in the driving snow shower of "uncomfortable 
 March," the on-looker, watching the struggle to its victorious close ; 
 and then, thinking of the cold March weather, suddenly this lusty old 
 March of Avison, by a strange freak of memory, rings in his head. 
 As the black-cap discovered the " brown-frayed flannel bit " far afield 
 from his usual haunts, so the poet describes his soul travelling back 
 through the years and pouncing on this " relic of a brain long still." 
 It is interesting to find Browning apostrophising " great John Relfe " 
 
SOME NOTES ON BROWNING's POEMS REFERRING TO MUSIC. 245 
 
 (who published a work with a view to the simplification of thorough-bass 
 and composition) as " Master of Mine," for it seems very natural that 
 the poet should have studied with some enthusiastic theorist (whether 
 John Eelfe or another), as I have always been impressed by the amount 
 of musical knowledge possessed by him ; and so far as my memory 
 serves me he is the only poet who is able to avail himself of this added 
 facility of illustration or explanation. I have been referred to 
 Eossetti's Monochord, but richly gifted as he was both as painter 
 and poet, and fully capable of true artistic elevation as he heard 
 music, it is evident that it was more or less of a mystery to him, and 
 the "flame turned cloud, and cloud returned to flame." A mono- 
 chord was an ancient instrument, not of ten strings, but only one. 
 I should imagine Rossetti meant by his " monochord " one range of 
 emotions, whether of " Life or Death," " regenerate rapture," or 
 *' coverts of dismay." Dryden in his Ode on St. Cecilia's Day in- 
 dulges in a little musical phraseology, but he is superficial in 
 comparison to Browning. A severe contrapuntist friend, also an 
 organist, took up a volume of Browning's poems from our table 
 and exclaimed in unfeigned surprise : " Why, this fellow understands 
 music ! " 
 
 This lively, self-satisfied March of Avison's is in the key of C, 
 with "the Greater Third" signifying the major key; and with no 
 modulation except the almost necessary one from tonic to dominant. 
 We next leave modern days and music — Brahms, Dvorak, Wagner, 
 and Liszt being mentioned as representative names of the modern 
 school — and travel back with the poet — to whom % Handel only ? — ■ 
 not so — Buononcini, Geminiani, Pepusch, and Avison were there to 
 dispute his priority — the said dispute being promptly decided by 
 posterity. The discussion as to the relative merits of Buononcini and 
 Handel waxed warm enough, and many will recall Dean Swift's 
 celebrated epigram on the subject : — 
 
 " Some say that Signor Bononcini 
 Compared to Handel is a ninny ; 
 While others vow that to him Handel 
 Is hardly fit to hold a candle. 
 Strange that such difference should be 
 'Twixt tweedle-dum and tweedle-dee." 
 
 Geminiani (Avison's master) was a famed violoncellist, who lived 
 for some time in England ; and in a treatise published by Avison 
 we find him preferring both Buononcini and Geminiani to Handel. 
 That Geminiani believed in Handel to some extent, but perhaps only 
 
246 SOME NOTES ON EROWXINg's POEMS REFERRING TO MUSIC. 
 
 as an executant, is evident from the fact that he always ^ipetlated, 
 when he played solos at concerts, that Handel should be asked to 
 accompany him. The Alexis referred to is one of six cantatas written 
 by Pepusch, and received with considerable favour in their day — for- 
 gotten now — (while The Messiah, Judas Maccabeus, Israel in Egypt and 
 others gain added glory from year to year) : — 
 
 " Such were feats 
 Of music in thy day, — dispute wlio list — 
 Avison of Newcastle, organist ! " 
 
 We are told next, how in those days musicians were absorbed 
 beart and soul in the new music of the time, just as now in Wagner's 
 music. (I wonder if Browning has a lurking suspicion that Wagner 
 may be almost forgotten a hundred years hence, as some of the last 
 century musicians are by us now ? ) The beavitiful passage about the 
 Tannhauser song, and the parenthesis on " Soul " follow quickly, both 
 most ably touched on in Mr. Arthur Symons's paper ; after which 
 comes a powerful description of the working of Mind, yet with the 
 ** SovQ's sea" always beneath. And then we come to an interesting 
 inquiry into the relative capabilities of the arts ; but I will leave 
 this fascinating subject for a few minutes umtil we hear what the poet 
 has to say in Aht Vogler. A second address to the departed "John 
 Eelfe " follows : this time he is likened to a master chemist, from 
 whose laboratory his pupil (the poet) ventures to abstract a bottle 
 containing " reactives," by the help of which he sprinkles " discords 
 and resolutions " broadcast over the page. 
 
 " He (Avison) lacked 
 Modern appliance, spread out phrase unracked 
 By modulation, fit to make each hair 
 Stiffen upon his wig — see there — and there ! 
 I sprinkle my reactives, pitch broad-cast 
 Discords and resolutions." 
 
 In this I am reminded of the remark of an old, self-taught Yorkshire 
 organist, to whom I showed a modern cantata, evei'y page of which 
 bristled with accidentals. The old man said, as he handed the book 
 back to me : " It's same as if he'd takken a sieve, and riddled sharps 
 and flats all over t'page ! " 
 
 The poet amuses himself by imagining the change which would be 
 wrought in Avison's March by " such irreverent innovation ; " then, 
 still indulging in musical metaphor, he modulates through the key of 
 ** A minor with the Lesser Third " (the relative minor of C major 
 
SOME NOTES ON BROWNING's POEMS REFERRING TO MUSIC. 247 
 
 with its Greater Third) back to the original key ; the minor moan of 
 section twelve being well suited to A minor, to be followed by the 
 March blared forth "in bold C majoi\" In section fourteen the wish 
 to embellish the simple March with musical innovations is again upper- 
 most, and by judicious treatment fit it for " March music of the 
 Futiu-e " ; when suddenly, by a strange freak of fancy, the poet goes 
 to the past instead of the future, and now imagines a " sable-stoled 
 procession to Tyburn," moving to '* dioning plain song," and wreaking 
 *' a classic vengeance on the March ; " it moans — 
 
 " Larges and Longs and Breves displacing quite 
 Crotcliet-and-quaver pertness." 
 
 The Larges, Longs, and Breves were the long-drawn notes, which 
 were used in the early days of music. Not satisfied even yet with the 
 varied forms, past and future, assigned to the March, it is suddenly 
 rearranged by the poet to express the patriotic jubilations of the 
 people, exulting in the escape of the celebrated Five from the arrest 
 of the King : — 
 
 " Hark the hymn ' 
 
 Rough, rude, robustious, homely heart a-throb 
 
 Harsh voice a-hallo, as', beseems the mob ! 
 
 How good is noise ! "What's silence but despair 
 
 Of making sound match gladness never there ? " 
 
 Leaving the March as a fit outlet for patriotic demonstration, we 
 will turn to Abt Vogler, only however to return to Charles Avison for 
 the discussion of the interesting question of the relative merits of 
 the sister arts of Music, Painting and Poetry. 
 
 Of all Browning's poems on Art, Aht Vogler seems to me to 
 shine out a star of the first magnitude amongst others, less con- 
 spicuous for their brilliancy, though scarcely less beautiful. Before 
 holding intercourse with the old musician-priest, bathed as he still is 
 in the golden glory which was about him like an halo in his ecstacy 
 of extemporization, it may be helpful to us if we know something of 
 the life and surroundings of the Abbe, who was an organist and 
 theorist of considerable note in the closing years of the last, and the 
 opening ones of this century. His great delight was to visit all 
 European cities in which were to be found organs of any note, the 
 simplification of organs and the introduction of new reeds, amounting 
 almost to a mania with him. We are told that he was beloved by all 
 who knew him, and that he was unsurpassed in reading at sight 
 and accompanying, but especially was he celebrated as an extern- 
 
248 SOME NOTES ON BROWNINO's POEMS REFERRING TO MUSIC. 
 
 porist. We have a cliarming glimpse of the Abbe in his later years 
 in the church at Darmstadt ; after Mass was concluded (one of his 
 Tonschule pupils having acted as organist) and the church was left 
 by all, excepting the Abbe, and one or two favourite pupils ; he would 
 propound a theme for improvisation, generally ending by playing him- 
 self — playing as he never did, except when alone with " his three dear 
 boys" in the otherwise empty church. From the mind of at least 
 one of these boys, the impression left by these performances Avas 
 never effaced, for Weber always described them as something never 
 to be forgotten. It is not drawing too much on the imagination to 
 picture this scene as similar to the one on which the poem is 
 founded. 
 
 The poem opens with the regret that " this beautiful building," the 
 improvisation, has vanished seemingly for ever ; and the musician 
 longs that, like Solomon's enchanted palace for the delight of his 
 Princess, it might rush into sight at will ; but regret soon loses itself in 
 artistic exultation over the " gone thing." Likening his extemporiza- 
 tion to the palace, the Abbe compares the organ keys to a crowd of 
 builders uniting to raise the building with rampii*ed walls of gold, 
 until by a great effort the " pinnacled glory reached and the pride of 
 my soul was in sight. In sight ] not half ! " For the higher the 
 inspiration, the nearer it is to heaven ; and the nearer it is to heaven, 
 the more intense is the light which reveals the imperfections of the 
 best human endeavour ; but then follows the perfect moment of 
 artist life. 
 
 "What never had been, was now ; what was, as it shall be anon ; 
 And what is — shall I say, matched both ? For I was made perfect too. " 
 
 To experience a moment such as this — one of actual participation in 
 heaven's glory — a lifetime of toil, or even apparent failure, were well 
 worth the living. And now the divine origin of music is claimed, and 
 thus its unquestionable superiority over the other arts : — 
 
 " We see that the forms are fair, we hear how the tale is told ; 
 It is all triumphant art, but art in obedience to laws, 
 Painter and poet are proud, in the artist list enrolled." 
 
 " But here is the finger of God, a flash of the wUl that can, 
 Existent behind all laws : that made them, and lo, they are ! 
 
 And I know not if, save in this, such gift be allowed to man, 
 
 That out of three sounds he frame, not a fourth sound, but a star." 
 
 These are wonderful words, but difficult of explanation, as I 
 know from experience. Let us, iust for a moment, consider the 
 
SOME NOTES ON BROWNING's POEMS REFERRING TO MUSIC 249 
 
 matter from a somewhat material point of view. Imagine, for 
 instance, our greatest painter or poet, shipwrecked let us say, on a 
 strange coast, and amongst people speaking an unknown tongue ; 
 what would the painter be without his colours and canvas, or the 
 poet without the gift of tongues ? But the musician — not merely a 
 singer, who makes a careful study of every ballad, or fashionable song 
 of the day, before singing it in public, but a musician — one who could 
 sing such songs of love and longing, of home and country, of joy 
 and sorrow that their meaning would be clear enough — this musician 
 would be joined by others, the music of the country would be his 
 before many days were over ; given two other voices, and there 
 would be a trio : the same with instruments. This is but a rude 
 illustration of a great truth, but it may help to show, how three 
 sounds, treated harmonically, form, not a melody, but the triad — a 
 perfect chord. With this as with many other mysteries — " Ye have 
 heard and seen, consider, and bow the head." Before proceeding with 
 this interesting subject, I should like to give a quotation bearing on it 
 from Balaustion's Adventure, when the reproach is brought against 
 her that she sees too much through masks and veils, etc. 
 
 " What's poetry except a power that makes ? 
 And speaking to one sense, inspires the rest, 
 Pressing them all into its service ; so 
 That who sees painting, seems to hear as well 
 The speech that's proper for the painted mouth ; 
 And who hears music feels his solitude 
 Peopled at once — for how count heart-beats plain 
 Unless a company, with hearts which beat, 
 Come close to the musician, seen or no ? " 
 
 Let us next observe how the composer of a great work is at once 
 en rapport with musicians throughout the world ; not only do they 
 appreciate his work, but they actually take part in it. Think for an 
 instant of Mendelssohn's Elijah. As soon as he had finished the 
 score of the oratorio in the month of August, 1846, he held a 
 rehearsal performance in Leipzig, at which the • leading performers 
 there assisted, and at once took the work into their affections. 
 Mendelssohn then came to London, where he conducted three 
 rehearsals ; then the full rehearsal at Birmingham, followed by the 
 eventful day itself, the 25th of August 1846, when Elijah was 
 given at the Festival — a performance, which to have assisted at^ 
 would have been well worth the living for. Thus writes the composer 
 the day following to his brother : " Had you only been there ! 
 During the whole of the two hours and a half that it lasted, the 
 
250 SOME NOTES OX BRG'.VNING's POEMS EEFERRING TO MUSIC. 
 
 two thousand people in the large hall, and the large orchestra, were 
 all so fully intent on the object in question, that not the sKghtest 
 sound was heard amongst the whole audience, so that I could sway 
 at pleasure the enormous orchestra and choir." Thus in the space of 
 about three weeks, thousands of musicians, or musical kindred spirits 
 both in England and Germany, came under the almost magical 
 personal influence of the composer ; and this is but one case out of 
 many, for the purpose of illustration, that great musical works come 
 within the reach and participation of all lovers of art. Not only, as 
 is the case with painting, can they look at and rejoice in the beautiful 
 work of the artist ; or, as with poetry, read the poem in the quiet of 
 their homes with infinite pleasure and profit to themselves ; but in 
 music, the performers lend themselves to the will of the composer, and 
 borrowing a thought from Abt Vogler, as builders they unite 
 to raise the glorious palace of sound — 
 
 " Ah ! one and all, how they helped, would dispart now, and now combine, 
 Zealous to hasten the work, heighten their master his praise ! " 
 
 until : — 
 
 " The emulous heaven yearned down, made effort to reach the earth, 
 As the earth had done her best, in my passion, to scale the sky." 
 
 And again — still following the train of thought suggested in Abt Vogler 
 — it seems to me that in music the Spirit of God works more directly 
 in man than in the sister arts, because more is left to actual inspiration ; 
 of course, now I speak of composers only, as distinguished from 
 mere performers. 
 
 In painting the artist has at first the picture befoi-e him, and what 
 is required of him are the materials wherewith to reproduce it. All 
 jjaintitig begins by imitation, the desire to reproduce ; in other words 
 to imitate, such a landscape, such a favourite animal, such a dearly- 
 loved face. 
 
 In poetry the language has first to be fashioned, and then the 
 poetry at first consists in telling of what has happened in our midst ; 
 tales of life and death, of love and heroism. 
 
 But with music it is very different. We are told, on the highest 
 musical authority, that the most strictly coi'rect musical intervals 
 in nature are the most unpleasing to the ear and the least desirable 
 to perpetuate — such as the caterwauling of cats, and even the 
 monotonous cry of the cuckoo and coo of the wood-pigeon. There- 
 fore man has had to stretch out his hand to attain to music, and 
 music being of heavenly oi-igin he has reached something from heaven 
 
SOME KOTES ON BROWNING's POEMS REFERRING TO MUSIC. 251 
 
 itself ; and thus it is in the intensest glow of musical ecstacy and 
 inspiration that heaven is opened to man. In Charles Avison the 
 want complained of in music is, that it cannot " run mercury into a 
 mould like lead," " shoot liquidity into a mould," or in some way 
 *' arrest Soul's evanescent moods." Here speaks the cool, dis- 
 passionate by-stander, seeing — or at least so he thinks — wherein 
 music fails, and wishing for some means of arresting the " hates, 
 loves, joys, woes, hopes, fears of earth." It has just occurred to me 
 that somewhat the same expression is used by the " Don Juan " of 
 Fifine at the Fair when he is comparing music to cookery, and old 
 tunes with modern effects to standard dishes with new 
 condiments : — 
 
 " As with hates 
 And loves and fears and hopes, so with what emulates 
 The same, expresses hates, loves, fears and hopes in Art ; 
 The forms, the themes — no one without its counterpart 
 Ages ago ; no one but mumbled the due time 
 r the mouth of the eater, needs be cooked again in rhyme. 
 Dished up anew in paint, sauce-smothered fresh in sound. 
 To suit the wisdom-tooth, just cut, of the age. " 
 
 Alt Vogler at once takes a higher stand, and would not admit 
 the fixing fast of evanescent moods to be the highest aim of music ; 
 he thinks music is imperfect until perfected by re-admission to 
 heaven : — 
 
 " There shall never be one lost good ! what was, shall live as before. 
 The evil is null, is nought, is silence implying sound ; 
 "What was good, shall be good, with, for evil, so much good more ; 
 On the earth the broken arcs ; in the heaven, a perfect round." 
 
 Again to quote from Charles Avison — 
 
 " To strike all this life dead. 
 Run mercury into a mould like lead. 
 And henceforth have the plain result to show — 
 How we Feel, hard and fast as what we Know — 
 This were the prize and puzzle ! which 
 Music essays to solve ; and here's the hitch 
 That baulks her of full triumph else to boast." 
 
 Thus speaks the critic — now for the musician, who knows : — 
 
 *' All we have willed or hoped or dreamed of good, shall exist ; 
 
 Not its semblance, but itself ; no beauty, nor good, nor power 
 Whose voice has gone forth, but each survives for the melodist, 
 
 When eternity confinns the conception of an hour. 
 The high that proved too high, the heroic for earth too hard, 
 
 The passion that left the ground, to lose itself in the sky, 
 Are music sent up to God by the lover and the bard ; 
 
 Enough that he heard it once ; we shall hear it by-and-by.*' 
 
252 SOME NOTES ON BROWNING S POEMS REFERRING TO MUSIC. 
 
 The grandeur of this thought is almost too much for us to take in. 
 But what an infinitely nobler inspiration, to know that our best will 
 be taken by God Himself, and kept by Him until such time as we 
 come for it — that the highest moment of life will be chronicled in 
 heaven, than to hanker after saving the " hates, loves, joys, woes, 
 hopas, fears of earth," " from chance and change we most abhor." 
 
 Looking back generally on these two poems Charles Avison 
 appears to me suggestive of the man who " on glass may stay his 
 eye," while Aht Vogler pleases to 
 
 " Thro' it pass 
 And then the heavens espy." 
 
 Or turning from George Herbert to Browning himself for help in 
 explanation of this, Charles Avison reminds me of "the heaven 
 that's shut " to Andrea, while Abt Vogler can " enter and take his 
 place there," sure enough. 
 
 Ghmles Amson is speculative, almost analytical, of the earth 
 earthy; while in Abt Vogler we gain admission to the Holiest of 
 Holies. In Charles Avison we have the reasonings of an out- 
 sider, in Aht Vogler the white-heat enthusiasm of one of those 
 favoured few " whom God whispers in the ear." 
 
 We leave Aht Vogler — our last glimpse of him is as he 
 surveys the heights he recently occupied, (his Mount of Trans- 
 figuration) with the glory of heaven still about him. He feels for 
 the common chord, slides down by semitones until he reaches the 
 original key — 
 
 *' The C Major of this life ; so now I will try to sleep." 
 
363 
 
 BROWNING'S JEWS AND SHAKESPEARE'S JEW. 
 
 By Professor BARNETT. 
 
 Read at the Fifty-fourth Meeting of the Browning Society, November 
 25th, 1887. 
 
 "When we count up the things which we expect a great poet to do, 
 not least of them is the rendering of truths that are universal, — world- 
 truths and not partisan-truths. Robert Browning has been praised 
 for representing a noble Christianity which cannot be ticketed and 
 pigeon-holed, but which is nevertheless so really catholic; the accidents 
 of the historical faith are with him so subordinated, that many 
 people — as for instance, I think, the distinguished founder of your 
 society — do not like to call the religious spirit of the poet Christianity 
 at all. But this is a small matter, after all, to quarrel about. All 
 that would not have been without Christ, some of us will persist in 
 calling Christian. 
 
 A great poet generalises the spirit of his time. As men read 
 Yirgil now to know the highest capabilities of the age of Augustus, 
 its real spirit, what it hands on to posterity as its contribution to 
 progressing civilisation ; as they read Homer to catch something of 
 the spirit of his age of fighting heroes ; as we go to Shakespeare and 
 the greatest of his contemporaries for knowledge of the reflection and 
 romance of their age of restless giants ; so, I think, people will turn 
 to Browning hereafter to find the best that could be thought in the 
 great age in which we live. It is so great, surely, that we, who live 
 in it, never perceive its greatness till we mark its high achievements 
 in such thinkers as Browning. 
 
 It is not easy to settle to what extent a great dramatist or 
 dramatic poet does really and truly transfer the personalities of the 
 
254 browning's jews and Shakespeare's jew 
 
 age lie is representing into his work. Certainly the mere use of 
 "properties" will not do it. An exact reproduction, in staging, of what 
 antiquarian investigation tells us about the age of the historical 
 Csesar or the historical Macbeth helps us less to understand a bygone 
 race than even the fatally faultless archaeology of a common " school " 
 of painting. Indeed, we may perhaps see reason to go further, and 
 say that a dramatic poet is great in spite of his antiquarian know- 
 ledge. It would be hard to imagine in what particular, for instance, 
 Shakespeare would gain by being more accurate about Macbeth and 
 Hamlet and the barbarous age they lived in. All, perhaps, that we 
 can say is that he would have moved easily in his shackles. At all 
 events, we have in Browning, the Shakespeare in whose time we are 
 lucky enough to live, a thinker hardly less in magnificent range 
 and depth of thought than he of the sixteenth century ; and that in 
 spite of encyclopaedic learning. 
 
 The reason sounds commonplace enough. The human soul is the 
 same in every age. Its passions are expended over the same objects, 
 — the difference lying in the varying proportions in which it applies 
 its strength to each severally — and, perhaps, in the reasons it gives 
 therefor. 
 
 It does not, after all, matter to us whether Shakespeare got his 
 Lear, his Macbeth, his Othello from Holinshed, Giraldo Cinthio, or 
 any one else. They are certainly not recognisable as archseologically 
 perfect reproductions, but they are as certainly human beings, and 
 therefore their tears are for all time. This is true, too, for much of 
 Browning's work. The tragedy of an Andrea del Sarto must surely 
 be re-enacted over and over again so long as there are souls to ruin 
 and such warnings are unheeded ; nor is it to Abt Vogler only that 
 the divinest comfort is given. But then it must be confessed that 
 Browning has, besides these everlasting truths of human nature, fixed 
 and painted . for us more successfully than any poet or maker 
 has ever done the very people as they lived and moved, not dressed 
 up lay-figures, but themselves. Browning has lived after and in an 
 age of (to use a cant term) criticism. But that has only failed to limit 
 his scope. Better ; he has lived the lives of these people, and he can 
 think as they thought ; not as they only, but (and here is the point) 
 as all the del Sartos and Abt Voglers of all time. 
 
 It is not without significance that these two greatest dramatic 
 poets, Shakespeare and Browning, should have applied themselves to 
 the peculiarly interesting problem of the Jewish consciousness, the 
 Jew himself, so to speak. The problem, to begin with, has a special 
 attractiveness. Here you have a national or at least tribal feeling 
 
browning's jews and Shakespeare's jew. 255 
 
 maintained in the midst of very hostile surroundings, with merely a 
 nominal local centre ; resting entirely on the strength of isolated 
 tradition ; a people of peculiarly clean and healthy life, yet living, as 
 it seems, on and not in its environing society. 
 
 If we consider shortly the differing ways in which the problem, 
 presents itself to Shakespeare and Browning respectively, we shall 
 have a very instructive and notable contrast between not only them, 
 but also the spirits of their respective ages. 
 
 We have for comparison Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice and 
 Browning's Filippo Baldinucci and Holy Cross Day. Jochanan 
 Hakkadosh, Rabbi Ben Ezra, and Saul do not enter into the field of 
 observation. These last deal with a consciousness far transcending 
 the mere national and personal feeling of Filippo Baldinucci and. 
 Holy Cross Day; there is nothing, I mean, peculiarly Jewish in them, 
 although, to be sure, the high compliment paid to the Jewish race and 
 history by Mr. Browning's so entitling his noble poems could not have 
 been quite fortuitous. But Filip>po Baldinucci and Holy Cross Day are 
 meant to deal with real persons, at definite times, in definite places. 
 They have a story, a whole and complete TrpSft?, just as Shylock has. 
 The works of art to which Browning has given their names are 
 histories not merely concerning souls, but concerning the Jewish soul 
 at particular crises. 
 
