Poet and Teacher in Old Age
During the last decade of his life Browning's influence as a literary
power was assured. The publication indeed of _The Ring and the Book_ in
1868 did much to establish his reputation with those readers who are not
watchers for a new planet but revise their astronomical charts upon
authority. He noted with satisfaction that fourteen hundred copies of
_Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau_ were sold in five days, and says of
_Balaustion's Adventure_ "2500 in five months is a good sale for the
likes of me." The later volumes were not perhaps more popular, but they
sent readers to the earlier poems, and successive volumes of Selections
made these easily accessible. That published by Moxon in 1865, and
dedicated in words of admiration and friendship to Tennyson, by no means
equalled in value the earlier Selections made by John Forster. The
volume of 1872--dedicated also to Tennyson--which has been frequently
reprinted, was arranged upon a principle, the reference of which to the
poems chosen is far from clear--"by simply stringing together certain
pieces"; Browning wrote, "on the thread of an imaginary personality, I
present them in succession, rather as the natural development of a
particular experience than because I account them the most noteworthy
portion of my work." We can perceive that some poems of love are
brought together, and some of art, and that the series closes with poems
of religious thought or experience, but such an order is not strictly
observed, and the "imaginary personality"--the thread--seems to be
imaginary in the fullest sense of the word. Yet it is of interest to
observe that something of a psychological-dramatic arrangement was at
least designed. A second series of Selections followed in 1880. Browning
was accepted by many admirers not only as a poet but as a prophet.
"Tennyson and I seem now to be regarded as the two kings of Brentford,"
he said laughingly in 1879.[141] The later-enthroned king was soon to
have an interesting court. In 1881 The Browning Society, founded by Dr
Furnivall--initiator of so much work that is invaluable to the student
of our literature--and Miss E.H. Hickey, herself a poet, began its
course. At first, according to Mrs Orr, Browning "treated the project as
a joke," but when once he understood it to be serious, "he did not
oppose it." He felt, however, that before the public he must stand aloof
from its work: "as Wilkes was no Wilkeite," he wrote to Edmund Yates, "I
am quite other than a Browningite." With a little nervousness as to the
discretion which the Society might or might not show, he felt grateful
for the interest in his writings demonstrated by persons many of whom
had been unknown to him even by name. He was always ready to furnish Dr
Furnivall with a note of facts or elucidation. His old admirers had made
him somewhat too much of a peculiar and private possession. A propaganda
of younger believers could not be unwelcome to one who had for so many
years been commonly regarded as an obscure heretic--not even an
heresiarch--of literature.
Other honours accompanied his old age. In 1884 he received the LL.D. of
the University of Edinburgh, and again declined to be nominated for the
Lord Rectorship of the University of St Andrews. Next year he accepted
the Honorary Presidency of the Five Associated Societies of Edinburgh.
In 1886 he was appointed Foreign Correspondent to the Royal Academy, a
sinecure post rendered vacant by the death of Lord Houghton. Though so
vigorous in talk, Browning could not make a public speech, or he shrank
from such an effort; none of the honours which he accepted were such as
to put him to this test. During many years he was President of the New
Shakspere Society. His veneration for Shakespeare is expressed in a
sonnet entitled _The Names_, written for the Book of the Show held in
the Albert Hall, May 1884, on behalf of the Fulham Road Hospital for
Women; it was not included in the edition of his works which he was
superintending during the last two years of his life. Browning was not
wholly uninterested in the attempts made to transfer the glory of the
Shakespearian drama to Bacon; he agreed with Spedding that whatever else
might be a matter of doubt, it was certain that the author of the
"Essays" could not have been the author of the plays. On another
question it is perhaps worth recording his opinion--he could see nothing
of Shakespeare, he declared, in the tragedy of _Titus Andronicus_.
