Æschylus (to Apollo).--"Aye, such were your feats in the house of
Pheres, where you persuaded the fates to make a mortal immortal: you it
was destroyed the ancient arrangement and deceived the goddesses with
wine."
Homer.--"The Fates are three virgin sisters,--winged and
white-haired,--dwelling below Parnassus: they feed on honey, and so get
drunk, and readily tell the truth. If deprived of it they delude."
Mr. Browning, however, varies the legend, first by making the Fates find
truth in the fumes of wine; and, secondly, by assuming that they never
knew an inspiring drunkenness until they tasted it: profoundly
intoxicating as their (fermented) honey must have been.
Apollo urges his request that Admetus, now threatened with premature
death, may live out the appointed seventy years. The Fates retort on
him by exclamations on the worthlessness of such a boon. They enumerate
the follies and miseries which beset the successive stages of man's
earthly career, and maintain that its only brightness lies in the
delusive sunshine, the glamour of hope, with which he (Apollo) gilds it.
Apollo owns that human happiness may rest upon illusion, but undertakes
to show that man holds the magic within himself; and to that end
persuades the sisters to drain a bowl of wine which he has brought with
him. In the moment's intoxication the scales fall from their eyes, and
they see that life is good. They see that if its earlier course means
conflict, old age is its recorded victory. They see it enriched by the
joys which are only remembered as by the good which only might have
been. They praise the Actual and still more the Potential--the infinite
possibilities to which Man is born and which imagination alone can
anticipate; and joining hands with Apollo in a delirious dance, proclaim
the discovery of the lost secret: _Fancy compounded with Fact._
This philosophy is, however, ill-suited to the dark ministers of fate;
and an oracular explosion from the earth's depths startles them back
into sobriety; in which condition they repudiate the new knowledge which
has been born of them, flinging it back on their accomplice with various
expressions of disgust. They admit, nevertheless, that the web of human
destiny often defeats their spinning; its intended good and evil change
places with each other; the true significance of life is only revealed
by death; and though they still refuse to yield to Apollo's demand, they
compromise with it: Admetus shall live, if someone else will voluntarily
die for him. It is true they neutralize their concession by deriding the
idea of such a devoted person being found; and Apollo also shows himself
a stranger to the decrees of the higher powers by making wrong guesses
as to the event; but the whole episode is conceived in a humorous and
very human spirit which especially reveals itself in the attitude of
the contending parties towards each other. The Fates display throughout
a proper contempt for what they regard as the showy but unsubstantial
personality of the young god; and the natural antagonism of light and
darkness, hope and despair, is as amusingly parodied in the mock
deference and ill-disguised aversion with which he approaches them.
Apollo finally vindicates Mr. Browning's optimistic theism by claiming
the gifts of Bacchus, youngest of the gods, for the beneficent purpose
and anterior wisdom of Zeus.
The one serious idea which runs through the poem is conveyed in its
tribute to the power of wine: in other words, to the value of
imagination as supplement to and interpreter of fact. Its partial,
tentative, and yet efficient illumining of the dark places of life is
vividly illustrated by Apollo: and he only changes his imagery when he
speaks of Reason as doing the same work. It is the imaginative, not the
scientific "reason" which Mr. Browning invokes as help in the
perplexities of experience;[122] as it is the spiritual, and not
scientific "experience" on which, in the subsequent discussions, he will
so emphatically take his stand.[123]
In the first "parleying" Mr. Browning invokes the wisdom of BERNARD DE
MANDEVILLE on certain problems of life: mainly those of the existence of
evil and the limitations of human knowledge; and the optimistic views in
which he believes Dr. Mandeville to concur with him are brought to bear
on the more gloomy philosophy of Carlyle, some well-known utterances of
whom are brought forward for confutation. The chief points of the
argument are as follows:--
Carlyle complains that God never intervenes to check the tyranny of
evil, so that it not only prevails in the present life, but for any sure
indications which exist to the contrary may still do so in the life to
come. It would be something, he thinks, if even triumphant wrong were
checked, although (here we must read between the lines) this would be
tantamount to the condoning of evil in all its less developed forms;
better still if he who has the power to do so habitually crushed it at
the birth.