 In this respect, again, Shylock stands very much apart from other 
 creations of Shakespeare, except those, of course, that come from his 
 hand in his treatment of national history. There is nothing particularly 
 British about Lear or Scotch about Macbeth or Danish about Hamlet. 
 Theirs, again, are histories concerning the human soul, quite apart 
 from racial or national qualifications ; more particular, to be sure, less 
 transcendent, than Rabbi Ben Ezra and Saul and Rabbi Jochanan, but 
 clearly of the same description, general. 
 
 Both Shakespeare and Browning apply themselves to the Jewish 
 problem as it presents itself at a special period, not the "Middle 
 Ages" as they are called, but (the difference is important) when 
 Christianity was becoming more self-conscious, less brutal, more 
 Christian ; and when, therefore, Christians may be supposed to have 
 been becoming uneasy, and, reforming themselves, to have been, 
 naturally perhaps, a little anxious to find excuses for a few of the 
 pleasant sins they had a mind to. The persecution of heretics is a 
 very fascinating exercise, for the reason that we are less hard on our 
 own offences if we persist in contemplating and exaggerating, and can 
 punish, the sins of others. 
 
 The historical synchronism is, then, the first point common to thfr 
 
256 browning's jews anb shakespeaee's jew. 
 
 two poets ; and of course there are subordinate details of corre- 
 spondence arising from this primary point. The fact of persecution 
 is put by both poets with perfect honesty. Filippo Baldinucci is, of 
 course, entirely frank about it ; he is nothing if not frank : 
 
 " We Christians never dreamed of scathe 
 Because we cursed or kicked the crew." 
 
 Antonio in the Merchant of Venice was, according to Bassanio, 
 
 "The kindest man, 
 The best-conditioned and unwearied spirit 
 In doing courtesies." 
 
 Yet, he did not merely laugh at Shylock's losses and mock at his 
 gains — which was pardonable, I daresay — but, he scorned his nation, 
 thwarted his bargains, cooled his friends, heated his enemies ; to him 
 Shylock is no better than the devil quoting ScriptiU'e : 
 
 " An evil soul producing holy witness 
 Is like a villain with a smiling cheek, 
 A goodly apple rotten at the core." 
 
 Antonio is told, and he makes no denial (and Shylock is at least 
 
 no liar), 
 
 " Siguier Antonio, many a time and oft 
 In the Eialto you have rated me 
 About my moneys and my usancies ; . . . 
 You call me misbeliever, cut-throat dog, 
 And spit upon my Jewish gaberdine. ..." 
 
 A " well- conditioned " gentleman could not do this ; it would be 
 impossible to associate such gross discourtesies with (say) Sir Thomas 
 More or Lord Chancellor Bacon. But an ill-conditioned, splenetic, 
 dyspeptic, and melancholy person might well be so guilty ; in which 
 light there is very little that is inexplicable in Antonio's melancholy. 
 Still, the fact remains, a man who passed for a gentleman with his 
 contemporaries behaved to a Jew in a way that would be nowadays 
 considered ill-bred in Whitechapel or the Seven Dials ; and his con- 
 temporaries thought him " well-conditioned." Clearly then public 
 opinion was at the back of such insults, Buti or his farmer 
 
 could be 
 
 " Firm with Florence at his back." 
 
 The testimony of Holy Cross Day is quite as strong. 
 
 •• It got to a pitch, when the hand indeed 
 "Which gutted my purse, would throttle my creed." 
 
browning's jews and Shakespeare's jew. 257 
 
 In both poets tlie persecutors show a strong desire to "convert." 
 First, observe, it is necessary to " gut " the purse and then — " convert." 
 So Antonio — 
 
 " I am content so lie will let me have 
 The other half iu use, to render it 
 Upon his death unto the gentleman 
 That lately stole Ms daughter ; 
 Two things provided more, that, for this favour, 
 He presently become a Christian. ..." 
 
 Of course the "conversion" must mean very little. Filippo 
 Baldinvicci, Buti, and his farmer, Antonio and the Bishop himself, 
 had small acquaintance with Christ, whatever they had with 
 " Christianity." 
 
 I should like to extract a quotation made by Mr, Beeching in his 
 admirable edition of the Merchant of Venice on this point. [I think by . 
 the way that Mr. Beeching has quite misread Antonio and Shy lock too; 
 and he certainly does not make out his case for the one or against the 
 other.] He quotes from Corcoryat's Crudities — 
 
 " Pitiful it is to see that few of them (the Jews) living in Italy are 
 converted to the Christian religion. For this I understand is the 
 maine impediment to their conversion. All their goodes are confiscated 
 as soon as they embrace Christianity ; and this I heard is the reason, 
 because whereas many of them doe raise their fortunes by usury, in so 
 much that they doe sometimes not only sheare but also flea many a 
 poore Christian's estate by their griping extortion ; it is therefore 
 decreed by the Pope and other free Princes in whose territories they 
 live, that they shall make a restitution of all their ill-gotten goods, 
 and so disclogge their soules and consciences when they are admitted 
 by holy baptism into the bosom of Christ's Church." 
 
 The methods were severe indeed. The holy work 
 
 ' ' Began, when a herd of us, picked and placed, 
 
 Were spurred through the Corso, stripped to the waist ; 
 Jew brutes, with sweat and blood well spent 
 To usher in worthily Christian Lent. 
 
 "It grew when the hangman entered our bounds, 
 Yelled, pricked us out to his church like hounds ; 
 It got to a pitch, when the hand indeed 
 Which gutted my purse, would throttle my creed ; 
 And it overflows when, to even the odd. 
 Men I helped to their sins, help me to then* God." 
 
 The farmer's method was more roguish than cruel, but the lives 
 led by Jews in Florence must have been hard : ^ 
 
258 browning's jews and shakespeake's jew. 
 
 " How Hebrews toil 
 Throiigli life in Florence, why relate 
 To those who lay the burden, si»oil 
 Our paths of peace ? We bear our fate. 
 But when with life the long toil ends, 
 Why must you — the expression craves 
 Pardon, but truth compels me, friends ! — 
 Why must you plague us in our graves ? " 
 
 At least, these were " harsh deed," " unkindly word," " frowning 
 brow," and " scornful lip." And Venice was not far from Florence. 
 
 Both poets agi'ee in making their Jews usurers. That is accurate 
 enough, no doubt. Venice and Florence had the Jews they deserved. 
 The Rabbi's son in Filij)iyo Baldinucci says, 
 
 " Foi-, don't I see, — let's issue join ! 
 Whenever I'm allowed pollute 
 (I — and iiiy little hag of coin) 
 Some Christian palace of repute. ..." 
 
 And in Holy Cross Day — 
 
 " Whom noio is the bishop a-lccring at ? 
 I know a point where his text falls pat. 
 I'll tell him to-morrow, a word just now 
 Went to my heart and made me vow 
 To meddle no more with the worst of trades ; 
 Let somebody else pay his serenades. " 
 
 And Browning, at least, as we read, pours scorn on the vileness of 
 those who used their Jews for vile purposes, and then — affect to pay 
 them with — God. The persecutors are pagans of the least pleasant 
 
 type. 
 
 ' ' ' Jew, since it must be, take in pledge 
 
 Of payment ' — so a cardinal 
 Has sighed to me as if a wedge 
 
 Entered his heart — ' this best of all 
 My treasures ! ' Leda, Ganymede, 
 
 Or Antiope : swan, eagle, ape, 
 (Or what's the beast of what's the breed ?) 
 
 And Jupiter in every shape," 
 
 Shakespeare and Browning both. Browning not more frankly 
 than Shakespeare, admit the strength of kin-affection of their Jews. 
 Shylock's turquoise, we remember, was very dear to Shylock ; and his 
 daughter, graceless, and light of character and finger as she was, was 
 his daughter, and at least as dear to him as his ducats ; and according 
 to Shakespeare that was very much. 
 
 It is very remarkable that both poets allow the high general morality 
 of the Jews. Shakespeare's Shylock is no such monster as Marlowe's 
 Jew of Malta. And Filippo Baldinucci reports without any denial 
 
browning's jews and Shakespeare's jew. 259 
 
 of the statements m'ade, the plea of the Jew that the " sacred " picture 
 overlooking the burial ground should be turned to the Christian high- 
 way, if only in that highway's behoof : 
 
 " Removal, not destruction, sirs ! 
 
 Just turn your picture ! Let it front 
 The public path ! Or memory errs, 
 Or that same public path is wont 
 To witness many a chance befall 
 
 Of lust, theft, bloodshed — sins enough 
 JVhercin our Hebrew part is small — 
 Convert yourselves ! . . ." 
 
 It is possible, I suppose, to refer this notable purity of morals in 
 large measure to the isolation in which the Jews lived. To be sure 
 isolation does not always produce such results ; but the isolation in 
 this case is peculiar. It is not local isolation ; the people lived in the 
 midst of an actively criticising society — and sometimes more than 
 criticising ; — a high standard of tribal respectability had to be kept 
 up ; and always has been. Such isolation certainly strengthened all 
 natural domestic affection. Shylock himself is eloquent on this ; the 
 incident of the Jewish son's mission in Filippo Baldinucci is only one 
 instance of Browning's sense of it. Shakespeare has a very significant 
 indication of the nature of current Christian morality. When Jessica 
 breaks at least two commandments in her effected plan : 
 
 " I will make fast the doors, and gild myself 
 With some more ducats, and be with you straight, — " 
 
 Gratiano, (a kind of chorus, be it observed) exclaims, 
 
 " Now, by my hood, a Gentile and no Jew I " 
 
 Both poets recognize the complexity of Christian motive. It 
 would be ridiculous to deny that the desire to uproot heresy is often 
 based on a real zeal for truth. Shakespe are, although the " conversion " 
 of Shylock is only another part of his punishment, is really angered 
 at the misuse of money of which Shylock is supposed to have been 
 guilty, and his main sympathies are quite certainly not with the 
 professional money-lender, though he could lend money himself, and 
 was clearly a good man of business. But Shakespeare did not trouble 
 himself about what we call " faith," and very probably thought with 
 the old Baldinucci that faith meant liberty to " curse and kick the 
 crew," and with the younger, that the same faith was made manifest by 
 pelting them with stones. It was chiefly the irony of the social 
 situation that struck Shakespeare; naturally. His Christians are 
 
 s 2 
 
260 browning's jews and Shakespeare's jew. 
 
 mostly, in this play, contemptible enough, the best of them Bassanio, 
 with his adventuring, and Antonio with his recklessness and 
 dyspepsia. 
 
 The Jews are made patient and courteous in both Shakespeare 
 and Browning. Shakespeare records his impressions ; Browning has 
 gone further. He gives us a reason. He has penetrated the national 
 consciousness in a way that could, of coiirse, be no part of Shakespeare's 
 purpose. For this point, the chief poem is Holy Cross Day. The 
 difference between Browning and Shakespeare in this respect is really 
 one of the main differences between them ; and it is the difference of 
 their times. Browning is a religious and Christian poet rather than 
 a romantic one ; a preacher, not a playwright. A great majority of 
 his greatest studies deal with Christianity, either directly, or, as in 
 the poems under special consideration now, indirectly, through some 
 story, "telling a truth obliquely." He has set himself to examine 
 the " Christian " spirit at various times, and a great deal of his work 
 in casuistry, so to speak, is bent on stating the complicated problems 
 of life as they appear to the Blougrams from within or the Cleons from 
 without. Certainly Christianity means something more to him than 
 it does to those who can view it only in relation to the circum- 
 stances of their little day. It is clearly to him a Spirit and not 
 a System. It is because of this, in virtue of it, that he has gone 
 so far to divest Judaism also, as it is called, of its accidental 
 characteristics. 
 
 Browning, like Shakespeare, is often commended for his accuracy 
 in small matters. There is however no very strong evidence in his 
 work that he has in matters Jewish anything like his knowledge in 
 other matters. I must confess his Jewish " antiquities " sometimes 
 seem to me peculiar. I should, for instance, like to know his 
 authority for making a cemetery-chapel, or mortuary, into a 
 synagogue. As a matter of fact, such a thing is nearly impossible. 
 Where the dead lie is unclean ; and the burial places of all orientals 
 are away from the buildings they hold sacred. The same consideration 
 makes the pound of flesh story ten times improbable. The touch of a 
 dead body was in the highest degree unclean. And again. Browning 
 makes his Jews in Fili]ppo Baldmucci go on a Sabbath morning to 
 bury their dead — again a thing quite impossible. That would have 
 been a gross and unheard-of pollution of the most sacred of days. 
 Such criticism, it may be said, is absurdly small. But I mention it 
 really to prove Browning's claim to a much higher gift than exact 
 antiquarian knowledge. With slips like these, quite patent and 
 simple, he has still penetrated the national consciousness ; so little do 
 
BKOWJ^INGS JEWS AND SHAKESPEARE S JEW. 261 
 
 externals matter. There is hardly any parallel between Browning 
 and Shakespeare in this respect; Shakespeare never addressed 
 himself, as I have said, to a precisely similar task. 
 
 Holy Cross Day professes to give some explanation of the self- 
 respecting pride of the Jews in the face of all they were suffering, and 
 had suffered, and were still to suffer. Whatever their active faith 
 may be now, there is no doubt that they were, in the days of Filippo 
 and Buti, Barnabas, Job, and Solomon, raised far and away above 
 their vulgar semi-pagan persecutors by the consciousness of being 
 reserved for greater things. "VVe are too much inclined to judge the 
 Jew of those days by the poor creatures who take refuge in the 
 purlieus of London from the barbarous miseries of Russia and Poland 
 and Germany. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries European 
 Jews seem to have been generally well-bred and prosperous. Shake- 
 speare and Browning do not contradict tradition. Nothing could be 
 finer in its loftiness and patient dignity than the first address of the 
 "posse" of Florentine Jews to Buti and the farmer — 
 
 XIII. 
 
 " Friends, grant a grace ! How Hebrews toil 
 
 Through life in Florence — why relate 
 To those who lay the burden, spoil 
 
 Our paths of peace ? We bear our fate. 
 But when with life the long toil ends. 
 
 Why must you — the expression craves 
 Pardon, but truth compels me, friends ! — 
 
 Why must you plague us in our graves ? 
 
 XIV. 
 "■^ Thoughtlessly plague, I would believe ! 
 For how can you — the lords of ease 
 By nurture, birthright, — e'en conceive 
 
 Our luxury to lie with trees 
 And turf, — the cricket and the bird 
 Left for our last companionship : 
 No harsh deed, no unkindly word. 
 No frowning brow, nor scornful lip ! 
 
 XV. 
 
 " Death's luxury we now rehearse 
 
 While, living, through your streets we fare 
 And take your hatred : nothing worse 
 
 Have we, once dead and safe, to bear ! 
 So we refresh our souls, fulfil 
 
 Our works, our daily tasks ; and thus 
 Gather you grain — earth's harvest ; — still 
 
 The wheat for you, the straw for us. 
 
262 BROWNING S JEWS AND SHAKES PEARE's JEW. 
 
 XYI. 
 
 " * What flouting in a face, what harm 
 In just a lady borne from bier 
 By boy's heads, wings for leg and arm ? ' 
 
 You questio5i. Friends, the harm is here — 
 That just when our last sigh is heard. 
 And we would fain thank God and you 
 , For labour done and peace achieved, 
 Back comes the Past in full review ! 
 
 XVII. 
 
 "At sight of just that simple flag. 
 
 Starts the foe-feeling serpent-like 
 From slumber. Leave it lulled, nor drag — 
 
 Though fangless — forth, what needs must strike 
 When stricken sore, though stroke be vain 
 
 Against the mailed oppressor ! Give 
 Play to our fancy that we gain 
 
 Life's rights when once we cease to live ! " 
 
 So mvTch the speaker addresses to the gentle feelings of his 
 Christian oppressors. Then he caps it with a bribe, which very 
 naturally brings to utterance his hate and contempt for Christian 
 hypocrisy. "Convert yom-selves " — and no doubt, "he cut up 
 rough." 
 
 The conversation after the second insult is remarkable. Five 
 lines are enough : 
 
 " The Farmer has the best ; he rates 
 
 The rascal, as the old High Priest 
 Takes on himself to sennonize — 
 
 iSTay, sneer, * We Jews supposed, at least, 
 Theft was a crime in Christian eyes ! ' " 
 
 The Farmer is discourteous all through, the High Priest 
 " sermonizes" at first ; no doubt, gently and loftily asserts bare 
 demands with appeal to courtesy and honour. This is just what 
 the Farmer would call sermonizing. But, again, the hardness and 
 hypocrisy of his Christians goad him to a passionate taunt — 
 
 " We Jews supposed, at least, 
 Theft was a crime in Christian eyes." 
 
 The bearing of the High Priest's son in his mission to Buti is 
 perfect. It is worth while noting that for this incident Mr. Browning 
 is indebted to his own invention, and shows thereby, if any showing 
 
browning's jews and Shakespeare's jew, 263 
 
 were needed, whom he thought nobly of. Certainly not the shallow, 
 cowardly Gentile, from whom the apparition of 
 
 " A six-feet-high herculean -built 
 Young he-Jew with a beard, that baulks 
 Description," 
 
 wrings a sudden cry for help, and makes him try " to smuggle out of 
 sight the picture's self." He begins calmly, with great bitterness, 
 but with much self-control, when suddenly he becomes furious and 
 murderous. Why ? Because the Farmer suggested that he had risen 
 to — the height — of conversion to Christianity. To the Jew this 
 must have been, as Browning feels, a real insult. He felt himself 
 already leagues above a " Christianity," as it called itself, to which 
 so plain a matter as theft was no crime. 
 
 The old Rabbi had begged, at the first, that there should be peace 
 for the highest conceivable reason. He would, he and his people 
 would, fain thank God for labour and peace ; but just when God's 
 peace seems to be theirs, — back comes the Past. The feeling of 
 hatred, impossible to real Christianity, is quickened again — 
 
 " Starts the foe-feeling serpent-like 
 From slumber." 
 
 It was not with Christ or Mary that the Jews had a quarrel. 
 Baldinucci speaks from his own imbecile little soul when he supposes 
 that even Jews contemporary with him would reserve a place in their 
 hierarchy of saints for Pilate. 
 
 The sense of watching and waiting for a Messiah lent to the Jews 
 a dignity which such sorry fellows as the Farmer and Buti and the 
 bishop in Holy Cross Day could not possibly understand. They could 
 declare with R. ben Ezra that they were 
 
 " At watch and ward, 
 Till Christ in the end relieves our guard. 
 By His servant Moses the watch was set : 
 Though near upon cock-crow, we keep it yet." 
 
 How much the bishop and his fellows " believed " in the coming 
 of Christ the poem I quote from shows. The Jews fell truly. 
 
 " In one point only we sinned, at worst." 
 
 They look around them and see a degraded society : 
 
 "Dogs and swine 
 Whose life laughs through and spits at their creed, 
 Who maintain thee in word, and defy thee in deed.'' 
 
264 browning's jews and Shakespeare's jew. 
 
 What could they possibly think 1 It may have been, they thought, 
 that they had given the Cross to Him to whom the Throne was 
 due. But they appeal to divine justice : 
 
 " Thou art the Judge. "We are bmised thus. 
 But, the judgment over, join sides with us ! 
 Thine too is the cause ! . . . . 
 
 "We withstood Christ then ? Be mindful how 
 
 At least we withstand Barabbas now ! 
 
 "Was our outrage sore ? But the worst we spared, 
 
 To have called these Christians, had we dared ! 
 
 Let defiance to them pay mistrust of thee 
 And Rome make amends for Calvary." 
 
 Of all the gross insults and cruelties the worst was what i 
 
 " The summons to Christian fellowship ! . . . ." 
 
 " "We boast our proof that at least the Jew 
 "Would wrest Christ's name from the Devil's crew, 
 Thy face look never so deep a shade, 
 But we fought them in it, God our aid ! " 
 
 The current morality of Christianity — at least in high places — 
 is never spared Browning's scathing condemnation. What the thick- 
 headed Baldinucci says in stanza xxvii is significant enough of current 
 sacerdotal morality amongst Christians : 
 
 " They'd say their prayers and sing their hymns 
 As if her husband were the Pope." 
 
 And the leering bishop in Holy Cross Day is unpleasant enough to 
 think of. 
 
 To the Jews of Baldinucci's youth what else could the " religion " 
 called " Christianity " appear but an only half-systematized hypoc- 
 risy ? In both the poems I have quoted this feeling is very prominent. 
 The quarrel of the Jews was not with Christ or Mary ; they quarrelled 
 with the whole spirit of papal religion. It must never be forgotten 
 that the very " faith " was only half held by its professors. At the 
 best, these people worshipped, if anything, a meretricious art, or at 
 all events, an art that lent itself with astounding readiness to mere- 
 tricious uses. The Eabbi's son finds " sacred " pictures cheek by jowl 
 with pictures of beast-gods — 
 
 " How comes it these false godships frisk 
 In presence of — what yonder frame 
 
 Pretends to image ? Surely, odd 
 It seems, you let confront The Name 
 
 Each beast the heathen called his god ! " 
 
BROWNING S JEWS AND SHAKESPEARE S JEW. 265 
 
 And now note the Cardinal's reply. " You and I have different 
 opinions of what is ' Truth,' Certainly it is no particular view of 
 past events. To us " — this is what the assertion comes to — " all the 
 canvases convey some truth. Anyhow, now that Christ is undoubtedly 
 born, why should we fear to parade these things that can do us no 
 harm 1 " Yet they were pictures of the very grossest incidents of 
 heathen mythology. 
 
 " 'Tis truth, we prize 1 
 Art's the sole question in debate ! 
 
 These subjects are so many lies. 
 "We treat them with a proper scorn 
 
 "When we turn lies — called gods forsooth — 
 To lies' fit use, now Christ is born. 
 
 Drawing and colouring are Truth. 
 
 Think you I honour lies so much 
 
 As scruple to parade the charms 
 Of Leda — Titian every touch — 
 
 Because the thing within her arms 
 Meana Jupiter, who had the praise 
 
 And prayer of a benighted world ? 
 Benighted I, too, if, in days 
 
 Of light, I kept the canvas furled ! " 
 
 We cannot affect to think ill of Greeks and Romans because the 
 incidents of their mythologies were sometimes repulsive. But the 
 case is different with the self-conscious and reflective sensuality of 
 the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The inventions and 
 imaginations of early civilization are the faults, sometimes, of reck- 
 less and mischievous children who cannot keep their hands off things 
 or keep things out of their heads, for very marvelling. But the 
 profligate Bishop or Pope was one of those who were curious and 
 filthy in spite of shame and knowledge. So Art, through which God 
 uses us to help each other, was cursed and perverted to the destruction 
 of church and churchmen by the churchmen themselves. 
 
 There is, of course, another side to this, besides the sinister one 
 suggested by the Cardinal, and that is, that to the greatest spirits of 
 the Renaissance the traditions of Greek and Roman and Hebrew 
 were all true in a peculiar sense and all at the same time. They half 
 believed in their Ledas and Ganymedes and Jupiters ; the lives lived 
 around them, if not their own, showed it. But they also believed in 
 Christ and Calvary, and therefore they were not averse to painting 
 themselves and their contemporaries at the foot of the Cross. 
 
 Now the Jews could never see things in this light. They were 
 obstinate, undoubtedly, and they had never allowed their definito 
 
266 BROWNmo's jews and Shakespeare's jew. 
 
 convictions and traditions to be sapped by imaginative art. Their 
 interpretation of tradition, therefore, was not artistic ; it was literal. 
 So, although they saw, perhaps, only one side of the universe, they 
 saw it persistently and really believed in what they saw, Moses and 
 Aaron and David and the rest of them were all the more real because 
 the Jews had never seen differing representations of them in art. They 
 had all the realness of abstraction. There is nothing like Art for 
 destroying religions that depend on this or that attitude towards 
 historical facts. Hell cannot be believed in after it has been painted. 
 It is outside the regions of " fact " that religions are strong ; and 
 rightly. And that is why the Jews never could understand the 
 impartiality of people like the Cardinal of Filippo Baldinucci and the 
 Bishop of Holy Cross Bay, whose practices and lives seemed so much 
 at variance with the purity of which they were the official repre- 
 sentatives. Of course the impartiality seemed to them to be 
 hypocrisy. 
 