In 1879 appeared _Dramatic Idyls_ and in the following year _Dramatic
Idyls, Second Series_. They differed in two respects from the volumes of
miscellaneous poetry which Browning had previously published. Hitherto
the contents of his collections of verse in the main fell into three
groups--poems which were interpretations of the passion of love, poems
which dealt with art and artists, poems which were inspired by the ideas
and emotions of religion. Unless we regard _Ned Bratts_ as a poem of
religious experience, we may say that these themes are wholly absent
from the _Dramatic Idyls_. Secondly, the short story in verse for the
first time becomes predominant, or rather excludes other forms, and the
short story here is in general not romantic or fantastic, but what we
understand by the word "realistic." The outward body of the story is in
several instances more built up by cumulative details than formerly,
which gives it an air of solidity or massiveness, and is less expressed
through a swift selection of things essential. And this may lead a
reader to suppose that the story is more a narrative of external
incidents than is actually the case. In truth, though the "corporal
rind" of the narrative bulks upon our view, the poet remains essentially
the psychologist. The narrative interest is not evenly distributed over
the whole as it is in the works of such a writer as Chaucer, who loves
narrative for its own sake. There is ordinarily a crisis, a culmination,
a decisive and eventful invasion or outbreak of spiritual passion to
which we are led up by all that precedes it. If the poem should be
humorous, it works up to some humorous point, or surprise. The narrative
is in fact a picture that hangs from a nail, and the nail here is some
vivid moment of spiritual experience, or else some jest which also has
its crisis. A question sometimes arises as to whether the central
motive is sufficient to bear the elaborate apparatus; for the parts of
the poem do not always justify themselves except by reference to their
centre, in the case, for example, of _Doctor_----, the thesis is that a
bad wife is stronger than death; the jest culminates at the point where
the Devil upon sight of his formidable spouse flies from the bed's-head
of one who is about to die, and thus allows his victim to escape the
imminent death. The question, "Will the jest sustain a poem of such
length?" is a fair one, and a good-natured reader will stretch a point
and say that he has not after all been so ill amused, which he might
also say of an Ingoldsby Legend; but even a good-natured reader will
hardly return to _Doctor_ ---- with pleasure. Chaucer with as thin a
jest could have made an admirable poem, for the interest would have been
distributed by his lightness of touch, by his descriptive power, by
slyness, by geniality, by a changeful ripple of enjoyment over the
entire piece. With Browning, when we have arrived at the apex of the
jest, we are fatigued by the climb, and too much out of breath to be
capable of laughter. In like manner few persons except the Browning
enthusiast, who is not responsible for his fervour, will assert that
either the jest or the frankly cynical moral of _Pietro of Abano_
compensates for the jolting in a springless waggon over a rough road and
a long. We make the acquaintance of a magician who with knowledge
uninspired by love has kicks and cuffs for his reward, and the
acquaintance of an astute Greek, who, at least in his dream of life,
imposed upon him by the art of magic, exploits the talents of his friend
Pietro, and gains the prize of his astuteness, having learnt to rule men
by the potent spell of "cleverness uncurbed by conscience." The
cynicism is only inverted morality, and implies that the writer is the
reverse of cynical; but it lacks the attractive sub-acid flavour of a
delicate cynicism, which insinuates its prophylactic virus into our
veins, and the humour of the poem, ascending from stage to stage until
we reach Pietro's final failure, is cumbrous and mechanical.
The two series of _Dramatic Idyls_ included some conspicuous successes.
The classical poems _Pheidippides_, _Echetlos_, _Pan and Luna_, idyls
heroic and mythological, invite us by their beauty to return to them
again and again. Browning's sympathy with gallantry in action, with
self-devotion to a worthy cause, was never more vividly rendered than in
the first of these poems. The runner of Athens is a more graceful
brother of the Breton sailor who saved a fleet for France; but the
vision of majestical Pan in "the cool of a cleft" exalts our human
heroism into relation with the divine benevolence, and the reward of
release from labour is proportionally higher than a holiday with the
"belle Aurore." Victory and then domestic love is the human
interpretation of Pan's oracular promise; but the gifts of the gods are
better than our hopes and it proves to be victory and death:
He flung down his shield,
Ran like fire once more: and the space 'twixt the Fennel-field
And Athens was stubble again, a field which a fire runs through,
Till in he broke: "Rejoice, we conquer!" Like wine through clay,
Joy in his blood bursting his heart, he died--the bliss!
The companion poem of Marathon, the story of the nameless clown, the
mysterious holder of the ploughshare, is not less inspiring. The unknown
champion, so plain in his heroic magnitude of mind, so brilliant as he
flashes in the van, in the rear, is like the incarnated genius of the
soil, which hides itself in the furrow and flashes into the harvest; and
it is his glory to be obscured for ever by his deed--"the great deed
ne'er grows small." Browning's development of the Vergilian myth--"si
credere dignum est"--of Pan and Luna astonishes by its vehement
sensuousness and its frank chastity; and while the beauty of the
Girl-moon and the terror of her betrayal are realised with the utmost
energy of imagination, we are made to feel that all which happens is the
transaction of a significant dream or legend.
