Trees and the fowls here, beast and creeping thing.
Yon otter, sleek-wet, black, lithe as a leech;
Yon auk, one fire-eye, in a ball of foam,
That floats and feeds; a certain badger brown
He hath watched hunt with that slant white-wedge eye
By moonlight; and the pie with the long tongue
That pricks deep into oakwarts for a worm,
And says a plain word when she finds her prize,
But will not eat the ants; the ants themselves
That build a wall of seeds and settled stalks
About their hole—He made all these and more,
Made all we see, and us, in spite: how else?’
It may seem perhaps to most readers that these lines are very difficult,
and that they are unpleasant. And so they are. We quote them to
illustrate, not the _success_ of grotesque art, but the _nature_ of
grotesque art. It shows the end at which this species of art aims, and
if it fails it is from over-boldness in the choice of a subject by the
artist, or from the defects of its execution. A thinking faculty more in
difficulties—a great type,—an inquisitive, searching intellect under more
disagreeable conditions, with worse helps, more likely to find falsehood,
less likely to find truth, can scarcely be imagined. Nor is the mere
description of the thought at all bad: on the contrary, if we closely
examine it, it is very clever. Hardly anyone could have amassed so many
ideas at once nasty and suitable. But scarcely any readers—any casual
readers—who are not of the sect of Mr. Browning’s admirers will be able
to examine it enough to appreciate it. From a defect, partly of subject,
and partly of style, many of Mr. Browning’s works make a demand upon the
reader’s zeal and sense of duty to which the nature of most readers is
unequal. They have on the turf the convenient expression ‘staying power’:
some horses can hold on and others cannot. But hardly any reader not of
especial and peculiar nature can hold on through such composition. There
is not enough of ‘staying power’ in human nature. One of his greatest
admirers once owned to us that he seldom or never began a new poem
without looking on in advance, and foreseeing with caution what length
of intellectual adventure he was about to commence. Whoever will work
hard at such poems will find much mind in them: they are a sort of quarry
of ideas, but who ever goes there will find these ideas in such a jagged,
ugly, useless shape that he can hardly bear them.
We are not judging Mr. Browning simply from a hasty, recent production.
All poets are liable to misconceptions, and if such a piece as ‘Caliban
upon Setebos’ were an isolated error, a venial and particular exception,
we should have given it no prominence. We have put it forward because it
just elucidates both our subject and the characteristics of Mr. Browning.
But many other of his best known pieces do so almost equally; what
several of his devotees think his best piece is quite enough illustrative
for anything we want. It appears that on Holy Cross day at Rome the
Jews were obliged to listen to a Christian sermon in the hope of their
conversion, though this is, according to Mr. Browning, what they really
said when they came away:—
‘Fee, faw, fum! bubble and squeak!
Blessedest Thursday’s the fat of the week.
Rumble and tumble, sleek and rough,
Stinking and savoury, smug and gruff,
Take the church-road, for the bell’s due chime
Gives us the summons—’tis sermon-time.
‘Boh, here’s Barnabas! Job, that’s you?
Up stumps Solomon—bustling too?
Shame, man! greedy beyond your years
To handsel the bishop’s shaving-shears?
Fair play’s a jewel! leave friends in the lurch?
Stand on a line ere you start for the church.
‘Higgledy, piggledy, packed we lie,
Rats in a hamper, swine in a stye,
Wasps in a bottle, frogs in a sieve,
Worms in a carcase, fleas in a sleeve.
Hist! square shoulders, settle your thumbs
And buzz for the bishop—here he comes.’
And after similar nice remarks for a church, the edified congregation
concludes:—
‘But now, while the scapegoats leave our flock,
And the rest sit silent and count the clock,
Since forced to muse the appointed time
On these precious facts and truths sublime,—
Let us fitly employ it, under our breath,
In saying Ben Ezra’s Song of Death.
‘For Rabbi Ben Ezra, the night he died,
Called sons and son’s sons to his side,
And spoke, “This world has been harsh and strange;
Something is wrong: there needeth a change.
But what, or where? at the last, or first?
In one point only we sinned, at worst.
‘“The Lord will have mercy on Jacob yet,
And again in his border see Israel set.
When Judah beholds Jerusalem,
The stranger-seed shall be joined to them:
To Jacob’s House shall the Gentiles cleave.
