PR 
 
 i|231 
 
 W5 
 
 'RIMER 
 
 ON 
 
 OWNING 
 
 rr" WILSON
 
 LIBRARY 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF 
 CALIFCmNIA 
 
 SAN DIEGO 
 
 J
 
 A,.. 
 Iv5
 
 A PRIMER 
 
 ON 
 
 B Pi W N I N a 
 
 BY 
 
 F. MARY ^yILSOX 
 
 ILontiou 
 MACMJLLAX AXD CO. 
 
 A N I) N K W V (J K K 
 
 1891 
 
 All righU rtserrtd
 
 C N T E N T S. 
 
 CHAPTER T. 
 
 BROWNING S LITERARY LIFE. 
 
 1. 
 
 ' Lives of the Poets ' . 
 
 TAOE 
 . 1 
 
 2. 
 
 Rrowiiing's Reticence and Openness 
 
 . 2 
 
 3. 
 
 Parentage .... 
 
 . 3 
 
 4. 
 
 Cliildhooil and Education 
 
 . 5 
 
 5. 
 
 Earlier ilanliood 
 
 6 
 
 6. 
 
 Marriage and Middle Life 
 
 9 
 
 7. 
 
 Later Life .... 
 
 . 10 
 
 rTT.XPTER TT. 
 
 UROWNINOS CHAUACTEHlSTICi?. 
 
 1. Universality 
 
 2. Courage 
 
 3. Philosophy and llcHgiou 
 
 15 
 If. 
 17
 
 VI 
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 4. Subjects 
 
 5. The Art of Browning . 
 
 6. Browning as a Writer of Plays 
 
 7. Defects and Difficulties 
 
 PAGE 
 
 23 
 36 
 
 41 
 43 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 INTRODTJCTIONS TO THE POEMS 
 
 Pauline . 
 
 Paracelsus 
 
 Strafford 
 
 Sordello . 
 
 Pippa Passes 
 
 King Victor and King Charles 
 
 Dramatic Lyrics . 
 
 The Return of tlie Druses 
 
 A Blot in the 'Scutcheon 
 
 Colombe's Birthday 
 
 Dramatic Romances and Lyrics 
 
 Luria 
 
 A Soul's Tragedy 
 
 Christmas-Eve and E&,ster-Day 
 
 Men and Women 
 
 Dramatis Personse 
 
 The Rino; and the Book 
 
 49 
 
 53 
 
 61 
 
 64 
 
 75 
 
 78 
 
 81 
 
 83 
 
 86 
 
 88 
 
 92 
 
 97 
 
 101 
 
 103 
 
 lOS 
 
 124 
 
 131
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 VI 1 
 
 PAciK 
 
 Biilaustion's Ailvcuture ..... l(il 
 
 Prince Hoheiistiel-Schwaiij,';iu . .166 
 
 Fifine at the Fail- . . 170 
 
 Red Cotton Night-Cap Coimtrj- . .177 
 
 Aristophanes' Aiiolopy . . .182 
 
 The Inn Album . .188 
 
 Pacchiarotto and how lie Worked in Distemper: willi 
 
 other Poems . . . . .196 
 
 The Agamemnon of .ffischylus .... 202 
 
 La Saisiaz : The Two Poets of Croisic . .207 
 
 Dramatic Idyls . . .211 
 
 Jocoscria . . . . 220 
 
 Ferishtah's Fancies ..... 226 
 
 Parleyings with Certain People .... 233 
 
 Asolando . . . . .239 
 
 Inde.\ ....... 246 
 
 N.B.-Thc references to the Poems, by page, are to Tfic 
 Poetical U'urks of Jlohrrl Bnnrnmij, Smith, Elder, 1888, in 
 sixteen volumes ; and to Asolando, Smith, Elder, 1890.
 
 A rrJMER ON BEOAYNING. 
 
 CHAPTET^ T. 
 
 browning's literary LIFH. 
 
 1. 'Lives of the Poets.'— A gi-eat writer's life is 
 
 to be fuuiul in his works rather than in his biography. 
 The essential life of Wordsworth, George Eliot, and 
 Carlyle is absorbed in their writings, and any other 
 record of their years is comparatively fruitless lore. 
 Out of the raw material of their sensations and 
 perceptions they weave a finished product, with 
 which alone we need greatly concern ourselves. The 
 necessity to specialise and sulxlivide various depart- 
 ments of human laljour increases with each century, 
 and men who are at once fanujus as warriors, courtiers, 
 statesmen, and pcjets scarcely exist in our times. 
 Kven a master spirit now has to exert himself to the 
 utmost before he can make a step in advance of all 
 tliat has already been created or di-scovered in one 
 field alone.' Accordingly the observers and tran- 
 scribers of bfe tend more and nioro to become a 
 
 ' WorkH, XII. 89. lied CuUun Xi<jht-Cap Vounlry. 
 & B
 
 2 BROWNING. chap. 
 
 separate class, so that the lives of the literary men 
 of this age are, to speak broadly, private and 
 uneventful. 
 
 2. Browning's Reticence and Openness.— 
 Having allowed all this, it is still natural that we 
 should wish to know something of what were the 
 makings of a great poet as we read him in his Avorks, 
 and in what circumstances the works were written. 
 Some outline of such facts is precious, for often what 
 specially hallows our poets to us is a silent happiness 
 or fortitude of living which no reader's spirit-sense 
 could unaided find between the lines. The more 
 dramatic a Avriter is, the less easy it is to construct his 
 personality out of his writings, and no writer ever 
 had a more dramatic spirit running through his poems 
 than BroAvning. If Ave read Childe Harold or Elia 
 we lay them doAvn Avith some-idea of what manner of 
 men were Byron and Lamb, but it is Browning's ideaP 
 and his individual claim,^ that through the poet's 
 ' AAdndoAV ' all men may look, but no foot be allowed 
 across his 'threshold.' Moreover, Browning's poetical 
 Avorks fill at least seventeen volumes, and are, as has 
 been said, not books but a literature. Yet no one 
 Avho studies these seventeen volumes fails to find the 
 presentation of a personality subdominant throughout, 
 a personality more explicit, it may be, in one place 
 than another, and only speaking with direct utterance 
 in some later poems entirely, and elseAvhere in 
 
 ' XIII. 40, 41. Aristophanes' Apology. 
 2 XIV. 39. House.
 
 I LITERARY IJFE. 3 
 
 scattered passages, luit always the same Browning, 
 self-expressed, even when most dramatic, in his 
 selection of characters and their action, one whose 
 moral tests and spiiitual hopes, hatreds, loves, and 
 scorns are (even in his own despite, if that be so) 
 ours to know. Most minds possess marked opposites 
 of their strongest characteristics, and so Browning's 
 professed austerity of attitude ^ towards his readers 
 is at most the reaction from that great instinct of 
 seif-reveiiling which he shares ^\^th every other poet. 
 3. Parentage. — Robert Browning was born May 
 7th, 1812. His father, also Kobert, for nearly fifty 
 yciirs a clerk in the Bank of England, was the son 
 of another Kubert Browning, who held an important 
 jxjst in the same place for over the half century. 
 The Brownings had been Dorsetshire people, but 
 London and the "West of England did not supply the 
 only pre-natal streams that flowed into the blood of 
 the poet. It is extremely interesting to know, as any 
 observer of his sympathies and insights would reason- 
 ably expect, that he came of mixed nationalities. 
 His gi~andmother on the paternal side was a Creole, 
 owning a sugar plantation at St. Kitt's, where his 
 father spent some time wlien a youth. His mother, 
 Siiriarnia Wiedemann, born at her parents' home in 
 Dundee, was the daughter of a mother who was pure 
 Scotfl and a father of German extraction. There is 
 no proof, though the question has been mooted, that 
 
 » XIV. 31. AlUie "MennauL" XV. IGI. Ki.iloKur I., /tntmatic 
 Idyll. \\\. 89, Lyric to A Bean- Stripe, Frrishtalis Fancies,
 
 4 BROWNING. chap. 
 
 this grandfather on the spindle side had any Jewish 
 traces. 
 
 Thus there were in Browning mingled threads of 
 nationality, worked upon a web of English middle 
 class. In Browning's heredity were germinated his 
 vast intellectual and emotional range and his sus- 
 ceptibility to race differences, but the genius which 
 modulated these varying strains into undreamed-of 
 harmony was his own. As we shall see, intelligence 
 and cultivation were preparing in the Browning 
 family before 1812^ but though something of the 
 perfected intelligence we call genius may be prepared 
 by progenitors, much more seems directly inspired 
 by the breath of a wind which bloweth where it 
 listeth.'^ 
 
 Browning's grandfather was an expert man of 
 business. His father was a genial, popular man, 
 versatile and accomplished. Besides his clever cari- 
 catures of faces, well known in the Bank of England, 
 he was learned in art history. He could improvise 
 and illustrate stories in rhyme for the children. 
 He "was a scholar and knew Greek," ^ and used to 
 rock his little boy in his arms to the sound of Anacreon. 
 In English poetry he adhered to Pope's secure couplets, 
 in contradistinction to his wife, who liked more 
 innovating fashions of verse. Both parents were 
 Congregationalists. One of the poet's uncles, William 
 Shergold Browning, wrote a highly regarded History 
 
 ' See, on this subject, XI. 202, 203. 
 ^ Asolando. 123. Development.
 
 I LITERARY LIFE. 6 
 
 of the Hutpienots. An interesting note on Browning's 
 father is his ingenuity in the dovetailing of detective 
 eWdence, and his intimacy with mediaeval legends, 
 "he seemed to have known Paracelsus and even 
 Talmudic personages personally," a noteworthy 
 environment for the future author of The Ring and 
 the Book, Pktro of Abano, Paracelsus, and Jochanan 
 Hakkadosh. Doubtless Browning's inherited vigour 
 and buoyancy of constitution helped to preserve his 
 cheerful trust in unprovable spiritualities from the 
 falterings and backslidings of other men. What of 
 the poet's mother? She was a religious woman 
 who loved music, and whom her son loved with 
 never-fitrgctting emotion. 
 
 4. Childhood and Education.— Browning was 
 born in Suuihaniptun Street, rcckham. That suburb 
 and its neighbours, Camberwell and Heme Hill, 
 were less absorbed then than now into the circle 
 of fog and soot, and we may think of Browning's 
 childhood as spent among 'old trees,' 'climbing 
 plant.s,' and ' morning swallows.' ^ His imagination 
 was deeply impressed by distant London, murmur- 
 ous, lighting the sky by night, and imaging that 
 ' need of a world of men ' ^ so paramount in the 
 after years. We hear of Avison's March, to the air 
 of which the little boy wcnild step,^ of an Italian 
 etigmving of Andromeda,^ oi the tale of Troy as 
 
 ' I. 8. I'aiiline. 
 
 ' VI. 46. I'artinij at Afurning. 
 
 " XVI. 'I'Si. I'urlryin'jH. With ''harks AvUutu 
 
 * I. 29. I'auline.
 
 6 BROWNING. chap. 
 
 suggested by the outlines of the coals in the grate. 
 Such trifles fed his fancy - hunger. Some of the 
 poems of Browning's maturity drew their magic 
 suggestion from isolated memories of childhood, 
 and a habit of seeing human contours in coals and 
 clouds may have originated such a memorable tableau 
 of the sunset's Persian encounter as we find in Gerard 
 de Lairesse in Parleyiiujs. 
 
 Till he was fourteen, Browning was taught at 
 private schools near home. Then he studied for a 
 time with a tutor, who used to come to his father's 
 house. When, in 1829, University College, London, 
 was opened, Browning attended a few lectures there. 
 The bald enumeration of such chartered means of 
 education seems in Browning's case peculiarly vain. 
 Browning's are the works of a great reader, a winner 
 of universal knowledge, and he early began to 
 assimilate his proper food. His brief inthralment 
 to Byron, of which boyish verses were the natural 
 acknoAvledgment, was annulled, in 1826, by a 
 wondrous boon, for then Browning became possessed 
 of the poems of Shelley and Keats. It was a memor- 
 able day to the coming poet when the inspiring 
 beauty of those earlier twain was revealed to him. 
 
 5. Earlier Manhood. — His son and daughter 
 having the pro&pect of fair means, there was wisely 
 no thought with Browning's father of tying Robert 
 down to uncongenial occupation to make money 
 withal. Browning was left free to follow his own 
 bent, i.e. to make poetry his profession.
 
 I LITERARY LIFE. 7 
 
 III 1832, Browning wrote Pauline, and in 1833 
 it was pul dished. Soon after this, the poet went 
 abroad for nearly a year. Travel was a valualilc 
 element in the shaping of Browning. He went to 
 Knssia, and Italy, first visited in 1838, was, in his 
 own phrase, his 'University.' He delved into the 
 history, famous and out-of-the-way, of the places he 
 stiiyed in,^ and became familiar with the people. In 
 the Italian journey of 1838, he made his first acquaint- 
 ance with his perennial loves, Asolo" and Venice.^ 
 
 In 1835, Paracflsit3, Browning's first acknowledged 
 work, was published, and about the same time several 
 brilliant and spirited short poems came out in the 
 Mmitlih/ Heposihiri/, which was edited by Browning's 
 firm friend, Mr. W. Johnson Fox. Among these were 
 the two, Juluuines Agrimht and ]'i»j)hi/ria (called later 
 Porphyrias Lover), which, in 1842, were combined 
 under the title of Madhouse Cells. ]\Iany of Brown- 
 ing's earlier friendships, with the gi-eat men wlio 
 })elonged U) the generation that was old Avhen he him- 
 self was young, date from the appearance of Paracelsus. 
 
 At Macrcady's instance. Browning wrote a tragedy, 
 and Straffonl was produced at Covcnt Garden Theatre, 
 May 1st, 1837. The drama, like nuich of Pararel.'ius, 
 had been partly conceived during those midnight 
 walks, dear to the imaginatif)n of Browning, in a 
 wo<k1 near Dulwich. The i)lay was not unsuccessful, 
 but it W518 more than the most successful play could 
 
 ' I. 'J85, 'ibtf. SorJello. '^ I. Iii9. Sjrddlo. 
 
 * I. 161. Sm-dello.
 
 8 BROWNING. chap. 
 
 do to prop the tottering fortunes of Covent Garden 
 Theatre. After five nights the financial storm broke, 
 and Strafford bent to it. As Browning's boyish 
 writings had been considered too easily melodious 
 and transparent, so Paracelsus was condemned by 
 Sterling and Caroline Fox for being verbose. Brown- 
 ing laid the unexpected word to heart, and Sonlello 
 (1840) witnesses to its bitter fruit, for the music of 
 Pauline and Paracelsus is silenced, and in one word 
 he essays the work of five. Strafford is concise too, 
 not with the curtailed compressions of Sordello, but 
 only in keeping with the stern conciseness of its 
 chronicle and characters. Sordello was attacked and 
 ridiculed on all sides, and from this time forth Brown- 
 ing followed his own course and took no more lessons 
 from his critics.^ He had to work and wait for two 
 more decades before any full measure of jDublic re- 
 cognition became his. As we can well imagine, 
 such neglect was disadvantageous to his art and 
 bitter and hard to bear. In the years following 
 on Strafford, Browning Avrote a number of poetical 
 dramas. Two of these, A Blot in the 'Scutcheon and 
 Colombe's Birthday, were performed in by the chief 
 actors of the time — Macready, Miss Helena Faucit, 
 and Phelps. The plays, together with many short 
 poems, included in later editions under the headings 
 of Dramatic Lyrics, Dramatic Romances, and Men and 
 Women, came out, between 1841 and 1846, in eight 
 
 1 XIII. 70, 71. Aristophanes Apology; XVI. 257. The Two Poels 
 of Croisic ; aud XV. 260. Pambo,
 
 I LITKRARV LIFE. 9 
 
 numbers, bearing the general name of Bells and 
 Ponifgranate^. This name, borrowed from the decora- 
 tion round the higli-priest's robe, was thus explained 
 b}' Browning,^ " I meant l)v the title to indicate an 
 endeiivour towards something like an alternation, or 
 mixture of music with discoursing, sound with sense, 
 poetry with thought, which looks too ambitions thus 
 expressed, so the symbol was preferred." Browning's 
 taste was ever towards such symbols, imaginatively 
 bcjiutiful in themselves, nor was it always his first care 
 to point out how they should be read. Fii'st in the 
 series of Bells and Pomegranates was that wonderful 
 prove rhe, Pippa Passes (1841). 
 
 6. Marriage and Middle Life. — The forties 
 form a great epoch in tlie .story of Kobert Browning, 
 not only for the marvellous poems he was then 
 writing, but for the commencement of a perfect inward 
 poem, his marriage with Elizabeth Barrett, which 
 took place September 12th, 1846. A week later, the 
 two poets left England, and Mrs. Browning's health for 
 ever forl»ade her return on any but flitting visits. The 
 first winter was .sj)ent in Pisa, the summer in Ancona 
 and its neighbourhood. Before the ii^xt winter Mr. 
 and Mrs. Browning had Uiken up their residence in 
 Florence. Except the house of the Alighieri, there is 
 no sp<jt in Fl<jrence so siicred for jwetry's sake as Casa 
 Ciuidi. Here, on March 9th, 1849, a child, Robert Wiedc- 
 niaini liarrett Browning, wjus born. The Brcjwnings 
 spent two or three of their winters in Home, and one in 
 > (No. VIII.) Preface to A iknU't Tragedy.
 
 10 BROWNING. CHAP. 
 
 Paris with Mr. Browning's father and sister, who were 
 living there. Florence gave Browning the prompting 
 idea of his famous Art poems, such as Amlrea del 
 Sarto. The time was rich in poetic plans formed and 
 carried out. Mrs. Browning wrote Casa Guidi 
 JFindows, Aurora Leigh, and other famous poems, and 
 the publication of the fifty — and One — AIe7i ami 
 JFomen, in 1855, marks a new era in the widening 
 renown of Browning. In 1861, the golden union 
 underwent the sorrow that comes to all unions, for, 
 on June 29th, the fragile life of Mrs. Browning passed 
 beyond mortal ken. A few months after, Browning 
 wrote Prospke, that grand testimony to the faith 
 that looks through death. Three years after, the 
 poem was published in Dramatis Personce. In 1868-69 
 Browning's giant work. The Iling and the Book, was 
 given to the world. At the beginning of it, Browning 
 tells how, in 1865, he accidentally picked up, at a 
 book-stall in Florence, the square, yellow book, the 
 record of the Francescbini trial, that was the germ 
 of his wonderful production. 
 
 7. Later Life. — Bereft of his Wifc,Browningceased 
 to consider Italy his home, and with his boy he came 
 to live in London, at 19. Warwick Crescent, like the 
 Valladolid poet's, a 'stuccoed third house by the 
 bridge.'^ After the death of their father, in 1866, 
 his sister. Miss Browning, came to live with him, and 
 continued to do so till he died. From 1868 forward, 
 few were the years unmarked by a book by Brown- 
 
 1 IV. 179. Ilnw it Strikes a Contemporary.
 
 I LITEKAKV LIFK. 11 
 
 ing. In 1887, Browning left Pjiddington for 29. De 
 Vere Ciarilens. He went abroad every year, and Bed 
 Cotton Xight-Cap Count n/, hi Saisiaz, and A sol a mi o record 
 such visits. Browning spent his autumns in Venice. 
 In Tlie Flight of the Dudusn, Browning wrote : 
 
 " What a thing friendship is, world without end ! " ^ 
 
 and no man has lived his life through more encora- 
 piissed with friends. The only ones of whom it 
 behoves here to speak are those to whom Browning 
 refei-s in his works. We remember how Meres spoke 
 of Shakspere's ^sugred sonnets among his private 
 friend.s,' and the same epithet applies to Browning's 
 dediciitions. Among the loved and loving friends in 
 Browning's poems, we early find the names of John 
 Foreter and M. Milsiind of Dijon,'- the French critic, 
 and Browning's enthusiiistic admirer. Walter Savage 
 Landor is referred to in Sordello,'^ and Lurui is dedi- 
 catetl to him. Browning's goodness to Landor, when 
 the older jx^et stood in urgent need of a friend's help, 
 is one of the many lovable traits of his character. 
 ' My English Eyeljright ' of the third Book of 
 ,Svrdello* is Miss Euphrasia Haworth, an early friend. 
 Paracelsus is inscribed to aM(jther, Count de Ripert- 
 Munclar, and Strafford to William Macready, for 
 whose little boy, Willy, Browning wrote tlie I'ied 
 Piper, not thinking at the time of including it among 
 
 > V. 150. 
 
 ' It waj» the 1863 rejifiut of Surddlo thut was tltdicutcd lo .M. 
 Militand. 
 
 * I. 169-170. * I. 170.
 
 12 BROAVNING. chap. 
 
 his 'works.' In three epigrammatic lines, Browning 
 dedicated Pippa Passes to Mr. Sergeant Talfoxird, and 
 the literaiy name of Procter is affectionately written 
 at the beginning of Colomhe^s Birthday. To John 
 Kenyon, Miss Barrett's cousin, who introduced the 
 poet and poetess to each other, and possessed social 
 and intellectual eminence as well as wealth and gener- 
 osity, Browning dedicated Dramatic Lyrics (1842). The 
 original of ' Waring ' was Mr. Domett, a lyrical writer, 
 sometime a minister of state in New Zealand, and 
 the ' Alfred ' to whom The Guardian-Angel is addressed. 
 Belonging to Browning's later period {i.e. taking The 
 Ring and the Book, 1868-69), as in some sort a bound- 
 ary between the first and second halves of Browning's 
 literary life) is the charming inscription of Balau- 
 stion's Adventure to Lady Cowper, who had inspired 
 its production. Browning dedicated his selection 
 from his poetry (1872) to Tennyson, to whom, in the 
 preface to an earlier nosegay (1865), he had done 
 graceful homage. Red Cotton Night - Cap Country, 
 besides being formally 'to Miss Thackeray,' is full 
 of sweet and informal reference to her and to 
 honoured Milsand. In the prose 'chat,' that goes 
 with the Agamemnon, Browning quotes from one 
 'eloquent friend,' Matthew Arnold, and refers his 
 own work to another, 'dear and noble,' Carlyle. The 
 subject of Browning's 'In Afemoriam,' La Saisiaz,is Miss 
 Anne Egerton Smith. Parleyings is sacred to the 
 memory of the highly valued Joseph Milsand. With 
 Asolando goes a letter to Mrs. Bronson, Browning's
 
 1 LITERARY LIFE. 13 
 
 American friend and hostess at Venice and Asolo. 
 'My Kirkup,' who appairs in a parenthesis on the 
 first iKige of racchiarutto, w;vs a Florentine acquaint- 
 ance, the discoverer of Giotto's portrait of Dante in 
 the Rirgello. John Kelfe, apostropliiscd in Charles 
 Avi^un, had been one of Browning's music-mastei-s in 
 boyhood. 
 
 In 1872, Browning's popularity was proved and 
 furthered by the issue of two volumes in the 
 Tauchnitz edition of poems selected from his works. 
 Browning was made Honorary Fellow of Balliol in 
 1868, and honorary degrees have been given him by 
 Oxford, Cambridge, and Edin])urgh. Browning took 
 great pride in his artist son, and that son's marriage 
 to an Americjin lady, Miss Fanny Coddington, meant 
 yet another affectionate bond to the old man. Brown- 
 ing, by character and career, stands among the sane 
 and well-ordered representatives of a high civilisa- 
 tion, which allows of 'placid lives, leisurely works.' ^ 
 It wa.s a part of his transcendentalism to insist that 
 the soul, insteiid of aging like the body, gi-ows and 
 gain.s,^ and certainly he lived out his own belief. The 
 la.st works of ' K;ibl>i ' Browning are mellow, and 
 have none of the spleen of ad\anced years. Brown- 
 ing had not learnt from his Greeks their cruel 
 worship of youth and abhorrence of age.^ In the 
 passage * in Aristupliancs' Ajjolotjy in which Aristo- 
 
 'XIV. 2.'19. The T\cn I'l^h of Croisic. 
 
 • XI. 2-1 .1. Fiji'"' 'it If"" '''"'■• 
 
 » XI 11. 272. Agamemnon. ' Mil 10, 11.
 
 14 BROWNING. CHAP. 
 
 phanes depicts a poet in and out of the world, there 
 seems a likeness to the poet who was so fond of, and 
 yet so independent of society, able to dispense him- 
 self prodigally because conscious of the colossal 
 strength which he had only to shut his study door 
 upon the silken company to renew. Browning's per- 
 sonal appearance was expressive to those who could 
 see deep enough. His eyes wonderfully combined 
 searching scrutiny with the meditative far-off regard. 
 Landor, long ago describing Browning's exterior per- 
 sonality, spoke of the spruce, hale man, with 'active 
 step,' ' inquiring eye,' and ' tongue so varied in 
 discoiu-se.' 
 
 In the autumn of 1889, after spending some time 
 at Asolo, Browning moved on to Venice, to the 
 Rezzonico Palace, the property of his. daughter and 
 son. There, late in November, he was attacked by 
 bronchitis, aggravated by asthma, and rendered 
 serious by weak action of the heart. On December 
 12th, after a short illness, he died at the age of 
 seventy-seven. 
 
 It was thought that what was mortal of the poet 
 would lie by his wife in the Florentine cemetery, but 
 this was not to be. England claimed her poet for 
 Westminster Abbey. On December 31st, 1889, the 
 body of Browning was interred in Poets' Corner, 
 amid a great throng of witnesses, representative of 
 England's best.
 
 II CHARACTERISTICS. 15 
 
 CIlAl'TEK II. 
 
 bkonyning's charactkkistics. 
 
 1. Universality. — No criticism on Browning has 
 surpjissed those lines written by his wife, then Miss 
 liirrett, wherein she indivitlualised him by his 'veined 
 humanity," and added that his works, 'pomegranates' 
 indeetl, need cutting deep to come at the red heart 
 within. The greatest passion and the utmost power 
 of Browning are spent in depicting men and women. 
 His poems are full of incidents ; he ransacks history 
 and the world for curious and effective stories ; but 
 to Browning, unlike Scott or Homer, incident alone 
 is meaningless, valuable only as an opportunity for 
 revftiling character. Browning is most at home 
 with complexity, outward and inward. The more 
 exceptional the incident, the more exceptional and 
 interesting the character, according to him. That 
 is why his works are so full, and ever increasingly 
 so, of the out-of-the-way, occasionally the repellent. 
 With every poet matter and manner are wedded, 
 and with none more indissolubly than with Browning. 
 Every thing in Browning, his ideas, especially those 
 which at first seem contradictory, his beliefs, his 
 selection of subjects, his defects and untowardnesses 
 prove on close inspection to be ])arts of th(.' most 
 immutable, welde<l whole. His continuous unity of 
 thought ami purpose is extraordinary.
 
 16 BROWNING. chap. 
 
 Browning's penetrative sympathy delights to 
 enter all the various forms of life, to try to look 
 through each man's eyes, and describe in his character 
 how his outside world is affecting the individual 
 within. In Browning's harvesting all ranks afford 
 an equally rich yield of humanity. He shows the 
 husk, only to remove it and present us with the 
 soul. He is as interested in psychologising a Paris 
 jeweller as a queen. The soul in each is his great 
 object of study, the soul testing itself on circum- 
 stances,^ strong if it aims, grows, fights on,^ despic- 
 able if it shirks conflict.^ 
 
 2. Courage. — In nothing is Browning more 
 remarkable than in the second light he will throw 
 on actions and motives, and in his new treatment 
 of old episodes. After every one else tas comfortably 
 acquiesced, in some ' obvious ' verdict and fancied 
 that further appeal is over, hoAV poor and crude 
 that verdict appears under the illumination of this 
 mind, late in time, but fresh as the primal morn- 
 ing ! Take, for instance, in The Ring and the Booh, 
 the unconventional summing-up of the Pope on 
 Gruido, with that sublime illustrative storm,^ 
 only excelled by the matchless tempest in Pippa 
 Passes.^ The same electric light flashes out in Ivb,n 
 Ivanovikh, in the old priest's judgment, swift and 
 
 * VII. Rahhi hen Ezra. Et passim. 
 
 ^ IV. 266. Bishop Blougram's Apology. 
 
 ^ V. The Statue and the Bust. 
 
 * X. 147, 148. The Rinfj and the Book. The Pope. 
 
 ^ III. 23. Pippa Passes. Morning.
 
 II L1IAUACTERISTIC8. 17 
 
 overturning as one of Christ's.^ Similar originality 
 and fearlessness come out in llic Glare and Vl'ur. 
 Then what an unusual view of death there is in 
 Prospice ! Browning ever sides with the fighter, 
 Ciiger ' to grapple danger where1)y souls grow 
 strong,'" as in his view of temptation, which he would 
 wish to have dragged up by its haii- in order to do 
 battle with it.^ The second light he throws on 
 character appears in his reasoning too, as in the 
 opulent re-inforcement in Two Camels^ to the 
 argument against asceticism. A curious extra 
 argument, entirely Browning's own, is to be found 
 in Fijine at the Fair, XI. c.x.wiii. Another instance 
 occurs in Fust's dilemma of conscience in the 
 Epilogue to Farleifini/s.'' There is not one line of 
 fluff or claptrap in Browning. 
 
 3. Philosophy and Religion.— Browning is not 
 solely a i><jetic artist, he is besides that a ' thinker,' 
 with so persistent an answer to the ultimate question 
 of life that few of his poems can l^e appraised without 
 reference to it. He would have thought his work 
 of little worth if it only served to mirror the chance 
 and scattered experience of many men, or give 
 artistic satisfaction by its mere perfection of utter- 
 ance. If he ditl not originate the broadest expression 
 of nineteenth century belief, at least he tiaiisinutes 
 it, so that through his poetry it re-enters many a soul 
 
 ' XV. [,0-r,i. /ivlrt Inhifrvitch. 
 
 ■ X. no. r/./- j'i'jx', liiiL- i;j02. 
 
 ' X. 111. T/u: i'ujjf, lim-s 1 IK,--..! 19L'. 
 ♦ XVI. VJ, .'/J. " XVI. -JC-J, -i;.] 271. 
 
 {■
 
 18 BROWNING. chap. 
 
 with healing in its wings. To many people his 
 works are a latter evangel of reasonable Christianity. 
 Browning restates, in language proper to our day, 
 the need, the fitness, one might say the inevitahle- 
 ness of two correlative beings, the soul and God. 
 While he acknowledges that these two existences 
 are unprovable, being beyond the region of scientific 
 experiment, he, for his own part, takes them as self- 
 evident and the 'knowledge' of them as intuitive. 
 Like Wordsworth, he looks within, not without, 
 for the sources of knowledge.^ Knowledge from 
 within he deems absolute truth and, at the same 
 time, transcendent mystery. The existence of the 
 soul is the root of Browning's philosophy, the one 
 thing in it which is taken for granted. The soul 
 being allowed as the subject — that which perceives, 
 that which is perceived — God, follows as a matter 
 of course, the object complementary to the subject. 
 Browning has a fine passage in Red Cotton Night-Cap 
 Country in which he definitely confronts the insidious 
 idea of soul and body being one and the same, 
 'the new Beligio Medici' as he calls it,^ and there 
 he explains his own concept of body, as ministrant 
 and servant to soul, not including soul in itself. 
 To recapitulate : — the soul represents to Browning 
 the fundamental fact of life, it is the basis of his 
 philosophy, and the only part of it which tran- 
 scends logical proof. In every further step Browning 
 
 ^ XV. 243. Jochanan Hakkadosh. 
 ^ XII. 113. Bed Cotton Night-Caj) Country.
 
 II 
 
 CHAILVCTERISTICS. 19 
 
 addresses liini.-^olf to the intellect and submits his 
 arguments to its severest tests. AVhilc his process 
 is intellectual, it is far from being colourless. A 
 philosopher, dealing ^vith abstract ideas, appeals 
 solely to intellect, so does a historian, discussing 
 the value of documentary e\'idence, but Browning is 
 above every thing a poet, and a poet ascribing the 
 deepest thrill of his inspiration to a religion which 
 represents the vitidising and personal element in 
 philosophy and history. Both the man and the theme 
 are in touch with the heart and the emotions. 
 Herein lies the value to religion of a great poet 
 when enlisted in its service, he above all men having 
 the faculty for raising the key of the appeal so that 
 it enters the soul by the double gateway of intellect 
 and feelings. There is something very sustaining to 
 weaker faith in the unfaltering vigour of Browning's. 
 One of the greatest intellects of the age encounters 
 materialistic thought with a constant determination 
 to 'hope hard in the subtle thing that's spirit.'^ 
 In the very uncertainty of the unseen. Browning 
 finds the foremost evidence of its truth. Life is 
 probation, the race -ground of the soul, and soids 
 develop only when will and faith have perfectly 
 free play.'^ He never tires of sttiting and exemplifying 
 this cardimil idea, he looks at it from every side, 
 and never finds it fail. In Fvnrs and Sa-uples wo 
 have one of his strangest illustrations of the spiritual 
 
 * XIV. 4. Prologue to PacrJiiarotta. 
 '•' IV. 101, 192. An K]jUlc.
 
 20 BROWNING. chap. 
 
 uses of uncertainty. The existence of evil offers 
 development to man's moral energy, just as the 
 noblest possibility of human love is provided for by 
 the existence of pain and weakness.^ Our failures 
 are an evidence of our ultimate triumph, and life's 
 shortness and imperfection imply immortality. 
 Browning is Wagner in literature ; for both, discords 
 exist to be quenched in concord." 
 
 Given God's power and knowledge. His love is as 
 inevitable as the third angle of the triangle. Man's 
 sublimest love being the strength of weakness, Brown- 
 ing sees nothing for it but that God's love should be 
 similar in manifestation. This is the point at which 
 he is touched by the appeal of Christ.^ God's love 
 once proved a necessity, no way lies open by which 
 it can meet man half-way but by clothing its strength 
 in weakness like man's own. How can man bridge 
 the gulf between his own need and the claim Christ 
 made 1 Shall he ' reject Christ through very need of 
 Him ' 1 * No, for Christianity is the only hypothesis 
 by which Browning, and those who have been able to 
 follow him thus far, can ' solve all questions in the 
 earth and out of it,'^ even while taking every oppos- 
 ing difficulty into consideration. 
 
 To Browning all secondary dogma is subject to 
 the relativity of truth. Man's knowledge and condi- 
 
 ^ VI. 117. Saul, and XIV. La Sakiaz. 
 
 2 VII. 108. Aht Vocjler, and XVI. 224. With Charles Avison. 
 
 3 VI. 122. Sa2i,l, and XVI. 30. Ferishtah : The Sim. 
 
 * VII. 141. A Death in the Desert. 
 
 5 VII. 139. A Death in the Desert.
 
 n CHARACTERISTICS. 21 
 
 tions sxiit his degree of development. He is accorded 
 just so much truth as will prick him <»n to earn more. 
 Education comes to the race, as to every child,' hy 
 gradual steps, by concessions to Aveakness and ignor- 
 ance, by a slowly increasing grant of opportunities to 
 develop and leave childish horizons and old illusions, 
 i.e. old aids, behind. " Law deals the same with soul 
 and body."- Browning affirms the existence of 'a 
 falsish false' and 'a falsish true,'^ as well as truth 
 pure and simple, the difference between them being 
 that the falsity is fleeting, a means to the end, which 
 is truth itself.^ Delusions are essential to man's 
 growth, and whom God deludes, Browning considers 
 well deluded. 
 
 " When faith is ripe for sight, — why, icasonuhly then 
 Comes the great cleariiig-ui). Wait threescore years and ten ! " 
 
 Browning's ever present thought is the indivitlual 
 soul ;is judged individually.^ He constantly reiterates 
 the independent personal relation that exists between 
 the soul and (Jml. While he believes that every man 
 shall give account of his own soul first and foremost, 
 he thinks no less of the other side of the shield, the 
 working out, or rather the witness, of soul in love 
 and Kicrificc. He never tires of saying, "Love is 
 \yest," "Love is all and Death is nought," "Renounce 
 
 ' Aiolando, p. l'J3. Juvdopmrnt, ami VII. 115. liahbi Ikn 
 Ezra. 
 
 * XVI. 118. J'arlri/iit'jn, lirrnard de MaiulevUle. 
 
 * XII. <5r». IM Cnllnn yifflU-Cap Country. 
 
 * XI. 3.1'J, 'SM. F,finf at live Fair. 
 
 * V. 2yi, 'Ji»2. I'hrialiinu- Kic and KttjiUr ■ Day, VII. ti.'-l, 
 KpUogue, nml XVI. "2, FrrisfUn/i's Funcifn : A /iran-Stiipr.
 
 22 BROWNING. chap. 
 
 joy for my fellows' sake? That's joy beyond joy." 
 The question Browning would ask at the end of any 
 man's life is not, What has he done 1 but, What did he 
 try to do 1 Other lives may follow this, let them suffice 
 for perfection, all man can do here is to tend upward, 
 If his reach be beyond his grasp, so much the better, 
 therein lies his warrant of immortality. A com- 
 parison l)etween the spirituality of Browning and 
 that of Lord Tennyson is suggested by the conclu- 
 sion of Apparent Failure, which closely resembles 
 much in In Memoriam. Generally speaking, where 
 Lord Tennyson is meditative. Browning is argument- 
 ative, showing us his thought in process as it moves 
 from point to point. In this, the difference between 
 the two poets resembles the similar difference between 
 S. John and S. Paul. But while Browning delights in 
 demonstrating the entire structure of his belief. Lord 
 Tennyson's belief is a sentiment, a pensive desire, a 
 temperamental bias, shaken by materialistic thought. 
 Though Browning weaves in the ideas, terms, and 
 tales of science as much as does his great compeer, 
 he is far less affected by its pessimism. He is really 
 disregardful of it, being principally occupied with the 
 spiritual region which science ignores. There is no re- 
 cord in Browning's work of a personally sceptical stage. 
 Even Pauline, far from being touched with a young 
 man's infidelity, such as finds extreme expression in 
 Shelley's earlier work, is markedly religious, even 
 devout. Dramatically, of course, as in Christmas-Eve 
 and Easier-Day, Browning frequently travels over the
 
 II CHARACTERISTICS. 23 
 
 waste places ii\ which he himself seems never to have 
 lingered. His imagination loves the larger possil)ili- 
 ties otiered it by faith. Yet the optimism of his 
 watchwoi-d, "Trust God nor be afraid," is not really 
 easy-going. Such a charge is etl'ectually replied to in 
 lied Cotton Night - Cap Countri/, cxxviii. Equally 
 significant as a reply is Browning's comparison of 
 faith to the angel Michael, with the snake, unbelief, 
 beneath his foot, treading firmer, " because he feels 
 it writhe."^ Bro^^^^ing is a later Coleridge, with a 
 theolo£ric<il instinct less bounded and more acute than 
 Coleridge's, manageable, not nebulous, thinking about 
 men, not about thought. In another direction, some 
 readers are disappointed to find certain characters, as 
 in The Pope and the Xct, dismissed without blame or 
 punishment. Browning sympathises with energy of 
 life, with life as life, and, keenly aware of life's com- 
 plexity, he cannot constrain it or dogmatise about it in 
 any narrow or restricted way. If he occasionally 
 troubles us by his seeming sympathy with evil and 
 mi.schief, it is of his dramatic imagination, like the 
 Shaksperian artistry which joyed equally in present- 
 ing lago and Desdemona. There is room in a gi-cat 
 master for many theories, without his being him.sclf 
 Ixjundcd ])}■ any, nor is tlie consistency of Browning's 
 philosophy marred, but rather strengthened, by his 
 sutfenince of evil, 
 
 4. Subjects. — Browning cares far more U>r tli*^ 
 individual than for men in niasses. Unlike Sliak- 
 
 ' IV. '2«i5. Buhop BliiuijTams Apology,
 
 24 BROWNING. chap. 
 
 spore, he troubles little about national life. He 
 shows a growing^ indifference, which is half scorn, 
 for general movements. The collective progress of 
 the race and the material advancement of civilisation 
 do not swell his theme as they do Lord Tennyson's, 
 or intoxicate him as they do Whitman. In this re- 
 gard, a Wordsworthian aloofness characterises Brown- 
 ing. Indeed, Browning is in saneness and tonic effect, 
 and also, it must be said, in a tendency to prolixity, 
 Wordsworth's lineal descendant. The blazing ques- 
 tions of the day all seem to Browning to be more or 
 less beside the mark. ' Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau' 
 (XL 152, 163) compares the socialistic and individual- 
 istic views to the disadvantage of the former, and in 
 Pacchiarotto Browning laughs at socialists' belief that 
 'aims heavenly' can be 'attained by means earthly.' 
 He rejoices in the impossibility, since he sees im- 
 perfection necessary to the world, and only personal 
 reform valuable. His favourite 'revolutionary' is 
 sober Pym. Browning's reply ^ to his question, " How 
 can I help England f'^ is not concerned with democratic 
 solutions. Like Chaucer, like Shakspere, though 
 perhaps from different causes, he does not love the 
 mob. There is very little of the fanatic or the 
 enthusiast about him. Eesponsibility and retribution 
 are his leading notes. He believes in ' war for hate 
 of war,'^ he glories in the failure of science to explain 
 
 1 Compare II. 36, 171. Paracelsus with XV. 242. Jochanan 
 Hakkadosh. ^ XIV. 203. La Saisiaz. 
 
 ^ Vr. 97. Home-Thoughts, from the Sea. 
 •* XI. 200. Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau,
 
 II C1IARACTF.KI>^TICS. 26 
 
 the facts of heredity/ he uphoUls the punishment of 
 (Iciith,- fimling in his ^schyhis that l)lood is the 
 inentalile price of l)]oo(l,^ that "the killrr has all 
 to p;iy.'' 
 
 Against ViWsectiun Ijiowiiing has (liiectcJ two 
 poems, Tray and Arcades Amlio. Simihir in applica- 
 tion are Ihnald and Titc IauJij and the Painter. The 
 other Animal Poems are Uow they hrmtciht the Good A^eivs 
 and MuhUjkeh. Browning is always ready to speak 
 for the speechless, and his references to animals are 
 as observant as they are sympathetic. The idea of 
 the hero, even a dog hero,'* is characteristic of 
 him. 
 
 Concerning children (with the exception of TJw I'icd 
 Piper of Jlamelin, which was written e.\'i)ressly for a 
 child), and the ptirental and filial relation, Browning 
 h;is few specific poems. Pom])ilia's motherhood,'' in 
 The liing and the Book, is unsurpassed in our litera- 
 ture. Pompilia, with her ba])e, reflects the white 
 and tender holiness of a Kafael Madonna. In Tvhn 
 Jvanoi'itch, Browning speaks his mind on parental 
 respon8il)ility and the sacredness of motherhood, of 
 whicii Dmitri's wife is the disgrace, as Pompilia is 
 the extpiisite examj)le. "Womanliness means only 
 motherhofxl," Browning says in The Inn Alburn.^ 
 JLdberl and Iloh is the stf)ry of the terrible sa\agery 
 
 ' XI. 202, 203. Prince IloJunstid-Schminijau. 
 ' Koc the I'ojie'H reaiMiiiK for j>roiiouiiciiiK Ki-iitence on Gnido in 
 The liing and the liiMik (X), ami XV. 17. Ivdn li\\novilrh. 
 * XIII. .'K'lO. Ayiimfiniiun. * XV. ■'i7. Trail. 
 
 •IX. 2)5-239. I'omjiUia. " XII. L'it(J.
 
 26 BROWNING. chap. 
 
 and tardy softening of a grown-up son and his father. 
 In Browning's Euripides there is a passage on fathers 
 with their lads, in which Herakles naively describes 
 men as 'the children -loving race. ' ^ There are 
 Strafford's care for his children, and the advocate's, 
 Don de Archangelis, fussy fondness for his boy of 
 the many diminutives,^ but, besides these, little or 
 nothing on the subject of child-love in Browning's 
 works. Browning has drawn a whole world of 
 women. One-third of his poetry is on the subject 
 of love, culminating in his personal expression about 
 his wife. The numerous lyrics, scattered about, like 
 jewels, in the hewn gold of his works, are sufficient 
 to redeem him from the charge of constant difficulty 
 and harshness, as, for instance. The Lost Mistress, 
 Round us the wild creatures in Ferishtah, and Summwm 
 Bonum. Browning's essentially man-like imagination 
 of woman is as subtle and free from commonplace as 
 all his fancy is. He seems peculiarly attracted by an 
 outwardly reserved, inwardly glowing disposition. ^ 
 From Faidine, up through Any JVife to amj Husband, 
 he loves to accentuate woman's best beauty, faithful- 
 ness. Men who can die for a principle are not more 
 abundant in Browning than women who can die for 
 a personality. He nobly vindicates women's friend- 
 ship, women's belief in women, in Guendolen Tresham,* 
 
 1 XTII. 181. 2 IX. 242. The Ring and the Booh. 
 
 » VI. 125. My Star, XIV. 60. Magical Nature, XIV. 167. 
 La Saisiaz (XIV. 211, 212. The Two Poets of Groisic and Asolando. 
 14. A Pearl, A Girl.) 
 
 ■* IV. 45-51. A Blot in the 'Scutcheon.
 
 II 
 
 CHARACTERISTICS. 27 
 
 fighting, like generous Bcittrice, against men's coward- 
 ice and condemnation. In Bifurcation, Brooming 
 asserts that mutual love constitutes duty. The 
 woman there called the love-forsaking path duty, but 
 the responsibility of her lover's spoiled life lies at her 
 door. The s;ime idea is still more strikingly brought 
 out in Crist inn. Browning's handling of love in all 
 its aspects is strong and healthful. To him, earthly 
 marriage is the type and expression of the soul union 
 which consecrates it. An impulse to protect, pity, 
 and console, rather than to worship and take pride 
 in, tinges Bro^^^ling's vision of love, as in Jules and 
 Phene and the song, " Give her but a least excuse," ^ 
 and in the ' digi-ession ' in Surdclhr This minister- 
 ing love, the passion to serve, is also indicated in The 
 Flight of the Durhess (V. 1 46). In simple little Pippa's 
 reverie, love me<ins to be cherished and safely folded 
 with a protector's arm,'' and in A JFoman^s Last JFord 
 a woman's hope of love is the same. But, for all 
 that. Browning maintains that only 'the weaker 
 woman's-want ' is to lean, the best women themselves 
 uplift and sustain, so that all their love is a kind of 
 motherhood.* In Browning's earliest poem, th(! ycung 
 jxjfCs beli»'f in love — Pauline's — saves him. Love, 
 purity, devotion, these are the most divine things in 
 the world, and so recognised in his heart of hearts 
 by every character in Browning's works, even l>y tlir 
 
 > III. 44-46. Pippa PoMft. ' I. 159-104. Sordello. 
 
 » III. 11, 12. Pippa I'msrs. 
 
 * .Ml. l.'ir.. JUd Cullon yujht-Cap Country, nml XII. 29;'., 290. 
 Inn Allium.
 
 28 BROWNING. chap. 
 
 most debased criminal, as in that tremendous last line 
 wrung from Guido Franceschini — 
 
 "Christ,— Maria,— God, . . . 
 Pompilia, will you let them murder me 1 " 
 
 The poem of the cricket, who supplied the missing 
 
 string of the lyre, turns on the might of love, as do 
 
 the Prologue to Pacchiar otto and JFanting is — What? 
 
 The eternity of love Browning considers dependent 
 
 on a mutual response between souls. Love needs 
 
 soul's beauty to make it live on, the value of bodily 
 
 beauty is in arousing it.^ In Fifine at the Fair,'^ Avith 
 
 seeming ingenuity, but entirely derivatively from his 
 
 philosophy of individuality, Browning accounts for 
 
 tastes in faces and forms by saying that the soul sees, 
 
 consciously or unconsciously, its complement, what it 
 
 loves, in another soul, a-strain through some bodily 
 
 token more or less minute, and that it straightway 
 
 seeks to gain that other soul to amalgamate its OAvn 
 
 with it. Nature, the imperfect artist, is supplemented, 
 
 remedied, by the perfect artist, love. But the separate 
 
 individuality of the soul of each is for ever to be 
 
 retained and respected. True love and perfect 
 
 marriage mean union, not unification.^ 
 
 All Browning's dealings Avith human love are 
 
 sanctified by his own love for his 'dearest poet,' 
 
 Avhich over and over again finds expression in his 
 
 works. Explicitly, he Avrites of her, during her life, 
 
 in By the Fireside, in The Guardian- Angel, incidentally, 
 
 1 XII. 273. Inn Album. ^ XI. 254-267. 
 
 3 XII. 92. Red Cotton Night-Cap Country.
 
 It 
 
 CHARACTERISTICS. 29 
 
 <is 'nvj angel,' 'my love,' and in Our Jf'ord More, 
 to E. B. B. ; since her death, in Prospke, in the 
 'Invocation," and end of Th^ Bing and the Bool; 
 in Bulau^tions Adventure,- where he quotes from her 
 Wine of Cyprius and in the Epilogue to Parrhiarotto, 
 where he again quotes from the same poem. How 
 many more poems may not be due to the inspiration 
 of his Wife ? For in speaking of the explicit reference 
 of Prospice, it seems almost arbitrary to exclude 
 'A Jrall,'^ and IFanting xs—JPliat? from the same 
 category. In various touches of description of 
 Browning's favourite women, and in the tender 
 intimacy with a mother's feelings in Pompilia, we 
 may judge h<jw life fed art. 
 
 From early youth. Browning was strongly attracted 
 towanls Greek life and literature. Perhaps in the 
 very fact that his own mind is pre-eminently Gothic 
 lies the fjiscination to him of the clear-cut bright- 
 ness and poignancy of Greece. This interest was 
 strengthened and deepened by Mrs. Browning's 
 classicid scholarship. Balaxuition's Adventure (1871), 
 with the ' Transcript ' from Mr. and Mrs. Browning's 
 favourite pjct, Euripides, ylristophanes' Apologij (1875), 
 emlMxlying another transcript, and the Agnmeranon of 
 /Eschylus (1877) .sufficiently bear out the presenti- 
 ment which Browning already had in Bij Die Fireside 
 (1855) of how, in the years to come, the study of 
 
 ' Vlll. .'<t;;)7. Thf Rin'j and Ihe lioiik. 
 
 - \\. Vl\. 
 