Mr. Browning (alias Mandeville) replies by the parable of a garden in
which beneficent and noxious plants grow side by side. "You must
either," he declares, "admit--which you do not--that both good and evil
were chance sown, or refer their joint presence to some necessary or
pre-ordained connection between them. In the latter case you may use
your judgment in pruning away the too great exuberance of the noxious
plant, but if you destroy it once for all, you have frustrated the
intentions of him who placed it there."
Carlyle reminds his opponent of that other parable, according to which
it was an enemy who surreptitiously sowed the tares of evil, and these
grow because no one can pull them out. Divine power and foresight are,
in his opinion, incompatible with either theory, and both of these
mistaken efforts on man's part to "cram" the infinite within the limits
of his own mind and understand what passes understanding. He deprecates
the folly of linking divine and human together on the strength of the
short space which they may tread side by side, and the anthropomorphic
spirit which subjects the one to the other by presenting the illimitable
in human form.
Mr. Browning defends his position by an illustration of the use (as also
abuse) of symbols spiritual and material; Carlyle retorts somewhat
impatiently that in thinking of God we have no need of symbolism; we
know Him as Immensity, Eternity, and other abstract qualities, and to
fancy Him under human attributes is superfluous; and Mr. Browning
dismisses this theology, with the intellectual curiosities and
intellectual discontents which he knows in the present case to have
accompanied it, in a modification of the Promethean myth--such a one as
the more "human" Euripides might have imagined. "When the sun's light
first broke upon the earth, and everywhere in and on this there was
life, man was the only creature which did not rejoice: for he said, I
alone am incomplete in my completeness; I am subject to a power which I
alone have the intellect to recognize, hence the desire to grasp. I do
not aspire to penetrate the hidden essence, the underlying mystery of
the sun's force; but I crave possession of one beam of its light
wherewith to render palpable to myself its unseen action in the
universe. And Prometheus then revealed to him the 'artifice' of the
burning-glass, through which henceforward he might enslave the sun's
rays to his service while disrobing them of the essential brilliancy
which no human sight could endure."
In the material uses of the burning-glass we have a parallel for the
value of an intellectual or religious symbol. This too is a gathering
point for impressions otherwise too diffuse; or, inversely conceived, a
sign guiding the mental vision through spaces which would otherwise be
blank. Its reduced or microcosmic presentment of facts too large for
man's mental grasp suggests also an answer to those who bemoan the
limitations of human knowledge. Characteristic remarks on this subject
occur at the beginning of the poem.
Bernard de Mandeville figures throughout the "parleying" as author of
"The Fable of the Bees"; and it is in this work that Mr. Browning
discovers their special ground of sympathy. "The Fable of the Bees,"
also entitled "Private Vices Public Benefits," and again "The Grumbling
Hive, or Knaves turned Honest," is meant to show that self-indulgence
and self-seeking carried even to the extent of vice are required to
stimulate the activities and secure the material well-being of a
community. The doctrine, as originally set forth, had at least an
appearance of cynicism, and is throughout not free from conscious or
unconscious sophistry; and though the theological condemnation evoked by
it was nothing short of insane, we cannot wonder that the morality of
the author's purpose was impugned. He defends this, however, in
successive additions to the work, asserting and re-asserting, by
statement and illustration, that his object has been to expose the vices
inherent to human society--in no sense to justify them; and Mr. Browning
fully accepts the vindication and even regards it as superfluous. He
sees nothing, either in the fable itself or the commentary first
attached to it, which may not equally be covered by the Christian
doctrine of original sin, or the philosophic acceptance of evil as a
necessary concomitant, or condition, of good: and finds fresh guarantees
for a sound moral intention in the bright humour and sound practical
sense in which the book abounds. This judgment was formed (as I have
already implied) very early in Mr. Browning's life, even before the
appearance of "Pauline," and supplies a curious comment on any
impression of mental immaturity which his own work of that period may
have produced.
