“Rejoice that man is hurled
From change to change unceasingly,
His soul’s wings never furled!”
“Nothing endures,” says the wind. “There’s life’s pact—perhaps, too, its probation; but man might at least, as he grasps ‘one fair, good, wise thing,’—the love of a loving woman—grave it on his soul’s hands’ palms to be his for ever.”
VII. Among the Rocks.—Earth sets his bones to bask in the sun, and smiles in the beauty with which the rippling water adorns him; and so she comforts herself by reflecting that we may make the low earth-nature better by suffusing it with our love-tides. Love is gain if we love only what is worth our love. How much more to make the low nature better by our throes!
VIII. Beside the Drawing-Board.—She has been drawing a hand. A clay cast of a perfect thing is before her. She has learned something of the infinite beauty of the human hand—has studied it, has praised God, its Maker, for it; and as she contemplates the world of wonders to be discovered therein, she is fain to efface her work and begin anew, for somehow grace slips from soulless finger-tips. The cast is that of a hand by Leonardo da Vinci. She has passionately longed to copy its perfection, but as the great master could not copy the perfection of the dead hand, so she has failed to draw the cast. And so she turns to the peasant girl model who is by her side that day, “a little girl with the poor coarse hand,” and as she contemplates it she begins to understand the worth of flesh and blood, and that there is a great deal more than beauty in a hand. She has read Bell on the human hand, and she knows something of the infinite uses of the mechanism which is hidden beneath the flesh. She knows what use survives the beauty in the peasant hand that spins and bakes. The living woman is better than the dead cast. She has learned the lesson that all this craving for what can never be hers—for the love she cannot gain, any more than the perfection she cannot draw—is wasting her life. She will be up and doing, no longer dreaming and sighing.
IX. On Deck.—It was better to leave him! She will set him free. She had no beauty, no grace; nothing in her deserved any place in his mind. She was harsh and ill-favoured (and perhaps this was the secret of the trouble). Still, had he loved her, love could and would have made her beautiful. Some day it may be even so; and in the years to come a face, a form—her own—may rise before his mental vision, his eyes be opened, his liberated soul leap forth in a passionate “’Tis she!”
Jesus Christ. That Mr. Browning was something more than a Theist, a Unitarian, or a Broad Churchman, may be gathered from several passages in his works, as well as from direct statements to individuals. Three lines in the Death in the Desert (though often said to be used only dramatically), when taken in connection with the whole drift and purpose of the poem, seem to indicate a faith which is more than mere Theism:
“The acknowledgment of God in Christ, accepted by thy reason,
Solves for thee all questions in the earth and out of it,
And has so far advanced thee to be wise.”
In the Epistle of Karshish, the Arab physician says concerning Jesus, who had raised Lazarus from the dead:—
“The very God! think, Abib, dost thou think?
So, the All-Great, were the All-Loving too—
So, through the thunder comes a loving voice
Saying, ‘O heart I made, a heart beats here!
Face, my hands fashioned, see it in myself!
Thou hast no power nor may’st conceive of mine.
But love I gave thee, with myself to love,
And thou must love me who have died for thee!’
The madman saith He said so: it is strange.”
Christmas Eve and Easter Day seem to be meaningless if they do not express the author’s faith in the divinity of our Lord. Just as every believer in Him can detect the true ring of the Christian believer and lover of his Lord in the lines quoted from the Epistle of Karshish, so will his touchstone detect the Christian in many other passages of the poet’s work.
In Saul, canto xviii., David says:—
“My flesh, that I seek
In the Godhead! I seek and I find it. O Saul, it shall be
A Face like my face that receives thee; a Man like to me,
Thou shalt love and be loved by, for ever: a Hand like this hand
Shall throw open the gates of new life to thee! See the Christ stand!”
David—to whom Christendom attributes the Psalms, even were he only the editor of that wonderful body of prayer and praise—as the utterer of sentiments like these, is permitted to express the orthodox opinion that he prophesied of the Christ who was to come. Mr. Browning would have hardly done this “dramatically.” (What are termed “the Messianic Psalms” are ii., xxi., xxii., xlv., lxxii., cx.) Pompilia, in The Ring and the Book, a character which is built up of the purest and warmest faith of the poet’s heart, says:—
“I never realised God’s truth before—
How He grew likest God in being born.”
The poem entitled “The Sun,” in Ferishtah’s Fancies, No. 5, may be studied in this connection.
Jews. Browning had great sympathy with the Jewish spirit. See Rabbi Ben Ezra, Jochanan Hakkadosh, Ben Karshook, Holy Cross Day, and Filippo Baldinucci.
Jochanan Hakkadosh. (Jocoseria: 1883.) The Hebrew which Mr. Browning quotes in the tale as the title of the work from which his incidents are derived, may be translated as “Collection of many Fables”; and the second Hebrew phrase means “from Moses to Moses [Moses Maimonides] there was never one like Moses.” Although the story of this poem is not historical, it is founded on characters and events which are familiar to students of Jewish literature and history. Hakkadosh means “The Holy.” Rabbi Yehudah Hannasi (the Prince) was the reputed author of the Mishnah, and was born before the year 140 of the Christian era. On account of his holy living he was surnamed Rabbenu Haḳkadosh. Jochanan means John. In the Jewish Messenger for March 4th, 1887, the poem is reviewed from a Jewish point of view by “Mary M. Cohen,” from which interesting study we extract the following particulars:—The scene of the poem is laid at Schiphaz, which is probably intended for Sheeraz, in Persia. “I think,” says the authoress, “that, with artistic licence, Mr. Browning does not here portray any individual man, but takes the names and characteristics of several rabbis, fusing all into a whole. Jochanan finds old age a continued disappointment. He is represented as almost overtaken by death; his loving scholars, as was usual in the days of rabbinism, cluster about him for some worthy word of parting advice. One of the pupils asks: ‘Say, does age acquiesce in vanished youth?’ The rabbi, groaning, answers grimly:
“Last as first
The truth speak I—in boyhood who began
Striving to live an angel, and, amerced
For such presumption, die now hardly, man.
