ago, and there saw the gypsy who is the original of Fifine.
His fancy was evidently set roaming by her audacity, her
strength--the contrast which she presented to the more
spiritual types of womanhood; and this contrast eventually
found expression in a poetic theory of life, in which these
opposite types and their corresponding modes of attraction
became the necessary complement of each other. As he laid
down the theory, Mr. Browning would be speaking in his own
person. But he would turn into someone else in the act of
working it out--for it insensibly carried with it a plea for
yielding to those opposite attractions, not only
successively, but at the same time; and a modified Don Juan
would grow up under his pen."[47]
This modified Don Juan is the spokesman of the poem: not the "splendid
devil" of Tirso de Molina, but a modern gentleman, living at Pornic, a
refined, cultured, musical, artistic and philosophical person, "of high
attainments, lofty aspirations, strong emotions, and capricious will."
Strolling through the fair with his wife, he expatiates on the charm of
a Bohemian existence, and, more particularly, on the charms of one
Fifine, a rope-dancer, whose performance he has witnessed. Urged by the
troubled look of his wife, he launches forth into an elaborate defence
of inconstancy in love, and consequently of the character of his
admiration for Fifine.
He starts by arguing:--
"That bodies show me minds,
That, through the outward sign, the inward grace allures,
And sparks from heaven transpierce earth's coarsest covertures,--
All by demonstrating the value of Fifine!"
He then applies his method to the whole of earthly life, finally
resolving it into the principle:--
"All's change, but permanence as well.
* * * * *
Truth inside, and outside, truth also; and between
Each, falsehood that is change, as truth is permanence.
The individual soul works through the shows of sense,
(Which, ever proving false, still promise to be true)
Up to an outer soul as individual too;
And, through the fleeting, lives to die into the fixed,
And reach at length 'God, man, or both together mixed.'"
Last of all, just as his speculations have come to an end in an earnest
profession of entire love to his wife, and they pause for a moment on
the threshold of the villa, he receives a note from Fifine.
"Oh, threaten no farewell! five minutes shall suffice
To clear the matter up. I go, and in a trice
Return; five minutes past, expect me! If in vain--
Why, slip from flesh and blood, and play the ghost again!"
He exceeds the allotted five minutes. Elvire takes him at his word; and,
as we seem to be told in the epilogue, husband and wife are reconciled
only in death.
Such is the barest outline of the structure and purport of the poem. But
no outline can convey much notion of the wide range, profound
significance and infinite ingenuity of the arguments; of the splendour
and vigour of the poetry; or of the subtle consistency and exquisite
truth of the character-painting. Small in amount as is this last in
proportion to the philosophy, it is of very notable kind and quality.
Not only the speaker, but Fifine, and still more Elvire, are quickened
into life by graphic and delicate touches. If we except Lucrezia in
_Andrea del Sarto_, in no other monologue is the presence and
personality of the silent or seldom-speaking listener so vividly felt.
We see the wronged wife Elvire, we know her, and we trace the very
progress of her moods, the very changes in her face, as she listens to
the fluent talk of her husband. Don Juan (if we may so call him) is a
distinct addition to Browning's portrait-gallery. Let no one suppose him
to be a mere mouthpiece for dialectical disquisitions. He is this
certainly, but his utterances are tinged with individual colour. This
fact which, from the artistic point of view, is an inestimable
advantage, is apt to prove, as in the case of Prince Hohenstiel,
somewhat of a practical difficulty. "The clearest way of showing where
he uses (1) Truth, (2) Sophism, (3) a mixture of both--is to say that
wherever he speaks of Fifine (whether as type or not) in relation to
himself and his own desire for truth, or right living with his wife, he
is sophistical: wherever he speaks directly of his wife's value to him
he speaks truth with an alloy of sophism; and wherever he speaks
impersonally he speaks the truth.[48]" Keeping this in mind, we can
easily separate the grain from the chaff; and the grain is emphatically
worth storing. Perhaps no poem of Browning's contains so much deep and
acute comment on life and conduct: few, such superabounding wealth of
thought and imagery. Browning is famed for his elaborate and original
similes; but I doubt if he has conceived any with more originality, or
worked them out with richer elaboration, than those of the Swimmer, of
the Carnival, of the Druid Monument, of Fifine herself. Nor has he often
written more original poetry than some of the more passionate or
imaginative passages of the poem. The following lines, describing an
imaginary face representing Horror, have all the vivid sharpness of an
actual vision or revelation:--
"Observe how brow recedes,
Head shudders back on spine, as if one haled the hair,
Would have the full-face front what pin-point eye's sharp stare
Announces; mouth agape to drink the flowing fate,
While chin protrudes to meet the burst o' the wave; elate
Almost, spurred on to brave necessity, expend
All life left, in one flash, as fire does at its end."
