"IN A YEAR" is a wondering and sorrowful little comment on a man's shallowness and inconstancy.
"WOMEN AND ROSES" is the impression of a dream, and both vague and vivid, as such impressions are. The author dreams of a "red rose-tree," with three roses upon it: one withered, the second full-blown, the third still in the bud; and, floating round each, a generation of women: those famed in the past; the loved and loving of the present; the "beauties yet unborn." He casts his passion at the feet of the dead; but they float past him unmoved. He enfolds in it the glowing forms of the living; but these also elude him. He pours it into the budding life, which may thus respond to his own; but the procession of maidens drifts past him too. They all circle unceasingly round their own rose.
"BEFORE" and "AFTER" are companion poems, which show how differently an act may present itself in prospect and in remembrance, whether regarded in its abstract justification, or in its actual results. The question is that of a duel; and "BEFORE" is the utterance of a third person to whom the propriety of fighting it seems beyond a doubt. "A great wrong has been done. The wronged man, who is also the better one, is bound to assert himself in defence of the right. If he is killed, he will have gained his heaven. For his slayer, hell will have begun: for he will feel the impending judgment, in the earth which still offers its fruits; in the sky, which makes no sign; in the leopard-like conscience[96] which leers in mock obeisance at his side, ready to spring on him whenever the moment comes. There has been enough of delay and extenuation. Let the culprit acknowledge his guilt, or take its final consequences."
The duel is fought, but it is the guilty one who falls; and "AFTER" gives the words of his adversary—his boyhood's friend—struck with bitter remorse for what he has done. As the man who wronged him lies wrapped in the majesty of death, his offence dwindles into insignificance; and the survivor can only feel how disproportionate has been the punishment, and above all, how unavailing. "Would," he exclaims, "that the past could be recalled, and they were boys again together! It would be so easy then to endure!"
"MEMORABILIA" shows the perspective of memory in a tribute to the poet Shelley. His fugitive contact with a commonplace life, like the trace of an eagle's passage across the moor, leaves an illumined spot amidst blankness.
"THE LAST RIDE TOGETHER" depicts the emotions of a ride, which a finally dismissed lover has been allowed to take with his beloved. He has vainly passed his youth in loving her. But as this boon is granted, she lies for a moment on his breast. "She might have loved him more; she might also have liked him less." As they ride away side by side, a sense of resignation comes over him. His life is not alone in its failure. Every one strives. Few or none succeed. The best success proves itself to be shallow. And if it were otherwise—if the goal could be reached on earth—what care would one take for heaven? Then the peace which is in him absorbs the consciousness of reality. He fancies himself riding with the loved one till the end of time; and he asks himself if his destined heaven may not prove to be this.
"A GRAMMARIAN'S FUNERAL" describes the rendering of the last honours to one whose life has consumed itself in the pursuit of knowledge. The knowledge pursued has been pedantic and minute, but for him it represented a mighty truth; and he has refused to live, in the world's sense, till he had mastered that truth, co-extensive, as he believed it, with life everlasting. Like Sordello, though in a different way, he would KNOW before he allowed himself to BE. He would realize the Whole; he would not discount it. His disciples are bearing him to a mountain-top, that the loftiness of his endeavour may be symbolized by his last resting-place. He is to lie
where the new morning for which he waited will figuratively first break upon him.
"JOHANNES AGRICOLA IN MEDITATION" is a glowing and fantastic description of the privileges of the "elect," cast in the form of a monologue, and illustrated in the person of the speaker. Johannes Agricola was a German reformer of the sixteenth century, and alleged founder of the sect of the Antinomians: a class of Christians who extended the Low Church doctrine of the insufficiency of good works, and declared the children of God to be exempt from the necessity of performing them; absolved from doing right, because unable to do wrong; because no sin would be accounted to them as such. Some authorities contend that he personally rejected only the Mosaic, not the moral law; but Mr. Browning has credited him with the full measure of Antinomian belief, and makes him specially exult in the Divine assurance that the concentrated venom of the worst committed sins can only work in him for salvation. He also comments wonderingly on the state of the virtuous man and woman, and of the blameless child, "undone," as he was saved, before the world began; whose very striving is turned to sin; whose life-long prayer and sacrifice can only end in damnation. But, as he declares, he praises God the more that he cannot understand Him; that His ways are inscrutable, that His love may not be bought.
