"FERISHTAH'S FANCIES."
The idea of "FERISHTAH'S FANCIES" grew out of a fable by Pilpay, which
Mr. Browning read when a boy. He lately put this into verse; and it then
occurred to him to make the poem the beginning of a series, in which the
Dervish, who is first introduced as a learner, should reappear in the
character of a teacher. Ferishtah's "fancies" are the familiar
illustrations, by which his teachings are enforced. Each fancy or fable,
with its accompanying dialogue, is followed by a Lyric, in which the
same or cognate ideas are expressed in an emotional form; and the effect
produced by this combination of moods is itself illustrated in a
Prologue by the blended flavours of a favourite Italian dish, which is
fully described there. An introductory passage from "King Lear" seems to
tell us what we soon find out for ourselves, that Ferishtah's opinions
are in the main Mr. Browning's own.
Fancy 1. "THE EAGLE," contains the lesson which determined Ferishtah,
not yet a Dervish, to become one. He has learned from the experience
which it describes, that it is man's mission to feed those hungry ones
who are unable to feed themselves. "The soul often starves as well as
the body. He will minister to the hunger of the soul. And to this end
he will leave the solitude of the woods in which the lesson came to him,
and seek the haunts of men."
The Lyric deprecates the solitude which united souls may enjoy, by a
selfish or fastidious seclusion from the haunts of men.
2. "THE MELON-SELLER," records an incident referred to in a letter from
the "Times'" correspondent, written many years ago. It illustrates the
text--given by Mr. Browning in Hebrew--"Shall we receive good at the
hands of God, and shall we not receive evil?" and marks the second stage
in Ferishtah's progress towards Dervish-hood.
The Lyric bids the loved one be unjust for once if she will. "The
lover's heart preserves so many looks and words, in which she gave him
more than justice."
3. "SHAH ABBAS" shows Ferishtah, now full Dervish, expounding the
relative character of belief. "We wrongly give the name of belief to the
easy acquiescence in those reported facts, to the truth of which we are
indifferent; or the name of unbelief to that doubting attitude towards
reported facts, which is born of our anxious desire that they may be
true. It is the assent of the heart, not that of the head, which is
valued by the Creator."
Lyric. Love will guide us smoothly through the recesses of another's
heart. Without it, as in a darkened room, we stumble at every step,
wrongly fancying the objects misplaced, against which we are stumbling.
4. "THE FAMILY" again defends the heart against the head. It defends the
impulse to pray for the health and safety of those we love, though such
prayer may imply rebellion to the will of God. "He, in whom anxiety for
those he loves cannot for the moment sweep all before it, will sometimes
be more than man, but will much more often be less."
Lyric. "Let me love, as man may, content with such perfection as may
fill a human heart; not looking beyond it for that which only an angel's
sense can apprehend."
5. "THE SUN" justifies the tendency to think of God as in human form.
Life moves us to many feelings of love and praise. These embrace in an
ascending scale all its beneficent agencies, unconscious and conscious,
and cannot stop short of the first and greatest of all. This First Cause
must be thought of as competent to appreciate our praise and love, and
as moved by a beneficent purpose to the acts which have inspired them.
The sun is a symbol of this creative power--by many even imagined to be
its reality. But that mighty orb is unconscious of the feelings it may
inspire; and the Divine Omnipotence, which it symbolizes, must be no
less incompetent to earn them. For purpose is the negation of power,
implying something which power has not attained; and would imply
deficiency in an existence which presents itself to our intelligence as
complete. Reason therefore tells us that God can have no resemblance
with man; but it tells us, as plainly, that, without a fiction of
resemblance, the proper relation between Creator and creature, between
God and man, is unattainable.[121] If one exists, for whom the fiction
or fancy has been converted into fact--for whom the Unknowable has
proved itself to contain the Knowable: the ball of fire to hold within
it an earthly substance unconsumed; he deserves credit for the
magnitude, not scorn for the extravagance, of his conception.
Lyric. "Fire has been cradled in the flint, though its Ethereal
splendours may disclaim the association."
6. "MIHRAB SHAH" vindicates the existence of physical suffering as
necessary to the consciousness of well-being; and also, and most
especially, as neutralizing the differences, and thus creating the one
complete bond of sympathy, between man and man.
Lyric. "Your soul is weighed down by a feeble body. In me a strong body
is allied to a sluggish soul. You would fitly leave me behind. Impeded
as you also are, I may yet overtake you."
7. "A CAMEL-DRIVER" declares the injustice of punishment, in regard to
all cases in which the offence has been committed in ignorance; and
shows also that, while a timely warning would always have obviated such
an offence, it is often sufficiently punished by the culprit's too tardy
recognition of it. "God's justice distinguishes itself from that of man
in the acknowledgment of this fact."
The Lyric deals specially with the imperfections of human judgment. "You
have overrated my small faults, you have failed to detect the greater
ones."
8. "TWO CAMELS" is directed against asceticism. "An ill-fed animal
breaks down in the fulfilment of its task. A man who deprives himself of
natural joys, not for the sake of his fellow-men, but for his own, is
also unfitted for the obligations of Life. For he cannot instruct others
in its use and abuse. Nor, being thus ignorant of earth, can he conceive
of heaven."