Bernard de Mandeville was a Dutch physician, born at Dort in the second
half of the last century, but who settled in England after taking his
degree. He published, besides "The Fable of the Bees," some works of a
more professional kind. His name, as we know it, must have been
Anglicized.
DANIEL BARTOLI was a Jesuit and historian of his order. Mr. Browning
characterizes him in a footnote as "a learned and ingenious writer," and
while acknowledging his blindness in matters of faith would gladly
testify to his penetration in those of knowledge;[124] but the Don's
editor, Angelo Cerutti, declares in the same note that his historical
work so overflows with superstition and is so crammed with accounts of
prodigious miracles as to make the reading it an infliction; and the
saint-worship involved in this kind of narrative is the supposed text of
the "parleying." Mr. Browning claims Don Bartoli's allegiance for a
secular saint: a woman more divine in her non-miraculous virtues than
some at least of those whom the Church has canonized, and whose
existence has the merit of not being legendary. The saint in question
was Marianne Pajot, daughter of the apothecary of Gaston Duke of
Orleans; and her story, as Mr. Browning relates it, a well-known episode
in the lives of Charles IV., Duke of Lorraine, and the Marquis de
Lassay.
Charles of Lorraine fell violently in love with Marianne Pajot, whom he
met at the "Luxembourg" when visiting Madame d'Orleans, his sister. She
was "so fair, so modest, so virtuous, and so witty" that he did not
hesitate to offer her his hand; and they were man and wife so far as
legal formalities could make them when the Monarch (Louis XIV.)
intervened. Charles had by a recent treaty made Louis his heir. This
threatened no obstacle to his union, since a clause in the marriage
contract barred all claims to succession on the part of the children who
might be born of it. But "Madame" resented the mésalliance; she joined
her persuasions with those of the Minister le Tellier; and the latter
persuaded the young King, not absolutely to prevent the marriage, but to
turn it to account. A paper was drawn up pledging the Duke to fresh
concessions, and the bride was challenged in the King's name to obtain
his signature to it. On this condition she was to be recognized as
Duchess with all the honours due to her rank; failing this, she was to
be banished to a convent. The alternative was offered to her at the
nuptial banquet, at which le Tellier had appeared--a carriage and
military escort awaiting him outside. She emphatically declined taking
part in so disgraceful a compact:[125] and after doing her best to allay
the Duke's wrath (which was for the moment terrible), calmly allowed the
Minister to lead her away, leaving all the bystanders in tears. A few
days later Marianne returned the jewels which Charles had given her,
saying, it was not suitable that she should keep them "since she had not
the honour of being his wife." He seems to have resigned her without
farther protest.
De Lassay was much impressed by this occurrence, though at the time only
ten years old. He too conceived an attachment for Marianne Pajot, and
married her, being already a widower, at the age of twenty-three. Their
union, dissolved a few years later by her death, was one of unclouded
happiness on his part, of unmixed devotion on hers; and the moral
dignity by which she had subjugated this somewhat weak and excitable
nature was equally attested by the intensity of her husband's sorrow and
by its transitoriness. The military and still more amorous adventures of
the Marquis de Lassay make him a conspicuous figure in the annals of
French Court life. He is indirectly connected with our own through a
somewhat pale and artificial passion for Sophia Dorothea, the young
Princess of Hanover, whose husband became ultimately George I. Mr.
Browning indicates the later as well as earlier stages of de Lassay's
career; he only follows that of the Duke of Lorraine into an imaginary
though not impossible development. Charles had shown himself a being of
smaller spiritual stature than his intended wife; and it was only too
likely, Mr. Browning thinks, that the diamonds which should have graced
her neck soon sparkled on that of some venal beauty whose challenge to
his admiration proceeded from the opposite pole of womanhood.
Nevertheless he feels kindly towards him. The nobler love was not
dishonoured by the more ignoble fancy, since it could not be touched by
it. Duke Charles was still faithful as a man may be.