 • (The l^n4iMjue to I'accliiaruUo with otiicr I'uems. )
 
 30 BROWNING. chap. 
 
 Greek would lead him on Avith increasing force. 
 But it is in independent, short poems and in scattered 
 passages, such as Artemis Prologizes, Pheidippides, the 
 early lines of Cleon, and Prometheus, Artemis, and 
 the nymph and Satyr in Gerard de Lairesse, that we 
 get the nearest approach in Biowning to Greek 
 presentment. 
 
 Another love and source of inspiration to both 
 poet husband and poet wife is Italy, their home for 
 fifteen years. Browning is saturated with the 
 language, art, and history of Italy, and a large 
 proportion of his subjects is Italian. He directly 
 records his love of Italy in By the Fireside, " De 
 
 Gusiihiis ," and the end of Pietro of Abano, and he 
 
 describes Italian natural scenery in The Englishman 
 in Italy and many another poem. Bordello, Pippa 
 Passes, My Last Duchess, In a Gondola, The Bishop 
 orders his Tomb at Saint Praxed's Church, The Boy 
 and the Angel, A Soul's Tragedy, Up at a Villa — 
 Dovm in the City, A Toccata of Galuppi's, Holy-Cross 
 Day, The Guardian-Angel, Two in the Campagna, The 
 Ring and the Book, Pacchiarotto, Cemiaja, The Cardinal 
 and the Dog, The Pope and the Net, The Bean Feast, 
 Ponte delV Angela, Venice, Beatrice Signorini, "Imperante 
 
 Augusta natus est ," are all Italian in characters and 
 
 circumstances. Pictor Ignotus, Luria, Fra Lippo Lippi, 
 The Statue and the Bust, Andrea del Sarto, Old Pictures in 
 Florence, and Filippo Baldinucci on the Privilege of Burial 
 belong especially to Florence. The Italian in Eng- 
 land, Old Pictures in Florence, and "i)e Gustibus "
 
 II CHARACTERISTICS. 81 
 
 express the Italian hate of the foreign rule in Italy, 
 so fervently shared by Kobert and Elizabeth Brown- 
 ing. There are other poems, such as Forphi/rias Lover, 
 A Face, Daniel Bartuli, and Francis Fitriiti, which, 
 even if not definitely placed in Italy, are under 
 Italian iiiHuences. The atmosphere of Browning's 
 only drama of English life, The Blot in the 'Scutcheon, 
 is Italian rather than English. The criminal, 
 treacherous, magnificent character that fascinated 
 Webster, Tourneur, and Massinger, and all their 
 company has a powerful attraction for the subtle 
 mind of Browning. Of the three or four pages of 
 The Bishop orders his Tomb at Saint Praxcd's Church, 
 Mr. Kuskin says that the exact temper of the Italian 
 central Renaissance has never been more unerringly 
 discerned. Browning's longest work, however, Tlie 
 Ring and the Book, is occupied with a meaner period 
 in Italian annals, the late seventeenth centmy. 
 
 Many of Browning's poems are on Art and artists. 
 His treatment of pictorial art is characteristic, in 
 that he finds his examples in Italy, and that there 
 the early painters, men of lofty aims and imperfect 
 accompli-shments, are dearest to him. The advance 
 of the pre-Kaphaelites on the Greek sculptors is that 
 while the latter wrought a perfection unattainable 
 by the 'actual generations,' and thereby taught 
 stunted men humility, as well as uphold 'the Truth 
 of Man,' the lUilian painters suggested the larger 
 swjpe by their very defectiveness, and cared most 
 to expres.s the new strife and hopes of the inward
 
 32 BROWNING. chap. 
 
 and invisible.^ Browning does not cherish the defects 
 of the eariy schools as final excellences. In Fra 
 Lippo Lippi, he traces the evolution of the next step 
 beyond Giotto and Fra Angelico, art's supreme gift, 
 to make us " love 
 
 First when we see them painted, things we have passed 
 Perhaps a hundred times, nor cared to see." 
 
 In Fifine,^ Browning deepens this definition by 
 
 speaking of art as the disinterested, instinctive 
 
 passion for reaching at all points the truth of 
 
 things. The artist struggles to make out of nature's 
 
 scattered fragments a human creation, which shall at 
 
 once surpass nature and reach reality. Perfectly 
 
 comprehensible in this connection is Browning's 
 
 acknowledgment in Red Cotton Night -Cap Country^ 
 
 that the ' artist-preference ' is ' for work complete, 
 
 inferiorly ' proposed, to incompletion, though it aim 
 
 aright.' That preference is an intellectual necessity, 
 
 because it is part of the work of intellect to rightly 
 
 adjust means to ends. Meissonier as an artist is 
 
 better than Blake. Only in poetry, which Browning 
 
 places above art, because nearer the 'soul's verge 
 
 of vastness,' is the 'incomplete more than completion.' 
 
 Browning, as an artist, recognises and applauds in 
 
 artists the j^erpetual endeavour to obliterate 
 
 ' Artistry's haunting curse, the Incomplete ' ; ^ as 
 
 a spectator, he pronounces incompleteness inevitable, 
 
 1 VI. 80-86. Old Pictures in Florence. 
 
 2 XI. 256. 3 XII. 168. 
 
 ■* X. 210. The Ring and tlie Book, repeated on Asolando. 78.
 
 II CHARACTERISTICS. 33 
 
 and a blessing, for it goads on to further effort, and 
 points to perfection Itehind the veil. In J'tirlcj/inga, 
 Browning deals with various art questions. He 
 indignantly opposes the attack on the nude in art, 
 in Francis Furini, as he does in The Lady and the 
 Painter, and, implicitly, in Fra Lippo Lippi, and in 
 Ari,-<tophane's Apology, XII 1. 21, 120. In Christopher 
 Smart ^ it is interesting to see what modern painters 
 Browning joins -with the august names of Michael 
 Angelo, Kafael, and Leonardo. In the lines in 
 Aristophanes' Apology- that describe the listeners to 
 Balaustion's adventure, we can fancy Greek girlhood 
 as depicted by Sir Frederick Leighton, who is, in 
 rejility, the ' great Kaunian painter ' ^ M'hose work 
 is described in the earlier narrative. In the first 
 section of Furini,* there is what, if not intended as 
 such, serves aa a criticism on the paintings of a 
 great poet, Rossetti. Browning's descriptions of 
 ol»jects of art both steal and give beauty, e.g. the 
 della Robbia in The Statue and the Bmt, the Eastern 
 weapons in yl Forgiveness, and the font in the castle 
 of Goito.* Browning's descriptions constantly suggest 
 pictures. Such are the landscape in " Childe lioland," 
 the group of the gipsy queen, the lady, and Jacynth 
 'in a rosy sleep along the floor,' in 'The Flight of the 
 Ifuehess, and I'omjjilia, a portrait with which even 
 Dante's .Mjwionna I'ia cannot compare. 
 
 ' XVI. 152. ^ XIII. II. 
 
 * XI. 121. lialaiiftiiin'g Adwutitre. (.See also Kiirydice to 
 Orphfut), 
 
 * XVI. 170, 177. » I. 67, 08. Sn-deUo. 
 
 I)
 
 34 BROWNING. chap. 
 
 Browning's love of music has given birth to what 
 is perhaps his most faultless poem, Abt Vogler, and 
 to A Toccata of Gahtppi's, blaster Hugues of Saxe- 
 GotJia, and Charles Avison. Music not only gives 
 Browning intense emotional pleasure, but it is to 
 him the truest truth; how and why are explained 
 in Avison} 
 
 Browning claims the highest place for poetry, 
 because it 'impinges on and illuminates the other 
 arts.' He throws light on his own poetic methods in 
 the lines 
 
 ' ' Who is a poet needs must understand 
 Alike both speech and thoughts which prompt to speak." ^ 
 
 Browning draws a sharp line between the dilettant 
 and the artist,^ and, while giving a grim smile to the 
 former's make-believe, he emphasises the strenuous 
 labour of the artist's life. In Furini, he speaks of 
 the 'agony' of 'art's high-strung brain.'* In de- 
 scribing poets, Browning constantly dwells on the 
 separateness of the genius and the man, in each. 
 This idea is thoroughly worked out in Sordello. Even 
 in Ralhi Ben Ezra (xxiii.-xxv.), we meet with a 
 similar view : a man's work is not himself. The same 
 feeling tinges Browning's references to his own poetry. 
 One Word More contains a highly poetic expression of 
 this separation between the artist and the man, and 
 
 1 XVI. 227, etc. 
 
 2 XIT. 138. Red Cotton Night-Cap Country. 
 
 •* XII. 89-91. Red Cotton Night-Cap Country. 
 
 •* XVI. 179.
 
 II CHARACTERISTICS. 35 
 
 Shop sounds, from the other end of the scale, a pro- 
 test against a man's profession, his 'shop,' constitut- 
 ing his life. There is no doubt that Browning drew 
 the idcii from his own expeiience, and in this way it 
 throws considerable light on the dramatic shape of 
 his mind. 
 
 Very beautifnl are the wreaths which Browning 
 lays at the feet of his predecessors in the kingdom of 
 poetry. He celebrates Dante in Sordello and One Word 
 Mure, and Shelley in 1\iuUm, Sordello,^ Memorahilut, and 
 Cenciaja, as well as in his prose Introductory Essay to 
 Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1852. Popidarity is 
 Siicred to the memory of Keats, who is again referred 
 tx) in a similar vein at the commencement of Tlie Two 
 Poets of Cruisic. Beside At the " Mermaid," House, and 
 Aristopluiiies' Apology, XIII. 234, Browning has, in 
 Bishop Blougram's Apology, at least three vivid lines 
 on Shakspere, 
 
 and 
 
 " His power and consciousness and self-delight," 
 
 " He leaves his towers and gorgeous palaces 
 To build the trimmest house in Stratford town.'"- 
 
 In Prinr4' Jlahenstiel - Schwangau,^ Fifine,* Epilogue 
 to J'arrhi/irotto,^ At the ''Mermaid,"^ and La Saisiaz~' 
 Browning derides Byron for his contempt of men and 
 
 ' I. W-54. 
 
 ' Sec aliio V. 248. Christmag - Eve and Easter - Day ; and 
 Browning's vnrolUcted Sonnet, Thr Xuiiu-.i. 
 
 * XI. 145-147. * XI. 277-279. » XIV. 111). 
 
 " XIV. 35. 7 XIV. 200-201.
 
 36 BROWNING. chap. 
 
 glorification of waste nature, and for his slipshod way 
 of writing; but in La Saisiaz a tenderness for the 
 'Pilgrim' escapes him.^ Like 'Childe Harold' 
 before him, Browning, in La Saisiaz, pauses before 
 those illustrious men of letters who made their 
 homes round Lake Leman. He approaches Voltaire, 
 Gribbon, Kousseau, and Byron himself, to weigh what 
 they gave by what they received. Browning often 
 flashes out a phrase that contains a volume of criti- 
 cism, as in ' Addison's tye-wig preachment,' ^ and it is 
 interesting to note how he esteems a comparatively 
 recent poetical writer, that singular mind, Thomas 
 Lovell Beddoes.^ 
 
 Browning's works almos£ defy an orderly arrange- 
 ment according to subjects. Too many a poem 
 eludes classification, or demands a class to itself. 
 Only after reading through the poems in the order 
 in which they were written, do we gain a true idea 
 of Browning's immense range. 
 
 5. The Art of Browning*. — Only those who 
 know Browning intimately can say what an educa- 
 tion he is in the resources of langiiage. His memory 
 and circumstantial lore seem boundless. As each of 
 his dissolving views disappears to give place to its 
 successor, Browning seems to steep himself in every 
 appropriate phrase and befitting suggestion that maj^ 
 give vividness to his next creation. We notice 
 instances in Ned Bratts, in 
 
 1 XIV. 200, 202-203. ^ xvi. 120. Bernard de Mandeville. 
 
 3 XIV. 270. The Two Poets of Croisic.
 
 II CHARACTERISTICS. 87 
 
 ' ' A burden at your back, 
 Good Master Christmas ? " 
 
 (Ned Bratt5 means ' Christian ') 
 
 "To-morrow brings Tom Bcarward with his hears : 
 One new black-muzzled brute beats Sackcrson he swears." 
 
 ('Sackerson' was the famous bear kept at Paris 
 Garden), and 
 
 " I rather see the fruit of twelve years' pious reign — 
 Astnea Redux, Charles." 
 
 Browning might well call himself the 'far-flyer.'^ 
 He has the cuiiosities of all dictionaries at his fingers' 
 ends. He uses technical and obsolete words ^vith 
 the most familiar usage, coining new and amplifying 
 old for his piu-poses. All sorts of colloquialisms 
 and rarities help to feather his dramatic nest. This 
 habit helps to make up the total impression made by 
 Browning of intellectual resource and power. He 
 often repeats his turns of phrase, and many parallel- 
 isms may be cited from his works. Such slovenliness 
 as ' better than them all ' never appears in Brown- 
 iiig,2 his grammar being exquisitely accurate, some- 
 times even to pedantry. His mentid associations are 
 akin to his vocabulary in variety and unexpectedness. 
 As insUinces, we may take from among his illustra- 
 tions Cloethe's Weimar Kstate in Bernard de Maiide- 
 vUlc and Joan of Arc in Franrui Furini. Among 
 Browning's finest siniiies and metaphors are the 
 CJibin (sopliistical) in Uislmp Jiloiiyrain'n Aixdngy and 
 
 > XIV. 223. Charlts Avison. 
 ' e.'j. X. 81. Tlu Rin'j and the Book.
 
 38 BROWNING. chap. 
 
 the cup (truthful) in Rahhi Ben Ezra. Every alkision 
 
 is exactly in keeping with the ^-^bits of the person 
 
 who uses it. We note in An Epistle how the Arab 
 
 physician measures the distance between Bethany and 
 
 Jerusalem, 
 
 ' ' scarce the distance 
 A man with plague-sores at the third degree 
 Runs till he drops down dead." 
 
 Entire freeness from commonplace in imagery and 
 nomenclature distinguishes Browning. With the 
 ' White Way ' ^ of Pauline, Browning commenced a 
 long series of new names for well-known things, delight- 
 ful for freshness and the sense of direct impression. 
 Perhaps of all objects in nature he has found the moon 
 most 'noteworthy.'^ The descriptions of the moon 
 in Christmas-Eve, One JFord More, Pan and Luna, and 
 the passage from 'Mark the flying orb' to 'one 
 glow and variegation ! ' ^ in A Bean-Stripe are in 
 Browning's finest vein. They have all the charm of 
 eloquence and emotion that can be claimed for poetry. 
 Parleyings is rich in day-breaks.* The thunder that 
 ushers the day into being, dawning, mid-day, and 
 sunset form the loom on which, in Gerard de Lairesse, 
 Browning weaves a web, alternately real and fan- 
 tastic, though, at the end, the fantastic fails, con- 
 quered by thi^, potency of the real. The salute to. 
 Spring,^ in the same poem, is instinct with the modern 
 feeling for nature, which refuses personifications or 
 
 1 I. 19. 2 jy_ 303_ 3 XVI. 72-73. 
 
 ■* XVI. 126-127, and 209-216. ^ xvi. 219-220.
 
 II CHARACTERISTICS. 39 
 
 any other derivative sentiments. It delights ns by 
 its simple tliish of vernal colour and movement, 
 though perhaps, like Shelley's 'West Wind,' it is not 
 far from the kingdom of pathos. Browning gives in 
 The Inn Alhuia (XII. L'OO) a fine bit of English village 
 road, and the woods under the sunset ^ in SordeUo 
 form another of Browning's beauties of description. 
 We have, too, in Introduction and Part I. of Pippa 
 Piuses wonderful representations of the glare of 
 Italian morning, and in LaSaisiaz as faithful glimpses 
 of the mountain sides round the Lake of Geneva. 
 Browning's observation is pre-eminently original. He 
 notices, trejisiu-es, and uses what others might meet 
 with and pass again and again, as in his conmient on 
 the myth of Hercules and Atlas.^ This is Browning's 
 value to us, he so enriches observation, reflection, and 
 love. In reading his works, we experience the 
 exhilaration that comes from contact with a forceful 
 personality. He catches us up in the free play of his 
 genius over the whole visible and invisible world, 
 every thing of both lying before him, he only having 
 to choose what shall serve him on each occasion. If 
 we wrestle, it is with an angel. If the reading bo 
 RtrenuoiLs, it imparts life, and a strange power seems to 
 pxss from him to us. For the time being, we see oiu-- 
 selves us a^loured by a stripe of his rainbow genius. 
 
 Less often possessed by his theme, and therefore 
 less pjissionately imaginative than Shaksj)cro or 
 Coleridge, Browning not infrequently reaches their 
 
 » I. 54. ■•' XI. 153.
 
 
 40 BROWNING. chap. 
 
 white-heat of intensity. One example of this is in 
 Caponsacchi's Dantesque forecdct of Guido, left by 
 his judges to 'live,' and how, when he dies, or at 
 least disappears from among men, he will find only 
 Judas to be his companion, ' the cockatrice ' met 'with 
 the basilisk.'^ Browning's works abound in gro- 
 tesqueness and humour. That Browning is intensely 
 capable of the ludicrous is clear from such a passage 
 as that in which the advocate deplores for Capon- 
 sacchi the comi^anionship on the drive to Rome of 
 
 ' ' only one young female substitute 
 For seventeen other Canons of ripe age 
 Were wont to keep liim company." ^ 
 
 Sometimes we find the humour of a single word, as 
 in one physician writing to another, 
 
 •' Scalp-disease 
 Confounds me, crossing so with leprosy : 
 Thou hadst admired one sort I gained at Zoar."^ 
 
 Browning is a wonderful and versatile rhymer. 
 Nothing daunts him. Sustained double rhymes, as 
 in A Grammarian's Funeral, are his daily wear. 
 Through the Metidja is a triumph of rhymes on one 
 word only. Browning revels in whimsicalities, as 
 in The Flight of the Duchess and The Pied Piper. 
 Pacchiarotto is a carnival of rhymes. They pour out 
 as in some uproarious game of capping rhymes and 
 rapping rhymes. Pietro of Ahano shows Browning's 
 
 1 IX. 159-160. The Ring and the Book. 
 
 ' X. 28. The Ring and the Book. 
 
 ^ IV. 188. An Epistle.
 
 II CHARACTERISTICS. 41 
 
 metrical ability, and Ixion is a skilful example of hex- 
 ameters ami pentameters. With extreme eflectiveness, 
 the beat of the vei-se in Ivan Ivhnovitch is changed after 
 the fii-st distant 'pad' of the wolves, so that the 
 woman's tight breathing, and the terrible excitement 
 of that most nightmare-like fear of being gained upon 
 by the four-footed demons seem to inspire its hard 
 pidscs, through which we hear too the ever nearing 
 ' pad,' 'pad,' and at last the horrid onset. The Last 
 Hide Together may be counted among Browning's 
 most musical productions. 
 
 6. Browning as aWriterof Plays.— Humanity 
 
 is the theme of drama, ucliuu its instrument. A 
 drama is an organic structme of interesting events 
 which are the interaction of its characters. No 
 dramatist ever took a keener interest in human 
 beings than Browning, nor felt more strongly that 
 they must be represented dramatically to be repre- 
 sented truthfully, must not be described as from 
 without, but must speak for themselves as from 
 within. Accordingly, Browning's vivid, picturesque 
 poems alx)und in one great dramatic quality, char- 
 actcri.sjitiun. My hist Duchess, A Light Jl'oinan, A 
 For(jivene.<s prove Browning's mastery of dramatic 
 material. To this he adds forcible objective realisa- 
 tion of the great moments of life. If his poems 
 disj)lay material for dramatic situations, his jjjays are 
 rirh in sitiuitions themselves, Jis in the night of 
 I^uria's dciith, the alternations of false and true 
 kiriglines-s in Victor and Charles, aii«l that great
 
 42 BROWNING. chap. 
 
 scene in which Strafford drains the cup of anguish.^ 
 For tragic terror it would be hard to match the 
 dialogue between Ottima and Sebald in Pippa Passes. 
 Yet, when all is said, Browning's plays are not 
 dramas, but studies. They are without the light 
 and shade, the inevitable cohesion and the indubit- 
 able conclusion that are the distinguishing marks of 
 a great drama. Their beauties are inorganic or 
 fragmentary. A complex but indissoluble action 
 is the very life of drama, whereas Browning cares 
 little for action and sacrifices it to soliloquy. His 
 eight plays represent the dynamics of the soul rather 
 than of incident. He is more occupied with the 
 intricacies of motive than Avith its fruit in conduct. 
 Probably Browning's century does not excel in the 
 kind of greatness that stimulates drama. Its sub- 
 jective character, its introspection, its self-absorption 
 are all opposed to the objective character of dramatic 
 genius. In Browning's eyes, the more internal, the 
 more real, but the invisible, however momentous, is 
 apt to be ineffectual in drama, and, if not that, its 
 expression comes too near showing machinery that 
 should be hidden. Neither should a play, which is 
 primarily intended for acting, strain the mental 
 attention as severely as a poem intended for reading 
 may do. The piece hastens on, and no halt, no 
 retracing are possible. Browning expects of his 
 audience transitions of mind as swift and subtle as 
 his own. Too much is taken as said, and the 
 
 1 11. 290-307. Strafford.
 
 II CnARACTKKISTICS. 43 
 
 speeches, besides being frequently of immoderiitc 
 leii^'th, are diffitult from extreme condensation. As 
 a playwright, Browning lacked acquaintance with 
 theatrical conditions and verisimilitudes,^ which even 
 such a b(jrn dramatist as Shakspero could ill have 
 spared. It may be sjiid of Browning that, adjectively 
 dramatic, he is not substantively a dramatist. Urged, 
 at firet, to drama by the qualities in him which were 
 dramatic, with time he wisely forsook the limitations 
 of the theatre, and created for himself a fitter instru- 
 ment in the dramatic monologue, the form of so 
 many of his greatest poems. Mental debates in 
 character, both debates and characters being ex- 
 tremely interesting in themselves, they arc properly 
 indepoiidiMit of stage and footlights. 
 
 7. Defects and Difficulties. — Browning has not 
 an infalliJde metrical ear. His metres are frequently 
 unsuited to his themes. Christmas-Eve contiiins 
 doggerel rhymes that give to their great argiunent 
 an alien air of burlesque, as if a seer broke oflf in the 
 midst of his vision to turn wheels like a street arab. 
 SordtUo would have been ennobled and lilicrated by 
 blank verse. The rmUKjue. to Parlcyings has a falsely 
 archaic air from being a conversation arranged in 
 stiinzas, reciilling some old Mystery or Miracle Play. 
 It is an altogether anomalous metrical arrangement. 
 In these examples, and wherever his rhymes and 
 fancies iMJur out in pcll-nitll confusion. Browning 
 fihowa a want of the selectivencss of fine art. ' Mind- 
 * See Song in A lilot in t/ie 'HcutcliMn.
 
 44 BROWNING. chap. 
 
 Freaks'^ is an expression "«ed by Browning which 
 fits many passages in his own writings, where the 
 liberty of power degenerates into licence. After the 
 poetical line in Popularity, 
 
 ' ' The sea has only just o'erwhispered ! " ^ 
 one shrinks from 
 
 " As if they still the water's lisp Tieard " 
 
 as from an unexpected, intentional rudeness. Brown- 
 ing's rhymes often coerce his ideas, leading him off 
 after them into some parenthesis or congested allusion 
 from which he re-emerges, with great cleverness, no 
 doubt, but with cleverness that seems a blot on genius. 
 If in some places Browning makes mere rhyme the 
 pivot of the sense, in others he neglects rhythm. 
 His blank verse is sometimes regardless of scansion, 
 and not true blank verse at all. His poetry is often 
 unpoetic by reason of its crabbedness and harshness, 
 its lack of grace and melody, as in 
 
 "Irks care the crop -full bird? Frets doubt the maw- 
 crammed beast ? " ^ 
 
 Browning perpetually makes polysyllabic superla- 
 tives, for compression's sake, as 'portentousest,'* 
 ' sagaciousest.' ^ A crudity disfigures the close of 
 Furini in 
 
 ' ' Memorize that burst's moment, Francis ! " ^ 
 
 1 XV. 94. Olive. a VI. 194. 
 
 =* VII. 110. Rabbi Ben Ezra. 
 
 ■* VIII. 9. The Ring and the Book. 
 
 5 XV. 49. Ivdn Ivdnovitch. « XVI. 199.
 
 II CHARACTERISTICS. 45 
 
 A string of ' possessivcs ' is not rare, as 
 
 "The strong fierce heart's love's labour's due." ' 
 
 Browning's works are professedly not meant for 
 a slothful or inattentive reader. Browning's intel- 
 lectual processes are performed so rapidly, his turns 
 of thought are so abrupt, that a less leaping, less 
 impetuous brain is apt to consider the expression of 
 such velocity incoherent. Stringent reasoning, of 
 which there is so much in BroAATiing, is necessarily 
 hard to follow, and demands considerable stress of 
 attention. But most of his verbal difficulties proceed 
 from condens;ition. Sordello's sources of feeling are 
 no more remote than Hamlet's, but the expression of 
 them is infinitely more crumpled. As a specimen of 
 close packing, see 
 
 " Etrurian circlets found . . . 
 
 . . . alive 
 Spark-like 'mid urifarthed slope-side figtree-roots, 
 That roof old tombs at Chiusi."- 
 
 At first, the reader's comprehen.sion seems often 
 to be balancing on a tight-rope, where the slightest 
 touch woulcl be dangerous, and, if it comes, in the 
 shape of an additional difficulty, does indeed jn-ccipi- 
 tate the already faltering comi)rehcnsion into an 
 abyss of bewilderment. Comparative ease in re;idiiig 
 Browning being due to familiarity with his peculi- 
 arities, the following notes may prove useful finger- 
 
 ' XV. 190. Mara WidhtonfcraJ't mid Fundi. 
 ' VIII. 1. The Ring and the liook.
 
 46 BROWNING. ohap. 
 
 posts. There is in Browning's sentences a frequent 
 omission ... of relatives, e.g. 
 
 " Hold her tottering ark Ipiat or wliidi] had tumbled else " ^ 
 ... of ' pronominal ' adjectives, e.g. 
 
 " DofF [your] spectacles, wipe [your] pen, shut [your] book " ^ 
 
 ... of ^0 with the infinitive, e.g. 
 
 " Mend matters peradventure God loves [to] mar ? " ^ 
 
 Readers have to become used to a general scarcity of 
 prepositions, as well as of conjunctions, e.g. 
 
 "The gap 'twixt what is, [and] what should be."^ 
 
 Pronouns sometimes precede by several lines the 
 nouns for which they stand. Dialogues within 
 dialogues are another source of difficulty. Readers 
 have often to look several lines forward to help their 
 notion of the sense by finding whether the expected 
 note of interrogation ends the sentence. Notes of 
 interrogation are very frequent, especially in the 
 poems of internal debate, or where casuistry meets 
 casuistry. Inversions are characteristic, e.g. 
 
 " Of joy were it fuller, of span because ampler ? " '' 
 
 Any dozen pages of Browning contain a volume's 
 references to history and biography, and question 
 and research are being continually aroused. Brown- 
 
 1 VIII. 9. The Ring and the Book. 
 
 ^ XI. 207. Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau. 
 
 3 VIII. 221. The Ring and the Book. 
 
 •» IX. 102. The Ring a7id the Book. 
 
 ^ XVI. 101. Apollo and the Fates. 
 
 i
 
 II CHARACTERISTICS. 47 
 
 ing loves to go off at ;i tangent. He follows np a 
 Itninch line with as much interest j\s though it were 
 his niiiin theme. He is a 'creeper into wormholes,' 
 antl the oli.scurities and unknowns of the past are more 
 to him than its great events and trampling conquerors. 
 Yet Browning's hardest lines are no harder to subject 
 to grammaticiil analysis than many in Paradise Lost. 
 The worst that can be said of his roughness and 
 difficulty is as much as to say : here is pure gold, but 
 it is uncoined and must be dug for, and certain frag- 
 ments of rock are sticking to the nuggets. 
 
 There is another valid charge brought against 
 Browning, a charge which the reputation of many a 
 Iftiding poet has encountered and survived, that of 
 inequality of poetic inspiration. Large portions of 
 Browning's works are, from the poetic stand-point, 
 comparatively sterile. Good sense and pungency 
 are rarely, if ever, lacking to a single line, but these 
 are the virtues of the prosaist, not the wonder-work 
 of emotion and word without which great i)oetry is 
 not. Much of La Saisiaz is too polemical for poetry. 
 Those 'five facts' and 'six facts' (XIV. 193, 
 194), are not poetry, but 'divinity.' The Pope's 
 meditation in T/ie Ring ami the 2^oo^• is poetically finer, 
 partly because the theology is subordinated to the 
 cluiracter of the Pope, and consequently the present- 
 ment is more imaginative. Mere serpentinings of 
 thought and hair-splittings ciinnot of themselves reach 
 that incandescent point at whiih poetry is Btnuk 
 from the anvil. Piincf lioheiiHtiel -Schwangau's
 
 48 BROWNING. chap. 
 
 special pleading is metri'^al prose, with most occa- 
 sional gleams of poetry. Browning's later characters 
 are too eager to ' try conclusions ' with their outside 
 adversary or innei' tempter, too intent to ' read their 
 title clear ' to theism and immortality, in a word, too 
 argumentative for poetic creations. Though Brown- 
 ing reached his high- water mark in the vital mono- 
 logues of Tlie Ring and the Booh, his short poems, 
 such as are to be found in the volumes of Selections, 
 contain his most flawless poetry. To cover his work, 
 and not only account for special portions of it, it 
 must e'en be conceded that truth is more to Brown- 
 ing than beauty. What is this but saying that the 
 man is greater than the artist ? Truly, a brave sin, 
 and one which more than ever confirms the sense of 
 unity in Browning's personality and all its output. 
 Browning's poetics manifest a temporary decline in 
 Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau, Fifine at the Fair, and 
 Aristophanes' Apology. These books are thorny read- 
 ing, and in them, and more especially in Red Cotton 
 Night - Cap Country, Browning's passion for strange 
 backwaters of character takes him among that which 
 is morally ugly and even worthless. Browning's 
 optimism is a stumbling-block to some readers, and 
 certainly it does not leave him much room for ulti- 
 mate pathos. Whether, in this. Browning does well 
 or ill depends on whether his root belief, that no 
 failure is final, be well founded or no. The question 
 is wider than a criticism of Browning.
 
 Ill INTKOUUCTIONS TO THE POEMS. 49 
 
 CHAPTER ILL 
 
 INTRODUCTIONS TO TIIE FORMS. 
 
 Pauline; A Fragment of a Confession. 1833 
 (VoL L), was the tirst work Browning gave the 
 world. In conformity M-ith an intention of youtli, 
 he issued it anonymously. The word 'Richmond,' 
 added to the date at the end, was a fiction, intended 
 to baffle I'eaders. PauUiw was not included among 
 Browning's works till the edition of 18G8, when, for 
 necessary reasons, ' with extreme repugnance ' he 
 acknowledged and retained it. He made some slight 
 corrections for the 1888 edition. Pauline, by an 
 unknown poet, met with little general notice. Two 
 great men. separate enough, Stuart Mill and Dante 
 Rossetti, were much struck by it, Rossetti divining 
 that the writer of Pauline was the Browning of 
 Paracelsus. The motto from the old French of 
 Ck'ment Marot, " I am no longer — I could never be 
 again — what I was," is the burden of the 'Confes- 
 sion.' The preface of Cornelius Agrippa suggests 
 that Browning cared to 'half reveal and liall con- 
 ce<'il ' a partial identity l^etween his own youthful 
 mind and the mind of the young poet who is supposed 
 to be speaking — or writing — throughout. ' Pauline ' 
 herself only speaks once, iis supposed editress of the 
 
 K
 
 50 BROWNING. CHAP. 
 
 fragment, in a prose note in French. She is repre- 
 sented by the poet as a wise, calm friend, unfailing in 
 her devotion to him, forgiving the inconstancy and 
 degradation he has previously confessed to her, for a 
 former confession is referred to (pp. 5, 6), the result 
 of which emboldens this one. If we Avere to take 
 dramatically Pauline's note, in which she speaks of 
 her ' pauvre ami ' in a tone of pitying patronage, her 
 calm would be more apparent than her love, but the 
 note, with its very just criticism, is in fact Brown- 
 ing's, not 'Pauline's.' As a foretaste of the sanity 
 and reflectiveness of Browning's genius, it is extremely 
 interesting. It shows the youth of twenty, looldng 
 at his just written poem, and even then recognising 
 its indistinctness, fitfulness, and lack of balance. 
 Throughout the Confession, the young ;poet^s vivid 
 imagination of Pauline makes him address her as if 
 she, Avith her 'soft breast' and 'sweet eyes,' were 
 listening to his words, though he is really alone, 
 writing what she is to read (see Pauline's note, 
 p. 36). The chief things the poet has to confess are 
 the faults of a genius ahead of moral judgment. He 
 records no incidents, only the phases of thought and 
 feeling which underlay action, or were in great part 
 their own end, for he exaggerates his faults, and is 
 abnormally sensitive about merely imaginative sins 
 — perhaps, after all, as ' real ' to this typical idealist 
 as matter-of-fact offences. Excess of imagination 
 combined with moral wavering (p. 42), self-absorp- 
 tion, restless craving after unattainable joy and
 
 Ill INTRODUCTIONS TO THE POEMS. 51 
 
 beauty, have di-iven his now exhausted miiul into 
 every untenable extreme. He bitterly regrets his 
 loss of the freshness of youth (p. 8), his powers of 
 concentration foregone (pp. 27, 28), his aimless, 
 truthless, unlonng state. He sadly tells Pauline 
 how, Im-ed by beauty in strange eyes, he has broken 
 his allegiance. Much of his experience resembles 
 that of Paracelsus and Sordello. He is a sketch for 
 their finished portraits. Like Paracelsus, he craves 
 for knowledge (p. 28), and for a time makes that his 
 god. Still more like Aprile, and with the same 
 artistic and poetic temperament, he forsakes duty to 
 follow after loveliness. Most like Sordello, in his 
 ' first dawn of life ' be fancies himself all the bright 
 heroes of childhood (p. 16), and, grown man, resem- 
 bles him in despair of translating his passion and 
 insight into any form that can influence the many 
 (pp. 19-25), and so essays to be himself his All-in-all 
 (p. 31). Like those other three, the mind of this 
 first of Browning's characters clears again (pp. 39, 40, 
 45). Through all his wanderings, he never loses 
 sight of some fixed stars. His ' yearning after God ' 
 (pp. 15, 37), partly obscured by a fatuous fatalism 
 (p. 15), never dies, and he longs to see and be loved 
 by Chri.st (p. 38). Then, too, introductory to the 
 beautiful address in which Browning glorifies Slielley 
 under the title of ' Sun-treader ' (pp. 9, 10, 11), tli^ 
 poet says — 
 
 " the glow I felt at HIS {i.e. Shelley's) awunl 
 AiiHured me all was uot extiuct withiu."
 
 52 BROWNING. chap. 
 
 He speaks of first poetic efforts being half original, 
 half imitative (p. 19), and the reader hears echoes of 
 Shelley in various lines. The poem closes with an 
 invocation to him. At that time Browning was 
 steeped in Shelley. He has always expressed intense 
 admiration for the earlier poet, the most aerial 
 charming the most indubitably human ! Music is 
 another voice that appealed to Pauline's lover. In 
 this first work, Browning speaks of music (p. 18) 
 as the one language of innermost soul, not mind, 
 exactly as in Abt Vogler (1864) and Charles Avison 
 (1887). One speaks ad^dsedly of Browning's con- 
 tinuous unity of thought and purpose ! Again, the 
 poet speaks of the limitless dreams opened to him 
 by Plato (p. 20), but at the failure (p. 21) of such 
 hopes of life's perfectibility he denies all goodness 
 (p. 22). This dark mood is too foreign to his natui-e 
 to last. Beauty and desire are stronger temptations 
 than negation to this poet as typical as Keats. 
 Browning's intense susceptibility to the charm of 
 Greek life and myth are as marked in Pauline as 
 ever later. Whenever, even in his most analytic 
 years. Browning approaches Hellas, he becomes 
 simpler and more direct, his hand to a perceptible 
 extent subdued to what it works in. That cameo, 
 the passage that describes Andromeda (pp. 29, 30), 
 would grace the finest anthology. The lines referring 
 to Agamemnon, Ajax, and Orestes (p. 26), and the 
 'pale sister,' Antigone (p. 43) are equally poetical. 
 Separated in subject, yet akin in interpenetrative
 
 Ill ixTRODrrxioxs to the poems. 68 
 
 imagination, are the lines on Christ's sorrow and 
 tiiuniph (p. 38). England was a potent word to 
 Browning (pp. 31, 43) while Italy was still unknown 
 eiirth. Tlw poet and Paidine are to go to her native 
 pines and snows, there his humility and her love 
 shall fit him for truer life. Pauline is fuller of 
 ' poets' poetry ' and of nature than any later work. 
 The faithful reporting of natiu-e, after impassioned 
 contemplation of it, in such passages as the spring 
 morning (p. 5), the bird mounting the tree (p. 32), 
 the pool (p. 33), the forest water (p. 34), those 
 Shelleyan snakes, and, not least, the li\'ing natiu'e 
 of Paidine's eyes and cheeks and neck (p. 40) need 
 no commentator. Though full of poetry in 1832, 
 Browning had not yet foimd his true walk, i.e. 
 souls dramatically revealed, poetry resting on a 
 substantial prose basis. 
 
 Paracelsus, 1835 (Vol. II.), met, on publication, 
 with at all events one competent re\iewer. In his 
 article, 'Evidences of a New Dramatic Poetry,' 
 John Forster wrote, "Mr. Browning is a man of 
 genius, he has in himself all the elements of a gi-eat 
 poet, philosojjhical as well as dramatic." Paracelsus 
 is chiefly in dialogue, but though in one sense 
 intensely dramatic, the poem is no drama, and, by 
 a note to the first edition, Browning secured it from 
 l)cing so regarded. Incidents Uikc no i)art in Paracelsus, 
 though it is less remote from action than I'auUM, 
 and, to a much greater extent, its crises of tlutught 
 and feeling presage or follow events. The narnitivo
 
 54 BROWNING. chap. 
 
 is definite, 'no problem for tlie fancy but a life 
 spent and decided ' (pp. 40, 41). Browning's erudite, 
 eight-paged note at the end of the poem gives history's 
 account of Bombastus Paracelsus (1493-1541), a 
 famous name in the progress of chemistry and 
 medical science, a 'prodigious genius,' according 
 to Lavater. He was German or German -Swiss, 
 contemporary with Luther, Zuinglius, Erasmus, and 
 Frobenius. He introduced the use of mercury and 
 laudanum, and his writings foreshadow some of the 
 most productive discoveries of modern times. Wonder- 
 ful tales were told of magic residing in his sword, 
 Azoth. The discoverer of laudanum was naturally 
 associated with sorcery, at a date when the Ages of 
 Roger Bacon, elixir vitse, and the philosopher's stone 
 had scarcely succumbed to printing and Luther. 
 Paracelsus himself sought science through astrology 
 and alchemy, and, if research and experiment scattered 
 his belief, he continued to impose on others' credulity. 
 As a lecturer he was boastful and domineering, and 
 instead of answering the sages, burned their books. 
 Exposed as an impostor, he had to vacate his Basel 
 professorship. He wandered through many lands, 
 restlessly pursuing knowledge. The father of 
 chemistry, a world benefactor, a drunkard and 
 pretender, he died in a hospital cell. This was 
 history's Paracelsus. What is Browning's ? Paracelsus 
 is in five parts ; in the first, Paracelsus is on the eve, 
 perhaps, in the midst, of a crisis. The last links 
 between the lowly charities of home feelings and
 
 Ill INTRODUCTIONS TO THE POEMS. 55 
 
 his proud, unquestioning flight are snapping in this 
 Wiirzburg garden, where ' Paracelsus aspires ' to 
 knowledge. Part I. is a conversation between him 
 and Festus, with an occasional word from sweet 
 Michal. This night precedes the departure of 
 Paracelsus on his quest. Festus, who has always 
 adored his genius, prophesied his transcendency, 
 and cherished his spirit (p. 11), now, when Paracelsus 
 touches 'the brink of his design' (p. 11), seems 
 faint-heartedly dissuading him from what his previous 
 encouragements might have prepared him for. He 
 is really dissuading him from the immolation of all 
 life's good except what comes from grappling physics 
 and metciphysics to force them to render up the 
 wonderful secret which Paracelsus believes can, when 
 once seized, be v\Tung out in one ineffable moment 
 to raise and magnify mankind. Paracelsus abjures 
 Black Arts (p. 19), "too intimate a tie connects him 
 with God." but in his undisciplined expectation of 
 some universal secret he belongs to a half art, half 
 science period. Paracelsus starts with entire self- 
 confidence (p. 20), and a convenient belief that he 
 is (Io<l'8 organ (pp. 17, 27-28), working Clod's will. 
 In sublime prophecy, pathetic in the light of subse- 
 •juent non-fulfilment, he declares his conviction oi 
 'God's commission' to him (p. 11) to go forth and 
 conquer knowledge for mankind. There is already 
 a vague 8f)phisticjdnes3, a mixture of motives, in 
 Paracelsus. We share tht? siidne.ss and doubts of 
 I'V'stus whose hero-worship of his fnVnd and agree-
 
 56 BROWNING. ohap. 
 
 ment with his theories are disturbed by an uneasy 
 instinct he is powerless to define that ' Aureole ' is 
 entering on a self-willed, arrogant course. \.t every 
 objection Festus raises, Paracelsus routs his arguments, 
 floods him with oratorical rhetoric (p 20), or stuns 
 him with his self-belief. He further confounds his 
 impressible, somewhat ineffectual friend by a genuine 
 sympathy with his ideals, a true sense of what he 
 himself renounces. Paracelsus, Festus presently 
 acknowledges, is so exceptional that he does right 
 to take an exceptional course. God has a special 
 message to deliver by such angel -men, and woe to 
 the dullards who would restrain them. Paracelsus 
 mistakenly imagines his 'vast longings' God -sent 
 (p. 13), and, ignorant of himself, condemns those 
 who believe in their ' innate strength ' (p. 17). Festus 
 timidly questions the sincerity of his friend's self-anni- 
 hilation in devotion to ' God's will,' whether, for all he 
 fancies, a more personal ambition does not mingle with 
 the nobler one, whether he discerns his path clear as his 
 desire (pp. 17-18). With overwhelming eloquence, 
 Paracelsus deprecates rather than meets this objection 
 (p. 19). Then Festus urges the solidarity of great 
 thinkers. Should not Paracelsus rather receive learn- 
 ing's torch from Aristotle (p. 22), and pass it on, than 
 stand solitary '! If Paracelsus really cared for J^ruth, he 
 Avould gladly accept it from whatever source (p. 22). 
 Paracelsus reveals his weakness in his contempt of 
 men (p. 24), his standing, even while their benefactor, 
 aloof from their lives (pp. 29, 30). He fancies it
 
 Ill IXTKODITTIOXS TO THE TOEMS. 67 
 
 disiiiteresteilness, and the voice which whispers so, 
 Gotl's voice (p. 2G). Of course there is also the 
 noltly scientific spirit in his determination to take 
 notliing on trust, to lightly esteem knowled<,'c at 
 seconil-hand, and insist on interrogating nature direct. 
 In reading pp. 26, 27, we yearn towards Paracelsus, who 
 is most self-sacrificing as we commonly coiuit sacrifice, 
 and whose faults are " brave sins which saint when 
 shi-iven.' Paracelsus points to the sages' failure in 
 remedying misery (p. 28); he will adventm-e apart 
 from their lore. Michal's readier womaidy belief 
 entirely elicited (pp. 28, 29, 38), she yet joins Festus 
 in predicting danger from spurning love and fellow- 
 feeling (pp. 30, 31). Paracelsus asserts that a]»solute 
 knowledge is shut in a man's brei\st, to be extracted 
 thence (pp. 34, 35), not, as he finds later (p. 169), to 
 j)enetrate therein by experience and })ainful toils. 
 Paracelsus entertains hopes, significant, in their uii- 
 justifiableness, of his almost unconscious defect 
 (p. 37). His outlook is terribly far from the perfect 
 outlook described in SordcUo, the two sights God 
 has conceded man. Paracelsus has the sight of the 
 ' whole work,' he ignores, or confounds with it, 
 the 'minute's work.' 
 
 By Part II., nine years have elapsed, and Para- 
 celsus is at Constantinople, at a fortune-teller's he 
 has 8to«jped to consult. He has just written, in the 
 guest-book, the sum of his life thus far, and he makes 
 this a halting-point whence to review his gains. We 
 know they are disiippointiiig before he coiuits tliem.
 
 58 BROWNING. 
 
 CHAP. 
 
 Wasted in strength, lowered in spirit (p. 48), inserting 
 his chronicle among others still more unsound (p. 40), 
 he is despising the dupes around him equally with 
 the Greek adept. His hunger for knowledge has 
 become wolfish (p. 44), he can no longer control it 
 (p. 45). On pp. 47, 48, 49 he reaches a climax of 
 bitterness, after which he reflects that, after all, since 
 God has not sent a warning like Constantine's cross 
 (p. 50), he must yet be meant for great things. Here 
 Aprile's wail breaks in. The Italian poet, the ' lover, 
 had tried to live by art, beauty, and emotion, as the 
 German philosopher, the ' knower,' by science, power, 
 and intellect. Both fail because each is half of a dis- 
 severed whole (p. 65). The Shelley-like Aprile gives 
 glorious expositions of the artist's passion (pp. 56-64). 
 Though his trials have been different, Paracelsus is 
 pierced when Aprile attributes his own failure to hav- 
 ing gazed upon the prize till blinded to the ' patient 
 toil ' (p. 59). Finally they bind themselves, Paracel- 
 sus, to love ; Aprile, to know ; but the tenderness of 
 Parcelsus cannot save Aprile's life. He dies, leaving 
 Paracelsus with one first attainment — the discovery 
 that love must work with knowledge. 
 
 In Part III., Paracelsus is a lecturer at Basel. 
 Apparently he has learned little from Aprile. That 
 germ has yet t<> develop. To illustrate to Festus his 
 interest in simple life, Paracelsus describes (p. 72) a 
 death -bed he has lately tended. This passage is 
 worthy to be placed beside Shakspere's death of Fal- 
 staff. Paracelsus explains his half mocking, half wistful
 
 Ill INTRODUCTIONS TO THE POEMS. 59 
 
 talk by confessing his deterioration. He is dissatis- 
 fied mth his discoveries (pp. 90, 91), and disgn.sted at 
 the stupid opposition of his patients and of liis disciples 
 (pp. 84-87, 92) — to whom he gives only inferior 
 knowledge (p. 104). Former hopes gone, he is en- 
 slaved by former habits of thought. He has reached 
 the obverse of his infatuated idea of God's will 
 (p. 88), confesses his sensual excesses, and admits 
 Ills failure in assimilating Aprile's lesson (pp. 95, 96). 
 Festus tries to calm his maddened talk (p. 101). 
 Again the only solution for Festus is in believing 
 his friend beyond men's scope of judgment (p. 102). 
 Lastly, Paracelsus sadly acknowledges that 'love, 
 hope, fear, faith,' and not intellectual gains disparted 
 from these, 'make humanity.' He is learning, but 
 slowly as yet. 
 
 Part IV. shows Paracelsus in the depths of outward 
 degradation. Liechtenfels, referred to here, was a 
 pjitient, recovered by laudanum, who refused liis fee. 
 The authorities being applied to, Paracelsus raised 
 such a brawl against them, that he had to leave Basel 
 for Alsatia. Again 'aspiring,' but in a reckless, 
 revengeful mood, he explains to Festus tluit he 
 re-eml>races his earliest aims (p. 118), but sings, in 
 an exquisite lyric, the requiem of the old means 
 (p. 119). He now intends to enjoy and know 
 (p. 121). Presently ho subsides into feverish self- 
 Ifjathirig (pp. 124, 137), calling his life only a make- 
 fihift, a Hhufliing U) the grave. Jiy a paral)lc, itsi-lf a 
 «j)lendid j»ocm. complete, musical, arid dear, lio
 
 60 BROWNING. ohap. 
 
 symbolises the fate of mistaken choosers who " have 
 no heart " to choose afresh. Festus (p. 1 34) blames 
 Paracelsus for his want of humility, his attempted 
 tyranny over God. Only in that way, Paracelsus 
 replies, can such as he serve God (p. 135). Again, 
 Festus shrinks from condemnation. An exquisite 
 gleam occurs when Paracelsus, with unusual humility, 
 expresses his hope of immortality. The solemn 
 newness of his belief is unmeaning to the tame 
 orthodoxy of Festus. 
 
 In Part V. we come to the last Attainment. The 
 tender friend seeks to pierce the dying man's lethargy. 
 Thoughts of Aprile (p. 145), the torture men's scorn 
 has cost him (p. 153), a recollected visit to a witch 
 (p. 148), swim before Paracelsus. Festus, like Brown- 
 ing's David, recites a sweet nature-poem (p. 158) and 
 soon after a great quietness falls on Paracelsus. In 
 his person, Browning expresses a doctrine, frequent 
 in his works, rather to be felt than defined, i.e. that 
 God's praise rises in any case, and that He sees 
 deeper in forming his praisers and their way of 
 praising than men guess (pp. 164, 165), Paracelsus 
 has a magnificent vision of creation, culminating in 
 its interpreter, man. Each phase of earth's evolu- 
 tion is a thrill of God's joy. Man has to love, 
 learn, be patitmt. But evolution has not ended with 
 humanity as we know it ; the race is to be liberated 
 and perfected in each of its members, and to help 
 this forward men like Paracelsus are born. Patience, 
 sympathy, wisdom were what he lacked. He noAV
 
 iifc INTRODUCTIONS TO TIIK POEMS. 61 
 
 compieheiuls all, and hopefully his great soul dis- 
 appears. 
 