What have I proved of life? To live, indeed,
That much I learned.”
It was suggested to the dying rabbi that if compassionating folk would render him up a portion of their lives, Hakkadosh might attain his fourscore years. Tsaddik, the scholar, well versed in the Targums, was foremost in urging the adoption of this expedient. By yielding up part of their lives, the pupils of Jochanan hope to combine the lessons of perfect wisdom and varied experience of life. But experience proves fatal to all the hopes, the aspirations, the high ideals of youth. Experience paralyses action. Experience chills the aspirations which animate the generous mind of the lover, the soldier, the poet, the statesman. When the men of experience contributed their quota, ‘certain gamesome boys’ must needs throw some of theirs also. This accounts for the rabbi being found alive unexpectedly after a long interval:
“Trailing clouds of glory do we come from God, who is our home.”
The rabbi utters heaven-sent intuitions, the gift of these lads. Under the influence of the Ruach, or spirit, Jochanan declares that happiness, here and hereafter, is found in acting on the generous impulses, the noble ideals which are sent into the mind, in spite of the testimony of experience that we shall fail to realise our aspirations. ‘There is no sin,’ says the rabbi, ‘except in doubting that the light which lured the unwary into darkness did no wrong, had I but marched on boldly.’ What we see here as antitheses, or as complementary truths, are reconciled hereafter. This reconciliation cannot be grasped by our present faculties. The rabbi seems to ‘babble’ when he tries to express in words the truth he sees. The pure white light of truth, seen through the medium of the flesh, is composed of many coloured rays. Evil is like the dark lines in the spectrum. The whole duty of man is to learn to love. If he fails, it matters not; he has learned the art: ‘so much for the attempt—anon performance.’ Love is the sum of our spiritual intuitions, the law of our practical conduct.”
Notes.—Mishna, the second or oral Jewish law; the great collection of legal decisions by the ancient rabbis; and so the fundamental document of Jewish oral law. Schiphaz, an imaginary place; or perhaps Sheeraz, on the Bundemeer, referred to at end of poem. Jochanan Ben Sabbathai, not historical. Khubbezleh, a fanciful name of the poet’s invention. Targum, a Chaldee version or paraphrase of the Old Testament. Nine Points of Perfection: Nine is a trinity of trinities, and is a mystical number of perfection; the slang expression “dressed to the nines” means dressed to perfection. Tsaddik == just, not historical. Dob == Bear (the constellation). The Bear, the constellation. Aish, the Great Bear. The Bier: the Jews called the constellation of the Great Bear “The Bier.” Three Daughters, the tail stars of the Bear. Banoth == daughters. The Ten: Jewish martyrs under the Roman empire. Akiba, Rabbi, lived A.C. 117, and laid the groundwork of the Mishna. He was one of the greatest Jewish teachers, and was at the height of his popularity when the revolt of the Jews under Barcochab took place. (See for a history of the revolt, and of Akiba’s influence, Milman’s History of the Jews, Book xviii.) He was scraped to death with an iron comb. Perida: a Jewish teacher of such infinite patience that the Talmud records that he repeated his lesson to a dull pupil four hundred times, and as even then he could not understand, four hundred times more, on which the spirit declared that four hundred years should be added to his life. Uzzean: Job, the most patient man, was of the land of Uz. Djinn, a supernatural being. Edom: Rome and Christianity went by this name in the Talmud. “Sic Jesus vult,” so Jesus wills. The Statist == the statesman. Mizraim == Egypt. Shushan == lily. Tohu-bohu, void and waste. Halaphta, Talmudic teachers. Ruach, spirit. Bendimir: no doubt the Bundemeer, one of the chief rivers of Farzistan, a province in Persia. Og’s thigh bone: “Og was king of Bashan. The rabbis say that the height of his stature was 23,033 cubits (nearly six miles). He used to drink water from the clouds, and toast fish by holding them before the orb of the sun. He asked Noah to take him into the ark, but Noah would not. When the flood was at its deepest, it did not reach to the knees of this giant. Og lived 3000 years, and then he was slain by the hand of Moses. Moses was himself ten cubits in stature (15 feet), and he took a spear ten cubits long, and threw it ten cubits high, and yet it only reached the heel of Og.... When dead, his body reached as far as the river Nile. Og’s mother was Enach, a daughter of Adam. Her fingers were two cubits long (one yard), and on each finger she had two sharp nails. She was devoured by wild beasts.—Maracci.”