 Once more and lastly. In the incompleteness and perpetual hope 
 of the Jews, Mr. Browning sees some feeling akin to that which 
 inspires so much of his own philosophy, — the brokenness of good 
 here, and the promise of the perfection and completion of it in 
 some future, whether Messianic or not. The Jews lived in Life and 
 not Art. They could find no such complete satisfaction in Art as 
 their Gentile contemporaries. So they declared themselves 
 
 "At watch and ward 
 Till Clirist at the end relieve our guard." 
 
 That was Life. 
 
267 
 
 ABT VOGLER, THE MAN. 
 
 By HELEN J. ORMEROD. 
 
 Bead at the Fifty-fifth Meeting of the Browning Society, January 27th, 18SS. 
 
 It is impossible to attempt, in this paper, to do more than give a 
 sketch of the career of Abt Yogler, this sketch being taken from the 
 more finished work by Dr. Karl Emil von Schafhautl : Abt Georg 
 Josei^h Vogler : Sein Lehen, Charahter, und Musikalisher System, &c., 
 with occasional assistance from the masterly article on Yogler which 
 appears in Sir G. Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians, by the 
 Rev. J. H. Mee, Mus. Bac, with regard to which Dr. von Schafhautl 
 thus comments — " It is worthy of notice that the most reliable 
 biography of Vogler is from the pen of an Englishman." I must 
 also gratefully tender my thanks to Mr. T. Craddock, Mus. Bac. , for 
 much kind explanatory help in technical mysteries, which have been 
 rendered clearer to me by his practical demonstrations on the fine 
 organ in Upton Church, Torquay ; also to Dr. Furnivall, for his loan 
 of valuable and interesting editions and MSS. of Abt Vogler's music 
 and theoretical writings. 
 
 That Abt "Vogler wrote sundry operas, masses, and other mvisical 
 works, which one hears spoken of but never performed ; that he died 
 at Darmstadt beloved by his pupils, and honourably and lovingly 
 mentioned by his two famous pupils, Carl Maria von Weber and Meyer- 
 beer ; and that he is immortalised by Browning as having extemporised 
 on an instrument of his own invention — this is known to most of us ; 
 and these facts as to the career of the remarkable man seem to have 
 sufficed for most people and many musicians, though our "Papers" 
 have already given us somewhat more. 
 
 In thinking of Abt Vogler however in connection with the Brown- 
 ing Society, it is difficult to imagine any form more definite than that 
 of the somewhat • .^lised figure of the musician Driest seen through 
 
268 HELEN J. ORMBROD. ABT VOGLER, THE MAN. 
 
 the softening haze of years, as he is represented to us in Browning's 
 magnificent poem. And at first it seems to border almost on the 
 profane to bring the dream of heaven down to the level of every-day 
 existence. Yet sudden as the change is, from wandering in the 
 heavenly realms of music to the " C major of this life," this view of 
 the poem and life is not without its charm also. In spite of the 
 countless anxieties and disappointments which beset the artistic career, 
 moments of rapture and inspiration such as those described in the 
 poem, are vouchsafed to those favoured few whom " God whispers in 
 the ear." It is my wish now to bring before you a sketch of the 
 enthusiastic musician, the earnest priest, and (using the expression 
 in a higher sense than that in which it is generally used) the cultivated 
 man of the world. 
 
 That a more definite position in musical history has not from the 
 first been accorded to this remarkable man, is due to various reasons 
 — chief among them being the more than ordinary jealousy and sus- 
 picion roused amongst contemporary musicians, caused on the one 
 hand by the social and literary advantages which, at that time, 
 resulted from Vogler's superior education as a priest ; and on the 
 other hand, by his bold enterprise in attacking existing codes of 
 harmony and methods of organ-building. Another probable cause 
 of his uncertain position until lately is accounted for by his wander- 
 ing life, as at no time was he settled in one place, or even country, 
 for any considerable length of time. Dr. von Schafhautl has under- 
 taken the vindication of his hero's fame with all the ardour of an 
 enthusiast, and in his preface he thus expresses himself : " No eye- 
 and ear-witnesses now survive to testify to the efiiciency of Vogler's 
 life-work and teaching : and in our histories of music he is represented 
 to the public almost as a caricature, growing ever more and more 
 indistinct through the veil of tradition. Therefore I, born in 1803, 
 have taken up the study of Vogler's teachings and work with all the 
 ardour of youth. I have studied and analysed his writings, both 
 practical and theoretical, in order that in this book I may preserve 
 the fame of this highly gifted man, that he may occupy in history 
 the place due to him." 
 
 That Dr. von Schafhautl speaks with authority as a biographer, 
 may be gathered from his opening sentences : " I have accompanied 
 Abt Vogler, who has been so misrepresented by biogi-aphers, all my 
 life, and followed the highly gifted man both in his teachings and 
 bis work : I have mixed with his best friends and admirers in Munich 
 (where he had only one enemy, and he was an organ-builder), and 
 therefore I believe myself to be more intimately acquainted with the 
 
HELEN J. ORMEROD. ABT VOGLER, THE MAN. 269 
 
 Abbe than any of my contemporaries, and that I have gained the 
 right to speak a word with authority, accurately founded on historical 
 facts, as to the literary but misunderstood genius." 
 
 Though it may be impossible to agree with the author in every 
 point, we cannot but admire the zeal with which he has thrown 
 himself into the cause. It may be advisable at the outset to refer to 
 the remark that the title Abbe or Abt was a complimentary one, as 
 some writers have doubted Yogler's right to assume it. As a com- 
 plimentary title it does not betoken the head of a monastery, for in 
 France and Italy all eminent ecclesiastics who held no settled appoint- 
 ment were greeted as Abbe — the word being identical with the 
 Chaldean Abba, and simply signifying "Father," as in Latin the 
 word " Pater " is used. 
 
 Georg Joseph Vogler, commonly known as Abt Yogler, was born 
 at Pleicchart, a suburb of Wiirzburg, on the 15th June, 1749, and 
 was the youngest of nine children, of whom only three survived. 
 His father was a coui^t musician, also court violin-maker, at Wiirz- 
 burg. He died at Darmstadt on the 6th of May, 1814, loaded with 
 honours, both musical and papal, from Rome, Sweden, Bavaria, Paris, 
 London, &c. 
 
 The young Vogler gave early evidence of various characteristics 
 which distinguished him throughout his life, and are thus described : 
 " An earnest piety, a wonderful memory, and an equally wonderful 
 gift for languages." " An untiring energy, and above all an indomit- 
 able industry and a mighty ambition, which ever urged him on 
 to be first and best." He passed through the Jesuit Gymnasium 
 and Lyceum at Wiirzburg as a matter of convenience, but he was no 
 Jesuit, neither was he brought up as one. Vogler soon gave promise 
 of his musical career, thus fulfilling the vocation of his family. He 
 was a good pianist, and an extraordinary organist, even in his youth. 
 The Prince Bishop of Wiirzburg prided himself on his fine choir; 
 but the cynosure of all Kapelles in the world was the Mannheim 
 Court Kapelle. Vogler was fortunate in his testimonials, and the 
 Elector of the Palatinate gave him a kind reception, and commissioned 
 him to write a ballet for the Court Theatre. Karl Theodor, then 
 Elector, was the most cultivated prince of his time, and a man of art 
 and letters, and he welcomed Vogler even more warmly as a musician 
 than a theologian. Everything in connection with his court was of the 
 best, except the opera, and this he determined to remedy by inviting 
 Vogler to his court. This was an impoi-tant moment in Vogler' s life, 
 as he was on the point of entering the Franciscan monastery at 
 Wiirzburg when he received the appointment of almoner to the Elector. 
 
270 HELEN J. ORMEROD. ABT VOGLER, THE MAN. 
 
 After a time of doubt and hesitation he accepted the post. Mozart 
 remarks of him that " he came to Mannheim in a miserable state," 
 and " that compassion was shown him ; " but this remark is untrue, 
 for his family was anything but poor. His fame as a musician soon 
 spread ; and Bernhard Anselm Weber, at the age of seven, was 
 placed under his tuition. All the time the desire increased within 
 him for a guide to the secrets of harmony, and Italy became the dream 
 of his soul. Thither he was allowed to go by his patron in 1773, first 
 studying under Martini at Bologna, and then under Yallotti at Padua, 
 distracting both teachers by his perplexing questions, leaving Martini 
 when only through the half -course, and causing Yallotti to exclaim 
 in desperation — " He would learn in fifty minutes what it has taken 
 me fifty years to learn ! " Vallotti was however delighted with his 
 mathematical exactitude, never having taken a pupil before, because 
 of their deficiency in knowledge of mathematics. When visiting in 
 Venice, Vogler was a welcome guest at the house of the musician 
 Hasse, then seventy-five years old : not only was he a favourite 
 with Hasse himself, but with the great Faustina, a former queen 
 of song. 
 
 He was ordained a priest in Rome ; and in 1774 the Elector visited 
 Rome, and was gratified to find that his lyrotege had made a name in 
 the musical world there. Vogler returned to Mannheim towards the 
 close of 1775. There he was appointed Court Chaplain and m'ce- 
 Kajjellmeister. Mozart hints that these appointments fell to his lot 
 because of certain ladies at the court ; but with his credentials and 
 testimonials from Italy, both as priest and musician, there seemed no 
 need to rely on feminine influence. There was undoubtedly some 
 ill feeling on Mozart's part towards Vogler, and this is rather pointedly 
 touched on (and perhaps only naturally) by Dr. von Schafhautl. 
 Nevertheless, to Mozart must be accorded the higher place as a 
 musician. Time alone decides as to whether gold, silver, precious 
 stones, wood, hay, or stubble be built on the foundation of music. 
 
 At Mannheim, Vogler founded the first of his three schools of 
 music, the second being at Stockholm, and the third at Darmstadt. 
 As a result of this enterprise, he published his first theoretical work 
 in 1776 — Tonwissenschaft und Tonsetzkunst. He also edited a monthly 
 periodical, which was carried on for three years — Betrachtungen der 
 Mannheimer Tonschule. In 1778 the Elector removed his court to 
 Munich, having become Elector of Bavaria. Vogler however re- 
 mained faithful to his Mannheim school, and probably did not go to 
 Munich till 1 780. While at Mannheim, he wrote several important 
 works, including a Miserere, about which and its composer, Mozart 
 
HELEN J. ORMEROD. ABT VOGLER, THE MAN. 271 
 
 expresses himself rather strongly in a letter dated November 22nd. 
 1777, which letter, it must be confessed, is suggestive of spite and 
 personal ill feeling on the part of Mozart, and is incorrect in state- 
 ment. That these opinions were not shared by other musicians, 
 including even Beethoven himself, we shall presently have occasion 
 to notice. 
 
 In December, 1780, Yogler visited Paris, and found there two 
 distinct musical parties, Louis XVI. being the leader of the followers 
 of Piccini, and Marie-Antoinette remaining faithful to Gluck. Vogler 
 was presented to the Queen, who was charmed with his playing, and 
 constituted herself his patroness, frequently sending a carriage to 
 convey him to Versailles, accepting also the dedication of two of his 
 popular compositions. It was at this time that Vogler gave two 
 organ recitals on the then famous organ of St. Sulpice, and as usual 
 excited admiration and wonder at his capacity for arranging the stops. 
 At that time the art of song was scarcely understood by the French 
 (Mozart also having unfavourably commented on the French song- 
 stresses). Vogler despaired of giving an opera, having lost his temper 
 at a rehearsal, and therefore being unpopular with chorus and soloists. 
 The Queen however came to his assistance, and his opera was per- 
 formed at Versailles with eclat under the title of La Patriotisme. 
 
 From Paris, Vogler proceeded to England, and expounded to the 
 Royal Society his system, with illustrations on his Toninaass. Sir 
 Joseph Banks, President of the Ptoyal Society, expressed to him in 
 appreciative terms the acquiescence of the Society in his system. In 
 1784, Vogler was appointed chief Kapellmeister at Munich by the 
 Elector, and received a commission to write an opera for the carnival 
 in 1786. He chose the subject of Castor and Pollux, and, as has been 
 remarked, had full scope for the exercise of creative musical faculty, 
 the scenes being laid " in Sparta, and in the realms of heaven and 
 hell " ! The overture to this opera was one of Vogler's finest com- 
 positions. Schumann remarks of it — " It seems to me as if Vogler's 
 contemporaries had not sufficiently appreciated him." After the first 
 production of this opera, however, military rather than musical matters 
 became uppermost in Munich, chiefly through the presence of the 
 famous Benjamin Thompson ; and so Vogler left Munich to travel. In 
 1784 he went (as we saw) from Paris to London. In May he gave 
 a concert at Liibeck ; on the 30th of May we hear of him at Berlin ; 
 in October, 1785, at Diisseldorf, where we find him placing his piano- 
 forte before the most celebrated pictures in the gallery there, and 
 striving to express in music the emotions caused by the contemplation 
 of them. In November he was in Amsterdam, where he gave an 
 
272 HELEN J. ORMEROD. ABT VOGLER, THE MAN. 
 
 organ recital, for which 7,000 tickets were sold. At this time 
 Gustavus III. of Sweden invited him to his court as Kapellmeister, 
 and music-master for the Crown-Princess. The Swedish king, himself 
 a poet, was anxious to advance the cause of art, and especially of 
 music, in his kingdom. He received Vogler in 1786 with much 
 kindness, and told him he considered it an honour to have him in his 
 service. Yogler received 2,000 rix thalers a year, besides fodder for 
 two horses, and leave of absence for six out of the twelve months of 
 each year. He was pledged to remain for ten years under these 
 conditions, at the expiration of which time he would be entitled to a 
 pension of 500 rix thalers. The appointment of the Catholic priest 
 was looked on with suspicion by the Protestant court, but Vogler 
 did not care. He established at Stockholm a music school, and 
 a school for singing. He was the first Kapellmeister to produce 
 one of Gluck's operas in its entirety in the Stockholm theatre. He 
 utilised every day of his six months' leave. In 1788 we find him, 
 accompanied by one of his nephews, journeying to Russia, playing 
 before the emperor, receiving from him a jewelled golden snuff-box, 
 and visiting the chief organ-builders, Kirsnik amongst others, who 
 had already been experimenting on organ-pipes, Yogler had now 
 found a kindred spirit ; and he engaged the Swedish organ-builder 
 Racknitz, who had worked under Kirsnik, to carry out his plans for 
 his portable organ, his " orchestrion." It had been Yogler's lifelong 
 endeavour to invent a portable organ on which to perform at his 
 recitals, and now his efforts were to meet with success. He had the 
 instrument for which he had longed, "the instrument of his own 
 invention " of which Browning speaks, and the plan of it led him to 
 form schemes for the remodelling and simplification of existing organs. 
 In the year 1790 Yogler visited England again, and won laurels as 
 an organist ; but an event occurred which called him to Darmstadt. 
 Louis IX., the Landgrave of Hesse, having died, was about to be 
 succeeded by his son, and Yogler's patron, Louis X. 
 
 Yogler's journey to Darmstadt was a series of triumphs, and in 
 October we hear of his being present at the coronation of Leopold II. 
 at Frankfort, and in November giving concerts in Holland on his 
 orchestrion. When at Hamburg in 1792 he received the news of the 
 murder of his royal friend and patron, Gustavus III. This so em- 
 bittered his stay there, that at the invitation of the Portuguese Queen 
 he embarked for Lisbon. Finding the Queen however too ill to receive 
 him, he proceeded to Cadiz, and thence to North Africa, India, and 
 Greece, attracted thither by his desire to study original, national 
 m.elodies. He occupied himself on his return at the end of 1793, in 
 
HELEN J. ORMEROD. ABT VOGLER^ THE MAN. 273 
 
 Stockholm, by weaving these ancient melodies into a work he called 
 Polymelos. In 1796 he journeyed to Paris, after following each incident 
 of the French Revolution with the deepest interest and concern, 
 grieving over the degradation and terrible fate of the royal family, and 
 rejoicing over the fall of Eobespierre. He made this visit with a 
 view to study the national songs of the Revolution. In 1796 his ten 
 years' engagement at Stockholm came to an end. In 1797 Yogler 
 received a letter inviting him to return to "VViirzburg, his native place, 
 which was the desire of his heart. His letter, in reply, is too in- 
 teresting not to be noticed, though too long to quote in full. After 
 dwelling on the advantages of his engagement at the Swedish court, 
 and alluding to the fact that with any superfluous means he possessed 
 and earned he relieved the poor, and helped to support members of 
 his own and his step-father's family, he tells with justifiable pride of 
 his instrument the orchestrion, and thanks God that both bodily and 
 mentally he feels stronger at forty-nine than at twenty-nine years of 
 age. He then relates how, when he came to Sweden, he was not 
 unmindful of his calling as a priest, but said he ventured to speak of 
 himself almost as a missionary in Norway, holding services in out-of- 
 the-way places, and attending to the interests of his church in Sweden. 
 He also visited the persecuted Catholics under the Turks, and adds 
 how he acted as confessor to 1,500 persons in five months, the con- 
 fessions being made in twelve diiJerent languages. This is of 
 special interest, because of the doubts raised as to the genuineness 
 of his priesthood. 
 
 Unfortunately his settlement at Wiirzburg was rendered impos- 
 sible by pecuniary diflficulties resulting from the late war and military 
 preparations for the futiu'e. Therefore Vogler acceded to the strongly 
 expressed wishes of the Duke-regent and Crown-prince of Sweden, 
 and did not leave Stockholm until 1798. He altered the cathedral 
 organ at Stockholm; and at this time it is mentioned that he had 
 given upwards of a thousand organ concerts. It seems but natural 
 that at the age of fifty-two he began to think of rest. He journeyed 
 again to his native country and received an invitation to visit Vienna, 
 where a brilliant era in musical history was almost over. Haydn was 
 now seventy-one years old ; Salieri, though only fifty-three, was exhausted 
 alike in mind and body ; and the musical society invited Vogler to 
 come and personally conduct one of his own works. He arrived at 
 Vienna in 1803, and was received with great enthusiasm. He gave 
 his opera Castor and Pollux before a delighted audience, and shortly cele- 
 brated the thirtieth anniversary of his priesthood in the church of St. 
 Peter's by a celebration, at which his D Minor Mass was performed. 
 
274 HELEN J, ORMEROD. ABT VOGLER, THE MAN. 
 
 It was during the autumn of 1803 that Carl Maria von Weber, 
 then a youth of seventeen, was placed under Vogler's tuition. In Sir 
 Julius Benedict's Life of Weber he thus speaks of the choice of a 
 master : " Instead of trying to repair the mischief done by incom- 
 petent teachers, his (Weber's) father selected, in preference to a sound 
 musician like Albrechtsberger, or a master of the art like Haydn, the 
 fashionable composer and organist of the period, Abt Vogler ; a man 
 gifted with the highest social attractions, full of wit and anecdote, 
 persona grata at the Imperial Court, and undoubtedly a clever eclectic 
 in his art, adapting himself to all styles, and pilfering right and left 
 with consummate skill. Though much over-rated and extolled as a 
 genius by the musical public of Vienna, he was considered an un- 
 principled mountebank by the great musical authorities of the period." 
 
 Judging from the accounts we read of Vogler, he seems to have 
 encountered the difficulties and met with the discouragements common 
 to all musicians; while his roving Bohemian proclivities seem to 
 redeem him from the reproach of "fashionable." As regards the 
 charge of "pilfering," both Mr. Mee in his article, and Dr. von 
 Schafhautl in his Life, allude to this groundless accusation. The 
 former thus speaks : " At Berlin he (Vogler) was charged with steal- 
 ing the pipes removed in 'simplifying' the organ in St. Mary's 
 church. The falsity of the charge was demonstrated, but it shows 
 the feeling against him" — (feeling of course against the musical 
 reformer). Dr. von Schafhautl speaks more in detail : " Much 
 interest was shown in his original system, and the organ in the 
 chiirch of St. Mary's (Berlin) was given over to him for the carrying 
 out of his simplification system. ... In the remodelling of the St. 
 Mary's organ Vogler removed many pipes that were unnecessary for his 
 simplified organ. These pipes he utilised in the erection of a new organ 
 in the Catholic Hedwigskirche, which he completed at his own expense, 
 and which exists to this day with but slight alterations. Owing to 
 marks of honour bestowed on him by the court, much envious feeling 
 was raised up against him, and he was accused of stealing the pipes 
 he dispensed with from St. Mary's organ. A public testimony from 
 the church officials silenced these truly ridiculous accusations." 
 
 As regards the opinions of the " great musical authorities of the 
 period," something may be said on this score also. In the same year 
 (1803) that Weber was placed under his tuition, Vogler's meeting 
 with Beethoven occurred at a musical soii^ee given by Sonnleithner, 
 when Vogler and Beethoven extemporised alternately, each giving 
 the other a theme. Gansbacher (also a pupil of Vogler's) thus 
 describes his impressions : " I heard both masters for the first time. 
 
HELEN J. ORMEROD. ABT VOGLER, THE MAN. 275 
 
 Beethoven's extraordinary powers as a pianist, enriched as his playing 
 was with a wealth of most beautiful ideas, overcame me with astonish- 
 ment, but could not raise me to the pitch of enthusiasm with which 
 Vogler's masterly playing, unequalled as it was in harmonic and 
 contrapuntal resources, inspired me." In Rinck's autobiography he 
 thus speaks of Vogler : " I rejoiced in his friendship in the highest 
 degree, and I shall never forget the hours I spent in his company. 
 His organ-playing was grand, effective in the utmost degree, and 
 when he played in his best style must have astonished every one. His 
 effective arrangement of stops displayed his real knowledge of organ- 
 building." Haydn bore testimony to Yogler's brilliant powers as an 
 organist, and Schumann remarked, after hearing some of his music, 
 that he had not been sufficiently appreciated by his contemporaries. 
 
 After this digression, which seemed almost necessary at this junc- 
 ture, we will proceed with Vogler's life. In 1804; a change in the 
 musical woi'ld of Vienna, occasioned by Sonnleithner's withdrawal 
 from the musical directorship of the opera, coupled also with the 
 appearance of ominous thunder-clouds on the political horizon, in- 
 duced Vogler to return to Munich. On the first of January, 1806, 
 Bavaria was proclaimed a kingdom. Napoleon reached Munich on 
 the 31st of December, 1805, to assist at the marriage of his adopted 
 son, the Viceroy of Italy. On the 15th of January, 1806, a brilliant 
 performance of Vogler's opera Castor and Pollux was given under his 
 direction before the Emperor and many crowned heads, concluding 
 with a " wedding song " composed for the occasion by Vogler. He 
 hoped to have obtained a settled appointment in Munich, but owing 
 to aimless delays on the part of the court, and the failure of his pension 
 from Sweden, Vogler resumed his roving life and went to visit his 
 old friends, travelling through Bavaria and the Rhineland. In June 
 he met his patron the Grand Duke of Darmstadt, and told him of his 
 hopes and fate. His old friend and patron at once offered him a settled 
 appointment in Darmstadt, with ample salary and comfortable, not to 
 say luxurious, domestic arrangements. This was at once accepted by 
 Vogler, and in Darmstadt he found the rest, peace and appreciation foi 
 which lately he had longed. Like Ulysses, he returned to his old home 
 after long years of wandering. Here he founded his thii-d school of 
 music, and spent his last years peacefully and usefully. More a favoured 
 friend than a servant of the Grand Duke, he dined every day at the 
 ducal table, and gave lessons to the Grand Duchess. He still went 
 on with his favourite work of simplifying organs ; and when his love 
 of change became irresistible he contented himself with visits to 
 Munich, Frankfort, Mainz, &c. In ISIO we find him welcoming 
 
276 HELEN J. ORMEROD. ABT VOGLER, THE MAN. 
 
 Meyerbeer as his pupil, then a youth of nineteen years of age. In 
 the same month (April) Giinsbacher and Carl Maria von "Weber both 
 rejoined Yogler, and thus we find him, happy and honoured in his old 
 age, and surrounded by his favourite and most famous pupils, looked 
 on by them almost as a father, and lovingly called " Papa Vogler." 
 It is at this period that we have a charming glimpse of the old 
 musician, extemporising in the old Darmstadt church. *' Never," 
 said Weber, " did Yogler in his extemporisation drink more deeply 
 at the source of all beauty than when, before his three dear boys, as 
 he liked to call us, he drew from the organ angelic voices and words 
 of thunder." 
 