 Strafford; A Tragedy, 1^37 (Vol. II.), came out 
 a year alter the Lite of ►Suatlord in Lardner's Eminent 
 British Statesmen. This life, published unilcr Forster's 
 name, was com])leted, peihaps chieHy written by Brown- 
 ing with materials supplied by Forster, who was ill and 
 anxious about the volume's completion, ^\'hatever may 
 have been the extent of Browning's assistiince to 
 Forster, the biography furnished the basis and point of 
 view^ of the drama, and is an invaluable companion to it. 
 
 Act I., Scene 1. The play opens in November (or 
 September), 1639. Ireland is under sword-law and 
 the Scots' Parliament is just dissolved. England has 
 had no Parliament for ten years, and her leaders 
 believe that the growing despotism is due to the 
 'aiK)state,' Wentworth. The fervent Vane, the 
 mfxlerate Hampden, Kudyard, even Wentworth's 
 brother-in-law, Hollis, are gathering, up their pent 
 indignation U) bring him to doom. Oidy Pym 
 l>elieves that, from very disgust with Charles, his 
 once dwir friend may yet be theirs. In Scene 2, 
 La<ly Carlisle, who loves the stern, heroic Wentworth, 
 reveids to him the Queen and Coiut's ill-will. Went- 
 worth, wholly absorbed in king-worship, but worn and 
 broken by the half trust reposed in him by Charles, 
 has been meanly summoned to undertiiko the Scots' 
 war, U> thrust I^uid's Service-book down their throats 
 at the sword's i>oint. He entirely depreaites the 
 
 ' See Preface to ttrst edition of StToffonl.
 
 62 BROWNING. chap. 
 
 expedition, though he is to bear its odium. With 
 noble, disarming honesty, Pym strives to regain him, 
 but no de\dation of career is possible to Wentworth. 
 Created Earl, Strafford begs his kingly idol to summon 
 Parliaments, both for levies, and support against 
 Scotland. The taunts of the pernicious Queen soon 
 obliterate in Charles the uncongenial influence for 
 constitutional instrumentation. In Act II., the Short 
 Parliament has been convened, to be outraged by a 
 demand for twelve subsidies (about £840,000). The 
 leaders' bitterness waxes. Only Pym's hope of 
 Strafford is augmented by Charles's speedy dissolution 
 of Parliament. In Scene 2, Strafford finds himself 
 shamefully crossed by Charles in his plans for the 
 'Bishops' war.' He almost reviles the unthankful 
 King, whose one care is to screen himself behind 
 Strafford's thorough devotion, but, Pym and Hamp- 
 den entering, stronger instincts rush back, and 
 Strafford, solemiily challenged by the disillusioned 
 Pym to answer for his crimes, tenderly warned by 
 Lady Carlisle, the storm gathering darkly around 
 him, hurries from the presence to fulfil the King's 
 wiU. By Act III., Scene 1, the Long Parliament 
 has been reluctantly called (November 3rd, 1640). 
 Foiled by the Scots, Charles, without consulting 
 Strafford, has made a truce. This is England's 
 turning-point. The Commons, not the King, are 
 now supreme, and their first work is to arraign 
 Strafford. In this juncture (Scene 2), Charles has 
 selfishly summoned him to help him through a critical
 
 Ill INTRODUCTIONS TO TlIK POEMS. 63 
 
 time, though all know that Strafford sacrifices every 
 chance of sjifety by appearing in London. When, 
 v^ith unswerWng fidelity, he arrives, a new energy 
 inspii-es him. Ho reveids to Lucy Percy his intention 
 of impeaching Pym and the ' Cabal ' for treasonably 
 in\'iting a Scots invasion. She cannot bear to tell 
 him that his own impeachment is in hand. Scene 3 
 depicts the hub-bub near the doors of the House 
 while Pym's attack on Straftbrd is going on. On 
 learning his fall, Strafford again almost abjvu-es his 
 false master. In Act IV., Scene 1, we are in the 
 midst of Strafford's Trial. Hollis is at Whitehall to 
 find whether the King will be heartless enough to 
 escape by thro>nng Strafford to the people. After 
 much ^\Tetched shuffling, Charles engages in a 
 desperate plan — depending, however, on Strafford's 
 unlikely assent — to save him by the army. Mean- 
 while Strafford has defended himself with colossal 
 ability, basing his rej)lies on the novel meaning his 
 opponents put to ' treason.' (Scene 2) It is in vain. 
 Pym concentrates every engine, bars every escape. 
 Vane, Pudyard, Fiennes beseech him to stop short 
 of the Bill of Att-iinder, but the public security is Pym's 
 supreme law, and England recjuires Strafford's death. 
 In Scene 3, Pym, disregarding Charles's promises 
 and penitence, warns him of the danger of refusing 
 his assent to the death-warrant, and thereby wrings 
 the act of infamy from him. Act "\'. oj)ens with 
 Uuly Carlisle'H scheme of rescuing Straflord. Scene 2 
 represents Strafford iiiipiisone<l, still trusting to the
 
 64 BROWiVING. chap. 
 
 King's plighted word to save him. Hollis shatters 
 this remnant of faith, to leave Charles writhing in 
 ineffectual remorse before his martyr. The plan of 
 rescue, accepted by Strafford for his master's sake, is 
 averted by Pym. At last, the two men stand face 
 to face as men, and no longer as embodied forces, des- 
 potism incarnated in Strafford, despotism's vengeance 
 in Pym. In the new light of ruin and death, Went- 
 worth partly descries that his love for England has 
 worn the mask of hate, and that Pym, not himself, 
 has been her real helper. But still the ruling passion 
 is devotion to the Stuart, 'the man and not the 
 king,'i whose life Strafford, foreseeing the future, 
 implores Pym to spare. 
 
 Truth to character rather than historical precision 
 of facts and events is the aim of the drama. It is in 
 this play following on Paracelsus, that Browning's 
 strong sympathy with the world's failures begins to 
 impress us. Unlike Charles I., Browning is 
 
 " of those who care the more for men 
 That they're unfortunate."^ 
 
 Sordello, 1840 (Vol. I.), is the story of a poet's 
 inner life. Difficulties of composition are greater in 
 Sordello than in any other of Browning's works. 
 Tantalising and tedious in parts, it is to many readers 
 his most fascinating poem, over which his unique 
 imagination seems to brood most lovingly. The pre- 
 fatory letter is Sordello's most valuable comment. 
 
 1 p. 241. 2 p_ 237.
 
 Ill INTRODUCTIONS TO TIIK POEMS. 65 
 
 The continuous headings, added in 1863 anil designed 
 to exphiin the poem, are al)sent from the hist edition. 
 Browning seems to tell Sordello's ^ story just as it first 
 struck anil shaped itself to hira, an inartistic, though 
 natural, process. Tirahoschi, Storkt della Lett end a la 
 Italiami, IV. 3G0, and Mm-atori, Annali iVItalki, Tomo 
 Sett into, may be referred to, the one for suppositions con- 
 cerning Sordello's identity and c<areer, the other for the 
 historical characters and facts the form and pressure of 
 which compose the backgi'ouiul. The skeleton of the 
 poem is as follows. Book the First. I*lace, Verona ; 
 period, e<irly thirteenth century. Pp. 52-54 — To hear 
 his unexampled story, Browning summons dead and liv- 
 ing. He gives twa scenes of a night in Verona. (1) In 
 the market-place. 55 — Disturbing news has come that 
 the city's prince, Kichard of Saint Boniface, ally of 
 Azzo of Este, the Guelf ' lion,' is entrapped in Ferrara, 
 while seeking to thntst thence Taurello Salinguerra, 
 Ecelin Romano's su})porter. (G7 — Struggles preceding 
 Richard's capture are narrated.) 5G-63 — Envoys, 
 Ijurghers, fighters help Browning to describe the em- 
 broilment. The Lombard League, fifteen cities, must 
 nmsom Richard. The Emperor's descent on Italy is 
 feared. 59, GO — ^His barons are compared to sea rocks, 
 the more democratic Papal party to the growth of 
 weed. 61 — Tin.' naturalisation of the foiiuidable 
 family of Ecelo (' liill-ciit ') is describi'tl. (i') Inside 
 Richard's palace G3, 64 — The heroine has just left 
 Sonh'Ilo, at some crisis, but for us a glimpse only. 
 
 ' Sec Dniite, I'unjntorio, VI. 68-81. 
 V
 
 66 TROWNING. chap. 
 
 65 ■ — Browning turns and proposes to disentwine 
 Sordello, Dante's forerunner in Italian literature, 
 from the great name in Avhich his own has become 
 lost. 66 — We are moved back thirty years, and 
 within Goito Castle, in Mantuan land, a lonely boy 
 feeds his imagination from carvings and tapestry. 
 This castle is Ghibellin Adelaide the Tuscan's, Ecelin's 
 wife. 69 — Here too lives Palma (Dante's ' Cunizza '), 
 Ecelin's daughter by Agnes of Este. Sordello's poetical 
 temperament is described in a look forward, not this 
 time into his ' out- world,' but into his developing 
 character. 72 — He is of the better class of poets, 
 separate from, and above their works. 73 — -Two 
 dangers threaten such, inactivity through despair of 
 achievement, and impotent strife for completeness. 
 Both forms of 'leprosy' will be Sordello's. 75 — 
 The mystery and isolation of the child's life are 
 traced. 78 — Naddo, the Trouvere, is common-place 
 sense incarnated. 76, 77 — Sordello outgrows con- 
 tentment with the ' pretend ' life of unresponding 
 flowers. 80 — He yearns to surpass and impress a 
 world more real than the woodland. 82 — His simul- 
 acrum of men is unsatisfactory, but he will make it 
 suffice. 83 — The boy cannot equal his heroes, 84^ 
 except in fancy, which, therefore, for the present, he 
 deifies, 85 — and imagines himself ideal strength and 
 grace combined, 86 — Apollo. 88 — Apollo demands 
 Daphne. Palma (designed as bride for Richard — to 
 ally Este) is she. 
 
 Book the Second. 29 — Dreaming of Palma, Sor-
 
 Ill IXTRODUCTIOXS TO THE POEMS. 67 
 
 dello comes upon her :it ;v poetic<al tournament. 94 
 — E_i,'lamor's (Kicharils Troubadour) 'Elys' theme 
 is excelled in 1»\' Sordello, who, 95 — amid applaust", 
 is made Palma's minstrel. 96, 97 — Dazed till alone, 
 Soitlello ponders the supremacy of song. 98 — Egla- 
 mor, dead of defeat, is carried past. 99 — To such 
 ;is Eglamor, art is the god they serve. 102 — Sordello 
 {jjiys tribute to the corpse, whence a symbol tlowei- 
 springs. 103 — Sordello must leiirn his origin. 104 
 — Ala.s, he is a common archer's child, but, 105 — 
 knowing his mentnl rarit}', he means yet to master the 
 world by his will, 106 — for he can enter into all 
 ideals, 107 — is no mere slave of one. 107 — What 
 self - importiince to be quenched ! 1 08 — Sordello 
 expects by consciousness of all powers and delights, 
 outstripping limited achievement in any one, to sway 
 mankind. 109 — Poetry shall be his instrument, 
 whereby to mould humanity. 110 — Called upon to 
 poetise, Sordello finds that something reached by 
 song, not song itself, is his desire. 110, 11 1 — Naddo's 
 gocxl stupidity comments on Sordello. Ill, 112 — 
 As for Sordello, his fictions so strike the Mantuans, 
 that he feai-s being spoilt for his lofty aims by their 
 flattery. 113, 1 14 — Soidello makes of spoken It;dian 
 a lite, ary language,' but greater ditliculty lies in 
 adaj)ting perception to the slow recon.struction of 
 words. He tiikes comfort from thinking that, himself 
 alx)ve his |K)etry, he, not it, is the vital concern, 1 1.') 
 — but a blow comes when he finds peo|)lc (h> imt see 
 
 ' Sec I>aiit«, /m I'ulyari /ilvqiiu), I. 10.
 
 68 BROWNING. chap. 
 
 Sordello in Sordello's characters. 116 — This audi- 
 ence is no better tlian his childish one. 117 — Years 
 pass, Sordello's ' Man-portion ' is content with ignoble 
 rewards, is sundered from his still intact Poet-half. 
 118 — Each cancels the other's action. 121, 122 — He 
 is matched with poetasters, and ' Naddo ' makes his 
 vulgar suggestions for Sordello's (and here Brown- 
 ing's) attainment of success. 124 — Distracted for 
 want of a comprehensive point of view, Sordello 
 alternately finds body alone and soul alone impractic- 
 able. 125 — Adelaide of Vicenza dying, Ecelin seeks 
 to marry his children to Gruelfs. 126 — Taurello, 
 apprised, hastens to prevent this, but only Palma is 
 still unGuelfed. 127-130 — Sordello is urged to greet 
 Taurello with song, but, disappointed of poetry's 
 second lure, he retreats to Goito to devise some new 
 foot-hold. 
 
 Book the Third. 134, 135— The river's flooding 
 rouses Sordello from artificial lethargy, through realis- 
 ing that though Nature repeats itself, Man's oppor- 
 tunities do not. Soi'dello has squandered his one 
 chance of love, pleasure, esteem. His own development, 
 not these, was his desire ; now he sees that develop- 
 ment is only attainable through experience of life. 
 139, 140 — He wasted his Mantuan life, he now will 
 gather up the fragments, act and live, however im- 
 perfectly. 141 — Palma summons Sordello to Verona, 
 142-144 — and we have returned to the night glanced 
 at in Book the First. 144-146 — Palma confesses her 
 need of and attraction to Sordello. 147-150 — Sketch-
 
 Ill INTRODUCTIONS TO THK rO?:i^IS. 60 
 
 ing the scheming Adelaide, Palma describes her 
 death-bed, Ecelin's retirement, and her own ani1)itioii, 
 stimulated by Salinguerra, to expand Adelaide's 
 Ghibellin policy. 152 — To enmesh Richard, Palma's 
 betrothal to him has still to be assumed. 153 — 
 Palma has come for Ecelin's warrant to Taurello to 
 act. That failing, she chooses this occasion to declare 
 herself. Her interests are henceforth indivisi])le 
 from Sordello. 15^ — Fate^ has placed action ^\^thin 
 Sordello's grasp. Henceforth mankind shall be 
 
 "by him themselves made act, 
 Not watch Sordello acting each ot them." 
 
 156 — Like a magician leaving his magic tree. Brown- 
 ing — at Venice — enters upon a ' Digression ' till the 
 end of tlie Book. He exalts Poet Sordello, beyond 
 and larger than his art, above Poet Eglamor, whose 
 art is his sole existence. 158 — The greater poet, like 
 the sailor, willingly describes his voyages, but, at the 
 first opportunity, departs on new explorations. These, 
 not describing them, constitute his life. 159 — Brown- 
 ing by preference chooses a sin and sorrow-burdened 
 auditor, 1G3 — since evil is inevitable in life, and each 
 human being latently loves good though apparently 
 following evil. 1 04 — But false professors of relief, be- 
 gone ! Browning, calling himself an awkward Moses, 
 smites the true rock. 165 — He vindicates his poetry 
 a« that of aprobationary world. 16G-1GH — Three cla.ssc8 
 of poeiii exist; a specimen from each is given. 169 — 
 
 ' Sfcc p. 64.
 
 70 BROWNING. chap. 
 
 Sordellos and Salinguerras are separate entities as yet, 
 171 — and Sordello's nature is designated 'agod's germ.' 
 Book the Fourth. 173, 174 — The ransoming 
 envoys and Legate appear in Ferrara. The city has 
 suffered from Guelfs and Ghibellins. 176, 177— The 
 League's delegates discuss the ill-reputed House of 
 Ecelo and the ravages around. 178, 179 — The 
 garden and statues are described that Taurello raised 
 for his wife, Retrude, Heinrich's kinswoman. 180 — 
 Sordello, arrived with Palma, is startled by to-day's 
 experience into finding humanity larger than he 
 thought. 182 — Behind their representatives, press 
 the masses. To fulfil their dumb demand for happi- 
 ness, he primarily vows himself. 185 — Will Pope 
 or Kaiser help best? 186 — He puts this question to 
 Taurello, whose answer cruelly wounds his enthusiasm. 
 As he staggers away, fresh human horrors disclose 
 themselves. 187 — His rhymes, how futile now! 
 188-190 — Salinguerra, a contrast to Sordello, is 
 musing too. 191-194 — His thoughts are occupied 
 with his past, his curious failui-es in attainment, his 
 old bitter grudge against the Estian Guelfs, his 
 Ghibellin marriage, the Guelf routing of himself and 
 Ecelin from Vicenza. 195 — Since then, he has 
 merged himself in Ecelin. 196, 197 — Taurello's 
 accomplishments are worn lightly, for utilitarian, not 
 ideal, ends. 198-203 — Ecelin's decline and present 
 monkish dotage are indeed far from that delirious 
 night they fled and fired Vicenza, when Elcorte ^ 
 
 ' See p. 104.
 
 Ill IXTKOnrCTIOXS to TIIK poems. 71 
 
 saved Adelaide and her newborn babe, while Ketnule 
 and hei-s .... Tanrello recalls Heinrich's promise of 
 the Prefecture of Lomliardy, to-day redeemed in the 
 Imperial rescript. 204 — Shall Tanrello wear Fried- 
 rich's badge? 206 — Shall young Ecelin? Taiu'cllo 
 returns to more immediate questions. 207 — A 
 marvellous simile illustrates the cool practicidity that 
 dispei-ses his reverie. 208 — Sordello begs Palma to 
 explain Ghibellin ethics. 209 — Her luisatisfactory 
 reply makes him ask if Guelfs arc better, or as bad ; 
 whether either party loves the people. 210 — Is there 
 a third and nobler cause whereby he can serve man 1 
 The deeds of Crescentius (a.d. 998) suggest the worth 
 and meaning of Kome. Kome shall typify man's 
 ciiu.se, and rebuilding Kome, SordcUo's work. 
 
 Book the Fifth. 214 — Reactionary di.sgust at the 
 brutishness of the masses overtakes Sordello. 215- 
 218 — His visionary Kome disappears. But an en- 
 couragement Sordellf) needs is given in the form of 
 an eloquent eidargement of the saying that Rome 
 was not l)uilt in a day. Progress, in poetry or 
 sTK'ial welfare, comes of collective, associated eftbrts. 
 219-222 — Strength (as Charlemagne and his 
 successors) emerged first, slowly followed by Know- 
 ledge (as Hildebrand and his). From these, new 
 combinations arose, and their full developments, in 
 which Knowledge ever tends to supersede Strength, 
 are yet to come. 223— Each advance, however small, 
 must be secure and thorough. Soidcllo may shiik 
 service if ho ch<x»8e«, but can Ik; nuw / 224, 225 —
 
 72 
 
 BROWNING. 
 
 CHAP. 
 
 His question rather is, how can he, pricked on to real 
 effort by comprehending real misery, give Crescentius- 
 like help? 226 — By inspiring action in— Taurello 
 Salinguerra ! Indifterently well received, 227, 228 — 
 he adjures Taurello to turn Guelf (since Guelfs and 
 Eome favour the multitude). Alas, Sordello looks 
 for applause too, and his speech is vitiated by con- 
 sciousness of meiit, by self-display. Half-rhetorical, 
 half -earnest, it gains Taurello's contempt for ' poesy.' 
 228-235 — Self-scorn is harder, and goaded to his 
 best, Sordello forgets himself, and with infinite 
 nobleness vindicates the Poet, while condemning 
 himself. 236 — The Poet, finest effluence of Know- 
 ledge, is, and will be, earth's king, exalted in degree, 
 but resembling other men in kind. Sordello's vision 
 of poetry distinguishes as types Dante, Shakspere, 
 and the _poet of a later age, and ends with rejoicing, 
 237-239 — which may be Browning's or Sordello's, on 
 his individual advance in securing comprehension 
 and sympathy. 240 — Taurello is stirred, not moved 
 Sordello's way. He sanctions Palma's love, recounts 
 his negative views concerning the badge, 242 — which, 
 half instinctively, half capriciously, he throws round 
 Sordello, pronouncing him Eomano's Head. 243 — 
 Emotion at high tide, Palma tells Goito's secret. 
 244 - 246 — D'-vining that Taurello's supremacy de- 
 pended on an heir, Adelaide unscrupulously concealed 
 the fact of his child's surviving that Vicenza flight, 
 in jealousy for her boy. Thus, Sordello, called 
 Elcorte's son, is Salinguerra's. 247-249 — Taurello's
 
 m INTRODUCTIOXS TO THE POEMS. 73 
 
 ambition revives ; they shall be independently power- 
 ful. 251 — A -wonderful picture is presented where 
 the exultant soldier, alone vrith Palma, describes 
 their conquering future. 253 — A sound above arrests 
 them and the end approaches. 
 
 Book the Sixth. 255 — Fate, conscious of a crisis, 
 pauses ^vith Sordello. 256— He becomes aware that 
 his life has lacked the great motive - power, love. 
 257 — Without its task -master no life is effective. 
 Some external motive must inspire Action, which 
 is a result, never a cause. 259, 260 — Sophistry 
 intervenes. Does a Sordello transcend, originate 
 law? Does he not serve men by ministering to 
 himself? 261 — He can do much for himself, little 
 for the race. 262 — Conscience suggests the value 
 of that little, now exemplified in foregoing the 
 Prefecture. 263-267— Temptation suggests every 
 specious reason against doing so. Sordello's problem 
 is hard. 268— Is not Sordello's complete bliss more 
 than a set-off against an infinitesimal diminution of joy 
 divided among the crowd ? 269— He longs for life. 
 Perhaps his world is made to quench his thirst for 
 life. 270, 271— If so, how gi-eat the error of refusing 
 the cup for the sake of some future one, and all the 
 while uncertain if he serves mankind percei)til)ly l)y 
 his denial ! 272—' Life !' why have ' sage, champion, 
 martyr,' relinq»iishe<l it then? He has not their 
 secret. To glean, not forego, experience ever seemed 
 duty to him. 273, 274— Diving deeper into truth, 
 S<jrdello perceives that Soul and Eternity are IkikI
 
 74 BROWNING. chap. 
 
 to reconcile with their necessary instruments, Matter 
 and Time. Joy comes of their correlation, Sorrow 
 comes when Soul overinforms Matter. 275 — Body is 
 short-lived. Soul eternal, and Soul seeking to reconcile 
 their difference only finds Body . . . dead. Such is 
 now the case with Sordello. 277 — But the dispropor- 
 tion between Soul and Body may be accepted and used 
 more wisely than Sordello knew. 279 — He needed 
 God, and especially God in Christ. 279 — Sordello's 
 last act is to spurn selfishness, to tread underfoot 
 the badge. Yet an insect understands adapting 
 means to ends better than Sordello did. 280, 281 — 
 Salinguerra, his ambition again cut short, marries 
 Ecelin's youngest daughter and is reabsorbed into 
 Romano. 282 — The Ghibellins aggrandise, 283 — 
 but Taurello at eighty is in easy imprisonment in 
 Venice. ,285 — Ecelin III. and Alberic deserve their 
 violent ends. 286 — Browning retains a tenderness 
 for Eglamor, 287 — quotes later Sordello traditions, 
 288 — and describes Sordello's divided Will as a fatal 
 disease. Yet, after all, Eglamor is a singing lark, 
 Sordello a higher being though undeveloped, a child 
 who sings "unintelligible words," but all the while 
 " up and up goes he." 
 
 This briefest of surveys ignores Sordello's encrusted 
 gems ; for insv/ance, of quaint adornment, as that 
 wherein the ' Soldan's pining daughter ' figures 
 (p. 129), vivid description, as of the scene and 
 mood when Palma leaves Sordello (p. 64), and 
 wondrous portraiture, as of Ecelin's daughters,
 
 Ill INTKODUCTIOXS TO THE I'UKMS. 76 
 
 "sly and tall 
 Antl curling and compliant" (p. 62). 
 
 AhcrSonhllo,n will be foiiiid that Browning changes 
 his hero, and in Soixlello himself we trace the change 
 in process. Browning's characters will always be 
 full of thought, but hereafter the thoughts will be 
 about life, not about self. 
 
 Pippa Passes; A Drama, 18-11 (Vol. III.), is 
 simpler to understand than the foregoing poems, 
 and the help of a detiiiled summary is not needed 
 towards enjoying the beauty of it and sounding the 
 depth. Fijypa I'asses is alternately idyllic and tragic. 
 Fourteen-year-old Pippa, a silk-winder, begins her 
 one annual holiday l)y deciding that during the day 
 she will fancy herself each of the four people she 
 deems happiest in Asolo. Eiich is loved, and she is 
 lonely, but Pippa 's hymn, the key-note of the piece, 
 declares the service of all God's children to ])e 
 equally vahuil)le in His sight. 80 it comes about 
 that Pippa, as she wanders round Asolo through 
 morning, noon, evening, and night, unconsciously 
 inHuences the lives of tho.se four she is fancying 
 herself, by her songs and the goodness and innocence 
 they breathe. Ottima, Phene, Luigi, Monsignor, all 
 owe to Pippa redemjjtion from evil. P^acli of the 
 day's four groups is at some crisis of character and 
 action, in which tempUition wouhl conquei-, liut for 
 the bett<'r inspiration ct>ming from the passing 
 Words. With beautiful 'dramatic justice,' in the
 
 76 BROWNING. chap. 
 
 last case, Monsignor's, Browning makes Pippa the 
 un^yitting instrument of her own protection. 
 
 The 3forning of Pippa Passes is in many respects the 
 most powerful scene in Browning. At first, Ottima 
 and her lover attempt a forced disregard of their 
 crime, but vainly. Sebald, the more accessible to 
 remorse, will not drink the red wine, for to his 
 horrified imagination it looks like Luca's blood. It 
 is the crowning ingratitude of having slain the man 
 who was good to him that tortures Sebald. Ottima 
 tries to make him face the deed more coolly, and 
 seems winning him away from conscience, when 
 Pippa passes singing, and Sebald's sa^dng recoil is 
 completed by her words. Ottima looks no longer 
 superb, but frightful, and he loathes her. Her 
 replies to his bitter words are intensely dramatic 
 in their eloquent shortness. When Sebald instinc- 
 tively feels that death is the only expiation for the 
 law of life he has outraged, even Ottima rises out 
 of her selfishness. Buried conscience revives in 
 
 "kill me, 
 Mine is the wliole crime. Do but kill me." 
 
 Her one impulse now is to protect Sebald, and that 
 being impossible, to die with him. In Pippa Passes 
 and A Soul's Tragedy Browning introduces prose 
 scenes as suitable to unimaginative characters. 
 
 When Pippa passes singing at noon, the crisis, 
 if less tremendous, is more touching. The lofty, 
 pure-minded sculptor, tricked and humiliated, is
 
 Ill INTRODUCTIONS TO THE POEMS. 77 
 
 dismissing the liriilo who has been palmed upon liiiu, 
 when a new idea, suggested by Pippa's song, strikes 
 him. Instead of being the raised in love, shall he 
 nut be the raiser, the sculptor of a mural Galatea, of 
 this woman 'with the new soul'? So the diviner 
 spark is elicited from this apparently hopeless love. 
 
 The young patriot, Luigi, who acts from impulse 
 and feelings, believes it his duty to assassinate the 
 Austrian iiiler, therefore his temptation lies in being 
 di.ssuaded from his resolve. His mother works on 
 him to desist, through her love and the remembrance 
 of a young girl, Chiara. Here the most beautiful 
 of Pippa's songs interposes, to remind Luigi that, 
 for the sake of the ideal 'king,' he must destroy 
 the 'Python' at Vienna. The poetry of Noon, 
 especially that exquisite pas.sage beginning 'last 
 year's sunsets, and gieat stars,' has the pre-eminence, 
 but the motive of action is not equal to the others. 
 The meanings assigned to duty and temptation are 
 tictitious, and the benefit of Pippa's song is accidental, 
 f<jr only owing to an official blunder is Luigi's departure 
 for Vienna unmolested. 
 
 In Part IV., the little silk-winder being found to 
 be Monsignor's niece, who.se inheritance he has 
 wrungfidly enjoyed, the deadly tem[)tatiun to have 
 her ma<le away with is di.ssii)ated by the sweet 
 words of passitig Pipj)a. 
 
 "Su<Meiily find took me" 
 is the closing line. Hearing this, the Bishop, who
 
 78 BROWNING. chap. 
 
 was to have let a devilish man take the unconscious 
 singer, can bear the hideous idea no longer. Lastly 
 we see Pippa back in her bed-room, babbling to her 
 martagon lily, never dreaming how near she has 
 come to-day to the inner lives of Asolo's Four chosen 
 Ones. In this play Browning impresses what Pippa 
 cannot know, i.e. how mistaken an estimate we may 
 form of the happiness of others, and hoAV little the 
 appearance of well-being may mean, for was not 
 the mill -girl happier than the people she fancied 
 ' Happiest ' ? 
 
 King Victor and King Charles ; A Tragedy, 
 1842 (Vol. III.), is a page from Sardinian history. 
 In 1730, Victor Amadeus, first King of Sardinia, 
 abdicated in favour of his son, Charles Emanuel. 
 In 1731, he attempted to resume the crown. The 
 only divergence from fact is in the close of the play. 
 In Charles, Browning depicts a man whose master- 
 motive is the sense of responsibility. His character, 
 set over against his father's, represents the moral 
 triumph of honesty and candour over intrigue and 
 guile. Inferior to Victor in mental calibre, Charles 
 attests Browning's line in La Saisiaz, 
 
 "Weakness nevei" needs be falseness," 
 
 First Year, 1730. King Victor. Part I. We are 
 first acquainted with the stunted life dragged on 
 by Prince Charles and his wife, Polyxena, in Victor's 
 court. Ignored till his brother's death made him 
 heir, Charles has ever been sneered at and insulted
 
 Ill INTKODITTIONS TO THE POEMS. 79 
 
 by his father and the minister, DOrniOii. When 
 the tragedy opens, their ' policy ' has exposed 
 Victor to such threatened vengeance from Spain and 
 Austria, who have been disgracefully deceived, and 
 from an overtaxed people, mad with wrongs, that 
 he decides to escape by passing on the crown, with 
 its responsibilities, to his son. Charles is at first 
 ignorant of the intended abdication and its causes, 
 antl he takes D'Ormea's self-interested dissuasions 
 from kingship as conveying his father's wish that 
 he should retire from the succession. Sickened of 
 painful and fruitless efforts to cope w'iih state- 
 papers, Charles determines to forestall matters by 
 voluntarily retiring. Part II. D'Ormea seeks to 
 dissuade Victor from alxlication, knowing what 
 ruin the abrupt change means for him, but the 
 second-rate knave looks in vain for consideration 
 from the abler one. When Charles enters, his own 
 intended resignation gives him nerve and self- 
 respect that surprise Victor. Charles accepts the 
 pilotiige of the sUite — to Polyxena's dismay. She 
 suspects all Victor does, and judges his abdication 
 a temporary ruse. Alieady, the fiim dignity of 
 Charles's view of his new responsil)ilily ilisconccrls 
 his father. D'Oraiea tries to leave the ship he 
 liclicves sinking, but is retiiined by Charles, whose 
 moral uprigiitness is as.sociated with a hesitant 
 weakness, which his wife's stronger mind .strives to 
 correct. Second Year, 1731. King Charles. I'art I. 
 In a year, Victor is weary of retircim-iit, aiid Cli.iiles
 
 80 . BROWNING. chap. 
 
 having supplanted the crooked ways of the last 
 administration by right dealing, and re-established 
 the realm in respect and content, the crown again 
 offers attractions to the perfidious ex -king, now 
 'Count Tende.' He steals to Rivoli Palace, and 
 his monologue there is the finest study in the 
 drama. Till Victor appeared, Charles had not 
 altogether believed him capable of this perjured 
 close to his strategical abdication. Victor of course 
 shows himself utterly ignorant of the depths of 
 faithfulness and responsil^ility in the nature of 
 Charles, who however ignores his father's real 
 design, and even attempts to screen it. Part II. 
 Victor's conspiracy, spied upon by D'Ormea, 
 approaches its climax. Charles still mistrusts 
 D'Ormea, (whom he has made a better man) and 
 partly to test him, partly because he will not, in 
 the last resort, resign the realm without doing his 
 utmost duty in its defence, he insists on putting 
 the minister's cautions to extreme proof. The great, 
 unwavering conscience of one of Browning's noblest 
 women comes out in Polyxena's admonition to 
 Charles to live out the dim and difficult duty of 
 supporting the crown. To Charles's anguish, D'Ormea 
 has persevered, and Victor is brought in, a prisoner. 
 This unseemly degradation is too much for the 
 son's instincts, and he returns the crown to his 
 father. But the old, fraudful life is played «ut, 
 and, acknowledging Charles's superioiity, Victor 
 dies. His last word is tantamount to an avowal
 
 Ill INTKODUCTIONS TO THK I'OEMS. 81 
 
 that his alxlicatioii provtHl the only real good of his 
 reign. 
 
 Dramatic Lyrics (ISii') was the title of Bells 
 and l\>iiu<jiaind<.<, No. 111. The sixteen poems are 
 now (lispei-sed uiuler various headings, as indicated 
 below. 
 
 Caviilkr Tunes (Vol. VI.) (1. Marching Along, II. 
 Give a Bmise, III. J loot and Saddle, originally called 
 Ml/ Wife Gertrude), are splendid presentations of the 
 royalist spirit. ' Young Harry ' is Sir Henry Vane 
 the younger. 
 
 My Last Duchess (Vol. V.) (with Count Gismond, 
 originally called Jtali/ ami France) ushers in the long 
 series of Browning's monologues. The Duchess seems 
 a first sketch for the heroine of The Flight of tlie 
 Ihirhcss. Note the signific<vnt bronze ' Neptune, 
 taming a scii - horse.' Such a Neptune Ferrara's 
 Duke would fain have been. 
 
 Count Gisnwml — Aix in Provence (Vol. V.) is a fine 
 ' impression ' of mediiEvali.sm, with its al).solute faith 
 in ordeids by battle. Among the fine touches is that 
 foreshadowing of Pompilia and Capoiisacchi in the 
 twelfth sUmzii. 
 
 Incident of the French Camp (Vol. V.) (with Soliloqui/ 
 of Vie SjHinish Cloister, originally c;dled Catnj) (French) 
 and Cloister (Spanish), vividly realises an insttxnce of 
 his 'children's' enthusiasm for Napoleon. 
 
 Sdilij^iuy of tlie Spanish Cloister (\->\. \l.) is a 
 'study' of the ingenuities of envy, hatred, malice, 
 and uncharitjiblerie.ss. 
 
 O
 
 82 BROWNING. chap. 
 
 In a Gondola (Vol. V.) is a lyric story of love, 
 every fantasy of Avhich is dogged by tragic destiny. 
 The dusk villainy of tlie ' Three,' her friends who for 
 some reason are his foes, gives the fit quietus. In 
 a Gondola is peerless in lovely grace. 
 
 Artemis Prologizes (Vol. IV.) is a fragment of an 
 unwritten large work. While her ministrant, -5^]scul- 
 apius, tends and revives the slaughtered Hippolytus, 
 Artemis recounts his death, its cause, and what 
 potency bore him to her woods and now awaits his 
 restoration. 
 
 Waring (Vol. V.) is a fantasia on the disappearance 
 from London of a modern man. The fascination of 
 mystery hangs about the character, departure, and 
 subsequent doings of Waring. The simile of the 
 unflattered lady, by which Waring's friend illustrates 
 his memory of him, evinces the very genius of 
 sympathy. Browning speaks in Waring of a certain 
 March as the month when 
 
 ' ' small birds said to themselves 
 What should soon be actual song," 
 
 a lovely infusion of imagination into observation. 
 
 Rudel to the Lady of Tripoli (Vol. IV.) reads like 
 some crusading romaunt, and may Avell be called 
 Queen Worship, under which title it and Cristina 
 originally appeared. 
 
 Cristina (Vol. VI.) contains Browning's extremest 
 statement of love being life's paramount object. 
 It is to be taken to some extent dramatically. 
 
 I
 
 Ill INTRODUCTIONS TO THE POEMS. 83 
 
 Browning condemns those who allow worldly con- 
 siderations to (juench confessed and mutual love. 
 Stcinzas 3 and 4 are particularly fine, apart from 
 their context. 
 
 Johannes Agricohi in Meditation (Vol. IV.) expresses 
 the ecstatic satisfaction of some medijeval believer 
 in predestination. Johannes 'glorifies' God by 
 blaspheming His reason and goodness. 
 
 Porphyrias Lover (Vol. V.) describes how a man 
 strangled his love, in the insane idea of so preserving 
 her passion for him from defiection. The power of 
 the poem lies in its imaginative circumstances, and in 
 the madman's ^'iew of his deed as natural and vii-tuous. 
 
 Through the Metiilja to Ahd-El-Kadr (Vol. VT.) 
 records, in mimetic measure, a desert ride. It 
 breiithes an Eastern's fanatic mysticism. 
 
 The Vied Piper ofllavwiiu; a Child's Story (Vol. V.) 
 is all fun and frolic, with an indisputable 'moral' 
 tacked on. 
 
 The Return of the Druses; A Tragedy, 
 1843 (Vol. III.), illustrates Browning's interest in 
 nice differences. Arab character is throughout the 
 drama contrasted with 'Frank' or European. The 
 actifjn ('Time — 14 — , Place — an Islet of the 
 Southern Sporades '), occui)ic.s half a day, every 
 hour of which is surcharged with incident and 
 excitement. 
 
 Act I. licgiris with the dawn of the gi-eat day 
 when the island's Christian Prefect, the scouige of 
 the Druse exiles, is t<j be .slain \>y l)jubal, and the
 
 84 BROWNING. chap. 
 
 re-incarnation of their Khalif God (Hakeem) to take 
 place in the person of Djabal, who will lead his tribe 
 under Venetian convoy home to Lebanon. Loys, 
 Djabal's Breton friend, knows no more of these secrets 
 than the yet uninitiated among the Druses. If he 
 did, he would utterly scout the notion of Djabal's 
 divinity. To-day Loys returns from Rhodes with 
 other means of delivering the Druse tribe from their 
 oppression. Act IL Djabal's inherited wrongs and 
 unique rank marked him for leadership from the first. 
 Anael, his betrothed, unconsciously lit in him the 
 enthusiasm of believing himself the latent Hakeem. 
 Once a genuine delusion, the assumption has grown 
 almost unbearable to him. It has degraded a noble 
 nature to the lying tricks of the impostor, hourly 
 more difficult to abandon. We cannot sympathise 
 with Djabal if we judge him purely by European 
 standards. It is the mingling of Frank influences 
 with the native Orientalism of his character that 
 furnishes the key to his morbid development. Anael, 
 a typical theocrat, with her burning Eastern heart, 
 unconsciously feels, by love's instinct, that Djabal 
 is merely a man, even such a one as Loys. This, 
 far from shaking her loyalty, only oppresses her 
 with a sense of terrible unworthiness in herself, which 
 prevents her from recognising the coming God, 
 and renders her unfit to share in Djabal's 'elevation.' 
 Act III. To wipe out what she considers her disgrace, 
 Anael meditates some tremendous sacrifice, some 
 ' deed ' which shall absolve her. Almost before her 
 
 I
 
 Ill INTRODUCTIOXS TO THE POEMS. 85 
 
 interview with Loys (p. *207), we feel that she is 
 nerving hereelf, and has donned the Druse weapon 
 in order to forestall Djabal in slaying the Prefect. 
 She shrinks from it, hut she will do it. Act IV. 
 Anael's words, when she emerges from the Prefect's 
 chamber and tells Djabal what she has done, are 
 thrilled with horror. The utter contrast between the 
 Prefect's self-gratulation over his safety, and his 
 instJintaneous death — with the groan Loys takes for 
 laughter — is intensely dramatic. When Djabal, over- 
 whelmed by Anael's deed, which truthfulness of his 
 would have averted, does at last confess to her his 
 deceit, her momentary rcMdsion, and then her faithful 
 love, not untouched with g]a(lnes.s, and com1)ined with 
 fearless resolution to have the truth told, lead up to 
 the last touch of her devotedness. The torrent of 
 her contempt .at Djjibal's refusal to confess his false- 
 ness to their people forces her to denounce him to 
 the Nuncio. Act V. Wlien, at the end, love, pity, 
 and pitriotism wring from her a last offering, the 
 dying cry of Hakeem,^ that turns the tide of the fickle 
 mob for Djabal, we feel that all the poetry of the 
 play concentres in Anael. Loys, the kin'ght-novice, 
 with his noble love for Anael, is a brave, maidy 
 figure. The Nuncio, sent by the Patriarch of the 
 t^ustem Church, is, whatever his corruption, at least 
 no coward. He is a specimen of Browning's favourite 
 type of a worldly ccclcsiiislic. The same general 
 features belong to liiiii as to .Mdiisigiioi- in /'iji/m 
 
 ' (,'oni|)arc Dcfidcmona's " yoboJy ; / m>/.irl/."
 
 86 BROWNING. chap. 
 
 Passes, Ogniben in A Soul's Tragedy, and Bishop 
 Blougram. Khali], Anael's brother, is Anael -^vith 
 the ever-womanly left out. His appeal to Djabal to 
 restore his sister to life is piteously poignant. The 
 swift fire of fanaticism inherent in Asiatics, the clash- 
 ing ideas and interests of various peoples, and the 
 mob's unfailing greed and unruliness form a rich and 
 picturesque background. 
 
 A Blot in the 'Scutcheon ; A Tragedy, 1843 
 (Vol. IV.), is the one play of Browning's which gives 
 an impression of painful and unconquerable dissonance 
 between plot and treatment. In Borneo and Juliet and 
 Faust, every step of the march of events is ineAdtable, 
 with that inevitableness which is the life of drama, 
 but from which Mertoun's wronging of Mildred stands 
 absolutely apart. The central subject of A Blot in the 
 'Scutcheon is inadequately motived. Mertoun's boyish 
 dread of Tresham, which he strives to plead in extenua- 
 tion, would be a wretched coward's excuse, and the 
 extreme youth of both lovers, also pleaded in extenua- 
 tion, would as such be repulsive, did we not feel that 
 both pleas are unreal. Taking the facts of her story as 
 we find them, the Mildred of Act I. is untrue to nature 
 as no character of Browning's ever was before or since. 
 The enchanting beauty of the poetry is heavily handi- 
 capped, and th3 impression the drama leaves is one of 
 staginess, slightness, and ineffectualness, almost as 
 though the planned-out work of an inferior writer had 
 been bequeathed to Browning to make the best of. 
 Act I., Scenes 1 and 2 describe the state visit of
 
 Ill INTRODUCTIONS TO THE POEMS. 87 
 
 Eiirl Mertoun to sue for the hand of Mildred Troshatii. 
 Tlie iliamond-wittcJ Guendolen discovers the flaw in 
 his suit, viz. his al>senee of anxiety to be furthered 
 in the lady's own good graces. All his diffidence is 
 expended on Mildred's brother, Lord Tresham. This, 
 and old Gerard's unexplained trouble, are our first 
 intimation that all is not well. In Tresham we see 
 a man of two ideas, fraternal affection and family 
 pride. The expected canker in the rose proves to be 
 the pre\'ious illicit love of ^lertoun and Mildred, with 
 the piteous story of Avhich Scene 3 acquaints us. 
 Mertoun's tender devotion cannot allay Mildred's 
 remorse. The glaring falseness of their betrothal is 
 torture to her deep, earnest nature. In Act II., the 
 retribution, which Mildred rightly knew was inherent 
 in the sin, ])egins to be accomplished. Tresham learns 
 that the sister he deemed so peerless receives an un- 
 known, secret visitor. Entreated to explain, Mildred 
 attempts no palliation, only refuses to tell her lover's 
 name. Tresham accepts a hushed, stained future for 
 himself and her, but first bids her dictate to him the 
 Etirl's dismissed. This she refuses to do. Wrought 
 pjist silence at such crowning depravity, and too head- 
 strong to guess the truth, Tresham calls his brother 
 and Cluendolen, and l»efore them cui-ses Mildred. 
 With womanly chivalry, Guendolen interposes, and 
 showing the pearl si<le of her character in lefusing 
 to Ixjlievc the worst, presently guesses that it was 
 Mertoun's name Mildr«d concealed. Act IIT. At 
 midnight, in the avenue, Treshiim comes upon the
 
 88 BROWNING. chap. 
 
 destroyer of his sister's honour. Challenged to 
 make known who he is, Mertoun discloses himself. 
 Tresham, inexpressibly disgusted at his perfidy, with- 
 oiit alloAving him to speak, bids him draw. Mertoun 
 suffers himself • to be mortally wounded, and falls. 
 The non-resistance and the upturned, boyish face give 
 Tresham's anger pause. Pardoning and pardoned, 
 he bitterly rues his cruel haste, but too late to save 
 the life he has taken. In Scene 2, Tresham is with 
 Mildred. She quickly divines from what deed he 
 comes, and, dying herself, grants forgiveness to her 
 brother. Tresham, whose eyes sorrow and repentance 
 have unbandaged, sees and understands the purity 
 beneath the blot, the life more sacred than the 
 'scutcheon. Nothing is left him, he feels, but to 
 follow Mertoun and Mildred, and as the poison he has 
 taken ends his life, he reminds those who hang over 
 him that only disaster and failure come when a man 
 assumes God's prerogative of judgment and requital. 
 
 Colombe's Birthday; A Play, 1844 (Vol. IV.), 
 is a drama of which the story, only imaginatively 
 historical, exactly suits the development of Brown- 
 ing's special methods. It gives scope to the all- 
 pervasive unconventionality and the creating of 
 mental zigzags and surprises that characterise his 
 ' fundamental brain- work.' 
 
 Act I. Prince Berthold, abetted by Pope and 
 kings, has just sent in his claim to his young cousin 
 Colombe's Duchy, under Salic law. The few courtiers 
 who have not openly deserted Colombe's sinking
 
 Ill IXTRODUCTIONS TO THF, POKMS. 89 
 
 fortunes are disputing which shall present the dis- 
 concerting document. Of the self-interested crew, 
 Ouucelnic is most, Guiliort least corrupt. Guihert 
 has just expressed supreme contempt for the brutish 
 People, when, from the almost empty vesti])ule, a 
 suitor. Valence, the 'advoavte' of Cleves, forces his 
 way in. He pleads Cleves' woes to his old debtor, 
 Guibert, as a means towards laying Cleves' petition 
 before Colombe. His severely simple negative to 
 the courtiers' question whether rumour bruits 
 Colombe's coming ruin convinces Gaucelme that the 
 right man to present Berthold's missive — as the 
 price of approach to Colombe — is Valence. Ignorant 
 of the contents. Valence accedes. Act H. The 
 Duchess marks the sainty attendance at her audience, 
 Init as yet no report of Berthold's enti'ance has 
 reached her. Valence, who saw Colombe a year ago 
 and loved her with a man's love beside a sul)ject's 
 loyalty, advances and descril)es his townsmen's 
 sufferings, at the same time presenting Berthold's 
 recpiisition. Coloml)e reads it, and with dignified 
 gentleness prepares to resign her coronet. Valence 
 tla.shcs his indignation at Guibert for his trickery, 
 and, turning to Colom])e, begs her to sliakc; oft" this 
 mist of c(nirtiers between herself and hei- real .subjects, 
 and remain l)uche.ss for the People's sake. Colombe, 
 inspiretl Ijy enthusiasm, congenial but hitlierto un- 
 known, defies Beilhold, dismi.sses her courtiers, and 
 takes Valence for counsellor. Act HI. liertliold, 
 arrive<l, is discussing with Melchior liis past .iml
 
 90 BROWNING. chap. 
 
 present position regarding this step towards his end, 
 the Empire. He treats the servile courtiers "vnth 
 sardonic irony, till Guibert, showing a grain of 
 conscience, or of shame at being inferior to Valence, 
 utters Colombe's defiance. Berthold, startled, even 
 pleasurably piqued, by Colombe's daring, makes 
 way as she enters talking to Valence. Colombe, 
 because she feels she has been a 'play -queen,' 
 is again inclining to relinquish her sway. Berthold 
 affects to regard the denial of his claim as her friends' 
 doing, not hers. Valence, with deep, chivalrous 
 enthusiasm, which transcends Berthold's princely 
 politeness, dispels this, and, while describing Colombe 
 as alone, describes her People as hers to live or die. 
 Berthold, entertaining a new idea, forbears fiu-ther 
 discussion, gives Valence his credentials, and with- 
 draws. The courtiers decide that Colombe and 
 Valence love each other, and retire to shape a suitable 
 policy. Colombe, best of disciples, though not of 
 solitary learners — a true woman — leaves Valence to 
 decide her coiu-se. He is torn between love and 
 duty, love urging him to lower Colombe's rank, 
 and duty to guide her towards beneficent rule. But 
 with the genius of conscience, he determines to judge 
 regardlessly of consequence. Act IV. The courtiers' 
 scheme is to "\ du Berthold's gratitude by apprising 
 him that if Colombe marries the advocate, she forfeits 
 her Duchy to himself, the next heir. Meantime 
 Valence has found Berthold's claims incontrovertible. 
 He is deprecating his own consequent joy, when
 
 in IXTRODUCTIONS TO THE POEMS. 91 
 
 Bcrthold entei"s to s;vv that he proposes to make 
 ;i.<siii-ance doubly sm-e by weddini,' Colombo — a mes- 
 s;ige he charges Valence to give her. AVhen Colombo 
 next appears, she is almost happily contemplating 
 private liberty, and Valence's task is all the harder. 
 In a speech of nobly imaginative insight, he depicts 
 the true greatness of the imperial career, then tenders 
 her Berthold's proposal. The thought of an imperial 
 lover flattei-s her, but Valence rightly deducts love 
 from the proposal. His reason asked, it is, ho 
 answers, love's instinct. The idea that Valence loves 
 is importunate and engi-ossing (so we watch Colomlio's 
 own love daAvning), and bit by bit it comes out whom 
 he loves. At present the declaration hurts Colombo : 
 the morning's serWco then was love, not loyalty, and 
 nothing is what it seems. Act V. To Bcrthold, 
 the fulfilment of ambition is an absorbing art, loved 
 for the skill's sake. "When ho states his proposal to 
 Colombo, he explicitly disclaims sentiment, proffering 
 her his Empire to be, — and regard. The courtiers 
 here spring their mine, ^vinning scant thanks from 
 Berthold. What they effect is to hasten C<ilombe's 
 decision. Neither Berthold nor his friend can c(jn- 
 ccive the la<ly refusing the Empire, and Valence 
 trembles. But love beckons sweet C<jlombe, and 
 she resigns her Duchy in order to bestow lu-rself 
 ujwn Valence. Bcrthold li;ilf regretfully admires 
 her conduct, acknowledging the Duchy she so easily 
 n-linquishcs to he. far mtire necessjiry to himself than 
 to her. Guibcrt follows the lady to Kiivestein and
 
 92 BROWNING. chap. 
 
 his former comrades are promised a sufficiently penal 
 future. 
 