Just as good in a different style, is this quaint and quiet landscape:--
"For, arm in arm, we two have reached, nay, passed, you see,
The village-precinct; sun sets mild on Saint-Marie--
We only catch the spire, and yet I seem to know
What's hid i' the turn o' the hill: how all the graves must glow
Soberly, as each warms its little iron cross,
Flourished about with gold, and graced (if private loss
Be fresh) with stiff rope-wreath of yellow, crisp bead-blooms
Which tempt down birds to pay their supper, mid the tombs,
With prattle good as song, amuse the dead awhile,
If couched they hear beneath the matted camomile."
The poem is written in Alexandrine couplets, and is, I believe, the only
English poem of any length written in this metre since Drayton's
_Polyolbion_. Browning's metre has scarcely the flexibility of the best
French verse, but he allows himself occasionally two licenses not used
in French since the time of Marot: (1) the addition of an unaccented
syllable at the end of the first half of the verse, as:--
"'Twas not for every Gawain to gaze upon the Grail!"--
(2) the addition of two syllables, making seven instead of six beats.
"What good were else i' the drum and fife? O pleasant
land of France!"
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 47: _Handbook_, p. 148.]
[Footnote 48: J.T. Nettleship on "Fifine at the Fair" (_Browning
Society's Papers_, Part II. p. 223). Mr. Nettleship's elaborate analysis
of the poem is a most helpful and admirable piece of work.]
21. RED COTTON NIGHT-CAP COUNTRY; OR, TURF AND TOWERS.
[Published in 1873 (_Poetical Works_, 1889, Vol XII. pp.
1-177).]
_Red Cotton Night-Cap Country_ is a story of real life, true in all its
facts, and studied at the place where it had occurred a few years
before: St. Aubin, in Normandy (the St. Rambert of the poem). It is the
story of the life of Antoine Mellerio, the Paris jeweller, whose tragic
death occurred at St. Aubin on the 13th April 1870. A suit concerning
his will, decided only in the summer of 1872, supplied Browning with the
materials of his tragedy. In the first proof of the poem the real names
of persons and places were given; but they were changed before
publication, and are now in every case fictitious. The second edition of
Mrs. Orr's _Handbook_ contains a list of the real names, which I
subjoin.[49]
The book is dedicated to Miss Thackeray (Mrs. Richmond Ritchie), and the
whole story is supposed to be told to her (as in substance it was) by
Browning, who has thus given to the poem a tone of pleasant
colloquialism. Told as it is, it becomes in part a dramatic monologue of
which the _dramatis persona_ is Robert Browning. It is full of quiet,
sometimes grim, humour; of picturesque and witty touches; of pungency
and irony. Its manner, the humorous telling of a tragic tale, is a
little after the pattern of Carlyle. In such a setting the tragic
episodes, sometimes all but heroic, sometimes almost grotesque, have all
the impressiveness of contrast.
The story itself, in the main, is a sordid enough tragedy: like several
of Browning's later books, it is a study in evil. The two characters who
fill the stage of this little history are tragic comedians; they, too,
are "real creatures, exquisitely fantastical, strangely exposed to the
world by a lurid catastrophe, who teach us that fiction, if it can
imagine events and persons more agreeable to the taste it has educated,
can read us no such furrowing lesson in life." The character of Miranda,
the sinner who would reconcile sin with salvation, is drawn with special
subtlety; analysed, dissected rather, with the unerring scalpel of the
experienced operator. Miranda is swayed through life by two opposing
tendencies, for he is of mixed Castilian and French blood. He is
mastered at once by two passions, earthly and religious, illicit love
and Catholic devotion: he cannot let go the one and he will not let go
the other; he would enjoy himself on the "Turf" without abandoning the
shelter of the "Towers." His life is spent in trying to effect a
compromise between the two antagonistic powers which finally pull down
his house of life. Clara, his mistress-wife, is a mirror of himself; she
humours him, manages him, perhaps on his own lines of inclination.
