P. 89. _Plataian help._ The Platæans sent a thousand well appointed
warriors to help at Marathon. The term stands for _timely_ help.
P. 94. _Plethron square._ 100 feet square.
P. 98. _Palaistra tool._ Tool used at the Palaistra, or wrestling
school: in this case the strigil.
P. 99. _Phales._ _Iacchos._ Two epithets of Bacchus--the former
indecent.
P. 112. _Kinesias._ According to Aristophanes, a bad profligate lyric
poet, notable for his leanness.
P. 113. _Rattei._ Like "Neblaretai," an imitative or gibberish word
expressing joyous excitement. _Aristonumos._ _Sannurion._ Two comic
poets, the latter ridiculed by Aristophanes for his leanness.
P. 124. _Parabasis._ Movement of the chorus, wherein the Coryphoeus came
forward and spoke in the poet's name.
P. 128. _Skiadeion._ Sunshade. Parasol.
P. 129. _Theoria._ _Opora._ Characters in the Eirené or "Peace:" the
first personifying games, spectacles, sights; the second, plenty,
fruitful autumn, and so on.
P. 133. _Philokleon._ Lover of Kleon. (Cleon.) _Bdelukleon._ Reviler of
Kleon.
P. 135. _Logeion._ Front of the stage occupied by the actors.
P. 137. _Kukloboros-roaring._ Roaring like the torrent Cycloborus (in
Attica).
P. 140. _Konnos._ The play by Ameipsias which beat the "Clouds."
_Euthumenes._ One who refused the pay of the comic writers, while he
tripled that of those who attended at the Assembly. _Argurrhios._ As
before. _Kinesias._ As before.
P. 144. _Triballos._ A supposed _country_ and clownish god.
P. 172. _Propula._ (Propyla.) Gateway to the Acropolis.
P. 248. _Elaphebolion month._ The "Stag-striking" month.
P. 249. _Bakis prophecy._ Foolish prophecies attributed to one Bacis,
rife at that time; a collective name for all such.
P. 255. _Kommos._ General weeping--by the chorus and an actor.
"FIFINE AT THE FAIR."
"Fifine at the Fair" is a defence of inconstancy, or of the right of
experiment in love; and is addressed by a husband to his wife, whose
supposed and very natural comments the monologue reflects. The speaker's
implied name of Don Juan sufficiently tells us what we are meant to
think of his arguments; and they also convict themselves by landing him
in an act of immorality, which brings its own punishment. This character
is nevertheless a standing puzzle to Mr. Browning's readers, because
that which he condemns in it, and that which he does not, are not to be
distinguished from each other. It is impossible to see where Mr.
Browning ends and where Don Juan begins. The reasoning is scarcely ever
that of a heartless or profligate person, though it very often betrays
an unconsciously selfish one. It treats love as an education still more
than as a pleasure; and if it lowers the standard of love, or defends
too free an indulgence in it, it does so by asserting what is true for
imaginative persons, though not for the commonplace: that whatever stirs
even a sensuous admiration appeals also to the artistic, the moral, and
even the religious nature. Its obvious sophistries are mixed up with the
profoundest truths, and the speaker's tone has often the tenderness of
one who, with all his inconstancy, has loved deeply and long. We can
only solve the problem by referring to the circumstances in which the
idea of the poem arose.
Mr. Browning was, with his family, at Pornic many years ago, and there
saw the gipsy who is the original of Fifine. His fancy was evidently
sent roaming, by her audacity, her strength--the contrast which she
presented to the more spiritual types of womanhood; and this contrast
eventually found expression in a poetic theory of life, in which these
opposite types and their corresponding modes of attraction became the
necessary complement of each other. As he laid down the theory, Mr.
Browning would be speaking in his own person. But he would turn into
someone else in the act of working it out--for it insensibly carried
with it a plea for yielding to those opposite attractions, not only
successively, but at the same time; and a modified Don Juan would grow
up under his pen, thinking in some degree his thoughts, using in some
degree his language, and only standing out as a distinctive character at
the end of the poem. The higher type of womanhood must appear in the
story, at the same time as the lower which is represented by Fifine; and
Mr. Browning would instinctively clothe it in the form which first
suggested or emphasized the contrast. He would soon, however, feel that
the vision was desecrated by the part it was called upon to play. He
would disguise or ward it off when possible: now addressing Elvire by
her husband's mouth, in the terms of an ideal companionship, now again
reducing her to the level of an every-day injured wife; and when the
dramatic Don Juan was about to throw off the mask, the flickering wifely
personality would be extinguished altogether, and the unfaithful husband
left face to face with the mere phantom of conscience which, in one
sense, Elvire is always felt to be. This is what actually occurs; and
only from this point of view can we account for the perpetual
encroaching of the imaginary on the real, the real on the imaginary,
which characterizes the work.