 Dramatic Romances and Lyrics (1845), was 
 the title of Bdh ami Pomegranates, No. VII. The 
 contents are now distributed under other titles. 
 
 How they brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix 
 (Vol. VI.), that glorious 'stirrup -piece,' is popular 
 wherever English is spoken, and Roland is the prince 
 of poetry's horses. 
 
 Pidor Ignotus (Vol. IV.) is one of Browning's Art 
 poems and turns on an artist's personal problem. 
 Rather than lower his refined ideal to the vulgarity 
 of picture-buyers and the mart, the 'unknown painter,' 
 shrinking into himself, chooses to paint cold and life- 
 less altar-pieces. He gives up conceiving pictures 
 such as Rafael's, and sacrifices the happiness and 
 stimulus _ of such praise and love as met the work of 
 Cimabue. 
 
 The Italian in England (Vol. V.) (originally called 
 Italy in England), is a Lombard exile's reminiscence 
 of a desperate expedient, during Metternich's ad- 
 ministration, which brought him rescue at the hands 
 of a peasant girl. He lives to recall her generous 
 courage and to labour anew for Italy. 
 
 The Englishman in Italy (Vol. V.) (originally called 
 Englaml in Italy), is Browning's one purely descriptive 
 poem. ' The Englishman ' tells over to a child listener 
 details and peculiarities of the nature and natural 
 life of the Sorrento Plain and Bay of Naples. 
 Lasagne is the flat, broad macaroni. The English
 
 Ill INTKODUCTIONS TO TllK I'OK.MS. 93 
 
 Corn-laws (repealed in 184G) are compared to the 
 witherini;, oppressive Scirocco. 
 
 Thi Lid Liiuhr (Vol. VI.), records the desertion by 
 11 certain poet of the cause of liberty and proi^ress. 
 The last four lines recommend him to justify his 
 instruction l)y doughty fighting, though for the wvw 
 jKirty, opposing anil menacing the old. Time \\\\\ 
 reconvert him, antl then — for he is still loved — God 
 will panlon him and reiuiite him to his first allies. 
 
 Tlie Lost Misfn.^s (Vol. VI.) is a man's regretful 
 acceptance of friendship where love existed previously. 
 Stanzii 2 is a delicious nature note. 
 
 JIi'iiii.'-Tlii'U<ili(<; from Almnid (Vol. VI.) sketches 
 English April and May. Browning's works contain 
 no more m.agicid touches than the words describing 
 the ' Imttercups ' and 'wise thrush.' 
 
 IIouie-Thnughts, from the Sea (Vol. ^'I.) records a 
 noble question, nobly answered by Browning in his 
 gift of j)oetry to England. 
 
 7'he Bishop orders his Tomb at Saint P raxed' s Church 
 (Vol. IV.) (originally adled The Tomb at Saint Praxed's), 
 is a marvelhjus piece of craftsmanship. After read- 
 ing it, one never again hears the ' blessed mutter ' 
 in a Il«jnian church, or goes round the ecclesiastics' 
 monuments of rijinlUiio or iiero<iniico without recalling 
 the voluptuoiLs pagan of the Renaissance, who im- 
 plores his 'nephews' for gocwl marljle, good carving, 
 and Ciceronian Latin. ' Ebu-rsrrhd ' ('he shone forth ' 
 or ' w.'is not;il)le ') should be 'elucebat.' 'J'he Bishop 
 derides Ulpian's dog-latin.
 
 94 BROWNING. chap. 
 
 Garden Fancies (Vol. VI.) I. The Flower's Name is a 
 lover's delicate rhapsody. II. Sibrandus ScJmafburgensis 
 is the portentous name of the writer of a dull and 
 solemn book, a reader's merry revenge on which the 
 poem narrates. The spider 'with arms akimbo' is 
 an amusing touch of actuality. 
 
 llie Laboratory (Vol. VI.) (mth The Confessional 
 called France and Spain), is a vivid picture of the 
 intense, scorching jealousy of an unscrupulous woman, 
 who flourished when poisoning was fashionable. In 
 a speaking picture, Browning makes us see the keeper 
 of the poison shop and his fair, e\'il customer. 
 
 Tlie Confessional (Vol. VI.) is the desperate outcry 
 of an unhappy girl, whom a priest inveigled, under 
 false pretences, into telling the secrets of her lover, 
 a malcontent. Two days later, she saw her lover 
 executed. She has herself been incarcerated and 
 tortured for her impotent denunciation of priestly 
 treachery. 
 
 The Flight of the Duchess (Vol. V.) is the enchant- 
 ingly fantastic narrative of an ardent, natural young 
 girl's immurement in artificial surroundings and 
 among unloving people. The death-in-life becoming 
 impossible, she escapes, under the influence of a 
 wondrous crone, the Gipsies' Queen. The descriptions 
 of Moldavia, tl e ' middle-age-manners-adapter ' Duke, 
 the crafts of the gipsies, and the Duchess's departure 
 are particularly fresh and romantic. The lulling, 
 stimulating words the gipsy croons over the Duchess 
 are open to wide interpretation. Their didactic
 
 m INTRODUCTIONS TO THE POEMS. 9o 
 
 mysticalness is etiectively contrasted with the rough 
 and rei\dy style of the huntsman who tells the story. 
 In this poem, Browning first speaks of the distinct 
 happiness of age in restful retrospect, the harvesting 
 of ripened memories, that happy, characteristic view 
 of By the Fireside, Babhi Ben Ezra, and other poems. 
 
 Earth's Immoi-talities (Vol. VI.) reminds us how 
 oblivion swallows fame, and how love passes too, 
 and, despite its febrile promise of ' for exev,' becomes 
 as forgotten as June is in autumn's snows. 
 
 Son^ (Vol. VI.) is a lover's impassioned demand of 
 praise for his lady, who is too dear to him for his own 
 praising. 
 
 The Boy and the Angel (Vol. V.) is a kind of legend 
 of how Gabriel took Theocrite's place, that Theocrite 
 might be Pope. Both angel and boy found their 
 mistake, for God missed the 'little human praise.' 
 Each returned to his proper calling, with the chasten- 
 ing knowledge that while all service ranks the same 
 with God, Ciich creatiu-e's grace is evinced in acqui- 
 escence in the conditions of his own life. 
 
 M'ding at Xitjht and J'arting at Morning (Vol. VI.) 
 (originally called Night and Morning), are descriptive 
 and ethical, the second poem implying that as suiely 
 .•IS morning brings the sun his task, the privilege and 
 resptjnsiljility of life in the world devolve on a man 
 (op. the first lyric in FerLshtah). 
 
 Nationality in Drinks (Vol. \'I.) (two-thirds of which 
 were originally willed Clard ami Tokay), consists of 
 two lively wine fancies, French and Hungarian, and
 
 96 BROWNING. chap. 
 
 a fact concerning Nelson, whose memory is drunk in 
 ' British Beer.' 
 
 Saul (VoL VI.), one of the world's finest poems, is 
 founded on 1 Sam. xvi. 14-23. To arouse the King 
 from his terrible lethargy, David tries all his harp 
 tunes. He begins with the music that folds the 
 sheep, the music that attracts birds and insects, the 
 music of human existence. All these availing little 
 to stir Saul, David sings the joys of living, all con- 
 centrated upon Israel's King. Then he turns to life's 
 deeper harmonies, and Saul's great deeds that will 
 never die nor be forgotten. His spirit yearning over 
 Saul in his distress, a great inspiration enters David, 
 and laying aside harp and song, he prophesies, step 
 by step from his own love, which only to die for 
 Saul, if need were, can satisfy, the existence of a 
 similar love in God. It is a tremendous inference, 
 but nothing less is possible, unless the creature is to 
 surpass the creator, and David, enwrapped in vision, 
 sees and knows the Human Love in the Divine Power, 
 the self-sacrificing Christ. As David returns home- 
 ward through the night, Nature's voices are hushed 
 Avith acquiescence in or tremulous in attestation of 
 the new law, the new life. (Saul was written in two 
 parts, i.-ix., appearing in 1845, the rest in 1855, 
 among Men avd Women.) 
 
 Time's Revenges (Vol. V.) is a man's bitter reflection 
 on one-sided attraction. His friend's devotion to him, 
 Avhich he repays with contempt, is revenged by his 
 own devouring love for a heartless society woman.
 
 Ill INTHODUCTIOXS TO THE POEM.^. 97 
 
 The Glove (Vol. V.) takes up Scliillor and Hunt's 
 liallail, trwits the theme afresh, and eontinues it be- 
 yond the old conclusion, according to a new view of 
 the eomluct of the 'dame' and I)e Lorge. Instead 
 of taking the well-known superficial, and somewhat 
 brutal, riew of the episoile. Browning convincingly 
 justifies the lady in putting her knight's professions 
 to the test. 
 
 Luria; A Tragedy. 1846 (Vol. VI.), may well be 
 allied Browning's favourite drama. The character 
 of Luria, an absolutely original creation without 
 historicid kisis, is unmatched in literature. Liuia 
 shares with Othello the fervour of the Oriental, as, 
 guileless like him, he is surrounded by Italian craft 
 and guile. Luria is the most utterly unselfish and 
 lofty of men. He loved Florence so much, and was 
 so tme to her, that he woultl perish rather than 
 allow her t^j be false to him. He died to save 
 Florence from that shame. 
 
 Act I. ('Scene — Liu-ia's Camp between Florence 
 and Pisa. Time, 14 — .') Puccio, the commander 
 Luria luus superseded, is reporting to Braccio, the 
 Florentine Signoria's commissary, how Liuia stands 
 prepared for to-day's decisive battle with Pisa. 
 Jealcjus ami carping as his displacement inclines him 
 to l>e, the honest -natured Puccio c^iimot forbear 
 leHtifying to Luria's consununate conduct. This 
 messiige is never destined to reach Florence. Braccio 
 tears the n-jKJrt as soon as Puccio leaves him, substi- 
 tuting a missive U> the efVect that as the Pisans are 
 
 H
 
 98 BROWNING. chap. 
 
 sure to be defeated by Luria, the baseless trial (which 
 has been secretly proceeded with in Florence) and 
 sentence of the Moor may be completed. Braccio's 
 Secretary expostulates, but Braccio has determined 
 Luria's fate. Depending on no evidence, he merely 
 takes dangerous ambition for granted in a successful 
 commander. Florentine captains have ended their 
 career so, and, according to Braccio, it is inevitable, 
 all the more in an alien. Braccio regards, or affects 
 to regard, a Moorish mercenary as a dangerous animal, 
 best treated with faithlessness. Luria, entering, 
 shows by his dalliance with the Florentines' suspicion 
 how unconscious he is of his adored city's treachery. 
 To Luria, the Italian character is extraordinarily 
 fascinating, and trustworthy for its very impassi- 
 bility. Act IL Domizia, whose House has been 
 uprooted by Florence on charges similar to that now 
 laid against Luria, is an embodied revenge, who is 
 influencing Luria for the moment when, his sentence 
 pronounced, he may rise and, with his worshipping 
 army, crush the ungrateful city. Husain, Luria's 
 friend, strives to make Luria distrust Florence and, 
 this victory won, abjure her service. But Luria's 
 feeling, his Eastern dower, is laid under a spell by 
 Florentine thought, and his one prevision is dread of 
 dismissal when Florence needs her fighter no longer. 
 Tiburzio, Pisa's commander, a generous foe, here 
 appears to offer Luria, not truce, but news and proof 
 of the Signoria's treachery. He invites Luria to join 
 Pisa. Luria will neither read Braccio's intercepted
 
 Ill INTKODUrTIOXS TO THE POE.MJ?. 90 
 
 letter, nor believe the treachery without further test. 
 Iiicii[«iWe of bjiseness, he cannot imagine but that 
 Fliirence will acquit him if he goes on steadij}' serving 
 her through this critical day. B}' Act III., the battle 
 is won, and Tilnnzio taken prisoner. Luria, who 
 thought this victory would amend all, finds he Avas 
 mistaken. Braccio admits the existence of the trial, 
 indicating the city or nation's carelessness of tlie 
 individual as necessixry to the preservation of itself, 
 the type. He disarms Luria's possible appeal to his 
 soldiery, by denominating such an appeal a justifica- 
 tion of the Signory's doubts. Hereupon, Tibiu-zio 
 again beseeches Luria to change masters, and, alone 
 and Anthout followers, take from him liis own com- 
 mandei-ship, in Pisa's name. But Luria plans a 
 difierent punishment for Florence, viz. contiimed 
 rectitude in her sernce, bound, as he believes, to 
 bring surprised recognition, with attendant shame 
 and remorse. Meantime he dismisses Tiburzio, 
 Braccio, and Domizia, assuring them that till tlie 
 sentence arrives, he remains the officer of Florence. 
 Act IV. Puccio, who reveres Luria, and Ilusain, 
 who loves him, think his vengeance on Florence, 
 by the d<nible instiument of his and the Pisan anny, 
 worthy and inevita1»le, and Ditiiiizia appeals to Luria 
 to tiike this revenge for very righteousness' sake. 
 Luria, alone again, far from assimilating the othei-s' 
 suggestions, falls U) thinking his own nicditatcMJ 
 'revenge' too cruel. .\ft«'r all, tin- Sigiiorv, iint 
 the I'eople, are false, so why liraiid these uiih
 
 100 
 
 BROWNING. 
 
 CHAP. 
 
 eternal disgrace for those ? Best disappear, his day 
 ended, like the sun of his native land. To save 
 Florence from the consequences of her 'strange 
 mistake,' he swallows a slow poison. Act V. Luria 
 explains to Puccio how to conclude the campaign 
 victoriously, when he shall have departed, though 
 not to Pisa, as Puccio thought. Overwhelmed by 
 Luria's magnanimity, Puccio refuses to supersede 
 him, and begs to be allowed to serve him. Jacopo, 
 too, the Secretary, on whom Luria enjoins the task 
 of righting the reputation of Domizia's House, is 
 won from Braccio's equivocal service, and, with his 
 heart's homage, accepts Luiia's charge. Next enters 
 Domizia, a changed woman, whom knowledge of 
 Luria has taught that revenge is a poor ambition. 
 She divines that whatever Luria now devises for 
 Florence,- is at least 
 
 "No brute-like punishment of bad by worse." 
 
 Tiburzio has used his liberty to visit Florence a,nd 
 there vindicate, as he well could, Luria's unswerving 
 loyalty. Braccio, too, acknowledges his entire con- 
 version to the truth of the Moor. During their 
 speeches, Luria has gradually grown more silent, till 
 suddenly those present find fulfilled the punishment 
 he prepared {as a punishment, unconsciously) for 
 Florence, his own death. Nothing can be more 
 beautiful and impressive than Luria's comment at 
 the close of the confession of each of his convertites, 
 that there's another for eternity. Of all the suicides
 
 Ill INTRODUCTIONS TO THE POEMS. 101 
 
 ever read of there was uever one more perfectly 
 purj^ed of self than Lnriiu 
 
 A Soul's Tragedy, 1843 (Vol. III.), is a drama, 
 the title of which is ironic, as the chief personage, 
 Chiappino, merely attitudinises. 
 
 Act I. Chiappino i.s, with Eulalia, awaiting the 
 retiu-n of Luitolfo, Eulalia's affianced lover, who has 
 gone to the tyrannical Provost to try to obtain some 
 mitigation of the sentence of banishment passed on 
 Chiappino for reviling the Provost and Provostship. 
 The graceless ingrate, Chiappino, employs the hour 
 in sneering down Luitolfo to Eulalia, and professing 
 his old love for her. This love he describes as all 
 along unspoken, because choked by the forestalling 
 glibness and hampering 'benefits' of the prosperous 
 Luitulfo. Ill - c(jnditioned in adversit}', Chiappino 
 puts an ungenerous construction on Luitolfo's deeds 
 and words and, while vaunting his own depth of 
 feeling, kve of liberty, and general superiority, 
 proves himself one who only symjiathises with him- 
 self. He h.is just denounced the craven spirit of the 
 Faentines and gibed at Luitolfo's probably magnilo- 
 quent description of an unsuccessful interview with 
 the Provost, when an agitated knocking is heard. 
 Luitolfo enters, his garments ]>lood-stained. lie 
 tells them that, gfjaded past furbearance, he has 
 struck, and, he believes, killed the Provost. To a 
 man oi weak nerve, as Luitolfo is, the reaction fioni 
 his impulsive deed, with the pro.spect of torture and 
 death, i« stupefying. C'liiajipino rises to the occasion,
 
 102 BROWNING. chap. 
 
 and almost is, what he has always considered himself, 
 heroic. He hurries the half-stunned Luitolfo out of 
 the house, with his own travelling gear and route, 
 and then puts on Luitolfo's blood-stained vest. He 
 is in a highly excited state when, the multitude 
 rushing in, the situation is instantly transformed, for 
 they reply to Chiappino's announcement, " I killed 
 the Provost ! " by hailing him as their saviour and 
 the destroyer of their oppressor. Before the scene 
 closes, we are prepared for what is to follow, for 
 Chiappino shows that the new delight of applause 
 and popularity ai'e too sweet, coming after such 
 strain, to be immediately relinquished. Act H., a 
 month later, represents Luitolfo, in disguise, mingling 
 with the populace, and hearing that Chiappino, 
 having modified his revolutionary ideas, is about 
 to be made the new Provost. To compose the 
 popular tumult, Ogniben, the Pope's Legate, has 
 come over from Ravenna, where the old Provost 
 is lying wounded but not, as was imagined, killed. 
 Ogniben has quickly taken Chiappino's measure. 
 He is now for a time fooling him to the top of his 
 bent, in order to bring him to the more complete 
 collapse. To this end, in discourse with him, he 
 carries out into glaring extremes Chiappino's 
 sophistical vindications of his inconsistency in 
 accepting the Provostship. At last the wily fisher 
 of men sees Chiappino floundering and gasping 
 in the net. Then, to moi-tify him more entirely, 
 he coolly remarks, that beside the complete depend-
 
 !ii INTRODUCTIONS TO THE POEMS. 103 
 
 ence of the new Provost on himself, uniler Kome, 
 he has another stipulation to make, which is, 'that 
 in c<ise the actual assiiilant of the late Provost is 
 discovered ' . . . a sentence cut short by a discon- 
 certed ejacxdation from Chiappino. Hereupon, 
 Ogniben, giving his victim to understand how 
 exactly he is acquainted with his false position, 
 publicly demands to have the actual assailant 
 handed over to justice. To this demand Luitolfo 
 h;is the courage to respond, whereupon Chiap- 
 pino, to esciipe the general hiss of derision, slinks 
 out of Faenza, leanng Ognibcn still master of the 
 situation. 
 
 Christmas-Eve and Easter-Day, 1850 (Vol. V.), 
 
 is the name of two imaginative religious poems. 
 The central point of each is the Divinity of Christ, 
 and each narrates a revelation in a vision. The only 
 circurastiintial link between the poems is that both 
 visions appeared on the same common. 
 
 The speaker in Christ mas-Eve is a man Avho has 
 received his religious life from nature, though always 
 recognising Divine Love above it. On this Christmas- 
 IWc, he emerges, on the common's edge, from a 
 • lissenting chajjcl in which he had sheltered from 
 the rain. Disgust at the bigf)try, the heat without 
 light, of past(»r and flock, drove him out again. 
 The Htonn is succeeded by a doul)le lunar rainlxtw, 
 and out of this appeals tin; Figure of Christ, almost 
 an though in resiK>nse to an intuitive cxpecUition 
 thiit a yet more solemn splendour wius about to be
 
 104 BROWNING. chap. 
 
 revealed. As in ff dream, terrified, not surprised, 
 he seizes the hem of Christ's garment, and is borne 
 along by it to Saint Peter's at Rome, where Christ 
 enters, he following Him. At first, he hesitated to 
 do so, feeling that Christ would not expect him to 
 worship amid so much error. Then he reflects that 
 the love of those worshijjpers' forefathers is what 
 once dissipated by its spirituality the earthliness of 
 the antique world, and that if their descendants' 
 love is still infantine, it is nevertheless love. Again 
 he is caught up in the vestiire, and carried to a 
 Gottingen lecture-hall, Avhere a Professor is disposing 
 of the Myth of Christ. Eliminating Christ's Divinity, 
 the lecturer yet calls for enthusiasm for His intellect 
 and goodness. 'Christ's intellect,' comments the 
 listener, 'is no higher a title to veneration than 
 other men's, and rather the less, on account of His 
 claim to Divinity, supposing Him mere man. On 
 the same supposition, Christ's goodness is no title 
 to worship, for goodness, only differing in degree, 
 is common to all, and God's gift. No ; the worship- 
 fulness of Christ lies in His Godship, in the motive 
 of love which that furnishes. It is a matter of 
 personal religion, not of morality. And yet there 
 is something to admire in the untamable instinct 
 of the Professor and his pupils to reverence Christ 
 though robbed of Divinity.' As the speaker poises 
 the qualities of the various forms of religion, we 
 recognise in his purely intellectual toleration a tone 
 of superiority, far from the proselytising partisanship.
 
 Ill INTRODUCTIONS TO THK POKMS. 105 
 
 the hum1»le fellowsliip with Christ, which the vision 
 has yet to te<ich him. SntUlenly, he finds the garment 
 has quitted his hanil, and therefrom he learns his 
 hick of con^'iction and sincerity. Tlie world is large 
 and many-voiced, Ijut each liver in ii has only his 
 one life, and this and what he reads in it of teaching 
 or warning, are his prime concern. A man must 
 make some choice of his o\n^. Once more the robe 
 is in his hand, and he is again inside the chapel, 
 his >ision over. The people are as ugl}' and mean 
 as before, but he feels, and no longer only coldly 
 knows, the earnestness and devotion that tran.sform 
 them. His eyes are changed to recognise the water 
 of life in an earthen vessel, and to drink of it 
 gladly. 
 
 The humorous descriptions of people, the exquisite 
 idea of suldimating the vision from the rainbow, 
 the repeated description of the movement of the 
 man carried along by Christ's luminous vesture, 
 fcjrai a collection of passages that express the whole 
 gamut of Browning's imaginative genius. 
 
 The vision of Easter-Day is of the Judgment, the 
 account of it being introduced into a conversation 
 l>ctween two friends. The subject of their dialogue 
 i.s the hardness of realising faith sutliciently to make 
 it the master-motive of actual life. l!<>th acknow- 
 Iwlgc that the difhculty li<'s in relimjuisliing the 
 worM's obvious gifts ft»r what is at J)est only known 
 jw a promise. The fii-st speaker, whose opinions are, 
 ;w wu find later, solemnised by his visionaiy experience,
 
 106 BROAVNING. chap. 
 
 is the more earnest, though by disposition the less 
 hopeful, of the two. They discuss and, on the 
 whole, agree to the necessity of faith as God's touch- 
 stone for men. They then pass on to consider 
 faith from man's point of view. What evidences 
 are there to make it tenable 1 The act of renuncia- 
 tion is not the hardest part, for people are constantly 
 found renouncing the world for some one interest 
 or hobby. Here the friends are divided, the second 
 speaker denying that it is necessary to renounce 
 the Avorld in order to be a Christian. The other 
 describes himself as one who would acknowledge the 
 absolute justice of God's 'blacking out' his 'brief 
 life's pleasantness' for his share in the Crucifixion. 
 For his own part, he cannot ignore the Bible's 
 reiterated command to abjure the world. This 
 being his mind, it is, his friend allows, all-important 
 to him to live up to it. Again the first speaker, 
 recollecting what has been said as to the ease with 
 which many renounce the world for purely earthly 
 pursuits, confesses that in the case of even the most 
 trifling, the renouncer has something to show for 
 his pains. This reflection shakes, though it does not 
 overturn, his faith. His friend chides him for dis- 
 turbing his easier faith by even suggesting so much 
 doubt. In reply to this, the first speaker disallows 
 the faith that looks for easiness. Not only is such 
 confidence a fool's paradise, but the incessant conflict 
 with uncertainty is (and here he speaks with deeper 
 meaning) actually a boon. It proves that the
 
 in IXTRODUCTIOXS TO THE POEMS. 107 
 
 priWlege of probation is still oiirs, that no after- 
 juil^Tnent sUignation has fallen upon ns. He will 
 explain his conviction by relating a dread vision 
 he saw on Easter-Eve three years before. He was 
 musing as to whether, if death overtook him then 
 and there, he woukl fall faithful or faithless. Common 
 Sense stayed him with specious comfort, Init still 
 he longed for a day when God's will and his duty 
 mijiht be cleared from doubt. Hardly had he done 
 so, when the sky became alight with fire, and, as the 
 tlames sprejul, linking earth and heaven in one grand 
 conflagration, he heard a voice declare his soul judged 
 and Eternity begiui. Then the fire seemed suddenly 
 to burn out, leaving the common dai-k as before. 
 He fancied himself awaked from a nightmare, till 
 once more he heard the voice and this time saw the 
 awful Figure of Christ. He fell on his face before 
 Him, to he.'ir that, having chosen earth during his 
 life, eiirth shouUl henceforth lu' his portion. At 
 first, this did not seem the terrible doom it was. 
 'Nature,' he cried, 'and its beauties, in these I will 
 joy for ever.' The voice replied that earthly beauty 
 was but a jjledgc of the plenitude, which, whoso 
 retains the pledge for ever, foregoes. 'Then I 
 ch<)(jse art,' he resixjiided. 'Choose it,' said the 
 voice. 'Without its soul, its hojje, its conscious 
 suggestion of unearthly perfection, tin- noblest art 
 is worthless.' Despairingly, the man clung to Mind, 
 but even ;us he did so, he realised the emptiness of 
 a race for knowledge the goal of which is proved a
 
 108 BROWNING. 
 
 CHAP. 
 
 ruin. More deep]y yet the voice impressed upon 
 him the use of the formei- life's paradoxes, its 
 intuitions and ignorance, its spirit and sense, its 
 truth and fable. But the man tried yet another 
 choice, and this time chose love, admittedly only 
 the show of it, yet precious for the memory of what 
 love was. At this, his Judge, instead of relenting, 
 answered, more austerely than ever, that Love was 
 the very thing that had mixed in all his former 
 life's concerns, and yet the very thing he could not 
 believe God capable of was the Love of Christ. Then 
 the man, whose every choice had crumbled, prayed 
 Christ to restore to him the semblance of the old 
 life of uncertainty and probation, for the sake of its 
 hope. At this point, the vision passed away, and 
 he was back in the life he had learned to prize. 
 This is the explanation of his conviction that worldly 
 gifts, accepted for their own sake, are unsatisfying, 
 and that warfare and doubt are precious, compared 
 with what might be. 
 
 Men and Women, 1855, is a collection of great 
 short poems, chiefly dramatic monologues. The 
 poems are fifty in number, exclusive of the dedica- 
 tion or One Word More. Men and Women was published 
 in two volumes, the second commencing at Andrea 
 del Sario, and in the following order. 
 
 Love among the Ruins (Vol. VI.) describes the glory 
 and pomp of a long dead capital, as contrasted with 
 the present silence of its site. A pair of lovers keep 
 their tryst in the single turret left standing, and
 
 Ill INTKODUCTIOXS TO TITK TOEMS. 100 
 
 Bi"owniing consideis it nioio worthily occupiml than 
 in its proud days. 
 
 A Lovers Qunnrl (Vol. VI.) recounts liow happily 
 and easily two lovers passed their time three months 
 ago (Jainiary, 1853) when snow-drifts kept them 
 prisonei-s. They used to play like children, and it 
 p;vjises the man's comprehension that a word can now 
 have sundered them, mdlifying their past. It is the 
 hanler to bear with spring coming on. If only it 
 were November, the very bareness and coldness of 
 the world would bring them together in a reconcilia- 
 tion which is very eiisily imaginable. 
 
 Evelyn Hope (Vol. VI.) is a poem of the tenderness 
 and love felt by a man of middle age for a young 
 ffirl, who dies at sixteen. Slie was not aware of 
 this love, but she is to be, when she awakens 
 in some other life, and, for rememl)rance, the man 
 folds a leaf into her hand. Evelyn Hope is the 
 poem of the unmarried, and .shf)uld be read in con- 
 nection with Cristina, as giving the other side of 
 love's shield. 
 
 Up at a Villa — Down in the City (VdI. VI.) is an 
 amusing contrast, as drawn ' by an Italian Person of 
 Quality,' between the borecbnn of his country resi- 
 dence and the alluring but ruinous life 'in the city- 
 square.' The menUil calibre of the person of quality 
 is humf)rously self-revealed. 
 
 A IVuman's Last IVord (Vol. VI.) contains the story 
 of a woman who is striving to confurin licr ideal to a 
 man's refpiiremcnts. While sorrowfully acknowlcdg-
 
 110 BROWNING. CHAP. 
 
 ing their mutual misunderstanding, she decides to 
 sink her individuality for the sake of the man's love. 
 To contend with him may imperil love, and is there- 
 fore as foolish as if two birds were to quarrel while 
 a hawk was watching them. 
 
 Fra Lippo Lippi (Vol. IV.) is first of the great mono- 
 logues grown out of My Last Duchess and the dramas, 
 and is one of Browning's finest poems. It is, among 
 other things, Lippo Lippi's plea for naturalism in art. 
 The biographical materials, as "vvith Andrea and Old 
 Pictures in Florence, are in Vasari, and to look from 
 his biographies to the poems is a lesson in appreci- 
 ating imaginative literature. Browning's Friar is a 
 flesh-and-blood reality. He is a man of free and 
 merry manners, whose head got inside a cowl by 
 mistake, and a painter who is keenly obsei'vant, and 
 resolute jn depicting healthful beauty. The man 
 recruits the painter with the perpetual reminder, 
 amid the monastery's bones and nimbus preachments, 
 that 
 
 " The world and life's too big to pass for a dream." 
 
 ' Hulking Tom ' is Masaccio, and ' Brother Lorenzo,' 
 a monk of the order of Camaldoli, is the Don Lorenzo 
 of Vasari. 
 
 A Toccata ofGahppi's(Vo\. VI.) is a dramatic reverie 
 on eighteenth century Venice. The reverie, taking 
 the form of an imaginary conversation with the dead 
 Venetian composer, is coloured, or rather achromatised, 
 by one of his capriccios. Galuppi's music reflects the 
 element of dissatisfaction in the frivolous life around
 
 m INTRODUCTIONS TO TllK I'uK.MS. ill 
 
 it. The jMJOple who liked to listen to it have dis- 
 appeared and left no trace. Their day was an empty 
 one, and doubtless they deserved extinction. At the 
 same time, it is a painful reflection that all their grace 
 and beauty were so vain. 
 
 By the Firmde (Vol. VI.) represents a husl)and's 
 quiet talk, prospect and retrospect, \\\\.\\ his wife. 
 The ditlerent epochs of his life are strung, like beads, 
 on a thread of love. Before liini lie age and the 
 study of Greek, l)ehind him, youth, Itidy, and the 
 declaration of his love, made during an Alpine walk. 
 Every feature of that scene was priceless, and seemed 
 to thrill up to a climax, the spoken word which broke 
 down the barrier between the pair, and tested the 
 man's worth and his life's purpose in one supicme 
 opportiuiity. 
 
 Any JFife to any Husband (Vol. VI.) is a dying 
 woman's lament that a man's consUmcy to a memory 
 is so much more likely to waver than a woman's 
 would )>e. She would fain believe that her husband 
 will rank no other woman beside her in his heart, 
 that absence will be no sorer trial to him than it 
 would be U) her — but she knows otherwi.se, and lui- 
 hust word expres.ses this pathetic cert;iinty. 
 
 An Ei>i4U: of Karshish (Vol. IV.) lelates, from an 
 Anib jjhysician's p)int of view, the impression made 
 uixm him by I^iziinis, the raised from the dead. 'I'lie 
 contrast between the physician's (juaint preconceptions 
 and the awcf-inspiiing uni<iueness of La/arus is most 
 striking, 'i'he .lew's belief in his ' nncr ' licirig ( lud,
 
 112 BROWNING. chap. 
 
 has made an extraordinary impression on the other's 
 fervent Eastern nature, albeit Karshish professes to 
 look upon his ' case ' from the materialistic stand- 
 point. The realisation of the altered mind and 
 conduct of Lazarus is deeply imaginative.^ An 
 Epistle is charged with Browning's favourite religious 
 evidence, the uses of uncertainty. 'Premature full 
 growth ' unmans Lazarus. 
 
 Mesmerism (Vol. V.) is a description of a feat of 
 'willing.' First, the lover wills into his presence 
 the image or simulacrum of the girl he loves, and 
 then, by eager concentration of intent, he draws her- 
 self, her real presence, into the room. Mesmerism 
 ends with abjuring the use of an uncomprehended, 
 unmeasured power. 
 
 A Serenade at the Villa (Vol. VI.) is an instance of 
 Browning's power of absolute fusion of the aspects of 
 nature with the imaginations of a man's heart. The 
 serenader hopes his worshipping words were noted, 
 but fears that his lady only declared hife song the 
 last element of tiresomeness in oppressive weather. 
 
 My Star (Vol. VL) is a lover's allegory. His ' star ' 
 (a favourite term with Browning for untouched 
 perfectness), having revealed herself to him, no 
 outside commendation of her is needed to ratify 
 his love.^ 
 
 Instans Tyrannus (Vol. V.), like Time's Revenges, re- 
 presents an ugly trait of humanity. Here it is the 
 
 ■^ Cp. In Memoriam, xxxi. 
 
 ^ Contrast with this 2:>ersonal expression a dramatic passage in 
 opposition to its sentiment in Fijine at the Fair, XI. 243-2-14.
 
 m INTRODUCTIONS TO THE TOEMS. 113 
 
 capricious cruelty of some thre<atening ruler, hating 
 for hating's s;ike. The poem imagines an obstacle, 
 which intervenes and, apparently miraculously, guards 
 the man who seemed so helpless from his destroyer. 
 
 ,/ rnttij iFomaii (Vol. VI.) recalls two lines in Fra 
 Lippo Lippi — 
 
 '* If you get simple beauty and nought else, 
 You get about the best tiling Goil invents." 
 
 The pretty woman is soulless and cannot love. Why 
 blame her 1 Rither praise and like — love being beside 
 the mark — the perfection she possesses, prettiness. 
 
 ''ChilfU Ui>hin<l to the Dark Toiccr came" (Vol. V.) 
 is a dreiim-like, though profoundly connected and 
 coherent, romance. Beyond its demanding some 
 final effort which has cost many lives, the ol)ject of 
 Childe Itoland's life-long faithful allegiance and pur- 
 suit is shrouded in mystery. The atmosphere is one 
 of gloomy horror, heightened by Childe Roland's 
 imagination that every thing about him is set there 
 to do him evil. Nothing appears but he transforms 
 it into something infinitely worse. Sooner than he 
 e.xpect.s, he comes upon tho object of his quest. The 
 conclusion of the poem is tantalising, imagination 
 having been set rocking with expecUition of some 
 crowning struggle. We only guess success within 
 the D.irk T<»wer by the fact that Childe Roland lives 
 to tell his tide. 
 
 ly<p('rt(tljililtj(V()\. VI.) is a man's congratulation to 
 himself and the woman hr l<nes, either that their 
 
 I
 
 114 BROWNING. chap. 
 
 union has not received the world's shallow approval, 
 or that they have even temporarily eluded society's 
 conventionalities. The situation is open to either 
 interpretation. 
 
 A Light Woman (Vol. V.) is the story of a man who 
 sought a right end by wrong means. He gets him- 
 self and the two other persons concerned into a 
 difficult, and, as Browning adds, a particularly dra- 
 matic position. 
 
 The Statue and the Bust (Vol. V.) is founded on a 
 Florentine legend. In the poem, supineness and 
 irresolution debar the lovers from their paradise, 
 and, though it was, as he says, a sinful one, Browning 
 makes the story serve him for denouncing those faults 
 which are, from his characteristic standpoint, 'sins.' 
 
 Love in a Life (Vol. VI.) describes a lover's un- 
 daunted chase after the adored one, and her equally 
 constant elusion of his pursuit. 
 
 Life in a Love (Vol. VI.) describes the temper which 
 animates the chase of Love in a Life. She, the idealised 
 woman, has but to glance back towards her pursuer, 
 and, recovering from failure, he determines to renew 
 the pursuit, though it last his life. 
 
 How it strikes a Contemporary (Vol. IV.) tells, in a 
 specified instance, how mistaken a view may be taken 
 of a man by those among whom he lives. The ' poet ' 
 is considered to be the King's spy, because of his 
 ©bservant ways. The last paragraph, describing the 
 ' Corrector's ' death-bed, gives the man's true status 
 and character.
 
 Ill IXTKODUlTlONS TO THE rOEM.S. llo 
 
 Tlie Last Hide Tugdhcr (Vol, V.) shows how musical 
 Browning can make a lyric, which is also a psycho- 
 logical study. A lover can accept his fate, which is 
 parting from his mistress, and in this last ride gather 
 up the raptiu-e of a life-time, since all fail of compass- 
 ing their o^^^l desire, and since the bliss of life spent 
 with his mistress woiUd leave no further heaven to 
 lie hoi)ed for. Again, the ride itself may lengthen 
 out into eternity. (Cp. the first half of Stanza x. 
 with Porphyria's Lover.) 
 
 The Patriot— A71 Old Story (Vol. V.) tells how the 
 mob treats one who, a year ago, was its darling and 
 sa\iour. 
 
 Ma.<t>r llugucs of Saxe-Gotha (Vol. \'l.) represents an 
 organist who desires to summon a dead composer into 
 the organ-loft to tell what his fugues meant. The 
 jangle of a fugue is described, but what vexes the 
 organist is that the business and stiife of it all tend 
 to no result. It is therefore, as a form of art, either 
 a discouraging criticism of life, or a false one. The 
 organist decides that it is the latter. 
 
 Bishop Blougram's Apology (Vol. IV.) is the first of 
 those ' special pleadings ' which are so associated 
 with Browning's name. It is an elaborate piece of 
 casuistry, throughout which we must bear in mind 
 that the Iloman Catholic liishop is talking down an 
 inferior «lialectician, rather than seriously arguing. 
 The msiHterly Blougram is able to make niince-mwit 
 of the young, shallow scribbler, Cigadibs, who is, ho 
 throughout assume", really envious of him. Most of
 
 116 BROWNING. chap. 
 
 the defence, therefore, is ironical, and its fallacies 
 conscious. It represents what a man of Blougram's 
 age and position would be likely to reply to a Giga- 
 dibs, when stung to the quick by him. The chief 
 fallacy, which Gigadibs should have immediately 
 questioned, is the comparison of life to the cabin on 
 a six months' voyage. Blougram's putting of comfort 
 before the ideal is directly opposed to the idea of his 
 Church. Blougram's defence is sound when he de- 
 clares that faith is necessarily struggling; he shows 
 his untruthfulness in averring that this attitude must 
 be masked from others in order to rule them. Blou- 
 gram is not the gross, cynical worldling he seems. 
 He betrays himself in his reference to Luther. Again, 
 when Gigadibs finally urges the all-importance of truth 
 in one's life (p. 270), Blougram has no argument but 
 to turn the tables and retaliate. At all events, his 
 talk and his counter-criticism of his critic, if they did 
 himself no good, caused a ferment in Gigadibs' mind 
 that led to his relinquishment of merely notional 
 theories. The beauty of many parts of the ' Apology ' 
 and the power of all need no pointing out. It is a 
 poem that quickens the intellect at a hundred points. 
 
 Memorabilia (Vol. VI.) is supposed to be addressed 
 to some one who had met Shelley but was unmoved 
 by the recollection. To Browning, the fact of the 
 man's having seen Shelley is his one point of interest, 
 the ' eagle-feather ' off a blank moor. 
 
 Andrea del Sarto (Vol. IV.) was written and sent to 
 a friend in default (!) of a copy of the Pitti portrait
 
 in INTRODUCTIONS TO THE POEMS. 117 
 
 called Andrea and his vdic. The poem is a study in 
 low tones, its key set by the line — 
 
 "A commoji grcyness silvers everything." 
 
 Beautiful and interesting as a study, it is not com- 
 parable \nth the poems in which Browning speaks 
 right out from his own heart al)out his own feelings. 
 Andrea attributes his uninspired life to Lucrezia and 
 to Go<rs ' fetter.' He has sunk into eftbrtless fatalism 
 and doting worship of Lucrezia's beauty. He inertly 
 regrets his misappropriation of Francis the First's 
 mone}', with no thought of atoning for that fatal 
 dishonesty beyond imagining a certain expiation in 
 resignation to its consequences. We know Lucrezia's 
 stupid, sordid mind through Andrea's talk. It is 
 jKirt of Browning's superb art to characterise a mono- 
 logue's listener only less clearly than its speaker. 
 
 Before (Vol. VI.) gives an onlooker's reasoned assent 
 to a cert-iin duel. One of the fighters (which, is 
 unknown) has been too terribly wTonged to make 
 existence possible without this appeal to God. Should 
 the guilty man survive, life may be trusted to punish 
 him. After (Vol. VI.) is the surWvor's speech. Though 
 victory is with the right, every thing seems luiimport- 
 ant and bearable now, sjive the terrible! fact that the 
 man before him lies slain by his hand. 
 
 In Thrcf Ihnjii (Vol. VI.) represents a Invcr's delight 
 ill the prospect of rejoim'ng his mistres.s. lie (oiild 
 bnive any augury of evil, sjivc that the meeting w.w 
 to l>e delaye«l.
 
 118 BROAVNING. chap. 
 
 In a Year (Vol. VI.) is the comment of a woman, 
 beautiful, rich, and devoted, on the passing away of 
 her husband's love. She would have done any thing 
 to avert it, and cannot guess the cause. Unconsciously 
 she touches it, and, by the words she imagines the 
 man uttering, we realise his shallow insensibility. 
 
 Old Pictures in Florence (Vol. VI.) is a personal utter- 
 ance, containing the gist of Browning's art philosophy, 
 viz., that aim should transcend accomplishment. The 
 poem's most valuable passage explains wherein early 
 Italian art, imperfect and faulty as it was, marked an 
 advance on the period of Greek sculpture. It is 
 interesting, beside Browning's playful lines, to study 
 Vasari's accounts of the painters cited. The brilliant 
 whimsicalness of the rhymes is in keeping with the 
 serio-comic tone of the piece. 'Carlino' is Carlo 
 Dolci. Stanzas xxi. and xxii. are alien from the 
 ruling idea of the poem and from Browning's general 
 philosophy.^ They need to be taken dramatically, or 
 as expressing a passing mood in which rest seems the 
 chief good. 
 
 In a Balcony (Vol. VII.) is a condensed drama of 
 three characters. The oldish Queen, who, beneath 
 a long frozen exterior is so passionately desirous of 
 love, and Norbert, Constance's lover, who performs 
 his startled part between the two women with veracity 
 and uprightness, are not hard to understand. Con- 
 stance, whose wits are so subtle, but whose judgment 
 errs into leading herself, Norbert, and the Queen 
 
 1 Contrast Aristo;plianes' Apology, XIII. 8, bottom of page.
 
 Ill INTRODUCTIONS TO THH POEMS. 119 
 
 into a terrible quandary, is a more complex character. 
 She is a typical woman in lior unstraightforward, 
 timorous way of seeking her heart's desire, and in 
 the r.ipiil rising to an occa.sion wherein she utterly 
 abnegates hei-self. In playing her mock part before 
 Norbert and the Queen, she is apparently treacherous 
 to love, and wo can sympathise with the man's up- 
 braiding of her, but she is really surpassing his 
 imagination of unselfish generosity. Her motive is 
 pure and devoted throughout. The tragic blissful- 
 ness of her last sentences convinces us how tenderly 
 she loved Norbert through all her divagation. Her 
 apparent giving of him to the Queen was the effect 
 of a rush of pity and of sympathy with that 
 starved, unfriended heart. She would at all costs 
 spare the cruelty of undeceiving it. She saw, too, 
 how entirely it lay with the (.^hieen to complete or 
 ruin Norbert's cherished c<ireei-. She partly trusts 
 to his ambition of the greatness she ardently desires 
 for him to make him return the Queen's love, ami 
 corrolx)rate the impression made by the ill-advised 
 introduction to the appeal to her for her kinswoman's 
 hand. ConsUince shows worst in expecting Norlicrt, 
 at her bidding, to .set her aside. Siie is Inu-ried and 
 excited by the Queen's appearance in a terribly 
 unpro[);ired for juncture, and, ardent with self denial, 
 hardly rwiliscs Norbert's outlook. With time to 
 reflect, she could never have wronged him by believing 
 him cajwiblc of the sudden exchange. Neither coidd 
 she have so blotted out li.r past with liini as to
 
 120 BROWNING. chap. 
 
 imagine that he takes her seriously, when she pretends, 
 before the stricken Queen, that the interrupted scene 
 was a comedy, and herself all along a smoother of 
 his path to another woman. Norbert fancies the 
 Queen is testing his love for Constance. That Con- 
 stance herself could propose the test, even as a test, 
 wounds and affronts him. Before his indignation, 
 his unswerving love, her artifice of self-sacrifice 
 breaks down. Norbert and Constance once again 
 know each other and the interrupted perfectness of 
 their love. But that has crossed their lives which 
 cannot be gainsaid — ^the force of circumstances, and 
 they know that the outraged Queen is sending them 
 the summons of death. In a Balcony is a tragedy of 
 circumstances rather than of character. 
 
 " De Gustibus " (Vol. VI.) describes an English 
 
 lane, a tree-loving friend's favourite place, after which 
 Browning accounts for his own taste, in two enchant- 
 ing sketches of Italy, 'his Italy.' 
 
 Women and Roses (Vol. VI.) is a dreamer's tantalising 
 vision of an entrancing rose-tree, bearing three sym- 
 bolic roses. Kound the first rose the beautiful women 
 of the past dance or float ; round the second, beautiful 
 living women; roimd the third, ' beauties yet unborn.' 
 The dreamer appeals to each in turn, but, heedless of 
 him, they onlj^ go on each circling their rose. 
 
 Frotus (Vol. V.) instances how the first may be 
 last, or rather that to be born Avith a gold spoon in 
 one's mouth is less conducive to empery than to possess 
 an iron will.
 
 ni INTRODUCTIONS^ TO THE POEMS 121 
 
 HoJtj-Cross Day (Vol. V.), first of ii small group 
 of Jewish }X)ems, realises, from the inside, one of 
 the persecutions Jews bore at ' Christian ' hands. 
 Bro\ming penetrates into the upholding Jewish 
 consciousness of being reserved for greater things. 
 The idea in the prayer to Christ is i)iu-e Browning 
 and nineteenth century, and would not represent 
 a twelfth century Hebrew, however large-minded. 
 
 The Guarduxn-Angd (Vol. VI.) is one of the rare 
 poems in which Browning lets his love and life look 
 through. Note the beautiful name, 'bird of God,' 
 for an angel, and the inspiring words that conclude 
 Stanza v. 
 
 Chan (Vol. IV.) is another Epistle, comjiarable 
 with ' the Arab phy.sician's ' in tliat it also touches 
 on the doctrine of Christianity — this time as atiecting 
 a contemiK)rary Greek mind. In Chon^ however, 
 the prol)lem of life is rather stated than the solution 
 l)roposed, though such a solution is imi)licitly associated 
 with the teaching of 'Christus.' The main theme 
 of the poem is the vacuum and disappointment that 
 exist where high culture is nevertheless ignorant of 
 what p:v8ses knowledge. The blank wall of death and 
 future non- existence limits the joy of one whose 
 cuiKibility for joy has grown infinite. The irony of 
 the merely second-hand life led by the artist, an idea 
 alrea<ly expressed in The ImsI Hide Tixjcthn- and /// 
 a Balcony (Vli. :51) is exjjandcd here. As in (lie 
 other epi.stle, tlu" essence lies in tin; p<(sts(rii)t. 
 
 Tlie Twim (Vol. V.) is a parable from Luther,
 
 122 BROWNING. chap. 
 
 whose terse vigour of thought and word strikes a 
 responsive chord from Browning. 
 
 Popularity (Vol. VI.) is an imaginary utterance 
 suitable to one who appreciated Keats's genius while 
 Keats was living unrecognised. Just as the first 
 fisher of the murex that contained the famous Tyrian 
 purple is unknown and um-ewarded, so it is with 
 a new and original poet. 
 
 Tlie Heretic's Tragedy (Vol. V.) is a wonderful, 
 quaint account of a horrible ' Act of faith.' 
 
 Ttoo in the Campagna (Vol. VI.) opens with a 
 description of the billowy country round Rome, 
 with its pale verdure. The speaker expresses how 
 he and the girl with him experience a moment of 
 mutual supreme emotion, when immediately the 
 thrill is dissipated by some shadow, incomprehension, 
 cooling, that the next moment inevitably brings. 
 
 A Grammarian's Funeral (Vol. V.) clothes in a 
 curious and interesting dress Browning's favourite 
 tenet, which may be defined in the words of the 
 Talmud, "It is not incumbent on thee to complete 
 the work : but thou must not therefore cease from 
 it." This lesson the grammarian enforces. His 
 triumphant trust in the endlessness of life saved 
 him from being the mere pedant and layer of an 
 atom of mosaic in erudition's perishable floor. As 
 the corpse bearers wind up the mountain, we seem 
 to feel the cooler air and to hear their heartening 
 chorus. 
 
 One Way of Love (Vol. VI.) represents an unselfish
 
 in INTRODUCTIONS TO THE POEMS. 123 
 
 lover who has staked his all to win ' Pauline.' He 
 may fail, he knows, perhaps he has already failed, 
 but, if so, he will utter no reproachful nor ropiniiii; 
 woixls, but feelingly felicitate another man who 
 succeeds. Anoih^ Jfau of Love (^^ol. VI.) is a girl's 
 warning speech, in semi-allegoric form, to a ' spoilt ' 
 lover. She depicts a selfish man carelessly asking his 
 betrothed if she would ' greatly care ' if their engage- 
 ment were broken off. For reply, she dismisses him 
 with novel asperity, remarking that she is able to live 
 without him, and perhaps choose a l)etter lover, 
 or, should this ' spider ' try to weave his web round 
 her agjiin, be careful to speedily demolish it. 
 