In contrast with these classical pieces, _Halbert and Hob_ reads like a
fragment from some Scandinavian saga telling of the life of forlorn and
monstrous creatures, cave-dwellers, who are less men than beasts. Yet
father and son are indeed men; the remorse which checks the last outrage
against paternity is the touch of the finger of God upon human hearts;
and though old Halbert sits dead,
With an outburst blackening still the old bad fighting face,
and young Hob henceforth goes tottering, muttering, mumbling with a
mindless docility, they are, like Browning's men of the Paris morgue,
only "apparent failures"; there was in them that spark of divine
illumination which can never be wholly extinguished. Positive misdeeds,
the presence of a wild crew of evil passions, do not suffice to make
Browning's faith or hope falter. It is the absence of human virtue which
appals him; if the salt have lost its savour wherewith shall it be
salted? This it is which condemns to a swift, and what the poem
represents as a just, abolishment from earth the mother who in _Ivàn
Ivànovitch_ has given her children to the wolves, and has thereby proved
the complete nullity of her womanhood. For her there is no possible
redemption; she must cease to cumber the ground. Ivàn acts merely as the
instinctive doomsman of Nature or of God, and the old village Pope, who,
as the veil of life grows thin, is feeling after the law above human
law, justifies the wielder of the axe, which has been no instrument of
vengeance but simply an exponent of the wholesome vitality of earth. The
objection that carpenters and joiners, who assume the Heraklean task of
purging the earth of monsters, must be prepared to undergo a period of
confinement at the pleasure of the Czar in a Criminal Lunatic Asylum is
highly sensible, and wholly inappropriate, belonging, as it does, to a
plane of thought and feeling other than that in which the poem moves.
But perhaps it is not a defect of feeling to fail in admiration of that
admired final tableau in which the formidable carpenter is discovered
building a toy Kremlin for his five children. We can take for granted
that the excellent homicide, having done so simple a bit of the day's
work as that of decapitating a fellow-creature, proceeds tranquilly to
other innocent pleasures and duties; we do not require the ostentatious
theatrical group, with limelight effects on the Kremlin and the
honey-coloured beard, displayed for our benefit just before the curtain
is rung down.[142]
[Illustration: SPECIMEN OF BROWNING'S HANDWRITING.
_From a letter to D.S. CURTIS, Esq._]
_Martin Relph_ is a story of life-long remorse, self-condemnation and
self-denunciation; there is something approaching the supernatural, and
yet terribly real, in the figure of the strange old man with a beard as
white as snow, standing, on a bright May day, in monumental grief, and
exposing his ulcerated heart to the spectators who form for him a kind
of posterity. One instant's failure in the probation of life, one
momentary syncope of his better nature long years ago, has condemned his
whole after-existence to become a climbing of the purgatorial mount,
with an agony of pain annually renewed at the season when the earth
rejoices. Only a high-strung delicate spirit is capable of such a
perennial passion of penitence. _Ned Bratts_ may be described as a
companion, but a contrasted piece. It is a story of sudden conversion
and of penitence taking an immediate and highly effective form. The
humour of the poem, which is excellent of its kind, resembles more the
humour of Rowlandson than that of Hogarth. The Bedford Court House on
the sweltering Midsummer Day, the Puritan recusants, reeking of piety
and the cow-house conventicle, the Judges at high jinks upon the
bench--to whom, all in a muck-sweat and ablaze with the fervour of
conversion, enter Black Ned, the stout publican, and big Tab, his slut
of a wife,--these are drawn after the broad British style of humorous
illustration, which combines a frank exaggeration of the characteristic
lines with, at times, a certain grace in deformity. Here at least is
downright belief in the invisible, here is genuine conviction driven
home by the Spirit of God and the terror of hell-fire. Black Ned and the
slut Tabby as yet may not seem the most suitable additions to the
company of the blessed who move singing
In solemn troops and sweet societies;
but when a pair of lusty sinners desire nothing so much as to be hanged,
and that forthwith, we may take it that they are resolved, as
"Christmas" was, to quit the City of Destruction; and the saints above
have learnt not to be fastidious as they bend over repentant rogues.