A fanciful prologue, "Amphibian," strikes its key-note. The writer
imagines himself floating on the sea, pleasantly conscious of his bodily
existence, yet feeling unfettered by it. A strange beautiful butterfly
floats past him in the air; her radiant wings can be only those of a
soul; and it strikes him that while the waves are his property, and the
air is hers, hers is true freedom, his only the mimicry of it. He sees
little to regret in this, since imagination is as good as reality; and
Heaven itself can only be made up of such things as poets dream. Yet he
knows that his swimming seems but a foolish compromise between the
flight to which he cannot attain, and the more grovelling mode of being
which he has no real wish to renounce; and he wonders whether she, the
already released, who is upborne by those sunlit wings, does not look
down with pity and wonder upon him. So also will Elvire, though less
dispassionately, watch the intellectual vagaries of her Don Juan, which
embrace the heavens, but are always centred in earth. This prologue is
preceded by a quotation from Molière's "Don Juan," in which Elvire
satirically prescribes to her lover the kind of self-defence--or
something not unlike it--which Mr. Browning's hero will adopt.
Don Juan invites his wife to walk with him through the fair: and as he
points out its sights to her, he expatiates on the pleasures of
vagrancy, and declares that the red pennon waving on the top of the
principal booth sends an answering thrill of restlessness through his
own frame. He then passes to a glowing eulogium on the charms of the
dark-skinned rope-dancer, Fifine, who forms part of the itinerant show.
Elvire gives tokens of perturbation, and her husband frankly owns that
as far as Fifine is concerned, he cannot defend his taste: he can
scarcely account for it. "Beautiful she is, in her feminine grace and
strength, set forth by her boyish dress; but with probably no more
feeling than a sprite, and no more conscience than a flower. It is
likely enough that her antecedents have been execrable, and that her
life is in harmony with them." Still, he does not wish it supposed that
he admires a body without a soul: and he tries to convince himself that
Fifine, after all, is not quite without one. "There is no grain of sand
on the sea-shore which may not, once in a century, be the first to
flash back the rising sun; there can be no human spirit which does not
in the course of its existence greet the Divine light with one answering
ray."
But no heavenly spark can be detected in Fifine; and he is reduced to
seeking a virtue for her, a justification for himself, in that very
fact. If she has no virtue, she also pretends to none. If she gives
nothing to society, she asks nothing of it. His fancy raises up a
procession of such women as the world has crowned: a Helen, a Cleopatra,
some Christian saint; he bids Elvire see herself as part of it--as the
true Helen, who, according to the legend, never quitted Greece,
contemplated her own phantom within the walls of Troy--and be satisfied
that she is "best" of all. "All alike are wanting in one grace which
Fifine possesses: that of self-effacement. Helen and Cleopatra demand
unquestioning homage for their own mental as well as bodily charms; the
saint demands it for the principle she sets forth. His love demands that
he shall see into her heart; his wife that he shall believe the
impossible as regards her own powers of devotion. Fifine says,'You come
to look at my outside, my foreign face and figure my outlandish limbs.
Pay for the sight if it has pleased you, and give me credit for nothing
beyond what you see.' So simply honest an appeal must touch his heart."
Don Juan well knows what his wife thinks of all this, and he says it for
her. "Fifine attracts him for no such out of the way reason. Her charm
is that she is something new, and something which does not belong to
him. He is the soul of inconstancy; and if he had the sun for his own,
he would hanker after other light, were it that of a tallow-candle or a
squib." But he assures her that this reasoning is unsound, and his
amusing himself with a lower thing does not prove that he has become
indifferent to the higher. He shows this by reminding her of a picture
of Raphael's, which he was mad to possess; which now that he possesses
it, he often neglects for a picture-book of Doré's; but which, if
threatened with destruction, he would save at the sacrifice of a million
Dorés, perhaps of his own life. And now he turns back to her phantom
self, as present in his own mind; describes it in terms of exquisite
grace and purity; and declares hers the one face which fits into his
heart, and makes whole what would be half without it.
Elvire is conciliated; but her husband will not leave well alone. He has
established her full claim to his admiration: but he is going to prove
that so far as her physical charms are concerned, she owes it to his
very attachment: "for those charms are not attested by her
looking-glass. He discovers them by the eye of love--in other words--by
the artist soul within him."
All beauty, Don Juan farther explains, is in the imagination of him who
feels it, be he lover or artist; be the beauty he descries the attribute
of a living face, of a portrait, or of some special arrangement of
sound. The feeling is inspired by its outward objects, but it cannot be
retraced to them. It is a fancy created by fact, as flame by fuel; no
more identical with it. The fancy is not on that account a delusion. It
is the vision of ideal truth: the recognition by an inner sense of that
which does not exist for the outer. That is why hearts choose each other
by help of the face, and why they choose so diversely. The eye of love,
which again is the eye of art, reads soul into the features, however
incomplete their expression of it may be. It reconstructs the ideal type
which nature has failed to carry out.
He illustrates this by means of three faces roughly sketched in the
sand. At first sight they are grotesque and unmeaning. Yet a few more
strokes of the broken pipe which is serving him as a pencil, will give
to two of these a predominating expression; convert the third into a
likeness of Elvire.
"These completing touches represent the artist's action upon life. By
this method Don Juan has been enabled on a former occasion, to complete
a work of high art. A block of marble had come into his possession, half
shaped by the hand of Michael Angelo.