So the Prophet saith and his sons believe.
‘“Ay, the children of the chosen race
Shall carry and bring them to their place:
In the land of the Lord shall lead the same,
Bondsmen and handmaids. Who shall blame,
When the slave enslave, the oppressed ones o’er
The oppressor triumph for evermore?
‘“God spoke, and gave us the word to keep:
Bade never fold the hands nor sleep
’Mid a faithless world,—at watch and ward,
Till Christ at the end relieve our guard.
By His servant Moses the watch was set:
Though near upon cock-crow, we keep it yet.
‘“Thou! if Thou wast He, who at mid watch came,
By the starlight, naming a dubious Name!
And if, too heavy with sleep—too rash
With fear—O Thou, if that martyr gash
Fell on Thee coming to take Thine own,
And we gave the Cross, when we owed the Throne—
‘“Thou art the Judge. We are bruised thus.
But, the judgment over, join sides with us!
Thine too is the cause! and not more Thine
Than ours, is the work of these dogs and swine,
Whose life laughs through and spits at their creed,
Who maintain Thee in word, and defy Thee in deed!
‘“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!
‘“By the torture, prolonged from age to age,
By the infamy, Israel’s heritage,
By the Ghetto’s plague, by the garb’s disgrace,
By the badge of shame, by the felon’s place,
By the branding-tool, the bloody whip,
And 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 took never so deep a shade
But we fought them in it, God our aid!
A trophy to bear, as we march, Thy band
South, East, and on to the Pleasant Land!”’
It is very natural that a poet whose wishes incline, or whose genius
conducts him to a grotesque art, should be attracted towards mediæval
subjects. There is no age whose legends are so full of grotesque
subjects, and no age whose real life was so fit to suggest them. Then,
more than at any other time, good principles have been under great
hardships. The vestiges of ancient civilisation, the germs of modern
civilisation, the little remains of what had been, the small beginnings
of what is, were buried under a cumbrous mass of barbarism and cruelty.
Good elements hidden in horrid accompaniments are the special theme of
grotesque art, and these mediæval life and legends afford more copiously
than could have been furnished before Christianity gave its new elements
of good, or since modern civilisation has removed some few at least of
the old elements of destruction. A _buried_ life like the spiritual
mediæval was Mr. Browning’s natural element, and he was right to be
attracted by it. His mistake has been, that he has not made it pleasant;
that he has forced his art to topics on which no one could charm, or on
which he, at any rate, could not; that on these occasions and in these
poems he has failed in fascinating men and women of sane taste.
We say ‘sane’ because there is a most formidable and estimable _insane_
taste. The will has great though indirect power over the taste, just as
it has over the belief. There are some horrid beliefs from which human
nature revolts, from which at first it shrinks, to which, at first, no
effort can force it. But if we fix the mind upon them they have a power
over us just because of their natural offensiveness. They are like the
sight of human blood: experienced soldiers tell us that at first men are
sickened by the smell and newness of blood almost to death and fainting,
but that as soon as they harden their hearts and stiffen their minds,
as soon as they _will_ bear it, then comes an appetite for slaughter, a
tendency to gloat on carnage, to love blood, at least for the moment,
with a deep, eager love. It is a principle that if we put down a healthy
instinctive aversion, nature avenges herself by creating an unhealthy
insane attraction. For this reason, the most earnest truth-seeking men
fall into the worst delusions; they will not let their mind alone; they
force it towards some ugly thing, which a crotchet of argument, a conceit
of intellect recommends, and nature punishes their disregard of her
warning by subjection to the ugly one, by belief in it. Just so the most
industrious critics get the most admiration. They think it unjust to rest
in their instinctive natural horror: they overcome it, and angry nature
gives them over to ugly poems and marries them to detestable stanzas.
