The poems contained in this group are, taking them in the order of their
importance,
"A Death in the Desert." Dramatis Personæ. 1864.
"Rabbi Ben Ezra." Dramatis Personæ. 1864.
"Deaf and Dumb: a group by Woolner." Dramatis Personæ. 1864.
"The Statue and the Bust." Dramatic Romances. Published in "Men and
Women." 1855.
"A DEATH IN THE DESERT" is the record of an imaginary last scene in the
life of St. John. It is conceived in perfect harmony with the facts of
the case: the great age which the Evangelist attained: the mystery which
shrouded his death: the persecutions which had overtaken the Church: the
heresies which already threatened to disturb it; but Mr. Browning has
given to St. John a foreknowledge of that age of philosophic doubt in
which its very foundations would be shaken; and has made him the
exponent of his own belief--already hinted in "Easter Eve" and "Bishop
Blougram:" to be fully set forth in "The Ring and the Book" and "La
Saisiaz"--that such doubt is ordained for the maturer mind, as the test
of faith, and its preserver.
The supposed last words of the Evangelist, and the circumstances in
which they were spoken, are reported by loving simplicity as by one who
heard them, and who puts forward this evidence of St. John's death
against the current belief that he lingers yet upon earth. The account,
first spoken, then written, has passed apparently from hand to hand, as
one disciple after the other died the martyr's death; and we find the
MS. in the possession of an unnamed person, and prefaced by him with a
descriptive note, in which religious reverence and bibliographical
interest are touchingly blended with each other.
St. John is dying in the desert, concealed in an inmost chamber of the
rock. Four grown disciples and a boy are with him. He lies as if in
sleep. But, as the end approaches, faint signs of consciousness appear
about the mouth and eyes, and the patient and loving ministrations of
those about him nurse the flickering vital spark into a flame.
St. John returns to life, feeling, as it were, the retreating soul
forced back upon the ashes of his brain, and taxing the flesh to one
supreme exertion. But he lives again in a far off time when "John" is
dead, and there is no one left who _saw_. And he lives in a sense as of
decrepit age, seeking a "foot-hold through a blank profound;" grasping
at facts which snap beneath his touch; in strange lands, and among
people yet unborn, who ask,
"Was John at all, and did he say he saw?" (vol vii. p. 128.)
and will believe nothing till the proof be proved.
This prophetic self-consciousness does not, however, displace the memory
of his former self. John knows himself the man who _heard_ and
_saw_--receiving the words of Christ from His own mouth, and enduring
those glories of apocalyptic vision which he marvels that he could bear,
and live; seeing truths already plain grow of their own strength: and
those he guessed as points expanding into stars. And the life-long faith
regains its active power as the doubting future takes shape before him;
as he sees its children
"... stand conversing, each new face
Either in fields, of yellow summer eves,
On islets yet unnamed amid the sea;
Or pace for shelter 'neath a portico
Out of the crowd in some enormous town
Where now the larks sing in a solitude:
Or muse upon blank heaps of stone and sand
Idly conjectured to be Ephesus:...."
(vol. vii. p. 134.)
and he hears them questioning truths of deeper import than those of his
own life and work.
The subsequent monologue is an earnest endeavour to answer those
questionings, which he sets forth, in order that he may do so; his
eloquence being perhaps the more pathetic, that in the depth of his own
conviction--in his loving desire to impart it--he assumes a great deal
of what he tries to prove. "He has _seen_ it all--the miracle of that
life and death; the need, and yet the transiency, of death and sin; the
constant presence of the Divine love; those things which not only _were_
to him, but _are_. And he is called upon to prove it to those who
_cannot see_: whose spirit is darkened by the veil of fleshly strength,
while his own lies all but bare to the contact of the Heavenly light. He
must needs be as an optic-glass, bringing those things before them, not
in confusing nearness, but at the right historic distance from the eye."
"Life," he admits, "is given to us that we may learn the truth. But the
soul does not learn from it as the flesh does. For the flesh has little
time to stay, and must gain its lesson once and for all. Man needs no
second proof of the worth of fire: once found, he would not part with it
for gold. But the highest spiritual certainty is not like our conviction
of a bodily fact; and though we know the worth of Christ as we know the
preciousness of fire, we may not in like manner grasp this truth,
acknowledging it in our lives. He--John--in whose sight his Lord had
been transfigured, had walked upon the waters, and raised the dead to
life: _he, too_, forsook Him when the 'noise' and 'torchlight,' and the
'sudden Roman faces,' and the 'violent hands' were upon them...."