 The time however was approaching when it was necessary for 
 teacher and pupils to part, Giinsbacher was the first to leave, and 
 he parted from Yogler and his friends with burning tears. Weber 
 was the next to go, after the lapse of a few months ; but Meyerbeer 
 lingered on, having means at his disposal, and Yogler found it neces- 
 sary at last to urge him to go out into the world, Yogler thought 
 often with longing of his native town of Wiirzburg, and it was his 
 great desire to leave a memorial of his work there. He was finally 
 commissioned to undertake the simplification of the organ in the 
 Neuminster there. Owing to unfortunate misunderstandings his 
 organ concert at the opening of the organ was a failure, and 
 Yogler was not only sorely wounded, but also sustained a personal 
 pecuniary loss. 
 
 In 1812 he visited Munich, where be simplified an organ, and 
 gave a successful organ concert for the benefit of the widows and 
 orphans of the Bavarian soldiers. It was a veritable triumph, and 
 happy indeed was the Abb6, with Meyerbeer on the^ one side and 
 Caspar Ett on the other, attending to the stops. Shortly after 
 this Meyerbeer left him, and with the departure of this last pupil 
 Yogler's fortune seemed to waver. 
 
 Owing to a breach of contract in Munich, he found himself sud- 
 denly in considerable financial distress, and pride restrained him from 
 appealing to his patron the Grand Duke, with whom he had had a 
 slight misunderstanding before leaving Darmstadt to visit Munich. 
 With renewed hope he paid a visit to Yienna, but on the way there was 
 robbed of a considerable sum of money. In Yienna everything went 
 wrong, and it was actually necessary for him to place his golden 
 snuff-box, the gift of the Emperor of Russia, in pawn, in order to 
 obtain money for his return journey. In spite of all these mis- 
 fortunes his musical spu-it remained fresh and unimpaired. He 
 composed a new overture to Samori, which he laid before the Grand 
 
HELEN J, OEIIEEOD, ABT TOGLER, THE MAN, 277 
 
 Duke in 1813, and wrote several hymns and songs during his stay 
 in Munich. On his retiu'n to Darmstadt he undertook the building 
 of a new instrument, which he named " Mikropan." 
 
 In Vogler's last letter from Munich to the Grand Duke, he said 
 that the air there did not suit his health. Doubtless his recent 
 misfortunes and worries were telling already on his system. He 
 returned to Darmstadt, and was incapable of taking any exercise 
 owing to a sore in his foot. Ptinck was one of his last visitors, and 
 found his old friend bright and active-minded as ever, Gottfried 
 Weber spent the day before his death with him, and wondered at the 
 youthful spirit and strength of the gifted old man. He was taken 
 away suddenly in the night of the 6th of May, 1814, with an 
 apoplectic stroke. 
 
 Great was the grief of his pupils on hearing the sad news ; but as 
 "Weber wrote to Giinsbacher, " He will ever live in our hearts," He 
 was buried quietly, but with every token of esteem and honour ; and 
 thus passed away this remarkable and gifted man. 
 
 It has been a subject of no little consideration to know how far I 
 might enlarge on Vogler's musical and simplification systems before 
 an audience not entirely composed of musicians. As this paper 
 however has been written for the Browning Society, I will confine 
 myself to the consideration of the musical instrument of Vogler's 
 own invention, of Avhich instrument we read at the heading of the 
 well-known poem, I Avill only ask you to remember that he also 
 invented an iustrument for the measuring of musical intervals with 
 mathematical exactitude which he called the " Ton-maass ; " that he 
 strongly advocated the tuning of organs at equal temperature ; that 
 he devised a method of fingering Avhich was strongly objected to by 
 Mozart, and also by many present authorities, and that his musical 
 compositions were numerous, though in too many instances not 
 calculated to stand the test of time. His organ preludes have much 
 interested me, but having no separate pedal part, it involves more 
 or less difficulty for the organist to arrange the pedal part as he 
 plays ; and the characteristics of these preludes are more pleasing 
 than striking or original. 
 
 His hymn Hier liegt im Stauh vor Dir is an interesting com- 
 position, well adapted for an anthem. Of his operas, Castor and 
 Pollux and Samori deserve first mention, while his music to Hermann 
 von Unna was an undoubted success — we read of people waiting 
 for upwards of twelve hours at the ticket oflace before its per- 
 formance. 
 
 It is difficult to know what to say of Vogler's musical system. 
 
278 HELEN J. OKMEROD. ABT VOGLER, THE MAN. 
 
 The one certainty about it is, that so far it has never been generally 
 adopted ; and musicians now are not open to the reproach of being 
 illiterate, as was the case with Kirnberger, "Weber, in his enthusiasm 
 for his master thus writes : 
 
 " Before thee never were combined 
 Such lore and genius in one mind." 
 
 It is evident that Vogler liked to build up all knowledge from a 
 scientific foundation ; and was incapable of accepting facts without 
 proving them. Mozart taunts him with publishing handbooks on 
 arithmetic instead of music ; but with Vogler's love of, and skill in 
 mathematics, it was an added pleasure to him to reduce everything 
 to mathematical measurements and exactitude, j ust as a botanist will 
 dissect a lovely flower and reduce it to a science. His desire was to 
 simplify theory, as well as organs ; to introduce new triads, and even 
 chords commonly accepted as discords, without the ceremony of 
 modulation. It was on organ-building that Yogler exercised a real 
 and lasting influence ; and I am glad to hear that in some of our 
 leading firms of organ-bviilders various methods of arranging the 
 pipes and wind are spoken of as " the Abt Yogler plan." In his 
 simplification of organs his one aim was to avoid the use of large 
 and unnecessary pipes ; and all his inventions in this direction were 
 based on the theory of harmonics, as elucidated by Tartini — hence 
 the quint on the pedal organ. To Vogler also belongs the credit of 
 the introduction of free reeds ; we have been indebted to the 
 Chinese for many inventions, and with them originated this in- 
 vention, and the first loose tongue in the history of music. This 
 primitive instrument of the Chinese was called Tscheng, and was 
 manufactured in great numbers. One of these instruments had 
 found its way to Copenhagen," and was there found by Professor 
 Kratzenstein and Kirsnick. The latter realised the importance of 
 the discovery, and on establishing himself as an organ-builder at St. 
 Petersburg, began to work out the principle. It was to see into 
 this matter that Vogler went to St. Petersburg to see Kirsnick, and 
 finally invited Racknitz to join him in his work. These pipes 
 promised to become the soul of his new instrument, and in 1792 he 
 placed the pipes in his orchestrion, and also introduced them for the 
 first time into a church at Rotterdam. Thus was his unremitting 
 search for the pipes he desired, rewarded. 
 
 Another point for which Vogler contended was the order of 
 arrangement of organ pipes — placing the large pipes at the left end 
 of the sound-board, and the smaller ones at the right. The mixtures 
 
HELEN J. ORMEROD. ABT VOGLER, THE MAN. 279 
 
 for wbicli Yogler worked are an undoubted success ; and his plan of 
 bringing the wind nearer to the player is an acknowledged benefit. 
 
 His difficulties with organ-builders were even greater and more 
 nuiaerous than were his encounters with the theorists and publishers 
 of the period. " Yogler once said to his friends, in a sad hour, full 
 of Apprehension, ' It is not only that people will not hear and study 
 mj works, but will not even know how and what I thought. Yet 
 it may be that I shall live again, when my enemies think I have 
 passed away for ever,' " 
 
 Dr. von Schafhautl claims for Yogler a place equal to that of the 
 discovers of the steam-engine, and remarks (Yogler having only 
 bui't one organ on his perfected system), " How many thousands of 
 steam-engines were built before they had attained to their present 
 staidpoint ! It is almost the same in the history of all discoveries 
 before they are admitted to the full rights of citizenship amongst 
 us," Yogler, unfortunately, had no rich Englishman such as Bolton 
 to stand surety for his invention ; and his invention, being destined 
 ciiefly for use in churches, and not in factories — for the divine art 
 oi music, and not for the lower love of greed-^did not gain greatly in 
 favour. Strange it is that so many people complain of too much 
 masic in the service of God, and would willingly do away with the 
 added expense of a first-rate instrument, organist and choir ! content 
 with the idea that anything is good enough for church-music, and 
 with the belief that the musical stands apart from the religious 
 world ! Dr. von Schafhautl speaks as follows, " When I drew 
 attention in a Munich paper to the mangling and neglect of the 
 organ in St. Peter's Church, and complained of the same, I received 
 this answer from an organ-builder, 'Yogler built a concert-organ 
 that no one is able to play.' 
 
 " The answer was right after a fashion. 
 
 " Churches do not require concert-organs ; and likewise it fre- 
 quently happens that our organists will not play for so scanty a 
 salary ! " 
 
 In his own instrument, his orchestrion, he combined his inven- 
 tions and improvements : and had the proud delight of conveying his 
 instrument with him from place to place. It was about three feet 
 square, and higher in the middle than the sides ; it contained about 
 SOO pipes, had shutters for crescendos and diminuendos, and naturally 
 the reed stops were free reeds. In his system for simplifying organs, 
 he relied too much, as has been already suggested, on the musical 
 knowledge of the organists, who were at that time rarely men of 
 much education. " The simplified organs," says Dr, von Schafhautl, 
 
280 HELEN J. ORMEROD. ABT VOGLER, THE MAN. 
 
 " had nearly all the same fate. When Yogler played, every one was 
 charmed, but when an organist followed, who was accustomed to an 
 ordinary organ, it invariably happened, when the first delight ivas 
 forgotten, that there were the same complaints as to technical diffi- 
 culties, and the organ's want of power. The only organist vho 
 understood the manipulation of these simplified organs was the friend 
 and amanuensis of Yogler at Munich — the organist of St, Michael's 
 Church, Caspar Ett. When the organist of the simplified organ in 
 the Protestant church complained also of his organ's want of pover, 
 Ett himself played on it, and the organist exclaimed in as- 
 tonishment, 'Who could have believed that the organ possessed 
 such power 1 ' 
 
 " The power of an organ is usually reckoned by its size and lum- 
 ber of pipes and stops. The more stops are pulled out, and therefore 
 added, the stronger of course must be the sound of the organ. 
 
 " Yogler drew out stops with reference to their acoustic relation- 
 ship, and by these means obtained the same power as with twice as 
 many stops." 
 
 It was in the church of St. Michael's, Munich, that we hear 
 of him utilising old pipes for a quint, in which he cut an opening 
 to obtain the thirty- two feet sound ; it was at once given forth, 
 "and the thunder was heard beyond the church, down the wide 
 Hauptstrasse." 
 
 Before leaving the technical side of the question, I have been 
 struck in Dr. von Schafhautl's work with the constant reference to 
 the triad, or common chord in Yogler's and Yallotti's theory. " Each 
 sound in music," writes Yogler, " is a plurality of three compounded 
 tones — the key-note, the third, and the fifth." This of course refers 
 to harmonics, the principle of which was first explained by Sauveur — 
 but I cannot but recall the lines : 
 
 *' But I know not if, save in this, such gift be allowed to man, 
 That out of three sounds he frame, not a fourth sound, but a star." 
 
 Enough has been said in this outline of Yogler's life to show 
 that he was devoted to his art, and earnest in his religious profession. 
 He was a generous and sincere friend, a kind and thoughtful brother, 
 and as a teacher was almost universally beloved by his pupils. As a 
 reformer, attacking what he considered to be existing abuses, he was 
 absolutely fearless ; and this naturally accounts for much ill will. 
 Another ground for hatred was his boldness in declaring Bach's 
 chorals to be unsuited for congregational use, and his subsequent 
 re-arrangement of them. 
 
HELEN J. ORMEROD. ABT VOGLER, THE MAN. 281 
 
 That organists objected to his " simplification system " was a 
 constant grief to him. His own performances on them delighted his 
 audiences ; but the constant complaint was that only Yogler could 
 play on them ! This astonished him, as it surprises every one with a 
 gift of his own, to find that what is in his case second nature, may 
 be a serious difiiculty in the case of another not equally gifted. 
 
 How was it that he failed to attain to that which was greatest and 
 most permanent in music? Dr. von Schafhautl almost claims for 
 him a place amongst the greatest musicians, but this I can scarcely 
 understand, although if we may trust to Browning's representation 
 of him he 
 
 " Entered and took his place there sure enough — 
 Tho' he came back, and coidd not tell the icorld." 
 
 Vogler himself once admitted that he considered himself deficient 
 in the gift of melody. Possibly, too, his wandering life, with nothing 
 of domestic joy to embellish it, may have tended to the non-fulfilment of 
 his dream of future greatness. There is the genius, which like Handel's, 
 soars ever higher and higher, whose craving for the greatest in art 
 seems to extingviish all longings for earthly ties. Others again, have 
 gained an added pathos from life's joys and sorrows. Mendelssohn's 
 exquisite music breathes of refinement and harmonious surroundings, 
 yet he, too, must have had his moments of agonised solitude before 
 " It is enough " could have been written. Chopin's very soul goes 
 forth in his love and longing for the highly-gifted woman who broke 
 his heart, but the world is richer for his suffering. 
 
 It is difiicult to assign to each his place, when looking on them 
 from our human standpoint. In a mountain-range a world-renowned 
 peak may seem insignificant, because of our inability to gain a 
 desirable point of view ; but were it possible to stand on the moun- 
 tain peak itself, to look down on all the others in no spirit of pride, 
 but of heavenly confidence, this indeed were greatness ! But there 
 would be no confession of weakness, though many of humility : no 
 falling back into the deep. This brings me back to the poem, with 
 which theme I started. Here again we have the instinctive power 
 of the poet thoroughly realising that the Abbe was a born musician, 
 capable of true art, gifted with moments of veritable inspiration 
 when extemporising, yet apparently incapable of sojourning long 
 enough on the heights to render these moments permanent. I have 
 read how, amidst the Himalayan snows, fleecy cloud-banners hang 
 around the highest peaks in the early morning hours ; then, as the 
 sun gains in power, they are drawn upwards and disperse themselves 
 
ZiGZ HELEN J. ORMEROD. ABT VOGLER, THE MAN. 
 
 in the blue of heaven. Carrying further this mountain simile, it 
 seems as though, in the case of a musician such as Abt Yogler, these 
 cloud-like thoughts of beauty collected about the musician in his 
 inspired moments of extemporisation ; but instead of descending in 
 showers to enrich the world, they were at once drawn heavenwards, 
 and thus, though lost to us, were part of the " music sent up 
 to God." 
 
283 
 
 BEOWNmG AS A TEACHER OF THE NINETEENTH 
 CENTUPtY. 
 
 By Miss C. M. WHITEHEAD. 
 
 Read at the Fifty-eighth Meeting of the Brovming Society, 
 April Tith, 1888. 
 
 Every age has its own characteristics, needs, and faults, which one 
 who aspires to be its poet must in some way or another meet, minister 
 to, or correct. 
 
 Past times have not been so complicated as our own. Our pro- 
 gress has its drawbacks. The rush of an overwhelming tide of life 
 has come upon us within the last twenty years. Every year 
 accelerates the whirl with the increased facilities for movement and 
 progress which it brings. The poets of those earlier years had a 
 comparatively easy task. Cowper, Crabbe, and Burns had each 
 his mission, while they left it to Wordsworth to unfold the deep 
 inner life of Nature, and bring home her teaching to the individual 
 heart. Shelley was free to lift his generation into pure ether with 
 his skylark, Coleridge to thrill the same time with his power of 
 visionary insight, Keats to lull it with a charm of verse unknown 
 before, and still fresh fields were left on which Byron and Scott were 
 to gather laurels all their own. 
 
 But the poet of the present day has a far harder work. First, he 
 has to make his voice heard clear and distinct from all those who 
 have preceded him, and then if he is to be our teacher and guide he 
 has to touch life at a thousand different points ; nay, more, he has to 
 -go down to its depths, and probe its principles and motives at their 
 source. In short, he must be in some sort a " philosopher." 
 
284 BROWNING AS A TEACHER OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. 
 
 Life has come upon us with a rush that finds us unprepared. We 
 have, those of us who exist to any purpose, to live at the fullest 
 stretch of our powers, at a pressure past ages did not know, and yet 
 we are required to mould this rapid life of ours on the deepest 
 principles of the ages past unless we would wreck it altogether. 
 Like the Jews of old, we have to fight and repair our breaches as 
 we fight. 
 
 We are called to take our part in great questions and to decide on 
 them from day to day, and yet we are expected to have formed our 
 decisions and opinions upon firm fundamental principles of reason and 
 thought. We are called many of us into the arena to grapple with 
 problems which tax us to the uttermost, just at the moment when 
 the imperative call to action makes us realise most our lack of in- 
 tellectual preparation for the work which comes to us, and from which 
 there is no escape because so few are ready to do it. The generation 
 which is rising up now may have its own especial diflEiculties, but it 
 will realise far better what they are, and enter the conflict more 
 prepared to meet them than this present one has been. 
 
 We are called to be actors when we should be students, and the 
 problem presses upon us how can we best live our life, and at the 
 same time learn from our own experience and that of the past. We 
 need the poet, with his gift of " infinite insight," to teach us. 
 
 It was said in one of our discussions that we could not expect 
 poems on sanitary matters, or the Channel Tunnel, that we had not 
 got them from Mr. Browning, and could not ask them from any poet. 
 Certainly not, but if the age is commercial, common-place, and un- 
 I'omantic, all the more do we need the poet to put soul into it for us.^ 
 to sanctify the common-place. As Aurora Leigh says : — - 
 
 " Ay, and while your common men 
 Lay telegraphs, gauge railroads, reign, reap, dine, 
 And dust the flaunty carpets of the world 
 For kings to walk on, or our president, 
 The poet suddenly will catch them up 
 With his voice like a thunder : ' This is soul ! 
 This is life ! this word is being said in Heaven — 
 Here's God down on us ! "What are you about ? * 
 How all those workers start amid their work, 
 Look round, look up, and feel a moment's space, 
 That carpet-dusting, though a pretty trade, 
 Is not the imperative labour after all." 
 
 Yes, can do that, but can also make us feel that even " carpet-dust- 
 ing " is capable of being a service above its seeming according to the- 
 spirit in which it is done. 
 
BROWNING AS A TEACHER OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY, 285 
 
 It is with his gift of " infinite insight " that the poet can look 
 down upon this crowded arena where we have to play our part, and 
 with a loving human sympathy direct us to the deeper principles by 
 which alone we can play it worthily. He is as it were cur general, 
 controlling the combat from a height; our critic, watching the 
 rehearsal of our parts ; and still more our seer, who from the mountain- 
 tops can read for us the signs of the times, not in detail but in clear 
 strong outlines. 
 
 When we are worn out with work, blinded by our individual 
 prejudices, dazzled by the praise of our little circle, or utterly cast 
 down by its blame, we need one by whose side we can throw aside 
 our armour, who will take the part assigned to calm old age in Rahhi 
 hen Ezra, and 
 
 " Youtli ended, try 
 My gain or loss thereby, and weigh the same ; 
 Give life its praise or blame." 
 
 Work in the world at the present involves entering upon so many 
 problems, and grappling with such stern realities of life, that all deep 
 thinkers who would help humanity are called to hold up a standard 
 of thought and principle which shall not only rest but also invigorate 
 those who turn to them for solace and refreshment. Some minds ask 
 this more than others, especially those forced out into action by the, 
 demands of this age, who yet in their inmost souls yearn after the 
 life of quiet thought and study, and vainly strive to unite the two, 
 and welcome therefore any teacher who gives to them what they 
 would seek for themselves, adapted to the needs of the stirring life to 
 which they have felt irresistibly drawn by forces that could not be 
 resisted. 
 
 It is my contention that it is such a need which Mr. Browning, more 
 than any one else at the present day, meets and satisfies. He tests our 
 armour for us, and sends us back to our post with the hope that 
 the battle may yet be retrieved, or if it seems lost, that apparent defeat 
 may only mean a surer victory : — 
 
 " But we brought forth and reared in hours 
 Of change, alarm, surprise, 
 What shelter to grow ripe is ours, 
 What leisure to grow wise ? " 
 
 To give us that shelter and that leisure, Mr. Browning, I venture to 
 think, contributes more than any other writer of our time. 
 
 The points on which Mr. Browning stands as a teacher divide into 
 two very wide classes — 
 
286 BROWNING AS A TEACHER OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. 
 
 1. Those which touch the more practical questions of the day. 
 
 2. Those which concern metaphysical problems. Capable of sub- 
 division again into (1) those which influence life and character in some 
 measure ; (2) those which lie more entirely in the region of abstract 
 thought, which it is impossible to touch in the limits of a short paper, 
 even if I were equal to the task, which I entirely disclaim being. 
 
 I would guard myself at the outset from being understood to imply 
 that Mr. Browning authoritatively lays down the law on one side 
 or the other on disputed questions. He rather indicates principles 
 capable of interpretation and application. 
 
 For instance, to plunge boldly into one burning question of the day, 
 whole poems on the wrong and cruelty of vivisection would not be so 
 strong as his starting-point with regard to the lower animals : — 
 
 " God made all tlie creatures, and gave them om- love and our fear. 
 To give sign we and they are His children, one family here. " 
 
 We hardly need the indignant sarcasm at the expense of those who 
 think the scalpel the appointed means for scientific investigation : — 
 
 " By vivisection at expense 
 Of half an hour and eigliteenpence 
 How braLa secretes dog's soul we'll see." 
 
 Other later words give a deeper principle by which to test this and 
 kindred subjects — namely, that for a paltry benefit (if benefit it be?) 
 the whole race barters its higher good in gaining any advantage at 
 cost to a living sentient thing : — • 
 
 "Never dare alienate God's gift you hold 
 Simply in trust for Him. 
 Love as well you lose 
 Slain by what slays in you the honour. 
 Could you so stumble in your choice." 
 
 We betray our trust to those who are at our mercy, and nothing 
 can compensate for the deterioration of character which follows such 
 a betrayal. It is the world's voice heard in many different strains : — 
 
 " Eightly done, 
 It is the politic, the thrifty way 
 Will clearly make you in the end returns." 
 
 The leading principle over and over again laid down by Mr. 
 Browning is that only self-sacrifice is true worship, and "seals 
 up the perfect man." 
 
BROWNING AS A TEACHER OP THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. 287 
 
 " Donald " carries the lesson further, and points a moral to those 
 who instead of welcoming and resting content in the alleviations 
 which science has procured, turn them into a curse by procuring 
 through them the mutilation and prolonged torture of creatures who 
 are in our power. 
 
 The story of " Donald " is given as a quick answer to the proposition 
 that in sport " there is little likelihood of a man's displaying meanness." 
 Evidently it does not rank with Mr. Browning as an Englishman's 
 first duty to kill something every day. The lady of his love lifts 
 
 *' The poor snail my chance foot spurned, 
 To feed and forget it the leaves among." 
 
 We do not need books like " St. Bernard's " to tell us that the tend- 
 ency of the present day is to grow callous and careless to individual 
 suffering so long as the race is benefited in the main, forgetful that 
 the race is made up of units which have to suffer for the possible 
 benefit only, of a future generation. Again and again, to counteract 
 that tendency, is it pressed home upon us that it is 
 
 "Love, not knowledge, that profits," 
 
 and that 
 
 " When we draw a circle premature, 
 Heedless of far gain 
 Greedy for quick returns of profit, sure. 
 Bad is our bargain." 
 