"... One hand,--the Master's,--smoothed and scraped
That mass, he hammered on and hewed at, till he hurled
Life out of death, and left a challenge: for the world,
Death still,--...." (vol. xi. p. 260.)
Not death to him: for as he gazed on the rough-hewn block, a form
emerged upon his mental sight--a form which he interpreted as that of
the goddess Eidotheé.[53] And as his soul received it from that of the
dead master, his hand carried it out."
Mr. Browning's whole theory of artistic perception is contained in the
foregoing lines; but he proceeds to enforce it in another way. "The life
thus evoked from death, the beauty from ugliness, is the gain of each
special soul--its permanent conquest over matter. The mode of effecting
this is the special secret of every soul; and this Don Juan defines as
its chemic secret, the law of its affinities, the law of its actions and
reactions. Where one, he says, lights force, another draws forth pity;
where one finds food for self-indulgence, another acquires strength for
self-sacrifice. One blows life's ashes into rose-coloured flame, another
into less heavenly hues. Love will have reached its height when the
secret of each soul has become the knowledge of all; and the
many-coloured rays of individual experience are fused in the white light
of universal truth."
Here again Don Juan imagines a retort. Elvire makes short work of his
poetic theories, and declares that this professed interest in souls is a
mere pretext for the gratification of sense. "Whom in heaven's name is
he trying to take in?" He entreats music to take his part. "It alone can
pierce the mists of falsehood which intervene between the soul and
truth. And now, as they stroll homewards in the light of the setting
sun, all things seem charged with those deeper harmonies--with those
vital truths of existence which words are powerless to convey. Elvire,
however, has no soul for music, and her husband must have recourse to
words."
The case between them may, he thinks, be stated in this question, "How
do we rise from falseness into truth?" "We do so after the fashion of
the swimmer who brings his nostrils to the level of the upper air, but
leaves the rest of his body under water--by the act of self-immersion in
the very element from which we wish to escape. Truth is to the aspiring
soul as the upper air to the swimmer: the breath of life. But if the
swimmer attempts to free his head and arms, he goes under more
completely than before. If the soul strives to escape from the grosser
atmosphere into the higher, she shares the same fate. Her truthward
yearnings plunge her only deeper into falsehood. Body and soul must
alike surrender themselves to an element in which they cannot breathe,
for this element can alone sustain them. But through the act of plunging
we float up again, with a deeper disgust at the briny taste we have
brought back; with a deeper faith in the life above, and a deeper
confidence in ourselves, whom the coarser element has proved unable to
submerge."
"Suppose again, that as we paddle with our hands under water, we grasp
at something which seems a soul. The piece of falsity slips through our
fingers, but by the mechanical reaction just described, it sends us
upwards into the realm of truth. This is precisely what Fifine has done.
Of the earth earthy as she is, she has driven you and me into the realms
of abstract truth. We have thus no right to despise her" This discourse
is interrupted by a contemptuous allusion to a passage in "Childe
Harold," (fourth canto), in which the human intelligence is challenged
to humble itself before the ocean.
Elvire is still dissatisfied. The suspicious fact remains, that whatever
experience her husband desires to gain, it is always a woman who must
supply it. This he frankly admits; and he gives his reason. "Women lend
themselves to experiment; men do not. Men are egotists, and absorb
whatever comes in their way. Women, whether Fifines or Elvires, allow
themselves to be absorbed. You master men only by reducing yourself to
their level. You captivate women by showing yourself at your best. Their
power of hero-worship is illustrated by the act of the dolphin, 'True
woman creature,' which bore the ship-wrecked Arion to the Corinthian
coast. Men are not only wanting in true love: their best powers are
called forth by hate. They resemble the vine, first 'stung' into
'fertility' by the browsing goat, which nibbled away its tendrils, and
gained the 'indignant wine' by the process. In their feminine
characteristics Elvire stands far higher than Fifine; but Fifine is for
that very reason more useful as a means of education; for Elvire may be
trusted implicitly; Fifine teaches one to take care of himself. They are
to each other as the strong ship and the little rotten bark." This
comparison is suggested by a boatman whom they lately saw adventurously
pushing his way through shoal and sandbank because he would not wait for
the tide.
Don Juan begs leave to speak one word more in defence of Fifine and her
masquerading tribe; it will recall his early eulogium on her frankness.
"All men are actors: but these alone do not deceive. All you are
expected to applaud in them is the excellence of the avowed sham."
Don Juan has thus developed his theory that soul is attainable through
flesh, truth through falsehood, the real through what only seems; and,
as he thinks, justified the conclusion that a man's spiritual life is
advanced by every experience, moral or immoral, which comes in his way.
He now relates a dream by which, as he says, those abstract reflections
have been in part inspired; in reality, it continues, and in some degree
refutes them. The dream came to him this morning when he had played
himself to sleep with Schumann's Carnival; having chosen this piece
because his brain was burdened with many thoughts and fancies which,
better than any other, it would enable him to work off; and as he tells
this, he enlarges on the faculty of music to register, as well as
express, every passing emotion of the human soul. He notes also the
constant recurrence of the same old themes, and the caprice of taste
which strives as constantly to convert them into something new.