Thanks to the grace of God and John Bunyan's book, husband and wife
triumphantly aspire to and attain the gallows; "they were lovely and
pleasant in their lives, and in their death they were not divided." A
wise economy of spiritual force!--for while their effectual calling
cannot be gainsaid, the final perseverance of these interesting
converts, had they lingered on the pilgrims' way, as Ned is painfully
aware, might have been less of a certainty.
Browning's method as a story-teller may be studied with special
advantage in _Clive_. The circumstances under which the tale is related
have to be caught at by the reader, which quickens his attention and
keeps him on the alert; this device is, of course, not in itself
difficult, but to employ it with success is an achievement requiring
skill; it is a device proper to the dramatic or quasi-dramatic form; the
speaker, who is by no means a Clive, has to betray something of his own
character, and at the same time to set forth the character of the hero
of his tale; the narrative must tend to a moment of culmination, a
crisis; and that this should involve a paradox--Clive's fear, in the
present instance, being not that the antagonist's pistol, presented at
his head, should be discharged but rather that it should be remorsefully
or contemptuously flung away--gives the poet an opportunity for some
subtle or some passionate casuistry. The effect of the whole is that of
a stream or a shock from an electric battery of mind, for which the
story serves as a conductor. It is not a simple but a highly complex
species of narrative. In _Muléykeh_, one of the most delightful of
Browning's later poems, uniting, as it does, the poetry of the rapture
of swift motion with the poetry of high-hearted passion, the narrative
leads up to a supreme moment, and this resolves itself through a paradox
of the heart. Shall Hóseyn recover his stolen Pearl of a steed, but
recover her dishonoured in the race, or abandon her to the captor with
her glory untarnished? It is he himself who betrays himself to loss and
grief, for to perfect love, pride in the supremacy of the beloved is
more than possession; and thus as Clive's fear was courage, as Ivan's
violation of law was obedience to law, so Hóseyn's loss is Hóseyn's
gain. In each case Browning's casuistry is not argumentative; it lies in
an appeal to some passion or some intuition that is above our common
levels of passion or of insight, and his power of uplifting his reader
for even a moment into this higher mood is his special gift as a poet.
We can return safely enough to the common ground, but we return with a
possession which instructs the heart.
A mood of acquiescence, which does not displace the moods of aspiration
and of combat but rather floats above them as an atmosphere, was growing
familiar to Browning in these his elder years. He had sought for truth,
and had now found all that earth was likely to yield him, of which not
the least important part was a conviction that much of our supposed
knowledge ends in a perception of our ignorance. He was now disposed to
accept what seemed to be the providential order that truth and error
should mingle in our earthly life, that truth should be served by
illusion; he would not rearrange the disposition of things if he could.
He was inclined to hold by the simple certainties of our present life
and to be content with these as provisional truths, or as temporary
illusions which lead on towards the truth. In the _Pisgah Sights_ of the
_Pacchiarotto_ volume he had imagined this mood of acquiescence as
belonging to the hour of death. But old age in reality is an earlier
stage in the process of dying, and with all his ardour and his energy,
Browning was being detached from the contentions and from some of the
hopes and aspirations of life. And because he was detached he could take
the world to his heart, though in a different temper from that of youth
or middle age; he could limit his view to things that are near, because
their claim upon his passions had diminished while their claim upon his
tenderness had increased. He could smile amiably, for to the mood of
acquiescence a smile seems to be worth more than an argument. He could
recall the thoughts of love, and reanimate them in his imagination, and
could love love with the devotion of an old man to the most precious of
the things that have been. Some of an old man's jests may be found in
_Jocoseria_, some of an old man's imaginative passion in _Asolando_, and
in both volumes, and still more clearly in _Ferishtah's Fancies_ may be
seen an old man's spirit of acquiescence, or to use a catch-word of
Matthew Arnold, the epoch of concentration which follows an epoch of
expansion. But the embrace of earth and the things of earth is like the
embrace, with a pathos in its ardour, which precedes a farewell. From
the first he had recognised the danger on the one hand of settling down
to browse contentedly in the paddock of our earthly life, and on the
other hand the danger of ignoring our limitations, the danger of
attempting to "thrust in earth eternity's concerns." In his earlier
years he had chiefly feared the first of these two dangers, and even
while pointing out, as in _Paracelsus_, the errors of the seeker for
absolute knowledge or for absolute love, he had felt a certain sympathy
with such glorious transgressors. He had valued more than any positive
acquisitions of knowledge those "grasps of guess, which pull the more
into the less." Now such guesses, such hopes were as precious to him as
ever, but he set more store than formerly by the
certainties--certainties even if illusions--of the general heart of man.