Jocoseria. The volume of poems under this title was published in 1883. It contains the following works: “Wanting is—What?” “Donald,” “Solomon and Balkis,” “Cristina and Monaldeschi,” “Mary Wollstonecraft and Fuseli,” “Adam, Lilith and Eve,” “Ixion,” “Jochanan Hakkadosh,” “Never the Time and the Place,” “Pambo.” In a letter to a friend, along with an early copy of this work, the poet stated that “the title is taken from the work of Melander (Schwartzmann)—reviewed, by a curious coincidence, in the Blackwood of this month. I referred to it in a note to ‘Paracelsus.’ The two Hebrew quotations (put in to give a grave look to what is mere fun and invention), being translated, amount to: (1) “A Collection of Many Lies”; and (2) an old saying, ‘From Moses to Moses arose none like to Moses’ (i.e. Moses Maimonides)....” One of the notes to Paracelsus refers to Melander’s “Jocoseria” as “rubbish.” Melander, whose proper name was Otho Schwartzmann, was born in 1571. He published a work called “Joco-Seria,” because it was a collection of stories both grave and gay.
Johannes Agricola in Meditation. (First published in The Monthly Repository, and signed “Z.,” in 1836. Reprinted in Dramatic Lyrics, in Bells and Pomegranates, 1842.) Johannes Agricola meditates on the thought of his election or choice by the Supreme Being, who in His eternal counsels has before all worlds predestined him as an object of mercy and salvation. God thought of him before He thought of suns or moons, ordained every incident of his life for him, and mapped out its every circumstance. Totally irrespective of his conduct, God having chosen of His own sovereign grace, uninfluenced in the slightest degree by anything which Johannes has done or left undone, to consider him as a guiltless being, is pledged to save him of free mercy. It would make no difference to his ultimate salvation were he to mix all hideous sins in one draught, and drink it to the dregs. Predestined to be saved, nothing that he can do can unsave him; foreordained to heaven, nothing he could do could lead him hell-wards. As a corollary, those souls who are not so predestined in the counsels of God to eternal salvation may be as holy, as perfect, in the sight of men as he (Agricola) might be vile in their sight; yet they shall be tormented for ever in hell, simply because God has mysteriously left them out of His choice. They are reprobate, non-elect, and nothing that they could possibly do could avail to save them. When Adam sinned, he sinned not only for himself, but for the whole human race, and the whole species was forthwith condemned in him, excepting only those whom God in His Sovereign mercy had from all eternity elected to save, and that without regard to their merit or demerit. These reprobate persons might try to win God’s favour, might labour with all their might to please Him, and would only thereby add to their sin. Priest, doctor, hermit, monk, martyr, nun, or chorister,—all these, leading holy and before men beautiful lives, were eternally foreordained to be lost before God fashioned star or sun. For all this Johannes Agricola praises God, praises Him all the more that he cannot understand Him or His ways, praises Him especially that he has not to bargain for His love or pay a price for his salvation. Such is the terrible portrait which Mr. Browning has drawn of the teaching of a man who, as one of the Reformers, and as a friend of Luther, was the founder of what is known in religious history as Antinomianism. Hideous as is the perversion of gospel teaching which Agricola set forth, the doctrines of Antinomianism still linger on amongst certain sects of Calvinists in England and Scotland. The doctrine of reprobation is thus stated in the Westminster Confession of Faith, iii. 7: “The rest of mankind (i.e. all but the elect), God was pleased ... to pass by, and to ordain them to dishonour and wrath, etc.” Mosheim, in his Ecclesiastical History (century xvii., Sect. II., Part II., chap, ii., 23), thus describes the Presbyterian Antinomians: “The Antinomians are over-rigid Calvinists, who are thought by the other Presbyterians to abuse Calvin’s doctrine of the absolute decrees of God, to the injury of the cause of piety. Some of them ... deny that it is necessary for ministers to exhort Christians to holiness and obedience of the law, because those whom God from all eternity elected to salvation will themselves, and without being admonished and exhorted by any one, by a Divine influence, or the impulse of Almighty grace, perform holy and good deeds; while those who are destined by the Divine decrees to eternal punishment, though admonished and entreated ever so much, will not obey the Divine law, since Divine grace is denied them; and it is therefore sufficient, in preaching to the people, to hold up only the gospel and faith in Jesus Christ. But others merely hold that the elect, because they cannot lose the Divine favour, do not truly commit sin and break the Divine law, although they should go contrary to its precepts and do wicked actions, and therefore it is not necessary that they should confess their sins or grieve for them: that adultery for instance, in one of the elect appears to us indeed to be a sin or a violation of the law, yet it is no sin in the sight of God, because one who is elected to salvation can do nothing displeasing to God and forbidden by the law.” Very similar teaching may be discovered at the present day in the body of religionists known as Hyper-Calvinists or Strict Baptists. The professors are for the most part much better than their creed, and they are exceedingly reticent concerning their doctrines so far as they are represented by the term Antinomian; but the organs of their phase of religious belief, The Gospel Standard and The Earthen Vessel, frequently contain proofs of the vitality of Agricola’s doctrines in their pages. For example, in the Gospel Standard for July 1891, p. 288, we find the following: “No hope, nor salvation, can possibly arise out of the law or covenant of works. Every man’s works are sin,—his best works are polluted. Every page of the law unfolds his defects and shortcomings, nor will allow of a few shillings to the pound,—Pay the whole or die the death.” The tendency of Antinomianism is to become an esoteric doctrine, and it is seldom preached in any grosser form than this, however sweet it may be to the hearts of the initiated.
John of Halberstadt. The ecclesiastic in Transcendentalism who was also a magician and performed the “prestigious feat” of conjuring roses up in winter.