The Lyric shows how the Finite may prefigure the Infinite, by
illustrations derived from science and from love.
9. "CHERRIES" illustrates the axiom that a gift must be measured, not by
itself, but by the faculty of the giver, and by the amount of loving
care which he has bestowed upon it. Man's general performance is to be
judged from the same point of view.
The Lyric connects itself with the argument less closely and less
seriously in this case than in the foregoing ones. The speaker has
striven to master the art of poetry, and found life too short for it.
"He contents himself with doing little, only because doing nothing is
worse. But when he turns from verse-making to making love, or, as the
sense implies, seeks to express in love what he has failed to express in
poetry, all limitations of time and power are suspended; every moment's
realization is absolute and lasting."
10. "PLOT-CULTURE" is a distinct statement of the belief in a purely
personal relation between God and man. It justifies every experience
which bears moral fruit, however immoral from human points of view; and
refers both the individual and his critic to the final harvest, on which
alone the Divine judgment will be passed.
The Lyric repeats the image in which this idea is clothed, more directly
than the idea itself. A lover pleads permission to love with his whole
being--with Sense as well as with Soul.
11. "A PILLAR AT SEBZEVAR" lays down the proposition that the pursuit of
knowledge is invariably disappointing: while love is always, and in
itself, a gain.
The Lyric modifies this idea into the advocacy of a silent love: one
which reveals itself without declaration.
12. "A BEAN-STRIPE: ALSO APPLE-EATING" is a summary of Mr. Browning's
religious and practical beliefs. We cannot, it says, determine the
prevailing colour of any human life, though we have before us a balanced
record of its bright and dark days. For light or darkness is only
absolute in so far as the human spirit can isolate or, as it were, stand
still within, it. Every living experience, actual or remembered, takes
something of its hue from those which precede or follow it: now catching
the reflection of the adjoining lights and shades; now brighter or
darker by contrast with them. The act of living fuses black and white
into grey; and as we grasp the melting whole in one backward glance, its
blackness strikes most on the sense of one man, its whiteness on that of
another.
Ferishtah admits that there are lives which seem to be, perhaps are,
stained with a black so deep that no intervening whiteness can affect
it; and he declares that this possibility of absolute human suffering is
a constant chastener to his own joys. But when called upon to reconcile
the avowed optimism of his views with the actual as well as sympathetic
experience of such suffering, he shows that he does not really believe
in it. One race, he argues, will flourish under conditions which another
would regard as incompatible with life; and the philosophers who most
cry down the value of life are sometimes the least willing to renounce
it. He cannot resist the conviction that the same compensating laws are
at work everywhere.
In explanation of the fact, that nothing given in our experience affords
a stable truth--that the black or white of one moment is always the
darker or lighter grey of another--Ferishtah refers his disciples to the
will of God. Our very scheme of goodness is a fiction, which man the
impotent cannot, God the all-powerful does not, convert into reality.
But it is a fiction created by God within the human mind, that it may
work for truth there; so also is it with the fictitious conceptions
which blend the qualities of man with those of God. To the objection
"A power, confessed past knowledge, nay, past thought,
--Thus thought and known!" (vol. xvi. p. 84.)
Ferishtah replies that to know the power by its operation, is all we
_need_ in the case of a human benefactor or lord: all we _can_ in the
case of those natural forces which we recognize in every act of our
life. And when reminded that the sense of indebtedness implies a
debtor--one ready to receive his due: and that we need look no farther
for the recipient than the great men who have benefited our race: his
answer is, that such gratitude to his fellow-men would be gratitude to
himself, in whose perception half their greatness lies. "He might as
well thank the starlight for the impressions of colour, which have been
supplied by his own brain."
The Lyric disclaims, in the name of one of the world's workers, all
excessive--_i.e._, loving recognition of his work. The speaker has not
striven for the world's sake, nor sought his ideals there. "Those who
have done so may claim its love. For himself he asks only a just
judgment on what he has achieved."
Mr. Browning here expresses for the first time his feeling towards the
"Religion of Humanity;" and though this was more or less to be inferred
from his general religious views, it affords, as now stated, a new, as
well as valuable, illustration of them. The Theistic philosophy which
makes the individual the centre of the universe, is, perhaps, nowhere in
his works, so distinctly set forth as in this latest of them. But
nowhere either has he more distinctly declared that the fullest
realization of the individual life is self-sacrifice.
"Renounce joy for my fellows sake? That's joy
Beyond joy;"
(_Two Camels_, vol. xvi p. 50.)
The lyrical supplement to Fancy 12 somewhat obscures the idea on which
it turns, by presenting it from a different point of view. But here, as
in the remainder of the book, we must regard the Lyric as suggested by
the argument, not necessarily as part of it.
The EPILOGUE is a vision of present and future, in which the woe and
conflict of our mortal existence are absorbed in the widening glory of
an eternal day. The vision comes to one cradled in the happiness of
love; and he is startled from it by a presentiment that it has been an
illusion created by his happiness. But we know that from Mr. Browning's
point of view, Love, even in its illusions, may be accepted as a
messenger of truth.