These are the forms of thought and feeling divinely imposed upon us; we
cannot do better than to accept them; but we must accept them only as
provisional, as part of our education on earth, as a needful rung of the
ladder by which we may climb to higher things. And the faith which leads
to such acquiescence also results in the acceptance of hopes as things
not be struggled for but rested in as a substantial portion of the
divine order of our lives. In autumn come for spirits rightly attuned
these pellucid halcyon days of the Indian summer.
In _Jocoseria_, which appeared in Browning's seventy-first year (1883),
he shows nothing of his boisterous humour, but smiles at our human
infirmities from the heights of experience. The prop of Israel, the
much-enlightened master, "Eximious Jochanan Ben Sabbathai," when his
last hour is at hand has to confess that all his wisdom of life lies in
his theoric; in practice he is still an infant; striving presumptuously
in boyhood to live an angel, now that he comes to die he is hardly a
man. And Solomon himself is no more than man; the truth-compelling ring
extorts the confession that an itch of vanity still tickles and teazes
him; the Queen of Sheba, seeker for wisdom and patroness of culture,
after all likes wisdom best when its exponents are young men tall and
proper, and prefers to the solution of the riddles of life by elderly
monarchs one small kiss from a fool. Lilith in a moment of terror
acknowledges that her dignified reserve was the cloak of passion, and
Eve acknowledges that her profession of love was transferred to the
wrong man; both ladies recover their self-possession and resume their
make-believe decorums, and Adam, like a gallant gentleman, will not see
through what is transparent. These are harmless jests at the ironies of
life. Browning's best gifts in this volume, that looks pale beside its
predecessors, are one or two short lyrics of love, which continue the
series of his latest lyrical poems, begun in the exquisite prologue to
_La Saisiaz_ and the graceful epilogue to _The Two Poets of Croisic_,
and continued in the songs of _Ferishtah's Fancies_ and _Asolando_--not
the least valuable part of the work of his elder years. His strength in
this volume of 1883 is put into that protest of human righteousness
against immoral conceptions of the Deity uttered by Ixion from his wheel
of torture. Rather than obey an immoral supreme Power, as John Stuart
Mill put it, "to Hell I will go"--and such is the cry of Browning's
victim of Zeus. He is aware that in his recognition of righteousness he
is himself superior to the evil god who afflicts him; and as this
righteousness is a moral quality, and no creation of his own
consciousness but rather imposed upon it as an eternal law, he rises
past Zeus to the Potency above him, after which even the undeveloped
sense of a Caliban blindly felt when he discovered a Quiet above the
bitter god Setebos; but the Quiet of Caliban is a negation of those evil
attributes of the supreme Being, which he reflects upwards from his own
gross heart, not the energy of righteousness which Ixion demands in his
transcendent "Potency." Into this poem went the energy of Browning's
heart and imagination; some of his matured wisdom entered into _Jochanan
Hakkadosh_, of which, however, the contents are insufficient to sustain
the length. The saint and sage of Israel has at the close of his life
found no solution of the riddle of existence. Lover, bard, soldier,
statist, he has obtained in each of his careers only doubts and
dissatisfaction. Twelve months added to a long life by the generosity of
his admirers, each of whom surrenders a fragment of his own life to
prolong that of the saint, bring him no clearer illumination--still all
is vanity and vexation of spirit. Only at the last, when by some
unexpected chance, a final opportunity of surveying the past and
anticipating the future is granted him, all has become clear. Instead of
trying to solve the riddle he accepts it. He sees from his Pisgah how
life, with all its confusions and contrarieties, is the school which
educates the soul and fits it for further wayfaring. The ultimate faith
of Jochanan the Saint had been already expressed by Browning:
Over the ball of it,
Peering and prying,
How I see all of it,
Life there, outlying!