Mr. Browning possibly, and some of the worst of Mr. Browning’s admirers
certainly, will say that these grotesque objects exist in real life,
and therefore they ought to be, at least may be, described in art. But,
though pleasure is not the end of poetry, pleasing is a condition of
poetry. An exceptional monstrosity of horrid ugliness cannot be made
pleasing, except it be made to suggest—to recall—the perfection, the
beauty, from which it is a deviation. Perhaps in extreme cases no art is
equal to this; but then such self-imposed problems should not be worked
by the artist; these out-of-the-way and detestable subjects should be let
alone by him. It is rather characteristic of Mr. Browning to neglect this
rule. He is the most of a realist, and the least of an idealist, of any
poet we know. He evidently sympathises with some part at least of Bishop
Blougram’s apology. Anyhow this world exists. ‘There _is_ good wine—there
_are_ pretty women—there _are_ comfortable benefices—there _is_ money,
and it is pleasant to spend it. Accept the creed of your age and you get
these, reject that creed and you lose them. And for what do you lose
them? For a fancy creed of your own, which no one else will accept, which
hardly anyone will call a “creed,” which most people will consider a sort
of unbelief.’ Again, Mr. Browning evidently loves what we may call the
realism, the grotesque realism, of orthodox Christianity. Many parts of
it in which great divines have felt keen difficulties are quite pleasant
to him. He must _see_ his religion, he must have an ‘object-lesson’
in believing. He must have a creed that will _take_, which wins and
holds the miscellaneous world, which stout men will heed, which nice
women will adore. The spare moments of solitary religion—the ‘obdurate
questionings,’ the high ‘instincts,’ the ‘first affections,’ the ‘shadowy
recollections,’
‘Which, do they what they may,
Are yet the fountain-light of all our day—
Are yet a master-light of all our seeing;’
the great but vague faith—the unutterable tenets—seem to him worthless,
visionary; they are not enough immersed in matter; they move about ‘in
worlds not realised.’ We wish he could be tried like the prophet once;
he would have found God in the earthquake and the storm; he would have
deciphered from them a bracing and a rough religion: he would have known
that crude men and ignorant women felt them too, and he would accordingly
have trusted them; but he would have distrusted and disregarded the
‘still small voice:’ he would have said it was ‘fancy’—a thing you
thought you heard to-day, but were not sure you had heard to-morrow: he
would call it a nice illusion, an immaterial prettiness; he would ask
triumphantly ‘How are you to get the mass of men to heed this little
thing?’ he would have persevered and insisted ‘_My wife_ does not hear
it.’
But although a suspicion of beauty, and a taste for ugly reality, have
led Mr. Browning to exaggerate the functions, and to caricature the
nature of grotesque art, we own, or rather we maintain, that he has given
many excellent specimens of that art within its proper boundaries and
limits. Take an example, his picture of what we may call the _bourgeois_
nature in _difficulties_; in the utmost difficulty, in contact with magic
and the supernatural. He has made of it something homely, comic, true;
reminding us of what _bourgeois_ nature really is. By showing us the type
under abnormal conditions, he reminds us of the type under its best and
most satisfactory conditions:—
‘Hamelin Town’s in Brunswick,
By famous Hanover city;
The river Weser, deep and wide,
Washes its walls on the southern side;
A pleasanter spot you never spied;
But, when begins my ditty,
Almost five hundred years ago,
To see the townsfolk suffer so
From vermin, was a pity.
‘Rats!
They fought the dogs, and killed the cats,
And bit the babies in the cradles,
And ate the cheeses out of the vats,
And licked the soup from the cook’s own ladles,
Split open the kegs of salted sprats,
Made nests inside men’s Sunday hats,
And even spoiled the women’s chats,
By drowning their speaking
With shrieking and squeaking
In fifty different sharps and flats.
‘At last the people in a body
To the Town Hall came flocking:
“’Tis clear,” cried they, “our Mayor’s a noddy;
And as for our Corporation—shocking,
To think we buy gowns lined with ermine,
For dolts that can’t or won’t determine
What’s best to rid us of our vermin!
You hope, because you’re old and obese,
To find in the furry civic robe ease?
Rouse up, Sirs! Give your brains a racking
To find the remedy we’re lacking,
Or, sure as fate, we’ll send you packing!”
At this the Mayor and Corporation
Quaked with a mighty consternation.’
A person of musical abilities proposes to extricate the civic dignitaries
from the difficulty, and they promise him a thousand guilders if he does.
‘Into the street the Piper stept,
Smiling first a little smile,
As if he knew what magic slept
In his quiet pipe the while;
Then, like a musical adept,
To blow the pipe his lips he wrinkled,
And green and blue his sharp eye twinkled
Like a candle-flame when salt is sprinkled;
And ere three shrill notes the pipe uttered
You heard as if an army muttered;
And the muttering grew to a grumbling;
And the grumbling grew to a mighty rumbling:
And out of the houses the rats came tumbling.