 It is the lesson taught by Paracelsus. What avail so-called dis- 
 coveries, investigations, with possible benefit to future generations^ 
 while love, the root of all good, is put aside. 
 
 " I learned my own deep error ; love's undoing 
 Taught me the worth of love in man's estate. 
 Love preceding 
 Power, and with much power always much more love." 
 
 It is an age in which the scalpel is applied as ruthlessly to mind, 
 and brain, and soul. The public demands to know all that ought 
 to be most scrupulously reserved from its gaze, and there are 
 traitors to be found who are willing to show the secrets of the prison- 
 house. The poet zealously maintains that right of the soul to 
 reserve : — 
 
 " God be thanked the meanest of His creatures 
 Boasts two soul-sides — one to face the world with. 
 One to show a woman that he loves her 1 " 
 
288 BEO'n'NING AS A TEACHER OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. 
 
 In " House " : — 
 
 " The goodman at least 
 Kept house to himself till an earthquake came." 
 
 Those who clamour to look within forget that it is an earth- 
 quake that must reveal the otherwise well-guarded house ; and in 
 A Likeness the poet shows that the effect of irreverent praise or 
 blame is to destroy the value of the thing only fit to be tossed away 
 
 "Half in a rapture, half in a rage." 
 
 Every soul has a right to its own reserves, and also to live its 
 own life. Criticism not only fetters but kills out all grace and spon- 
 taneity. In My Last Duchess a most pathetic picture is drawn 
 for us of a life simply dying under coldness which forbade it to be its 
 own gracious self, and as one reads it one does so with a thrUl of 
 consciousness that to some extent the same snuffing out process is 
 going on in thousands of homes at the present time, and that, in spite 
 of all our boasted freedom and progress, domestic tyranny of mind 
 over mind stUl too often exists. The early life of John Stuart Mill 
 is one example, where many might be found, of a parent crushing 
 down a child's life in the desire to thwart Nature by moulding it anew 
 on a pattern chosen by an iron will. " The flight of the Duchess " is a 
 pendant to the picture, showing how a stronger soul can find courage 
 to spread its wings and flee in obedience to the call of the gipsy, — 
 type of one or other of the many voices which call on every side, and 
 bid an enthralled soul deliver itself and live its own unfettered life. 
 The old-worldly conventionality would get its death-blow from IVIr. 
 Browning if anything could slay it. The whole poem teems with satire 
 on following fashion for fashion's sake, on consciously moulding life 
 on a stated pattern : — 
 
 *' So all that the old Dukes had been without knowing it, 
 This Duke would fain know he was, without being it. 
 'Twas not for the joy's self, but the joy of his showing it ; 
 Not for the pride's sake, but the pride of our seeing it, 
 He revived all usages thoroughly worn out, 
 The souls of them fumed forth, the hearts of them torn out." 
 
 A sly thrust one must feel is given here to mediaeval fashions 
 revived only because they were the fashion and not for use or beauty. 
 In days like these, when, another poet tells us, 
 
 " Every door is barr'd. with gold, and opens but to golden keys," 
 
 and services you do not require, and never requested, are thrust 
 upon you only in the hope of extorting some coin of the realm, it 
 
BROWNING AS A TEACHER OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. 289 
 
 is refreshing to read the protest against even an important service 
 being paid by silver or gold : — 
 
 " Dropped me — ah, had it been a purse 
 Of silver, my friend, or gold, that's worse, 
 Why you see as soon as I found myself 
 So understood — that a true heart so may gain 
 Such a reward — I should have gone home again 
 And soberly drowned myself." 
 
 The gipsy is the sign of the " great deliverance " which comes to 
 some in this day from deep convictions, or a call to work — anything 
 in fact which sets the soul free to choose its own path, whether of 
 thought or action, unbiased and untrammelled by other minds. 
 
 In Pictor Ignotus, the painter's art shrinks before the cold, 
 calculating appraising of the multitude : — 
 
 " Who summoned those cold faces that begun 
 To press on me, and judge me ? 
 And where they live needs must our pictures live. 
 And see their faces, listen to their prate, 
 Partakers of their daily pettiness ; . . . 
 At least no merchant traffics in my heart." 
 
 Words fit to be a motto of warning to be inscribed on the walls 
 of our Royal Academy, from which our noblest painters have been till 
 late excluded, and only those who could stoop their genius to things 
 vmderstanded of the multitude could enter. The right function of 
 art is given by the mouth of Lippo Lippi : — 
 
 " God's works — paint any one, and count it crime 
 To let a truth slip. 
 We're made so that we love 
 
 First when we see them painted, things we have passed 
 Perhaps a hundred times nor cared to see ; 
 And so they are better painted — better to us 
 Which is the same thing. Art was given for that. 
 God uses us to help each other, so 
 Sending our minds out " 
 
 painting so as to give a glimpse of the soul through right and true 
 delineation of its shrine. 
 
 The money-getting spirit of our time is the death of true Art 
 as well as of other things. 
 
 Most true it is of England now — 
 
 *' Your shop was all your house." 
 " He saw no use of life 
 
 But while he drove a roaring trade 
 To chuckle, ' Customers are rife.'" 
 
290 BROWNING AS A TEACHER OP THE NINETEENTH CENT-ITRT. 
 
 *' Friend, your good angel slept, your star 
 Suffered eclipse, fate did you wrong ! 
 From where these sorts of treasures are. 
 There should our hearts be — Christ, how far ? " 
 
 And far worse than being merely commercial, which might be a 
 glory, our system of trading is rotten to the core — through dishonesty, 
 and stUl more through our scamping of work, our working for show ; 
 whether it is in a defective bayonet, or in the intellectual world the 
 getting up subjects superficially by the aid of reviews; education 
 meaning passing such and such examinations, not awakening the 
 deep thirst for accurate knowledge which should be the end and 
 object of all study. To all the system of shams Browning calls, 
 " Stand and deliver. How far is your work good 1 What is its object, 
 its aim ? Never mind that it fails ; that it should be your best is your 
 sole concern." That is the tone in passages too many to quote that 
 Mr, Browning opposes to the pretence of work mental as well as 
 practical of our day, which is slowly but surely bringing a deep 
 retribution upon us in the pauperism which has its hold on the 
 country. 
 
 It is an age also of mediocrity, and of the conceit which accom- 
 panies mediocrity, every one thinking his or her experience of vital 
 importance, and as such to be communicated to the world at large by 
 means of a feeble book, or letter to the daily papers. Mr. Browning 
 corrects that mood of mind by showing the littleness of the 
 individual, and that the real ground for a true estimate of yourself 
 and your work is humility. 
 
 " 'Tis looking downward makes one dizzy." 
 " So you saw yourself as j'ou wished you were, 
 
 As you might have been, as you cannot be, 
 Earth here rebuked by Olympus there. 
 
 And grew content in your poor degree." 
 
 Old Pictures in Florence gives us our right place in life's history ; 
 we grow patient under our imperfection. " What's come to 2:>er/ection 
 perisJies," — still more that which imagines itself to have reached 
 perfection. It is in humility alone that all progress towards our 
 ideal lies. Our easy self-contentment, our want of aspiration, our 
 dead level of attainment, are the bane of high achievement. Truth 
 and humility, he teaches us, go hand in hand, while one of our chief 
 duties to the age is to be ourselves. It is a true wisdom which speaks 
 from the lips of Bishop Blougram : — 
 
BROWNING AS A TEACHER OP THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. 291 
 
 " The common problem — yours, mine, every one's 
 Is — not to fancy what were fair in life. 
 Provided it could be ; but finding first 
 What may be, then find out how to make it fair 
 Up to our means : a very different thing. " 
 
 To realise our limitation of gifts and graces is the first element 
 of growth. 
 
 As a correction to that sense of individual littleness comes the 
 realisation of brotherhood : — 
 
 " A people is but the attempt of many 
 To rise to the completer life of one ; 
 And those who live as models for the mas3 
 Are singly of more value than they all." 
 
 We get a note of patriotism from Browning which is as a trumpet- 
 call in a time when love of party and power — in short, self-interest — • 
 claims the place which love of country once held. Luria, A SouVs Tragedy y 
 The Patriot, in different tones speak the same spirit, and give the warn- 
 ing that he who would serve his fellow-men must expect as his reward 
 misunderstanding, ingratitude, and scorn ; and that his sole support 
 must be in the consciousness of his own integrity and God's approval ; 
 nay, even, he must sometimes go on in darkness without that ground 
 of confidence, as when, in Victor and Charles, his wife urges Charles 
 to the right course to keep his kingdom, and warns him that not only 
 must the deed " look wrong in the world's eye," but that 
 
 " 'Twill be only in moments that the duty's seen 
 As palpably as now — the months, the years, of painful 
 Indistinctness are to come." 
 
 " What matters happiness ? Duty — 
 There's man's one moment. This is yours." 
 
 But there is one question which cannot be left out in inquiring 
 how much Mr. Browning is in sympathy with the movements of 
 the time, and that is the progress of women ; and here I can only 
 bear witness to the gratitude women must feel with regard to his 
 attitude towards them. 
 
 He does not, like our other great poet, 
 
 " set a woman to man 
 Like perfect music unto noble words,' 
 
 u 2 
 
292 BROWNING AS A TEACHER OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. 
 
 or ask her to " yield herself up," 
 
 " Seeing either sex alone 
 Is half itself." 
 
 Mr. Browning does not waste words over defining woman's 
 position, he simply gives it her. I do not think one line can be found 
 implying that she is to gain "mental breadth" by contact with a man's 
 mind, and that her work must fail unless she has 
 
 " A helper me that know 
 The woman's cause is man's." 
 
 He treats men and women on a broad level of equality, judging 
 each individual according to merit, not sex. You can hardly see better 
 the position he accords to woman than by contrasting it with that 
 which Tennyson grants her. She is a being to be lectured, tutored, 
 guided, improved, generally weak until she has been linked long enough 
 to some man to gain strength by contact 
 
 •' Yoked in all exercise of noble end." 
 
 No man drawn by the latter ever owns " that his own small life 
 grew complete " in a woman's ; that " he must feel her brain prompt 
 his." 
 
 There is no shade of patronage in Mr. Browning's tone about women, 
 but a frank acknowledgment of mutual help and assistance between 
 them and men, a recognition of the friendship which is one of the 
 most helpful features of our time. Again and again it is a woman 
 who sees the truth, and impresses it on the men around. Polixena, as 
 we have seen, saw clear and distinct amidst all sophistries the line 
 Charles should take. Guendolen, in the Blot in the '/Scutcheon, has the 
 true instinct, and the whole tragedy might have been averted if her 
 voice could have prevailed. Pompilia's trust in Caponsacchi called 
 forth his chivalry, while even Ottima is stronger in her wickedness 
 than her weak pai-tner in sin. Only one of his women fails the man 
 she loves, and in failing wrecks him and herself — Constance in In a 
 Balcony. Little as Michal comes prominently before us, we know her 
 chiefly as an inspiration to Paracelsus. 
 
 No woman would have dared to claim for herself such superiority 
 in the quality of her love as Mr. Browning unhesitatingly assigns 
 to it in the mouth of the dying wife who says to her husband — 
 
 " Might I go last and show thee I " 
 
BROWNING AS A TEACHEU OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. 293 
 
 the immortality of love, how the lonely years would be lighted by the 
 memory of past happiness. 
 
 It is perhaps a digression to show here how different is the view 
 Mr. Browning takes of past happiness from that rendered by 
 Tennyson — 
 
 " A sorrow's crown of sorrow 
 Is remembering happier things." 
 
 Happiness he rather thinks the fittest preparation for endurance, and 
 believes that there are minds grateful, humble, and just enough to 
 realize that joy rightly received gives lasting good. " Glad for what 
 was." He drives home the lesson by the melon-seller in Ferishfah's 
 Fancies, who from his present misery lifts a brow "luminous and 
 imperial " at the remembrance of the years he basked in royal favour 
 and enjoyed the good of life. Healthy souls can stand such teaching. 
 With all Browning's vast sympathy and penetration into the deeper 
 woes of the soul, he has no weakening pity for the morbid mind 
 which hugs its grief. " Ich habe gelebt und geliebt," he would say, 
 and rejoice that pain at least had brought experience. 
 
 And it is that healthy tone, free from sentimentality, which 
 makes his view of love so essentially that which suits our day. 
 Passionate, reverential, as it is, holding in its entirety its rightful 
 supremacy, it is always manly, never morbid, and always in its 
 deepest anguish or joy realizes that love is only one of the great 
 factors in life's experience. All is not lost because his individual life 
 is not completed. Though he knows his fate — ■ 
 
 " My whole heart rises up to bless 
 Your name in pride and thankfulness." 
 
 And though in that last ride his sense of loss is deepened, yet his 
 mind is quickened to sympathy with the sum of human pain, and 
 insufficiency, and failure, and he holds himself in check, remembering 
 that all lots, however ideal, have some flaw, some goal beyond 
 unattained. 
 
 The sense is never wanting, I think, in his most passionate 
 utterances, of a firm hand upon himself, as if he never lost sight of 
 the other side, the possible disenchantment. Also he recognizes to 
 the full the right of every individual soul to withhold the gift he 
 craves, realizes that there may be no responsive thrill, no magnetism 
 answering to his own ; the humility of true love is never wanting. 
 
 No picture of love has been drawn for us, I venture to think, 
 
294 BEOWNING AS A TEACHER OF THE NINETEENTH CENTUKT. 
 
 which combines in itself the perfections of different phases with all 
 that men and women of the noblest type have grown to demand 
 now. 
 
 It has a touch of old-world chivalry that would stand at nothing — • 
 
 ' ' Is she wronged ? To the rescue of her honour, 
 My heart ! 
 Is she poor ? What costs it to become a donour I 
 There an earth to cleave, a sea to part." 
 
 It idealizes the object loved, and sees beauty where none exists, as in 
 Too Late, and James Lee^s Wife. It has a tender reverence, as in The 
 Lost Mistress ; a rare pathos, as in May and Death. Its foundation 
 must be truth — 
 
 ' ' Truth is the strong thing. 
 Let man's life be true ! 
 And love's the truth of mine." 
 
 It includes friendship, which is the heart of true love. 
 
 "Friends— lovers that might have been." 
 
 It only fails when honour and trust are dead — 
 
 " Love you lose 
 Slain by what slays in you the honour." 
 
 And yet it can be very patient. It endures faults, misunderstandings 
 
 pleads — 
 
 " Bear with a moment's spite. 
 What of a hasty word ? " 
 
 because it lies deeper than outside difference. 
 It is undying, for eternity — 
 
 " In the worst of a storm's uproar 
 I shall pull her through the door ; 
 I shall have her for evermore." 
 
 Its passion would sweep all before it, but for the under-current of 
 humility and self-control, as in The Lost Mistress — 
 
 " Friends the merest keep much that I resign." 
 
 It is a love that asks no reward, that is not self-seeking. Lady 
 Carlisle says — 
 
 " Ah, have I spared 
 
 Strafford a pang, and shall I seek reward 
 
 Beyond that memory ? " 
 
BROWNING AS A TEACHER OP THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. 295 
 
 and still more forcibly "Valence — 
 
 " "Who thought upon reward ? Aud yet how much 
 Comes after ! oh what amplest recompense ! 
 Is the knowledge of her nought ? the memory nought ? 
 Lady, should such an one have looked on you 
 Ne'er wrong yourself so far as quote the world 
 And say love can go unrequited here ! 
 You will have blessed him to his whole life's end — 
 Low passions hindered, baser cares kept back : 
 Where self-love makes such room for love for you 
 He would not serve you now 
 The vulgar way." 
 
 And enfolding all, like the setting of the jewel, is an element of pure 
 self-sacrifice — mutual, not one-sided — but expressed, if anything, more 
 strongly on the man's side, not expected only from the woman — 
 
 ' ' One to count night day for me 
 
 Patient through the watches long, 
 Serving most with none to see." 
 
 " I will speak thy speech, Love, 
 Think thy thought. 
 Meet, if thou require it, 
 Both demands." 
 
 Mr. Browning presents us, then, with an ideal picture of love fitted 
 for this age in its manly self-i'especting tone, one which really 
 deserves a paper to itself, and not to be glanced at superficially in 
 passing. 
 
 It follows as a matter of course that no one lashes as he does 
 the sin of a careless marriage. Wlienever I read the Ring and the 
 Book, I am surprised that the fashionable and conventional world 
 have not long ago risen to demand that it should be withdrawn from 
 the list of circulating libraries, and I only ascribe its not having 
 done so to the fact that it is unread, and so the story of Pompilia, 
 which in its main detail is being re-enacted every day, does not reach 
 those who should profit by its warning against the mere sordid 
 bargains which pass for marriages only too often — 
 
 " Marriage making for the earth. 
 With gold so much, birth, power, repute. 
 Or beauty — youth so much in so much lack of these." 
 
 Youth and Art shows again what might have been to two souls 
 who missed their life's happiness through worldliness — 
 
 " Each life's unfulfilled you see ; 
 We have not sighed deep, laughed free, 
 Starved, feasted, despaired — been heppy "— 
 
296 BEOVTN-I^-G AS A TEACHER OF THE XIXETEENTH CENTURY. 
 
 aud from the Pope's mouth come the strongest words on the ruia 
 and havoc the greed for money produces where it enters into the 
 question of mai-riage — 
 
 " Not one permissible impulse mores the man. 
 From the mere hking of the eye and ear 
 To the true longing of the heart that loves. 
 All is the lust for money — to get gold — 
 Why he, rob, if it must be murder ! Slake 
 Body and soul bring gold out, lured -nithin 
 The clutch of hate by love, the trap's pretence. 
 So have success by marriage undertaken in God's face 
 "With all these lies so opposite God's truth." 
 
 One point, the last of the practical questions I may take here, La 
 conjunction with Guido's crime, and notice how strongly Mr. Browning 
 puts the argument in favour of capital punishment — 
 
 " For the main criminal I have no hope 
 Except in suddenness of fate ; 
 So may the ti-uth be flashed out by one blow. 
 And Guide see, one instant, and be saved." 
 
 Death we see as the great revealer, alike to the sinner and the 
 saint. For Guido says — 
 
 " You never know what life means till you die. 
 Even throughout life 'tis death that makes life Uve, 
 Gives it whatever the significance." 
 
 Whilst to Pompilia, death shows 
 
 ' ' how needful now 
 Of understanding somewhat of my past. 
 Know hfe a httle, I should leave so soon ; 
 Nay, got foretaste too 
 Of better life beginning where this ends." 
 
 Death is ever to Mr. Browning a friend to be met open-eyed — 
 
 " I wotdd hate that death bandaged my eyes — and forbore 
 And bade me creep past." 
 
 Death is to him the filling up of life — 
 
 " Let age approve of youth, and death complete the same." 
 
 Death is the moment of true vision — 
 
 " Wait till life have jiassed horn out the world. ' 
 
BROWNING AS A TEACHER OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. 297 
 
 II. 
 
 When we turn to the second division, and take the deeper thoughts 
 which influence character and action, first on the threshold stands the- 
 question which the deep-seated pessimism of the day is ever asking : 
 " Is life worth living 'i " Mr. Browning's answer is unhesitating : 
 " Thanks that I am a man ; " and yet it is not an answer given in 
 ignorance of the tremendous odds against us at the present time — 
 the aggregate mass of suffering and misery brought home to us as 
 never before, which we are more highly strung ourselves to encounter, 
 the tension of life being greater enhancing our power to suffer. No 
 one more entirely understands the anguish of living than he does. 
 There is one line which sums it all up and accentuates it as whole 
 poems could never do — 
 
 " Only I discern 
 Infinite paesion, and the pain of finite hearts that yearn." 
 
 '* Most progress " means for many at the present day *' most 
 failure." The sense that death may come ere life's task is half 
 done, that those fall from our side who are most needed, most fitted 
 to achieve good for their fellows and to help the race, that evil 
 overmasters good, — all these sources of discouragement Mr. Browning 
 faces, and suggests comfort for. Death is not the end, he argues,, 
 from probability and past experience — • 
 
 " Some fitter way express. 
 Heart's satisfaction that the Past indeed 
 Is past, gives way before Life's best and last, 
 The all-including Future. Soul 
 Nothing has been which shall not bettered be hereafter." 
 
 The remedy is to 
 
 " Let things be, not seem, 
 
 I counsel rather. Do and no wise dream. 
 
 Cheer up. Be death with me of man's calamities the last and worst ; 
 
 What once lives never dies, 
 
 What here attains to a beginning has no end, still gains 
 
 And never loses aught : when, where, and how lies in Law's lap." 
 
 But we are in such a hurry to reach perfection, to put an end to- 
 our condition of probation, to reach the goal — 
 
 " No as with body so deals law with soul, 
 That, stung to strength thro' weakness, strives for good 
 Thro' evil, earth its race-ground, Heaven its goal, 
 Presumably." 
 
298 BROWNING AS A TEACHER OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. 
 
 If Cleon felt that there must be a hereafter where fruition and 
 -fulfilment should consummate the attempts and failures of earth — 
 
 " I dare at times imagine to my need 
 Some future state unlimited in capability 
 For joy as this is in desire for joy. 
 To seek wliicli the joy hunger forces us : 
 That stung by straitness of our life, made strait 
 On purpose to make prized the life at large, 
 Freed by the throbbing impulse we call death, 
 We burst there as the worm into the fly " — 
 
 how much more shall we, with a deeper experience to judge from, 
 
 feel that it is 
 
 •' God's task to make the heavenly period 
 Perfect the earthen ; " 
 
 and bear patiently our state of limitation here. 
 
 Mr. Browning's warnings against the impatience and hurry of 
 the age are very strong, at least that I interpret (it may be wrongly) 
 to be one of the striking lessons Bordello's life is meant to convey. 
 
 And curiously, the Spectator accuses Mr. Browning himself of the 
 faults of the time. It says : — " The impatience and excitability proper 
 to an age of inquisitiveness and of change have had their effect on 
 our poetry. They have left the mark of hurry on one of our greatest 
 and most powerful thinkers, Mr. Browning, who ventriloquises for us 
 under a hundred different masks without perfecting more than a 
 tenth part of his work." If this is a true charge, it is an interesting 
 example of what we see every day. A teacher warns people against 
 a fault which perhaps it needs little insight to recognise as one of his 
 own ; the greater number cry, " How inconsistent ! " Only a few clearer- 
 eyed, from a sympathy born of self-knowledge, say, "He has learnt 
 that knowledge through many a wrestling match ; ay, through many 
 a fall and defeat, in striving for a mastery not yet attained." 
 
 Can anyone achieve a perfect limitation in this crowded stage 
 of the world's history. We are out of breath with the demands upon 
 us, other times had their own natural limitations, we have to make 
 our own, a life's study of itself, disturbed by the criticism under which 
 the most reserved life has to attempt to live. Concentration is a 
 task seemingly beyond our power, since every work and vocation is 
 now a tangled thread of many strands. 
 
 From Sordello's story we see how a man of less genius than his, 
 ♦but of more concentrated purpose, fulfils his vocation and serves his 
 
BROWNING AS A TEACHER OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY, 299 
 
 age better than a man of glorious gifts who dissipates his power by 
 scattering it on divided aims. Near the end of his life Sordello saw 
 his mistake — 
 
 " His truth rose again, and naked at liis feet 
 Lighted his old life's every shift and change, 
 Effort with counter- effort ; nor the range 
 Of each looked wrong except wherein it checked 
 Some other — which of these could he suspect, 
 Prying into them by the sudden blaze, 
 The real way seemed made up of all the ways. 
 Mood after mood of the one mind in him ; 
 Tokens of the existence bright or dim 
 Of a transcendent all-embracing sense 
 Demanding only outward influence. 
 A soul, in Palma's phrase, above his soul. 
 Power to uplift his power — the moon's control 
 Over the sea depths — and their mass had swept 
 Onward from the beginning and still kept 
 Its course ; but years and years the sky above 
 Held none, and so untasked of any love 
 His sensitiveness idled and .... 
 