"'But--loved him?' Friend, I do not praise her love!
True love works never for the loved one so,
Nor spares skin-surface, smoothening truth away,
Love bids touch truth, endure truth, and embrace
Truth, though, embracing truth, love crush itself.
'Worship not me, but God!' the angels urge!"
This man and woman are analysed with exquisite skill; but they are not
in the strict sense inventions, creations: we understand rather than see
them. Only towards the end, where the facts leave freer play for the
poetic impulse, do they rise into sharp vividness of dramatic life and
speech. Nothing in the poem equals in intensity the great soliloquy of
Miranda before his strange and suicidal leap, and the speech of Clara to
the "Cousinry." Here we pass at a bound from chronicling to creation. As
a narrative, _Red Cotton Night-Cap Country_ has all the interest of a
novel, with the concentration and higher pitch of poetry. Less ingenious
and philosophical than _Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau_ and _Fifine at the
Fair_, it is far more intimately human, more closely concerned with
"man's thoughts and loves and hates," with the manifestations of his
eager and uneasy spirit, in strange shapes, on miry roads, in dubious
twilights. Of all Browning's works it is perhaps the easiest to read; no
tale could be more straightforward, no language more lucid, no verse
more free from harshness or irregularity, The versification, indeed, is
exceptionally smooth and measured, seldom rising into strong passion,
but never running into volubility. Here and there are short passages,
which I can scarcely detach for quotation, with a singular charm of
vague remote music. The final summary of Clara and Miranda, excellent
and convenient alike, may be severed without much damage from the
context.
"Clara, I hold the happier specimen,--
It may be, through that artist-preference
For work complete, inferiorly proposed,
To incompletion, though it aim aright.
Morally, no! Aspire, break bounds! I say,
Endeavour to be good, and better still,
And best! Success is nought, endeavour's all.
But intellect adjusts the means to ends,
Tries the low thing, and leaves it done, at least;
No prejudice to high thing, intellect
Would do and will do, only give the means.
Miranda, in my picture-gallery,
Presents a Blake; be Clara--Meissonnier!
Merely considered so, by artist, mind!
For, break through Art and rise to poetry,
Bring Art to tremble nearer, touch enough
The verge of vastness to inform our soul
What orb makes transit through the dark above,
And there's the triumph!--there the incomplete,
More than completion, matches the immense,--
Then, Michelagnolo against the world!"
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 49: Page 2. _The Firm Miranda_--Mellerio Brothers. Page 4.
_St. Rambert_--St Aubin; _Joyeux, Joyous Gard_--Lion, Lionesse. Page 6.
_Vire_--Caen. Page 25. _St. Rambertese_--St. Aubinese. Page 29.
_Londres_--Douvres; _London_--Dover; _La Roche_--Courcelle;
_Monlieu_--Bernières; _Villeneuve_--Langrune; _Pons_--Luc; _La
Ravissante_--La Délivrande. Page 33. _Raimbaux_--Bayeux. Page 34.
_Morillon_--Hugonin; _Mirecourt_--Bonnechose; _Miranda_--Mellerio. Page
35. _New York_--Madrid. Page 41. _Clairvaux_--Tailleville. Page 42.
_Madrilene_--Turinese. Page 43. _Gonthier_--Bény; _Rousseau_--Voltaire;
_Léonce_--Antoine. Page 52. _Of "Firm Miranda, London and New
York"_--"Mellerio Brothers"--Meller, people say. Page 79. _Rare
Vissante_--Del Yvrande; _Aldabert_--Regnobert. Page 80.
_Eldobert_--Ragnebert; _Mailleville_--Beaudoin. Page 81.
_Chaumont_--Quelen; _Vertgalant_--Talleyrand. Page 89.
_Ravissantish_--Délivrandish. Page 101. _Clara de Millefleurs_--Anna de
Beaupré; _Coliseum Street_--Miromesnil Street. Page 110.
_Steiner_--Mayer; _Commercy_--Larocy; _Sierck_--Metz. Page 111.
_Muhlhausen_--Debacker. Page 112, _Carlino Centofanti_--Miranda di
Mongino. Page 121. _Portugal_--Italy. Page 125. "_Gustave_"--"Alfred."
Page 135. _Vaillant_--Mériel. Page 149. _Thirty-three_--Twenty-five.