Joris. One of the riders in the poem “How they brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix.”
Jules. (Pippa Passes). The young French artist who married Phene under a misunderstanding, the result of a practical joke played upon him by his companions.
Karshish. (An Epistle.) The Arab physician who wrote of the interesting cases which he had seen in his travels to his brother leech, and who described Lazarus, who was raised from the dead, as having been in a trance.
King, A. The song in Pippa Passes, beginning “A king lived long ago,” was originally published in The Monthly Repository (edited by W. J. Fox) in 1835.
King Charles I. of England. See Strafford.
King Charles Emanuel, of Savoy (King Victor and King Charles), was the son of Victor Amadeus II., Duke of Savoy. He became king when his father suddenly abdicated, in 1730.
King Victor and King Charles: A Tragedy. (Bells and Pomegranates, II., 1842.) Victor Amadeus II., born in 1666, was Duke of Savoy. He obtained the kingdom of Sicily by treaty from Spain, which he afterwards exchanged with the Emperor for the island of Sardinia, with the title of King (1720). He was fierce, audacious, unscrupulous, and selfish, profound in dissimulation, prolific in resources, and a “breaker of vows both to God and man.” He was, however, an able and warlike monarch, and had the interests of his kingdom at heart. He was, moreover, beloved by the people over whom he ruled, and under his reign the country made great progress in finances, education, and the development of its natural resources. His whole reign was one of unexampled prosperity, and his life was a continued career of happiness until, in 1715, his beloved son Victor died. His daughter, the Queen of Spain, died shortly after. Charles Emanuel, his second son, had never been a favourite with the King. He was ill-favoured in appearance, and weak and vacillating in his conduct. When the Queen died, in 1728, Victor married Anna Teresa Canali, a widowed countess, whom he created Marchioness of Spigno. For some reasons or other which have never been satisfactorily explained, the King now decided to abdicate in favour of his son Charles Emanuel. He gave out that he was weary of the world and disgusted with affairs of State, and desired to live in retirement for the remainder of his days. It is more probable that his fiery and audacious temper, and his deceitfulness, dissimulation, and persistent endeavours to overreach the other powers with which he had intercourse, had involved him in difficulties of State policy from which he could only extricate himself by this grave step. Mr. Browning implies, in the preface to his tragedy, that his investigations of the memoirs and correspondence of the period had enabled him to offer a more reasonable solution of the difficulties connected with this strange episode in Italian history than any previous account has offered. When the King announced his intention to resign his crown, he was entreated by his people, his ministers and his son, to forego a project which every one thought would be prejudicial to the interests of the kingdom; but nothing would induce him to reconsider his decision, which he carried out with the completest ceremonial. After taking this step he retired with his wife to his castle at Chambéry; and, as might have been expected, he speedily grew weary of his seclusion. He had an attack of apoplexy, and when he recovered it was with faculties impaired and a temper readily irritated to outbursts of violent behaviour. The marchioness now began to suggest to him that he had done unwisely by resigning his crown; and, day by day, urged him to recover it. This was probably due to the desire she felt of being queen. He still remained on good terms with his son, who visited him at Chambéry; but he gave him to understand that he was not satisfied with his management of affairs, and constantly intervened in their direction. In the summer of 1731 Charles, accompanied by his queen (Polyxena) visited his father at the baths of Eviano, and before his return home he received private intimation that his father was about to proceed to Turin to resume the crown he had resigned. He lost no time in returning home, which he reached just before his father and the marchioness. He visited the ex-king on the following day, when he was informed that his reason for returning to Turin was the necessity for seeking a climate more suitable to his present state of health. Charles was satisfied with the explanation, and placed the castle of Moncalieri at his father’s service: here the ex-king received his son’s ministers, and hints were dropped and threatening expressions used by Victor, which left little doubt as to his intentions on the minds of his audience. It now became necessary for King Charles to seriously consider the best means to secure himself and his queen from the effects of his father’s change of mind. Victor lost little time in declaring himself: on September 25th, 1731, he sent for the Marquis del Borgo, and ordered him to deliver up the deed by which he had resigned his crown. The minister evaded in his reply, and of course informed the King of the demand. Now it was that Charles was inclined to waver between his duty to his realm and his duty to his father. He was a good, obedient son, and of upright and generous disposition, and was inclined to yield to his father’s wishes. He called the chief officers of state around him, and laid the matter before them. They were not forgetful of the threats which the old king had recently used towards them, and the Archbishop of Turin had little difficulty in convincing them and the king that it was impossible to comply with his father’s demands. If anything were wanting to confirm them in their decision, it was forthcoming in the shape of news that the old king had demanded at midnight admittance into the fortress of Turin, but had been refused by the commander. The council of Charles Emanuel readily concurred in the opinion that Victor should be arrested. The Marquis d’Ormea, who had been the old king’s prime minister, was charged with the execution of the warrant of arrest. He proceeded, with assistance and appropriate military precautions, to carry out the order, entering the king’s apartments at Moncalieri. They captured the marchioness, who was hurried away screaming to a state prison at Ceva, with many of her relatives and supporters; and then secured the person of the old king. He was asleep, and when aroused and made acquainted with the mission of the intruders, he became violently excited, and had to be wrapped in the bedclothes and forced into one of the court carriages, which conveyed him to the castle of Rivoli, situated in a small town of five thousand inhabitants, near Turin. His attendants and guards were strictly ordered to say nothing to him: if he addressed them, they maintained an inflexible silence, merely by way of reply making a very low and submissive bow. He was afterwards permitted to have the company of his wife and to remove to another prison, but on October 31st, 1732, he died.