"CONFESSIONS" is the answer of a dying man to the clergyman's question: does he "view the world as a vale of tears?" His fancy is living through a romance of past days, of which the scene comes back to him in the arrangement of physic-bottles on a table beside him, while the curtain, which may be green, but to his dying eyes is blue, makes the June weather about it all. He is seeing the girl he loved, as watching for him from a terrace near the stopper of that last and tallest bottle in the row; and he is retracing the path by which he could creep, unseen by any eyes but hers, to the "rose-wreathed" gate which was their trysting-place. "No, reverend sir," is the first and last word of his reply, "the world has been no vale of tears to me."
"MAY AND DEATH" expresses a mourner's wish, so natural to the egotism of a deep sorrow, that the season which robbed him of his friend's life should bury all its sweetness with him. The speaker retracts this wish, in justice to the many pairs of friends who have each their right to happiness. But there is, he says, one red-streaked plant which their May might spare, since one wood alone would miss it. For its leaf is dashed as with the blood of Spring; and whenever henceforth it grows in that same place, the drop will have been drawn from his heart.[97]
"YOUTH AND ART" is a humorous, but regretful reminiscence of "Bohemian" days, addressed by a great singer to a sculptor, also famous, who once worked in a garret opposite to her own. They were young then, as well as poor and obscure; and they watched and coquetted with each other, though they neither spoke nor met; and perhaps played with the idea of a more serious courtship. Caution and ambition, however, prevailed; and they have reached the summit of their respective professions, and accepted the social honours which the position insures. But she thinks of all that might have been, if they had listened to nature, and cast in their lot with each other; of the sighs and the laughter, the starvation and the feasting, the despairs and the joys of the struggling artist's career; and she feels that in its fullest and freest sense, their artist life has remained incomplete.
"A LIKENESS" describes the feelings which are inspired by the familiar or indifferent handling of any object sacred to our own mind. They are illustrated by the idea of a print or picture, bought for the sake of a resemblance; and which may be hanging against a wall, or stowed away in a portfolio: and, in either case, provoke comment, contemptuous or admiring, which will cause a secret and angry pain to its possessor.
"APPEARANCES," a little poem in two stanzas, illustrates the power of association. Its contents can only be given in its own words.
"ST. MARTIN'S SUMMER" represents a lover, with his beloved, striving to elude the memory of a former attachment, and finding himself cheated by it. As the fires of a departed summer will glow once more, in the countenance of the wintry year, so also has his past life projected itself into the present, assuming its features as a mask. And when the ghosts, from whom, figuratively, the young pair are hiding, rise from their moss-grown graves; and the lover would disregard their remonstrant procession as only "faint march-music in the air": he becomes suddenly conscious that the past has withdrawn its gifts, and that the mere mask of love remains to him.
The poem would seem intended to deny that a second love can be genuine: were not its light tone and fantastic circumstance incompatible with serious intention.
PROLOGUE TO "LA SAISIAZ," reprinted as "Pisgah-Sights," III., is a fantastic little vision of the body and the soul, as disengaged from each other by death: the soul wandering at will through the realms of air; the body consigned to the
of its native earth.
Second Group.
"CAVALIER TUNES" consists of three songs, with chorus, full of rousing enthusiasm for the cause of King Charles, and of contemptuous defiance for the Roundheads who are opposing him: I. "Marching Along." II. "Give a Rouse." III. "Boot and Saddle."