With CHRISTOPHER SMART is an interrogative comment on the strange mental
vicissitudes of this mediocre poet, whose one inspired work, "A Song to
David," was produced in a mad-house[126]. Of this "Song" Rossetti has
said (I quote the "Athenæum" of Feb. 19, 1887) in a published letter to
Mr. Caine, "This wonderful poem of Smart's is the only great
_accomplished_ poem of the last century. The _un_accomplished ones are
Chatterton's--of course I mean earlier than Blake or Coleridge, and
without reckoning so exceptional a genius as Burns. A masterpiece of
rich imagery, exhaustive resources, and reverberant sound." How Mr.
Browning was impressed by such a work of genius, springing up from the
dead level of the author's own and his contemporary life, he describes
in a simile.
He is exploring a large house. He goes from room to room, finding
everywhere evidence of decent taste and sufficient, but moderate,
expenditure: nothing to repel and nothing to attract him in what he
sees. He suddenly enters the chapel; and here all richness is massed,
all fancy is embodied, art of all styles and periods is blended to one
perfection. He passes from it into another suite of rooms, half fearful
of fresh surprise; and decent mediocrity, respectable commonplace again
meet him on every side. Thus, it seems to him, was the imagination of
Christopher Smart for one moment transfigured by the flames of madness
to resume for ever afterwards the prosaic character of its sanity; and
he now asks the author of "A Song to David" how one who had thus touched
the absolute in art could so decline from it. He assumes that the
madness had but revealed the poet: whether or not the fiery outbreak was
due to force suppressed or to particles of brain substance disturbed.
Why was he after as before silent?
It might be urged in answer that the full glory of that vision did not
return--that the strength and beauty of the universe never came to him
again with so direct a message for the eye and ear of his fellow men.
But, Mr. Browning continues, impressions of strength and beauty are only
the materials of knowledge. They contain the lesson of life. And that
lesson is not given in the reiterated vision of what is beautiful, but
in the patient conversion into knowledge and motive of such impressions
of beauty--in other words, of strength or power--as Man's natural
existence affords. The poet's privilege, as the poet's duty, is not
merely to impart the pleasure, but to aid the process of instruction. He
only suggests the explanation to disclaim it in Smart's name.
These arguments are very typical of Mr. Browning's philosophy of Art: of
his conviction that Art has no mission, its intuitions have no
authority, distinct from moral and intellectual truth. He concludes the
little sermon by denouncing that impatience of Fancy which would grasp
the end of things before the beginning, and scale the heights of
Knowledge, while rejecting Experience, through which, as by a ladder, we
scale them step by step.
The lines in "Paracelsus," vol. ii., p. 36, which are in this view so
appropriate to the case of Christopher Smart, bore reference to him. The
main facts of his life may be found in any biographical dictionary.
With GEORGE BUBB DODINGTON is a lesson in the philosophy of intrigue, or
the art of imposing on our fellow men. It is addressed to Bubb
Dodington[127] as to an ambitious, obsequious, unscrupulous, and only
partially successful courtier; and undertakes to show that, being (more
or less) a knave, his conduct also proclaimed him a fool, and lost him
the rewards of knavery. Mr. Browning does not concern himself with the
moralities of the case; these, for the time being, are put out of court.
He assumes, for the purposes of the discussion, that everyone is selfish
and no one need be sincere, and that "George" was justified in labouring
for his own advancement and cheating others, if possible, into
subservience to it; but he argues that the aim being right, the means
employed were wrong, and could only result in failure.
The argument begins and ends in the proposition, in itself a truism but
which receives here a novel significance, that nothing in creation obeys
its like, and that he who would mount by the backs of his fellow men
must show some reason why they should lend them. In the olden time, we
are reminded, such reasons were supplied by physical force; later, force
was superseded by intelligence, _i.e._, wit or cunning; and this must
now be supplemented by something deeper, because it has become the
property of so many persons as to place no one person at an advantage.
Bubb Dodington's methods have been those of simple cunning, and
therefore they have not availed him. The multitude whom he cajoled have
seen through his cajoleries, and have resented in these both the attempt
to deceive them and the pretension--unfounded as it proved--to exalt
himself at their expense.