Laboratory, The: Ancien Regime. First appeared in Hood’s Magazine, June 1844, to which it was contributed to help Hood in his illness; afterwards published in Dramatic Romances and Lyrics (Bells and Pomegranates, VII.) This poem and The Confessional were printed together, and entitled France and Spain. Mr. Arthur Symons reminds us that Rossetti’s first water-colour was an illustration of this poem, and has for subject and title the line “Which is the poison to poison her, prithee?” The keynote of the poem is jealousy, a distorted love-frenzy that impels to the rival’s extinction. The story is told in the most powerful and concentrated manner. The jealous woman’s whole soul is compressed into her words and actions; her emotion is visible; her voice, subdued yet full of energy, is audible in every line. The woman is a Brinvilliers, who has secured an interview with an alchemist in his laboratory, that she may purchase a deadly poison for her rival. We gather from the first verse that the poison consisted principally of arsenic. The “faint smokes curling whitely,” to protect the chemist from which it was necessary to wear a glass mask, sufficiently supplement our knowledge of the old poisoner’s art to enable us to indicate its nature. The patience of the woman, who in her eagerness for her rival’s death has no desire to hurry the manufacture of the means of it, is powerfully described. She is content to watch the chemist at his deadly work, asking questions in a dainty manner about the secrets of his art. She has all the ideas of “a big dose” which the uninitiated think requisite for big patients. “She’s not little—no minion like me!” “What, only a drop?” she asks. She is anxious to know if it hurts the victim. Is it likely to injure herself too? Reassured on that point, the glass mask is removed, and for reward the old man has all her jewels and gold to his fill. He may kiss her besides, and on the mouth if he will. There is a very remarkable instance in the second verse of the use made of antithesis by the poet. The proper emphasis can only be given when we rightly apprehend the ideas which oppose each other in the lines—
“He is with her, and they know that I know
Where they are, what they do: they believe my tears flow
While they laugh, laugh at me, at me fled to the drear
Empty church, to pray God in, for them!—I am here.”
The antithesis of the several sets of ideas is the only safe guide to the emphasis—he as opposed to her, tears to laughter, me to them, the church to the laboratory.[1] Although the effects of some of the deadliest poisons were well known to the ancients, their detection and recovery from the body by chemical means is a branch of science of only modern discovery. The Greeks and Romans were well acquainted with mercury, arsenic, henbane, aconite and hemlock. The art of poisoning was brought to great perfection in India; but, though dissection of the living and the dead was practised by the Alexandrian School in the third century B.C., the Greek and Roman physicians were quite incapable of such a knowledge of pathology as would enable them to detect any but the coarsest signs of poisoning in a dead body. Much less were they able to detect or recover by analysis the particular poison used by the criminal. It is not surprising that, under such circumstances, professional poisoners usually escaped punishment. In the fourteenth century arsenic was generally employed. Of the great schools of poisoners which flourished in Italy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Venice was the earliest. Troublesome people were removed by the Council of Ten by means of convenient poisons. Toffana and others combined poisoning with the art of cookery; and T. Baptist Porta, in his book on “Natural Magic,” under the section of cooking, shows that the trades of poisoner and cook were often combined. Toffana was the greatest of all the seventeenth-century poisoners. She made solutions of arsenic of various strengths, and sold them in phials under the name of “Naples Water” or “Acquetta di Napol.” It is said that she poisoned six hundred persons, including Popes Pius III. and Clement XIV. There was practically no fear of detection, and the liquid was sold openly to any one willing to pay the price for a deadly compound; the purpose for which it could alone be employed being perfectly well understood. Mr. Browning’s poem introduces us to a laboratory, where an arsenical preparation is being prepared. The glass mask refered to in the first line was used to protect the purchaser from the white, deadly smoke which the mineral gave off. The poison for which the lady paid so lavishly could be prepared nowadays by any chemist’s apprentice for a few pence; but, plentiful as it is, it is comparatively rarely used by criminals, as the same apprentice could infallibly detect it in the body after death, and reproduce in a test tube the very same poison used by the criminal.
Lady and the Painter, The. (Asolando: 1889.) A lady visiting an artist who has a picture on his easel of a nude female figure, protests against the irreverence to womanhood involved in his inducing a young woman to strip and stand stark-naked as his model. Before replying, he asks the lady what it is that clings half-savage-like around her hat. She, thinking he is admiring her headgear, tells him they are “wild-bird wings, and that the Paris fashion-books say that next year the skirts of women’s dresses are to be feathered too. Owls, hawks, jays and swallows are most in vogue.” Asking if he may speak plainly, and having been answered that he may, he tells Lady Blanche that it would be more to her credit to strip off all her bird-spoils and stand naked to help art, like his poor model, as a type of purest womanhood. “You, clothed with murder of His best of harmless beings, what have you to teach?” The poem is directed against the savage and wicked custom of wearing the plumage of birds, by which millions of God’s beautiful creatures are doomed annually to slaughter; by wearing gloves made of skins stripped from the living bodies of animals (if report be true); and by the use of sealskin and other animal coverings, which necessitates the wholesale slaughter of countless thousands of happy creatures in Arctic seas. I recently asked Miss Frances Power Cobbe—the noble lady who was a friend of Mr. Browning, and who has devoted her life and splendid literary talents to befriending dumb animals and protesting against cruelty in high places—to furnish me with some account of the agitation against the foolish habit of wearing bird-plumage in women’s bonnets. I have received from Miss Cobbe the following particulars: “The Plumage League began December 1885. It started with a letter in the Times, December 18th, 1885 (quoted in extenso in the Zoophilist, January 1886, p. 164), by the Rev. F. O. Morris, embodying one from Lady Mount Temple. Before May 1886 a long list of names (given in the Zoophilist) were given as patrons of the League, including Lady Mount Temple, Duchess of Sutherland, Lady Londesborough, Lady Sudeley, Hon. Mrs. R. C. Boyle, Louisa Marchioness of Waterford, Princess Christian, Lady Burdett Coutts, Lady Eastlake, Lady John Manners, Lady Tennyson, Lady Herbert of Lea, and about forty other ladies of rank. I should say that the League was originated by Lady Mount Temple and the Rev. F. O. Morris. There is another society in existence for the same purpose, working in London—the Birds’ Protection Society—one of whose local secretaries lately applied to me for a subscription.”