The doubter, he imagines, will argue thus, taking "John's" Gospel for
his starting-point:--
(_a_) "Your story is proved inaccurate, if not untrue. The doctrine
which rests upon it is therefore unproved, except in so far as it is
attested by the human heart. And this proof again is invalid. For the
doctrine is that of Divine love; and we, who believe in love, because we
ourselves possess it, may read it into a record in which it has no
place. Man, in his mental infancy, read his own emotions and his own
will into the forces of nature, as he clothed their supposed personal
existence in his own face and form. But his growing understanding
discarded the idea of these material gods. It now replaces the idea of
the one Divine intelligence by that of universal law. God is proved to
us as law--'named,' but 'not known.' A divinity, which we can recognize
by like attributes to our own, is disproved by them."
(_b_) "And granting that there is truth in your teaching: why is this
allowed to mislead us? Why are we left to hit or miss the truth,
according as our insight is weak or strong, instead of being plainly
told this thing _was_, or it _was not_? Does 'John' proceed with us as
did the heathen bard, who drew a fictitious picture of the manner in
which fire had been given to man; and left his readers to discover that
the fact was not the fable itself, but only contained in it?"
And John replies:
(_a_) "Man is made for progress, and receives therefore, step by step,
such spiritual assistance as is proportionate to his strength. The
testimony of miracles is granted when it is needed to assist faith. It
is withdrawn so soon as it would compel it. He who rejects God's love in
Christ because _he_ has learned the need of love, is as the lamp which
overswims with oil, the stomach which flags from excess of food: his
mind is being starved by the very abundance of what was meant to nourish
it. Man was spiritually living, when he shrank appalled from the
spectacle of Nature, and needed to be assured that there was a might
beyond _its_ might. But when he says, 'Since Might is everywhere, there
is no need of Will;' though he knows from his own experience how Might
may combine with Will, then is he spiritually dead. And man is
spiritually living, when he asks if there be love
"Behind the will and might, as real as they?" (vol. vii. p. 140.)
But when he reasons: since love is everywhere, and we love and would be
loved, we make the love which we recognize as Christ: and Christ was
_not_; then is he spiritually dead. For the loss which comes through
gain is death, and the sole death."
(_b_) The second objection he answers by reverting to his first
statement. "Man is made for progress. He could not progress if his
doubtings were at once changed to certainties, and all he struggles for
at once found. He must yearn for truth, and grasp at error as a 'midway
help' to it. He must learn and unlearn. He must creep from fancies on to
fact; and correct to-day's facts by the light of to-morrow's knowledge.
He must be as the sculptor, who evokes a life-like form from a lump of
clay, ever seeing the reality in a series of false presentments;
attaining it through them, God alone makes the live shape at a jet."
The tenderness which has underlain even John's remonstrances culminates
in his closing words. "If there be a greater woe than this (the doubt)
which he has lived to see, may he," he says, "be 'absent,' though it
were for another hundred years, plucking the blind ones from the abyss."
"But he was dead." (vol. vii. p. 146.)
The record has a postscript, written not by the same person, but in his
name, confronting the opinions of St. John with those of Cerinthus, his
noted opponent in belief, into whose hands the MS. is also supposed to
have fallen. It is chiefly interesting as heightening the historical
effect of the poem.[62]
"RABBI BEN EZRA" is the expression of a religious philosophy which,
being, from another point of view, Mr. Browning's own, has much in
common with that which he has imputed to St. John; and, as "A Death in
the Desert" only gave the words which the Evangelist might have spoken,
so is "Rabbi Ben Ezra" only the possible utterance of that pious and
learned Jew. But the Christian doctrine of the one poem brings into
strong relief the pure Theism of the other; and the religious
imagination in "Rabbi Ben Ezra" is strongly touched with the gorgeous
and solemn realism which distinguishes the Old Testament from the new.
The most striking feature of Rabbi Ben Ezra's philosophy is his estimate
of age. According to him the soul is eternal, but it completes the first
stage of its experience in the earthly life; and the climax of the
earthly life is attained, not in the middle of it, but at its close. Age
is therefore a period, not only of rest, but of fruition.
