"PARLEYINGS WITH CERTAIN PEOPLE OF IMPORTANCE IN THEIR DAY."
This volume occupies, even more than its predecessor, a distinctive
position in Mr. Browning's work. It does not discard his old dramatic
methods, but in a manner it inverts them; Mr. Browning has summoned his
group of men not for the sake of drawing their portraits, but that they
might help him to draw his own. It seems as if the accumulated
convictions which find vent in the "parleyings" could no longer endure
even the form of dramatic disguise; and they appear in them in all the
force of direct reiterated statement, and all the freshness of novel
points of view. And the portrait is in some degree a biography; it is
full of reminiscences. The "people" with whom Mr. Browning parleys,
important in their day, virtually unknown in ours, are with one
exception his old familiar friends: men whose works connect themselves
with the intellectual sympathies and the imaginative pleasures of his
very earliest youth. The parleyings are:
I. "With Bernard de Mandeville."
II. "With Daniel Bartoli."
III. "With Christopher Smart."
IV. "With George Bubb Dodington."
V. "With Francis Furini."
VI. "With Gerard de Lairesse."
VII. "With Charles Avison."
They are enclosed between a Prologue and an Epilogue both dramatic and
fanciful, but scarcely less expressive of the author's mental
personality than the body of the work.
"Apollo and the Fates."
"Fust and his Friends."
In "Apollo and the Fates" the fanciful, or rather fantastic element
preponderates. It represents Apollo as descending into the realms of
darkness and pleading with the Fate Sisters for the life of Admetus, the
thread of which Atropos is about to clip; and shows how he obtained for
him a conditional reprieve by intoxicating the sisters with wine. The
sequel to this incident has been given in Mr. Browning's transcript from
"Alkestis"; and the present poem is introduced by references to that
work of Euripides, to the "Eumenides" of Æschylus and to Homer's "Hymn
to Mercury": the general sense of the passages indicated being this:--