"HOW THEY BROUGHT THE GOOD NEWS FROM GHENT TO AIX" is an imaginary picture, which would gain nothing in force by being true. It is that of three horsemen galloping to save the life of their town; galloping without rest, from moonset to sunrise, from sunrise into the blaze of noon; one horse dropping dead on the way, the second, within sight of the goal; and the third, Roland, urged on by frantic exertions on his rider's part—the blood filling his nostrils, and starting in red circles round his eyes—galloping into the market-place of Aix; to rest there with his head between his master's knees: while the last measure of wine which the city contains is being poured down his throat.
"SONG" is a lover's assertion of his lady's transcendent charms, which he challenges those even to deny who do not love her.
"INCIDENT OF THE FRENCH CAMP." A boy soldier of the army of Napoleon has received his death wound in planting the Imperial flag within the walls of Ratisbon. He contrives by a supreme effort to gallop out to the Emperor—who has watched the storming of the city from a mound a mile or two away—fling himself from the horse, and, holding himself erect by its mane, announce the victory. No sign of pain escapes him. But when Napoleon suddenly exclaims: "You are wounded," the soldier's pride in him is touched. "I am killed, Sire," he replies; and, smiling, falls dead at the Emperor's feet. The story is true; but its actual hero was a man.
"COUNT GISMOND" is an imaginary episode of the days of chivalry. It relates how a young girl had been chosen queen of a tournament; and how a false knight, instigated by two cousins who were jealous of her beauty, accused her, in the open field, of being unfit to bestow a crown; how a true knight who loved her, killed the lie by a blow struck at the liar's mouth; and then, mortally wounding him in single combat, dragged him to retract it at the lady's feet; how he laid his protecting arm around her, and led her away to the southern home where she is now his proud and happy wife, with sons growing up to resemble him.
The fearless confidence with which she has awaited the result of the duel, as bearing God's testimony to the truth, is very characteristic of the time.
"THE BOY AND THE ANGEL" is an imaginary legend which presents one of Mr. Browning's deepest convictions in a popular form. Theocrite was a poor boy, who worked diligently at his craft, and praised God as he did so. He dearly wished to become Pope, that he might praise Him better, and God granted the wish. Theocrite sickened and seemed to die. And he awoke to find himself a priest, and also, in due time, Pope. But God missed the praise, which had gone up to Him from the boy craftsman's cell; and the angel Gabriel came down to earth, and took Theocrite's former place. And God was again not satisfied; for the angelic praise could not replace for Him the human. "The silencing of that one weak voice had stopped the chorus of creation." So Theocrite returned to his old self; and the angel Gabriel became Pope instead of him.
"THE GLOVE" is the well-known story[98] of a lady of the Court of Francis I., who, in order to test the courage of her suitor, threw her glove into the enclosure in which a captive lion stood; and describes the suitor—one De Lorge—as calmly rescuing the glove, but only to fling it in the lady's face; this protest against her heartlessness and vanity being endorsed by both the King and Court. But at this point Mr. Browning departs from the usual version: for he takes the woman's part. The supposed witness and narrator of the incident, the poet Ronsard, sees a look in her face which seems to say that the experiment, if painful, has been worth making; and he gives her the opportunity of declaring so. She had too long, she explains, been expected to take words for deeds, and to believe on his mere assertion, that her admirer was prepared to die for her; and when the sight of this lion brought before her the men who had risked their lives in capturing it, without royal applause to sustain them, the moment seemed opportune for discovering what this one's courage was worth. She marries a youth, so the poet continues, whose love reveals itself at this moment of her disgrace; and (he is disposed to believe) will live happily, though away from the Court. De Lorge, rendered famous by the incident, woos and wins a beauty who is admired by the King, and acquires practice in seeking her gloves—where he is not meant to find them—at the moments in which his presence is superfluous.
"THE TWINS" is a parable told by Luther in his "Table Talk," to show that charity and prosperity go hand in hand: and that to those who cease to give it will no longer be given. "Dabitur" only flourishes where "Date" is well-fed.