Lady Carlisle, Lucy Percy. (Strafford.) She was the daughter of the ninth Earl of Northumberland, and did her utmost to save Strafford’s life.
Lapaccia. Mona Lapaccia was Fra Lippo Lippi’s aunt, the sister of his father, who brought him up till he was eight years old, when, being no longer able to maintain him, she took him to the Carmelite Convent.
La Saisiaz (A. E. S., Sept. 14th, 1877).—Mr. Browning was staying during the autumn of 1877, with his sister, amongst the mountains near Geneva, at a villa called “La Saisiaz,” which in the Savoyard dialect means “The Sun.” They were accompanied on this occasion by Miss Ann Egerton Smith. The happiness of the visit to this beautiful spot was marred by the sudden death of Miss Smith, from heart disease, on the night of September 14th. The poem is the result of the poet’s musings on death, God, the soul, and the future state. It is one of Mr. Browning’s noblest and most beautiful utterances on the great questions of the Supreme Being and the ultimate destiny of the soul of man. It is Theism of the loftiest kind, and the grounds on which it is based are as philosophical as they are poetically expressed. The work has often been compared with the In Memoriam of Tennyson. The powerful optimism, the robust confidence and devout faith in the infinite love and wisdom of the Supreme Being, are in each poem emphasized again and again. After several pages of description of the scenery of the locality, Mr. Browning imagines that a spirit of the place bade him question, and promised answer, of the problems of existence—
“Does the soul survive the body? Is there God’s self—no or yes?”
He is weak, but “weakness never needs be falseness.” He will go to the foundations of his faith; he will take stock—see how he stands in the matter of belief and doubt; will fight the question out without fence or self-deception. It shall not satisfy him to say that a second life is necessary to give value to the present, or that pleasure, if not permanent, turns to pain; in the presence of that recent death there must be rigid honesty, and it does not satisfy him to know there’s ever some one lives though we be dead. Such a thought is repugnant to him,—not that repugnance matters if it be all the truth. He must, however, ask if there be any prospect of supplemental happiness? In the face of the strong bodies yoked to stunted souls, and the spirits that would soar were they not tethered by a fleshly chain; of the hindering helps, and the hindrances which are really helps in disguise,—the fact remains that hindered we are. However the fact be explained, life is a burthen; at best, more or less, in its whole amount is it curse or blessing? He thinks he has courage enough to fairly ask this question, and accept the answer of reason. He has questioned, and has been answered. Now, a question presupposes two things: that which questions and answers must exist. “I think, therefore I am” (Cogito, ergo sum), said Descartes. (And this is about the only thing in life of which we can be certain. Matter may be all illusion; as Bishop Berkeley said, we may be living in one long dream. But at least it takes a mind to do that. We therefore are; soul is, whatever else is not.) The second thing presupposed is, that the fact of being answered is proof that there must be a force outside itself:
“Actual ere its own beginning, operative through its course,
Unaffected by its end,—that this thing likewise needs must be.”
Here, then, are two facts: the last we may call God; the first, Soul. If an objector demands that he shall prove these facts his answer is that, recognising they surpass his power of proving these facts, proves them such to him:
“Ask the rush if it suspects
Whence and how the stream which floats it had a rise, and where and how
Falls or flows on still!”