How then can the multitude be deceived into subservience?--By the
pretence of indifference to them. An impostor is always supposed to be
in earnest. The commonplace impostor is so: he has staked everything on
the appearance of being sincere. He, on the other hand, who is reckless
in mendacity, who cheats with a laughing eye; who, while silently
strenuous in a given cause, appears to take seriously neither it,
himself, nor those on whom both depend, irresistibly strikes the vulgar
as moved by something greater than himself or they. A "quack" he may be,
but like the spiritualistic quack, he invokes the belief in the
Supernatural, and perhaps shares it. He has the secret which Bubb
Dodington had not.
It may be wondered why Mr. Browning treats the shallower political
cunning as merely a foil to the deeper, instead of opposing to it
something better than both: but he finds the natural contrast to the
half-successful schemer in the wholly triumphant one: and the second
picture, like the first, has been drawn from life. It is that of the
late Lord Beaconsfield--as Mr. Browning sees him.
With FRANCIS FURINI is a defence of the study of the nude, based on the
life and work of this Florentine painter (born 1600), who at the age of
forty also became a priest. According to his biographer, Filippo
Baldinucci,[128] Furini was not only a skilful artist, but a
conscientious priest, and a good man. No reproach attached to him but
that he attained a special charm of colouring through the practice of
painting very young women undraped; and we may infer that he repented
this from the current report that when he felt himself dying he
entreated those about him to have his pictures burnt. But Baldinucci
also relates that he had a specious answer ready for whoever
remonstrated with him on thus endangering his soul. The answer, which he
frankly quotes, is by no means "specious" in the sense in which it is
made; and Mr. Browning cannot believe that a man so inspired by the true
artistic passion as those words imply, could in any circumstances become
ashamed of the acts to which they refer. "If," Furini says, "those
scrupulous persons only knew what is the agony of endeavour with which
the artist strives at faithfully imitating what he sees, they would also
know how little room this leaves in him for the intrusion of alien"
(immoral) "thoughts." Mr. Browning goes farther still. He asserts not
only the innocence, but the religiousness, of the painter's art when
directed towards the marvels of the female form. He declares its
exercise, so directed, to be a subject, not of shame in the sight of the
Creator, but of thanksgiving to Him, and also the best form in which
human thanks can be conveyed; and he employs all the vividness of his
illustration and all the force of his invective against the so-called
artist who sees in the Divineness of female beauty only incitement to
low desires; in the art which seeks to reproduce it only a cloak for
their indulgence. His argument is very strong, and would be
unanswerable, but for the touch of speciousness which Baldinucci by
anticipation detects in it: Mr. Browning--as did Furini--regards the
breach of formal chastity exclusively from the artist's point of view.
But he may also argue that this will in the long run determine that of
the spectator and that the model herself is from the first amenable to
it.
Mr. Browning lays stress upon the technical skill which results from the
close copying of nature, and by virtue of which Furini must be styled a
good painter, whether or not a great one: and though he has never
underrated the positive value of technical skill, we do not feel that in
this third page of the "parleyings" he gives to the inspiring thought as
high a relative place as in his earlier works. The old convictions
reappear at pages 182-3 of vol. xvi., when he asserts the danger in
which the skilled hand may involve the artistic soul, by stifling its
insight into the spiritual essence of fleshly things or silencing its
testimony to it; when, too, he admits that not the least worthy of the
"sacred" ones have been thus betrayed. He still, however, maintains that
the true offender against Art will ever be the mock artist--the
Philistine--who sees cause of offence in it.