Roughness and smoothness,
Shine and defilement,
Grace and uncouthness:
One reconcilement.
But even to his favourite disciple the sage is unable so to impart the
secret that Tsaddik's mind shall really embrace it.
The spirit of the saint of Israel is also the spirit of that wise
Dervish of Browning's invention (1884), the Persian Ferishtah. The
volume is frankly didactic, and Browning, as becomes a master who would
make his lessons easy to children, teaches by parables and pictures. In
reading _Ferishtah's Fancies_ we might suppose that we were in the
Interpreter's House, and that the Interpreter himself was pointing a
moral with the robin that has a spider in his mouth, or the hen walking
in a fourfold method towards her chickens. The discourses of the Dervish
are in the main theological or philosophical; the lyrics, which are
interposed between the discourses or discussions, are amatory. In
Persian Poetry much that at first sight might be taken for amatory has
in its inner meaning a mystical theological sense. Browning reverses the
order of such poetry; he gives us first his doctrine concerning life or
God, and gives it clothed in a parable; then in a lyric the subject is
retracted into the sphere of human affections, and the truth of theology
condenses itself into a corresponding truth respecting the love of man
and woman.
Throughout the series of poems it is not a Persian Dervish who is the
speaker and teacher; we hear the authentic voice of the Dervish born in
Camberwell in the year 1812--Ferishtah-Browning. The doctrine set forth
is the doctrine of Browning; the manner of speech is the manner of the
poet. The illustrations and imagery are often Oriental; the ideas are
those of a Western thinker; yet no sense of discordance is produced. The
parable of the starving ravens fed by an eagle serves happily as an
induction; let us become not waiters on providence, but workers with
providence; and to feed hungry souls is even more needful than to feed
hungry bodies:
I starve in soul:
So may mankind: and since men congregate
In towns, not woods--to Ispahan forthwith!
Such is the lesson of energetic charity. And the lesson for the
acceptance of providential gifts is that put in words by the poor
melon-seller, once the Shah's Prime Minister--words spoken in the spirit
of the afflicted Job--"Shall we receive good at the hand of God and
shall we not receive evil?"[143] Or rather--Shall not our hearts even in
the midst of evil be lifted up in gratitude at the remembrance of the
good which we have received? Browning proceeds, under a transparent veil
of Oriental fable, to consider the story of the life of Christ. Do we
believe in that tale of wonder in the full sense of the word belief?
The more it really concerns us, the more exacting grow our demands for
evidence of its truth; an otiose assent is easy, but this has none of
the potency of genuine conviction. And, after all, intellectual assent
is of little importance compared with that love for the Divine which may
co-exist as truly with denial as with assent. _The Family_ sets forth,
through a parable, the wisdom of accepting and living in our human views
of things transcendent. Why pray to God at all? Why not rather accept
His will and His Providential disposition of our lives as absolutely
wise, and right? That, Browning replies, may be the way of the angels.
We are men, and it is God's will that we should feel and think as men:
Be man and nothing more--
Man who, as man conceiving, hopes and fears,
And craves and deprecates, and loves and loathes,
And bids God help him, till death touch his eyes
And show God granted most, denying all.
The same spirit of acceptance of our intellectual and moral limitations
is applied in _The Sun_ to the defence of anthropomorphic religion. Our
spirit, burdened with the good gifts of life, looks upward for relief in
gratitude and praise; but we can praise and thank only One who is
righteous and loving, as we conceive righteousness and love. Let us not
strive to pass beyond these human feelings and conceptions. Perhaps they
are wholly remote from the unknown reality. They are none the less the
conceptions proper to humanity; we have no capacities with which to
correct them; let us hold fast by our human best, and preserve, as the
preacher very correctly expressed it, "the integrity of our
anthropomorphism." The "magnified non-natural man," and "the three Lord
Shaftesburys" of Matthew Arnold's irony are regarded with no fine scorn
by the intellect of Browning. His early Christian faith has expanded and
taken the non-historical form of a Humanitarian Theism, courageously
accepted, not as a complete account of the Unknowable, but as the best
provisional conception which we are competent to form. This theism
involves rather than displaces the truth shadowed forth in the life of
Christ. The crudest theism would seem to him far more reasonable than to
direct the religious emotions towards a "stream of tendency."