"THE PIED PIPER OF HAMELIN" (Hameln)[99] is the story of a mysterious piper who is said to have appeared at Hameln in the fourteenth century, at a moment when the city was infested by rats. According to the legend, he freed it from this nuisance, by shrill notes of his pipe which lured the rats after him to the edge of the river Weser, where they plunged in and were drowned; and then, to punish the corporation, which had refused him the promised pay, enticed away all its children, by sweet notes from his pipe; and disappeared with them into the Koppelberg, a neighbouring mountain, which opened and then closed on them for ever. The legend also asserts that these facts (to which Mr. Browning has made some imaginative additions), were recorded on a church window, and in the name of a street. But the assertion no longer finds belief.
"GOLD HAIR" is a true "Story of Pornic," which may be read in guide-books to the place. A young girl of good family died there in odour of sanctity; she seemed too pure and fragile for earth. But she had one earthly charm, that of glorious golden hair; and one earthly feeling, which was her apparent pride in it. As she lay on her deathbed, she entreated that it might not be disturbed; and she was buried near the high altar of the church of St. Gilles[100] with the golden tresses closely swathed about her. Years afterwards, the church needed repair. Part of the pavement was taken up. A loose coin drew attention to the spot in which the coffin lay. Its boards had burst, and scattered about, lay thirty double louis, which had been hidden in the golden hair. So the saint-like maiden was a miser.
"HERVÉ RIEL" commemorates the skill, courage, and singleness of heart of a Breton sailor, who saved the French squadron when beaten at Cape la Hogue and flying before the English to St. Malo, by guiding it through the shallows of the river Rance, in a manner declared impracticable by the Maloese themselves; being all the while so unconscious of the service he was rendering, that, when desired to name his reward, he begged for a whole day's holiday, to run home and see his wife. His home was Le Croisic.
Third Group.
"THROUGH THE METIDJA TO ABD-EL-KADR" represents a follower of Abd-el-Kadr hastening through the desert to join his chief. Mystic fancies crowd upon him as he "rides" and "rides": his pulses quickened by the end in view, and by the swift unresting motion of a horse which never needs the spur; and as he describes his experience in his own excited words, we receive not only the mental picture, but the physical impression of it. This poem is a strong instance of Mr. Browning's power of conveying sense by sound, when he sees occasion for doing so.
"MEETING AT NIGHT" is a glimpse of moonlight and repose; and of the appropriate seclusion in the company of the one woman loved.
"PARTING AT MORNING" asserts the need of "men" and their "world," which is born again with the sunshine.
"THE PATRIOT" tells, as its second title informs us, "an old story." Only this day year, the "patriot" entered the city as its hero, amidst a frenzy of gratitude and joy. To-day he passes out of it through comparatively silent streets; for those for whom he has laboured last as first, are waiting for him at the foot of the scaffold. No infliction of physical pain or moral outrage is spared him as he goes. He is "safer so," he declares. The reward men have withheld awaits him at the hand of God.
"INSTANS TYRANNUS"[101] is the confession of a king, who has been possessed by an unreasoning and uncontrolled hatred for one man. This man was his subject, but so friendless and obscure that no hatred could touch, so stupid or so upright that no temptation could lure him into his enemy's power. The King became exasperated by the very smallness of the creature which thus kept him at bay; drew the line of persecution closer and closer; and at last ran his victim to earth. But, at the critical moment, the man so long passive and cowering threw himself on the protection of God. The King saw, in a sudden revulsion of feeling, an Arm thrown out from the sky, and the "wretch" he had striven to crush, safely enfolded in it Then he in his turn—was "afraid."
"MESMERISM" is a fanciful but vivid description of an act of mesmeric power, which draws a woman, alone, in the darkness, and through every natural obstacle, to the presence of the man who loves her.
"TIME'S REVENGES" is also a confession made in the form of a soliloquy. The speaker has a friend whose devotion is equal to any test, and whose love he barely repays with liking; and he has a lady-love by whom this friend is avenged; for he has given up to his passion for her his body and his soul, his peace and his renown, every laudable ambition, every rational aim; and he knows she would let him roast by a slow fire if this would procure her an invitation to a certain ball.