After proclaiming the religiousness of Art, Furini is called upon to
unfold his theology: and he then passes to a confession of faith in
which Mr. Browning's known personal Theism is contrasted with the
scientific doctrines of Evolution. The Scientist and the Believer would
as he distinguishes them join issue on the value of the artistic study
of man, since man is for both of them the one essential object of
knowledge; but the study (artistic or scientific) is, Mr. Browning
considers, unrepaying in the one case, while it yields all necessary
results in the other. According to the scientist, Man reigns supreme by
his intelligence; according to the Believer, he is subject to all the
helplessness of his ignorance. In reasoning, therefore, each from his
own consciousness, the one finds his starting point at the summit of
creation, the other virtually at the bottom of it. The Scientist
acknowledges no mind beyond that of man; he seeks the impulse to life
within itself, and can therefore only track it through the descending
scale of being into the region of inorganic atoms and blind force. The
_believer_ refers that impulse to a conscious external First Cause, and
is content to live surrounded by its mystery, entrenched within the
facts of his own existence, guided (i.e., drawn upwards) by the
progressive revelations which these convey to him.
It is so that Furini has lived and learned. He has found his lesson in
the study of the human frame. There, as on a rock of experience, he has
planted his foot, finding confusion and instability wherever he
projected this beyond it; striking out sparks of knowledge at every
stamp on the firm ground. He has learned that the Cause of Life is
external, because he has seen how the soul permeates and impels the
body, how it makes it an instrument of its own raptures and a sharer in
them; and he believes that that which caused the soul and thus gifted it
will ultimately silence the spiritual conflict with Evil and perfect Its
own creation. He believes this because Evil has revealed itself to him
as the necessary complement of Good--the antitype through which alone
the type defines itself; as a condition of knowledge; as a test of what
is right; as a motive to life and virtue so indispensable that it must
exist as illusion if it did not exist as fact; because, therefore, its
existence cannot detract from the goodness of the First Cause or the
promise which that contains.
This constant assertion of the necessity of evil would land Mr. Browning
in a dilemma, if the axiom were presented by him in any character of
dogmatic truth: since it claims priority for certain laws of thought
over a Being which, if Omnipotent, must have created them. But the
anomaly disappears in the more floating outlines of a poetic personal
experience; and Mr. Browning (alias Furini) once more assures us that
what he "knows" of the nature and mode of action of the First Cause he
knows for himself only. How it operates for others is of the essence of
the mystery which enfolds him. Whether even the means of his own
instruction is reality or illusion, fiction or fact, is beyond his ken;
he is satisfied that it should be so.
Mr. Browning reverts to his defence of the nude in the description of a
picture--exhibited last year at the Grosvenor Gallery--the subject of
which he offers to Furini for treatment in the manner described.[129]
With GERARD DE LAIRESSE is a critical reminiscence of the unreal and
mythological in art, and its immediate subject a Belgian painter, born
at Liege, but who nourished at Amsterdam in the second half of the
seventeenth century. De Lairesse was a man of varied artistic culture as
well as versatile skill; but he was saturated with the pseudo-classical
spirit of the later period of the renaissance; and landscape itself
scarcely existed for him but as a setting for mythological incident or a
subject for embellishment by it. This is curiously apparent in a
treatise on the Art of Painting, which he composed, and, by a form of
dictation, also illustrated, when at the age of fifty he had lost his
sight. An English version of this fell into Mr. Browning's hands while
he was yet a child, and the deep and, at the time, delightful impression
which it made upon him is the motive of the present poem. Foremost in
his memory is an imaginary "Walk,"[130] in which the exercise of fancy
which the author practises and, Mr. Browning tells us, enjoins, is
strikingly displayed by his "conjecturing" Phaeton's tomb from the
evidence of a carved thunderbolt in an empty sepulchre, and the remains
of the "Chariot of the Sun" from a piece of broken wheel and some
similar fragment buried in the adjoining ground.
The remembrance converts itself into a question: the poet's fancy no
longer peoples the earth with gods and goddesses; has his insight become
less vivid? has the poetic spirit gone back? The answer is unwavering;
retrogression is not in the creative plan. The poet does not go back. He
is still as of yore a seer; he has only changed in this, that his chosen
visions are of the soul; their objects are no longer visible
unrealities, but the realities which are unseen. He can still, if he
pleases, evoke those as these, and Mr. Browning proceeds to show it by
calling up a series of dissolving views representing another "walk."