 .... disposed itself anew 
 At every passing instigation grew and dwindled at caprice, 
 
 "Not gathered up and hurled 
 Right from his heart encompassing the world. 
 So had Sordello been without a function by consequence. 
 
 " Others made pretence 
 To strength not half his own, yet had some core 
 Within submitted to some moon before 
 Them, still superior, still whate'er their force 
 Were able therefore to fulfil a course. 
 Nor missed life's crown, authentic attribute, 
 To each who lives must be a certain fruit 
 Of having lived in his degree." 
 
 Circumstances and the manifold endowments of his varied genius 
 had mastered Sordello. He had not ruled them by a purpose high 
 above his life to control it "as the moon the tides," consequently some 
 feebler, less gifted man had a power beyond his, because it was 
 " gathered up and hurled right from the heart." 
 
 Sordello, arraigning himself at his own tribunal, tells us that " no 
 mere human love or hate " would " equal prove to swaying all Sordello." 
 He needed a power above and beyond himself and his moods. Because 
 he lacked that Divine influence controlling and guiding him, " the 
 Best " eluded him, " might be and was not." 
 
 Sordello also failed because he did not balance body and soul. They 
 
300 BROWNING AS A TEACHER OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. 
 
 were at cross purposes, and did not mutually support and aid each 
 other. It is a lesson which a few souls need perhaps in every age, 
 those who are most finely, sensitively strung, who could dream life 
 away in gazing into the vast Beyond till they " touch earth only on 
 tip-toe," Such souls have dangers all their own, they are not under- 
 stood by those around them for the most part, and their unbalanced 
 natures lay them open to misconception. It is the history of many a 
 wrecked life, the secret of many a mood in our own lives difficult to 
 understand. The spiritual exaltation has been too powerful for the 
 body to sustain, and inconsistencies and eccentricities are its natural 
 revenge. Body and spirit have not been taught and trained so to 
 sustain the foi'ce of man's soul, and all crash together because they 
 have not learnt the secret of balance. Many need that lesson because 
 of the tension and pressure of the present time. A warning to our- 
 selves, it furnishes us with an excuse for others with minds of a high 
 order who have made shipwreck on this rock. 
 
 *' What made the secret of his past despair ? 
 This. Soul on Matter being tlirust, 
 Joy comes when so much Soul is wreaked in Tiina 
 On Matter. Let the Soul's attempt, sublime 
 Matter beyond the scheme, and so prevent 
 By more or less that deed's accomplishment. 
 And sorrow follows. Sorrow how avoid ? 
 Let the employer match the things employed 
 Fit to the finite his infinity." 
 
 The soul 
 
 *' Had fain conveyed her boundless 
 To the body's bounded lot. 
 And the poor body soon sinks 
 Under what was meaut a woudrous boon, 
 Leaving its bright accomplice all aghast." 
 
 It is a marvellous picture the poet has drawn for us of the times 
 all of a higher sensibility must experience when body and soul are at 
 strife, the one overwhelmed with the other ; the soul has urged both 
 body and intellect onward beyond their capacity, and the consequence 
 is that the finite is unequal to sustain the Infinite, and an anguish 
 almost incommunicable is the result, which threatens disaster and 
 destruction. 
 
 Then the poet, speaking in his own person, gives the assurance 
 
BROWNING AS A TEACHER OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. 301 
 
 chat to uphold this wondrous union there needs a third, the Divine, 
 to hold body and soul in a union safe and sure — 
 
 " The Human clear as that Divine concealed 
 "What utter need ! " 
 
 This want of balance is one reason of the inconsistencies of those 
 who aim highest and fail most palpably, but there are other causes, 
 and Mr. Browning gives them most forcibly by the mouth of the old 
 Pope in the Ring and the Booh. All that they once held firm and 
 strong has become merely a form of words with them — held, but having 
 no influence on their lives, because they pride themselves on having 
 attained ; their creed does all for them, having been once grasped. 
 " Religious parasites," Mr. Browning calls them, theirs is the 
 
 " Vice o' the watcher who bides near the bell, 
 Sleeps sound because the clock is vigilant." 
 
 They stand on their past achievements, and care comparatively 
 little for the continuing growing life which can alone prevent achieve- 
 ment and creed from becoming dead letters. 
 
 In every party in the Church, in every sect, some are to be found 
 who hold a form of sound words, the cardinal article of their faith, 
 from which all life — so far is it from having an influence on their 
 character or work — has fled. 
 
 The tale is told of one who visited Huguenot confessors in the 
 galleys, one of their own creed, and he found to his inexpressible grief 
 that the truths for which they had suffered had lost all force and 
 power to them, for the 
 
 " Moral sense grows but by exercise." 
 Resting on past experience is fatal — 
 
 " Have we not fought, bled, left our martyr mark ? " 
 The pity of it is, as the Pope goes on to say, summing up the 
 successive disappointments he had experienced from Archbishop, 
 simple monks, nuns, — all having come short of their high professions, — 
 that— 
 
 " It would be sad if in a philosopher ; 
 What is it when suspected in that Power 
 Who ordained salvation for man, bod}-, and soul ? " 
 
 '" Shall he wish back that thrill of dawn 
 When the whole truth touched man, burned up one fire." 
 
 ' ' The frail become the perfect rapt 
 From glory of pain to glory of joy." 
 
 '* Was this too easy for our after stage '. " 
 
30'2 BROWNING AS A TEACHER OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. 
 
 Mr. Browning recognizes that those less complicated ages were 
 much easier when martyrdom was the touchstone. Now man has to 
 walk — 
 
 " Bearing to see the liglit of Heaven still more 
 And more encroaclied on by the light of earth, 
 Earthly incitements that mankind serve God 
 For man's sole sake, not God's and therefore man's. 
 The world smiles. It is the politic, the thrifty way. 
 Will clearly make you in the end returns." 
 
 What is the remedy for this new Pharisaicism ] What will 
 uproot this " ignoble confidence " 1 
 
 By many different voices jNIr. Browning gives the answer : " Test 
 your faith." Doubt that martyrdom to some minds perhaps will 
 
 " shake 
 This torpor of assurance from our creed, 
 Ee-introduce the doubt discarded." 
 
 And here comes in one of the chief teachings of Mr. Browning : he 
 does not divide the world off into good and bad ; there is no sharp 
 dividing line between the saint and the sinner ; both have to stand 
 at the bar of a deeper judgment than that of man. 
 
 Hidden motives and springs of thought are dragged out till, 
 testing himself by an entirely new standard, 
 
 " Correcting the portrait by the living face, 
 Man's God by God's God," 
 
 each man feels he is one of those 
 
 ' ' Whose very sofls even now 
 Seem to need re-creating." 
 
 E,e-creating we do need in this age of unreality, when it is so hard to 
 see ourselves truly. 
 
 Mr. Browning teaches us to welcome the day of awakening in 
 whatever form it may come, thankful even for sorest temptation — 
 
 " Was the trial sore ? temptation sharp ? 
 Thank God a second time .... 
 Learning anew the use of soldiership, 
 Self-abnegation, freedom from all fear, 
 Loyalty to the life's end ! Ruminate, 
 Deserve the initiatory spasm once more. 
 Work, be unhappy, but bear life, my son." 
 
BROWNING AS A TEACHER OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. 303 
 
 But if old standards of a flawless exterior are to be distrusted,, 
 what is the real test ] 
 
 It lies deeper than man's judgment can see, in the 
 
 " seed of act, 
 God holds appraising in His hollow palm ; 
 Kot act grown great ; thence on the world below 
 Leafage and branchage, vulgar eyes admire ; 
 Therefore I stand on my integrity, 
 Nor fear at all." 
 
 And fearlessly Mr. Browning dares to set before us a pendant to the 
 group we have already seen drawn for us by the Pope, who fell 
 short — were moral cowards — just where their profession should have 
 bid them show courage and disinterestedness, in those who dared to 
 brave the world's opinion, to act in the face of received traditions, in 
 simple faith, firm in the integrity of their true-heartedness. 
 
 It seems as if Mr. Browning revelled in the contemplation of 
 simple hearts without one touch of morbidness ; as if — skilful dissector 
 and delineator of the most subtle mysteries of the human heart as he 
 is — he turned, con amore, to draw in many a different guise and form 
 those who, free from paralyzing self -questionings, see their duty plain 
 and do it. Pippa, Michal, Polixena, Colombe, Pompilia, Caponsacchi, 
 Norbert, Ivan, with his " How otherwise 1 " are types of that direct,, 
 earnest nature which can say with Pompilia — 
 
 " I know the right place by foot's feel. 
 I took it, and tread firm there." 
 
 It is the stuff of which fanatics — "earth's fanatics, but heaven's saints" 
 — are made : they hear the one call, and respond to that, and heed 
 not the voices around them which would lure them into other paths ; 
 and their way is easier because of its directness. 
 
 This age of ours, with all its subtler temptations, has had a few 
 stars which have shone luminous and 
 
 " Shown sufficient of God's light 
 For us i' the dark to rise by." 
 
 The directer natures have Mr. Browning's admiration ; the more 
 complex ones his sympathy and help, to guide them to those juster 
 judgments and decisions which have to take the place of fine instinct,^ 
 by which the happier souls are led. 
 
304 BROWXING AS A TEACHER OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. 
 
 To that bar of Divine judgment, out of the world's deafening 
 chorus of praise and blame, so ignorant where it thinks itself so wise, 
 he calls us, reminding us how worthless all human judgment is — 
 
 ** Our human speech is uouglit, 
 Our human testimony false, our fame 
 And human estimation words and wind." 
 
 " He fears God, why then need he fear the world ? " 
 
 Over and over again does Mr. Browning impress this lesson upon 
 us, as if sometimes he had no other that he wished so much to drive 
 home into our hearts, to be our shield against a cruel world — 
 
 " The inward work and worth 
 Of any mind what other mind may judge 
 Save God, who only knows the thing He made. 
 The veritable service He exacts." 
 
 Mr. Browning, in the defence which Caponsacchi makes for 
 himself, boldly confronts a point which is a matter of unspeakable 
 surprise and discouragement, more especially in the present time, i.e. 
 that great reforms for good, courageous warfare against crying evils, 
 have to be carried on more or less by lonely workers in the teeth of 
 an opposition which does not come only from the avowed enemies of 
 good, but from those bound by every claim to help them. In a recent 
 life written we see how cruel was the disappointment at the desertion 
 of natural friends. The reviling of the world is comparatively 
 easy to endure. It is the unexpected indifference and cowardice of 
 those from whom sympathy would naturally be expected that cuts 
 to the heart. 
 
 " I heard last time I stood here to be judged 
 Wbat is priests' duty — labour to pluck tares 
 ind weed the corn of Molinism. — Let me 
 Make you hear this time how in such a case 
 Man, be he in the priesthood or at j)lough. 
 Mindful of Christ, or marching step by step, 
 How he is bound better or worse to act. 
 For you and others hke you sure to come 
 Fresh work is sure to follow — wickedness 
 That wants withstanding. " 
 
 That is the choice which in various ways comes home to many, 
 between the mere life of thought and culture, and descending to 
 
BROWNING AS A TEACHER OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. 305 
 
 grapple with deadly forms of evil, " withstanding wickedness " 
 perishing, if need be, with the people in doing it. 
 
 There is no hesitation in Mr. Browning's tone as to the need of 
 brotherhood to Avhich we are called. Not only in " plucking out tares 
 or weeding out Molinism," and whatever stands for it now, lies duty — 
 
 " Duty to God is duty to her." 
 
 Caponsacchi "thought the other way — self-sacriiice " — till he learnt 
 that to save a fellow-ci*eature, even if he undid himself in the doing it, 
 
 " Was the true sealed up the perfect man." 
 
 The lesson is repeated in Ferishtalis Fancies ; it is unmistakably 
 insisted that these are not the days when a man may wrap himself 
 in selfish isolation of thought and culture — 
 
 " Since they are days when men congregate in towns not woods. " 
 
 There lies the part of the thinker. His thought will be richer 
 because it stimulates thought in those from whose lives it is crowded 
 out. Life's current will run deeper for the man that holds culture, 
 art, beauty, all that can enrich the charmed circle of his home for 
 others, and not only for himself. 
 
 These are the days when in a true socialism the best antidote can 
 be found for much that threatens to wreck society. 
 
 * ' Let throngs press thee to me 
 Up and down amid men, heart by heart fare we. 
 Welcome squalid vesture, harsh voice, hateful face ; 
 God is soul, souls I and thou, with souls should souls have peace." 
 
 It is most interesting to notice in studying Mr. Browning, how, as 
 it were, for fear of exaggerating one side of truth, he turns round 
 and gives you another point, correcting and keeping in check the 
 former view. Till this manner of his is understood, it seems as if 
 he were contradictory. You read one poem, and are, after much 
 thought, of one mind with him ; and you take up another, and he 
 turns round and faces yovi, almost as a perverse mind will sometimes 
 do for the sake of argument when you thought it in agreement with 
 your own. 
 
 Thus in the same volume, in the poem called the Two Camels, 
 he takes quite the other side, and corrects the morbid scruples of 
 those who now — when theories like those propounded in " England's 
 
306 BROWNING AS A TEACnEK OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. 
 
 Ideal " are rife, and Thoreau's life is held up as the true ideal to 
 which we should one and all return — hardly enjoy anything for 
 themselves, asking how they can in any degree feast whilst others 
 fast. 
 
 The same principle, he would say, holds good for enjoyment as 
 for abstinence. To 
 
 Tlie squeamish scruple, 
 
 What imports fasting or feasting ?" 
 
 The answer comes — 
 
 Do thy day's work, dare refuse no help thereto, 
 Since help refused is hindrance sought and found. ' 
 
 And aofain — 
 
 " Desire joy, and thank God for it. 
 Renounce it if needs be for others' sake, 
 Tliat's joy beyond joy." 
 
 Not abstinence from and indifference to God's gifts for the mere 
 sake of asceticism, but receiving that we may hand on, knowing 
 the value of the gift we give ; tasting that we may sympathise the 
 more — • 
 
 " The richness, hearted in such joy 
 Is in the knowing what are gifts we give." 
 
 "We are nearer to God in giving than in receiving, he says in Bahhi 
 hen Ezra — • 
 
 " Rejoice we are allied 
 To that which doth provide 
 And not partake, effect and not receive. 
 A spark disturbs our clod. 
 Nearer we hold of God 
 Who gives than of His Tribes that take I must believe. " 
 
 And here in Rabhi hen Ezra we have a corrective to that spirit 
 of reform which takes possession of a philanthropic age to the 
 exclusion of all care for self-discipline, when there is much hurry 
 to set other people's minds and houses in order, while the reformer's 
 own house and mind are in urgent need of attention. 
 
 In a recent short paper the complaint was made that except in 
 the verso I have just quoted there is no touch of Altruism in the 
 poem. But surely it has the highest Altruism in its argument — 
 that our best tribute to the world is to be our highest selves, 
 
BROWNING AS A TEACHER OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. 307 
 
 to learn by our experience a humility which comes from frequent 
 failure of reaching our ideal — and a divine dissatisfaction with our 
 own achievement which is the spur to perpetual progress. 
 
 Pijypa Passes is the complement of Rabbi ben Ezra — being your 
 highest, best self, whether by conscious struggle, or in the unconscious 
 goodness of a child-like nature, you touch and influence more than 
 you know. 
 
 " There was no duty patent in the world 
 Like daring try be good and true myself." 
 
 Mr. Browning never crowds the whole duty of man into a single 
 poem ; he gives one truth clear and sharp, and enforces it as if there 
 were no other for the time being ; but he will not let those who want the 
 other side of that same truth escape, he pursues and confronts them 
 with their lesson in another poem. It would be an interesting study 
 to see how often this is the case. 
 
 To take one example. In Bifurcation he gives us, it seems to me, the 
 complement to the story of Caponsacchi in a warning against a false 
 self-sacrifice, very specious and most tempting to some minds. As in 
 the Two Camels he blames asceticism for its own sake, so here it 
 is self-sacrifice for the sake of self-sacrifice he counts most dangerous. 
 He fights against the morbid idea that because a path is attractive 
 therefore it must be wrong, and shows we have no right to save our 
 own soul at the expense of another's, wrecking their life that we may 
 feel comfortable, destroying trust and hope in one fell blow, thinking 
 that 
 
 " Heaven will repair what wrong earth's journey did." 
 
 To all morbidness Mr. Browning's theories of life are the best tonic ; 
 and his optimism (which has often been dwelt on) is not of that 
 provokingly persistent cheerful nature which refuses to recognise pain 
 and suffering, and denies their very existence. He realises to the full 
 the varied forms of misery and anguish at the present time, and if he 
 cannot give an absolute answer hints at the line whence comfort may 
 spring. To some minds his solutions are fully satisfying, to others 
 they are not. But in the fact of the recognition of trial there is much 
 comfort, especially in questions which involve doubt and bewilderment 
 often shirked and put aside by teachers. Mr. Browning shirks 
 nothing, owns the difficulty, almost the despair. Especially is this so 
 in one of his latest volumes, where he speaks of a trial under which 
 some souls lose faith and heart altogether, i.e., the seeming victory 
 
 Y 9 
 
308 BROWNING AS A TEACHER OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. 
 
 of evil over good, while God stands as it were aloof and does not 
 interpose. 
 
 The bitterness of such a trial is clearly put forth— 
 
 •' No stirring of God's Finger to denote 
 He wills that right should have supremacy 
 On earth, not wrong. How helpful could we quote 
 But one poor instance when He interposed 
 Promptly and surely and beyond mistake 
 Between oppression and its victim, closed 
 Accounts with sin for once, and bade us wake 
 From our long dream that justice bears no sword." 
 
 Mr. Browning fully owns that " it is a sore to soothe not chafe," and 
 suggests comfort after his kind which satisfies some minds for a while 
 in the reminder that we are asking to understand what is beyond us 
 
 " Man with the narrow mind must cram inside 
 His finite God's infinitude." 
 
 He points to the analogy of natural law, how the child grows to be 
 the man through " infancy's probation" — 
 
 " By foiled darings, fond attempts back driven, 
 Fine faults of growth, brave sins which saint when shriven ; " 
 
 he does not 
 
 " stand full statured in magnificence. 
 No, as with body so deals law with soul. 
 That, stung to strength through weakness, strives for good 
 Through evil, earth its race-ground, Heaven its goal, 
 Presumably." 
 
 Failure, JNIr. Browning argues, is the natural condition of earth, 
 failure which God as man deigned to share with men ; it is the old cry 
 repeated by those who cannot understand " the force of weakness 
 which shakes the world"; " Let Him come down from the cross ; " 
 " Let Him save Himself, and Ave will believe Him." 
 
 In the " Epistle," the poet shows with all his dramatic power 
 the light in which the Christ appeared to those who could not 
 pierce the veil of His humanity ; he dares to show that it is only the 
 Supreme, the Almighty, who could in consciousness of Omnipotence 
 dare to seem to fail, in knowledge of final victory. 
 
 And nearest of all to the Divine, he holds those who, full of a holy 
 audacity, true to their own vinswerving inner truth of motive, move 
 untouched by blame or praise in a higher atmosphere than their 
 
BROWNING AS A TEACHER OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. 309 
 
 fellows who can be swayed by the world's voice. Failure to such is a 
 closer co-operation with the Divine, for every demand made upon our 
 faith, our endurance, and generosity, marks our relationship to the 
 Highest, and is an assurance of our own immortality, when the pain 
 of the finite will become the joy of the Infinite, and failure here is a 
 pledge of success there, a very token of sonship — 
 
 '* What is a failure here, but a triumph's evidence 
 For the fulness of the days 1 " 
 
 Experience gained below is our best equipment for fuller life above. 
 
 To gather up the threads of this desultory paper, I must revert to 
 my original proposition, which was to show from Mr, Browning's own 
 words how fully he is in sympathy with the age, how far he ministers 
 to its varied needs, and how firmly he corrects its faulty tendencies. 
 
 How far I have succeeded in my task I leave others to decide. 
 
310 
 
 '' saul; 
 
 By anna M. STODDAKT. 
 
 Bead at the Fifty-ninth Meeting of the Browning Society, Friday, 
 May 25, 1888. 
 
 David tells over to himself, so that no detail shall have time to 
 escape his memory, a wonderful adventure that happened to him the 
 afternoon and evening before, when he was led by a splendid emotional 
 intuition to prophesy as an essential element of the nature of God 
 the saving power of divine love able and willing to suffer for man 
 overwhelmed by the baleful pressure of life, as man may suffer for 
 man. He believes the prediction and proceeds to tell over, " his voice 
 to his heart," the chain of incidents which led to this marvel and 
 through which he was hurried the evening before. He had no time 
 to pause then, to consider whence came the impulse, whither it tended. 
 He knows that every incident was real, has happened, but he knows 
 that when real things are so rare, so exalted as these are, they are 
 elusive too, may "evanish like sleep." 
 
 He wakes, as day dawns, in a cool covert of the valley of the 
 Kidron. The brook flows along the deep gorge it has cut in the sun- 
 stricken hills to the west of the Dead Sea and makes its way thither 
 amidst groves of low trees, thickets of oleanders and tamarisks, and a 
 rich luxuriance of irises, scillas and other blossoms of early summer. 
 The sun is fierce by day, but the nights are cool and dewy, the early 
 mornings fresh. 
 
 He is alone, as he loves to be, for the keeper who had charge of 
 the flock during his absence at the camp has gone back to Bethlehem. 
 
ANNA M. STODDART. " SAUL." 311 
 
 "We can see him, as he sits there, a slender lad quick of movement, 
 his grey eyes humid and dilated, his hair of reddish gold, his face and 
 form instinct with magnetic gentleness and tenderness. He is one 
 with the nature that he loves, the birds flutter near him, the timid 
 creatures of the sand and thickets leap and dart about him, heedless 
 of his presence. Donatello, that sculptor of delicate insight, has 
 movalded for us just such a David. His harp lies near him untouched, 
 and yet he is wont to strike it in praise of God when he awakes at 
 dawn, for to God rise day and night his sweetest songs. He is so near 
 to God in his solitude that he communes with Him all the time, his 
 reveries are all eloquent of God. But this adventure is too strange 
 for praise as yet, — it has to be grasped, realised first, and his heart 
 still throbbing with awe, he calls on his memory to retrace its every 
 circumstance. A messenger from the camp had come to Bethlehem 
 yesterday, desiring him from Abner, the king's cousin, to come at 
 once with his harp, for Saul was ill, — and once before at the king's 
 house at Gibeah he had played and won him back to health. His 
 father had sent a keeper to take his place with the sheep and bade 
 him follow the messenger to Elah, for there was no time to lose. He 
 plucked a handful of blue irises and twined their broad leaves round 
 the strings of his harp to shield them from the fierce heat of his 
 journey over that desolate region where the sterile hills lie exposed to 
 the glare of noon, and the very stones and sand of the valleys are so 
 scorched that part of it is known as the Valley of Fire. He reached 
 the camp however fresh with the zeal to serve that filled him, and as 
 he stood before Abner, his presence drew from the king's cousin that 
 wonderful welcome in which joy and hope were mingled with love 
 and reverent admiration : 
 
 " Yet now my heart leaps, beloved ! God's child with his dew 
 On thy gracious gold hair, and those lilies still living and blue, 
 Just broken to twine round thy harp-strings, as if no wild heat 
 Were now raging to torture the desert ! " 
 
 The story was soon told. Three days and nights had Saul re- 
 mained in the royal pavilion, unapproachable, giving no sign, in the 
 agony of that sti-ange illness which overcame him now from time to 
 time, and which seemed to his courtiers like the descent upon him of 
 an evil spirit. 
 