152. _Beaumont_--Pasquier. Page 167. _Sceaux_--Garges. Page 203. _Luc de
la Maison Rouge_--Jean de la Becquetière; _Claise_--Vire; _Maude_--Anne.
Page 204. _Dionysius_--Eliezer; _Scolastica_--Elizabeth. Page 214.
_Twentieth_--Thirteenth. Page 241. _Fricquot_--"Picot."--Mrs. Orr's
_Handbook_, Second Edition, pp. 261-2.]
22. ARISTOPHANES' APOLOGY: including a Transcript from Euripides; being
the Last Adventure of Balaustion.
[Published in April, 1875. (_Poetical Works_, 1889, Vol.
XIII. pp. 1-258).]
_Aristophanes' Apology_, as its sub-title indicates, is a kind of sequel
to _Balaustion's Adventure_. It is the record, in Balaustion's words, of
an adventure which happened to her after her marriage with Euthukles. On
the day when the news of Euripides' death reached Athens, as Balaustion
and her husband were sitting at home, toward nightfall, Aristophanes,
coming home with his revellers from the banquet which followed his
triumph in the play of _Thesmophoriazousai_, burst in upon them.
"There stood in person Aristophanes.
And no ignoble presence! On the bulge
Of the clear baldness,--all his head one brow,--
True, the veins swelled, blue net-work, and there surged
A red from cheek to temple, then retired
As if the dark-leaved chaplet damped a flame,--
Was never nursed by temperance or health.
But huge the eyeballs rolled black native fire,
Imperiously triumphant: nostrils wide
Waited their incense; while the pursed mouth's pout
Aggressive, while the beak supreme above,
While the head, face, nay, pillared throat thrown back,
Beard whitening under like a vinous foam,
These made a glory, of such insolence--
I thought,--such domineering deity
Hephaistos might have carved to cut the brine
For his gay brother's prow, imbrue that path
Which, purpling, recognized the conqueror.
Impudent and majestic: drunk, perhaps,
But that's religion; sense too plainly snuffed:
Still, sensuality was grown a rite."
He, too, has just heard of Euripides' death, and an impulse, part
sympathy, part mockery, has brought him to the "house friendly to
Euripides." The revellers retire abashed before Balaustion; he alone
remains. From the extraordinary and only too natural gabble and garbage
of his opening words, he quickly passes to a more or less serious
explanation and defence of his conduct toward the dead poet; to an
exposition, in fact, of his aims and doings as a writer of comedy. When
his "apology" is ended, Balaustion replies, censuring him pretty
severely, making adroit use of the licence of a "stranger" and a woman,
and defending Euripides against him. For a further (and the best)
defence, she reads the whole of the _Herakles_, which Browning here
translates. Aristophanes, naturally, is not convinced; impressed he must
have been, to have borne so long a reading without demur: he flings them
a snatch of song, finding in his impromptu a hint for a new play, the
_Frogs_, and is gone. And now, a year after, as the couple return to
Rhodes from a disgraced and dismantled Athens, Balaustion dictates to
Euthukles her recollection of the "adventure," for the double purpose of
putting the past events on record, and of eluding the urgency of the
present sorrow.
It will thus be seen that the book consists of two distinct parts. There
is, first, the apology of Aristophanes, second, the translation of the
play of Euripides. _Herakles_, or, as it is more generally known,
_Hercules Furens_, is rendered completely and consecutively, in blank
verse and varied choric measures. It is not, as was the case with
_Alkestis_ worked into the body of the poem; not welded, but inserted.
We have thus, while losing the commentary, the advantage of a detached
transcript, with a lyrical rendering of the lyrical parts of the play.
These are given with a constant vigour and closeness, often with a rare
beauty (as in the famous "Ode bewailing Age," and that other on the
labours of Herakles). Precisely the same characteristics that we have
found in the translation of the _Alkestis_ are here again to be found,
and all that I said on the former, considered apart from its setting,
may be applied to the latter. We have the same literalness (again with a
few apparent exceptions), the same insistence on the root-meaning of
words, the same graphic force and vivifying touch, the same general
clearness and charm.