A majestic and varied landscape unfolds before us in the changing lights
of a long summer's day; and at each appropriate artistic moment becomes
the background of a mythological, idyllic, or semi-mythical scene. In
the early dawn we see Prometheus amidst departing thunders chained to
his rock:[131] the glutted, yet still hungering vulture cowering beside
him; in the dews of morning, Artemis triumphant in her double character
of huntress-queen and goddess of sudden death; in the heats of noon,
Lyda and the Satyr, enacting the pathetic story of his passion and her
indifference;[132] in the lengthening shadows, the approaching shock of
the armies of Darius and Alexander;[133]--in the falling night, a dim,
silent, deprecating figure: in other words, a ghost.
And here Mr. Browning bids the "fooling" stop; for he has touched the
point of extreme divergence between the classic spirit and his own. The
pallid vision which he repels speaks dumbly of pagan regret for what is
past, of pagan hopelessness of the to-come. _His_ religion, as we are
again reminded, is one of hope. Let us, he says, do and not dream, look
forward and not back; ascend the tree of existence into its ripening
glory, not hastening over leaf or blossom, not dallying with them; leave
Greek lore buried in its own ashes, and accept the evidence of life
itself that extinction is impossible; that death--mystery though it is,
calamity though it may be--ends nothing which has once begun. We may
then greet the spring which we do not live to see in other words than
those of the Greek bard; and the words suggested are those of a dainty
lyric, in which the note of gladness seems to break with a little sob,
and rings, perhaps, on that account the truer.[134]
With CHARLES AVISON might be called a reverie on music and musicians,
but for the extraordinary vividness of the images and emotions which it
conveys. It was induced, Mr. Browning tells us, by a picturesque little
incident which set his thoughts vibrating to the impressions of the word
"March": and supplies a parable for their instinctive flight into a
discredited and forgotten past. They have been feeling for a piece of
march-music; they have bridged the gulf which separates the school of
Wagner and Brahms from that of Handel or Buononcini; they alight on
Charles Avison's "Grand March."[135] It is a simple continuous air,
such as hearts could beat to in the olden time, though flat and somewhat
thin, and unrelieved by those caprices of modulation which are essential
to modern ears; and as it repeats itself in Mr. Browning's brain, the
persistent melody gains force from its very persistence: till it fills
with the sound, as it were glows with the aerial clashings, of many
martial instruments, till it strides in the lengthening,
drum-accentuated motion of many marching feet. He ponders the fact that
such melody has lost its power, and asks himself why this must be: since
the once perfected can never be surpassed, and the music of Charles
Avison was in its own day as inspiring and inspired--in other words, as
perfect--as that for which it has been cast aside.
He finds his answer in the special relation of this art to the life of
man. Music resembles painting and poetry in the essential characteristic
that her province is not Mind but Soul--the swaying sea of emotion which
underlies the firm ground of attainable, if often recondite, fact. All
three have this in common with the activities of Mind that they strive
for the same result; they aim at recording feeling as science registers
facts. The two latter in some measure attain this end, because they deal
with those definite moments of the soul's experience which share the
nature of fact. But music dredges deeper in the emotional sea. She draws
forth and embodies the more mysterious, more evanescent, more fluid
realities of the soul's life; and so, effecting more than the sister
arts, she yet succeeds less. Her forms remain; the spirit ebbs away from
them. As, however, Mr. Browning's own experience has shown, the departed
spirit may return--
"... Off they steal--
How gently, dawn-doomed phantoms! back come they
Full-blooded with new crimson of broad day--
Passion made palpable once more." (P. 232.)