 The attacks had come ever since his calamitous estrangement from 
 Samuel. The two strong natures had come into collision and the 
 stern seer had withdrawn the divine guidance of which he was the 
 
312 
 
 ANNA M. STODDART. 
 
 channel from the king. Left to himself, Saul, whose headstrong 
 pride was complicated with an invincible faith in God and sense of 
 His sovereignty, suffered awful relapses into despair. He endured, 
 as a fallen angel might have done, the agonies of a helplessness at 
 which his pride rebelled, but which his faith brought home to him. 
 The Hebrew mind had evolved no consoling philosophy for humanity 
 in such straits ; it was wanting in the dainty flimsiness which can 
 seriously find sufficient guidance in modern Epicureanism ; its ardent 
 faith in its own soul made the development of a calm Stoicism 
 impossible ; its capacity to conceive of God barred the way to 
 Positivism, — all these brave succours to man at war with God were 
 to come later to faith-atrophied peoples in other lands. The Jews 
 had no middle course, they were safe in the hands of God or wrecked 
 in their own. Saul had made his choice and was wrecked. After 
 a short communing with God, David made his way to the mid-tent, ap- 
 proached through one which formed its antechamber. He had to grope 
 his way unaided by artificial light and coming from the glare of the 
 afternoon with eyes too dazzled to profit by the half-light, which 
 the thick dark hangings of the pavilion permitted to filter through. 
 When he reached the hangings of the inner tent, he sought courage 
 again in prayer, " and opened the foldskirts and entered and was not 
 afraid." At first he could see nothing, and no answer came to his 
 gentle announcement, " Here is David, thy servant." Gradually 
 his eyes grew used to the obscurity, he distinguished the great post 
 which supported the tent from ground to roof, then the beam that 
 crossing this central support held the folds of the tent-covering 
 extended on either side, and then slowly it reached his sight that a 
 figure stood by the main prop with arms stretched along the cross- 
 beam on either side, as if crucified there, as the king-serpent, 
 emblem of Christ crucified, hangs on the tree "awaiting his change." 
 A sunbeam breaking into the inclosure showed him Saul. They stood 
 face to face, these two whom God had anointed, the one whom He 
 had forsaken, the other whom He inspired. David untwined the 
 lilies, which he had gathered beside Kidron, from his harp and began 
 to play ; little preludings of simple tunes at first, the folding tune, 
 little crooning melodies with which he amused himself in his lonely 
 shepherd vigils, attracting the shy wild creatures of desert and 
 cornland about him, the timid jerboa from his burrow in the sand, the 
 quaU from the ripening ears of wheat. Then human associations 
 began to press in on his memory and his harp swelled to richer strains, 
 to authentic Hebrew melodies, to the glad song of the reapers ia 
 
ANNA M. STODDART. " SAUL." 313 
 
 corn and vineyard to which Isaiah alludes (chap. xvi. v. 10), to the 
 chants of the singing-men and singing-women who lamented the dead 
 and whose elegies over great men were pi-eserved and repeated, as we 
 read in 2 Chronicles xxxv. v. 25 ; to joyous wedding chants ; to the 
 song of the builders as they worked and sped their work with song ; 
 and lastly to the grand processional chorus of the Levites as they 
 went up to the altar. This hymn, familiar to Saul's ears, reached 
 them, and the whole tent shook with his mighty shudder as he woke 
 to be reminded of the day when he too gladly sought God's altar to 
 inquire of Him. David ceased, paused in the twilight, to hear if any 
 sound of life followed that mighty shudder. His scattered fancies 
 were gradually growing concentrated on his king, as grand even in 
 his godlessness he towered above the slender young singer. He 
 caught no further sound and bent once more to his harp, his mind 
 filled with thoughts of Saul, their utterance shaping itself into his 
 song. Saul, the ruin, the failure, was before him, — in his thoughts 
 was another Saul, untried and unfallen, a strong and happy youth 
 favoured with the gift of life, tingling in every sense with keen 
 appreciation of its joys, the joys of youthful life, its at-homeness 
 with nature, its adventurousness for the mere pleasure of using its 
 strength, its relish of simple meals for healthy hunger, its fresh, 
 sensuous, irresponsible existence. David's song was of that side of 
 individual life which is most important to all young natures, which 
 the young Pagan world distinguished so keenly that it made its creed 
 of what such life offered, and peopled the world of faith correlative 
 to it with young and happy gods and joyous, careless fauns and 
 nymphs. A very real and necessary aspect of life it is, but it is not 
 all, as the Pagan world illustrates in its later bewilderment and 
 gloom and the melancholy inadequacy of its gods. So David's 
 song goes on to tell of growing maturity and of duty gladly under- 
 taken, of trial too and the wisdom it brought, of emulation 
 with his peers and the skill and polish and development of faculties it 
 gained him, of the gradual storing up of all his gains, the noble body, 
 the loving heart, the mental vigour, the high aim, worthy deeds and 
 spreading fame, till with a nation's glad consent Saul was crowned king. 
 Yearning to relieve the gloom of his present by a picture of that 
 radiant past, to remind Saul of his great worth and royalty that he 
 might arise and shake off despair, David's voice and harp had swelled 
 and risen to a burst of ardent appeal, and the sound reached the 
 king. He heard and understood, some vivifying influence stirred all 
 his frame, and released from the clutch of despair he stood by the 
 tent-prop pale and worn, but himself again and conscious. The past 
 
314 ANNA M. STODDART. " SAUL." 
 
 has recalled him to life, but the present is inadequate to make life 
 worth living to him. Quickly David's thoughts flash forward. 
 There is the fame of the great which descends to genei-ation after 
 generation, there is the immortal influence of royal lives, the germs 
 of ages to come, which are shaped by the illustrious dead of whom the 
 ages hear and whose memory they recoi-d. The future holds the 
 recompense for the present and for that Saul must needs thank God 
 that he exists. The king is struck by the promise ; no longer stand- 
 ing, he reclines on the heap of garments which lie at the base of the 
 tent-prop. The blood flows once more freely through his veins, natural 
 impulses again prompt his movements, he puts out his hand and lays 
 it on David's brow as he kneels there, his harp on the gx-ound before 
 him. The king's tender gaze and caress send a passion of love 
 through David's heart and he feels that the best he has done falls 
 utterly short of the best he would do. What is this to Saul, that his 
 life is great and has in it royal possibilities for other men and promise 
 of fame when lie shall lie low in the grave % How does it profit Saul's 
 self whom David loves % Love would give its gift to the being 
 beloved that he himself might have it and hold it. Not the joys of 
 living, exquisite though they be, not the harvest of an influential life, 
 the progressive advantages it opens to others, fame now, record after, 
 undying tribute from posterity : these pass away or they never reach 
 him and his heart has not a lasting joy the more because of them. 
 Love would give something immortal, would give what it seems God 
 himself has never oiSered. David would exceed God in the one 
 particular of loving and in all the rest " show his nothing-perfect 
 to God's all-complete." But who but God has created such 
 love in his heart \ Can God create a faculty He cannot exercise % No 
 indeed, that answers the question infinitely and yet definitely. The 
 heart to love Saul thus is the very gift of God. Can that heart doubt 
 then that God's heart loves him too and in proportion as completely 
 as David loves imperfectly % There is no boon for Saul which David 
 can conceive that God will not bestow. He would give to his king 
 for the life which has failed, a new life, an eternal life, a dayspring 
 into which " he will awake from death's minute of night " to find 
 himself clear and safe in new light and new life. To give him this, 
 David would wrestle and anguish, his will to serve Saul for love's sake 
 is perfect and therefore God's will to serve man whom He loves may 
 nowise shrink from suffering too. No, for he stands in spirit at the 
 very throne of God and " bare to the universal prick of light " learns 
 there the law of life. 
 
ANNA M. STODDART. " SAUL." 315 
 
 " He who did most shall bear most, the strongest shall stand the most weak. 
 'Tis the weakness in strength that I cry for ! my flesh that I seek. 
 In the Godhead ! I seek and I find it. Saul, it shall be 
 A Face like my face that receives thee, a man like to me 
 Thou shalt love and be loved by for ever : a Hand like this hand 
 Shall throw open the gates of new life to thee ! see the Christ stand ! " 
 
 Such is the story of the poem. Before passing from it to note in 
 ivhat manner it illustrates Mr. Browning's creed and methods, I should 
 like to say a word about the function of music in working out the 
 story. We know that Browning considers music an important means 
 of rapturous expression, a medium of prophecy in more than the 
 ancient acceptation of the term, and yet here, when the theme is ex- 
 panded beyond all experience and all imagination, David drops his 
 lyre as useless, his voice alone declares the word that God speaks 
 from his lips. It is as if he were himself the harp of God, vibrating 
 at the touch of the Master's fingers. Up to that point however it is 
 with harp and voice that he reaches the dulled ear of Saul and it is 
 worth while reminding ourselves how the first two kings of Isx-ael had 
 in common this sensitiveness to music. It is a commonplace now of 
 knowledge that from the genius and ardour of the Jews for music 
 the art radiated into other lands, where indeed to this day men of 
 Jewish race are amongst its most gifted exponents. The seer Samuel, 
 who anointed both David and Savil, gave to this art a great impulse 
 during his ascendency. New instruments were invented in his time, 
 notably the psaltery and pipe ; his college at Naioth cultivated 
 musicians who were known as prophets and their musical perform- 
 ances as prophecies. Much of his time was spent in training youths 
 for musical service in the worship of God, and it is possible that 
 some of our oldest church-music which is said to have been stolen by 
 friars in disguise from synagogue services may have had its origin in 
 the antiphonal choruses sung and accompanied by the trained choirs 
 and orchestras of Naioth. Both the men whom Samuel anointed to be 
 kings over Israel were trained musicians, one of them more sensitive 
 to the charm of music perhaps than practically musical, although on 
 at least two occasions he was constrained to prophesy, the other a 
 musician of the highest order. It is suggested that David invented 
 the psaltery, and tradition attributes to him a lute on which the wind 
 played as on an Aeolian harp and which hanging near him as he slept 
 awoke him as its strings vibrated the breath of the morning air. In 
 his time the cultivation of music reached its climax amongst the Jews, 
 — in after times when neighbouring empires encroached on Palestine, 
 a chief trophy of their conquests was the carrying into captivity a 
 
316 ANNA M. STODDAET, " SAUL." 
 
 band of trained Jewish musicians who played at the court festivals of 
 their conquerors. The power of music over the vexed senses and 
 troubled minds of men was thoroughly understood, and the eai'ly fame 
 of the young shepherd-singer of Bethlehem brought him into this 
 most dramatic relation with Saul, in which he, destined to supplant 
 him on the throne, knelt before him with tender and healing minis- 
 tration, soothing his distracted spirit with the sweet songs of Israel. 
 In Browning's first conception of this scene, we find it limited within 
 the bounds of Hebrew possibilities at the time, — in his extended 
 version of 1855, the poem becomes a very noble and exalted lyric 
 bursting all mere realistic boundaries and soaring with the strong 
 pinion of faith into possibilities of which God alone held the impulse 
 and the issue. But it may be urged by those who, admitting the 
 splendour of the lyric, triumphant in thought, imagery and form, 
 still refuse its conclusions and demur to its emotional reasoning, that 
 it is a mere poetical wliim to picture David at the moment of sudden 
 spiritual insight which penetrated the very counsels of God and 
 understood His remedy for a world at wreck. 
 
 In the life of a very great man now dead, we are told by the man 
 himself that his exclusive devotion to science reduced his mind to the 
 nature of a machine only capable of dealing with certain kinds of 
 facts. In youth, he loved nature, art, poetry ; but as he grew moi'e 
 and more absorbed in collecting and marshalling his facts, these 
 tastes languished and died, so that even the sweet influences of the 
 nature which yielded him the facts ceased to reach and refresh him. 
 Charles Darwin was a very great man, and so he knew that each 
 atrophied taste was a loss, that he was poorer without it, that his 
 out-look on humanity was dimmed, his opinion, except on his facts, 
 depreciated by it. He was so great that he could humbly admit his 
 imperfection for want of faculties he had permitted to decay. There 
 are many men and women now-a-days, who suffer defect in the spiritual 
 faculties by which the conclusion of this poem can be reached. They 
 are not all great enough to regret their incompleteness, but vaunt their 
 losses rather, as if Hope and Faith were unsightly growths, deformi- 
 ties that shamed their owner. Those who believe that the Kingdom 
 of God has always been, that His Spirit has in all ages been in touch 
 with the spirit of man, find perfect verisimihtude in the poem. 
 
 To understand thoroughly man's need of Christ, we must put 
 ourselves at the standpoint of an age before Christ came. We know 
 how different is the anticipation of an event to its retrospect. We 
 in this generation have never known what it is to be without Christ. 
 
ANNA M. STODDART. " SAUL." 317 
 
 The atheists of to-day are saturated with Christ and strangely enough 
 some of them admit it and think they leave Him behind by doing so. 
 Christ pervades our life in every phase of it, we cannot get rid of 
 Him. In a far more intimate than the general sense, our will is not 
 our own, but is instructed and modified by a thousand influences of 
 which Christ is the main-spring. It is a practical fact to be reckoned 
 with in all estimates of modern life that Christ is with us. But Saul's 
 was an age which had no Christ. He was gone wrong and helpless 
 and there was no one with love like man's and power like God's to 
 set him right. He was at war with God and mad with the misery of 
 his unnatural conflict and there was no one to make peace. The 
 noblest spirits of his nation indeed hoped and believed in the coming 
 of an Emmanuel, a Redeemer, a Prince of Peace. What a need they 
 must have felt of Him, what faith and hope theirs must have been, 
 while we who have Him seem wearied of Him. Close to the ruined 
 soul of this man David yearns to bring recreating comfort. He 
 seeks after the right message along the whole scale of human possi- 
 bihties, pressing every joy of this life into the service, — from the 
 irresponsible delights of youth, when the gradual awakening of his 
 own nature and capacities, the discovery of his circumstances and of 
 all that a world rich in yet untried experiences has to offer him are 
 enough for the eager adventui-er, up to the lofty ambitions of a 
 matured and kingly soul which would sway men to great ends while 
 it lasted and leave memories to become law and precedent when it 
 passed away. To the last Saul faintly responds ; there is a partial 
 recovery of self-respect ; but that is all ; the best David has brought 
 brings no joy. Sadder even than the unconscious wreck which he 
 has won back to wan life is this joyless, hopeless suiiering of life, 
 this dignity of the king doomed to endure his weird to the end, and 
 David agonises for the further light that shall reveal to him the 
 remedy for a need so great. " Just one lift of God's hand cleared 
 that distance, — God's throne from man's gi-ave." Only God Himself 
 is sufficient for Saul, for humanity at the point of ruin, and the human- 
 ising of God in Christ that He may reach down to man and finding 
 him may lift him up into the atmosphere of His own presence which 
 is immortality, is the inevitable assurance which he attains, the sup- 
 reme conclu.'iicr. reached by a reason supported by faith and love. 
 
 The analogy between the prediction ascribed in the poem to David 
 and those of later prophets who foretold Christ six hundred years 
 before is coming His perfect. It was from the gloom of subjection 
 and captivity that these men broke into their most joyous visions of 
 
318 ANNA M. STODDART. " SAUL." 
 
 the coming Eedeemer, When the state of the Jewish nation was 
 most hopeless, when its people were sunk in evil and idolatry, when 
 the heel first of the Egyptian and then of the Babylonian was on 
 its neck, when the prophet voices were loud with wrath and tremulous 
 with bitter lamentation, just then from time to time they were 
 exalted " by a lift of God's hand " to " sing aloud and shout, to be 
 glad and rejoice. — The Lord thy God in the midst of thee is mighty ; 
 he will save." Mr. Browning follows a method with which he has 
 made us familiar, when he uses Saul's need and David's ministry as 
 the exponents of human helplessness and divine help in an age long 
 anterior to Christ. We know how he prefers the heralds of each new 
 order to its declared representatives, — how obscure men on the verge 
 of a dawn, which they either hailed or longed for, attract him more 
 powerfully than the sons of its morning. Thus Abt Yogler and 
 Galuppi with their blurred memories live in his poems, not Beethoven 
 and Rossini ; — thus Fra Lippo Lippi cries aloud for deliverance from the 
 shackles that bound both man and art in the Middle Ages, not 
 Raphael ; — thus the nameless Grammarian who toiled his life long 
 for learning's sake to add so little to its sum, is glorified, not the 
 heirs of the Renaissance ; — thus Cleon thirsting for God and immort- 
 ality, but with his back turned to the star in the east, proclaims his 
 pensive sense of higher needs, not Paul the apostle of the Resur- 
 rection ; — thus not St. Francis of Assisi but Karshish thebpen-minded 
 Arab student stands entranced at first contact with the Christian faith, 
 " The very God I think, Abib ; dost thou think 1 So the All-Great 
 were the All-Loving too." — 
 
 Now it is worthy of note that the poet wrote the first part of 
 Saul at the age of 33, and made the addition which transformed it 
 ten years later at the age of 43. Much insistence is laid in our 
 discussions on Mr. Browning's opinions on this and that subject, an 
 unreasonable insistence I sometimes think, seeing his vast sympathy 
 embraces the standpoints of every sincere apologist for his creed even 
 when the sincerity seems to shallower observers but a minimum element 
 in the apology. It is as if we were to be irritated with Shakespeare 
 because he fails to tell us whether he admires or despises his consummate 
 knaves and fools. Very seldom does Mr. Browning lift the veil from 
 the inner chamber of his own likes and dislikes, of his selected pre- 
 ferences and opinions, but just now and then the veil flutters aside 
 and we get a sanctioned glance into a reserve which should be hallowed 
 in every man. And this biographical fact seems to me just such a 
 fluttering aside of the veil. We are permitted to know by it that to 
 
ANNA M. STODDART. " SAUL." 319 
 
 the mature man, spiritually quickened as he must have been at that 
 period of his life, his eai-ly conception of the poem grew ci-ude and 
 incomplete and his vision of the consolations of God expanded to 
 salvation and immortality as alone competent to the need. And with 
 that expansion comes joy. Other systems have each its striking 
 virtue for note. Tempei-ance, resignation, obedience, endui^ance, one 
 and all of them are the watchwords of great philosophies, the sum of 
 their wisdom projected by the experience of noble minds in contact 
 with life's problems. Noble systems have grown out of Christianity, 
 whose watchwords sum up the ethical teaching of Christ, while they 
 claim to have advanced beyond need of Him and to have discovered 
 that man is sufficient for his own salvation. Is there one of these, 
 ancient or modern, that is not unspeakably sad ? 
 
 What is the best message of Marcus Aurelius, surely the noblest 
 seeker after God untaught by Christ? Temperance, endurance, 
 resignation : — a great and beautiful message, but burdened with the 
 pain of life and its transitoriness. Take the message of the 
 Cyrenian and pursue a life of ever-varying sensation, form no ties, 
 realise no obligations, be unhampered as the wind, — and find joy if you 
 can. Take the graver, greater message of Epicurus. Men try it 
 now-a-days, men with frail bodies and sensitive, captious, fastidious 
 minds, and they pass as a caprice does and their life at the best seems 
 to have been but a sigh. Take the systems of to-day which claim to 
 teach better than Christ and at their best echo or develop His doc- 
 trines. Christ is not jealous that the seed He planted grows up into 
 a mighty tree. Advance and growth are what He promised vis and 
 we will gladly take all that the thinkers of this century offer us and 
 will thank Christ first for it. For without Him what is their best 
 boon to the individual soul 1 A most mortal immortality, uncertain 
 fame for the influential, for the rest of vis oblivion. The very best in 
 that kind is not the best possible for Mr. Browning. He sees the 
 futility of a self-abnegation that is afilicted with the hopeless heroism 
 of modern altruism. And in Saul as in a multitude of poems he 
 teaches us that the individual is precious, — that life is but the avenue 
 for each to immortality, the pledge of which is the " weakness in 
 strength," the Emmanuel who trod it. For what pledge have they who, 
 admitting God and rejecting his manifestation in Christ, still hope for 
 immortality 1 Immortality is the atmosphere of the Divine Being, 
 man has no claim to it, no organ in himself which can fit him to live 
 and move and have his being in it. He has to learn of Christ, who 
 has ascended up on high and ever liveth and who is the sufficient 
 
320 ANNA M. STODDAKT. " SAUL." 
 
 assurance for all ages, for Saul and for Ctesar, for Charlemagne and 
 St. Bernard, for yesterday, to-day and for ever. 
 
 The appropriateness of Mr. Browning's selection of David to be 
 both the actor in this episode and its narrator is emphasised by the 
 historical fact that Christ came of the royal house of David and 
 that His so coming was a national expectation and gave singular 
 definiteness to such Messianic predictions as that of Zechariah : " At 
 that day the house of David shall be as God, as the angel of the 
 Lord before them." 
 
 The exceeding beauty of the close of this poem with its sanctifica- 
 tion of all nature, gathering it up into the sphere of hallowed hope 
 and expectation, tempts me to end by quoting it without further 
 comment. 
 
 '* I know not too well how I found my way home in the night. 
 There were witnesses, cohorts about me, to left and to right, 
 Angels, powers, the unuttered, unseen, the alive, the aware : 
 I repressed, I got through them as hardly, as strugglingly there, 
 As a runner beset by the populace famished for news — 
 Life or death. The whole earth was awakened, hell loosed with her crews ; 
 And the stars of night beat with emotion, and tingled and shot 
 Out in fire the strong pain of pent knowledge : but I fainted not 
 For the Hand still impelled me at once and supported, suppressed 
 All the tumult, and quenched it with quiet and holy behest, 
 Till the rapture was shut in itself, and the earth sank to rest. 
 Anon at the dawn, all that trouble had withered from earth — 
 Not so much, but I saw it die out in the day's tender birth ; 
 In the gathered intensity brought to the grey of the hills ; 
 In the shuddering forests' held breath ; in the sudden wind-thrills ; 
 In the startled wild beasts that bore off, each with eye sidling still 
 Though averted with wonder and dread ; in the birds stiff and chill 
 That rose heavily, as I approached them, made stupid with awe ; 
 E'en the serpent that slid away silent, — he felt the new law. 
 The same stared in the white humid faces upturned by the flowers ; 
 The same worked in the heart of the cedar and moved the vine-bowers ; 
 And the little brooks witnessing murmured, persistent and low, 
 "With their obstinate, all but hushed voices — ' E'en so, it is so ! ' " 
 
321 
 
 ON BROWNING'S POEM "CEISTINA AND 
 MONALDESCHL" 
 
 By MRS. ALEXANDER IRELAND. 
 
 Read at the Eightieth Meeting of the Browning Society^ 
 Friday, February 21th, 1891. 
 
 Eew characters in history present a more striking picture than 
 does Cristina of Sweden, daughter of Gustavus Adolphus. The 
 elements of her character were unique, tragic, bizarre, and culmin- 
 ated in the wildly romantic murder of the Marquis Monaldeschi 
 under circumstances so astounding as to challenge belief, but that 
 authentic records remain which leave no doubt as to the absolute 
 details of the crime. Much has been written on the life of Cristina, 
 but it was reserved for Mr. Browning to give us a poem on the 
 subject which is almost hopelessly obscure to the uninitiated, whilst 
 throbbing with intensest power to those who know. 
 
 It would be idle to enter here on any lengthy account of 
 Cristina's remarkable childhood. In 1632, when his little child was 
 but an infant, the brave and faithful Gustavus Adolphus fell on 
 the battle-field of Lutzen. He had gone forth with unusual fore- 
 bodings, and had given the most precise and careful instructions to 
 his good friend Chancellor Oxenstiern regarding the whole plan of 
 the education of this dear and only child, Cristina, Gloriously 
 defending the religion that was dearer to him than life — namely, 
 the Protestant faith, the devoted father passed away. His queen, 
 the beautiful widowed Maria Eleonora of Brandenburg, impatient 
 at her inability to interfere with the minute directions left for the 
 education of her child, and in no way sympathizing with a plan 
 •which gave a boy's education to a giil, actually ran away from her 
 
 Y 
 
322 ON brownikg's poem " cristina and monaldeschi." 
 
 responsibilities, and in disguise fled to Denmark, where after long 
 years she died unregretted. The only other female guardian left to 
 the child, the Princess Katerina, sister of Gustavus, died prema- 
 turely while Cristina was yet vei'y young. The tutors and pi-ofessors 
 appointed by Oxenstiern taught their brilliant pupil much : she 
 became highly accomplished. She was also very hardy; would rise 
 at four, ride sixteen miles before breakfast, was often allowed to 
 sleep all night in the open air, was never permitted to satisfy her 
 hunger, and was thoroughly versed in Greek, Latin, French, German, 
 English, Italian, and Spanish. She had, indeed, a special Greek 
 professor resident in the palace — much as other young ladies have a 
 canary bird or a toy-terrier. She was, withal, a true woman at 
 heart, as her sad later history too plainly shews. Wilful, passionate, 
 rebellious, and perforce unfeminine, she suffered as only a woman 
 can suffer. 
 