 " Transcendentalism. A Poem in Twelve Books " 
 (Vol. IV.) is addressed by an older poet to a beginner 
 who is producing a work the title names. The 
 e.xperienced man's advice is that beauty and emotion 
 should be a poet's care, rather than the bald, tough 
 expression of metaphysical truth, better suited to 
 prose. The poems last eight lines are peculiarly 
 fine. 
 
 Misconceptioiifi (Vol. VI.) contains a touching little 
 story, preceded by its apologue. 
 
 One ll'drd More (Vol. IV.) is the most perfect poetic 
 love-tf)ken ever laid at the feet of wife or poet. 
 Like all the words Browning addresses to his ' moon 
 of poets,' this 'word' seems spoken amid a sacred hush. 
 The idea of the artist's longing to have a luiique art 
 L'lngiuigc whereby to address his beloved is exquisitely 
 dwelt on. Will niiglit iJrowning regard this poem
 
 124 BROWNING. ' chap. 
 
 as separate from his other work, and so classible with 
 Dante's picture, Rafael's sonnets. 
 
 Dramatis Personse, 1864 (Vol. VII.), Browning's 
 next volume, was published after a nine years' 
 interval. We trace in it the deeper thoughtfulness 
 and rarer flashes of ardent fancy that distinguish 
 the bulk of his later from his earlier work. The 
 contents are as follows . . . 
 
 James Lee's Wife (originally called James Lee) is a 
 wife's chronicle of her husband's estrangement. 
 Mrs. Lee is a similarly charactered wife to those in 
 A JFoman's Last Word, Any Wife to any Husband, 
 In a Year, and Fifine at the Fair. She is a good, 
 highly strung, but morbid and worrying woman, 
 married to a man of shallow soul, whom she loves 
 deeply. Finding him tired of her, bored by her 
 Avomanly demands for responsiveness, and probably 
 ruffled by her clear-sighted discernment of his short- 
 comings, she judges it necessary to his happiness 
 for her to leave him. To her, the companionship of 
 marriage means all or nothing. The poem's nine 
 sections record mood, not action. In I., the wife 
 first detects and dreads the change she dares hardly 
 face. In II., she charges her husband with it. 
 Bitterly, from the depth of her anguished love, she 
 contrasts the apparent warmth and happiness of their 
 life with its inner unsoundness. III. records a 
 deepening of her shuddering sense of change, with 
 a determination to live it down silently. IV. gives 
 the secret of her failure to retain her husband's fancy.
 
 Ill INTRODUCTIONS TO THE POKMS. l-_'5 
 
 V. is her own noble conception of K>\ o, t)ne which, 
 we feel, would be meaningless and irritating to a 
 James Lee. In VI., she criticises a young poet's 
 unt<?ste(l idea of pain. She moans over the pathos 
 of I0.SS and chantre and the limitation of all achieAO- 
 ment, though she c<in imagine their value. VII. 
 records, by a similitude which the rocks inspire, 
 her resolution to sink all thought of herself in 
 seeking the best course for her husband. VIII. A 
 coarse real hand, beside a beautiful cast from a 
 hand, tells her that duty and labour can survive 
 and transcend the happiness of being loved. In IX., 
 doubt and indecision over, she is leaving James Lee, 
 grievingly, as regards her own feelings, but in the 
 belief that her presence was only an incumbrance 
 and obstacle to his happiness. Her love remains 
 more yearning than ever. 
 
 G<jld Hair illu.strates Browning's love of an eccen- 
 tricity, a love thinly veiled, in the ca.se of this unpleas- 
 ing story, under an a.ssumed moralising intention. 
 
 The IVirrd of It is the speech of a man whose wife 
 h;is deceived and deserted him. His oidy feeling is 
 self-bhime, and intense, pitying regret for her. He 
 wishes he had siruied in her stead, if that might 
 have saved her from her sin and its consequences. 
 He I>elieve8 Grxl must forgive her, ;is he does, lie 
 would gladly elVace himself to efface the silent 
 accuHJition he knows he is. She has now turne<l his 
 gofxl to evil, Ijut this evil he regards ius self-originat 
 ing, and his own life as con.sequently iii<;rc blamable
 
 126 BROWNING. chap. 
 
 than hers. 'The worst of it' is that he can do 
 nothing for her who formerly gave him all. He 
 implores her to be good, though not for his sake. 
 
 Dts Aliter Visum represents a Avoman Avho recalls 
 to a man the occasion, ten years ago, when he almost 
 proposed to her. She describes the sea -side walk 
 and the man's one moment of sincerity to his en- 
 nobling impulse, followed by considerations — of in- 
 compatibilities, his age and her youth, and fears of 
 future reproaches and disgiist. The considerations 
 choked the impulse, and life's inestimable opportunity 
 was rejected. Two lives, nay, four, have been spoiled. 
 The man measured earthly congruity only, but, in 
 the words of the title, ' it seemed otherwise to 
 the gods.' 
 
 Too Late is a man's lament over a dead woman. 
 He never declared his love, and she became the wife 
 of a pitiful rhymer. It was comparatively easy to 
 do without her while she lived. Now she is dead, he 
 feels entirely desolate, and blames himself for his 
 earlier silence. He seeks a shadowy solace from 
 fancying her alive and entirely his, since she is no 
 longer another's. 
 
 AU Vogler is a glorious ascent on the Avings of 
 music into a triumphant expression of faith in im- 
 mortal personality and in heaven's compensation and 
 completion. Abb6 Vogler begins with sorrow that 
 his beautiful improvisation is gone, but this is suc- 
 ceeded by the thought that nothing good is ever lost. 
 Through that he rises to the conviction that earth's
 
 Ill INTRODUCTIONS TO THE I'OK.MS, 127 
 
 imperfect will be eternity's perfect. Bro\vnin^''s 
 works haitUy contain such another piece of simple 
 perfectness as the iletinition of a common chord in 
 Stanzji vii. 
 
 liiibbi Ben Ezra is a poem in which the thinker is 
 subordinated to the thought. It is consequently 
 pei-sonal rather than dramatic, and represents Brown- 
 ings Theism, though not, of course, his Christianity, 
 through an imaginary utterance of the great Eabbi. 
 The leading ideas are (1) The value of age in that 
 it consummates life, and is a peak whence youth may 
 be reviewed, understood, and hannonised. (2) The 
 uses of strife and trial in that they attest oiu- higher 
 miture and oui- kinship with the Father of spirits. 
 (3) The absolute solitariness of each soul in relation 
 to God, and its independence of earthly estimates. 
 Allied with this is the enduringness of the soul amid 
 the perpetual fliLX of circumstances. Man must take 
 his means from the Present, Imt his aim (man being 
 figured by a ' cup '), is solely to slake God's thirst. 
 
 A Death in the Desert is the imaginary last scene in 
 the life of the disciple whom Jesus loved. The poem's 
 fictitious setting (the 'parchment' 'supposed of 
 Pamphylax') is exquisitely faithful in its artless 
 simplicity of word and circumstance. Reflecting that 
 with his death the la.st witness to Christ's life passes 
 away, the dying Jrjhn refills his labours and success 
 in nuiking men believe. Death's insi)iration upon 
 him, he foresees down the centuries a more fuiida- 
 mcnUd disbelief than his life tinio lias kiif)wn. His
 
 128 BROWNING. chap. 
 
 last word shall be a refutation of disbelief to come. 
 This disbelief will be two-headed, disbelief in Christ 
 being other than a projection from man's mind — 
 (doubt of the Love), and disbelief in a Divine govern- 
 ance associated with miracles, in view of the early 
 superstitions of ' will ' everywhere resolved into ' law ' 
 — (doubt of the Power). To these doubts John 
 prophetically replies that . . . ' Miracles ' guided the 
 child, they are not to coerce the man. Because man 
 knows love and will in himself, and must feel that the 
 acknowledgment of a Divine Love and Power solves 
 earth's problem as nothing else does, he is preferring 
 death to life if he rejects the solution. In reply to 
 the objection against partial truth, imperfect revela- 
 tion, John urges that only such truth and revelation 
 give men a chance of progressing through the very 
 struggle to obtain better. God gives a gleam, that 
 men may do their part, which is to grow into fuller 
 light through working their own way to it. Brown- 
 ing, through John, accepts this age's doubt as a test 
 and stimulus to faith. 
 
 Caliban upon Setebos is one of the most truly creative 
 of Browning's works. Imagining the rudimentary 
 religion of Shakspere's most poor credulous monster, 
 it is in extraordinary contrast with the preceding 
 poem and with Browning's general transcendentalism. 
 It accords with the scientific and strictly natural ex- 
 planation of the evolution of religion. Caliban's 
 ' moral sense ' is the check of fear. He credits 
 Setebos with his own purposeless malignity, sullen
 
 Ill INTRODUCTIONS TO THE POEMS. 129 
 
 jealousy, and cm mini,', these l)eing liis mdimentaiy 
 idea of Will. Calilian evidences the dualism of 
 primitive belief in his notion of a certain 'Quiet' 
 above Setebos, this being his mdimentiiry idea of 
 Law. The genu of rites and sacrifices lives in Cali- 
 ban, the idea of Love is entirely latent. Browning 
 makes his uncouth creatiu-e speak of himself in the 
 third person, to suggest his undeveloped sense of 
 personality. This (/echaracterisation is not the least 
 brilliant stroke of the poem. 
 
 Confessions is a perfect piece of the art of realism, 
 distilling from every-day things a tragic comedy of life. 
 
 Minj and Death has the true touch of nature, recog- 
 nisable by every one who knows the poignancy of 
 some sight, scent, or sound that is associated Avith 
 the memory of the dead. 
 
 Deaf and Dumb (not included till 18G8) was Avritten 
 for Woolner's scidptured group of Sir Thomas Fair- 
 bairn's deiif and dimib children. Subject and statues 
 suggested an idea germane to Browning's general 
 conviction that all life's hindrances and limitations 
 contain compen.s;itory blessings. 
 
 J'losjAce is a brave soul's greeting to the enemy, 
 death. With unliandaged eyes, the strong man will 
 essay the bust conflict, mindful of its dreadfulness, yet 
 confident in the faith that anns him again.st fear. 
 
 Eurydice to Orpheus (not included till 18G8) is an 
 expression of overmastering love. The lines ajjpeared 
 in the Academy Catjdogue, 1864, to describe the face 
 of Eurydice, in Sir Frederick Leighton'.s picture. 
 
 K
 
 130 BROWNING. CHAV. 
 
 Youth and Art is a lighter variation of the theme 
 of Cristina and Dis Aliter Visum. Two people missed 
 love, once, and once only, within their reach, and, 
 missing love, they miss the best in life. 
 
 A Face records a wish to have a certain 'little 
 head ' painted in the style most advantageous to its 
 beauty. 
 
 A Likeness dwells on the instinct to keep certain 
 associations secret and sacred, and the feeling, half 
 delight, half irritation, when one's heart's hidden 
 treasure is noticed and admired by others. Marc 
 Antonio (Kaimondi) was the first famous Italian en- 
 graver (sixteenth century). Giovanni Volpato was 
 Bartolozzi's great pupil (1733-1802). 
 
 Mr. Sludge, " The Medium" is, with the exception of 
 Count Guido Franceschini, the only one of Browning's 
 special pleadings which is almost undiluted falsehood. 
 The 'medium,' found cheating and brought to bay, 
 gives his own account of the rise and progress of his 
 ' medium '-ship. That his life has been a tissue of the 
 most unwholesome fraud is beyond argument, so he 
 endeavours to throw its odium on his 'patrons,' 
 who may indeed be considered half responsible for 
 the garbage of his soul. They encouraged him 
 from point to point of rappings and manifestations 
 till the production of them became skilled labour. 
 They egged him on to emulate the ' Pennsylvanian 
 mediums.' They petted him for each deeper dip 
 in the morass. They accounted for every ignorance 
 and improbability of the spirits. Sludge loathsomely
 
 HI INTRODUCTIONS TO THE POEMS. 131 
 
 insinuates that he has at all events been helpful to the 
 cause of religion agjiinst atheists. The whole of the 
 'ajjology' is eiiten through and through with the 
 despicable artifices of luxuriant moral disease, coward- 
 ice, and untruthfulness. In the second part, Sludge 
 plausibly expresses his ' belief ' in the connection be- 
 tween this world and the supernatural, in di\'ine 
 intervention in so-called ' small ' events, and in the 
 selection of cert^iin persons (so w^hy not Sludge ?) to 
 gather and interpret such communications. The 
 unmasked character of Sludge only looks througli 
 when, Mr. Hiram H. Horsfall leaving him, he is 
 free to indulge in ^^tuperation, and to compose the 
 story whereby he intends to explain their dissolution 
 of amity. 
 
 Apparent Failure gives the reflections raised in 
 Browning's mind by the sight of three corpses in 
 the Morgue, and expresses a noble trust in the 
 compassion — and the justice — of God (cp. In Meuwriam 
 liv.) 
 
 Epilogue represents three religious phases : the 
 jubilant worship of David, the bereaved desolateness 
 of Renan, and la.stly, a renewed faith, dispensing 
 with symbolism, which Browning declares as 
 his own. 
 
 The Ring and the Book, 1SG8-G9, Brown- 
 ings niastcrpiuce, is one of lliu l<jiigest poems of the 
 century and dwils with more life, action, and 
 chiinicter than any other. It consists of twelve 
 monologues on one siibject, Count Guido Frances-
 
 132 BROWNHSTG. chap. 
 
 chini's murder-case. The first book and the closing 
 one are Browning's prologue and winding up of his 
 huge epic drama. The other ten retrospective 
 monologues are spoken by characters themselves, 
 nine in all, for Count Guido, the defendant, speaks 
 twice, once before his condemnation, once after. 
 Each character recounts the case throughout, and 
 any one monologue, read alone, would, in a sense, 
 give the complete story. So many tellings, and yet 
 no two are alike, and there is no sameness. Each 
 new version gives facts unnoticed by the others, 
 every observation and inference being always 
 exquisitely characteristic of its speaker. The Eing 
 and (he Book is most free from what Guido calls 
 
 ' Artistry's haunting curse, the Incomplete. 
 
 We feel that Browning has said all that was sayable 
 concerning the celebrated cause which was the talk of 
 Rome early in 1698, and looked at it from the stand- 
 point of all manner of men. Notwithstanding the 
 ring-like clasp of the one poetic imagination, we feel 
 as if we could not be reading one man's work, but 
 as if a magic mirror had been flashed upon the 
 individual mind of each long dead speaker. We are 
 chiefly conscious of this feeling some time aftei' 
 reading the poem, when the recognisable accent 
 of Browning has partially faded, and the mental 
 conceptions remain all the stronger. For us, those 
 obscure Italian people live with more vividness than 
 real, historical characters. The most unskilful reader
 
 Ill INTRODUCTIONS TO THE TOEMS. 133 
 
 finds it easy to pick out the defects of <a poem wTitten 
 on such a plan as The Ring and the Book. A story 
 which is practically known by the end of Book I., 
 and yet is going to be retold again and again, certainly 
 offers no stimulus to curiosity. To Browning, the 
 story as story is nothing, the characters, the souls in 
 strife, are all. How the souls strive, how fail, how 
 conquer, is the matter of real moment. And yet, 
 the circumstances of outer life are rendered price- 
 lessly significant by the soul's taking them for 
 stumbling-blocks or stepping-stones. But that this 
 \\QVf of Bro^vning's also applies to his subject-matter, 
 the selection of the Franceschini Trial for a poem 
 in twelve books might be considered capricious. If 
 the main motive is unheroic, and only horrible, out 
 of the meanness, out of the horror, the transcendent 
 virtue of two characters was disciplined into energy 
 of life. Of the dramatic monologues, which cover 
 a space of seven weeks, Guido's are the most uniquely 
 creative. Shakspere has his lago. Browning his 
 Guido. Guido's presentment, if without comment 
 and entirely self -spoken, would remain absolutely 
 ethical. Througliout his plausible first plea, we want 
 no light other than his own words attbrd to make us 
 recognise the evil man. The contrast between his 
 two speeches is as marvellous as nature. The most 
 IKJctic monologues, and, besides Guido's, the only 
 viUil ones, are Pumpilia's, Caponsacchi's, and the 
 l'oi>e'H. The other nionologties are spoken by ])erson8 
 IcHS jirofoundly interested in th<' Trial, oljservers,
 
 134 BROWNING. CHAP. 
 
 or only secondary actors. Three of them record the 
 world's rumour, outcry, and opinions. They are 
 dim-sighted or indifferent, and frivolously prejudiced. 
 The others are the fustian pleadings of two low- 
 minded lawyers employed on the case. The story 
 from real life two centuries ago which Browning 
 reanimates in The Fdng and the Book is, free from 
 colouring and briefly, this . . . Pietro and Violante 
 Comparini, an elderly, childless couple, lived in Rome, 
 They loved good living and were well-to-do, but the 
 chief of their property was tied up to pass to some legal 
 heir. Pietro often lamented their childlessness, which 
 rendered them unable to draw on the capital, in the 
 reversion of which they had no personal interest. 
 In 1679 or '80, Violante decided to bargain with a 
 woman of the worst class for her expected infant, 
 and to palm it on Pietro and the world as her own. 
 When in due time the baby girl came, it gladdened 
 Pietro's old heart, and he used to spend his days play- 
 ing with it. This child afterwards became the heroine 
 and victim of the whole affair, Pompilia. She grew 
 up as unconscious that the Comparini were not her 
 parents as Pietro was that she was not their child. 
 When she was thirteen. Count Guido Franceschini, 
 a nobleman, aged forty-six, needy and fortune-hunt- 
 ing, opened communications with the Comparini 
 through his brother, Abate Paolo, with a view to 
 wedding Pompilia, for her dowry and expectations. 
 The Franceschini allured Violante with Adsions of 
 their grandeur and greatness, for both of which
 
 Ill INTRODUCTIONS TO TilK I'OE.MS. 135 
 
 she was gi-eedy for Pompiliu. Pietro, however, on 
 looking into these promises and finding their dehisive- 
 ness, refused his consent to the match. Thereupon, 
 the unscrupuk)us and foolish Violante married Pompilia 
 secretly to Guido. Three weeks later, Guido claimed 
 bride and wealth, and the Comparini accompanied 
 Pompilia to live in Guido's palace at Arezzo, stripping 
 themselves of their money in favour of her husband. 
 For four months they endured the penuriousness and 
 siivagery of Guido and his relations. Then they 
 fled back to Kome, lea^ ing Pompilia to bear the full 
 brunt. Rick in Rome, Violante closed with the 
 Jubilee Indulgence of Innocent XII., to confess her 
 old fraud. Next, the Comparini legally demanded 
 from Guido Pompilia's doA\Ty, and the interest and 
 reversion of the usufruct, on the ground that Pompilia 
 was not their child. The Roman court, in its lao- 
 dicean way, acknowledged Pompilia's base birth, but 
 decreed the dowry, though not the rest of the estate, 
 to Guido. Now began Pompilia's tragedy in her 
 husl)and's nige and hate levelled against her. A 
 letter, puriK)rting to be from h«r, but really traced 
 in ink, over her husband's pencilling, by Pompilia, 
 who could neither read nor vnritc and was ignorant 
 of its contents, was received in Rome by Abate Paolo. 
 It represented Pietro ami \'iiilante in the worst light, 
 and accu.sed them of giving Pompilia a parting injiuic- 
 tion to find mmc gallant in whose company she could 
 follow them as wwjti as jHJSsible, previously jtillaging 
 and burning her husl>aiid's hoiisc and poisoning its
 
 136 BROWNING. chap. 
 
 inmates. The document was not only used as a 
 return weapon against the Comparinis' outcry against 
 Guido, but was also intended to pave the way for 
 what Guido, with "wicked cunning, now set his whole 
 brain to effect. His desire was to get rid of Pompilia 
 without ostensibly driving her away, so that the 
 money might be his. Abetted by his mother and 
 brother, he tormented his patient girl-wife with un- 
 remitting cruelty and outrage to body and soul. This 
 continued for three years. Guido did his secret 
 utmost to force her into an intimacy with Giuseppe 
 Caponsacchi, a young Aretine Canon, which should 
 justify him in divorcing her, but she proved incapable 
 of guile. At last, in April 1697, Pompilia knew she 
 was to be a mother, and then the one drear hope left 
 her of losing her life under Guido's cruelty changed 
 into the mother's obligation to preserve her child. 
 She must flee. But how? The Archbishop and 
 Governor of Arezzo and a friar had long ago refused 
 or failed to help her, even when she told them that 
 her miseries tempted her to suicide. Her thoughts 
 turned to the stranger, Caponsacchi, whose name was 
 hourly hissed in her ear, and she spoke to him from 
 her terrace and besought him to help her to escape 
 to those she called her parents. Ennobled by the 
 demand upon him, Caponsacchi gave her such help 
 as an angel might give a saint, and took her towards 
 Rome. The husband, whose longed for chance had 
 come, slyly noted all, and, in discreet time, followed. 
 At Castelnuovo, last stage before Rome, he overtook 
 
 (
 
 Ill INTRODUCTIONS TO THE POEMS. 137 
 
 the fugitive and the priest. Pompilia hud perforce 
 halted for a icw hours at the inn, so dangerous did 
 she believe her journeying farther without rest would 
 be, after the two days and nights of continuous flight. 
 In that inn, Pompilia, for the first and last time, con- 
 fronted her husband Nnth flaming wrath, :ind even 
 attempted to take his sword and kill him. This she 
 did, in irrepressible indignation at Guido's false charge 
 against her innocent deliverer of criminal elopement 
 with her. The very constables, called in liy the 
 coward, Guido, felt for the moment the greatness of 
 tmth as uttered by Pompilia. It did not suit Guido's 
 purix)se to slay then and there (as his partisans after- 
 wards regretted), for that might have lost him 
 Pompilia's money. Avarice as well as cowardice 
 held him back. Instead, he handed Caponsacchi and 
 Pompilia to the Public Force to be conveyed to 
 Rome. Just as he had previously forged letters 
 purporting to be from Pompilia, and had them de- 
 livered to Caponsacchi at Arezzo, so now he pretended 
 to pick up in the inn, as left behind by Pompilia 
 and Caponsacchi, a bundle of the most incriminating 
 'love- letters.' These letters, written by Guido, he 
 hid and foiuid, that they might bear witness against 
 the two. When Guido brought the case before the 
 Court, the ambiguous decision given again showed 
 the half-heartcdness, miswdlcd moderation, of the 
 Roman Tribiuial. Cap<»n.s;icchi was relegat('<l for 
 three years to CiviUi, and Pompilia wa.s sent to bide 
 cloistered with the Convertites, Guido being \ iitually
 
 138 BROWNING. chai>. 
 
 deprived of his wife for the time being. The sentence 
 was half-condemnation, half-acquittal, Caponsacchi's 
 relegation being distinctly termed no exile. The 
 Comparini now demanded in Pompilia's name her 
 divorce on the ground of cruelty, which plea Paolo 
 tried to frustrate by demanding on the other side a 
 divorce. Meanwhile, at Arezzo, Guido lay wallowing 
 in rancour and brooding over his townsfolks' mockery. 
 Presently, the Convent was allowed to open its door, 
 and Pompilia passed from one nominal detention to 
 another, this time going to the Comparini. They 
 took her to their villa outside Rome, where, shortly 
 after, her child, Gaetano, was born. Hearing of this, 
 the black blood of Guido surged indeed. It was at 
 last free to surge, for the birth of a child, his heir 
 and Pompilia's, would secure him the money in any 
 case. For days he meditated and arranged his last 
 frightful deed. On the second night of the year 1698, 
 he stole disguised to the villa, with four cutthroats. 
 He entered it, and with countless stabs killed the 
 Comparini and Pompilia, they aged seventy, she seven- 
 teen. But Pompilia, though mortally wounded and 
 left for dead, was not to die till she had been able to 
 make the truth apparent. That she might survive long 
 enough for that was her silent prayer as Guido struck. 
 She lived four days, to explain her life, to pardon Guido, 
 and to vindicate and glorify Caponsacchi. Guido 
 killed Pompilia because he had never tempted her 
 into sin, because he never could prove any thing 
 against her, and therefore his cheated avarice, and
 
 Ill INTROnrCTIONS TO THE POKMS. 139 
 
 his pride turned into sh;ime had been so long luilked 
 of revenge. CJuido's liirelings had ah'cady resolveil 
 to kill him for non-fulfilinent of his promise of pay- 
 ment, but that was intercepted by their being all 
 caught red-handed. The frenzy of his hate had 
 made Guido forget one preciiution of Hight, viz., to 
 secure the warrant for hiring post-horses. The 
 murderers were found tired out twenty miles from 
 the villa. They were carried to Rome, and, after a 
 month's Trial, were executed, the noble lieing be- 
 heailed, the others hanged. They were first con- 
 demned by the civil coiu't, when Guido's advocate, 
 thinking to &\ve him astutely, pleaded the fact of 
 his being in some sort a cleric, and therefore 
 privileged to appeal to the Church. Leniency was 
 expected of the aged Pope, but Innocent, when he 
 had msistered the matter, unhesitatingly sealed the 
 doom of Guido and his ruffian.s. The execution took 
 place on February L*2nd, 1698, in the Piazza del Popolo, 
 where a scaftuld, with the framed axe (maunaia), was 
 erected, flanked bv two gibljets. Pul)lic feeling was 
 immensely stirred b}' the Trial and its conclusion. The 
 more so, that Guido, the husband, the man of position 
 and influence, in whose favour the strange facts of 
 the case coultl so easily be distorted, liad the sufl'rage 
 of the superficial majority. . . . Such are the broad 
 facts «>f Pi>mj»ilia's story, omitting the dramatic 
 pictures<|Ueness of details and iiiinor ;u:ti<iiis which 
 are the flcsli and blood of it. 
 
 I. y'A<' lUii'J iiiul the Jjook is the sj)ecial title of the
 
 140 BROWNING. chap. 
 
 opening section. In it Browning lays before his 
 readers (1) the meaning of the title, (2) the origin 
 of the poem, (3) glimpses of the story and of the 
 contents of the old book, its foundation, (4) the 
 justification of his imaginative presentation of it, 
 and (5) his invocation to the dead singer, his wife, 
 under the name of ' lyric Love, half angel and half 
 bird.' (1) The notion of the Ring Browning gained 
 from the Roman jewellers, who mix a harder alloy 
 with gold in order to beat and emboss it into a ring 
 with carved devices. The ring finished, the alloy is 
 easily detached. So Browning intends to mix the 
 gold of fact with the ' alloy ' of fancy, without which 
 it could never be forged and filed into shape. This 
 'fancy,' moreover, what is it but a higher 'fact'? 
 (2) He tells how he found the Book, the small-quarto 
 that contained the contemporary records of the 
 Franceschini Trial, how he fused its facts with his 
 own insight and realisation, the Book with the ' Ring,' 
 and how, months after, in London, he knew the time 
 had come for writing what his spirit had been chaf- 
 ing to life. (3) Browning recounts his first glowing- 
 imagination of the story as its successive scenes 
 flashed upon his mental retina on that June night on 
 his terrace in Florence. This first telling of the tale, 
 fragmentary as it is, strikes the keynote of the truth 
 at once, by giving Browning's own view of the 
 characters and their action. Portions of the old 
 book, facts and comments taken from it, are 
 previously given. These are deeply interesting in
 
 I 
 
 I 
 
 III INTRODUCTIONS TO THE rOEMS. 141 
 
 their place and chiefly as showing the comparative 
 dea<lness of the Book without the metal that helps 
 to make the Ring. (4) Then comes a superb 
 imaginative account of how such a work as The liing 
 and the Book comes into existence, how a man's liAnng 
 spirit breathes, Elisha-like, upon the seeming corpses 
 and informs them with his own abounding life. 
 Browning next gives the condition, inside and out- 
 side, of all his speixkers at the time of their speaking. 
 The passages descriptive of the two Halves of Rome, 
 Tertium Quid, Count Guido Franceschini, Caponsacchi, 
 Pompilia, Dom. Hyaiinthus de Archangelis, Giovam- 
 battista Bottinius, the Pope, and Guido are each pre- 
 fatory to its proper monologue. Browning explains 
 his reason for presenting the one scries of actions 
 from so many stand-points. He wished to be faithful 
 to the sincerity and reach of real life, and also to 
 show how warped and how cruel is a narrow, sloth- 
 ful, or selfish estimate of whatever partakes of life's 
 Itaffling ob.scurations and changes. (Note on p. 55 
 the magical touches whereby Browning impersonates 
 Wint<}r and Summer.) (5) In the lovely posy of his 
 liing, Browning speaks first of his lyric Love's ante- 
 oarthly existence, and of her life on earth. Then, 
 in an exaltt-d strain mingled with pleading, he speaks 
 of her as retranslated to and gladdening heaven, and 
 yet accessible to his word that invokes her blessing 
 on every w<»rk begun and ended l»y him. 
 
 II. Ihdf-Iiome is the name of the first dramatic 
 monologue, the drift of which is
 
 142 BROWNING. chap. 
 
 " How Half- Rome found for Guido much excuse." 
 
 The speaker is a man predisposed to side with Count 
 Guido from the fact that he is himself a suspicious 
 husband. He is just lea\dng San Lorenzo, the 
 Comparinis' parish church, where Pompilia, who is 
 now dying in the hospital, was baptized and married. 
 There, on this, the day following the murder, Pietro 
 and Violante's bodies are laid out for public inspection, 
 at their feet the notched dagger that dealt the fatal 
 wounds. As this sample of Half -Rome leaves the 
 church, where, with the rest of the crowd, he has 
 been gloating over the horrible spectacle, he meets 
 an acquaintance. This person is promptly button- 
 holed, and has the benefit of hearing the story 
 of the Franceschini Case, as rumour has filtered it 
 in and bias filtered it out again of the head 
 piece of the worthy who addresses him. 'Half- 
 Rome ' takes it for granted that the deposition that is 
 expected from Pompilia in the hospital is the con- 
 fession of her crime. He considers the case extremely 
 simple, in fact only open to one construction, which 
 is, guilt on Pompilia's part, rank roguery on the 
 Comparinis', and on Guido's, justifiable reprisals, 
 unwisely deferred, it is true. Throughout the account, 
 Guido's avarice plays no part. In describing the 
 match-making between Violante and the Franceschini, 
 'Half -Rome' only sees Violante's blind greed of 
 grandeeship. Guido is supposed solely to care for 
 a fair young wife to brighten up his dingy palace.
 
 Ill IXTRODUCTIOX^; TO TIIK FOKMS. 143 
 
 The speaker unquestioningly accepts Guide's report 
 that he and liis household were (hugged and his 
 escritoire rifled by Ponipilia when she tied. Having 
 no iKirticuhir staiuhird of goodness and integrity, he 
 considei-s nothing so likely as cowardice and deceit. 
 The dutiful and pure Ponipilia, and the soldier-priest, 
 her champion, are as entirely beyond his range as 
 beings of a different sphere. Yet even ' Half-Rome's ' 
 words cannot conceal the potency of truth in their 
 speech and action when Guido came upon them in 
 the inn. The revelation is nevertheless unrecognised 
 by the speaker's own dull soul. ' Half-Rome ' fancies 
 that he allows facts to speak for themselves, and 
 every now and then reiterates how unprejudiced his 
 statement is. It is only by comparing the monologue 
 with others, that we appreciate the fine touches of 
 descriptive phrase whereby Browning discloses the 
 bent of the speaker. 
 
 HI. 'The Other Half -Rome,' addressing his 
 audience two days later, finds the wife innocent. 
 His speech is coloured by the thought of Ponipilia 
 as she lies in the hospital, surrounded by gazers. 
 Like all who have seen her, the speaker is touched 
 by the pitifulne.ss of her youth. From no merit of 
 his own, but becau.se he has half fortuitously espou.sed 
 Pompilia's side, and beciiuse his discourse opens with 
 a sympathetic description of lur dying liouis. his 
 account of the case comes nairer truth than 'Half- 
 Rome's.' 'The Oth<T Half-Rome ' laments Violante's 
 falsification of Pompilia's parentage, but says all lie
 
 144 BROWNIlSrG. chap 
 
 can in favour of the arrangement. He stigmatises 
 the Comparinis' inconsiderate foolishness in apprising 
 Guido of his wife's base birth. They might have 
 known that Guido would deny their story and never 
 give up Pompilia as long as he had the remotest 
 chance of gaining money through her. Nevertheless, 
 like the former sample speaker, this one is inclined 
 to give a choice of readings of the events, and, like 
 the Court, ruminate both, instead of rejecting one 
 and nourishing himself on the other. A wonderful 
 touch — puzzling to the speaker — of Pompilia 's purity 
 comes out in this narration, in the inconsistency 
 between her story and Caponsacchi's (both told the 
 Court eight months earlier) as to whether it was 
 evening or day-break when they reached Castelnuovo. 
 In the confusion of utter exhaustion, Pompilia believed 
 that it was morning when they entered the inn. 
 ' The Other Half-Rome ' is keenly aware of Guido's 
 main motive, his prompter and check, avarice. 
 Though he registers Pompilia's innocence, the insult 
 done to God in her murder is not what strikes 
 him. Rather, as a law-abiding citizen, speaking in 
 the interests of all, he condemns Guido for supple- 
 menting and correcting a decision previously pro- 
 nounced by law. The Molinists are continually in 
 and out of the discourses, any thing and every thing 
 being attributed or compared to their heresy. Such 
 references secure the approval of every orthodox 
 listener, and agreeably attest the speaker's sound- 
 ness. The lesson Browning enforces by these
 
 Ill INTRODUCTIONS TO TlIK I'OK.MS. Uj 
 
 specimens of ' human estimation,' the two Halves of 
 Rome, lie impresses by the curious variety in their 
 statement of events, and the diliering motives they 
 jissign to an action. Compare the two presentments uf 
 \'iolante's motive in her Jubilee confession, the two 
 accounts of Pompilia's Hight from Guido's house, ami 
 the two explanations of Guido's pass- word at the 
 villa door. 
 
 IV. Tertium Quid views the trial from an angle 
 different from either of the foregoing. He is the 
 veritable tertium quid of chemistry, the neutral salt. 
 Despising the vidgar partisanship of street and 
 market-place, this dispassionate third party holds a 
 middle course. His particidar listeners are an Excel- 
 lency and a Highness, grouped in an embrasure of a 
 fashionable saloon. Tertium Quid might reasonably be 
 expected to allow for an instinctive bias in favour of 
 a nobleman, but he is far too judicial to let this inter- 
 fere with his full recognition of the evidence against 
 Guido. He opens with a masterly sketch of aristocratic 
 poverty, and shows a general disposition to adorn the 
 tale and omit its less effective points. He supplies 
 characteristic new details, such as the first introduc- 
 tion of Pompilia's name to the Franceschini by the 
 'woman-dealer in penikes.' With his sIkiw of fair- 
 ness, he leaves the case exactly where he found it, 
 taking l>ack anything he has .saiil that may seem to 
 l«in Ui either side*. H<; appeai-s to consider the 
 refu.s;il« of the Aretine autliuiities to respond to her 
 appeals a strong point against i*oinpi]ia, and then 
 
 L
 
 146 BROWNING. chap. 
 
 goes on to reprehend her for escaping under the 
 escort of a fashionable young priest. He sneers at 
 Caponsacchi's ready acceptance of Pompilia's woeful 
 story. Terthim Quid's stupidity is of heart, not 
 brain. He concludes by avowing that the case is 
 extremely turbid, as indeed he has made it appear 
 to himself and others by his cynical summing up of 
 ' six of one and a half a dozen of the other.' Not 
 that he cares. His main object is to stand well with 
 his fastidious audience, and he has catered for its 
 taste accordingly. 
 
 V. Count Gruido Franceschini now pleads his cause 
 before his judges. He and his associates have been 
 tortured up to the point deemed necessary for ascer- 
 taining truth, and have, under tortiu'e, confessed to 
 the murder. ' Not guilty ' being therefore a plea out 
 of the question, the best Guido can now do for him- 
 self is to extenuate the ' irregular deed.' He flatters 
 his judges, strives to enlist their compassion, and 
 addresses himself to their prejudices. He takes his 
 stand on his regard for authority, the Church, and 
 law. Every act of his life has run in a prescribed 
 groove. Younger brothers are free to become soldiers 
 or churchmen, he, an eldest son, was bound to support 
 the house at home, to marry, and continue the 
 Franceschini line. He describes his married life as a 
 tortiu-e to pride and self-respect, which no rack 
 even mimics. He poses as a servant of law who 
 would not move in the first instance till law gave 
 the cue. Here, changing his tone to one of simulated
 
 m INTRODUCTIONS TO THE POEMS. 147 
 
 indignation, he reproaches the Court for the inade- 
 quacy of its previous judgment, which yet he proves 
 to have been so far an implicit condemnation of Pom- 
 pilia (as to its shame, it was) as to justify her hushand 
 and \ictim in supplementing it Anth nature's justice. 
 Thus he lays the burden of proof on the Judges them- 
 selves. He skilfully works up to the birth of the 
 child as the climax of his maddening grievance. 
 With the utmost nimbleness in fence, he perpetually 
 shifts his ground, as in his alternative hypothesis 
 regarding the child's parentage, so as to make it 
 serve his purpose equally well either way. Guido 
 professes the innocence which can atford to bring its 
 secret things to light. Of course he makes the most 
 of every thing that can by any po.ssi1)ility tell in his 
 favour, making nothing, or a distortion, of what tells 
 against him. Like Taiium Quid, he frankly acknow- 
 ledges the marriage a barter, and, on his side, a fair 
 bargain. He does not deny that he wrote the letter 
 which Pompilia traced over, because it is a husband's 
 duty to guide, and, if need be, coerce his wife into 
 the right path. He makes light of his cruelties to 
 Pompiliii as harshness excu-sable to his disappoint- 
 ment in her, and warranted by her levity. After all, 
 they were threateiiing.s and frightenings rather than 
 actual penalties, and her elopement pnjved their in- 
 efliciicy. Every tnfle in the speech is significant, and 
 not only the conscious, 1)ut the unconscious touches, 
 ;tH where (luido, in de.scribing his wish to get 
 bjick to Vittiano from Iif)me, mentions :is Vittiano's
 
 148 BROWNING. chap. 
 
 attraction that " one limes flocks of thrushes there." 
 The fiend of guile consummates his hypocrisy in 
 the description he gives of his enlisting the sym- 
 pathies of his four assistants (no ' bravo-hiring '), and 
 of his waiting through the Christmas season, its 
 ' Good will to man ' battling against the call of his 
 dread duty. His infamous use of Caponsacchi's 
 name at the villa door that night he twists into the 
 last supreme chance given by him to Pompilia. That 
 failing, he pretends he would have even then spared 
 the slaughter, had not his arch-enemy, Violante, ap- 
 peared first at the door. 
 
 VI. Giuseppe Caponsacchi's is the first certainty 
 among the dramatic monologues, the first which is 
 entirely free from moral confusion, Caponsacchi has 
 been summoned from Civita to retell, in the changed 
 circumstances caused by the murder (of which they 
 have just made him aware), the story he told the 
 same Court after the arrest at Castelnuovo. This 
 time he is called in to give counsel. At once he 
 breaks out into stern condemnation of his judges, 
 whose base torpidness of eight months ago is respon- 
 sible for the fresh terrible wrong. Awe-struck now, 
 they listen to him, till one weeps, another can no 
 longer keep his place. The whole glorious speech 
 quivers with impassioned wrath, pity, and sorrow. 
 One vision inspires it all, that of the 'snow-white 
 soul,' Pompilia, who ' is only dying while ' they speak. 
 
 ' Sirs, 
 'Only seventeen ! '
 
 m INTKODUCnOXS TO THE POEl^IS. 149 
 
 C.ipnnsacchi's character from earliest youth had li.ul 
 a prophecy written upon it. He was one wliosc 
 deeper nature only slumbered till some enthusiasm 
 should evoke it. The day he "was blessed by the 
 revelation " of Pomjiilia and she made her appeal to 
 him was his spirit's l)irthday. The grand oftcr of 
 his life and test of his worth came and he accepted 
 them. All the hollow nothings he had previously 
 lived in were burnt up like withered leaves. He 
 instantly recognised that the real and true and sure 
 were with Pomj)ilia, and threw conventionalities to 
 the winds. Nothing can be more beautiful than the 
 description of how Pompilia and Caponsacchi knew 
 each other instiintly by the look, except his account, 
 so serious and so simple, of the journey between 
 Arezzo and Castelnuovo. From first to last, Capon- 
 sacchi's feeling for Pompilia, which he is careful to 
 tell his judges is 'not love,' because he recollects 
 their titter of eight months back, is indeed love and 
 religion too. He himself cannot designate it except 
 as "faith, the feeling that there's God." Deep down 
 anfl unfolded in the characters of Pompilia and 
 Capf^nsacchi is the human love that exists between 
 a tnu' man and a pure woman when they love each 
 other. This love was in their case crystallised at its 
 first stiigo, at that absorbed devotion to the beauty 
 of each other's characters, which is really an intei'- 
 changc and elevation of hearts, transfiguring the rest 
 of life into res|K)nKibility and thankfidness. Cajjon- 
 gacchi never ceases to wonder at people's dulness of
 
 150 BROWNING. chap. 
 
 perception, at the cruel blindness of the Court's 
 jog-trot procedure. He himself has been so quick to 
 seize rights and wrongs, so ready to succour and 
 redress, a chivalrous soul with no selfish dross. 
 Heaven and hell are no farther apart than Capon- 
 sacchi and Guido, the incarnations of devotion and 
 hate. The worst regret for himself that Caponsacchi 
 has is that he did not extirpate Guido when he 
 might. All the tears and irony of life, as it is 
 mirrored in The Ring and the Book, are concentrated 
 in Caponsacchi's last line, which is also in a sense 
 the reaction from the selfless bravery of what precedes 
 it, 
 
 ' great, just, good God ! Miserable me ! ' 
 
 That is the bitter cry of a man who rebels from his 
 soul against the misnomers of society, the unutterably 
 pathetic captivity of good to ill, the world's old 
 error of crucifying its divinity. 
 
 VII. Pompilia's is the crowning monologue of the 
 cycle. Lying in the lazar-house, with her 'twenty- 
 two wounds, five deadly,' which, as she character- 
 istically words it, the "surgeon cared for her, to 
 count," she is full of gentle gratitude for the least 
 services. So lying and so speaking, Pompilia retraces 
 her years of nightmare and her few months of peace. 
 Because she has lived to know the bliss of seeing her 
 child and had it lying on her breast two days, the 
 peace seems to obliterate the anguish. On the third 
 day, the child was taken away to be safer from its 
 
 f
 
 Ill INTRODUCTIONS TO THE POEMS. 151 
 
 father. But no ; Ponipilia cannot have that, her boy 
 never had a father, only a mother — and God to 
 leAve it with. Pompilia rejoices that Guido himself 
 annulled their marriage by slaying her, saved as by 
 fire the life he had polluted. The name, Gaetano, 
 and the pathetic reason why Pompilia chose it for 
 her boy throw light on what Caponsiicchi could not 
 luiderstand in the flight from Arezzo, when her mind 
 was wandering, and he thought she meant ' Caj^on- 
 sacchi' when she murmured 'Gaetano.' Browning 
 represents in Pompilia motherhood idealised and 
 glorified, from that vivid day-break in the preceding 
 April to this her death-<lay. Pompilia would not be 
 Pompilia if she were entirely to palliate Violaute's 
 falsity, the first cause of all the woe. ' It was A\Tong, 
 or rather misUike, like almost all her life.' The 
 Comparini, her * poor parents,' as she calls them, 
 meant well by her, and that must be enough. Even 
 for the malignant Count Guido Pompilia can make 
 some excuse. He was cheated in the first instance, 
 and she, by being innocent and uncomprehending, 
 thwarted and angered him the more. A wonderful 
 touch of the mother's sympathy is in the line, 
 
 " I could not love liiin, but his mother did." 
 
 The outside world may think that CajKinsacchi failed 
 in his attempt to serve Pompilia, but Pompilia knows 
 otherwise. Capm.sacchi eflected the turning-point in 
 her miseries, every thing since then has been happiness 
 or at liiivt peace, an<l the niunhi-, that too has wrought
 
 152 BROWNING. chap. 
 
 good. Apart from consequences, Caponsacchi's deed 
 and example haA' e been a priceless boon, 
 
 " Through such souls alone 
 God stooping shows sufficient of His light 
 For us i' the dark to rise by. And I rise." 
 
 Pompilia is incomparable for absolute simplicity 
 and naturalness in the story of a short, strange, 
 sorrowful life. We see Pompilia as the pitiable little 
 bride, the victim in the wolf's den, thrown him like a 
 bone to mumble and be kept quiet by, the overtaken 
 and slandered fugitive, and lastly the two weeks' 
 mother hacked to pieces. The submissiveness, the 
 conscience, and the rectitude shine through at 
 every stage of the narrative, and beside them Pom- 
 pilia 's humility, and unconsciousness, as she explains 
 her life, of her own sanctity and loveliness of 
 character. 
 
 VIII. Dominus Hyacinthus de Archangelis next 
 speaks. He is the Procurator of the Poor, who is 
 to defend Guido and his four associates. This mono- 
 logue contains the rough notes of the defence, inter- 
 spersed Avith asides. These chiefly refer to the 
 advocate's little boy, his Giacinto, on Avhose name 
 is lavished every affectionate diminutive of which 
 the Italian language is capable, and in honour of 
 Avhose eighth birthday a feast is to be held to-night. 
 The doting papa cares very much more about 'old 
 curly -pate ' and the preparation of the lamb's fry 
 and other delights, than for the Franceschini Case.
 
 Ill IXTKODTTTIOXS TO THE POKMS. ir.3 
 
 The plea(liiit:jisverylmniorous,aiul would he extremely 
 amusing, if the spoit of it wt'io not so incongruous 
 with the deadly realities it juggles with. Its life-like- 
 ness is perhaps the stronger for the irony. Arcangeli's 
 defence is based on the ' Cause of Honour,' to vijidi- 
 c;\te which a man may do anything, equally so if 
 the injury be only misprision of the fact. Texts 
 are wrested and preposterous instances alleged to 
 support this. Arcangeli constantly has an eye to 
 the detested Fisc, his adversary, whom he means to 
 rout by Latinity as well as logic. The speech is 
 sprinkled Avith verbal bows and scrapes to the 
 Judges, and Arcangeli has good hopes that his 
 production will reach the Pope, poor dotard though 
 he be, and even that his treatment of the case will 
 \fe adopted by him. With professional identifica- 
 tion, Arcangeli speaks of Guido as ' we ' and ' our- 
 .selves,' a humorous touch in its suggestion of the 
 contnist between the comfortable family man and 
 the malevolent hater, his client. The entire argu- 
 ment is, of course, a sham, having nothing to do 
 with the que.'ition at issue. If a word shows reluct- 
 ance at being hitched into the lawyer's Latin, he 
 di.scards it for a more amenable one, even if it 
 contradicts fact, because if one Judge goes upon 
 law, another considers style. Nothing can be more 
 absiufl tli.iii the defence of Guido's 'helpmates,' 
 whom the Procurat<tr metiimorj)ho.ses into efpiitable, 
 though immature, nistics. At last the string of 
 fjuiljbles is finiKhed, and Arcangeli delightedly tlnusts
 
 154 BROWNING. chap. 
 
 it into a pigeon-hole, feeling his evening's domestic 
 joy honestly earned. 
 
 IX. Juris Doctor Johannes-Baptista Bottinius is 
 the public prosecutor, upon whom has devolved the 
 conduct of the proceedings against Guido. This 
 monologue supposes Bottini trying over to an 
 imaginary audience his final speech on the Case. 
 In it, we see how another kaleidoscopic lawyer can 
 shake up the facts and variegate them afresh. 
 Bottini's nominal task is to vindicate Pompilia's 
 fame, but he proposes a harder, i.e., to admit, for 
 argument's sake, every calumnious evidence against 
 her, and yet bring her out triumphing. Accordingly, 
 his oration, which opens with a self-displaying flourish, 
 is as futile, and more offensive, than Arcangeli's. 
 Bottini's waggish quips and abhorrent insinuations 
 are so glaringly unseemly that the whole discourse 
 is a burlesque. ' Peccadillos ' are the natural element 
 of Bottini's imagination, and to assume them in 
 Pompilia gives him so much the better chance of 
 exercising a sympathetic ingenuity in explaining 
 her actions, that he meets the objection of her death- 
 bed statements by depreciating them as a 'genial 
 falsehood,' which her (previous) last sacrament 
 absolved. The similitudes with which Bottinius 
 garlands the case aptly mark his bestial nature. 
 To him, 'our paragon,' as he terms Pompilia, was 
 an alluring, rosy daughter of Eve, Avho may easily 
 be forgiven, nay, applauded, for having escaped 
 womanhood's 'greatest sin, impudence,' though by
 
 HI INTKODUCriONS TO THE I'OEMS. 155 
 
 the exercise of 'feint, wile, aiul trick,' viz., by 
 enticing an enamoured priest to her aid by mere- 
 tricious promises, by a process described as ' splendidly 
 mendacious.' The action that the Fiscal most admires 
 throughout the case is clearly Guido's appeal to Law, 
 and what he defends with perhaps his gx-eatest 
 ingenuity is the answer Law then delivered. 
 