The dream carries him to Venice, and he awakes, in fancy, on some
pinnacle above St. Mark's Square, overlooking the Carnival. Here his
power of artistic divination--alias of human sympathy, is called into
play; for the men and women below him all wear the semblance of some
human deformity, of some animal type, or of some grotesque embodiment of
human feeling or passion. He throws himself into their midst, and these
monstrosities disappear. The human asserts itself; the brute-like
becomes softened away; what imperfection remains creates pity rather
than disgust. He finds that by shifting his point of view, he can see
even necessary qualities in what otherwise struck him as faults.
Another change takes place: one felt more easily than defined; and he
becomes aware that he is looking not on Venice, but on the world, and
that what seemed her Carnival is in reality the masquerade of life. The
change goes on. Halls and temples are transformed beneath his gaze. The
systems which they represent: religions, philosophies, moralities, and
theories of art, collapse before him, re-form and collapse again. He
sees that the deepest truth can only build on sand, though itself is
stationed on a rock; and can only assert its substance in the often
changing forms of error. The vision seems to declare that change is the
Law of Life.
"Not so," it was about to say. "That law is permanence." The scene has
resembled the forming and reforming, the blending and melting asunder of
a pile of sunset clouds. Like these, when the sun has set, it is
subsiding into a fixed repose, a stern and colourless uniformity.
Temple, tower, and dwelling-house assume the form of one solitary
granite pile, a Druid monument. This monument, as Mr. Browning describes
it,[54] consists really of two, so standing or lying as to form part of
each other. The one cross-shaped is supposed to have been sepulchral, or
in some other way sacred to death. The latter, on which he mainly
dwells, was, until lately, the centre of a rude nature-worship, and is
therefore consecrated to life. It symbolizes life in its most active and
most perennial form. It means the force which aspires to heaven, and the
strength which is rooted in the earth. It means that impulse of all
being towards something outside itself, which is constant amidst all
change, uniform amidst all variety. It means the last word of the scheme
of creation, and therefore also the first. It repeats and concludes the
utterance already sounding in the spectator's ear:--
"... 'All's change, but permanence as well.'
--Grave note whence--list aloft!--harmonics sound, that mean:
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,'"[55]
(p. 332.)
The condition of this monument, its history, the conjectures to which
it has given rise, are described in a humorous spirit which belies its
mystic significance; but that significance is imbedded in the very
conception of the poem, and distinctly expressed in the author's
subsequent words. The words which I have just quoted contain the whole
philosophy of "Fifine at the Fair" as viewed on its metaphysical side.
They declare the changing relations of the soul to some fixed eternal
truth foreshadowed in the impulses of sense. They are the burden of Don
Juan's argument even when he is defending what is wrong. They are the
constantly recurring keynote of what the author has meant to say.
Don Juan draws also a new and more moral lesson from this final vision
of his dream. "Inconstancy is not justified by natural law, for it means
unripeness of soul. The ripe soul evolves the Infinite from a fixed
point. It finds the many in the one. Elvire is the _one_ who includes
the _many_. Elvire is the ocean: while Fifine is but the foam-flake
which the ocean can multiply at pleasure. Elvire shall henceforth
suffice to him."
But here, as elsewhere, he makes a great mistake: that of confusing
nature with the individual man. Her instability supplied him with no
excuse for being inconstant, and her permanence gives him no motive for
constancy; and he proves this in another moment by breaking bounds no
longer in word only, but in deed. It turns out that he had put gold as
well as silver into Fifine's tambourine. The result, intended or not,
has been a letter slipped into his hand. He claims five minutes to go
and "clear the matter up;" exceeds the time, and on returning finds his
punishment in an empty home.
This at least, we seem intended to infer. For Elvire has already
startled him by assuming the likeness of a phantom, and he gives her
leave, in case he breaks his word, to vanish away altogether. The story
ends here; but its epilogue "The Householder" depicts a widowed
husband, grotesquely miserable, fetched home by his departed wife; and
his identity with Don Juan seems unmistakable. This scene is more
humorous than pathetic, as befits the dramatic spirit of the poem; but
the most serious purport and most comprehensive meaning of "Fifine at
the Fair" are summed up in its closing words. The "householder" is
composing his epitaph, and his wife thus concludes it: "Love is all, and
Death is nought."
"PRINCE HOHENSTIEL-SCHWANGAU, SAVIOUR OF SOCIETY."
"Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau" is a defence of the doctrine of
expediency: and the monologue is supposed to be carried on by the late
Emperor of the French, under this feigned name. Louis Napoleon is musing
over past and present, and blending them with each other in a waking
dream. He seems in exile again. But the events of his reign are all, or
for the most part behind him, and they have earned for him the title of
"inscrutable." A young lady of an adventurous type has crossed his path,
in the appropriate region of Leicester Square. Some adroit flattery on
her side has disposed him to confidence, and he is proving to her, over
tea and cigars, that he is not so "inscrutable" after all; or, if he be,
that the key to the enigma is a simple one. "This wearer of crinoline
seems destined to play Oedipus to the Sphinx he is supposed to be;" or
better still, as he gallantly adds, the "Lais" for whose sake he will
unveil the mystery unasked. The situation he thus assumes is not
dignified; but as Mr. Browning probably felt, his choice of a
_confidante_ suits the nature of what he has to tell, as well as the
circumstances in which he tells it. Politically, he has lived from hand
to mouth. So in a different way has she. A very trifling incident
enables him to illustrate his confession, which will proceed without
interruption on the listener's part.