If the rush could think and speak, it would say it only knows that it floats and is, and that an external stream bears it onward. What may happen to it the rush knows not: it may be wrecked, or it may land on shore and take root again; but this is mere surmise, not knowledge. Can we have better foundation for believing that, because we doubtless are, we shall as doubtless be? Men say we have, “because God seems good and wise.” But there reigns wrong in life. “God seems powerful,” they say; “why, then, are right and wrong at strife?” “Anyhow, we want a future life,” say men; “without it life would be brutish.” But wanting a thing, and hoping for it, are not proofs that our aspirations will be gratified; out of all our hopes, how many have had complete fulfilment? None. But “we believe,” men sigh. So far as others are concerned the poet will not speak—he knows not. But he knows not what he is himself, which nevertheless is an ignorance which is no barrier to his knowing that he exists and can recognise what gives him pain or pleasure. What others are or are not is surmise; his own experience is knowledge. To his own experience, then, he appeals. He has lived, done, suffered, loved, hated, learned and taught this: there is no reconciling wisdom with a distracted world, no reconciling goodness with evil if it is to finally triumph, no reconciling power if the aim is to fail; if—and he only speaks for himself, his own convictions, and not for any other man’s—if you hinder him from assuming that earth is a school-time and life a place of probation, all is chaos to him; he cannot say how these arguments and reasons may affect other men; he reiterates that he speaks for himself alone, because to colour-blind men the grass which is green to him may be red,—who is to decide which uses the proper term, supposing only two men existed, and one called grass green, the other red? So God must be the referee in His own case. The earth, as a school, is perhaps different for each individual; our pains and pleasures no more tally than our colour-sense. The poet, therefore, recognises that for him the world is his world, and no other man’s; he is to judge what it means for himself. He will therefore proceed to estimate the world as it seems to him, exactly as he would judge of an artisan’s work,—is it a success or a failure? Was God’s will or His power in fault when the vapours shrouded the blue heaven, and the flowers fell at the breath of the dragon? Death waits on every rose-bloom, pain upon every pleasure, shadow on every brightness. We cannot love, but death lurks hard by; cannot learn sympathy unless men suffer pain. If he is told that all this is necessity, he will bear it as best he can; if, on the other hand, you say it has been ordained by a Cause all-good, all-wise, all-potent, he protests as a man he will not acquiesce if, at the same time, you tell him that this life is all:
“No, as I am man, I mourn the poverty I must impute:
Goodness, wisdom, power, all bounded, each a human attribute!”
Speaking for himself he counts this show of things a failure if after this life there be no other; if the school is not to educate for another sphere, all its lessons are fruitless pain and toil. But, grant a second life, he heartily acquiesces; he sees triumph in misfortune’s worst assaults, and gain in all the loss. When was he so near to knowledge as when hampered by his recognised ignorance? Was not beauty made more precious by the deformities surrounding him? Did he not learn to love truth better when he contemplated the reign of falsehood? And for love, who knows what its value is till he has suffered by the death-pang? The poet here breaks off the argument to address the spirit of the lost friend, and express his hope that one day they may meet again:—
“Can it be, and must, and will it?”
Then he recalls his thoughts from the region of surmise, to which they have wandered, home to stern and sober fact. He needs not the old plausibilities of the “misery done to man” and the “injustice of God,” if another life compensate not for the ills of the present; he is prepared to take his stand as umpire to the champions Fancy and Reason, as they dispute the case between them. Fancy begins the amicable war by conceding that the surmise of life after death is as plain as a certainty, and acknowledges that there are now three facts—God, the soul, and the future life. Reason assents, sees there is definite advantage in the acknowledgment, admits the good of evil in the present life, detects the progress of everything towards good, and, as the next life must be an advance upon this one, suggests that, at the first cloud athwart man’s sky, he should not hesitate, but die. Fancy then increases its concession, and sees the necessity of a hell for the punishment of those who would act the butterfly before they have played out the worm. Thus we have five facts now—God, soul, earth, heaven and hell. Reason declares that more is required: are we to shut our eyes, stop our ears, and live here in a state of nescience, simply waiting for the life to come, which is to do everything for the soul? Fancy protests that this present stage of our existence has worth incalculable—that every moment spent here means so much loss or gain for that next life which on this life depends. We have now six plain facts established. Reason points out that Fancy has proved too much by appending a definite reward to every good action and a fixed punishment to every bad one. We lay down laws as stringent in the moral as the material world. If we say, “Would you live again, be just,” it is to put a necessity upon man as determined as the law of respiration—“Would you live now, regularly draw your breath.” If immortality were anything more than surmise, if heaven and hell were as plainly the consequences of our course of life here as a fall of a breach of the laws of gravity, then men would be compelled to do right and avoid evil. Probation would be gone, our freedom would be destroyed, neither merit nor discipline would remain—
“Thus have we come back full circle.”
The poet says he hopes,—he has no more than hope, but hope—no less than hope. Standing on the mountain, looking down upon the Lake of Geneva, his eye falls on the places where dwelt four great men: Rousseau, who lived at Geneva; Byron, lived at the villa called “Diodati,” at Geneva; and wrote the Prisoner of Chillon at Ouchy, on the Lake; Voltaire, who built himself a château at Fernex; Gibbon, who wrote the concluding portion of his great work at Lausanne. The somewhat obscure reference to the “pine tree of Makistos,” near the close of the poem, has caused considerable puzzling of brains amongst Browning students, none of whom have been able to assist me in solving the problem. So far as I am able to understand it, the solution seems to be this: The reference to Makistos is from the Agamemnon of Æschylus. The town of Makistos had a watch-tower on a neighbouring eminence, from which the beacon lights flashed the news of the fall of Troy to Greece. Clytemnestra says:
“sending a bright blaze from Ide,
Beacon did beacon send,
Pass on—the pine-tree—to Makistos’ watch-place.”
So the famous writers named as connected with that part of the Lake of Geneva contemplated by Mr. Browning, who were all Theists, passed on the pine-tree torch of Theism from age to age—Diodati, Rousseau, Gibbon, Byron, Voltaire, who—
“at least believed in Soul, was very sure of God.”
(Voltaire built a church at Ferney, over the portal of which he affixed the ostentatious inscription, “Deo erexit Voltaire.”) Many writers (Canon Cheyne for one, in the Origin of the Psalter, p. 410) have thought that by the lines beginning, “He there with the brand flamboyant,” etc., the poet referred to himself. Of course, any such idea is preposterous; the reference was to Voltaire. Mr. Browning, apart from the question of the egotism involved, could not say of himself, “he at least believed in soul.” There was no minimising of religious faith in the poet Still less could he speak of himself as “crowned by prose and verse.”