The presence of evil in a world created and governed by One all-wise,
all-powerful, all-loving, is justified in _Mirhab Shah_ as a necessity
of our education. How shall love be called forth unless there be the
possibility of self-sacrifice? How shall our human sympathy be perfected
unless there be pain? What room is there for thanks to God or love of
man if earth be the scene of such a blank monotony of well-being as may
be found in the star Rephan? But let us not call evil good, or think
pain in itself a gain. God may see that evil is null, and that pain is
gain; for us the human view, the human feeling must suffice. This
justification of pain as a needful part of an education is, however,
inapplicable to never-ending retributive punishment. Such a theological
horror Browning rejects with a hearty indignation, qualified only by a
humorous contempt, in his apologue of _A Camel-driver_; her driver, if
the camel bites, will with good cause thwack, and so instruct the brute
that mouths should munch not bite; he will not, six months afterwards,
thrust red-hot prongs into the soft of her flesh to hiss there. And God
has the advantage over the driver of seeing into the camel's brain and
of knowing precisely what moved the creature to offend. The poem which
follows is directed against asceticism. Self-sacrifice for the sake of
our fellows is indeed "joy beyond joy." As to the rest--the question is
not whether we fast or feast, but whether, fasting or feasting, we do
our day's work for the Master. If we would supply joy to our fellows, it
is needful that we should first know joy ourselves--
Therefore, desire joy and thank God for it!
Browning's argument is not profound, and could adroitly be turned
against himself; but his temperament would survive his argument; his
capacity for manifold pleasures was great, and he not only valued these
as good in themselves, but turned them to admirable uses. A feast of the
senses was to him as spiritually precious as a fast might be to one who
only by fasting could attain to higher joys than those of sense. And
this, he would maintain, is a better condition for a human being than
that which renders expedient the plucking out of an eye, the cutting off
of a hand. Joy for Browning means praise and gratitude; and in
recognising the occasions for such praise and thanks let us not wind
ourselves too high. Let us praise God for the little things that are so
considerately fitted to our little human wants and desires. The
morning-stars will sing together without our help; if we must choose our
moment for a _Te Deum_, let it be when we have enjoyed our plate of
cherries. The glorious lamp in the Shah's pavilion lightens other eyes
than mine; but to think that the Shah's goodness has provided slippers
for my feet in my own small chamber, and of the very colour that I most
affect! Nor, in returning thanks, should it cause us trouble that our
best thanks are poor, or even that they are mingled with an alloy of
earthly regards, "mere man's motives--"
Alas, Friend, what was free from this alloy,--
Some smatch thereof,--in best and purest love
Preferred thy earthly father? Dust thou art,
Dust shall be to the end.
Our little human pleasures--do they seem unworthy to meet the eye of
God? That is a question put by distrust and spiritual pride. God gives
each of us His little plot, within which each of us is master. The
question is not what compost, what manure, makes fruitful the soil; we
need not report to the Lord of the soil the history of our manures; let
us treat the ground as seems best, if only we bring sacks to His granary
in autumn. Nay, do not I also tickle the palate of my ass with a
thistle-bunch, so heartening him to do his work?
In _A Pillar at Sebzevah_, Ferishtah-Browning confronts the objection
that he has deposed knowledge and degraded humanity to the rank of an
ass whose highest attainment is to love--what? "Husked lupines, and
belike the feeder's self." The Dervish declares without shrinking the
faith that is in him:--
"Friend," quoth Ferishtah, "all I seem to know
Is--I know nothing save that love I can
Boundlessly, endlessly."
[Illustration]
If there be knowledge it shall vanish away; but charity never faileth.
As for knowledge, the prize is in the process; as gain we must
mistrust it, not as a road to gain:--
Knowledge means
Ever-renewed assurance by defeat
That victory is somehow still to reach,
But love is victory, the prize itself.