Great rats, small rats, lean rats, brawny rats,
Brown rats, black rats, grey rats, tawny rats,
Grave old plodders, gay young friskers,
Fathers, mothers, uncles, cousins,
Cocking tails and pricking whiskers,
Families by tens and dozens.
Brothers, sisters, husbands, wives—
Followed the Piper for their lives.
From street to street he piped advancing,
And step for step they followed dancing
Until they came to the river Weser,
Wherein all plunged and perished!
—Save one who, stout as Julius Cæsar,
Swam across and lived to carry
(As he, the manuscript he cherished)
To Rat-land home his commentary:
Which was, “At the first shrill notes of the pipe,
I heard a sound as of scraping tripe,
And putting apples, wondrous ripe,
Into a cider-press’s gripe:
And a moving away of pickle-tub boards,
And a leaving ajar of conserve-cupboards,
And a drawing the corks of train-oil flasks,
And a breaking the hoops of butter casks;
And it seemed as if a voice
(Sweeter far than by harp or by psaltery
Is breathed) called out, Oh rats, rejoice!
The world is grown to one vast drysaltery!
So munch on, crunch on, take your nuncheon,
Breakfast, supper, dinner, luncheon!
And just as a bulky sugar-puncheon,
All ready staved, like a great sun shone
Glorious scarce an inch before me,
Just as methought it said, Come, bore me!
—I found the Weser rolling o’er me.”
You should have heard the Hamelin people
Ringing the bells till they rocked the steeple.
“Go,” cried the Mayor, “and get long poles,
Poke out the nests and block up the holes!
Consult with carpenters and builders,
And leave in our town not even a trace
Of the rats!”—when suddenly, up the face
Of the Piper perked in the market-place,
With a “First, if you please, my thousand guilders!”
‘A thousand guilders! The Mayor looked blue;
So did the Corporation too.
For council dinners made rare havoc
With Claret, Moselle, Vin-de-Grave, Hock;
And half the money would replenish
Their cellar’s biggest butt with Rhenish.
To pay this sum to a wandering fellow
With a gipsy coat of red and yellow!
“Beside,” quoth the Mayor with a knowing wink,
“Our business was done at the river’s brink;
We saw with our eyes the vermin sink,
And what’s dead can’t come to life, I think.
So, friend, we’re not the folks to shrink
From the duty of giving you something for drink,
And a matter of money to put in your poke;
But as for the guilders, what we spoke
Of them, as you very well know, was in joke.
Beside, our losses have made us thrifty.
A thousand guilders! Come, take fifty!”
‘The Piper’s face fell, and he cried,
“No trifling! I can’t wait, beside!
I’ve promised to visit by dinner time
Bagdat, and accept the prime
Of the Head-Cook’s pottage, all he’s rich in,
For having left, in the Caliph’s kitchen,
Of a nest of scorpions no survivor—
With him I proved no bargain-driver.
With you, don’t think I’ll bate a stiver!
And folks who put me in a passion
May find me pipe to another fashion.”
‘“How?” cried the Mayor, “d’ye think I’ll brook
Being worse treated than a Cook?
Insulted by a lazy ribald
With idle pipe and vesture piebald?
You threaten us, fellow? Do your worst,
Blow your pipe there till you burst!”
‘Once more he stept into the street;
And to his lips again
Laid his long pipe of smooth straight cane;
And ere he blew three notes (such sweet
Soft notes as yet musician’s cunning
Never gave the enraptured air)
There was a rustling that seemed like a bustling
Of merry crowds justling at pitching and hustling,
Small feet were pattering, wooden shoes clattering,
Little hands clapping and little tongues chattering,
And, like fowls in a farm-yard when barley is scattering,
Out came the children running.
‘All the little boys and girls,
With rosy cheeks and flaxen curls,
And sparkling eyes and teeth like pearls,
Tripping and skipping, ran merrily after
The wonderful music with shouting and laughter.
...
And I must not omit to say
That in Transylvania there’s a tribe
Of alien people that ascribe
The outlandish ways and dress
On which their neighbours lay such stress,
To their fathers and mothers having risen
Out of some subterraneous prison
Into which they were trepanned
Long time ago in a mighty band
Out of Hamelin town in Brunswick land,
But how or why they don’t understand.’