 X. As soon as we open the Pope's deliberation, 
 we feel, in the weight and fruitfulncss of its every 
 word, that it is the conclusion of the whole matter. 
 It seems as though the fragmentary human judgments 
 were cleared away, while the Pope anticipates the 
 di\'ine view of each of the characters concerned in 
 the case, judging the life by the talents. Much was 
 given to Guido, little to Pompilia, thereby making 
 the one so much the more guilty, and the other so 
 much the more admirable. The meditation represents 
 the after-thoughts of the aged Pontift", who has already 
 inflexibly determined on confinning the legal sentence 
 on Guido and his accomplices. The principal note of 
 the Pope is his sense of responsibility, his conviction 
 that life is a grave, earnest aflair, a conflict to the 
 last, its 'business being just the terril)le choice' 
 between white and l)lack, any evasion of which choice 
 is grievous sin. Though cidm and cheerful as to his 
 judgment, the Pope is oppressed l)y the inmiense 
 gravity of the decision, this sending of five souls into 
 eternity ju.st bcfcjre his own. I'recedents of human 
 judgment are unsu.'^Uiining, the records of the Papacy 
 only rhronicling the cobwebs of 'infallibility.' Yet
 
 156 BROWNING. citap. 
 
 the Pope is not disconcei^ted, nor would he be even if 
 the after-time proved his judgment mistaken, for he 
 is acting up to his light, and he knows that God 
 values the intention, or 'seed of act.' The truth he 
 has evolved painfully from the case, he holds tenaci- 
 ously, and that is enough for him. The Pope recog- 
 nises as Pompilia's peculiar grace her brave change 
 from endurance to resistance at the first whisper of 
 responsibility. What he chiefly emphasises in the evil 
 course of Guido is his rejection of each chance of 
 repentance. Stern as is the condemnation, and rueful 
 the outlook for Guido's futm^e, the Pope thinks it 
 possible that his sentence may yet save Guido's soul, 
 by the very suddenness of retribution. He therefore 
 speaks of Guido's arrest, which prevented him from 
 being murdered by his companions, as a mercy-stroke 
 of respite. Nearly half the Pope's soliloquy has 
 regard to the ultimate foundations of his judgment. 
 His responsibility is so grave that it carries his 
 thoughts to the first principles of his faith. He 
 acknowledges the doubt urged upon him by the 
 weakness and guilt of professed Christians, Avhereas 
 human nature without Christianity is capable of hero- 
 ism like that which he has been considering to-day, 
 and of belief in virtue for virtue's sake, as Euripides 
 testifies. The Pope meets the trial to belief which 
 such facts suggest and acknowledges its severity. 
 Yet he overbears it by the thoiight (so characteristic 
 of Browning, when, as in JRahhi Ben Ezra, Ferishtah, 
 and here, we listen to his own verifiable tones), that
 
 I 
 
 III INTKODrcTIONS TO Till". I'OK.MS. 157 
 
 in the very weakiies.s of a rcligiuii is the greatest 
 incentive to love and help it — 
 
 "So, never 1 miss footing in the maze, 
 No, — I have light nor fear the dark ut all." 
 
 The Pope believes that eiich age has its peculiar irial, 
 and, through the inertness and depravity of his own 
 time of too assiu'ed noonday, he foresees a coming 
 period when 'faith in the report' will lie liravely 
 broken, 'through increased faith in the thing re- 
 ]xtrted.' The somewhat fearful and aged tone that 
 his retiections on the future assume, presently changes 
 into a reiteration of his individual determination to 
 \ntness to the last for Christ — which witness is on 
 this occiision expressed by his sentence on these 
 piirticular malefactors. Guido's death shall fulfil the 
 two aspects of such punishment, and deter as well 
 as avenge. 
 
 XI. Guido next speaks — to the two churchmen 
 who have been sent to prepare him for execution. 
 He is no longer the Count Franceschini, wary in 
 defence, but a raging animal, best described by his 
 own word, ' wolf.' He clings with desperate cowardice 
 to the faint h(jpe of intercession and ici)rieve, and 
 therefore fawn.s, as he begins by doing, intermittently, 
 on his appalled friends. The horrible prospect of 
 the severing axe, the near moment wiien he, so alive 
 now, will l)e liteniUy cut oil" from among the living, 
 vibnitc all through the mockery and ferocity of his 
 language. The speech is a rift into the hell of Guido's
 
 158 BROWNING. chap. 
 
 naked mind. He alternately pleads innocence and 
 guilt, provocation and irresponsible wolfishness. He 
 calls the Pope tlie ' murderous old man ' wlio incon- 
 sistently pushes a soul into perdition. He accuses 
 the present Cardinal and Abate, the Pope, and the 
 whole Christian world of being in a league of hypocrisy, 
 killing him because he is the one sinner among them 
 who has been frank. ' He will not pay religion and 
 morality their toll of confession. Why should he 
 satisfy their self-interested desire 1 Eepentance will 
 not save his life. At least, he will tell no lies to 
 please others. His last words shall be truth. The 
 social pact defines one man's pleasure as another's 
 pain. Law, therefore, prohibits undue pleasure. 
 Guido's life has disregarded this. He now pays for 
 it.' . . . 'Religion and irreligion are meaningless 
 and interchangeable terms. Love of life is the un- 
 spoken motive of everybody. Guido has recognised 
 no law he could not see. He has at least been 
 sincere, not played fast and loose with God like 
 these hypocrites. Because he has had the courage 
 of their opinions, the others have felled him in self- 
 defence.' . . . 'Why, among all the incredibilities 
 people accept, is his tale of maddened jealousy solely 
 disbelieved ? ' . . . ' He could not choose his tempera- 
 ment, his failure was a blunder, not a crime.' Guido 
 describes his detestation of Pompilia, of the patience, 
 stillness, and meekness which enraged him beyond 
 all other causes. Caponsacchi's name hardly occurs, 
 since to Guido he liad no real existence. Guido's 
 
 I
 
 Ill INTRODUCTIONS TO THE POEMS. 159 
 
 intensest hate of Pompilia is hate of her saintliness 
 and spiritual iiulepeiKlence of him. Her eyes haunt 
 him, most unbearable in their 'abnegation of revenge.' 
 ' Pompilia and the old pretentious fools, the Compar- 
 inis, formed a Chimrera, kid, lion, and serpent, which 
 he had no peace till he slew.' Guido regards cringing 
 and feigning as the wisdom of the weak, just as 
 plaguing, browbeating, and plundering are the in- 
 stinct and prerogative of the strong. He loathed 
 Pompilia because she never cringed nor feigned. 
 ' Guido's life has been one long warfare with humanity, 
 and luck has been against him just when he seemed 
 (at the inn, after the murder, on his Trial, with the 
 Pope) touching success.' . . . 'Let him die, life 
 would have nothing to offer.' Once more Guido 
 scathingly satirises his dissimulating, material age, 
 and then plunges frantically into the central abyss 
 of moral darkne-ss. The lurid gloom is almost grand. 
 Guido seems to shed his mean manhood, and become 
 an embodied hate, which may, he suggests, be yet 
 transformed when its uses have been exhausted. . . . 
 'Guido has raved because he thought they would not 
 slay impenitence.' Now he daslics hither and thither, 
 alternately begging for life and foaming at those who 
 Ciinnot gnint it. As his doom begins to close round 
 him in a])proaching steps and voices, Guido's hist 
 shriek gjithers up the concentrated essence of the 
 FninccHchini wise in one wcjrd — 
 
 " Pvinpiliii, will you lit tliLiii murder meT"
 
 160 BROWNING. chap. 
 
 XII. In The Book and the Ring, Browning winds 
 up the loose threads that remain. Details of Guido's 
 execution, aftermath of opinions, and the survivors' 
 subsequent dealings, each after his kind, are given. 
 Some of these are contributed as by private corre- 
 spondents, two of whom, Arcangeli and the Fisc, are 
 familiar to us. Browning veritably found the gi^ound- 
 work of their letters in the old Book. We learn 
 from one that the ' poor Count's ' end evinced the 
 decorum and piety of most reported executions. The 
 writers unite in misjudging ' old Somebody,' as the 
 Pope is nicknamed. Bottini encloses in his letter a 
 paragraph from the sermon of Brother Celestine, 
 Pompilia's last confessor. The extract is a comment 
 on the seeming rule of Avrong, and the weakness, 
 which, even more than Avickedness, falsifies fact. 
 Though the Augustinian's summary of human affiiirs 
 is apparently mournful, it really belongs to Brown- 
 ing's entire view, implicitly strongest in The Ring and 
 the Booh, that life is a paradox, and that probation 
 and postponement are the earth's most valid words. 
 Browning's ultimate hopefulness is not clouded by 
 the perplexities of Pompilia's story. It is only 
 tempered to the range and depth of its subject, life, 
 across whose worst welter Browning still detects 
 God's hand, in ' accident ' or human service, just, and 
 only just, upholding the earnest believer. As in life 
 itself, there are so many lessons in The Ring and the 
 Book that it seems artificial and futile to emphasise 
 one above another. It is enough that Caponsacchi
 
 Ill INTRODUCTIONS TO THE POEMS. IGl 
 
 and Pompilia and the Pope rise, while Guido falls. 
 In Browning's wise words — 
 
 *' it is the glory and good of Art, 
 That Art remains the one way possible 
 Of speaking trutii," 
 
 because 
 
 "Art may tell a truth 
 Obliquely, do the thing shall breed the thought." 
 
 Balaustion's Adventure ; including a Trans- 
 script from Euripides, 1871 (Vol. XI.), is a me- 
 morial of that affectionate preference for Euripides, 
 shared by Mr. and Mrs. Browning, and already partly 
 explained in a passage in 'The Pope.' Euripides' 
 himianity and pathos appealed to Mrs. Browning, as 
 the motto of JJalaustion's Adventure, taken from her 
 I fine of Cyprus, indicates, and a congeniality exists 
 between Browning and Euripides as poets, for the 
 last of the three Greek tragedians was, like Brown- 
 ing, not only an innovator and an extender of bound 
 in art, but a poet of ' hard matter and harsh manner,' 
 and a lover of colloquial phrase. The Transcript is 
 a tran-slation of that most touching story, the Alkestis, 
 interspersed with Browning's explanations of the 
 characters. An ethical exhibition of the subject is 
 thus interwoven with Euripides' dramatic coUocpiies, 
 while Browning's comments are dramatised in form 
 by being put into the mouth (jf an imaginary Greek 
 reciter of the play. Thi.s is Balau.stion, a Kliodiaii 
 maiden, who intnxluces her recitation of Alki'slis by 
 narrating her 'Adventure' to f<jur Athenian friends.
 
 162 BROWNING. chap. 
 
 She describes how her love and retention of Euri- 
 pides' poetry saved her life and the lives of a whole 
 ship's crew the year after the disastrous Syracusan 
 expedition of Nikias. A sudden wind drove the 
 Kaunian ship upon the hostile coast of Sicily, and 
 the Syracusans would have forced it back to be the 
 prey of a pursuing pirate-bark, had not the 'lyric 
 girl ' undertaken to save her companions by repeating 
 to the Syracusans the tragedy of Alkestis, as she 
 remembered hearing it in the theatre at Kameiros. 
 The verisimilitude of the ' Adventure ' is founded 
 on Plutarch's Life of Nikias, where the episode of 
 the saving of a crew by the power of Euripides' 
 poetry is given. The Sicilian Greeks were known to 
 be athirst to hear more of the new poet, and merciful 
 to such of their prisoners as could recite any frag- 
 ments from him. 
 
 In thinking of Browning as a translator of Alkestis, 
 we have to think of the modern spirit, with its ob- 
 stinate questionings, set to work upon the most 
 perplexing of ancient stories. There is a deep 
 problem in the strange correlation of its characters, 
 a problem which Euripides states and does not solve. 
 We have to imagine how the mystery and anguish of 
 Alkestis writhed in Browning's mind as he mused on 
 the tale till he felt compelled to probe its signifi- 
 cance as well as translate its words. Then, probably, 
 the recollection of Plutarch's sympathetic legend 
 came to him, and in the eager jind tender ' Wild- 
 pomegranate-flower ' be found an artistic means for
 
 Ill INTRODUCTIONS TO THE TOEMS. 163 
 
 his own commentary on Alkestis, Admctos, and 
 Herakles. The stx)ry of the self - immolating vriio, 
 who consents to die in the place of her cowardly 
 husband, and is rescued from Hades by Herakles in 
 gi-atitude for the hospitality of Admetos, has been 
 ti-ansformed and conformed to conventional ideas by 
 many a modern poet. While their Admetos is di- 
 vested of definiteness in order to divert attention from 
 his baseness, their Alkestis becomes blindly worship- 
 ful of the ignoble husband who lets her die for him. 
 This rose-water Alkestis is a phantasm compared 
 \vith the intensely real, intensely moving Alkestis 
 of Euripides, who consents to sacrifice herself, but 
 whose love for Admetos freezes in the act, and whose 
 last words, so self -measuring, austere, and joyless, 
 ignore his fluent lamentations, and solely regard the 
 future she may well fear for her children. It would 
 seem as though Euripides, true to his age, neither 
 sought nor cared to seek any solution of the ques- 
 tions that his heart-aching story would call up to a 
 modem writer who attempted to represent so daring 
 a sul)ject. That ineffable disdain for Admetos, how 
 is it to be forgotten in the restored life of Alkestis 1 
 What is the strange irony whereby Herakles wrests 
 Alkestis from Death, not because of his admira- 
 tion of her heroism, but because Admetos had the 
 courteous self-control to let him feast in his palace 
 while ho and his people were mourning? browning's 
 courageous intellect attempts t<» bridge the moral 
 chasm between the husband and wife by making
 
 164 BROWNING. chap. 
 
 Alkestis the stoiy of the development of a soul in 
 Admetos. Three-fourths of the Balaustion-Browning 
 commentary trace the gradual awakening of Admetos, 
 by means of loneliness and loss, to be a worthier 
 companion of the restored Alkestis. Euripides, in- 
 deed, superficially brings this about. But, with him, 
 the repentance of Admetos is little better than an 
 increasing self-pity, a growing sense that what with 
 the taunts of enemies and the widowed halls, his 
 lot is harder than to have died. Browning makes 
 much of the bitter altercation between Admetos and 
 Pheres, but, while to Euripides Pheres' thrusts only 
 represent to his son the world's scorn of him, to 
 Browning the scene is instrumental in the regenera- 
 tion of Admetos, through holding up the mirror of 
 sarcasm to his selfishness, as it is hardened and grown 
 shameless in his father. So, too, Browning indicates 
 the ennoblement of Admetos as complete before 
 Herakles re-appears with the veiled lady, so that 
 the demigod's temptations do not try him, but solely 
 prove him to his -wife. Browning does more for 
 Admetos than Euripides did, more, probably, than 
 reality would do. His idea is beautiful and modern, 
 but it misses the unspeakable tragicalness of the 
 original. Not satisfied even with his regenerated 
 Admetos, Browning, at the end of his re-presentation 
 of the Greek drama, draws a nobler husband, a happier 
 Alkestis. But the aspiration goes to ground. We 
 feel that it is intangible and that such a delineation 
 would not, like that other sterner story, have out-
 
 in INTRODUCTIONS TO THE TOEMS. ItJo 
 
 lived two thousiind years. Browning diminislics 
 what is so characteristic of the Greek drama, its 
 arbitrariness, which probably reconciled the com- 
 paratively primitive Euripides to his mournful 
 tragedy of marriage, in which moral feebleness 
 muixlers its mate, who dies willingl}*, and yet in an 
 anguish of open-eyed and despairing contempt. 
 Euripides' Herakles is idealised by Browning. The 
 jo\ial giant, glad to help an entertainer, and as glad 
 of the wine-cup, is essentially Euripidean, and the 
 scene of Herakles' carousal has been considered 
 suflBcient to label Alkestis as the satyric drama of a 
 tetralogy. But the "winning Helper of Browning is 
 altogether a higher-hearted being, and the compara- 
 tive slightness of his motive for restoring Alkestis is 
 overpowered by the pas.siiges of admiration with 
 which Browning irradiates the speeches and doings 
 of the man - God. Indeed, Browning's treatment 
 adumbrates the Christian idea rather than fuses ^^^th 
 the Greek. 
 
 The divergences between Browning and Euripides 
 are cumulative, for what is pure translation in the 
 poem is literally faithful, though occasionally the 
 translating words are just sufficiently tinged by 
 Browning's interpreUition of the characters to unite 
 the interludes artistically with the conversjitions. The 
 result of this comp(jund of the two poets of the 
 ancient and mfxlern world, each so strongly idiosyn- 
 cratic, is one of the most interesting and significant 
 contrasts in literature. Each jjoet steals from and
 
 166 BROWNING. chap. 
 
 gives to the other, Browning catching from Euripides 
 his pathos and simplicity, and Euripides gaining from 
 Browning ratiocination and a profounder beauty. 
 Browning's rendering of AUcestis is the greatest enrich- 
 ment that ancient literature has received from modern. 
 Prince Hohenstiel - Schwangau, Saviour of 
 Society, 1871 (Vol. XL), is a casuistical study from 
 within of Napoleon III., who was one of those moral 
 failures which so much interested Browning's forsenic 
 mind. Browning considers him a delinquent, but 
 one who, like Sludge and Blougram, shall not be 
 condemned unheard. This work is Louis Napoleon's 
 imaginary Ajjology for his life, and is principally 
 interesting in evincing Browning's sympathy with 
 every phase of thought and feeling. The monologue 
 is a difficult one on account of its shifting stand- 
 points. It is further complicated by sharing the 
 speciousness of its imaginary speaker, by holding in 
 solution Browning's real opinion on the case, and 
 by the presence to the reader of a third figure, the 
 historical Louis Napoleon. The naiTation is matched 
 by its circumstances. Thus, the entire piece may be 
 taken as the Emperor's soliloquy as he sits smoking 
 in the Tuileries, through the small hours, sometime 
 in the sixties. He has been debating whether to 
 dispatch a courier Avith a letter to his ' Cousin-Duke ' 
 (' Plon-Plon,' perhaps). Meanwhile, he amuses him- 
 self by uttering, in dream shape, a defence of his 
 life-work. This defence takes the circumstantial 
 form of being addressed to some female haunter of
 
 Ill INTRODUCTIONS TO THE POEMS. 107 
 
 Leicester Square, as he sits with her over tai and 
 cigars — a confused, inconseqiient repetition of his 
 earlier English exile. The fact that it is a waking 
 dream, that ' Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau ' is really 
 in his 'Residenz,' and only fancying himself in 
 London, is not stated till the end. ' Prince Hohen- 
 stiel - Schwangau's ' forgetfidness and mistakes in 
 names and the mixture of circumstances are signi- 
 ficant of the sul»joct of the work and the manner in 
 which that subject is treated. Browning almost, but 
 not quite, allows us to tivke ' Prince Hohenstiel- 
 Schwangau's ' apology seriously, and it is a curious 
 fact that, when the book came out, one of the first- 
 class reviews blamed Browning for bolstering up state 
 charlatanism. Otherwise, it scarcely need be said 
 that Browning in no wise whitewashes the temporis- 
 ing, unprincipled p»jlicy of the Second Empire when 
 he gives the special pleading by which its head may 
 be imagined to vindicate it. The manifest sophistry 
 and inadequacy of the plea are its strongest con- 
 demnation, and are so expressed by Browning, not 
 explicitly, but dramatically, according to his wont. 
 ' Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau ' unfolds the doctrine 
 of expediency, tries to make it appear the best thing 
 possible, and fails. F(jr clearness, we may divide 
 J'rince Jlohenstiel-Sdiuangau into two parts. Part the 
 first (pp. 125-173) gives the grounds of the actual 
 pcjlicy of Louis Napoleon, according to himself, i.e. 
 to Browning's Ixjuis Napoleon. ' Piince Hohenstiel- 
 Schwangau ' first defends his aim, the sustaiiiinont or
 
 168 BROWNING. chap. 
 
 ' saving ' of society. He is a practical man, professing 
 a religion which he vaunts as eminently workable. 
 He endeavours to prove that, in his special case, the 
 ' means ' taken were left to his private inclination, 
 provided that he attained God's ' end.' He does not 
 pretend to be one of earth's finest minds, his ' mission ' 
 consisted in utilising his peculiar gift of making the 
 best of what is. Great reformers are for great 
 crises, but society's conservators or ' saviours ' are 
 invaluable in other times. 'Prince Hohenstiel- 
 Schwangau ' has balanced people's opposing tendencies 
 for, say, twenty years, for he chiefly reverenced 
 human life. Browning takes this opportunity of 
 satirising the last stanzas of Childe Harold, and 
 declares that the greatest nature is human nature. 
 'Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau ' enlarges on the ad- 
 vantages of imperfection, here almost identifying the 
 defence with Bro'vvning's direct philosophy. Perhaps 
 the adaptability of his own ideas, even in a travestied 
 form, to Louis Napoleon's apology drew Browning 
 to the character he is delineating. Life is too short 
 for theories, pursues 'Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau.' 
 Fourierism, Comtism, Kantism need a life a century 
 long. A tinkering policy is best suited to life's 
 average length. There was a time — when he was 
 ' voice and nothing more ' — w^hen he, too, breathed 
 lofty aspirations, such as the deliverance of Ital}^ 
 and a democratic internal policy. He was censured 
 for abandoning these, but it was his conviction 
 that feeding the hungry is the essence of govern-
 
 Ill INTRODUCTIONS TO THE POEMS. 169 
 
 ment that made him subordinate every thing else. 
 Here Browning touches on Louis Napoleon's best 
 trait, his apparently genuine care for the poor. 
 * Prince Hoheiistiel - Schwangau ' acknowledges that 
 he only ministered to the nuiltitudinous bodies ; he 
 let the individual souls alone, except so far as to 
 keep the peace between them. At the conclusion 
 of this first part of the defence, Louis Napoleon 
 pauses, perceiving how entirely he has made his 
 account redqund to his own credit. Ostensibly to 
 balance this, really to defend himself anew, this 
 time obliquely, he proposes giving a fictitious auto- 
 biography, according to the Thiers-Hugo school of 
 iiistory. This shall represent him as embracing the 
 fine aims and doing the gi-and things Avhich he is 
 censured for not having embraced and done. It 
 shall also disiirm the critics of his actual life by 
 intimating the equal obloqu}' that would be heaped 
 upon this imaginary ' Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau ' 
 for being true to an impracticable idciil. 'Prince 
 I lohenstiel-Schwangau ' actually acted, on the other 
 hand, according to ' Sagacity,' and Avas condemned in 
 the spirit of his idealised self. Part the second. 
 Louis Napoleon describes his accession as it might 
 have been, and how, had lie spared the Caiip (TEtnt, 
 he would have been blamed for doing so. He 
 imagines what would have been the criticism passed 
 up<jn him had he estiiblished free Rome by the force, 
 not of the sword, but of public opinion, lb' (It-scribes 
 how he (in his might-have-been charactci) lioldly
 
 170 BROWNING. chap. 
 
 forbade France (' Hohenstiel-Schwangau ') its trucu- 
 lent joy in fighting, and kept it quiet, not by pretence 
 of preparation for war, and so forth, but by refusing 
 the iniquity of causeless bloodshed. In a fine passage 
 (p. 197), Browning lauds the 'magnetic race' of 
 France. ' Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau ' pleads his 
 acceptance of righteous warfare, and gives a favour- 
 able sketch of his disinterestedness in the Italian 
 undertaking. He hints that France would not have 
 supported him without the cession of Savoy and 
 Nice. He indulges in a final imaginative flight of 
 patriotism in the reasons he might have alleged for 
 refusing to have his child declared his successor. 
 At this point, the reverie is dispersed. The ' perora- 
 tion ' contains what are perhaps the sincerest words 
 yet spoken, in Louis Napoleon's expression of dis- 
 satisfaction both with his life and with its dubious 
 justification. 
 
 Fifine at the Fair, 1872 (Vol. XL), amid its con- 
 geries of fancies and opinions, has two prominent 
 themes, the value of falseness or transitoriness, and 
 the ideal meaning of marriage. These themes re- 
 spectively reach the height of their expression in 
 section cxxiv. and sections xliii., xliv. The tone 
 of intimacy which the poem possesses makes it 
 delightful reading to those who love Browning's mind 
 almost more than his art. Here, and in Red Cotton 
 Night-Cap Country, the poet seems to take his readers 
 into his confidence, seems to say to them : Be my 
 friends. As in Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau, and other
 
 I 
 
 in INTRODUCTIONS TO TlIK I'OE.MS. 171 
 
 works, an apparently capricious and remote choice of 
 sultject brings Browning round to those truths Avhich 
 he loves to dwell on and to illustrate in a hundred 
 ways. The dithcult}' of Fijine at (he Fair lies in the 
 bhuring of outline between its imaginary speaker, 
 'Don Juan's,' words of sophistry and Browning's 
 words of truth. Browning does not defend unlimited 
 experiment in love, though that is the application 
 forced by Don Juan out of the principle that souls 
 reach truth through falsity, and the knowledge of 
 the permanent through the fleeting. When the 
 monologue touches on principles, we have Browning 
 and truth, when it applies those principles to the 
 circumstiinces of its supposed speaker, we have per- 
 version. The poem is primarily dramatic, but over 
 and above its artistically complete characterisation 
 and story, it gives Browning's explanation — a pro- 
 found and acquiescent one — of life's law of change 
 and inc(jmpleteness. Fifine contains perhaps a greater 
 wealth of variegated imagery than any other work 
 of Browning's, while its rare and fascinating versifica- 
 tion, its sparkling sea-side air, and its passages of 
 impassioned imagination atone for its excessive 
 involution. 
 
 The Frolvgui; with its brine and sunshine, is a 
 fable of poetry as life's mimicry of inunortality — 
 
 " Unable to fly, one swims ! " 
 
 It also foreshcjws a husband and wife's separation by 
 dcatij. which we recognise, when we tome to the
 
 172 BROWNING. chap. 
 
 Epilogue, as binding together the three portions of 
 the poem by their deepest idea, the lastingness of 
 love. The extract from Moliere, giving a wife's 
 pungent suggestion to her inconstant husband of 
 the line his defence should take, strikes the key-note 
 of Fifine at the Fair, on its dramatic side. Browning's 
 ' Don Juan ' founds his plea for an extended experience 
 with regard to women on the assumption that such 
 experience is purely intellectual, and enhances, not 
 deposes, the wife. He addresses his closely knit 
 argument in defence of this position to Elvire, his 
 wife (who is a little faded and past her prime), during 
 an autumn evening's ramble at Pornic in Brittany. 
 ' Don Juan ' is a man of extreme aesthetic impressi- 
 bility, a warm admirer of opposed types of woman- 
 hood. His intellect is as subtilising as his senses 
 are inflammable, and he uses its refinements to try 
 and deceive his tearful, true wife and himself as to 
 the direction of his interest in the saucy dancer, 
 Fifine, who has just arrived at Pornic, with a caravan, 
 for the Fair, and whom he sees for the first time. 
 He imagines and formulates Elvire 's objections to his 
 dangerous marital theory, and combats them. Dram- 
 atically, the monologue is Don Juan's unconscious 
 expression of the bohemian impulse, the occasional 
 desire for chance and change which lurks in every 
 breast. Starting from a sympathising vindication 
 of the gipsy vagrants' cherished lawlessness, he soon 
 reaches the real secret of his interest in the troupe, 
 the allurement of the girl in tights and spangles,
 
 Ill INTRODUCTIONS TO THE POEMS. 173 
 
 Fifine. He gives brilliant sketches of four typical 
 women, Helen, Cleopatra, El\-ire, and Fitine, basing 
 the claim of the last on her negation of claim. Tliat 
 frankness, which she has, even in fraud, Don Juan 
 later declares to be the inmost charm of the actor 
 class to which she belongs. He pacifies Ehire by 
 comparing her to his Rafael, Fifine to a picture-book 
 of Dor6's. He loves the peerless possession none the 
 less that he amuses himself with the picture-book, 
 which, at an alarm of fire, he woidd throw away, 
 rushing to save his treasure. Having worked him- 
 self back into an enthusiasm for ' the wondrous wife,' 
 he defends the philosophical truth of the assertion 
 that beauty is in the eyes of the seer, by affinning 
 that it is so because love is the archetypal Art, sup- 
 plementing and repairing the short-comings and de- 
 fects of its subject, and discerning its secret beauty. 
 (Browning here branches into the Platonic theory 
 of souls seeking their complementary souls.) This 
 fructification of the lover's soul from the soul of the 
 beloved produces a new reality for the lover, who is 
 the sculptor, not of marble or clay, but of life. The 
 lover gets an absolute gain, of beauty from deformity, 
 of completeness from what was previously only sugges- 
 tion. In the fact of this gain, or rather cieation. 
 Browning finds the sign-manual of immortiility written 
 un love. He looks forward to a future when the soul 
 of the loved one tshall be consciously dowered with 
 the cxperienc(! gained in the individual life of the 
 other .soul. liutiian beings' eflorts and progress may
 
 174 BROWNING. chap. 
 
 to themselves seem self-kindled and self-centred, but 
 are really incited by, and move towards, their lode- 
 stars, the complementary souls. Elvira's objection 
 that this fine talk about minds and souls covers an 
 unconfessed interest in a certain fleshly sheath is 
 replied to by her husband thus : ' People have to live 
 in earthly falseness (which Fifine typifies) just as a 
 swimmer buoys himself in water, which, were he 
 submerged, would drown him. Truth is as vital to 
 the soul as air to the swimmer, but just as flying is 
 not adapted to man as he now is, so truth undiluted 
 is impossible in the present state. The impulse to 
 reach truth and air is necessary to life.' So far the 
 parallel is honest, but when Don Juan proceeds to 
 prove all experience, moral or otherwise, equally 
 valuable to the soul's progress, he is in the sophistical 
 region, and Browning stands aside. The sea simile 
 concludes by making fun of the meaning and grammar 
 of a passage in Childe Harold, and ridiculing Byron 
 and his imitators for their exaltation of inanimate 
 nature. 'Elvire may doubtless ask why women, 
 not men, are to be her husband's educators.' Don 
 Juan's reply, with its double pair of similitudes, 
 contains the finest poetry in the work, notably in 
 Ixxiii., and in the comparison of women to the 
 self -forgetting, generous dolphins in the legend of 
 Arion. ' Elvire perhaps wonders why she, avowedly 
 her husband's Best, cannot suffice him.' 'Because,' 
 he ingeniously replies, ' the Fifines, like crank boats, 
 teach ' seamanship ' better than safe and steady ships.
 
 in INTKODITTIOXS TO THE I'OEMS. 175 
 
 Life is a tri.il of strength, whence truth is wrested by 
 practice Avith the false.' Ten lines from the third of 
 the First Book of the Odes of Horace are translated 
 here (Ixxxii.) Don Juan attributes the drift of 
 all he has hitherto said to a dream he had in the 
 morning, after playing Schumann, while the music 
 itself atioitls him another instance of the permanence 
 within change which is the law of art and life. He 
 dreamed he was gazing down upon a Carnival of 
 masks, some representing animals, some the hideous- 
 ness of ignoble Age, or Youth Avithout promise, and 
 some, the overweening propensity which obliterates 
 every other trait in its possessor. Then he descended 
 among the masks to find their aggressive brutality 
 soften down on closer inspection. He found some- 
 thing to sympathi.se Anth, even to admire, in those 
 ' safeguards ' of the outward men which, at a distance, 
 had seemed repulsive. So far the ' dream ' might well 
 be Browning's own, but Don Juan adds the inevitable 
 touch of sophistry by emphasising anew the value of 
 every experience, inasmuch as self-knowledge is only 
 learned through acquaintince with different Iteings. 
 (Of course he is indirectly excusing his interest in 
 Fifine.) In his dream he next saw the houses, 
 temples, and domes dissolve, signifying to him the 
 evanescent chanicter of creeds, philosophies, and arts. 
 After variou.s transmutations, the buildings died into 
 a great, gatuit Dniid monument, such as exists at 
 Pomic. To Browning, the monument .symboli.scs the 
 objective Truth and Prnnanencc which humanity
 
 176 BROWNING. chap. 
 
 is meant to reach, through those very ' shows of sense,' 
 which, each promising to be true and proving false, 
 are the education which the soul— itself true and 
 permanent — must pass through in order to arrive 
 finally at its proper resting-place. The allusion to 
 the Prometheus of ^schylus, in cxxv., whimsically 
 compares Fifine to the Daughters of Ocean, who 
 solaced the chained Titan, In cxxix., Don Juan 
 overturns his sophistries by enunciating that " incon- 
 stancy means raw," that " love ends where love began," 
 and that 
 
 ' ' The wanderer brings home no profit from his quest 
 Beyond the sad surmise that keeping house were best 
 Could life begin anew." 
 
 A less di-amatic writer might have ended his work 
 here. Not so Browning, cxxxi. prepares us for 
 an anticlimax, which comes in the revelation of a 
 private understanding between the husband and 
 Fifine. There is something half pathetic in the con- 
 trast between Don Juan's last bit of philosophy and 
 his practice. If nothing else had done so, this appro- 
 priate conclusion would prove the fallacy of his 
 argument so far as he applied it to the justification 
 of disloyalty. The event and its sequel are sketchily 
 indicated in the Epilogue, which represents the hus- 
 band deprived of the wife he was unworthy of, but 
 rejoined to her in death by the very persistence of 
 the love which, in life, he had exalted in word and 
 outraged in deed.
 
 Ill INTRODUCTION'^! TO THE POEMS. 177 
 
 Red Cotton Night-Cap Country, or, Turf and 
 Towers. 1873 (Vol. XII.), is as many-sided as its 
 maker. According as we regard it, it is a sensational 
 novel in verse, a study of one of the anachronisms of 
 our century's religious transition, a realistic revela- 
 tion of the strange workings of certain hearts, or a 
 delightfully roundabout book. In any case, it is a 
 powerfid, wholly unconventional instiince of Brown- 
 ing's dramatic genius, which here invests with thought 
 and feeling a painfid story, that was tried, under the 
 name of the Mellerio-Debacker case, in 1872, in the 
 Coiui. of Caen. The early part and the close of Eed 
 Cotton Nifjlit-Cap Country owe their chatty, familiar 
 tone to the fact that the well-known writer, then 
 Miss Annie Thackeray, is the story's special recipient. 
 We learn from the poem that at ' Saint Kambert ' 
 (really Saint Aubin) on the Norman coast, where they 
 both were in the summer of 1872, a pleasant strife 
 arose between the poet and his friend as to vhether the 
 district was completely fitted by the appellation which 
 Miss Thackeray playfully gave it, of ' White Cotton 
 Night-Cap Coiuitry.' Browning characteristically in- 
 sisted that some ' Kcd,' sin's tragic hue, Indeed even 
 in that land of drowsy -head. For some time, he 
 plays at di-sappointing his listener's anticipation of 
 any specific scarlet, thereby awakening a keener 
 expectancy of it. When it comes, we find that the 
 grounds for his obstinate assertion that tho ' tragic 
 bit of Kcd ' could be extracted from the apparently 
 
 hum<lnim somnolency of that particular cunor of 
 
 N
 
 178 BROWNING. chap. 
 
 France were, truly, not far to seek. In April, 1870, 
 
 a curious death had occurred at Tailleville, near Saint 
 
 Aubin. Monsieur Mellerio, a Parisian ex-goldsmith, 
 
 son of a Southern father and French mother, had 
 
 mounted to the Belvedere of his chdteau, having been 
 
 previously heard to say that ' angels would take him,' 
 
 had plunged into the air, and, falling on the turf 
 
 below, had been killed instantly. His wealth was 
 
 left to the Church, with a life -interest to Madame 
 
 Debacker, his seventeen - years' companion. The 
 
 cousins of the deceased attempted to wrench away 
 
 the property, on the plea that Mellerio was insane 
 
 when he made the will, and under Madame Debacker's 
 
 influence. The public disasters of 1870 postponed 
 
 the lawsuit, which Avas only settled in July, 1872. 
 
 The verdict quashed the cousins' grievance, leaving 
 
 the property, as willed, to the Church, and to the 
 
 lady, sometime adventuress, who had so long lived 
 
 with the late Mellerio, and whose absolute fidelity 
 
 had only teen equalled by his to her. Many facts 
 
 of Mellerio's life came out in the trial, some ugly, 
 
 and one horrible yet almost grand. This Avas the 
 
 incident of his burning off his hands to the wrists to 
 
 ' purify bis past,' and to express his remorse for his 
 
 mother's death, which he had been made to believe 
 
 his profligacy and extravagance had induced. These 
 
 facts (waich most writers would have considered too 
 
 strange for fiction) Browning pondered, till he was 
 
 able to spell out an answer to the enigma, and to 
 
 realise, and pronounce sane, a man who could live
 
 Ill INTRODUCTIONS TO THE TOEMS. 179 
 
 in avowed sin ^^•ith a woman not his wiie, and yet 
 entertain the childish ignorance of imagining that 
 the Virgin would suspend gi-avitation for his special 
 assurance of her omnipotence and grace. It should 
 be mentioned that Mellerio, on the day of his death, 
 had evidently expected that a miracle would be 
 worked in his favour by one of the three wonder- 
 working images of France, La Ddivrandc, whose church 
 and establishment were two miles from Tailleville. 
 The only difference between the statements of the poem 
 and what appeared in the actual evidence consists in 
 an unimportant diversity of dates, and an entire 
 change of the names, both of persons and places, Paris 
 and the coast of Normandy alone remaining intact. 
 
 Red Cotton Night-Cap Country is so much the most 
 quickly read of BroA\Tiing's longer works, and is 
 so rapidly comprehensible that it is needless to 
 retrace its successive stages here. In it. Browning 
 shows himself for the first time mindful of the 
 novelist's art of stimulating curiosity to the end. 
 The two images of the title round off and illustrate 
 every incident and reflection. Almost as frequent 
 are the references to gems, lapidaries' similes which 
 befit the ex- jeweller's story. The idea of ' turf and 
 towers,' Ijcsides its manifest suitability to the catas- 
 trophe between the garden and the Belvedere, 
 continuoasly points a moral. As the poem proceeds, 
 the metaphor grows into an elab(»rate allegory, side 
 by side with the story. 'Turf symbolises self- 
 indulgence and wrong-doing, while by 'towere' is
 
 180 BROWNING. chap. 
 
 signified the life of duty. The towers, ' outline sad, 
 severe,' look forbidding enough in youth, when the 
 necessity for soldier-like manning of their ramparts 
 seems (as low-minded religious teachers would leave 
 men to infer) fifty years distant. For the present, at 
 all events, it is pleasanter to erect a tent or pavilion 
 on the tempting turf, for, doubtless, the towers 
 can be mounted later. The 'tent' represents the 
 fatal course of compromise, or 'general utility,' 
 which that devil-saint, Sganarelle,^ is always ready 
 to recommend to any one who will listen. ' L^once 
 Miranda ' (Mellerio) began life by trying to shrewdly 
 balance God and sin. It is needless to say that he 
 failed in the endeavour. The second half of his 
 life was spent in attempting to unite God and sin, 
 and to compound for guilt by penances. Because 
 'Clara Muhlhausen' (Madame Debacker) was a 
 divorced wife, 'Miranda' was too devout a son of 
 the Church to marry her, though he transgressed a 
 plainer law than the Church's by living with her with- 
 out marriage. His religion was a superstition, as his 
 Divinity was a ' Queen of Angels ' in lace and crown. 
 Still, it personified conscience to him, and it was 
 not his credulity, but his half-hearted action, that 
 wrecked him morally. The sublime bit of his life 
 was when he threw himself, his struggling and 
 unsatisfied conscience, his doubt, and the doubt 
 of the world upon the supernatural being whom he 
 had never succeeded in realising sufficiently, and, 
 
 ^ See Moliere's Bon Juan, and other plays.
 
 Ill IXTRODUCTIOXS TO THE TOEMS. 181 
 
 with a passionate appeal for acceptance, put his trust 
 and the power of 'The Bm^issante' (La Ddiirande) 
 to the test. In Browning's eyes, the deed was not 
 religious mania, but perfectly reasonable. Given 
 the belief, or half-belief, which was all that Miranda's 
 foolish head could hold, and there was something 
 heroic in risking his life on the promise of its 
 efficacy. Just because such a distracted deed, such 
 a folly, was possible. Browning pronounces the 
 religion which incited it, though 'decomposing,' 
 dangerous still, not, as some say, an extinct bug- 
 bear. This is the explanation of the allegory of 
 'the partial-ruin,' which Browning uses early in the 
 poem. He coimsels the timely demolition of what- 
 ever threatens to fall on any \\\\r\g head, letting the 
 picturesqueness of the 'ruins' be a secondary con- 
 sideration. The reactionary wave of Catholicism, 
 so perceptible in France in the early seventies, doubt- 
 less accentuated Browning's animadversion. At the 
 same time, it would be grotesquely untrue to regard 
 Red Cotton Night-Cap Country as principally a protest 
 against Romanism. To Browning, the worst e^^l 
 doers of the story are not the foolish thinkers, but 
 those, the ' Parish-priest ' and the ' Mother of the Con- 
 vent' of 'The liavissante' who condoned ' Miranda'.s ' 
 sin for the sake of his oflerings. The mother of 
 Leonce, 'Madame Miranda,' is likewise condemned 
 for countenancing that most pernicious rule of life, 
 'general utility.' Browning only judges 'Miranda' 
 and his poor, l>roken life from ' Miranda's ' own st<uid-
 
 182 BROWNING. chap. 
 
 point. It is not because lie mistook ' The Bavissante ' 
 for God, and ' Clara ' (Madame Debacker) for love's 
 representative, but because lie tried to compromise 
 between, and, tbat failing, to unite immorality and 
 religion that he is found wanting. ' Clara ' is a less 
 vivid shape to Browning's readers than the feminine 
 'Miranda,' though Browning himself regards her 
 parasitic character as the more readily definable. 
 She is a third-rate figure of steel coated with wax. 
 'Miranda' was constant to his love, generous, and, 
 at least, distinguished from his mediocre mental 
 equals by carrying out his fatuous logic to the point 
 of burning off his hands in expiation, of leaping 
 from a tower to testify and assure his faith. 
 
 The characters of the story, which at first sight 
 may seem tawdry, and certainly do not rise to heroic 
 simplicity, aptly represent something of the compli- 
 cated and dim uneasiness prevalent in the age 
 to which they belong. Still, there lingers the im- 
 pression of a kind of sophism about the work, a 
 making of the artistic worse appear the better, a 
 ■wilful choice of inferiorities, much as though the 
 glorious creativeness of Caponsacchi and Fompilia 
 Avere deliberately wasted on the composition of a 
 Eing and the Book in which Pietro and Violante 
 Comparini should figure as protagonists. 
 
 Aristophanes' Apology; including a Trans- 
 cript from Euripides; being the Last Adventure 
 of Balaustion, 1875 (Vol. XIII.), is, like the poem 
 to which it is in part a sequel, largely in honour of
 
 in IXTKODL'CTIONS TO THE POEMS. 183 
 
 the thiixl great Attic tragedian. Nino years have 
 passed since Rilaustion saved her life and gained 
 lier husband by reciting Alh'siis from the steps of 
 the Herakheum at Syracuse. The Peloponnosian 
 War is over, and Athens' Long Walls have been 
 razed, to the sound of joyful music. Rilaustion 
 and her husband, Euthukles, are sorrowfully quitting 
 the ' detid ' city of their adoption, the city of the 
 poet who links them to the divine. At every sunset- 
 close, as the galley beiirs them to Ehodes, Euthukles 
 writes from Balaustion's dictation her memorial of 
 Athens, and of its best friend, Euripides. Balaustion 
 cannot awake her memories without associatinii 
 them with a discourse, cognate to their subject, 
 that took place a year earlier between herself and 
 Aristophanes. That discourse she will revive, for 
 it is significant now that it ciin be interpreted by 
 the light of subsequent events. 
 
 Another story from Plutarch is embedded in tin's 
 second record of Biilaustion. The Phokian, mentioned 
 in the Life of Lysander as having averted the 
 demolition of Athens by recalling to the Spartans 
 a Chorus from Em-ipides' Ebklm, is assumed to be 
 Balaustion's husband. Indeed, this sequel to Balans- 
 (ion's Adventure is so adroitly founded on historical 
 facts, that its art seems nature, and the result an 
 inevitiible coincidence «if the story of declining 
 Athens with B;ilau.sti(jn, aiul nf l)()th with Euripides. 
 All things that make for vcrisinnlitudc seem to have 
 worked together for Browning in this setting of his
 
 184 BROWNING. chap. 
 
 translation of Herahles Mainomenos. 'Setting,' how- 
 ever, is too subordinate a term to describe Browning's 
 surrounding of Euripides' tragedy, so strenuous and 
 organic is 'Aristophanes' Apology' and the later 
 experience of Balaustion, the one as virile and 
 intellectual as the other is lyric and womanly. 
 
 The 'Last Adventure of Balaustion' was her 
 hearing of ' Aristophanes' Apology,' and occurred on 
 this wise. One night, a year before Aigispotamoi 
 (I follow Browning's spelling in order to act as a 
 finger-post to the poem), Aristophanes and his rabble 
 rout had burst into Balaustion's quiet home. It had 
 been the day of the representation of Aristophanes' 
 ThesmopJioriazusce, parodying and ridiculing Euiipides, 
 and also the day when the news reached Athens of 
 Euripides' death in Macedonia. Balaustion was 
 known to be the tragedian's most prominent admirer 
 in Athens, and Aristophanes, flown with wine, had 
 been struck, after his triumph -night feast at the 
 State's expense, with the idea of half insolently, half 
 sympathetically, calling upon Euripides' spiritual 
 executrix, the cloud left rosy with the departed 
 sunset of the poet. Intrusions upon household 
 privacy were frequent in Athens, and we need only 
 turn to the interruption and conclusion of Plato's 
 ' Banquet ' to find what perhaps supplied the hint for 
 the mise en schie and theme of Aristophanes^ Apology. 
 Abashed by the purity and severity of the Ehodian 
 wife, chorus, choragus, flute-boys, and dancing-girls 
 slink away, leaving the Wine-lees-poet alone with his
 
 Ill INTRODUCTIONS TO THE POEMS. IS'. 
 
 hosts. There ensues a long conversation, which is for 
 many pages Ari.stophanes' defence of his comedies, 
 and afterwards Balaust ion's refutation of each of liis 
 arguments. Challenged to defend her poet, Balaustion 
 knows no better way than, following an example set 
 by Sophokles, to read aloud the autograph work 
 Euripides gave her, which she and Euthukles wore 
 about to have read in commemoration, not vindica- 
 tion, had not Aristophanes broken in upon the rite. 
 Aristophanes' better nature is for the second time 
 evoked, and he comments, after the reading, on the 
 ditTerence between himself and Euripides, in a graver 
 mood than he has hitherto assumed. The ground of 
 his defence broadens and, for that very reason, 
 becomes even more sophistical. He tries to quiet 
 the still, small voice by asserting that artistic perfec- 
 tion surpasses elevation of character, and that he did 
 well to perfect his own bent — as if he had not culti- 
 vated a bent towards muck and mire and towards 
 ' taking stand on lower ground than truth ' ! Ilis 
 moral baseness, not the limitation of his genius, is the 
 cause of Balaustion's quarrel against him. The bur- 
 lesque vein presently reasserts itself, though not 
 before he has improvised a rhapsodical chant, almost 
 the one touch in Browning's Aristoi)hanes of that 
 Shelley -like sensibility to beauty which is as marked 
 a characteristic of the teacher of the Clouds as his 
 ribaldry and scurrility. Through the lyric words 
 breaks, with a strong rebouml, Aristophanes' intense 
 sense of the ludicrous, that es.sentially Aristophanic
 
 186 BROWNING. 
 
 CHAP. 
 
 quality which Browning ahnost sinks in the earlier part 
 of the Apology, when Aristophanes is pressing upon 
 hostile auditors his demand to be taken seriously. 
 
 The triumph of the poem is its imaginative creation 
 of the man, Aristophanes. Browning is as true to the 
 extant comedies and the references of contemporaries 
 as to his own conception and his prejudice against the 
 lampooner of Euripides. Every page of the Apology 
 is saturated with references to the plots, characters, 
 and mud-pellets of Aristophanes' works. ^ That 
 laughing-stock, Euripides according to the comedies, 
 with the caricatured lines 
 
 My tongue hath sworn — my mind remains unsworn ^ 
 and 
 
 Who knows if Life is Death . . . 
 And Death is Life ? ^ 
 
 appears throughout the Apology side by side with the 
 true shape of the retired, ascetic poet, who so much 
 exasperated his reviler by not noticing his abuse. 
 The poem is full of contrasts, — between the baldhead 
 bard and austere Balaustion, between the heroic 
 simplicity of Herakles and the sophistical complexities 
 of the 'Apology,' between the two methods, comic 
 and tragic — opposed systems of working for the social 
 benefit by depicting the lofty or making game of the 
 vile, between Aristophanes' attacks on Euripides as 
 
 1 The volume on Aristophanes in Ancient Classics for English 
 Readers is helpful towards understanding many of the allusions. 
 
 ^ Cp. Eur. Hippolytus, 608-612 with Aris. Thesmojjhoriazusce, 
 275 and Frogs, 101, i02, and 1471. 
 
 ^ Cp. Eur. Polyidus, fr. 639, and Phrixus, fr. 830 with Aris. 
 Frogs, 1082 and 1477.
 
 Ill INTRODUCTIOXS TO THE POEMS. 187 
 
 Athens' enemy and the comment thereupon aflbrded b}' 
 the fact that a line from Euripides saved the Akropolis, 
 ■while to the music of Aristophanes' chorus the Piraniu 
 bulwarks were demolished. A deeper contrast lies in 
 the universal meaning of the poem behind its elabo- 
 rate delineation of Athenian life. It is focused in 
 that brilliant illustration from the game of kottabos 
 (pp. 232, 233) which represents the conflict between 
 idealism and naturalism, between moral selection and 
 all-inclusive experience. The vitality of the poem 
 is not to be found in its welding of scholarship with 
 imagination, nor even in its creation of Balaustion, 
 Pompilia's kinswoman and the most cultivated heroine 
 in literature, but in Browning's contribution through 
 it to the eternal debate : Shall flesh rule me 1 or 
 spirit and flesh alternately? or together? or shall 
 spirit rule flesh? On the artistic side. Browning 
 sympathises with Aristophanes' defence; on the 
 moral side, he vividly realises his position ; and he 
 yearns, like his own Euripides, towards the degraded 
 Titan with his inextinguishable genius. Yet what 
 the argument, nothing if not ethical, actually resolves 
 itself into is, on Aristophanes' side, pleas, which he 
 feels to be dubious, for his lies, bestialities, and deter- 
 mination to raise a laugh at no matter whom nor at 
 what expense, and, on Balaustion'.s, a confutation of 
 Aristophanes by comparing him with Eurijjides, and a 
 confutation of his pleas, which is focused in the lines — 
 
 "know, — worst soplii-stry 
 Is when man'n own soul plays ita own self false."
 