Grasping at the sun, a child captures an orange: what if he were to
scorn his capture and refuse to suck its juice? The curse of life is
this--that every supposed accession to knowledge, every novel theory, is
accepted as a complete solution of the whole problem, while every
pleasure is despised as transitory or insubstantial. In truth the drop
of water found in the desert sand is infinitely precious; the mirage is
only a mirage. Browning, who in this volume puts forth his own doctrine
of theism, his justification of prayer, his belief in a superintending
providence, his explanation of the presence of evil in the world, is, of
course, no Pyrrhonist. He profoundly distrusts the capacity of the
intellect, acting as a pure organ of speculation, to unriddle the
mysteries of existence; he maintains, on the other hand, that knowledge
sufficient for the conduct of our lives is involved in the simple
experiences of good and evil, of joy and sorrow. In reality Browning's
attitude towards truth approaches more nearly what has now begun to
style itself "Pragmatism" than it approaches Pyrrhonism; but
philosophers whose joy is to beat the air may find that it is
condemnatory of their methods.
In his distrust of metaphysical speculation and in regarding the
affections as superior to the intellect, Browning as a teacher has
something in common with Comte; but there is perhaps no creed so alien
to his nature as the creed of Positivism. The last of Ferishtah's
discourses is concerned with the proportion which happiness bears to
pain in the average life of man, or rather--for Browning is nothing if
he is not individualistic--in the life of each man as an individual. The
conclusion arrived at is that no "bean-stripe"--each bean, white or
black, standing for a day--is wholly black, and that the more extended
is our field of vision the more is the general aspect of the
"bean-stripe" of a colour intermediate between the extremes of darkness
and of light. Before the poem closes, Browning turns aside to consider
the Positivist position. Why give our thanks and praise for all the good
things of life to God, whose existence is an inference of the heart
derived from its own need of rendering gratitude to some Being like
ourselves? Are not these good things the gifts of the race, of Humanity,
and its worthies who have preceded us and who at the present moment
constitute our environment of loving help? Ferishtah's reply, which is
far from conclusive, must be regarded as no discussion of the subject
but the utterance of an isolated thought. Praise rendered to Humanity
and the heroes of the race simply reverts to the giver of the praise;
his own perceptions of what is praiseworthy alone render praise
possible; he must first of all thank and praise the giver of such
perceptions--God. It is strange that Browning should fail to recognise
the fact that the Positivist would immediately trace the power of moral
perception to the energies of Humanity in its upward progress from
primitive savagery to our present state of imperfect development.
It has been necessary to transcribe in a reduced form the teaching of
Ferishtah, for this is the clearest record left by Browning of his own
beliefs on the most important of all subjects, this is an essential part
of his criticism of life, and at the same time it is little less than a
passage of autobiography. The poems are admirable in their vigour, their
humour, their seriousness, their felicity of imagery. Yet the wisdom of
_Ferishtah's Fancies_ is an old man's wisdom; we perceive in it the
inner life, as Baxter puts it, in speaking of changes wrought by his
elder years, quitting the leaves and branches and drawing down to the
root. But when in prologue or epilogue to this volume or that Browning
touches upon the great happiness, the great sorrow of his own life, he
is always young. Here the lyrical epilogue is inspired by a noble
enthusiasm, and closes with a surprise of beauty. What if all his happy
faith in the purpose of life, and the Divine presence through all its
course, were but a reflex from the private and personal love that had
once been his and was still above and around him? Such a doubt contained
its own refutation:
Only, at heart's utmost joy and triumph, terror
Sudden turns the blood to ice: a chill wind disencharms
All the late enchantment! What if all be error--
If the halo irised round my head were, Love, thine arms?
All the more, if this were so, must the speaker's heart turn Godwards in
gratitude. The whole design of the volume with its theological parables
and its beautiful lyrics of human love implies that there is a
correspondency between the truths of religion and the truths of the
passion of love between man and woman.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 141: Mr Gosse: "Dictionary of National Biography," Supplement,
i. 317.]
[Footnote 142: Of the mother in this poem, a writer in the "Browning
Society's Papers," Miss E.D. West, said justly: "There is discernible in
her no soul which could be cleansed from guilt by any purgatorial
process.... Her fault had not been moral, had not been sin, to be
punished by pain inflicted on the soul; it was merely the uncounteracted
primary instinct of self-preservation, and as such it is fitliest dealt
with by the simple depriving her, without further penalty, of the very
life which she had secured for herself at so horrible a cost."]
[Footnote 143: The story of the melon-seller was related by a
correspondent of _The Times_ in 1846, and is told by Browning in a
letter to Miss Barrett of Aug. 6 of that year. Thus subjects of verse
rose up in his memory after many years.]