Something more we had to say of Mr. Browning, but we must stop. It is
singularly characteristic of this age that the poems which rise to the
surface should be examples of ornate art, and grotesque art, not of pure
art. We live in the realm of the _half_ educated. The number of readers
grows daily, but the quality of readers does not improve rapidly. The
middle class is scattered, headless; it is well-meaning, but aimless;
wishing to be wise, but ignorant how to be wise. The aristocracy of
England never was a literary aristocracy, never even in the days of its
full power—of its unquestioned predominance, did it guide—did it even
seriously try to guide—the taste of England. Without guidance young men,
and tired men, are thrown amongst a mass of books; they have to choose
which they like; many of them would much like to improve their culture,
to chasten their taste, if they knew how. But left to themselves they
take, not pure art, but showy art; not that which permanently relieves
the eye and makes it happy whenever it looks, and as long as it looks,
but _glaring_ art which catches and arrests the eye for a moment,
but which in the end fatigues it. But before the wholesome remedy of
nature—the fatigue arrives—the hasty reader has passed on to some new
excitement, which in its turn stimulates for an instant, and then is
passed by for ever. These conditions are not favourable to the due
appreciation of pure art—of that art which must be known before it is
admired—which must have fastened irrevocably on the brain before you
appreciate it—which you must love ere it will seem worthy of your love.
Women too, whose voice in literature counts as well as that of men—and
in a light literature counts for more than that of men—women, such as
we know them, such as they are likely to be, ever prefer a delicate
unreality to a true or firm art. A dressy literature, an exaggerated
literature seem to be fated to us. These are our curses, as other times
had theirs.
‘And yet
Think not the living times forget,
Ages of heroes fought and fell,
That Homer in the end might tell;
O’er grovelling generations past
Upstood the Doric fane at last;
And countless hearts on countless years
Had wasted thoughts, and hopes, and fears,
Rude laughter and unmeaning tears;
Ere England Shakespeare saw, or Rome
The pure perfection of her dome.
Others I doubt not, if not we,
The issue of our toils shall see;
Young children gather as their own
The harvest that the dead had sown,
The dead forgotten and unknown.’[21]
APPENDIX.
_THE IGNORANCE OF MAN._[22]
(1862.)
A bold man once said that religion and morality were inconsistent.
He argued thus: The essence of religion—part of the essence, at any
rate—is recompense; a belief in another life is only another name for
the anticipation of a time when wickedness will be punished, and when
goodness will be rewarded. If you admit a Providence, you acknowledge
the existence of an adjusting agency, of a power which is recompensing
by its very definition, and of its very nature, which allots happiness
to virtue and pain to vice. On the other hand, the essence of morality
is disinterestedness; a man who does good for the sake of a future gain
to himself is, in a moral point of view, altogether inferior to one who
does good for the good’s sake, who hopes for nothing again, who is not
thinking of himself, who is not calculating his own futurity. Between a
man who does good to the world because he takes an intelligent view of
his real interest, and another who does harm to the world because he is
blind to that interest, there is only an intellectual difference,—the
one is mentally longsighted, the other mentally short-sighted. By the
admission of all mankind, a disinterested action is better than a selfish
action; a disinterested man is higher than a selfish man. Yet how is it
possible that a religious man can be disinterested? Heaven overarches
him, hell yawns before him. How can he help having his eyes attracted by
the one and terrified by the other? He boasts, indeed, that religion is
useful to mankind by producing good actions; he extols the attractive
influence of future reward, and the deterring efficacy of apprehended
penalty. But his boast is absurd and premature; by holding forth these
anticipated bribes, by menacing these pains, he extracts from virtue
_its virtue_; he makes it selfishness like the rest; he constructs
an edifying and hoping saint, but he spoils the disinterested and
uncalculating man.
These thoughts are not often boldly expressed. Fundamental difficulties
rarely are. They constantly confuse the mind, and they are always
floating like a vague mist in the intellectual air; they distort and blur
the outlines of everything else, but they have no distinct outline of
their own. An obscure difficulty is a pervading evil; the first requisite
for removing it is to make it clear; if you assign a limit, you notify
the frontier at which it may be attacked.