 188 BROWNING. chap. 
 
 In Aristophanes^ Apology, as elseAvhere, we find how 
 simple is the. substructure of Browning's most laby- 
 rinthine edifices. His art is so much more complicated 
 than his philosophy. 
 
 Rerakks is as much a sequel to Alkestis as is 
 Balaustion's later adventure to her earlier one. The 
 sequence of Euripidean victories is perfect in every 
 detail, down to its being the self-same Kaunian ship 
 and captain that now convey Balaustion to Rhodes. 
 
 Herakles, the jubilant champion and labourer for 
 men, cannot live without defeat. Life claims her 
 due, and the heavy payment comes about thus. 
 While Herakles performs his last labour, plucking 
 Kerberos from Haides, his wife, sons, and earthly 
 father are turned out of their palace by the usurper, 
 Lukos, and now await death at his hands. Herakles 
 reappears and slays Lukos, but Herd's vengeance is 
 not fully wreaked. She sends madness to Herakles, 
 and, in his frenzied state, he kills his boys, taking 
 them for his task-master's children. His wife, too, 
 he slays. When madness departs, despair and shame 
 take possession of Herakles. The kingly, grateful 
 Theseus befriends him in this desolation, and, at 
 Theseus' bidding, Herakles, his faith in God outliving 
 his rejection of Olympian legends, accepts the sorrow- 
 fulness of his life, with greater bravery than his most 
 daring labours evoked. His discipline and patience 
 are the sublimest picture in Euripides. 
 
 The Inn Album, 1875 (Vol. XH.), though in 
 narrative form, is properly an undeveloped drama.
 
 Ill INTRODUCTIONS TO THE POEMS. 189 
 
 and, save in the scene between Ottima and Sebald in 
 Fippa Fosses, its dramatic intensity is unequalled. 
 Browning ti\kes for subject, not ' the healthy natures 
 of a grand epoch,' ^ but a story from modern life, of 
 crime and moral distortion, suggesting melodrama, 
 but raised by his treatment to tragedy. So far the 
 poem resembles I!ed Cotton Xight-Cap Country, but the 
 speculative background, the meditative atmosphere 
 of the earlier work are absent from this one. Instead 
 of feeling the presence of the author, praising, 
 blaming, sympathising, sometimes momentarily identi- 
 fying himself Mith one or other of his characters, 
 we find an absolutely concentrated treatment, which 
 leaves no space for discursiveness. Browning's own 
 vision of life is curtained for the nonce, and the 
 dramatic half of his mind dominates, obliterating the 
 philosophical half, so far as we may call that oblitera- 
 tion which is really metamorphism. No embryonic 
 motives, no instincts still waiting in the cavity of 
 consciousness to be born and named, but human 
 nature, fully grown, manifesting itself in action, and 
 begetting its fate, is the subject of The Inn Album. 
 Throughout, there is not a line of soliloquy. Brown- 
 ing forbids himself any sclf-revcalment of his charac- 
 ters which is not modified by the presence of a hearer 
 or hearers. The drama is an internal and external 
 tragedy, and the outcome and conclusion of a former 
 one. The actors, intensely distinct and clear-cut, but 
 all nameless, are four — an oldish iikui, ;i woman, a 
 
 ' Preface to Straffvrd, 1637.
 
 190 
 
 BROWNING. 
 
 CHAP. 
 
 young man, and a girl. Though the girl is instru- 
 mental to the plot, psychologically, emotionally, the 
 play lies between the other three. 
 
 This tragedy of the passions is in eight scenes, or 
 half-acts, most of which take place (a contrast gro- 
 tesquely humorous) in the stuffy parlour of an inn. 
 The progress of the piece may be summarised thus 
 
 ... I. (Lord , a too accomplished card-player, 
 
 and a libertine 'of much newspaper-paragraph,' has 
 for a year past attached himself to a young fellow, 
 the son of a self-made millionaire. The older man, 
 whose life has been a failure, notwithstanding his 
 large measure of ability and what must be called 
 personal magnetism, crossed the young one's path 
 when the latter was suffering from a disappointment 
 in love for which he purposed abandoning the world 
 to misanthropise in a distant solitude. Induced by 
 his new friend to give up this idea, he became super- 
 ficially initiated by him in worldliness, and is now 
 about to marry a rich cousin.) The poem opens in 
 the village inn, where the youth has been spending 
 the eve of his visit to the country mansion of his 
 betrothed in playing cards with his evil genius, who 
 had hoped to indemnify himself by one night's success 
 for his approaching loss in the marriage of his 'pupil' 
 The first speaker is the older man. He asks for the 
 inn album, wherein to reckon the result of the night's 
 play. The reckoning proves him to be the loser, to 
 the extent of ten thousand pounds. The youth 
 offers to cancel the debt, which he knows would
 
 Ill INTRODUCTIONS TO THE TOEMS. 191 
 
 prove an almost impossible one to the needy man. 
 
 Lord affects to scout the idea, repl3-ing to the 
 
 well-meaning tactlessness of his half -unwilling ad- 
 mirer in words jxirtly sardonic, partly conciliatory. 
 IL The youth, still troubled at the thought of taking 
 the impoverished lord's money, sets to wondering 
 why it is that one so much older, so infinitely abler, 
 should be without any of those substantial goods 
 which he himself possesses in supei-abundance. His 
 companion acknowledges his failure to be due to a 
 fatal woman". Then he tells, in an impenitent, ignor- 
 ant way ('ignorant' in the sense applied to it on pp. 
 276, 278 of case-lmrdemd or narrow-hearted) the story 
 of how, four years ago, he won — and betrayed — a 
 young girl's love. His victim only leapt out of her 
 fascination, her captivity, when he disclosed that he 
 had not intended marriage. Her wrath surprised 
 him into offering it, whereupon she further astonished 
 him by refusing. He had destroyed the love he had 
 created. The enormity of his offence seems, even to 
 him.self, to demand some attempt at palliation, so he 
 lamely professes that he originally intended to act 
 honourably, had not circumstances hurried him wrong. 
 He dimly blames his victim's very perfection of sur- 
 face for hiding the soul which so removed her from 
 the women of his experience. Since her disdainful 
 rejection of his offer of marriage, her life has passed 
 from his ken. One fact only is known to him — that in 
 a month she had married a country clergyman. Now 
 comes one of the piercing flashes of insight into lliis
 
 192 BROWNING. chap. 
 
 tragedy of souls. The speaker acknowledges that, 
 since the affair he has been describing, his life has 
 withered, and every thing has gone wrong ; yet he 
 ignores the significance of the nemesis that has pur- 
 sued him. The man's grand opportunity (and we 
 know how great is Browning's sense of the value of 
 life's crises as chances for character) was the revela- 
 tion of a lofty and, till then, pure woman. She 
 loved him, and might have been his saviour. Instead, 
 he blasphemed his opportunity, defiling what he should 
 have worshipped and cherished. 
 
 " I hate who would not understand, 
 Let me repair things." 
 
 The blind heart that utters that is as much fool as 
 knave, as we shall presently see more completely. 
 Meanwhile his listener, true to youthfulness, does 
 not feel the tragedy much, till, as it soon will, it 
 crosses his own life. Encouraged, however, by his 
 companion's confidence, he tells' how he too met his 
 'wonder of a woman.' By this phrase, both in- 
 stinctively describe her, who, unknown to them, is 
 one and the same. She had met the young Oxonian 
 during the time of her captivation by the older man, 
 and had refused his honest devotion — "she was 
 another's." When, later, the youth heard that his 
 ideal had married, he thought it was to the man she 
 loved. Still, she stands to him for all love, all 
 loveliness, his afiianced cousin being merely his 
 cousin. III. The men vacate the stage for awhile.
 
 in IXTRODUCTIONS TO THE POEMS. 193 
 
 and the woman ami the girl enter. The latter has 
 lately been disturbed by a vagne fear that she and 
 her betrothed have mistaken ' easy ignorance ' of each 
 other for luiowledge. She has sent for the married 
 woman to decide the case, and, after seeing him, 
 pronounce judgment on the lover. For four years 
 the girl has seen nothing of her old friend, whom 
 conjugal happiness has, .she fancies, engrossed. Who 
 then so able to decide on a question regarding 
 marriage 1 The girl, like her cousin, possesses a large 
 share of insensibility, or she would discern the woman's 
 terrible world-weariness. In easy assumjition of the 
 life of bliss led by the parson's wife, she rattles on, 
 till even her stupidity is shivered by her interlocutor. 
 Before more can be inquired, the older woman has 
 despatched her to fetch the lover. IV. The sorrow- 
 ful lady is alone, when, all unwittingly, he, the fifty- 
 years-old libertine, enters, who was the cause of her 
 shame. There they stand, hate fronting hate in 
 words of ice and fire. The man, detesting the in- 
 carnation of that image which has seemed to dog 
 each subsequent false step of his life, taunts her with 
 her marriage, for which he guessed a l)asc, sh;dlow- 
 hearted motive. Her reply contiins anotlior of 
 Browning's fla.shes of insight into human nuture. 
 When, four years ago, she started l)ack in horror 
 from the raiscreant'.s (;<)nimoiq)lace proposal of malving 
 her 'amends by marriage,' eclipsed self-respect re- 
 dawned in her consciousness of her own cajjacity for 
 contempt. Browning regards that capacity for great 
 

 
 194 BROWNING. chap. 
 
 scorn as the sure pledge of a future, redeemable and 
 infinite. She who could feel so was not utterly lost 
 nor degraded. This being so, she could live on, choos- 
 ing a life penitential in the extreme. She married a 
 purblind, drudging parish-priest, old and poor, yet 
 desiring a woman's help in doling out his sterile 
 ministrations in a sterile parish. Among brutalised 
 people, she has endured an existence of drear apathy. 
 No ' human lucid laugh ' has penetrated it, and to- 
 day's hearing of one had almost forbidden her return 
 to bondage, till her betrayer's reappearance checked 
 such impulse. For reply, the man tells her she never 
 loved him if she loathes him now. She controverts 
 this, in words that, over its grave, recall the dead 
 enthusiasm. Then the man's cynicism half breaks 
 up. Throwing himself before her, he cries to her to 
 redeem his life by uniting hers with it to the end. 
 He strives to excuse his doubt of love, he assails her 
 soul with subtle temptation, finest flattery, himself 
 for the moment seeming to struggle with his own 
 evil. The passage is tragical in the contrast between 
 what is genuine in the man's appeal and the woman's 
 hurlhig back of all of it. She only hears in it a bid- 
 ding to break faith with the husband whom she has 
 rightly kept uninformed of her story of woe. She 
 is deriding the man, changing his revived ardour 
 into malignancy, when the youth enters. V. The 
 young man and she recognise each other. To his 
 whirl of consciousness, her presence together with 
 the older man's attitude look like plotted villainy.
 
 Ill INTRODUCTIONS TO THE POEMS. 195 
 
 His rash invective she silences by explaining the 
 situation sufficiently to solemnly warn him against 
 the ' friend ' who has ruined her life and would ruin 
 his. (And now the older man, with the luck 
 against him, and egged on by the woman's scorn and 
 disbelief, and the young man, his now undeceived 
 dupe's threats, prepares to play a last card. He con- 
 ceives the double purpose of ridding himself of his 
 money debt and revenging his rebuft" from the woman, 
 by writing in the Album what he calls the price of 
 his keeping silence on the past to her husband. This 
 he sends her into the adjoining room to read. The 
 price of his silence is that she shall accept a frankly 
 dishonouring offer if such be made her by the younger 
 man.) VI. Alone with the youth, the 'Adversary' 
 traduces the woman, predicting, in proof of her infamy, 
 that she will accept the proposal which he recommends 
 the young man to make her. The fee for the lesson 
 in womankind that he represents himself as giving, if 
 found correct, may fairly be, he urges, the remission 
 of the ten thousand pounds. VH. The evil one 
 retires to await success, and the lady re-enters. 
 (While in the other room, she has taken a poison 
 always kept by her against some such need.) She 
 comprehends what has passed during her absence, 
 and, in word.s that have death's calmness upon them, 
 disperses the calumnies of her foe. The young man's 
 reply to her, unknowing though he yet is of the 
 threat in tlic .Mbiim, is a generous, selfless ofler t(j 
 her of his life's service. This is one of the grandest
 
 196 BROWNING. chap, 
 
 dramatic passages in Browning's works. In its few 
 minutes, the youth turns man, all his callowness done 
 away with. Every rag of a boy's conventionality is 
 scattered to the winds in the equal delicacy and 
 directness of the speech. He has offered her his 
 hand for ever. She takes it, knowing, as he does 
 not, what 'for ever' means. When the enemy re- 
 turns, even he is taken aback at the apparent success 
 of his scheme. He little imagines the pact come to 
 by natures so unlike his. With loathsome compli- 
 ment, he congratulates the couple, but is interrupted 
 by the dying woman, who reads to her champion the 
 writing in the Album. For fitting comment, the 
 younger man springs at the villain, and strangles 
 him. Vni. The woman dies, but not till she has 
 falteringly written what will vindicate her deliverer's 
 conduct. There is silence in the room. Outside, a 
 laughing voice is heard. It is that of the girl, to 
 whom dreadful news has to be broken by the grave 
 survivor, saved as he is from doing her the supreme 
 indignity of marriage without love. 
 
 Pacchiarotto and how he worked in Dis- 
 temper: with other Poems, 1876 (Vol. XIV.), is 
 Browning's first work in the serio - grotesque key 
 which, on and off, distinguishes his penultimate 
 period. The poet's personal robustness runs riot in 
 the present volume. Four of the poems. At the 
 " Memmid" House, Shop, and the Epilogue repudiate 
 poetic self - delineation, yet in these very pieces 
 Browning is self-delineative as to his poetic methods
 
 m INTRODUCTIONS TO THE TOEMS. 107 
 
 and principles. Such a paradox conies naturally 
 from tlie apostle of paradoxes. 
 
 ProhHfue {A Jfall in the Selections, Second Series, 
 1S80) is a little reverie, induced by watching the 
 pulsation and Hutter of wall foliage. That common 
 sight, which mysteriously stimulates most imagina- 
 tions, is full of supersensual suggestiveness to 
 Browning. 
 
 Of PacchiaroUo, and how he worked in Distemper \s 
 a true story, frolicsomely told, of the Sienese painter 
 of the early sixteenth century whose personality it 
 is hard to disentangle from that of his contem- 
 porary fellow-townsman, Pacchia. The poem, with 
 its sportive rhymes, is a merry quirk, abounding in 
 the liberty of power. Browning has frequently in- 
 sisted that a man's wisdom is no more than he needs 
 to shai)e his own course aright, and he enjoys this 
 opiKjrtunity of showing how ill - advised meddling 
 and dreams of social perfectibility brought to grotesque 
 grief a reformer who would have done better to stick 
 to his paint-pot. A similar idea was gravely ex- 
 pressed in The Buy and the Angel. The reformed 
 reformer, the Abbot, and the corpse urge no selfish 
 letting-be, but a strenuous doing of one's individual 
 l>cst towards earth's amelioration, chastened by a full 
 acceptance of the uncompierable unevcnncss of what 
 Browning ' calls this ' Kehoarsal,' life. Browning 
 tacks on to I'arrhitirotto proper a roistering mockery 
 of his reviewers, ' in the drabs, blues, and yellows.' 
 
 ' (;p. Epictetus, Encheiridion, XVII.
 
 198 BROWNING. chap. 
 
 The next to naming of a special critic, and the char- 
 acter of his threatened punishment remind us that 
 Browning has been recently saturating himself in 
 Aristophanes. 
 
 At the " Mermaid " disclaims the idea of directly 
 personal utterance having any place in a dramatic 
 poet's works, and disavows a poetic leadership 
 founded on any pandering to the taste of the public 
 for personal disclosures. Browning puts on 
 Shakspere's mantle to cover the haughtiness of a 
 declaration of independence all his own. 'Last 
 king' is, of course, Byron, whom Browning so con- 
 stantly belabours. The expression " threw Venus " 
 refers to the best throw, called ' Venus ' (thrice six), 
 in dice. 
 
 House, like At the " Mermaid," disallows any spirit 
 in poetic utterance but the dramatic one. The quota- 
 tion is from Wordsworth's sonnet on the Sonnet. 
 Neither by mind nor art was Browning fitted to form 
 a triad with the sonnet masters, Shakspere and 
 Wordsworth. 
 
 Shop condemns those who write solely for profit — 
 of money or fame. Its striking and noble protest 
 equally applies to all men with muck-rakes, who can 
 look no way but downwards. 
 
 Pisgah - Sights. I. suggests the insight into the 
 meaning of life, and the acquiescence in its apparent 
 evils, which a dying man may have. II. resembles 
 An Epistle of Karshish in representing the paralysis of 
 action, and untimely spiritual precooity, that a man
 
 Ill INTRODUCTIOXS TO THE POEMS. 199 
 
 would have did his ' Pisgah-Sight ' come wliile he was 
 still toiling through earth's wilderness. 
 
 /Vars and Scrupks is a parable of theistic faith on 
 trial. Its personifications give it an aflecting inward- 
 ness. 
 
 Xatural Magic consists of two stanzas which trans- 
 pose, as is the case with allegories, the natural order 
 of thought. No lover needs an interpretation of 
 love's 'natural magic' 
 
 Magical Nature tells of the soul's beauty that age 
 cannot wither. Note the lovely versification of these 
 companion poems, especially the smooth opulence 
 of the line — 
 
 ' Jewel at no mercy of a moment in your prime.' 
 
 Bifurcation is one of Browning's most remarkable 
 short poems. Simple enough in expression, it is as 
 mysterious as a transcript from life should be. It is, 
 like Fears ami Scruple.'^, a riddle, only in this case the 
 answer is withheld. Browning seems to condemn 
 the woman for following a counsel of prudence instead 
 of the ardour of the heart, and the condemnation 
 would be ciiaracteristic, but perhaps he both forbears 
 to judge, an<l would have us forbear. 
 
 Xumj>hijhj)ti»; in natural proximity to JJifuixatum, 
 is high-fantajitical in its scenic circumstance. E.ssen- 
 tially, it describes a man ' seized by a nymjdi ' who 
 setH him tasks. Ho journeys forth on his (piests, to 
 return inevitably stainc<l with travelling. Tiie im- 
 maculate She will not furgive tlicso btain.s. Idle,
 
 200 BROWNING. chap . 
 
 useless, and ignorant of life, she expects the impos- 
 sible, weighing her worshipper by the unreal standard 
 of her own cloistered virtue. (Happily, the unsym- 
 pathising and ungenerous being, ' hearted ' in the 
 white centre of the prism, is not a superior young 
 woman, but only a ' nymph ' !) 
 
 Appearances, a dramatic miniature, tells how life 
 is made 'poor ' or 'rich,' not by externals, patent to 
 all, but by the hidden history of the heart. 
 
 St. Martinis Summer is instinct with a delicious 
 shiver of only half - metaphorical ghostliness. The 
 speaker deprecates the idea of formally entering upon 
 a new love. He has, and perhaps the lady he ad- 
 dresses has too, buried loves whose ghosts are unlaid. 
 Friendliness, better than love, suits such autumnal 
 creatures as he and she. Yet he is congratulating 
 himself on virtually eluding the ghosts, when suddenly 
 they assert their reality, mocking and pulverising the 
 present. 
 
 HervS Eiel, the grand ballad every one knows, 
 seems to belong to the same inspiration as Good Neivs 
 from Ghent. Neither of Browning's most popular 
 poems has an English theme. Hervd Eiel was' origin- 
 ally published in the Cornhill Magazine, March, 1871, 
 that Browning might contribute the sum (.£100) 
 given for it to the fund for sending food to Paris 
 after the siege. 
 
 A Forgiveness is the strongest poem in the Pacchi- 
 arotto volume. It is one of the four or five ' sample ' 
 pieces that Browning said he " should not object to
 
 Ill INTRODUCTIONS TO THE POE.MS. 201 
 
 be judged by." The narrative is given by a powerful 
 ami implacable Spaniard, in seeming confession to a 
 monk, once the man who wronged him. It is no 
 common story of a wife's dishonour and a husband's 
 revenge, for the husband scorned to award 'hate's 
 puni-shment' to her who had evoked only 'con- 
 tempts.' He let her act a part, not live, beside him, for 
 tlu-ee long years. Then she told him that jealousy 
 of his absorption in state affairs, not passion for the 
 wretched moth, her lover, had been her motive. 
 She loved, still loves, her husband. This avowal 
 raises her out of his contempt — into his hate. He 
 offers her a poisoned dagger. She uses it on herself, 
 as.sured that in revenge, hate is quenched, that, dead, 
 she will be loved ' as erst.' It now only remains to 
 annihilate the monk. Short as the poem is, its 
 characterisation is absolutely complete. Nothing 
 couUl more effectively express the stoic Spaniard, his 
 c«xle and ideal, than the measured punctiliousness, 
 the gradation from contempt to hatred, the self-com- 
 nian<l, the unhasting, unresting vindictivenes.s, and 
 the e.vquisitc torture devised for his enemy. 
 
 Ceiuiuja tracks the reference (in Shelley's Cenci, V., 
 4) that weighed with Clement VIII. to seal Beatrice 
 C'enci's doom. It is a story of the corrupt Church 
 of the year 1000, avenged, as Browning puts it, in 
 l.'^TO. The poem evidences Browning's sciiipulnus 
 love of win<ling uji every loose end of a story, 
 reminding us of tliat more famous reconl of the 
 miscariiages, and final vindication, of justice, as
 
 202 BROWNING. chap. 
 
 given in the last section of The Piing and the 
 Book. 
 
 Filippo Bcddinucd on the Privilege of Burial is a 
 grimly comic narration of what befel Jews in Florence. 
 Up to stanza xxxvi., the story is fact, as related 
 by Filippo Baldinucci (n. 1624— ob. 1696) in his 
 voluminous History of Design. Baldinucci's vulgar 
 imbecility is racily rendered, and in telling contrast 
 with the patient dignity of the Jews. 
 
 Epilogue contains more of such sturdy, vigorous 
 sentiments as appeared in At the " Mermaid." Brown- 
 ing now addresses the public rather than the critics. 
 His turning of the tables on those who swear by the 
 classics they do not read is caustic raillery. Stanza 
 xiv. is a piece of suggestive criticism. Again Brown- 
 ing refuses to make his 'house' his 'shop,' again he 
 gibes at Byron, again he tells us, what we know so 
 well, that he himself brews 'stiff drink' and his 
 ' vineyard ' is 
 
 ' Man's thoughts and loves and hates. ' 
 
 The Agamemnon of -ffischylus, 1877 (Vol. 
 XIII. ), is Browning's third transcript from the Greek. 
 Every one remembers the outline of what forms the 
 main subject of this Drama, the story of Agamem- 
 non's death — how he returned from Ilion to Argos in 
 company with Cassandra, and how Clytemnestra, his 
 wife, killed them both. The Agamemnon contains, 
 in common with all Greek plays, but here in sur- 
 passing measure, so almost infinite a number of
 
 in INTRODUCTIONS TO THE POEMS. 203 
 
 meanings, so incxliaustible a store of ageless life, 
 that one only wishes Browning had illuminated this 
 first, this form-creating Drama, as he did the Alkestis, 
 with such another wise and brilliant commentary. 
 Then we might have had the hymns concerning 
 Iphigenia and Helen as detached from the platitudes 
 of the chorus, and from the speeches of Cassandra, 
 agonising under Apollo's spell, and of Clytemnestra, 
 after the deed, ' magnificent in sin,' like Ottima and 
 Lady Macbeth, though greater and worse than either. 
 Then, too, Browning could have impressed upon his 
 readei-s how shallow is the conventional misnomer of 
 fatalism for ^schylus' supreme sense of retribu- 
 tion, of Erinnyes. ^schylus is mankind's majestic 
 prophet of the certainty of punishment for crime, 
 and of the far-reaching consequences of action, and 
 he is at his most proi)hetic in the Agamemnon. Itself 
 the story of the consequences of a precedent event 
 (the staining of the house of Tantalus by the horrible 
 meal of Atreus), it is oidy the commencement of 
 another continuous action, the first play of the 
 Oreska. Its truth to nature combining with an 
 artistically rounded, unmistakable presentment of re- 
 tributive justice makes the Orestm a mine of teaching. 
 .iEhchylus is no less certain than an old Jewish 
 lawgiver that the sins of the fathers must be 
 expiated by the children unto the third and fuuith 
 genemtiun. At the same time, he shows enough 
 immediate cause of these visitations to sjitisfy the 
 demand for justice to individuals and foi- human
 
 204 BROWNING. chap. 
 
 volition as well as divine vengeance and its impelling 
 force. Agamemnon dies, not merely because the un- 
 sated demon sits on his roof demanding fulfilment 
 of Thyestes' curse, but because he sacrificed his 
 daughter to his self-will and ambition. These are 
 the inner, ethical causes, but on the surface appear 
 what to the unthinking are causes enough for 
 Agamemnon's murder, in Clytemnestra's jealousy of 
 Cassandra, her desertion of Agamemnon for ^gis- 
 thus, and their joint scheme to destroy him. Neither 
 does ^schylus omit the favourite Greek moral, the 
 injury Avrought on character by too great prosperity. 
 The Greeks preferred a mixture of failure with 
 prosperity, instead of universal success, and ^schylus 
 gives effect to this feeling in the case of the King of 
 men by his 'treading,' though reluctantly, 'the 
 purple to his death.' ■*• 
 
 Both the excellences and defects of Browning's 
 translation are only appreciable by scholars, and, 
 on account of its daring, enthusiastic truthfulness 
 line by line to the text, by them alone can the great- 
 ness of Browning's toil and its result be valued. 
 The mode, or, at all events, the effect, of the render- 
 ing of Agamemnon, differs from that of Alkestis and 
 HeraMes. Its key is in the preface, where BroAvning 
 lays down as his axiom of translation literalness, 
 supporting it by many a good reason. But when 
 he speaks of translating 'the very turn of each 
 
 1 Pauline, i. 26 — an interesting reference when we compare 
 the dates of FauUne and this Transcript.
 
 Ill IXTRODUCTIOXS TO THE POEMS. 205 
 
 phrase,' we cannot lielp thinkini; of what is the 
 result of turning foreign idioms into literal Phiglish. 
 This is too much what he has tried to do Avith 
 ^Eschylus. He goes to the roots of both languages 
 in order to match the Greek word, with the result 
 that he not infrequently translates according to the 
 word, not according to the sense. He seems to 
 ignore how much the meaning of words depends on 
 the associations that perhaps the English word has 
 quite lost and is therefore, at the present time, no 
 real equivalent. The determination to achieve 
 etymological exactitude has here and there made 
 fidelity to the spirit of the original o'er -leap itself. 
 The letter killcth in 
 
 " things there be, one barks," 
 When uo man harks " (p. 289), 
 an<l 
 
 *' I was rightly of this slaughter stildi-man" (p. 352). 
 
 Then ag;iin, Browning acts well in i)reserving the 
 ruggedness of yEschylus, but ill when he overlays 
 it with words and phrases which from their oddity 
 give an added harshness. Inversions peculiar to 
 UroANTiing prevent the translation from being what 
 a translation should be, as far as possible a trans- 
 parent medium. If we compare the openings of 
 the first two speeches with a literal but unliterary 
 'crib,' such as Bohn's, we find how Browning has 
 adde<l tliHiculty to that which had too much, lie 
 would seem to have been committed to this occasion- 
 ally artificial fidelity before he translated the tragedy,
 
 206 BROWNING. chap. 
 
 otherwise it is hard to imagine how his dramatic 
 imagination, which stood him in such stead when 
 he was realising to himself Alkestis and Herakles, 
 should have permitted the flat rendering of certain 
 lines of Clytemnestra's and of the last words of the 
 tragic Cassandra. Doubtless, a less intimate tie 
 connects Browning's sympathy with yEschylus than 
 with Euripides. It seems ungracious to disparage 
 aught in a version wherein genius, scholarship, and 
 the most special qualifications in Browning's enormous 
 resources of word and rhymes have done their all 
 but triumphant. One rather turns to those in- 
 numerable instances where the native beauty of the 
 poem is accentuated by Browning. Tact in words 
 is a translator's genius, and, with certain egregious 
 exceptions. Browning's rendering abounds in it. 
 The approximations to the Greek measures both in 
 the dramatic and choric passages are very successful. 
 Certain lines, especially from the lyrics, must here- 
 after for ever cancel all other translations whatso- 
 ever. For examples, take a line from Clytemnestra's 
 imagination-picture of the victorious Greeks 
 
 ' In the spear-captured Troic habitations ' 
 
 and this of Helen in Troy — a history in a brace of 
 
 lines — 
 
 " There she stands silent ! meets no honour — no 
 Shame — sweetest still of things gone long ago " 
 
 and the accuracy, infinitely superior to 'elegances' 
 of translation, of
 
 Ill iXTRODrrnoxs to tiik pok.ms. 207 
 
 "All, Linos, say — ah, Linos, song of wail ! 
 But may tlie pood prevail ! " 
 
 La Saisiaz : The Two Poets of Croisic, 1878 
 
 (\ u\. Xl\.), are the poems, di.ssuciated eiiuugli in 
 nioml and tlieiue, whieh fonu Brownings next 
 volume. 
 
 La Saisiaz is prefaced by three verses (reprinted as 
 ru«j<ih-Sighf.<, III. in Selections, Second Series) which, 
 coming as they are imagined to do, from a just 
 disembodied soul, sound the key-note of tlic entire 
 work— faith in a better life after death. The eartli- 
 bound man utters darkling faith, but the freed spirit, 
 joyfid assurance. Tlie relation between this prelude 
 and La Saii<ia: is very beautifid. 
 
 ' La Saisiaz ' is the name of a villa among the moun- 
 tains of Savoy, where the sad incident occurred which 
 suggested the poem. A valued friend, who was staying 
 with the poet and his sister, died there suddenly on 
 September 14th, 1877. ^\■ithout warning, death's chill 
 and blank effaced the gaiety of the holiday, the apparent 
 security of the life, the sympathy of the companionship. 
 The mystery of death, never so earnestly interrogated 
 as after a shock of suddenness like thi.s, turned the 
 poet's reflections from his loss to the problem whether 
 the great change means extinction. The subject of 
 immortality had, a few days previously, been dis- 
 cussed iK'tween the friends, and Browning, climbing 
 where they were to have ascended together, speaks 
 out his train of thought, as though to the ' iJear and 
 True' who is no longer beside liiiu. iirowning's
 
 208 BROWlSrma chap. 
 
 structure of belief entirely rests on two postulates, 
 the existence of the soul and the existence of God. 
 He attempts to prove neither, because to him they are 
 self-evident. This point of individual testimony is 
 dwelt upon. Browning takes self (as in Eahbi Ben 
 Ezra) as the centre of its universe and the judge of 
 all phenomena, and self -development as self's tendency 
 and eventual aim. To grant these two personalities, 
 the subjective and the objective, or soul and God, is 
 an enormous assumption, though Browning never 
 questions either. This is not because he shrinks from 
 probing for truth, but because he was born a poet, 
 and therefore a mystic. Accordingly, he affirms that, 
 to the extent of his only two assumptions, he kiioivs^ 
 that "which passeth knowledge." All doctrine in- 
 ferential therefrom is matter for ' surmise,' and that 
 is the peculiar province of Browning's searching 
 intellect. The basis of his belief in immortality is 
 that life is only explicable as probation. It is the 
 inexplicableness, rather than the injustice, of life for 
 which he needs the hope of a different hereafter. 
 Yet, looking at life, he decides that, were its condi- 
 tions final, evil outweighs good. The positivist's 
 social immortality is inconsistent with the personal 
 soul's conception of the personal God. Successively, 
 Browning tries life, as he knows it, with every key 
 but that of probation and immortality, and finds that 
 
 1 Cp. Abt Vogler's— 
 
 "The others may reason and welcome; 'tis we musicians" (poets) 
 
 " know."
 
 Ill IXTRODUCTIOXS TO TIIK POEMS. 209 
 
 not one of them opens the door. Afterwards, lie 
 shifts his gi'oiind, and approaches his problem from 
 the other side. Conceding the existence of personal 
 immortality, he vindicates the nncertainty on the 
 snhject that is man's lot here. This vindication is 
 carried on in an internal debate, which Browning 
 endeavoni's to make as objective as possible in order 
 that its result shall not be impeachable as the ott- 
 spring of sentiment, the easy creation of wishes. 
 Expressed in a more argumentative form, the 
 substance of what ' Reason ' says is that of A Death 
 in the Deseii, Pisgah-Sights, II., and Fears and Scruples. 
 It proves the value of ignorance in developing forti- 
 tude which comes of faith, morality which comes of 
 volition, activity wliich comes of responsi])ility, 
 and self-reliance which comes of the absence of 
 authority. 
 
 La Sauiiaz sutlers from the personal directness 
 which Browning di&ivows. The poem is so ratiocina- 
 tive, that it needs characterisation to raise it generally 
 to the imaginative level. The serpentining trochaics 
 add to the strain on the attention, and what witli the 
 impetuous leaps, and only half expressed links, of its 
 thought, it is one of Browning's hardest works. 
 
 The Two I'ud.'i of Crouic is enclosed between two 
 exquisite lyrics. The one love of the personal life is 
 the subject of the first (called yl /i/icarances in the Selec- 
 tiom). The second (called A Tulr in the Selections), is 
 a story concerning a poet and his lyre. It brims over 
 with playful tenderncs.s, and tears - we need not a.sk 
 
 P
 
 210 BROWNING. chap. 
 
 for wliom — are in the voice that tells us how once in 
 the poet's life, the 
 
 " string that made 
 ' Love ' sound soft was snapt in twain." 
 
 The Two Poets of Croisic unearths two personages, 
 one of the sixteenth century, the other of the 
 eighteenth. Each made a rocket -like ascent in 
 Paris, fizzed awhile, and descended like rocket-sticks. 
 Browning describes himself as sitting over a ship- 
 wood fire, and telling what his fancy sees therein. 
 He conjures up the bleak Breton fishing - village, 
 Croisic, with its memoirs of Druidical savagery. His 
 first Croisickese poet is Rene Gentilhomme, Conde's 
 page, and a poetaster to whom came one hour of afflatus, 
 or, as he and his world believed, of direct revelation. 
 He prophesied the unhoped-for birth of Louis XHI. 
 Afterwards, he wrote no more, a wise abstinence 
 that gives him a title to respect in Browning's eyes. 
 Stanzas lix.-lxvi. recall Browning's conception in 
 An Epistle of the after-life of the raised Lazarus. 
 Browning's second 'poet,' for Avhom a yellow-green 
 flamelet does duty, is he whose history suggested 
 Piron's Mitromanie. Desf orges - Maillard, stimulated 
 by the earlier Croisickese example, determined to 
 achieve greatness too. He forwarded his verses to 
 Le Mercure de France to be contemptuously refused 
 admission into its pages. While he fumed under 
 the editor. La Roque's, treatment, his shrewder sister 
 hit on a plan of redress. Copying out her brother's
 
 Ill ixTRonrrTioxs to the poems. 211 
 
 efliisions, and forwarding them with a girlisli entreaty 
 and under a feminine pen-name, she not only subdued 
 La ixoque, and presently had him at her feet in a love- 
 letter, but also extracted liomage from Voltaire, and 
 adulation from literary Paris. The Breton Sappho, 
 as they calletl lier, doubtless enjoyed the continuance 
 of her joke, but the conceit of Desforges-iMaillard 
 covdd not long endure the \icarious reputation. He 
 journeyed to Paris and stormed the editor. La 
 Kociue hid his discomfiture, and, to spite Voltaire, to 
 whom he, being a man of letters, owed a gi-udge, he 
 passed him on the hoax. A glance was sufficient to 
 explain the situation to Voltaire, and Desforgcs- 
 Maillard was speedily returned — empty — to Brittany. 
 The following extract from Voltaire's correspondence 
 amusingly connects the poem with literary history : 
 " L'avcnture tie la Malcrais-Maillard est asscz plais- 
 ante. Elle prouve au moins (juc nous sommes tres- 
 galants ; car quand Maillanl nous ecrivait, nous ne 
 lisions pas ses vers ; quand Mdlle de la Vigne nous 
 ccrivit, nous lui fimes des declarations." 
 
 At the en«l of his story, Browning turns to his 
 au<litor and gives her a test for judging poets. That 
 jKHit, he says, who leads the happiest life is the 
 greatest, because a poet neces.sarily feels, i.e. sullers, 
 more than others, and if he can but yoke his feelings 
 to hi.s chariot, instead of being torn to pieces Ijy tiiem, 
 he proves his pre-eminence. 
 
 Dramatic Idyls. Fir.st Series, 1879, (Vol. XV.), 
 show lliu pijct of unexpectedness at the top uf
 
 212 BROWNING. chap. 
 
 his bent. Twists, surprises, abrupt turns which 
 seem, though they are not actually, changes of idea, 
 are ingredients in every poem. In Dramatic Idyls, 
 Browning collects a number of traditions and legends 
 of sensational action. But where others see the act, 
 Browning sees the motive, and so, in his accustomed 
 way, he gives the action as from within, identifying 
 himself with the doer. Accordingly, these dramatic 
 idyls illustrate character in action, not action by and 
 for itself. All the poems depict crises of character, 
 or those determining moments of life on the signifi- 
 cance of which Browning never tires of dwelling. 
 The circumstances of the stories are tragic, the im- 
 pression left by many of them painful and sad, for 
 whereas former moral struggles as realised by Brown- 
 ing have, as a rule, resulted in victory for the soul, 
 the stories of rare, yet thinkable trials in Martin 
 Belph, Ivan Ivanovitch, and Clive, with their dread 
 moral abysses, solely evoke from the depths of us 
 the trembling prayer. Lead us not into such tempta- 
 tion. Browning's own reconcilement with much that 
 is repellent, fierce, and criminal in the subjects of 
 his poems is to be found in the concluding lines of 
 Ilalhert and Hob. A spiritual unknown quantity, the 
 ' reason out of nature,' is never far from Bi-owning's 
 image of life, and we see how it operates in his pre- 
 sentment even of such characters as Halbert, Hob, 
 and the Bratts'. 
 
 Martin Relph records an old man's self-imposed 
 penance of annually standing just where he succumbed
 
 m INTRODUCTIONS TO THE POEMS. 213 
 
 to temptation, and telling the surrounding crowd how, 
 when he was young, he played coward, and, as he 
 darkly knows, murderer. A girl, suspected of deal- 
 ing ^^^th the Pretender's friends, was to be shot, 
 by military law. Martin Eclph alone saw a man 
 hurrying with the reprieve, but made no sign, and 
 a double death ensued — the girl's by the muskets, 
 her hastening lover's by the despair of hearing 
 them fired. "Was ^Martin Relph's muteness due to 
 cowardice or to something worse — jealous envy 1 
 Browning's intense vividness, and active S3^mpathy 
 with his characters, guilty or innocent, coarse or subtle, 
 come out strongly in ^lartin Relph's lamentable 
 confession. All the dramati.st is in that change of 
 tense from " was " to " am " as the anguished old man 
 revives the searing scene that constitutes his past 
 The sympathy the poem e.xcites is with the lover, 
 Vincent Parkes. But the maddening hindrances he 
 met in bringing the pardon, the despairing ignorance 
 of the girl as to the cause of his non-arrival, and the 
 climax of his being too late and thereat falling dead, 
 are rendered all the more ti-agic through being ever 
 afterwards Martin Kelph's instruments of self-torture. 
 Pheidippifles has for motto the Greek salutation 
 that was born of Marathon day, "Rejoice, we con- 
 quer I " The i)oem is a beautiful adaptation from the 
 story of the runner, Phcidippidcs, who in forty-eight 
 hours accomplished tlic one hundred and fifty miles 
 between Alliens anil Sparta, to ask lieli) against the 
 inva<ling Persians. The request was virtually refused
 
 214 BROWNING. chap. 
 
 by the malicious Spartans. Keturning, Pheidippides 
 met Pan, who gave him a sprig of marathrus for 
 a pledge of his aid, but juggled, as gods will, with 
 his personal hopes. The story stands out with 
 something of the joyful pride of a nobly propor- 
 tioned Greek statue among its Gothic associates, 
 between the sobbing passion of Martin Relph, and 
 the Northern gloom of the next poem. 
 
 Halhert and Hob treats of that phonograph-like 
 conservation of force, heredity, which can bottle up, 
 for a generation or more, some climax of character, 
 or rather some efflorescence of it in action, and then 
 discharge it, seemingly oblivious of the fact that 
 the particular exponent of the hereditary trait is 
 a fresh person. There is just enough difference 
 between Hob's behaviour and what Halbert recalls 
 as his to make the story as true to the variety as 
 to the similarity between related individuals. Here, 
 indeed, the trait deepens by transmission. The 
 incident of the poem is hideous till we get that 
 gleam in the gloom, that true light from Browning's 
 soul into the dark places of his mind, expressed in 
 the close. Browning can dissociate his imagination 
 from the vision of beauty, and ponder heredity with 
 any Northerner, but he is an optimist. Yet he 
 is rarely as pathetic as in the lines, 
 
 "'At his cursing and swearing!' tlie youngsters cried: but 
 the elders thought ' In prayer.' 
 A boy threw stones : he picked them up and stored them 
 in his vest."
 
 Ill INTRODUCTIONS TO THE POEMS. 215 
 
 At the same time, Hob's ^^olence has to be punished, 
 and idiocy, consequent on the moral revohition, comes 
 ujMjn him. 
 
 Ivan Ivhnovitch embodies the Russian folk-lore 
 tale of the wretched woman in the sledge who saved 
 herself from the wolves at the price of her children's 
 lives. Characteristically, and in this case not shrink- 
 ing from the utmost frightful realism, Browning 
 speaks as the woman herself. Her description of 
 the unnatural light, half snowy, half moony, in tlic 
 pine-forest, the horrible att;icks of the wild beasts, 
 and her own agony of physical fear are almost 
 unbearably exciting. Afterwards comes the judg- 
 ment, when Ivan Ivanovitch strikes off the head of 
 the woman who could so surrender her children. 
 And yet this thrilling tale, letting us into the 
 sophistries, the supreme weakness of the woman, 
 does not terminate the poem. Where any other 
 teller would stop, Browning has still much to say. 
 He has not only to present Ivan Ivanovitch's 
 execution of the unmotherly mother, but to give 
 the judgment articulateness through the aged priest 
 — Innocent XII. in another dress. We must feel 
 for the woman in her terrible trial, but lirowning 
 heightens her guilt by representing her as after- 
 wanls able to congratulate herself on her escape, 
 and to look forward to pleasant years, instead of 
 being overwhelmed with remorse, wakened as it 
 were from a hideous nightmare of her own selfish- 
 ness. That callous vileness is the justification of
 
 216 BROWNING. chap. 
 
 the carpenter's deed. The contrasts and strong 
 unity in Ivan's character are extremely dramatic. 
 The part of the poem we could least readily spare 
 is the final paragraph, where the vindicator of the 
 primal justice kneels building the model Kremlin 
 for his own children. 
 
 Traij is a curious and effective little poem, not 
 the less so on account of the obvious anachronism 
 between the Bard who tells his tale to a kind of 
 Fran9ois P^ and the eighteenpenny vivisection in 
 the tale itself. Browning's short pieces are con- 
 densed dramas, and the multiplicity of ideas even 
 in the shortest is strikingly exemplified here. The 
 characteristic after-gust which we find in each poem 
 in this collection is here the humans' complacent 
 superiority over the dog against whom they plan 
 their cold-blooded treachery while he gave them his 
 spontaneous generosity. 
 
 Ned Bratts is founded on ' The Story of old Tod ' 
 in Buny an's Life and Death of Mr. Badman. To compare 
 the poem with the original is to deepen one's sense 
 of Browning's imagination. Ned Bratts is a feat of 
 execution peculiar even in Browning, and resembling 
 Hogarth more than any other Englishman. The 
 fiery heat, fittest temperature for the hysterics of 
 revivalism with its coarse effects on brutalised people, 
 is wonderfully realised. The ' cause out of nature,' 
 here The Pilgrim's Progress, is, however, according 
 to Browning, not to be reasoned away by a mid- 
 summer madness explanation. This is the only
 
 Ill INTRODUCTIONS TO THE POEMS. 'J17 
 
 time a poet has approached the })roblem of con- 
 vci-sions. As given in Xcd Bratis, the selflessness 
 of Bunyan and the selfishness of his doctrine when 
 crystallised by the gross people to whom it appealed 
 as giving tiiem hold of the highest card form a 
 chapter in theological criticism. 
 
 Second Series, 1880. The proem suggests what most 
 of the ' Dramatic Idyls ' illustrate, the unaccounta- 
 bility, according to scientific data, of ' man's soul.' Our 
 test-tubes and plummets cannot resolve, cannot dive 
 into human motive. There is always that to count 
 on which Bro\\Tiing describes as something 'out of 
 nature,' the finger of God, the assertion of the indi- 
 vidual and freetlom of his will. 
 
 Echetlos (The Holder of the Ploughshare) is a 
 memory from ^Marathon, a poem that goes hand in 
 hand with riicidqipidcs. 
 
 Clive gives a story, referred to in Macaulay's Essay, 
 of the 'great unhappy ' Indian hero. Clive is de- 
 scribed as telling an old friend when, of all his days 
 of peril and bravery, he felt most fear. It was 
 when, still a lad, he failed to shoot a bully whom he 
 had detected cheating at cards. Clive's pistol missed, 
 and he stood to be shot. His steadiness luinerved 
 the cheat, who, confessing his disgrace, Hed the com- 
 pany. These eleven Clive bound over to silence, 
 with a stern word on their behaviour in the proceed- 
 ing. So far the story is obvious. Browning's sign- 
 manual uj)on it is still to come. . . . Il wa-s not dc-ath 
 Clive feared when the pistol fronted his lin)\v. Wiiat
 
 218 BROWNING. chap. 
 
 he dreaded was reprieve, a discreet forgiveness that 
 would have left him two alternatives, disgrace or 
 suicide. Here his interlocutor interposes an orthodox 
 objection — it needs more courage to disobey God's 
 canon against self-slaughter than to bear reputed 
 disgrace. Now comes the effectiveness of the 
 Browning interpolation. A week after the conversa- 
 tion, Clive destroyed himself. His last words were, 
 ' fearfully courageous ! ' So had the opium-drugged 
 man designated what he did in a fit of depression, so 
 had he clung to a possible interpretation of his 
 friend's words as some desperate excuse. 
 
 MuUyheli is a touching story of an Arab's pride in 
 his steed. It comes refreshingly after the melancholy 
 of Clive. The pathos of MitUijkeh is bearable. 
 
 Pietro of Ahano reads drearily after these vivid 
 and warm-blooded poems. The 'lilt' is of course 
 extremely clever and well-suited to the quasi-comic 
 treatment. Pietro of Abano (a suburb of Padua) 
 was a sort of inferior Paracelsus of the thirteenth 
 century, of whom it is recorded that he was pro- 
 hibited the drinking of milk. Browning takes this 
 milk as parabolic, or at least suggestive, of the human 
 kindness which a misunderstood benefactor of man- 
 kind has to forego. One night, the persecuted 
 philosopher was accosted by a Greek who offered 
 him gratitude and love if he would endow him with 
 his powerful secrets. Pietro seems to comply, mut- 
 tering the first half of a Benedicite as a charm. The 
 self-seeking Greek begins by applying the secret of
 
 Ill INTRODUCTIOXS TO THE POEMS. 219 
 
 Good the fruit of Evil to the furtherance of his own 
 schemes for obtaining wealth from his fellows. The 
 method succeeds. In a year's time, Pietro calls upon 
 the Greek for his payment. But the Greek prefers 
 to postpone it till Pietro has endowed him with 
 power to subjugate men. Power becomes his, and, 
 at the height of his success, Pietro again asks for 
 gratitude. This is again deferred, on the plea that 
 the Greek must first touch the top of the ladder, 
 and wield power over souls as well as bodies. His 
 request is granted and he is Pope. Pietro comes 
 again, and is about to be unceremoniously ousted, 
 when he utters the latter half of the Benedkite. The 
 spell is broken, and the Greek finds that Pietro only 
 gave him an instant's dream of greatness, to test the 
 sincerity of his promised gratitude. Pietro's would- 
 be disciple is dismissed, BroA\Tiing telling him that 
 magic is unnecessary to one so well able to riUe the 
 masses by * cleverness uncurbed by conscience.' The 
 conclusion is cynical, but Bro\vning regards his 
 version of Abano's legend ^ as a mere vagary, a throw 
 of 'sportive fancy-dice.' 
 
 Doctor renders the Talmudic tradition of Satan 
 
 married to a virago who is more than his match. 
 The touch of humour in Satan's medical son refusing 
 the prince.ss and her dowry (in account of liis father's 
 unfortunate matrimonial experience is Browning's 
 after-gust t<> the story. 
 
 Pan and Luna is in some respects one of Dinwn- 
 
 ' {'\t. (>riiiiiiiH' The FUlieniuin ami his Wife.
 
 220 BROWNING. chap. 
 
 ing's most perfect gems. Keats could not have 
 lingered more lovingly about the Girl-moon's orbed 
 loveliness. Browning averts Virgil's somewhat 
 equivocal conclusion of the myth by acknowledging 
 himself gratefully content to rest on the five con- 
 summate ideas, 
 
 ' Arcadia, night, a cloud, Pan, and the moon ! ' 
 
 The epilogue to Dramatic Idyls, with its contrasted 
 presentments of poet - nature, presentments which 
 after all are probably in Browning's eyes but the 
 inevitable two sides of a shield, recalls the Epilogue 
 to Pacchiarotto. 
 
 Jocoseria, 1883 (Vol. XV.), is a volume of mis- 
 cellaneous poems, made up of Browning's twin 
 moods, gravity and jest. The Joco-Seria of Melander 
 (16 — ) ■^ suggested the title. BroAvning's personality 
 is strong in Jocoseria, on his capriccioso side, as in 
 Solomon and Balkis, and on the side of his creed, as 
 in the last utterance of Jochanan Hakkadosh. Indi- 
 viduality, not poetical beauty, characterises the book, 
 though it contains a leaven of imaginative exaltation 
 in Ixion and Cristina and Monaldeschi 
 
 The prelude, ' Wanting is — what 1 ' expresses the 
 vivifying, transmuting power of love in a life. 
 