The original part of the book is of far closer texture and more
remarkable order than "the amber which embalms _Alkestis_" the first
adventure of Balaustion; but it has less human emotion, less general
appeal. It is nothing less than a resuscitation of the old controversy
between Aristophanes and Euripides; a resuscitation, not only of the
controversy, but of the combatants. "Local colour" is laid on with an
unsparing hand, though it cannot be said that the atmosphere is really
Greek. There is hardly a line, there is never a page, without an
allusion to some recondite thing: Athenian customs, Greek names, the
plays of Euripides, above all, the plays of Aristophanes. "Every line of
the poem," it has been truly said, "shows Mr. Browning as soaked and
steeped in the comedies as was Bunyan in his Bible." The result is a
vast, shapeless thing, splendidly and grotesquely alive, but alive with
the obscure and tangled life of the jungle.
Browning's attitude towards the controversy, the side he takes as
champion of Euripides, is distinctly shown, not merely in Balaustion's
statement and defence, but in the whole conduct of the piece.
Aristophanes, though on his own defence, is set in a decidedly
unfavourable light; and no one, judging from Browning's work, can doubt
as to his opinion of the relative qualities of the two great poets. It
is possible even to say there is a partiality in the presentment. But it
must be remembered on the other hand that Browning is not concerned
simply with the question of art, but with the whole bearings, artistic
and ethical, of the contest; and it must be remembered that the aim of
Comedy is intrinsically lower and more limited than that of Tragedy,
that it is destructive, disintegrating, negative, concerned with smaller
issues and more temporary questions; and that Euripides may reasonably
be held a better teacher, a keener, above all a more helpful, reader of
the riddle of life, than his mighty assailant. This is how Aristophanes
has been described, by one who should know:--
"He is an aggregate of many men, all of a certain greatness.
We may build up a conception of his powers if we mount
Rabelais upon Hudibras, lift him with the songfulness of
Shelley, give him a vein of Heinrich Heine, and cover him
with the mantle of the Anti-Jacobin, adding (that there may
be some Irish in him) a dash of Grattan, before he is in
motion."[50]
Now the "Titanic pamphleteer" is more recognisable in Browning's most
vivid portrait than the "lyric poet of aerial delicacy" who in some
strange fashion, beyond his own wildest metamorphoses, distracted and
idealised the otherwise congruous figure. Not that this is overlooked
or forgotten: it is brought out admirably in several places, notably in
the fine song put into the mouth of Aristophanes at the close; but it is
scarcely so prominent as lovers of him could desire. It is possible,
too, that Browning somewhat over-accentuates his earnestness; not his
fundamental earnestness, but the extent to which he remembered and
exhibited it. "My soul bade fight": yes, but "laugh," too, and laugh for
laughter's as well as fight for principle's sake. This, again, is merely
a matter of detail, of shading. There can be little doubt that the whole
general outline of the man is right, none whatever that it is a living
and breathing outline. His apology is presented in Browning's familiar
manner of genuine feeling tempered with sophistry. As a piece of
dramatic art it is worthy to stand beside his famous earlier apologies;
and it has value too as a contribution to criticism, to a vital
knowledge of the Attic drama and the work and personality of
Aristophanes and Euripides, and to a better understanding of the drama
as a criticism of life.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 50: George Meredith, _On the Idea of Comedy_.]
23. THE INN ALBUM.
[Published in November, 1875. (_Poetical Works_, 1889, Vol
XII. pp. 179-311.) Translated into German in 1877: "_Das
Fremdenbuch_ von Robert Browning. Aus dem Englischen von E.
Leo. Hamburg: W. Mauke Söhne."]
The story of _The Inn Album_ is founded on fact, though it is not, like
_Red Cotton Night-Cap Country_, an almost literal transcript from life.
The characters of the poem are four, all unnamed: a young "polished
snob," an impoverished middle-aged nobleman, a woman, whom he had
seduced, and who is now married to a clergyman; and a young girl, her
friend, who is betrothed to the younger of the two men. Of these
characters, the only one whom Browning has invented is the girl, through
whom, in his telling of the story, the tragedy is brought about. But he
has softened the repulsiveness of the original tale, and has also
brought it to a ringing close, not supplied by the bare facts. The
career of the elder man, which came to an end in 1839, did not by any
means terminate with the events recorded in the poem.
_The Inn Album_ is a story of wrecked lives, lost hopes, of sordid and
gloomy villainies; with only light enough in its darkness to make that
darkness visible. It is profoundly sad; yet
"These things are life:
And life, they say, is worthy of the Muse."