The revived passion may breathe under the name of another man; it may
stir again in the utterance of one dead and forgotten; and Mr. Browning,
borrowing the language of chemistry, invokes the reactive processes
through which its many-coloured flamelets may spring to life.[136] He
then passes by an insensible--because to him very natural--transition
from the realities of feeling to those of thought, and to the underlying
truth from which both series derive: and combats the idea that in
thought, any more than in feeling, the present can disprove the past,
the once true reveal itself as delusion. Time--otherwise growth--widens
the range as it complicates the necessities of musical, _i.e._ emotional
expression. It destroys the enfolding fictions which shield without
concealing the earlier stages of intellectual truth. But the emotions
were in existence before music began; and Truth was potentially "at
full" within us when as it were reborn to grow and bud and blossom for
the mind of man.[137] Therefore, he has said, addressing Avison's March,
"Blare it forth, bold C Major!" and "Therefore," he continues, in a
swift return of fancy:--
"... Bang the drums,
Blow the trumps, Avison! March-motive? That's
Truth which endures resetting. Sharps and flats,
Lavish at need, shall dance athwart thy score
When ophicleide and bombardon's uproar
Mate the approaching trample, even now
Big in the distance--or my ears deceive--
Of federated England, fitly weave
March-music for the future!" (P. 237.)
The musical transformation is for a moment followed back to the days of
Elizabethan plain-song, and then arrested at those of Avison, where he
may be imagined as joining chorus with Bach in celebrating the struggle
for English liberty. The closing stanzas are written to the music of
Avison's March, which is also given[138] at the end of the poem, and
throws a helpful light on its more technical parts.
FUST AND HIS FRIENDS is based on a version of the Faust legend which
identifies the inventor of printing with Dr. Faust, and contains
allusions to some of the incidents of Goethe's double poem: the magical
drinking bout of the first part, and the appearance of the Grecian Helen
in the second; but whereas the popular tradition makes Fust's great
discovery the fruit of his alliance with the powers of Evil, Mr.
Browning represents it as an act of atonement for the figurative
devil-worship which was involved in a disorderly and ostentatious life.
Fust has by his own admission sinned to this extent.[139] He has obeyed
the father of lies. He has also accepted with thankfulness the chance of
redeeming his soul by a signal service rendered to the cause of Truth.
The process of engraving on gold, furtively witnessed in a Tuscan
workshop, has suggested to him the manufacture of metallic types, and he
has been for years secluded with the conception of his printing-press,
and glowing visions of that winged word which should one day fly forth
at his command. Complacent ignorance and stupidity have buzzed freely
about him as he sat unaided and alone in what Mr. Browning poetically
depicts as the prolonged travail of a portentous mental birth; and, as
we are led to imagine, much well-meant remonstrance and advice rebounded
from his closed door. But at the moment in question the door is open,
for the work of Fust is complete. Seven "Friends" present themselves
prepared to lecture him for his good and for that of their city
(Mayence) which is endangered by his compact with the Devil; and the
ensuing intensely humorous colloquy supplies him with the fitting
occasion for distributing specimens of his new art and displaying the
mechanism through which its apparent magic is achieved. He then pours
forth his soul in an impassioned utterance, half soliloquy, half prayer,
in which gratitude for his own redemption tempers the sense of triumph
in the world-wide intellectual deliverance he has been privileged to
effect, and becomes a tribute of adoration to that Absolute of Creative
Knowledge, the law of which he has obeyed; which stirs in the
unconsciousness of the ore and plant, and impels man to Its realization
step by step in the ever-receding, ever-present vision of his own
ignorance.
He owns, however, when the talk is resumed, that his happiness is not
free from cloud: since the wings which he has given to truth will also
aid the diffusion of falsehood; and the note of humour returns to the
situation when this contingency asserts itself in the mind of some of
the "friends." These worthies have passed through the descending scale
of feeling proper to such persons on such an occasion. They have
received Fust's invention as diabolical--as wonderful--as very simple
after all; and now the fact stares them in the face that, printing being
so simple, the Hussite may publish his heresies as well as the Churchman
his truth, and the old sure remedy of burning him and his talk together
will no longer avail. One of the two Divines on whom this impresses
itself had indeed "been struck by it from the first."
The poem concludes with a joke on the name of Huss, which (I am told) is
the Bohemian equivalent for "goose," and his reported prophecy of the
advent and the triumph of Luther: which prophecy Fust re-echoes.[140]