 In due time she had batches of royal suitors. Prince Ulric of 
 Denmark, the Elector Palatine, the Elector of Brandenburg, the 
 Kings of Portugal and Spain, the King of the Romans, and her 
 cousin Charles Gustavus, amongst others — but she rejected them all. 
 She had no idea of binding herself by the marriage-tie, though the 
 chancellor suggested it was desirable, and her people undoubtedly 
 thought so too. The position of Oxenstiern was certainly no 
 sinecure. His fatherly advices bored her terribly. Cristina was a 
 great correspondent, and was extremely independent. She often 
 appointed the hours of 4 or 5 a.m. for her audiences with foreign 
 ambassadors or discourses with such men as Descartes and Sau- 
 mares ; she would then go out hunting, and by ten o'clock would 
 attend scientific lectures. 
 
 On October 24th, 1648, the Thirty Years' War came to an 
 end, and peace was signed. The Senate again urged Cristina to 
 marry, and, to make an end of this annoyance, she resolved to 
 abdicate. Her successor, chosen by herself, was her cousin Charles 
 Gustavus. The formal and unusual ceremony of abdication took 
 place in the Cathedral of TJpsala in June 1654. There was a great 
 difficulty in finding anyone who would lift the crown from the 
 golden-locked head of the beautiful young queen. All the officers 
 of state and the religious authorities were present. The crown once 
 removed, Cristina arose, after sitting for the last time on the silver 
 throne, herself laid aside her robes of royal state, curtesyed to the 
 prince, her successor, wished him well, and withdrew, leaving throne 
 and kingdom without regret to set forth on her wild and capricious 
 
ON browning's rOEM " CRISTINA AND MONALDESCHI." 323 
 
 wandering. Other fetters beside those of royalty were thrown off 
 by her when she crossed the little brook that divided Sweden from 
 Denmark. With her triumphant words as to havi-ag fouoid liberty at 
 last, she saw not before her to what dark abyss that same liberty 
 was to lead her. Picturesque, attractive, terribly human, dressed in 
 manly costume, with one or two followers, she crossed Denmark and 
 Germany, and went towards Rome. Inaccessible to counsel, she 
 trusted no one, she gave confidence to no one : it was thvis she had been 
 taught. Impatience of restraint was undoubtedly one of her leading 
 motives in the step she took, but there was a very much more 
 powerful one behind it. Her abdication would have been more 
 highly regarded had it not been followed by her change of religion. 
 As a Eoman Catholic she could not have held the Swedish sceptre. 
 She now lost little time in publicly embracing the faith of Rome. 
 Her moral course became so regrettable, that all her bright mental 
 gifts could not redeem it, nor make of her a good and honour- 
 able woman. Yet we feel the deepest pity for her. She was received 
 in Rome with great state by the religious authorities, and lost 
 no time in appointing household officers exclusively Italian. Among 
 these was the Marquis Monaldeschi, nominated " Master of the 
 Horse." Cristina's own memoirs give a striking account of this 
 Italian marquis. She describes him as " a gentleman of most hand- 
 some person and fine manners, who from the first moment reigned 
 exclusively over my heart." " Italy," she says, " was a scene of 
 enchantment to me when I met him there. I was penetrated, sunk 
 in joy ; all nature seemed the fairer for my happiness. The beau- 
 tiful, proud Monaldeschi opened a new world to me ! Could I, in 
 this joy, remember my abjuration 1 Could I, unhappy one, have the 
 least desire for God? But I was punished heavily for my impiety." 
 
 Indeed, the handsome, proud, wily Italian, for whom this lonely 
 and strange nature felt so deep an attachment, proved a traitor and 
 a scoundrel. Having taken every possible advantage of his position 
 as "favourite," having reaped honours and riches, Monaldeschi 
 wearied of his royal mistress and sought new attractions. It is, in 
 fact, the closing scene of Queen Cristina's liaison with her Grand 
 Equerry which inspired Browning to give us his splendid poem. The 
 poet chooses the moment when Cristina's eyes were opened to the 
 treachery of her lover ; how her passion for him had been his 
 " stock-in-trade " to amuse and interest a younger mistress in Rome. 
 
 From Rome, Cristina had proceeded to Fontainebleau, where 
 the letters came into her liands which broke her life. There was a 
 
 y 2 
 
324 ON BROWNING'S POEM " CRISTINA AND MONALDESCHI," 
 
 certain Cardinal Azzolino not averse to supplanting Monaldeschi in 
 his influence on the queen. He had obtained possession of the whole 
 wretched and dangerous correspondence ; he was the confessor of the 
 young Roman lady, and he used his power. The packet included 
 the queen's own letters to her lover — letters written in the fulness of 
 perfect trust, telling much that the unhappy lady could have told to 
 no other living being. Monaldeschi's letters to his young Roman 
 beauty made a jest, a mockery of the queen's exceeding fondness for 
 him. They were letters of unsparing and wounding ridicule ; and 
 while acting thus, Monaldeschi had steadily adhered to the show of 
 unaltered attachment to the queen, and deep respect for his royal 
 mistress. Cristina's emotions on seeing the whole hateful, cowardly 
 treachery laid bare were doubtless maddening. She arranged an 
 interview with the marquis in the picture gallery in the Palace of 
 Fontainebleau. She was accompanied by an official of her Court, 
 and had at hand a priest from the neighbouring Convent of the 
 Maturins armed with copies of the letters which were to serve as 
 the death-warrant of the marquis. They had been placed by Cardinal 
 Azzolino in Cristina's hands thi'ough the medium of her " Major- 
 Domo " with the knowledge that the cardinal had already seen their 
 infamous contents. The originals she had on her own person. Added 
 to thifi, she had in the backgiound her Captain of the Guard, 
 Sentinelli, with two other officers. 
 
 And now to Browning's poem. In the Galerie des Cerfs hung a 
 picture of Frangois I.^ and Diane de Poictiers, presumably the work 
 of Primatice, il Primatico, who had done much of the decoration in 
 the palace. To this picture the queen now led the marquis, pointing 
 out the motto on the frame — " Quis separabit V 
 
 And here Browning begins — 
 
 " All, but how each loved each, Marquis! 
 Here's the gallery they trod 
 Both together, he her god, 
 She his idol, — lend your rod, 
 Chamberlain ! — ay, there they are — ' Quis 
 Scparabit ? ' — plain those two 
 Touching words come into view, 
 Apposite for me and you ! 
 
 Since they witness to incessant 
 Love like ours : King Francis, he — 
 Diane the adored one, she — 
 Prototypes of you and me." 
 
 ^ I believe the portrait is of Henri II. — F. J. F. 
 
ON browning's poem " CKISTINA AND MONALDESCHI." 325 
 
 The crescent was the natural sign of Diane, but the salamander 
 •of Fran5ois I. needs some explanation. As a bold, brave, and 
 imperious youth, his father, to restrain his ardent nature, placed him 
 at the age of thirteen in the care of a wise governor, Le Chevalier 
 de Boissy, who, to express his tender and watchful care of his fiery- 
 minded pupil, gave him for his device, or crest, the salamander, with 
 the legend — " Nutrisco et extinguo (Je le nourris et je I'eteins)." 
 This device of the salamander still exists on some of the old carvings 
 and paintings at Fontainebleau. 
 
 "With renewed sternness Cristina attacks her victim. 
 
 " I — the woman ? See my habit, 
 Ask my people ! Anyhow, 
 Be we what we may, one vow 
 Binds us, male or female. Now — 
 Stand, Sir ! Eead ! ' Quis scparabit f ' " 
 
 It was true one vow had bound them. In the little ancient 
 church of Avon, a village on the east side of the park of Fontaine- 
 bleau, those two had stood, on a memorable evening, close to the 
 henitier in a supreme moment. Before them lay an ancient tomb- 
 stone ; around them, the stillness of the church and the deepest 
 happiness of life. And here, pointing to the marble slab at their 
 feet, the marquis had vowed that as that grave kept a silence over 
 the corpse which lay beneath, so would his love and trust hold fast 
 the secret of Cristina's love to all eternity. 
 
 Now the woman's spirit was wounded to death. She was scorned, 
 her pride outraged ; but she was a Queen and the man a subject, and 
 she felt she must assert her dignity at least once more. The marquis 
 doubtless tottered as he stood. " Kneel," she says — 
 
 " Cure what giddiness you feel, 
 This way. Do your senses reel ? 
 Not unlikely ! What rolls under ! 
 Yawning death in yon abyss 
 "Where the waters whirl and hiss, 
 Round more frightful peaks than this." 
 
 -But she will not release her victim yet. " Silent still % " she says — 
 " Why, pictures speak ! — 
 See, where Juno strikes Ixion, 
 Primatice speaks plainly ! Pooh — 
 Rather, Florentine Le Roux ! 
 I've lost head for who is who — 
 So it swims and wanders ! Fie on 
 What still proves me female ! Hero, 
 By the staircase ! — for we near 
 That dark ' Gallery of the Deer.' " 
 
326 ON browning's poem " cristina and monaldeschi." 
 
 This was the final scene of the tragedy. A word as to the rival 
 painters, both of whom assisted in the decoration of the Palace of 
 Fontainebleau. Francois Primatice, otherwise Le Primatice, or il 
 Primatico, who died in 1570 at Bologna, was the rival of Maltre Roux, 
 or " Le Eoux ; " but Primatice was first in the field, and a terrible 
 jealousy arose between the two painters. Primatice was the pet pupil 
 of Giulio Eomano. Rosso, who died in 1541, was a pupil of Michael 
 Angelo. Both were patronized by Frangois I., and both contributed 
 largely to the magnificent decorations of the palace. Primatice had 
 been sent to Italy by the king, nominally to collect works of art ; 
 and it was only after Ptosso's untimely death that he returned. Posso 
 had ill-luck : he was only forty-five at the time of his death, and 
 poisoned himself from bitter remorse at having falsely accused his 
 friend Pellegrini. But to our death-scene 
 
 Cristina now calls forth the priest and the assassins, having 
 granted herself the bitter pleasure of such personal revenge as was 
 possible for her, poor woman ! 
 
 " Friends, my four ! You, Priest, confess him ! 
 
 I have judged the culprit there : 
 
 Execute my sentence ! Care 
 
 For no mail such covrards wear ! 
 
 Done, Priest ? Then, absolve and Lless Ixim ! 
 
 Now — )"ou three, stab tliick and fast. 
 
 Deep and deeper ! Dead at last ? 
 
 Thanks, friends— Father, thanks ! Aghast ? " 
 " What one word of his confession 
 
 "Would you tell me, though I lured 
 
 With that roj'al crown abjured 
 
 Just because its bars immured 
 
 Love too much ? Love burst compression. 
 
 Fled free, finally confessed 
 
 All its secrets to that breast 
 
 Whence let Avon tell the rest ! " 
 
 Let US note that in October 1657, Cristina already felt suspicious 
 of Monaldeschi. Keenly watching his actions, she had found him 
 guilty of a double perfidy, and had led him on to a conversation 
 touching a similar unfaithfulness. "What," the queen had said, 
 " does the man deserve who should so have betrayed a woman 1 " 
 *' Instant death," said Monaldeschi, " 'twould be an act of justice." 
 *' It is well," said she ; " I will remember your words." In a recently 
 published work on Cristina by F. W. Bain, B. A., a defence is made 
 for this murder of Monaldeschi. " The whole point," said the writer, 
 ** turns on the legal aspect of the case ; how far had she a right ta- 
 
ON browning's poem "cristina and monaldeschi," 327 
 
 exercise the power of life and death over the culprit 1 " And Mr. 
 Bain goes on to state that, "By a special clause in the Act of Ab- 
 dication, Cristina retained absolute and sovereign jurisdiction over 
 her servants of all kinds." He therefore holds Cristina as morally 
 justified. So far, so good. The only objection made by the French 
 Court was that she ought not to have permitted the murder to take 
 place at Fontainebleau. 
 
 Mr. Bain decides in favour of Cristina's action, and agrees with 
 Leibnitz, who said : " All we can reproach the Queen of Sweden for, 
 is that she had not sufficient respect to the i^lace where she caused the 
 execution to be performed." " Cristina," says Mr. Bain, " had, in 
 fact, exactly the same right that a Court of Law has." 
 
 Few women would wish to take up that ground. It was as a woman 
 and not as a legal client that she suiiered. She made much noise in 
 her day. Philosophy, Atheism, and Devotion by turns possessed 
 her in excess ; her nature lent itself to the tragedy as well as to the 
 comedy of human life. She still attracts, fascinates, repels. Her own 
 writings were powerful. Here are a few sentences from her " Aphor- 
 isms." " Fools," she says, " are more to be pitied than knaves." 
 " The famous ' Know thyself,' given out as the source of human 
 wisdom, is only that of its misery." " Extraordinary merit is a crime 
 never forgiven." " Genius is always a paradox to those who are 
 without it." 
 
 Speaking of the murder of Monaldeschi, she wrote : *' Poor women 
 that we are, the details made me weep ! That we should be so keen 
 for vengeance, and then rain down our tears for the blood we ourselves 
 have caused to be shed ! " "I was on the point," she adds, " of 
 casting myself at the feet of Father Le Bel, but restrained myself by 
 my pride and my dignity. I did, however, by way of re]yaration, 
 order an almost infinite number of masses to be said for the poor 
 marquis. I had him buried in the church close to the benitier, and 
 instituted prayers for the repose of his soul. What agitation was 
 mine ! What a day of misfortune was that ! And actually I was 
 murmured at for this action, discussed, and complained of." 
 
 It was to Father Le Bel of the Monastery of the Maturins, pre- 
 sumably confessor to Queen Cristina ^ during her stay in Fontaine- 
 bleau, that the copies of the fatal letters had been entrusted by the 
 
 ^ The actual narrative of Father Le Bel is to be found in a small, discoloured, 
 vellum-bound book in the British Museum. It is one of three treatises there 
 contained, and the book is catalogued as anonymous. 
 
 It was written November 6th, 1657, and translated into German iu December 
 
328 ON browning's poem " cristina and monaldeschi." 
 
 queen ; and his reliable narrative of the murder to which he was 
 witness can be read in his own words. Four days after the copies of 
 the letters had been handed to him, a messenger from the palace 
 ordered Father Le Bel to the presence of the queen ; and now took 
 place the final interview between the royal mistress and the Marquis 
 Monaldeschi. He denying all knowledge of the contents of these 
 copies, the queen produced the originals, and the doomed man, mutter- 
 ing something indistinctly, heard the three soldiers in attendance 
 draw nearer with the clash of naked blades to despatch him. The 
 queen withdrew somewhat, and her victim was left with the priest 
 and the executioners. The unhappy man knelt down, laid his head 
 on the priest's knees, made his last confession, and received absolu- 
 tion. It is too painful to dwell on the long and desperate struggle 
 which ensued. Monaldeschi wore a heavy shirt of mail, which 
 rendered it difiicidt to strike him effectually, but he was at length 
 mercifully released at a quarter to four in the afternoon. 
 
 After this atrocious crime Cristina was compelled to leave France, 
 and finally retired to Rome, giving herself up to her artistic tastes, 
 science, chemistry, and idleness. Cardinal Azzolino was her con- 
 fidential friend till death. Her theory of life had been that, as 
 sovereign, she was responsible for her actions to no one, and this creed 
 she faithfully carried out to the end. It is believed, however, that 
 she had some wish to return to her own religion before her death, but 
 she had no time. She died on April 19th, 1689, her epitaph, 
 chosen by herself, being " Cristina lived sixty-three years." This 
 is significant, and savours of defiance. Hers was a strange and a 
 tragical life, a distorted human existence. 
 
 Browning's poem ends with splendid lines, in which the queen, 
 while denouncing the shameful treachery of the man now lying dead 
 
 the same year. It contains a fine portrait of Cristina, which Mr. Bain has 
 splendidly reproduced. 
 
 Cristina was herself an author. Amongst other works of hers is L' Outrage de 
 loisir ; but by far the most important work of hers, which is also to be seen in 
 the British Museum, is Mimoires de ma vie. Didiecs a Dieu. This was published 
 in Paris by Dehay, in 1830. In it she says : "We admire strong characters : we 
 ought rather to pity them ! " And perhaps she is right. The memoir is truly 
 astounding. The light of the more ' ' strong-minded woman " of to-day pales 
 before the lurid revelations of this unhappy lady. "\Ye may add that the late Mr. 
 Wilkie CoUins, in a series of papers called, we believe, "Out-of-the-way Nooks in 
 History," written for Household Words, gives a fine abstract of Father Le Bel's 
 narrative. D'Alembert, who was always making "Reflexions" on every imagin- 
 able person and subject, judging by the eighteen ponderous volumes thereof in 
 the British Museum, has freely eulogized Cristina iu one of his effusions, and so 
 have many other literary men. 
 
ON browning's poem " CRISTINA AND MONALDESGHI," 329 
 
 before her, puts up one pitiful plea for her own conduct, sums up all 
 her agony, and despair, and degradation in piercing expressions, which 
 cleave the heart. 
 
 Nowhere (I think) has our beloved poet shown more wonderful 
 treatment of a strikingly dramatic subject. 
 
 With regard to the much-vexed question of Cristina's legal 
 position as to her commanded punishment of Count Giovanni Kinaldo 
 Monaldeschi, I have made much research, and here give an extract 
 from an undoubtedly reliable work, published at Bonn in 1837, on 
 *' Chi-istina von Schweden und ihre Hof," von W. H. Grauert, This 
 learned and carefully-prepared work, in three volumes, does not pro- 
 nounce with certainty upon the point at issue, but it may be 
 interesting to quote from it. Speaking of the assassination of the 
 Count at Fontainebleau, the writer says : — ^ 
 
 " It made a painful impression. The Queen replied that she had 
 the right to exercise jurisdiction over her servants at all times and 
 in all places : that she was mistress of her will, and answerable to 
 God only for her actions. The King of France, Louis XIV,, was 
 not merely giving her asylum and shelter — as to a prisoner or 
 fugitive — he was entertaining her as a royal guest. Her intended 
 action also was not without precedent. She took the Almighty to 
 witness that she had cleansed her heart of all personal malice against 
 the betrayer, and was only punishing a crime which, in its unexampled 
 baseness, concerned the whole world. 
 
 " It is true that the suppliant had begged her either to let mercy 
 outweigh right, or to transfer the whole case to a legal tribunal as an 
 oi'dinary suit at law. 
 
 " ' What ? ' she replied, ' am /, who have absolute sovereign rights 
 over my subjects, thus to degrade myself 1 to enter a suit and insti- 
 tute proceedings against a traitorous servant, of whose shameful acts 
 of infidelity I hold the proofs in my hands ? written, too, and sealed 
 by himself! ' 
 
 " ' It is true,' said the wretched man, ' but remember you are a. 
 prejudiced party.' 
 
 " It was after all," says Grauert, " a looraan who devised and 
 carried out a terrible death sentence, one that was executed without 
 the shadow of customary judicial formalities. 
 
 " She was a Queen without a kingdom or sceptre who thus judged 
 a subject and exercised a sovereign right. 
 
 ^ Vol. ii. pp. 118, 119, and following pages. 
 
.;330 ON browning's poem " CRISTINA and MONALDESCni." 
 
 " The event took place in the country, and actually in the royal 
 residence of a powerful foreign monarch, who was extending his 
 kingly hospitality to the self-dethroned Queen of Sweden. 
 
 " The condemned man was also of noble family. The true and 
 actual motive of this deed must remain always more or less shrouded 
 in darkness. It certainly gave occasion to reports of a most dis- 
 honouring character 
 
 " The French Court looked askance on a deed which had taken 
 place at the Royal Castle of Fontainebleau without official notification. 
 
 " The refined French ladies, careful of open scandal, whose 
 hostility had already been aroused by jealousy of Christina's attrac- 
 tions and accomplishments, loudly denounced what they regarded as 
 jQere reckless barbarity. 
 
 "Much curiosity was felt as to the Pope's actual knowledge of 
 the facts, and the attitude he would assume with regard to the 
 matter 
 
 "Later on, Christina was openly charged with the deed. In 1668 
 the Swedish Government maintained this murder of Monaldeschi as 
 -a just reason for refusing her a residence in Sweden. 
 
 "Again, the same difficulty was urged in admitting her can- 
 didature for the throne of Poland (on the abdication of John 
 Cassimir). 
 
 "The whole tissue of events was, indeed, so exti-aordinary that 
 the case was dealt with as a cause celebre in judicial records of the 
 times, and argued by the highest authorities without absolute 
 result. 
 
 " Two points present themselves to be dealt with separately, yet in 
 their essence indissoluble : the question of jurisdiction, and, (shall we 
 «ay 1) propriety — certainly the questions of humanity and morality. 
 
 "As to the first point two questions must be considered: (1) 
 whether Christina, in spite of her abdication, still possessed judicial 
 rights over her subjects, of whatever nationality ; (2) such rights 
 being acknowledged her, could she legally exercise them in a foreign 
 land where she was sojourning in the capacity of gtcest to the reigning 
 monarch ? 
 
 " It has been largely assumed, and for the most part without 
 formal debate, that Christina had forfeited such judicial rights on her 
 abdication. In this case, the execution of Monaldeschi was simply a 
 murder. 
 
 " This view may, however, be dismissed in regarding the fact that 
 the Deed of Abdication specially reserved to Christina, by state 
 
ON browning's poem " CRISTINA AND MONALDESCHI." 331 
 
 •covenant, the right to punish the misdeeds of the court, and of her 
 personal attendants. 
 
 " This right she exercised, not only in the notorious case of 
 Monaldeschi, but throughout her household, generally speaking. 
 
 " For she had only resigned the Swedish crown, and not her royal 
 'dignity and sovereignty. 
 
 " The inhabitants of territorial lands under her control were still 
 •compelled to take the oath of allegiance to her, under reserve only 
 of the fealty due to king and country, thus rendering themselves 
 open to the possibility of lese-majeste (crimen laesae majestatis). 
 
 " Christina chose and dismissed her officials, maintained entire 
 independence, and was responsible to no one." 
 
 This is the utmost extent of actual knowledge I can find on the 
 subject of Cristina. Setting apart all purely legal right and wrong, 
 the matter cannot fail to be a painful one, and specially so to a 
 woman. 
 
 SICHARD CLAY AND SDKS, LIMITED, LOJTOON AITD EUNOAY. 
 
WORKS BY EDWARD BERDOE. 
 
 THE BROWNING CYCLOPAEDIA. 
 
 A Guide to the Study of the Works of Kobert Browning, with copious Ex- 
 planatory Notes and References on all difficult passages. Second Edition^ 
 Pp. XX., 572. Price IO5. M. 
 
 Some Opinioxs of the Peess, 
 
 " Conscientious and painstaking." — Times. 
 
 "A serviceable book, and deserves to be widely bought." — The Spectator. 
 
 " A book of far-reaching research and careful industry." — Scotsman. 
 
 "A most learned and creditable piece of work." — Vanity Fair. 
 
 "A monument of industry and devotion." — Bookman. 
 
 BROWNING'S MESSAGE TO HIS TIME: 
 
 His Religion, Philosophy, and Science. With Portrait and Facsimile Letters. 
 Third Edition. Price 3s. M. [Dilettante Library. J. 
 
 Opinions of the Press. 
 
 " FuU of admiration and sympathy." — Saturday Eeview. 
 
 "Should have a wide circulation; it is interesting and stimulative." — Literary 
 World. 
 
 "We have no hesitation in strongly recommending this little volume to any who 
 
 desire to understand the moral and mental attitude of Robert Browning We 
 
 are much obliged to Dr. Berdoe for his volume." — Oxford University Herald. 
 
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