They are sitting at a table with writing materials upon it. Among these
lies a piece of waste-paper. Prince Hohenstiel descries upon it two
blots, takes up a pen, and draws a line from one to the other. This
simple, half-mechanical act is, as he declares, a type of his whole
life; it contains the word of the enigma. His constant principle has
been: not to strive at creating anything new; not to risk marring what
already existed; but to adapt what he found half made and to continue
it. In other words, he has been a sustainer or "saviour," not a reformer
of society.
Many pages are devoted to the statement and vindication of this fact,
and they contain everything that can be said, from a religious or
practical point of view, in favour of taking the world as we find it.
Prince Hohenstiel's first argument is: that he has not the genius of a
reformer, and it is a man's first duty to his Creator to do that only
which he can do best; his second: that sweeping reforms are in
themselves opposed to the creative plan, because they sacrifice
everything to one leading idea, and aim at reducing to one pattern those
human activities which God has intended to be multiform; the third and
strongest: that the scheme of existence with all its apparent evils is
God's work, and no man can improve upon it. There have been, he admits,
revolutions in the moral as well as the physical world; and inspired
reformers, who were born to carry them on; but these men are rare and
portentous as the physical agencies to which they correspond, and
whether "dervish (desert-spectre), swordsman, saint, lawgiver," or
"lyrist," appear only when the time is ripe for them. Meanwhile, the
great machine advances by means of the minute springs, the revolving
wheel-work, of individual lives. Let each of these be content with its
limited sphere. God is with each and all.
And Prince Hohenstiel has another and still stronger reason for not
desiring to tamper with the existing order of things. He finds it good.
He loves existence as he knows it, with its mysteries and its beauties;
its complex causes and incalculable effects; the good it extracts from
evil; the virtue it evolves from suffering. He reveres that Temple of
God's own building, from which deploys the ever varying procession of
human life. If the temple be intricate in its internal construction, if
its architectural fancies impede our passage; if they make us stumble or
even fall; his invariable advice is this: "Throw light on the
stumbling-blocks; fix your torch above them at such points as the
architect approves. But do not burn them away." He considers himself
therefore, not a very great man, but a useful one: one possessing on a
small scale the patience of an Atlas, if not the showy courage of a
Hercules: one whose small achievements pave the way for the great ones.
Thus far the imaginary speaker so resembles Mr. Browning himself, that
we forget for the moment that we are not dealing with him; and his
vicarious testimony to the value of human life lands him, at page 145,
in a personal protest against the folly which under cover of poetry
seeks to run it down. He lashes out against the "bard" who can rave
about inanimate nature as something greater than man; and who talks of
the "unutterable" impressions conveyed by the ocean, as greater than the
intelligence and sympathy, the definite thoughts and feelings which
_can_ be uttered. The lines from "Childe Harold" which will be satirized
in "Fifine at the Fair" are clearly haunting him here. But we shall now
pass on to more historic ground.
It is a natural result of these opinions that Prince
Hohenstiel-Schwangau regards life as the one boon which contains every
other; and that the material prosperity of his people has been the first
object by which his "sustaining" policy was inspired. He does not deny
that even within the limits thus imposed, some choice of cause or system
seemed open to him. "It seemed open to him to choose between religion
and free-thought, between monarchy and government by the people: and to
throw his energies entirely into one scale or the other, instead of
weighting one and the other by turns. It could justly have been urged
that the simpler aim is included in the more complex, and that he would
promote the interests of his subjects by serving them from the wider,
rather than from the narrower point of view."
"But what is true in theory is not always so in practice. He has loved a
cause, and believed in it--the cause of united Italy; and so long as he
was free to express sympathy with this--so long, his critics say, as he
was a mere voice, with air to float in, and no obstacle to bar his
way--he expressed it from the bottom of his soul. But with the power to
act--with the firm ground wheron to act--came also the responsibilities
of action: the circumstance by which it must be controlled. He saw the
wants of his people; the eyes which craved light alone, and the mouths
which craved only bread. He felt that the ideal must yield to the real,
the remote to what was near; and the work of Italian deliverance
remained incomplete. It was his very devotion to the one principle which
brought the reproach of vacillation upon him."
"He broke faith with his people too"--so his critics continue--"for he
supplied food to their bodies; but withheld the promised liberties of
speech and writing which would have brought nourishment to their souls."
And again he answers that he gave them what they wanted most. He gave
them that which would enable them to acquire freedom of soul, and
without which such freedom would have been useless.
He concedes something, however, to reformers by declaring, as his final
excuse, that he would not have thus yielded to circumstances if the
average life of man were a hundred years instead of twenty; for, given
sufficient time, all adverse circumstance may be overcome. "The body
dies if it be thwarted. Mind--in other words, intellectual
truth--triumphs through opposition. Envy, hatred, and stupidity, are to
it as the rocks which obstruct the descending stream, and toss it in
jewelled spray above the chasm by which it is confined. Abstract
thinkers have therefore their rights also; and it is well that those, in
some respects, greater and better men than he, who are engaged in the
improvement of the world, should find success enough to justify their
hopes; failure enough to impose caution on their endeavours."