"THE ITALIAN IN ENGLAND" is the supposed adventure of a leading Italian patriot, told by himself in later years. He tells how he was hiding from the Austrians, who had put a price upon his head, and were scouring the country in pursuit of him; how, impelled by hunger, he disclosed his place of concealment to a peasant girl—the last of a troop of villagers who were passing by; and how she saved his life at the risk of her own, and when she would have been paid in gold for betraying him. He relates also that his first thought was to guard himself against betrayal by not telling her who he was; but that her loyal eyes, her dignified form and carriage (perhaps too, the consummate tact with which she had responded to his signal) in another moment had put the thought to flight, and he fearlessly placed his own, and his country's destiny in her hands. He is an exile in England now. Friends and brothers have made terms with the oppressor, and his home is no longer theirs. But among the wishes which still draw him to his native land, is one, less acknowledged than the rest and which perhaps lies deeper, that he may see that noble woman once more; talk to her of the husband who was then her lover, of her children, and her home; and, once more, as he did in parting from her, kiss her hand in gratitude, and lay his own in blessing on her head.[102]
"PROTUS" is a fragment of an imaginary chronicle: recording in the same page and under the head of the same year, how the child-Emperor, Protus, descended from a god, was growing in beauty and in grace, worshipped by the four quarters of the known world; and how John, the Pannonian blacksmith's bastard, came and took the Empire; but, as "some think," let Protus live—to be heard of later as dependent in a foreign court; or perhaps to become the monk, whom rumour speaks of as bearing his name, and who died at an advanced age in Thrace.
A fit comment on this Empire lost and won, is supplied by two busts, also imaginary, one showing a "rough hammered" coarse-jawed head; the other, a baby face, crowned with a wreath of violets.
"APPARENT FAILURE" is Mr. Browning's verdict on three drowned men, whose bodies he saw exposed at the Morgue[103] in Paris, in the summer of 1856. He justly assumes that the death was suicide; and as he reads in each face its special story of struggle and disappointment,
the conviction lays hold of him that their doom is not final, that the life God blessed in the beginning cannot end accursed of Him; that even a despair and a death like these, record only a seeming failure.
The poem was professedly written to save the memory of the Morgue, then about to be destroyed.
The friend, to whom "WARING" refers, is a restless, aspiring, sensitive person, who has planned great works, though he has completed none: who feels his powers always in excess of his performance, and who is hurt if those he loves refuse them credit for being so. He is gone now, no one knows whither; and the speaker, who is conscious that his own friendship has often seemed critical or cold, vainly wishes that he could recall him. His fancy travels longingly to those distant lands, in one of which Waring may be playing some new and romantic part; and back again to England, where he tries to think that he is lying concealed, while preparing to surprise the world with some great achievement in literature or art. Then someone solves the problem by saying that he has seen him—for one moment—on the Illyrian coast; seated in a light bark, just bounding away into the sunset. And the speaker rejoins
and, we conclude, takes comfort from the thought.
FOOTNOTES:
Both of these first in "Hood's Magazine."
First in "Hood's Magazine."
I here use the word "conscience" in its intellectual rather than its moral sense; as signifying that consciousness of a wrong done, which may, for a time, be evaded or pushed aside.
This poem was a personal utterance, provoked by the death of a relative whom Mr. Browning dearly loved.
Told by Schiller and Leigh Hunt.
Written for and inscribed to a little son of the actor, William Macready.
A picturesque old church which has since been destroyed.
The "Threatening Tyrant." Suggested by some words in Horace: 8th Ode, ii. Book.
Mr. Browning is proud to remember that Mazzini informed him he had read this poem to certain of his fellow-exiles in England to show how an Englishman could sympathize with them.
A small, square building on one of the quays, in which the bodies of drowned persons were placed for identification.
CONCLUDING GROUP.
"DRAMATIC IDYLS." "JOCOSERIA."