 Donald is a striking but improbable story with a 
 somewhat unfair application. A short introduction 
 
 ^ A reference was made in the Notes on Paracelsus to tliis jest- 
 book, in which, too, a version of the story immortalised in" The 
 Pied Piper appears nnder the title of De Diabolo horrenda 
 historia.
 
 Ill INTRODUCTIOXS TO THE POEMS. 221 
 
 (time, Lonij; Vacation ; place, a Highland Bothie), 
 ushei's in the story, as tokl, in another bothie, by the 
 cnlious protagonist. ' Donald ' met a stag on a narrow 
 way, above a preci{)icc, wliere they could neither turn 
 nor p:iss each other. The man lay down, and the stag, 
 with responsive intelligence, was daintily stepping 
 over him, when Donald, without a vestige of a sense 
 of honour, stubbed him. They rolled together ilown 
 the ravine, anti Donald had to repent his deed for the 
 rest of his lii'e. Browning tells the tale as a retort to 
 those who maintain that Sport educes manly virtues. 
 He calls the ^\Tetched ingrate, 'sportsman first, man 
 after.' As a matter of fact, the treacherous brutality 
 was not sport any more than the animal's action was 
 nature, and Donald's meanness would l)o as abhorrent 
 to honest sportsmen as to Browning himself. 
 
 Solomon and Balkis is an extravaganza of sound 
 and sense. Solomon and the Queen of Sheba hold 
 high converse on the ivory throne, till the lady, 
 jerking the hand of the King, brings into sight ' the 
 truth-compelling Name' on the royal ring. It then 
 comes out that Solomon's boasted delight in the com- 
 panionship of wise men is largely tinctured with 
 vanity and love of flattery, and that Balkis is not to 
 be taken literally when she professes a disinterested 
 eagerness for the companionship of the simply good. 
 She is a frivolous, but fa.scinating ' cat,' but Solomon 
 is the very Solomon of history. 
 
 C'ri.'iliiiu and Monaldn.schi, though it may be justly 
 accused of obscurity, resembles in dramatic fervency
 
 222 BROWNING. chap. 
 
 the grand poems of Men and Women. Cristina, 
 ' King ' of Sweden, the only child of Gnstavus 
 Adolphus, abdicated after four years' rule. She was 
 extraordinarily brilliant, but restless and fickle. Her 
 voice and bearing were manly, and she occasionally 
 assumed masculine garb. Marchese Monaldeschi, her 
 Secretary, disgracefully divulged her secrets, and his 
 violent execution was at least as much in punishment 
 for political treachery as for waning personal devo- 
 tion. Louis XIV. had assigned Cristina the palace of 
 Fontainebleau for a residence, and there, on November 
 1st, 1657, she had Monaldeschi killed in the Gallery of 
 Stags. Monaldeschi, coward as well as traitor, wore 
 beneath his clothes a shirt of mail, which prolonged 
 his death. An hour's previous conversation between 
 him and Cristina actually took place, she pacing the 
 gallery, while he, kneeling and prostrating himself, 
 implored her to spare his life. Monaldeschi was 
 buried in the church of Avon, a neighbouring village. 
 
 Mary Wollstonecraft and Fuseli is a lonely woman's 
 cry for love. The poem represents a strong, but 
 baffled nature, and so far reflects the general impres- 
 sion received from Mary's life. Whether Browning, 
 following Fuseli's biographer, is not unjust to her in 
 this particular episode of her career, does not, in the 
 poet's case, very much matter. The poem rests on 
 its truth to nature, not to Mary Wollstonecraft. 
 
 Adam, Lilith, and Eve is excellent fooling, where, 
 like Shakspere's, the serious lies near the jocular. 
 Eve confesses to her husband that her superficial
 
 Ill INTUOPrCTIONS TO THE POEMS. 223 
 
 disdain of him before they were married would at 
 any moment have melted at his kiss. Lilith makes 
 a more sinister avowal, viz. that she only married 
 Adam because a better man did not turn up. ^Vith 
 practical wisdom, Adam wiid<s at the confessions of 
 both his dames. 
 
 IxioH is Browning's word on future punishment. 
 Tlie uses of torment are ovov when the tormented 
 has learned from it the error of his past. Injustice, 
 not justice, schemes eternal expiation for crimes 
 committed against itself by short-lived ignorance and 
 weakness. Ixion can whirl on his agonising wheel, 
 yet rejoice in his moral superiority. He rises ' past 
 Zeus to the Potency o'er him.' The sweat, blood, 
 and tears that Hy oil' from the wheel make a rainbow 
 of hope. Prometheus-like, Ixion has wrung from his 
 suffering a gift for men — the certainty that Unreason 
 and Injustice cannot be supreme, that the tyrannous 
 ' Zeus ' is less than God, because worse than man. 
 The man-made Zeus who first tempts, then tortures 
 eternally, has no real existence. Browning's denial 
 of the reality of a ' Zeus ' separates, in the latter part 
 of the poem, from Ixion's protest against the injustice 
 of his tyrant. 
 
 Jochanan Ilakhulosh is introduced as a set-off to 
 
 Docfor of the Dramatic Lb/h. It follows the 
 
 favourite direction of Browning's mind, about this 
 period, towards Oriental stories an<l surroundings. 
 Jtjchawin IlakJcatlosh is professedly derived (see Note 
 at end) from a Rabbinical work, called A (JnlUdiun oj
 
 224 BROWNING. chap. 
 
 many Lies. Such a title sufficiently proves itself 'mere 
 fun and invention.' The Jewish saint (Hakkadosh- 
 Saint) lies dying, surrounded by sorrowing disciples. 
 They beg a last word which shall concentrate the 
 stored experience of the Kabbi's nine and seventy 
 years. Jochanan's reply amounts to an avowal that 
 his life has proved vain, ineffectual, and vexing to his 
 spirit, because his youth did not know, his age could 
 not do. He bids his scholars farewell, but they 
 cannot bear to part with him without having learned 
 more, so they bethink them of a means, known to 
 Talmudists, whereby Jochanan's life can be prolonged 
 a little. This may be effected by the gifts of short 
 periods from the lives of other people, which can be 
 grafted on the dying man. An eager competition to 
 give ensues. Four persons only are chosen, a lover, 
 a warrior, a poet, and a statesman. Each contributes 
 three months, and, at the end of each period, 
 Tsaddik, Jochanan's foremost disciple, comes to his 
 master to gather his words of wisdom. These arrange 
 themselves into comments on the special form of life 
 Jochanan has last imbibed. Remembering that the 
 four fractions of lives were all taken from the young, 
 we are prepared for their artificial and discordant 
 effect upon the octogenarian. First comes the word 
 on love. Worship and idealism of the beloved object, 
 enthusiasm for her charms and qualities are graces 
 proper to a young man, but impossible to the aged 
 experience of Jochanan. Feeling and his reason 
 being irreconcilable, 'love' appears bitterness and
 
 Ill IXTRODUCTIOXS TO THE POEMS. 225 
 
 vanity. Similar incongruity between tlic outlook of 
 youth and age is apparent in Jochanan's word on 
 war. The sage knows that self-sacrifice can be prac- 
 tised at less cost than by wholesale murder. He 
 knows, too, that the end striven for rarely justifies — 
 or is worth — the strife. Men seldom attain by 
 violence what they might not as well have waited 
 for. Next as to poetry. Its materials are hope and 
 the future, but as Jochanan has only the petrified 
 past to gaze upon, his view of poetry is all disillusion- 
 ment. Statecraft lastly comes in for its share of 
 pessimistic criticism. The statist has to legislate for 
 the mindless masses who obstruct, not for the cultured 
 few who would encourage his schemes. Tsaddik, who 
 had hoped to compile a work on The Science of Mtm't; 
 Life from Jochanan's utterances, feels that this gospel 
 of disillusionment will be of no use to any body. 
 Sorrowfully, he leaves Jochanan for dead. Three 
 months elapse, and the faithful visit the cave where 
 their master's body lies. To their astonishment, they 
 find Jochanan still living and supremely happy. A 
 new light has broken in \\\n}n liiin. lie calls it 
 ' ignorance confirmed by knowledge.' He now sees 
 life from heaven's standpoint, acquiesces in the 
 ignorance and failures of mortals, and knows that 
 all is well. Life, he declares, is a wine-press, who.sc 
 yield is known oidy in the ne.\t state. Vet Jochanan, 
 breathing his la.st, feels he caiuiot impart his beautiful 
 secret, for it 18 incomprehensible to men. Of this 
 fact the zealous Tsaddik, in his misappreiiension of 
 
 Q
 
 226 BROWNING. chap. 
 
 what Jochanan meant by ' the secret,' gives ample 
 corroboration. 
 
 Jochanan HaJckadosh is followed by three jocular 
 Sonnets, delicious exaggerations on the subject of 
 Og's hugeness. These are the first sonnets Browning 
 published, and the only ones at present included in 
 his Worhs. The idea in Jochanan is of the finite 
 striving to reach the infinite, and in the sonnets the 
 idea of unattainable distance and dimension is bandied 
 about in pure merriment. 
 
 Never the Time and the Place expresses love's 
 conquest over distrust. In the prelude. Browning 
 spoke of love as completing all that lacks without it, 
 and here he speaks of it as atoning for all other 
 incompleteness. 
 
 Pambo is an Envoy in which Browning amusingly 
 compares himself to a student who spent much time 
 trying to master the verse, " I will take heed to my 
 ways that I sin not with my tongue." Pambo is to 
 be met with in Wanley's Wonders of the Little World 
 among illustrations * Of the Veracityof some Persons, 
 their great Love to Truth.' Browning knows that 
 the ' darkling ' character of his muse is the very rock 
 of offence with his critics. 
 
 Ferishtah's Fancies, 1884 (Vol. XVI.), deals 
 with twelve subjects of religious thought. These are 
 put in quaint Persian guise and in the form of 
 parables and discussions, sprinkled with lines of dry 
 humour. A beautiful lyric follows each ' Fancy,' to 
 re-incarnate its spirit, or rather to give an analogy to
 
 Ill INTRODUCTIONS TO THE TOEMS. 227 
 
 it, chiefly from tlie experience of :i pair of Englisli 
 lovers. To preface his work, Browning (juotcs from 
 the speech of Lear's that he so ilhimineJ in Halhert 
 and Hob by his comment. This time, the apt (juotation 
 signifies what the author of J'auliiu; At the " Menmiht," 
 and House couUl hardly be expected to declare openly, 
 viz. that the 'garments' are ' Ferishtah's,' but the 
 speculations are the speculations of Browning. Never 
 before, indeed, has a poet expressed so specifically and 
 categorically a.s in Feri-^htah's Fancies his attitutle 
 towards the moot points of theistic influence. It is not 
 in Browning's fearless, truth-loving nature to shrink 
 from the responsibilities of his belief — or rather his 
 surmise, for the fervent faith of AU Vogler is 
 chastened at this later jjcriod by a deeper conviction 
 of the unthinkable nature of God. 
 
 Prolo(/ue is a whimsical allegory of the scheme of 
 the poems. They are to combine three ' flavours ' : — 
 the illustration of Ferishtah's lesson, which is the 
 plain toasted bread — ' sense ' ; the lesson itself, which 
 is the sage-leaf— 'sight'; and the lyrical variation on 
 the theme, which is the ortolan — ' sontr.' 
 
 Tlui Earjle narrates Ferishtah's call to dervish-hood. 
 By a miracle and a dream, he learns that God works 
 through human means, and that whoever can, must 
 8up|)ort himself and afterwards support the weak. 
 
 The lyric enshrines a similar idea. Love is not 
 to consist in tlie selfish isolation of two lives. Freely 
 the lovens have received, freely let them give. 
 
 Thr Mcloii-Sclltr resembles the ancient story of the
 
 228 BROWNING. chap. 
 
 philosophic slave who accepted the bitter gourd. All 
 God's gifts are of grace, ' the less deserved, the more 
 divine.' His stripes alone are 'just' (see Job ii. 10). 
 
 In the lyric, the lover prays his love not to retract 
 an unwonted harshness. If she is for strict justice, 
 none of all her kindness will remain his. 
 
 Shah Abbas deals with the difficulties of historico- 
 religious belief. An eager desire to believe a story 
 counts for more than an intellectual assent to its truth 
 which neither touches the emotions nor influences the 
 life. Love, even if it cannot justify itself, is dearer 
 to Grod than a cold credence. 
 
 In darkness, every piece of furniture is a stumbling- 
 block, but when once the lamp is lit, no obstacles 
 obstruct the way. Love resembles that lamp. 
 
 The Family treats of the value of prayer. 'If 
 God is wise, good, and mighty, why pray to Him, 
 as though man knew more than He?' To this 
 familiar objection, Ferishtah replies, 'Man obeys 
 the heart's instinct in praying. If he shared God's 
 omniscience, he would not pray, but human as he is, 
 he does best to act as humanity urges. Let him 
 pray according to ignorance, and God will answer 
 according to Knowledge.' 
 
 The lover is content to love as a mere man. 
 Therefore he will not pretend he looks for perfections 
 which, as man, he could not appreciate. 
 
 The Sun approaches the Incarnation from the 
 philosophical side. Ferishtah claims personality for 
 the Deity because he himself possesses it. Yet
 
 Ill INTRODUCTIONS TO THE I'OEMS. 229 
 
 purpose aiul will, the elements of personality, are 
 so incompatible with omnipotence that he can Init 
 confess the God tliat man creates in his own image 
 ntterly incomprehensible. Such is the enigma. May 
 not its solution lie in a ' rumour ' there is that 
 
 " God once assumed on earth a human shape " ? 
 
 The beginning of the poem recalls An Epistle, and 
 the conclusion, ./ Death in the Desert. 
 
 The lyric gives a familiar illustration of a kinship 
 which might well appear as inconceivable as tliat 
 between flesh and fire, man and God, viz. the kinship 
 between fire and flint. 
 
 Mihrah Shah contains Browning's reply to the 
 immemorial problem of the existence of suflfering. 
 'Pain is the bond of sympathy between man and 
 man.' The dialogue in tliis poem is particidarly 
 vigorous and vivacious, yet Mihrah Shah is somewhat 
 disappointing. We cannot feel that Ferishtah's hardy 
 optimism really helps to lighten the burden of the 
 mystery. 
 
 The idea is more touchingly expressed in the lyric. 
 
 A Camel- Driver, like Ixion, discusses the dogma of 
 eternal puni.shnient. 'Man's punishments of man 
 have but one motive — to deter the otlcnder from 
 oflending again or the by-standers from following his 
 example. After death, and with God, all is diff'crcnt. 
 But let none envy him who escapes man's punish- 
 ment.' Browning is assured that tardy knowledge 
 is HeU'H severest penalty. "Forgiveness? rather
 
 230 BROAVNING. chap. 
 
 grant forgetfulness ! " The thought of the uncon- 
 ditioned relation between the individual and Glod is 
 again strong, and the lines, 
 
 " Reason aims to raise 
 Some makeshift scaffold-vantage midway, whence 
 Man dares, for life's brief moment, peer," 
 
 sum up most of the teaching of the entire volume, 
 particularly that of The Sun and A Bean-Stripe. 
 
 The lyric dwells on the faultiness of human 
 judgments. 
 
 Two Camels condemns that self-regarding mortifica- 
 tion of the flesh which unfits a man for doing God's 
 work efficiently. God looks to the end for the multi- 
 plication of the talents, and it is man's wisdom to 
 adopt the best means thereto. Again, how is an 
 ascetic to contribute conscientiously to the joy of 
 others 1 No ; God who sends joy and the capacity 
 for joy may be trusted for the wisdom of His gifts. 
 
 Heaven itself may be an eternisation of life's 
 moments of bliss. 
 
 Cherries teaches us not to think gratitude to God 
 is to be reserved for great mercies. Little blessings 
 best suit our little lives. Cherries please the palate of 
 him to whom the reason why various planets exist 
 is incomprehensible. God's omnipotence is even 
 more displayed in His considering our everyday 
 requirements than in His creating the remote great- 
 ness of Jupiter.^ Man, in return, is to act, however 
 small his action be. Neither is he to be downcast 
 ^ Cp. Giuseppe Caponsacchi, II. 2090-2096.
 
 Ill INTRODUCTIOXS TO THE POKMS. 231 
 
 by the mixture of motives in his otlering. The chief 
 matter is to offer something. 
 
 The lyric repeats Ferislitah's last sentiment. 
 
 Plot-Culture, like Two Camch, justifies sense and 
 its gratification. God has regard to the harvest, not 
 to the year's daily processes towards it. 
 
 The particularly lyrical lyric restates the claims 
 of sense. 
 
 A Pillar at Sebzerar demonstrates the worthless- 
 ncss of knowledge a.s an end in itself, and the value 
 of love. Knowledge is relative, but love is absolute. 
 Fcrishtah counsels his disciple to take so much truth 
 as God lias vouchsafed for his individual needs, and 
 love and live by it, instead of investigating it and 
 turning on it the dubious lenses of his 'knowledge' 
 
 Silence may e.xpress admiration more eloquently 
 than volubility. 
 
 A Bean-Stripe: also, Apple-Eating crowns Ferish tab's 
 optimi.sni. The sublimated spiritual egoism, or self- 
 centralisation, of Ii'itbbi Ben Ezra is the basis of the 
 argument, yet while Browning herein emphasises 
 afresh the declaration that his verdict on life is 
 merely the result of individual experience, he goes 
 on to express disbelief, not only in practical pessimism, 
 but in any life being without compensation in some 
 shape. He derives his cheerful yet sober view from 
 the progres.s or ' motion ' of life and the growth which 
 ho detects to be the soul's law. 1 Hacks and whites 
 ranged alternately and whirled rapidly show neither 
 blackness nor whiteness but an amalgam of both. So,
 
 232 BROWNING. chap. 
 
 thanks to life's spiritual progression, happiness is 
 saddened and sorrow brightened. When Ferishtah's 
 scholar quarrels with this thesis for its want of 
 absoluteness, Ferishtah defends it by demonstrating 
 how unimaginable is all absolute truth. He instances 
 (as pre^dously in The Sun, to which he refers) our 
 necessarily provisional concepts of God. At best, we 
 can only know "what seems." To the objection that 
 there may well seem to be no God but mindless force, 
 Ferishtah replies that man's mind Avould be negatived 
 by God's mindlessness. Man's instinct of gratitude 
 is a presumption in favour of the existence of a being 
 to whom he owes gratitude. It is next urged that 
 the heroes of our race are fitter objects of gratitude 
 than an unknown God. 'What, thank myself?' 
 replies Ferishtah, ' for half the value of these bene- 
 factors' greatness lies in my perception of it. No, 
 He who gave me the perception which suggests grati- 
 tude is the Recipient of my thanks.' 
 
 The lyric supposes one of these heroic men, a 
 poet masked as ' Ferishtah,' disclaiming the worship 
 a Comtist might ofier him. The poet is answerable 
 to God, not men. 
 
 Fjnlogue is touched with a reaction against the 
 cheerfulness of A Bean-Stripe, the existence of which 
 'tremor' (see p. 77) the philosophj- therein expressed 
 faithfully acknowledged. What if, after all, the 
 happy circimistances of the individual illusively 
 paint the general life as worth living? Browning 
 does not answer the question, but we feel the chill
 
 Ill iNTKonrcTioNs TO Till-: roEMS. -jaa 
 
 mood to be only niomentar}-, and tlie lust word, as 
 well as the first, of Feri^lttah's Fancies to be 
 
 " 'Take what is, trust what may be ! ' 
 That's Life's true lesson." 
 
 Parleying-s with Certain People of Import- 
 ance in their Day, 1887 (A^ol. XVI.), is Ihowuiug's 
 jienultiniate volume, and, in conjunction -with A solando, 
 the last of his works, it not merely closes, but com- 
 pletes -B-ith a full carillon the range of music in our 
 poet's belfry. Echoes and repeats of almost all the 
 varied harmonies that have ever been there sound 
 in rarleijing.% not excepting certain bells that have 
 scarcely been stirred since raracclsus and Sonkllo, 
 though Browning's distinctively lyrical note is 
 reserved to ring out clear and sweet in Asohndo. 
 It is true that occ«isionally in the rarhi/ings, as 
 in Mandeville and ylvioon, the bells are muffled in 
 the harshness of argument and the oft- told tale of 
 optimism to which the years since The Ring and the 
 Book have inured us. What is the connecting link 
 of these seven colloquies, their Prologue, and their 
 Kjiihigue't It seems to be a sense of the multiformity 
 of life, a sen.se which ever widening experience would 
 only accentuate, an<l to which Browning's dramatic 
 imagination and increasing acquiescence in the 
 fact of man's spiritual darkness converge. A con- 
 viction that in the world evil cannot be dissociated 
 from good, and a confession of ultimate ignorance 
 united to an uncon(iuenible determination to exercise;
 
 234 BROWNING. chap. 
 
 that provisional knowledge which leads human exist- 
 ence to the liighest expression of itself in thought 
 and deed run through each 'parleying' on art and 
 life. Characteristically, the brilliant book opens 
 with Apollo, the god or soul of poetry, and closes 
 with Fust, the printer, who ministers to literature 
 as Browning believes body ministers to soul. The 
 poetic glory, however, which Browning puts into 
 the gamut between Fust and Apollo, and not the 
 familiar views, is the principal fact about the book. 
 
 The serio-grotesque Introduction is circumstanti- 
 ally a Prologue in Hell to Alkestis, and really a 
 summary of Browning's silver-lined-cloud philosophy 
 of life. Browning purposely reduces the Fates to 
 garrulous crones, far beneath Shakspere's 'weird 
 sisters.' Sober, they deny life to be worth living ; 
 besotted, they pronounce it so well worth living 
 that its triumph is absolute and unquestionable. 
 It needs an earthquake to strike the mean, and 
 convince these blind weavers, who were human for 
 the nonce, that their shuttles 
 
 " Weave living, not life sole and whole: as age — youth, 
 So death completes living, shows life in its truth." 
 
 In other words, no human solution of life may 
 conceit itself as final. At ,best, it is a crutch, with 
 the uses and tacit assumption of one. 
 
 With Bernard de Mandeville is the first ' parleying.' 
 Browning, Avith his love of paradox and belief in 
 the inextricableness of good from evil, naturally
 
 Ill iNTitonrrTioxs to the poems. 235 
 
 tiims his attention to the half forgotten fuhuHst of 
 The GrumUimj Ilivc (170')). Yet the cynical, material- 
 istic doctor, whose views coincide with all that 
 Bro\\'ning's philosophy disavows, is a curious supporter 
 of a piece of transcendentalism, though this felt 
 discrepancy docs not atlect the purpose of Browning's 
 IK)em. The real ' parleying ' is not with Mandeville, 
 hut with another, one who was ' more of a dynamic 
 than a didactic force,' and the invocation of Mande- 
 ville's argumentative aid does not necessarily involve 
 any thing beyond the train of ideas wliich the alterna- 
 tive title of 'Ihe Ikes (viz. Private Fi(^ Public Bemjits), 
 freely interpreted, suggests to Bro\vning, 
 
 JCith Daniel Barioli does not even take its text 
 from the invoked Jesuit writer. It is ' a fancy-freak 
 by contrast born of his loiifj-windcd stories, which 
 might be read, were they not so rniiioii.di/ full of all 
 manner of superstitions. " Saint me no saints ! " 
 Browning virtually says to the ingenious Bartoli, 
 " I will draw you a woman who outsaints them." 
 Then follows a story which in treatment resembles 
 Browning's The Glove. 
 
 With Chrvitojihrr Smart contains deeper hannonies. 
 Smart's Soiuj to Ihivid is the hint on which lirowning 
 writes, and he deals witli the relation between the 
 one perfect product, the ' single speech ' which some 
 men achieve and the mediocre residue of their life- 
 work. The illustration of the jewel-like chapel 
 amid tlic commonplaceness of the huge house, by 
 which Browning introduces his subject, is u never-
 
 236 BROWNING. chap. 
 
 to -be -forgotten treasure of imaginative criticism. 
 Section ix. is, as Browning acknowledges, an ex- 
 planation of which Smart could never have thought. 
 Its idea is that economy exists in poetic production, 
 that the vitalising, Adamic work of naming, which 
 is the poet's supreme gift to the world, is a gift 
 conditional on the use to which the world puts it. 
 Only so much as can, or will, be utilised does the 
 wise poet disburse. His treasures are, like God's 
 revelation, sparingly given, and only on the under- 
 standing that they prick men on to advance. 
 
 JFitli George Biibh Dodington is a caustic mock- 
 reproof to a knavish fool, in this case the most 
 crawling politician of Walpole's time. The Sludge- 
 like course ironically recommended to him, Avhich 
 he was not artful enough to take, resembles that 
 already outlined in the third stage of the Greek in 
 Pietro of Ahano. ' Inscrutableness is statecraft's 
 highest card, and it takes more than ordinary guile 
 to rule the masses who are already versed in all 
 the commoner strategies of selfishness.' 
 
 With Francis Furini primarily upholds the right 
 
 of high Art to depict the nude. Baldinucci (of 
 
 Privilege of Burial memory !), in his biography of the 
 
 painter-priest, Furini, tells the well-known story of 
 
 how, on his death-bed, the artist sought to destroy 
 
 his pictures of undraped womanhood. 
 
 "Nay, that, Furini, never I at least 
 Mean to believe ! " 
 
 begins Browning, -whose faculty for scorn and indigna-
 
 Ill INTRODUCTIONS TO THK POEMS. 237 
 
 tion is more directly shown here tlian in anj' other 
 poem. His plea for the nmle in Art is one with 
 his reverence for God's best handiwork. An artist, 
 he goes on to say, who would express spirit truth- 
 fully can only do so by painting flesh truthfully, 
 since the whole body expres.?cs the soul, which, 
 bodiless, would be inexpressive. The more philo- 
 sophical parts of the poem are linked to the rest 
 by the relation between the study of tlic human 
 form and the basis of ' Furini's ' philosophy, self- 
 con.sciousness. The shade of the ' painter-theologian ' 
 asserts that this self-consciou.sness, or this fact of 
 soul, is approached and known by studying the 
 revealer and medium of soul, body. The design 
 and beneficence of which he becomes more deeply 
 aware the closer he studies lead him on to recognise 
 the ' out '-soul, God. Thus is life turned cosmos by 
 ' Furini,' who dares the evolutionists to prove it on 
 their showing any thing but chaos. The poem ends 
 with a lovely passage which is not exactly comparable 
 with any other in Browning. It is as quiet and 
 simple as it is great. 
 
 Jl'ith Gerard de Laire'^se, the grandest and most 
 significant of the ' parleyings,' addresses itself to the 
 Dutch painter and writer on Art who in his ])lind 
 age went about fancying Holland peopled with gods 
 and goddesses. Browning challenges fantasy to 
 match fact, and then enters the lists in the cause of 
 reality against de Laire.s.se, who may reasonably be 
 considered a champion of dreams. Browning, who
 
 238 BROWNING. 
 
 CHAP. 
 
 in many respects lags behind 'latest developments,' 
 here heads the van of progress and gives the finest 
 poetic expression it has yet received to the essentially 
 modern passion for nature unendowed with any 
 factitious attributes. The poem, every word of which 
 is poetry, comes from the old, hopeful poet as an 
 insj)iring cry of ' forward.' 
 
 With Charles Avison reads like a continuation of 
 the thoughts on music in Fifine at the Fair. Avison 
 was an eighteenth century composer, of whom, as of 
 de Lairesse, Browning sjDeaks as an early friend. We 
 may probably accept as a certainty that most of the 
 old-world characters whose names are borrowed for 
 these ' parleyings ' belong to memories of the poet's 
 boyish reading. Browning evidently shares in the 
 touching instiiict of life's decline to return to its 
 earliest associations. Eyery art, says Browning, 
 strives to arrest the evanescence of feeling, to ' shoot 
 liquidity into a mould,' and none fails like music, 
 feeling's most direct language, because no other art 
 is so susceptible of change and superannuation. Yet 
 the truths Avhich music strives to register are un- 
 dying. Each composer is good, and best in that he 
 represents a link in music's chain, not an independent 
 ring, final and complete for ever. These ideas about 
 music, its pathos and its glory, ruled AU Fogler, 
 only there they were transmuted into sensation, 
 while here they are merely thought. 
 
 Fust and his Friends is a playful glimpse at the 
 infancy of printing. Besides this, it is, more im-
 
 Ill INTRODUCTIONS TO THE POEMS. 239 
 
 Illicitly, a coniniciit, in the sjiiiit of liie entire 
 volume, on the Heeting nature of our knowledge, its 
 liability to abuse, anil withal its cajiacity of begetting 
 new knowledge, which shall l)e in advance of it, just 
 as Luther was in achaiice of Huss. 
 
 Asolando : Fancies and Facts, 1^90, is invested 
 
 with a pathetic interest from the circumstances of 
 its publiaition. It was published on the day on 
 which Browning died, and his last words, "how 
 gratifying ! " M'ere in acknowledgment of the tele- 
 graphed news of its anticipatory welcome. Thus the 
 book has come to have a sacredness, a personal 
 association of memory which, at all events at pi-esent, 
 render an impartial appreciation of it almost im- 
 possible. One prefers to dwell upon its luimistakable 
 gems, such as 7V//r,s and Sum mum Bouum, rather 
 than criticise its tenuous reveries and Uiles wherein 
 we catch little more than the echo of more vigorous 
 achievement. It is clear that the general date of 
 1889 cannot be assigned to each poem, though we 
 cannot say how many may l)e referred to earlier 
 periods of production. Some, as J)ubiiii/, J'octicx, 
 IiKi/rjtieheiisivcuess, DercUipiiuiit, seem more specially 
 sheafed than othei-s by the binding tlireads of the Pro- 
 Iti/jur and /■Jjiildiju/', and these may prol)al>ly l)e taken as 
 the indubitable 'Asolani.' Their peculiar note is one 
 which could only emanate from a poet who is review- 
 ing life from its further end. It is that truth suipjisses 
 fiction as fact 8urpa.s.ses fancy, while, at the same 
 time, that fiction, far from being worthless, is the sole
 
 240 BROWNING. chap. 
 
 ladder up to truth. Browning's readers remember 
 in Sordello and Fippa Passes the introduction of Asolo, 
 the small white city of the Trevisan, mountains 
 behind and Lombard plain before, which, roughly 
 speaking, lies, for the traveller, between Bassano and 
 Vicenza. After Venice, Asolo was the first place in 
 Italy that Browning visited (1838), and it is the last 
 (1889) with which he is poetically associated. He 
 was as faithful to his love for Asolo as he was to all 
 his loves. And here, on the threshold of Browning's 
 last work, we may reiterate what has been at all 
 events held in solution by every page of these 
 comments, viz. that Browning's ' genius ' was the 
 expressive side of his whole nature. The more we 
 ponder what we learn from Browning's poetry, and 
 then compare it with the little we need to learn of 
 his life, the more we are struck by the unity of the 
 impression which as a personality, compounded of 
 genius and man,' he makes upon us, lovable in foibles 
 and weakness as in nobleness and strength. 
 
 Prologue is the lyric counterpart of Gerard de 
 Lairesse. To a poet of Browning's sage, sweet tem- 
 perament and development, years and ' disillusion- 
 ment' bring, not despondency, but gladness at 
 seeing truth drop the wraps that bound her. 
 
 Eosny, with its dramatic characterisation and 
 abrupt, perhaps bewildering, plunge into the centre 
 of the situation, belongs to the same class as Cristina 
 and Monaldeschi. It is spoken by a woman, armed at 
 all points against her unsuccessful rival, the ' Clara '
 
 Ill INTRODUCTIONS TO THE POEMS. 241 
 
 addicsi^ed. Kosny is away in the war, but wlietlier 
 he reiurns safely or falls, Clara sliall have no share 
 in his victory or sacrifice, shall not even know that 
 iier rival can feel anything besides the calmness of 
 perpetual superiority. There is something soulless 
 and eerie about the speaker which is indeterminately 
 heightened by the refrain of names. 
 
 Duhi'tij records an hour of mild, autumnal glad- 
 ness. Whence and whereby tlid it come 1 Not on 
 the wings of sleep or day-dream. It was a memory 
 
 of love. 
 
 ' Truth ever, truth only the excellent ! ' 
 
 Now is a poem of fourteen lines upon such a 
 moment of love as eternalises time, or rather annihil- 
 ates the conception of it. 
 
 IlumilUy is the poet's lovely thought concerning 
 the ungnidged crumbs which fall from the banquet 
 of one who makes love rich. 
 
 Pot(ii< is the name by which Browning designates 
 the raetaph«jrs of lovers. ' Ixose,' ' swan,' * moon,' to 
 these the adored one is compared, while all the time 
 she suipasses them l)y being a beautiful human 
 creature. 
 
 Surmnum Jionum ranks among the perfect short 
 love-poems of the English language. The manliness 
 and restraint of Browning are upon a poem the 
 melody and wonls of which sound more likc^ a lyric 
 of Mr. Swinburne's. lict us bear in mind that this 
 ex(|uiHite piece, as full of freshness as it is simple, was 
 put forth by a poet of sovcnty-soven. 
 
 R
 
 242 BROWNING. chap. 
 
 A Pearl, a Girl is hardly less delightful than 
 Summum Bonum. 
 
 Speculative might well be a lyric from Ferishtah's 
 Fancies. It is similar in idea to the conclusion of the 
 one that follows Ttvo Camels. 
 
 TFJiite JFitchcraft dallies with the innocence of love 
 and the playful mutual mockery in which tenderness 
 can securely indulge. 
 
 Bad Dreams. I. is a remarkable instance of how 
 much a great poet can condense into a couple of 
 quatrains of the simplest words. 
 
 Bad Dreams. II. is a curious piece of delicately 
 suggested horror. Its phantasmagoria recalls Tenny- 
 son's Vision of Sin. A lover sees in his dream the 
 girl he worships involved in a grisly and bestial cult. 
 He charges her with it, and she retorts upon him 
 with a dream of her own, probably similar in origin, 
 but ludicrously dispersive of his troubled sensations 
 regarding her. 
 
 Bad Dreams. III. is a nightmare on the grand 
 scale of upheaval and topsy-turveydom. 
 
 Bad Dreams. IV. records, in a particularly striking 
 way, a man's bitter regret and remorse for the death 
 of the girl who loved and was affianced to him. He 
 had systematically snubbed her for her deficient 
 mental culture, and chilled her heart by his cold scorn 
 of her frivolous ways. Love had been disguised as 
 blame and criticism. Now she is dead through his 
 unkindness, and he would thankfully humble himself 
 to the dust to have her alive and forgiving him.
 
 Ill INTRODUCTIONS TO THE POEMS. 213 
 
 Iriapprehensiveness, somewhat in the spirit of the 
 preceding poem, tells of a woman who is entirely 
 absorbed in verifying a writer's observation on a 
 weed, and utterly unconscious of the love for herself 
 which is consuming her companion — 
 
 " Oh, fancies that might be, oh, facts that are ! " 
 
 The worst of it is that her ' inapprehcnsive stave ' 
 freezes the expression of the man's love, so that he 
 merely replies to her cultured remark with a similar 
 one. We recall Two in the Campagna when we read 
 Inapprehensiveness. 
 
 jriiich ? paints subtle portraits in miniature. The 
 Countess is willing to be Providence to a lover, pro- 
 vided he on his side refers solely to her for salvation. 
 We are left to decide whether such an ideal of love, 
 if genuine, is or is not an arrogant usurpation of 
 God's prerogative. 
 
 77k" Cardimd and the Dorj is of a class of story in 
 frequent demand in a children's hour. 
 
 The Pope and ike Net is one of those hizarreries, like 
 the story of Judas and the fowl in Juris Doctor 
 Johannes- Buptista Bottinius, for whicli drowning has 
 a keen relish. 
 
 The JJcan- Feast is in the cast of thought of 
 J-Wisli ttih's Fnnrics. 
 
 Murkle-Miiuth Metj is a plea-sant Border ballad. 
 
 Armdf.< Ainho censures vivisection, which it ildines 
 with animosity and dubs cowardice. 
 
 Th4' Lady and thr Painter en'cetivcly inveighs again.st
 
 244 BROWNING. chap. 
 
 a conventionalism that approves a woman Avho wears 
 the wings and breasts of murdered birds,' and dis- 
 approves another who, as a model, suffers her beauti- 
 ful form to be reproduced in marble or on canvas. 
 
 Ponte delV Angelo, Venice, belongs to a group of 
 poems Browning has written on traditions of places. 
 Like the Greeks, he is partial to wiliness, especially 
 when, as here, it is a saint who gets the better of the 
 evil one. 
 
 Beatrice Signorini is a pretty tale of a Griselda 
 who had the wit on a provocative occasion to turn 
 Katharine and thereby rose immeasurably in her 
 husband's estimation. 
 
 Fhde Music, with an Accompaniment is a dialogue, 
 the ideas of which are suggested by a flautist's playing 
 heard through the ash-trees. A woman ridicules the 
 poetic construction which a man puts upon the fluting. 
 At last, he turns the tables upon her by affecting, at 
 all events, to take her cynical words as descriptive 
 and consequently condemnatory of her own ways 
 with him. The poem is accurately described by its 
 title, the precise meaning that may be put upon the 
 words being subsidiary — an ' accompaniment ' to 
 their music. 
 
 '^Imperante Augusto iiatus est " is a contemporary 
 
 comment on the greatness and glories of Augustus. 
 It gives the story of his annual donning of a beggar's 
 garb in order to avert the jealousy of the divine 
 element so dreaded by the Romans. The title and 
 the allusion at the end of the poem refer to the
 
 Ill IXTRODUCTIOXS TO THE POEMS. 215 
 
 so-called Messianic prophecy in one of the (forged) 
 Sybilline books. The poem accentuates the j)revail- 
 ing Koman sentiment of the uncertainty of things 
 and the nearness of supremacy to destruction. 
 
 Denhpmcnt is an interesting and delightful parable 
 of Browning's philosophy of illusion and growth. 
 
 liephan in a noble and imaginative manner ex- 
 presses contentment with the limitations, difficulties, 
 and ignorance in which mankind lives. 
 
 Reverie expresses Browning's belief that Love is 
 the hidden name of Power. On earth. Power and 
 Love appear dissociated, because on earth man is 
 meant to grope his o^ti way and attest the stuff of 
 which he is made. 
 
 Ejnlogue is the last word spoken by Browning to 
 the world. It is an ei)ilogue not only to Asolando 
 but to the whole of his life. Though it is not a 
 j)0cm that epitomi.ses his genius, it is one that calls 
 up a backward - glancing vision of the particular 
 iiiHuence he has everywhere exercised over his 
 readers. The Ej>ilt)f/ue to Asolando at least reminds 
 us of Browning's bracing, tonic effect upon all of us 
 and the hopefulness and support he has afforded 
 many in hours of gloom or trouble. Standing apart 
 from criticism, the j)oem is ];rave, energetic, stimulant, 
 and proves still true lirowniiig's line of self-descri[)- 
 tion in J'nuliit'; self-description which no moment 
 lived, no line written since has annulled, and which 
 is the 'secret' of P*rowning'K greatness — 
 
 " I am iiLiilc up of an iiitoiiscst lifi*."
 
 246 
 
 BROWNING. 
 
 CHAP. 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Abt Vooler, 126 
 
 Adam, Lilith, and Eve, 222 
 
 After, 117 
 
 Agamemnon of jEschylus, The, 202 
 
 Andrea del Sarto, 116 
 
 Another Way of Love, 123 
 
 Any Wife to any Husband, 111 
 
 Apollo and the Fates. A Prologue, 
 
 234 
 Apparent Failure, 131 
 Ajipearances, 200 
 Arcades Ambo, 243 
 Aristophanes' Apology, 182 
 Artemis Prologizes, 82 
 Asolando, 239 
 At the "Mermaid," 198 
 Avison, Charles, Parleying with, 
 
 238 
 
 Bad Dreams, 242 
 
 Balaustion's Adventure ; including 
 
 A Transcript from Euripides, 161 
 Baldinucei, Filippo, on the Privilege 
 
 of Burial, 202 
 Bartoli, Daniel, Parleying with, 235 
 Bean-Feast, The, 243 
 Bean-Stripe, A : also Apple-Bating, 
 
 231 
 Beatrice Signorini, 244 
 Before, 117 
 
 Bells and Pomegranates, 75-103 
 Bifurcation, 199 
 
 Bishop Blougram's Apology, 115 
 Bishop, The, orders his Tomb at 
 
 Saint Praxed's Church, 93 
 Blot in the 'Scutcheon, A, 86 
 Book, The, and the Ring, 160 
 Boot and Saddle, 81 
 Boy, The, and the Angel, 95 
 By the Fireside, 111 
 
 Caliban upon Setebos, 128 
 Camel-Driver, A, 229 
 Capoiisacchi, Giuseppe, 148 
 Cardinal, The, and the Dog, 243 
 Cavalier Tunes, 81 
 Cenciaja, 201 
 Cherries, 230 
 
 "Ohilde Roland to the Dark Tower 
 came," 113 
 
 Christmas-Eve, 103 
 
 Cleon, 121 
 
 Clive, 217 
 
 Colombe's Birthday, 88 
 
 Confessional, The, 94 
 
 Confessions, 129 
 
 Count Gismond, 81 
 
 Count Guido Pranceschinl, 146 
 
 Cristina, 82 
 
 Cristina and Monaldeschi, 221 
 
 " De Gustibus ," 120 
 
 Deaf and Dumb ; a Group by Wool- 
 
 ner, 129 
 Death in the Desert, A, 127 
 Development, 245 
 De Lairesse, Gerard, Parleying with, 
 
 237 
 De Mandeville, Bernard, Parleying 
 
 with, 234 
 Dis Aliter Visum ; or, le Byron de 
 
 nos Jours, 126 
 
 Doctor , 219 
 
 Dodington, George Bubb, Parleying 
 
 with, 236 
 Dominus Hyacinthus de Archangelis, 
 
 152 
 Donald, 220 
 
 Dramatic Idyls, First Series, 211 
 Dramatic Idyls, Second Series, 217 
 Dramatic Lyrics, 81 
 Dramatic Romances and Lyrics, 92 
 Dramatis Personae, 124 
 Dubiety, 241 
 
 Eagle, The, 227 
 Earth's Immortalities, 95 
 Easter-Day, 105 
 Bchetlos, 217 
 
 Englishman, The, in Italy, 92 
 Epilogue to Asolando, 245 
 Epilogue to Dramatis Personae, 131 
 Epilogue to Ferishtah's Fancies, 232 
 Epilogue to Pacohiarotto, 202 
 Epistle, An, containing the Strange 
 
 Medical Experience of Karshish, 
 
 the Arab Physician, 111 
 Eurydice to Orpheus ; a Picture by 
 
 Leighton, 129 
 Evelyn Hope, 109
 
 Ill 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 217 
 
 Face, A, 130 
 
 Family, Tho, •2-2S 
 
 Fears and Scruplos, 1!>0 
 
 Ferislitali's Fancies, -Jii! 
 
 Fifine at tlie Fair, IVO 
 
 Flight of the Duchess, The, 04 
 
 Flowers Name, The, !M 
 
 Flute -music, with an Accompani- 
 ment, 244 
 
 Forgiveness, A, 200 
 
 Pn Lipjo Lippi, 110 
 
 Furini, Francis, Parleying with, 
 236 
 
 Fust and his Friends : An Epilogue, 
 238 
 
 Gajiden Fancies, 94 
 
 Give a Rouse, 81 
 
 GInve, The, 97 
 
 Gold Hair: a Story of Pomio, 124 
 
 Grammarian's Funeral, A, 122 
 
 Guarxlian-Angel, The, 121 
 
 Guido, 157 
 
 Halbert and Hob, 214 
 
 Half-Rome, 141 
 
 Heretics Trata-dy, The, 122 
 
 Uvrvi- Riel, 200 
 
 Holy.Cn..sk Day, 121 
 
 Home-Thoughts, from Abrfiad, 93 
 
 Home-Thoughts, from the Sea, 93 
 
 House, 198 
 
 How it Strikes a Contemjiorary, 114 
 
 " How they brought the Good News 
 
 from Ghent to Alx," 92 
 Hutnility 241 
 
 "ImPERASTE AUOISTO XATCS J>r 
 
 " 244 
 
 In a Balcony, 118 
 
 In a Gondola, 82 
 
 In n Year, 118 
 
 In Tlirce Days, 117 
 
 InapiirehcnHiveness, 243 
 
 Incident of the French Camp, 81 
 
 Inn Album, Tlie, l^s 
 
 InntanH Tvmnnus, 112 
 
 It.i' in England, 92 
 
 I\ vch, 213 
 
 Ixi"ii, ... 
 
 Jam»m I,i:»:'m Wike, 124 
 J'iclian.-in Hiikka<l»Hb, 228 
 JociMMfria, 220 
 Johmnnes Agricola in Mc<litatlnn, 
 
 88 
 JuriH Doctor JobanneMUaptUtaUut- 
 
 UuiuH, IM 
 
 Kino Victor and Kino Charles, 
 
 78 
 
 I-a Saisiaz, 207 
 
 L.ilHvratory, The, 94 
 
 Lady, The, and the Painter, 243 
 
 Last Rill.' Together, The, 115 
 
 Life in a Love, 114 
 
 Light Woman, A, 114 
 
 Likeness, A, 130 
 
 Lost Leader, The, 93 
 
 L<jst Mistress, The, 93 
 
 Love among the Ruins, 108 
 
 Love in a Life, 114 
 
 Lover's Quarrel, A, 109 
 
 Luria, 97 
 
 Magical Nati-re, 199 
 
 Marehing Along, SI 
 
 Martin Relph, 212 
 
 Mary 'Wollstonecraft and Fusell, 
 
 222 
 Master Hugues of Saxe-Gotha, 116 
 May and Death, 129 
 Meeting at Night, 95 
 Mellon-Seller, The, 227 
 >lemorabilia, 116 
 Men and Women, 108 
 Mesmerism, 112 
 Mihrab Shah, 229 
 Misconceptions, 123 
 Mr. Sludge, "The Medium," 130 
 Muckle-Mouth Meg, 243 
 Muli'ykeh, 218 
 My Last Duchess, 81 
 My Star, 112 
 
 Nationality in Drinks, 95 
 
 Natural JIagic, 199 
 
 Ned Bratts, 210 
 
 Never the Time and the Place, 226 
 
 Now, 241 
 
 Numi)holept08, 199 
 
 Old Pictures in Florence, 118 
 One Way of Love, 122 
 f)ii.- Word More. To K. B. B., 123 
 Other Half-Rome, The, 143 
 
 Pacchiarotto and how he worked 
 in Dihtkmi-er : with other poems, 
 
 UMS 
 
 Pacchiarotto, Of, and how ho worked 
 
 in DistcmjM-r, 197 
 Pnmbo, "j'jt; 
 Pan anci Luna, 210 
 PaninlKUH, ,'>:( 
 ParleyiiigH with Certain People of 
 
 Importuucu in their Day, 238
 
 248 
 
 BROWNING. 
 
 CHAP. Ill 
 
 Parting at Morning, 95 
 
 Patriot, The, 115 
 
 Pauline ; A Fragment of a Con- 
 fession, 49 
 
 Pearl, A, A Girl, 242 
 
 Pheidippides, 213 
 
 Pictor Ignotus, 92 
 
 Pied Piper of Hamelin, The, — A 
 Child's Story, S3 
 
 Pietro of Abano, 21S 
 
 Pillar at Sebzevar, A, 231 
 
 Pippa Passes, 75 
 
 Pis^ah Sights, 198 
 
 Plot-Culture, 231 
 
 Poetics, 241 
 
 Pompilia, 150 
 
 Ponte dell' Angelo, Venice, 244 
 
 Pope, The, 155 
 
 Pope, The, and the Net, 243 
 
 Popularity, 122 
 
 Porphyria's Lover, S3 
 
 Pretty Woman, A, 113 
 
 Prince Hohenstiel - Schwangau, 
 Saviour of Society, 166 
 
 Prologue to Asolando, 240 
 
 Prologue to Perishtah's Fancies, 227 
 
 Prologue to Pacchiarotto, 197 
 
 Prospice, 129 
 
 Protus, 120 
 
 Rabbi Ben Ezra, 127 
 
 Red Cotton Night-Cap Country, or 
 
 Turf and Towers, 177 
 Rephan, 245 
 Respectability, 113 
 Return, The, of the Druses, S3 
 Reverie, 245 
 
 Ring, The, and the Book, 131 
 Rosny, 240 
 Rudel to the Lady of Tripoli, 82 
 
 Saul, 96 
 
 Serenade, A, at the Villa, 112 
 
 Shah Abbas, 228 
 
 Shop, 198 
 
 Sibrandus Schafnaburgensis, 94 
 
 Smart, Christopher, Parleying with, 
 
 235 
 Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister, 81 
 Solomon and Balkis, 221 
 Song, 95 
 Sordello, 64 
 Soul's Tragedy, A, 101 
 Speculative, 242 
 Statue, The, and the Bust, 114 
 St. Martin's Summer, 200 
 Stratford, 61 
 Summum Bonum, 241 
 Sun, The, 228 
 
 Tertidm Quid, 145 
 
 Through the Metidja to Abd-el-Kadr, 
 
 83 
 Time's Revenges, 96 
 Toccata of Galuppi's, A, 110 
 Too Late, 126 
 "Transcendentalism ," 123 
 Tray, 216 
 Twins, Tlie, 121 
 Two Camels, 230 
 Two in the Campagna, 123 
 Two Poets of Croisic, The, 210 
 
 Up at a Villa- 
 109 
 
 -Dov™ in the City, 
 
 Waring, 82 
 
 Wiiich? 243 
 
 White Witchcraft, 242 
 
 Woman's I^ast Word, A, 109 
 
 Women and Roses, 120 
 
 Worst of It, The, 125 
 
 Youth and Art, 130 
 
 THE END. 
 
 ! 
 
 Printed hy R. S; R. Clark, Edinburgh.
 
 I