The Prince confesses once for all, that since improvement is so
necessarily limited; since the higher life is incompatible with life in
the flesh: he is content to wait for the higher life and make the best
he can of the lower. But if anyone declares that this quiescent attitude
means indolence or sleep, his judgment is on a par with that which was
once passed on the famous statue of the Laocoon. Some artist had covered
the accessories of the group, and left only the contorted central
figure, with nothing to explain its contortions. One man said as he
looked upon it,
"... I think the gesture strives
Against some obstacle we cannot see." (p. 172.)
Every other spectator pronounced the "gesture" a yawn.
Prince Hohenstiel gives us a second proof that he is not without belief
in the ideal. He accepts the doctrine of evolution: though not in its
scientific sense. He likes the idea of having felt his way up to
humanity (as he now feels his way in it) through progressive forms of
existence; he being always himself, and nowise the thing he dwelt in. He
likes to account in this manner for the feeling of kinship which
attracts him to all created things. It also completes his vision of
mankind as fining off at the summit into isolated peaks, but held
together at the base by its common natural life; and thus confirms him
in the impression that the personal needs and mutual obligations of the
natural life are paramount.
As he concludes this part of his harangue, an amused consciousness
steals over him that he has been washing himself very white; and that
his self-defence has been principally self-praise--at least, to his
listener's ears. So he proceeds to show that his arguments were just, by
showing how easily, being blamed for the one course of action, he might
have been no less censured for the opposite. He imagines that his life
has been written by some romancing historian of the Thiers and Victor
Hugo type; and that in this version, practical wisdom, or SAGACITY, is
made to suggest everything which he has really done, while he unwisely
obeys the dictates of ideal virtue and does everything which he did not.
Hohenstiel-Schwangau (France) had made him her head-servant: president
of the assembly which she had elected to serve her; and he knew that his
fellow-servants were working for their own ends, while he alone was
faithful to his bond. He, doubtless, had his dreams, conjured up by
SAGACITY, of pouncing upon the unfaithful ones, denouncing them to his
mistress, the State, and begging her to allow him to do their work as
well as his own, till such time as the danger was past, and her desire
for a more popular government could be fulfilled. But in so doing he
would have deceived her, and he chose the truth. He knew that he had no
right to substitute himself for the multitude, his knowledge for their
ignorance, his will for theirs; since wise and foolish were alike of
God's creating, and each had his own place and purpose in the general
scheme. (Here and through the following pages, 176-7, the real and the
imaginary Prince appear merged into each other.) He performed his strict
duty, and left things to their natural course.
His position grew worse and worse. His fellow-servants made no secret of
their plans--to be carried into execution when his time of service
should have expired, and his controlling hand been removed from them.
Each had his own mine of tyranny--whether Popedom, Socialism, or
other--which he meant to spring on the people fancying itself free. The
Head Servant was silent. They took fright at his silence. "It meant
mischief." "It meant counterplot." "It meant some stroke of State." "He
must be braved and bullied. His re-election must be prevented; the sword
of office must be wrested from his grasp."
At length his time expired, and _then_ he acted and spoke. He made no
"stroke of State." He stepped down from his eminence; laid his authority
in the people's hand; proved to it its danger, and proposed that
Hohenstiel-Schwangau should give him the needful authority for
protecting her. The proposal was unanimously accepted; and he justified
his own judgment and that of his country by chastising every disturber
of the public peace, and reducing alike knaves and fools to silence and
submission. But now SAGACITY found fault: "he had not taken the evil in
time; he might have nipped it in the bud, and saved life and liberty by
so doing: he had waited till it was full grown, and the cost in life and
liberty had been enormous." He replied that he had been checked by his
allegiance to the law; and that rather than strain the law, however
slightly, he was bound to see it broken.
And so, the record continues, he worked and acted to the end. He had
received his authority from the people; he governed first for them.
(Here again, and at the following page 184, we seem to recognize the
real Hohenstiel or Louis Napoleon, rather than the imaginary.) He walked
reverently--superstitiously, if spectators will--in the path marked out
for him, ever fearing to imperil what was good in the existing order of
things; but casting all fear aside when an obvious evil cried out for
correction. Hohenstiel-Schwangau--herself a republic--had attacked the
liberties of Rome, and destroyed them with siege and slaughter. On his
accession to power, he found this "infamy triumphant."
SAGACITY suggested that he should leave it untouched. "It was no work of
his; he was not answerable for its existence. It had its political
advantages for his own country."
But he would not hear of such a course. There was a canker in the body
politic, requiring to be cut out; and he cut it out: though the patient
roared, the wound bled, and the operator was abused by friend and foe.
"Why so rough and precipitate?" again SAGACITY interposed, "though the
right were on your side? Why not temporize, persuade, even threaten,
before coming to blows?"
"Yes," was the reply, "and see the evil strengthen while you look on."