"Spiritual conflict is appropriate to youth. It is well that youth
should sigh for the impossible, and, if needs be, blunder in the
endeavour to improve what is. He would be a brute whose body could keep
pace with his soul. The highest test of man's bodily powers is the
distance to which they can project the soul on the way which it must
travel alone."
"But life in the flesh is good, showering gifts alike on sense and
brain. It is right that at some period of its existence man's heart
should beat in unison with it; that having seen God's power in the
scheme of creation, he should also see the perfectness of His love; that
he should thank Him for his manhood, for the power conferred on him to
live and learn. And this boon must be granted by age, which gathers in
the inheritance of youth."
"The inheritance is not one of earthly wisdom. Man learns to know the
right and the good, but he does not learn how outwardly to apply the
knowledge; for human judgments are formed to differ, and there is no one
who can arbitrate between them. Man's failure or success must be sought
in the unseen life--not in that which he has done, but in that which he
has aspired to do."
"Nothing dies or changes which has truly BEEN. The flight of time is but
the spinning of the potter's wheel to which we are as clay. This fleeing
circumstance is but the machinery which stamps the soul (that vessel
moulded for the Great Master's hand). And its latest impress is the
best: though the base of the cup be adorned with laughing loves, while
skull-like images constitute its rim."
"Look not thou down but up!
To uses of a cup,
The festal board, lamp's flash and trumpet's-peal,
The new wine's foaming flow,
The Master's lips a-glow!
Thou, heaven's consummate cup, what needst thou with earth's
wheel?"
(vol. vii. p. 119)
"DEAF AND DUMB" conveys, in a single stanza, the crowning lesson of the
life of Paracelsus, and indeed of every human life: for the sculptured
figures to which it refers have supplied the poet with an example of the
"glory" which may "arise" from "defect," the power from limitation. It
needs, he says, the obstructing prism to set free the rainbow hues of
the sunbeam. Only dumbness can give to love the full eloquence of the
eyes; only deafness can impress love's yearnings on the movements of
neck and face.
"THE STATUE AND THE BUST" is a warning against infirmity of purpose. Its
lesson is embodied in a picturesque story, in which fact and fiction are
combined.
In the piazza of the SS. Annunziata at Florence is an equestrian statue
of the Grand Duke Ferdinand the First, representing him as riding away
from the church, and with his head turned in the direction of the once
Riccardi Palace, which occupies a corner of the square. Tradition
asserts that he loved a lady whom her husband's jealousy kept a prisoner
there, and whom he could only see at her window; and that he avenged his
love by placing himself in effigy where his glance could always dwell
upon her.
In Mr. Browning's expanded version, the love is returned, and the lovers
determine to fly together. But each day brings fresh motives for
postponing the flight, and each day they exchange glances with each
other--he passing by on his horse, she looking down from her window--and
comfort themselves with the thought of the morrow. And as the days slip
by, their love grows cooler, and they learn to be content with
expectation. They realize at last that the love has been a dream, and
that they have spent their youth in dreaming it; and in order that the
dream may continue, and the memory of their lost youth be preserved,
they cause, he his statue to be cast, she her bust to be moulded, and
each placed in the attitude in which they have daily looked upon each
other. They feel the irony of the proceeding, though they find
satisfaction in it. Their image will do all that the reality has done.
Mr. Browning blames these lovers for not carrying out their intention,
whether or not it could be pronounced a good one. "Man should carry his
best energies into the game of life, whether the stake he is playing
for be good or bad--a reality or a sham. As a test of energy, the one
has no value above the other."
He leaves the "bust" in the region of fancy, by stating that it no
longer exists. But he tells us that it was executed in "della Robbia"
ware, specimens of which, still, at the time he wrote, adorned the outer
cornice of the palace. The statue is one of the finest works of John of
Bologna.
The partial darkening of the Via Larga by the over-hanging mass of the
Riccardi (formerly Medici) Palace[63] is figuratively connected in the
poem with the "crime" of two of its inmates: the "murder," by Cosimo dei
Medici and his (grand) son Lorenzo, of the liberties of the Florentine
Republic.
The smallness of this group, and its chiefly dramatic character, show
how little direct teaching Mr. Browning's works contain. There is,
however, direct instructiveness in another and larger group, which has
too much in common with all three foregoing to be included in either,
and will be best indicated by the term "critical." In certain respects,
indeed, this applies to several, perhaps to most, of those which I have
placed under other heads; and I use it rather to denote a lighter tone
and more incidental treatment, than any radical difference of subject or
intention.