"DRAMATIC IDYLS."
The Dramatic Idyls form, like the Dramas, a natural group; and though, unlike these, they might be distributed under various heads, it would not be desirable to thus disconnect them; for their appearing together at this late period of Mr. Browning's career, constitutes them a landmark in it. They each consist of a nucleus of fact—supplied by history or by romance, as the case may be—and of material, and in most cases, mental circumstance, which Mr. Browning's fancy has engrafted on it; and in both their material and their mental aspect they display a concentrated power, which clearly indicates what I have spoken of as the "crystallizing" process Mr. Browning's genius has undergone. A comparison of these poems with "Pauline," "Paracelsus," or even "Pippa Passes," will be found to justify this assertion.
The Idyls consist of two series, occupying each a volume. The first, published 1879, contains:—
- "Martin Relph."
- "Pheidippides."
- "Halbert and Hob."
- "Ivàn Ivànovitch."
- "Tray."
- "Ned Bratts."
The hero of "MARTIN RELPH" is an old man, whose life is haunted by something which happened to him when little more than a boy. A girl of his own village had been falsely convicted of treason, and the guns were already levelled for her execution, when Martin Relph, who had stolen round on to some rising ground behind the soldiers and villagers who witnessed the scene, saw what no one else could see: a man, about a quarter of mile distant, rushing onwards in staggering haste, and waving a white object over his head. He knew this was Vincent Parkes, Rosamond Page's lover, bearing the expected proofs of her innocence. He knew also that by a shout he might avert her doom. But something paralyzed his tongue, and the girl fell. The man who would have rescued her but for delays and obstacles, which no power of his could overcome, was found dead where Martin Relph had seen him.
The remembrance of these two deaths leaves Martin Relph no rest; for conscience tells him that his part in them was far worse than it appeared. It tells him that what struck him dumb at that awful moment was not, as others said, the simple cowardice of a boy: he loved in secret the girl whom Vincent Parkes was coming to save; and if he had saved her, it would have been for that other man. But that thought could only flash on him in one second of fiery consciousness; he had no time to recognize it as a motive; and he clings madly to the hope that his conscience is mistaken, and it was not that which silenced him. Every year, at the same spot, he re-enacts the scene, striving to convince himself—with those who hear him—that he has been a coward, but not a murderer; and in the moral and physical reaction from the renewed agony, half-succeeds in doing so.
The story, thus told in Martin Relph's words, is supposed to have been repeated to the present narrator by a grandfather, who heard them. It embodies a vague remembrance of something read by Mr. Browning when he was himself a boy.
The facts related in "PHEIDIPPIDES" belong to Greek legendary history, and are told by Herodotus and other writers. When Athens was threatened by the invading Persians, she sent a running messenger to Sparta, to demand help against the foreign foe. The mission was unsuccessful. But the "runner," Pheidippides, fell in on his return, with the god Pan; and though alone among Greeks the Athenians had refused to honour him, he promised to fight with them in the coming battle. Pheidippides was present, when this battle—that of Marathon—was fought and won. He "ran" once more, to announce the victory at Athens; and fell, dead, with the words, "Rejoice, we conquer!" on his lips. This death followed naturally on the excessive physical strain; but Mr. Browning has used it as a connecting link between the historic and the imaginary parts of the idyl. According to this, Pheidippides himself tells his first adventure, to the assembled rulers of Athens: depicting, in vivid words, the emotions which winged his course, and bore him onwards over mountains and through valleys, with the smooth swiftness of running fire; and he also relates that Pan promised him a personal reward for his "toil," which was to consist in release from it. This release he interprets as freedom to return home, and to marry the girl he loves. It meant a termination to his labours, more tragic, but far more glorious: to die, proclaiming the victory which they had helped to secure.
Pan is also made to present him with a sprig of fennel—symbol of Marathon, or the "fennel-field"—as pledge of his promised assistance.