SAGACITY defended her advice on larger grounds; and here too he was at
issue with her. Hohenstiel-Schwangau had a passion for fighting. She
would fight for anything, or for nothing, merely to show that she knew
how. Give her a year's peace after any war, and she was once more ready
for the fray. Prince Hohenstiel and SAGACITY both agreed that this evil
temper must be destroyed; but SAGACITY advised him to undermine--Prince
Hohenstiel chose to combat it.
SAGACITY said, "Here is an interval of peace. Prolong it, make it
delightful; but do so under cover of intending to cut it short. If you
would induce a fierce mountain tribe to come down from its fortress and
settle in the plain, you do not bid it destroy the fortress. You bid it
enjoy life in the city, and remember that it runs no risk in doing so,
because it has its fortress to fall back upon at the first hint of
danger. And the time will come when it can hear with equanimity that the
fortress has gone to ruin, and that fighting is no longer in fashion.
The mountain tribe will have learned to love the fatness of the valley,
while thinking of those mother ribs of its mountain fastness which are
ever waiting to prop up its life. Just so put a wooden sword into the
hand of the Hohenstieler, and let him brag of war, learning meanwhile
the value of peace."
"Not so," the Prince replied; "my people shall not be cheated into
virtue. Truth is the one good thing. I will tell them the truth. I will
tell them that war, for war's sake, is damnable; that glory at its best
is shame, since its image is a gilded bubble which a resolute hand might
prick, but the breath of a foolish multitude buoys up beyond its reach."
"And what," he asked, "is the glory, what the greatness, which this
foolish nation seeks? That of making every other small; not that of
holding its place among others which are themselves great. Shall such a
thing be possible as that the nation which earth loves best--a people so
aspiring, so endowed; so magnetic in its attraction for its
fellow-men--shall think its primacy endangered because another selects a
ruler it has not patronized, or chooses to sell steel untaxed?"
"But this does not mean that Hohenstiel is to relinquish the power of
war. The aggressiveness which is damnable in herself is to be condemned
in others, and to be punished in them. Therefore, for the sake of
Austria who sins, of Italy who suffers, of Hohenstiel-Schwangau who has
a duty to perform, the war which SAGACITY deprecates must be waged, and
Austria smitten till Italy is free."
"At least," rejoins SAGACITY, "you secure some reward from the country
you have freed; say, the cession of Nice and Savoy; something to satisfy
those at home who doubt the market-value of right and truth."
"No," is the reply, "you may preach that to Metternich and remain with
him." And so the Prince worked on; determined that neither fear, nor
treachery, nor much less blundering, on his part, should imperil the
precarious balance of the world's life.
Once more, and for the last time, SAGACITY lifts up her voice. "You were
the fittest man to rule. Give solidity to your life's work by leaving a
fit successor to carry it on. Secure yourself this successor in a son.
The world is open to you for the choice of your bride."
And again the ideal Prince retorts on the suggestion. "The fit successor
is not secured in this way. All experience proves it. The spark of
genius is dropped where God will. It may find hereditary (hence
accumulated) faculties ready to be ignited. It may fire the barren
rock." And, changing the metaphor,
"... The seed o' the apple-tree
Brings forth another tree which bears a crab:
'Tis the great gardener grafts the excellence
On wildings where he will." (p. 203.)
He ends by calling up the vision of an Italian wayside temple, in which,
as the legend declares, succession was carried on after a very different
principle. Each successive high priest has become so by murdering his
predecessor, his qualification being found in that simple fact; or in
the qualities of cunning or courage of which it has been the test.[56]
And now the dream is lived through, and Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau
awakens in his own palace: not much better pleased with his own plain
speaking than with the imaginary heroics of Messrs. Hugo and Thiers.
"One's case is so much stronger before it is put into words. Motives
which seem sufficient in the semi-darkness of one's own consciousness,
are so feeble in the light of day. When we reason with ourselves, we
subordinate outward claims without appearing to do so: since the
necessity of making the best of life for our own sake supplies
unconsciously to ourselves the point of view from which all our
reasonings proceed. When forced to think aloud, we stoop to what is
probably an untruth. We say that our motives were--what they should have
been; what perhaps we have fancied them to be."
These closing pages convey the author's comment on Prince Hohenstiel's
defence. They present it, in his well-known manner, as what such a man
might be tempted to say; rather than what this particular man was
justified in saying. But he takes the Prince's part in the lines
beginning,
"Alack, one lies oneself
Even in the stating that one's end was truth," (p. 209.)
for they farther declare that though we aim at truth, our words cannot
always be trusted to hit it. The best cannon ever rifled will sometimes
deflect. Words do this also. We recognize the conviction of the
inadequacy of language which was so forcibly expressed in the Pope's
soliloquy in "The Ring and the Book," but in what seems a more defined
form.
"BISHOP BLOUGRAM'S APOLOGY."
"Bishop Blougram's Apology" is a defence of religious conformity in
those cases in which the doctrines to which we conform exceed our powers
of belief, but are not throughout opposed to them; its point of view
being that of a Roman Catholic churchman, who has secured his preferment
by this kind of compromise. It is addressed to a semi-freethinker, who
is supposed to have declared that a man who could thus identify himself
with Romish superstitions must be despised as either knave or fool; and
Bishop Blougram has undertaken to prove that he is not to be thus
despised; and least of all by the person before him.