"HALBERT AND HOB" is the story of a fierce father and son who lived together in solitude, shunned by their fellow-men. One Christmas night they drifted into a quarrel, in the course of which the son seized his father, and was about to turn him out of doors: when the latter, with unaccustomed mildness, bade him stay his hand. Just so, he said, in his youth, had he proceeded against his own father; and at just this stage of the proceeding had a voice in his heart bidden him desist.... And the son thus appealed to desisted also.
This fact is told by Aristotle[104] as an instance of the hereditary nature of anger. But Mr. Browning sees more in it than that. If, he declares, Nature creates hard hearts, it is a power beyond hers which softens them; and in his version of "Halbert and Hob" this supernatural power completes the work it has begun. The two return in silence to their fireside. The next morning the father is found dead. The son has become a harmless idiot, to remain so till the end of his life.
"IVAN IVANOVITCH" is the reproduction, with fictitious names and imaginary circumstances, of a popular Russian story, known as "The Judgment of God." A young woman travelling through the forest on a winter's night, is attacked by wolves, and saves her own life by throwing her children to them. But when she reaches her village, and either confesses the deed or stands convicted of it, one of its inhabitants, by trade a carpenter and the Ivàn Ivànovitch of the idyl, lifts the axe which he is plying, and strikes off her head: this informal retribution being accepted, by those present, as in conformity with the higher law.
Mr. Browning has raised the mother's act out of the sphere of vulgar crime, by the characteristic method of making her tell her story: and show herself, as she may easily have been, not altogether bad; though a woman of weak maternal instincts, and one whose nature was powerless against the fear of pain, and the impulse to self-preservation. She describes with appalling vividness the experiences of the night: the moonlit forest—the snow-covered ground—the wolves approaching with a whispering tread, which seems at first but the soughing of a gentle wind—the wedge-like, ever-widening mass, which emerges from the trees; then the flight, and the pursuit: the latter arrested for one moment by the sacrifice of each victim; to be renewed the next, till none is left to sacrifice: one child dragged from the mother's arms; another shielded by her whole body, till the wolf's teeth have fastened in her flesh; and though she betrays, in the very effort to conceal it, how little she has done to protect her children's lives, we realize the horror of her situation, and pity even while we condemn, her. But some words of selfish rejoicing at her own deliverance precede the fatal stroke, and in some degree challenge it. And Mr. Browning farther preserves the spirit of the tradition, by giving to her sentence the sanction of the village priest or "pope," into whose presence the decapitated body has been conveyed. The secular authorities are also on the spot, and condemn the murder as contrary both to justice and to law. But the pope declares that the act of Ivàn Ivànovitch has been one of the higher justice which is above law. He himself is an aged man—so aged, he says, that he has passed through the clouds of human convention, and stands on the firm basis of eternal truth. Looking down upon the world from this vantage-ground, he sees that no gift of God is equal to that of life; no privilege so high as that of reproducing its "miracle;" and that the mother who has cast away her maternal crown, and given over to destruction the creatures which she has borne, has sinned an "unexampled sin," for which a "novel punishment" was required. No otherwise than did Moses of old, has Ivàn Ivànovitch interpreted the will—shown himself the servant—of God.
How Mr. Browning's Ivàn Ivànovitch himself judges the case, is evidenced by this fact, that after wiping the blood from his axe, he betakes himself to playing with his children; and that when the lord of the village has—reluctantly—sent a deputation to inform him that he is free, the words, "how otherwise?" are his only answer.
"TRAY" describes an instance of animal courage and devotion which a friend of Mr. Browning's actually witnessed in Paris. A little girl had fallen into the river. None of the bystanders attempted to rescue her. But a dog, bouncing over the balustrade, brought the child to land; dived again, no one could guess why; and after battling with a dangerous current, emerged with the child's doll; then trotted away as if nothing had occurred.
This "Tray" is made to illustrate Mr. Browning's ideal of a hero, in opposition to certain showy and conventional human types; and the little narrative contains some scathing reflections on those who talk of such a creature as merely led by instinct, or would dissect its brain alive to discover how the "soul" is secreted there.