The argument is therefore special-pleading in the full sense of the
word; and it is clear from a kind of editor's note with which the poem
concludes, that we are meant to take it as such. But it is supposed to
lie in the nature of the man who utters, as also in the circumstance in
which it is uttered: for Bishop Blougram was suggested by Cardinal
Wiseman;[57] and the literary hack, Gigadibs, is the kind of critic by
whom a Cardinal Wiseman is most likely to be assailed: a man young,
shallow, and untried; unused to any but paper warfare; blind to the
deeper issues of both conformity and dissent, and as much alive to the
distinction of dining in a bishop's palace as Bishop Blougram himself.
The monologue is spoken on such an occasion, and includes everything
which Mr. Gigadibs says, or might say, on his own side of the question.
We must therefore treat it as a conversation.
Mr. Gigadibs' reasoning resolves itself into this: "_he_ does not
believe in dogmas, and he says so. The Bishop cannot believe in them,
but does not say so. He is true to his own convictions: the Bishop is
not true to his." And the Bishop's defence is as follows.
"Mr. Gigadibs aims at living his own life: in other words, the ideal
life. And this means that he is living no life at all. For a man, in
order to live, must make the best of the world he is born in; he must
adapt himself to its capabilities as a cabin-passenger to those of his
cabin. He must not load himself with moral and intellectual fittings
which the ship cannot carry, and which will therefore have to be thrown
overboard. He (the Bishop) has chosen to live a real life; and has
equipped himself accordingly."
"And, supposing he displays what Mr. Gigadibs considers the courage of
his convictions, and flings his dogmas overboard,--what will he have
gained? Simply that his uncertainty has changed sides. Believing, he had
shocks of unbelief. Disbelieving, he will have shocks of belief (note a
fine passage, vol. iv. p. 245): since no certainty in these matters is
possible."
"But," says Gigadibs; "on that principle, your belief is worth no more
than my unbelief."
"Yes," replies the Bishop, "it is worth much more in practice, if no
more in theory. Life cannot be carried on by negations. Least of all
will religious negations be tolerated by those we live with. And the
more definite the religion affirmed, the better will the purposes of
life be advanced by it."
"Not those of a noble life," argues Gigadibs, "nor in the judgment of
the best men. You are debasing your standard by living for the many
fools who cannot see through you, instead of the wiser few who can."
To which the Bishop replies that he lives according to the nature which
God has given him, and which is not so ignoble after all; and that he
succeeds with wise men as well as with fools, because they do not see
through him either: because their judgment is kept in constant
suspension as to whether he can believe what he professes or cannot;
whether, in short, he is a knave or a fool. The proposition is vividly
illustrated; and a few more obvious sophistries complete this portion of
the argument.
Gigadibs still harps upon the fact that conformity cannot do the work of
belief; and the Bishop now changes his ground. "He conforms to
Christianity in the _wish_ that it may be true; and he thinks that this
wish has all the value of belief, and brings him as near to it as the
Creator intends. The human mind cannot bear the full light of truth; and
it is only in the struggle with doubt and error that its spiritual
powers can be developed." He concedes, in short, that he is much more in
earnest than he appeared; and the concession is confirmed when he goes
on to declare that we live by our instincts and not by our beliefs. This
is proved--he alleges--by such a man as Gigadibs, who has no warrant in
his belief for living a moral life, and does so because his instincts
compel it. Just so the Bishop's instincts compel a believing life. They
demand for him a living, self-proving God (here the doctrine of
expediency re-asserts itself), and they tell him that the good things
which his position confers are the gift of that God, and intended by Him
for his enjoyment. "You," he adds, "who live for something which never
is, but always is _to be_, are like a traveller, who casts off, in every
country he passes through, the covering that will be too warm for him in
the next; and is comfortable nowhen and nowhere."
One of his latest arguments is the best. Gigadibs has said: "If you must
hold a dogmatic faith, at all events reform it. Prune its excrescences
away."
"And where," he retorts, "am I to stop, when once that process has
begun? I put my knife to the _liquefaction_,[58] and end, like Fichte,
by slashing at God Himself. And meanwhile, we have to control a mass of
ignorant persons whose obedience is linked to the farthest end of the
chain (to the first superstition which I am called upon to lop off). We
have here again a question of making the best of our cabin-fittings, the
best of the opportunities which life places to our hand." In conclusion,
he draws a contemptuous picture of the obscure and inconsequent
existence which Gigadibs accepts, as the apostle without genius and
without enthusiasm, of what is, if it be one at all, a _non-working_
truth.
Gigadibs is silenced, and, as it proves, impressed; but the Bishop is
too clever to be very proud of his victory; for he knows it has been a
personal, much more than a real one. His strength has lain chiefly in
the assumption (which only the entire monologue can justify or even
convey) that his opponent would change places with him if he could; and
he knows that in arguing from this point of view he has been only half
sincere. His reasonings have been good enough for the occasion. That is
the best he can say for them.