"NED BRATTS" was suggested by the remembrance of a passage in John Bunyan's "Life and Death of Mr. Badman." Bunyan relates there that some twenty years ago, "at a summer assizes holden at Hertford, while the judge was sitting on the Bench," a certain old Tod came into the Court, and declared himself "the veriest rogue that breathes upon the earth"—a thief from childhood, &c., &c.; that the judge first thought him mad, but after conferring with some of the justices, agreed to indict him "of several felonious actions;" and that as he heartily confessed to all of these, he was hanged, with his wife, at the same time. Mr. Browning has turned Hertford into Bedford; made the time of the occurrence coincide with that of Bunyan's imprisonment; and supposed the evident conversion of this man and woman to be among the many which he effected there. The blind daughter of Bunyan, who plays an important part in "Ned Bratts," is affectingly spoken of in her father's work; and the tag-laces, which have subserved the criminal purposes of Bratts and his wife, represent an industry by which he is known to have supported himself in prison. Mr. Browning, finally, has used the indications Bunyan gives, of the incident taking place on a very hot day, so as to combine the sense of spiritual stirring with one of unwholesome and grotesque physical excitement; and this, as he describes it, is the genuine key-note of the situation.
The character of Ned Bratts is made a perfect vehicle for these impressions. His "Tab" (Tabitha) has had an interview with John Bunyan, and been really moved by his majestic presence, and warning, yet hope-inspiring words. But he himself has been principally worked upon by the reading of the "Pilgrim's Progress;" and we see in him throughout, an unregenerate ruffian, whose carnal energies have merely transferred themselves to another field; and whose blood is fired to this act of martyrdom both by yesterday's potations, and to-day's virtuously endured thirst. "A mug," he cries, in the midst of his confessions; or, "no (addressing his wife), a prayer!"
The precarious nature of his conversion is, indeed, vividly present to his own mind. It is borne in upon him that he is "Christmas," and must escape from the City of Destruction. He would like nothing better, in his present mood, than to undertake the whole Pilgrimage, and, as it were, cudgel his way through; and since it is late in the day for this, he chooses the short cut by the gallows, as the next best thing. But he is, above all, desirous to be taken while the penitent fit is on him: and urgently sets forth those past misdeeds, which constitute his and his wife's claim to a speedy despatch, such as will place them beyond the danger of backsliding. Already, he declares, Satan is whispering to him of the pleasures he is leaving behind; and the seductions of to-morrow's brawl and bear-baiting are threatening to turn the scale. Another moment, and instead of going up to heaven, like Faithful, in a chariot and pair, he will be the Lost Man in the Iron Cage!
When the two have had their wish, and been hanged "out of hand," the bystanders are edified to tears. But the loyalty of the Chief Justice forbids any imputing of the act of grace to the influence of John Bunyan. Its cause lies rather, he asserts, in the twelve years' pious reign of the restored Charles.
The second series of the "Dramatic Idyls" was published in 1880, and contains:—
- "Echetlos."
- "Clive."
- "Muléykeh."
- "Pietro of Abano."
- "Doctor ——"
- "Pan and Luna."
It has also a little prologue and epilogue: the former satirizing the pretension to understand the Soul, which we cannot see, while we are baffled by the workings of the bodily organs, which we can see; the latter directed against the popular idea that the more impressible and more quickly responsive natures are the soil of which "song" is born. The true poet, it declares, is as the pine tree which has grown out of a rock.
"ECHETLOS" (holder of the ploughshare) is another legend of the battle of Marathon. It tells, in Mr. Browning's words, how one with the goat-skin garment, and the broad bare limbs of a "clown," was seen on the battle-field ploughing down the enemy's ranks: the ploughshare flashing now here, now there, wherever the Grecian lines needed strengthening; how he vanished when the battle was won; and how the oracle, of which his name was asked, bade the inquirers not care for it:
Miltiades and Themistocles had shown that a great name could do so.[105]