Notes.—Python, the Rock-snake, the typical genus of Pythonidæ; “Athanasius contra mundum” == Athanasius against the world. St. Athanasius, Bishop of Alexandria, and one of the most illustrious defenders of the Christian faith, was born about the year 297. In defending the Nicene Creed he had so much opposition to contend with from the Arian heretics that, in the words of Hooker, it was “the whole world against Athanasius, and Athanasius against it.”
Last Ride Together, The. (Men and Women, 1855; Romances, 1863; Dramatic Romances, 1868.) This poem is considered by many critics to be the noblest of all Browning’s love poems; for dramatic intensity, for power, for its exhibition of what Mr. Raleigh has aptly termed Browning’s “tremendous concentration of his power in excluding the object world and its relations,” the poem is certainly unequalled. It is a poem of unrequited love, in which there is nothing but the noblest resignation; a compliance with the decrees of fate, but with neither a shadow of disloyalty to the ideal, nor despair of the result of the dismissal to the lover’s own soul development. The woman may reject him,—there is no wounded pride; she does not love him,—he is not angry with her, nor annoyed that she fails to estimate him as highly as he estimates himself. He has the ideal in his heart; it shall be cherished as the occupant of his heart’s throne for ever—of the ideal he, at least, can never be deprived. This ideal shall be used to elevate and sublimate his desires, to expand his soul to the fruition of his boundless aspiration for human love, used till it transfigures the human in the man till it almost becomes Divine. And so—as he knows his fate—since all his life seemed meant for, fails—his whole heart rises up to bless the woman, to whom he gives back the hope she gave; he asks only its memory and her leave for one more last ride with him. It is granted:
“Who knows but the world may end to-night?”
(a line which no poet but Browning ever could have written. The force of the hour, the value of the quintessential moment as factors in the development of the soul, have never been set forth, even by Browning, with such startling power.) She lay for a moment on his breast, and then the ride began. He will not question how he might have succeeded better had he said this or that, done this or the other. She might not only not have loved him, she might have hated. He reflects that all men strive, but few succeed. He contrasts the petty done with the vast undone,
“What hand and brain went ever paired?
What heart alike conceived and dared?
What act proved all its thought had been?
What will but felt the fleshly screen?”
And the meaning of it all, the reason of the struggle, the outcome of the effort? The poet alone can tell: he says what we feel. “But, poet,” he asks, “are you nearer your own sublime than we rhymeless ones? You sculptor, you man of music, have you attained your aims?” Then he consoles himself that if here we had perfect bliss, still there is the life beyond, and it is better to have a bliss to die with dim-descried—
“Earth being so good, would heaven seem best?”
What if for ever he rode on with her as now, “The instant made eternity”?
Lazarus, who was raised from the dead, is the real hero of the poem An Epistle.
Léonce Miranda. (Red Cotton Night-Cap Country.) The principal actor in the drama was the son and heir of a wealthy Paris jeweller. He formed an illicit connection with Clara de Millefleurs, and lived with her at St. Rambert, finally committing suicide from the tower on his estate. It is said that the real name of the firm of jewellers was “Meller Brothers,” and that Clara de Millefleurs was Anna de Beaupré.
Levi Lincoln Thaxter. Poet Lore, vol. i., p. 598 (1889), states that Mr. Browning wrote an inscription for the grave of Levi Lincoln Thaxter, a well known American Browning reader, on the Maine sea-coast. The inscription runs thus:—“Levi Lincoln Thaxter. Born in Watertown, Massachusetts, Feb. 1st, 1824. Died May 31st, 1884.
“Thou, whom these eyes saw never! Say friends true
Who say my soul, helped onward by my song,
Though all unwittingly, has helped thee too?
I gave of but the little that I knew;
How were the gift requited, while along
Life’s path I pace, couldst thou make weakness strong!
Help me with knowledge—for Life’s Old——Death’s New!”
R. B. to L. L. T., April 1885.
Life in a Love. (Men and Women, 1855, Lyrics, 1863; Dramatic Lyrics, 1868.) A man is content to spend his whole life on the chance that the woman whose heart he pursues will one day cease to elude him. When the old hope is dashed to the ground, a new one springs up and flies straight to the same mark. And what if he fail of his purpose here? How can life be better expended than in devotion to one worthy ideal?
Light Woman, A. (Men and Women, 1855; Romances, 1863; Dramatic Romances, 1868.) A wanton-eyed woman ensnares a man in her toils just to add him to the hundred others she has captured. The victim has a friend who feels equal to conquering the victor. It is a question which is the stronger soul; the woman of a hundred conquests lies in the strong man’s hand as tame as a pear from the wall. But the game turns out to be a serious one: the light woman recognises her conqueror as the higher soul, and loves him accordingly. What is he to do? He does not wish to eat the pear; is he to cast it away? It is an awkward thing to play with souls. Light as she was, she had a heart, though the hundred others could not discover a way to it; this man did, and broke it. The question for the breaker is What does he seem to himself? The last lines of the poem are interesting. The author says of himself:—
“And Robert Browning, you writer of plays,
Here’s a subject made to your hand.”
Likeness, A. (Dramatis Personæ, 1864.) As no two faces are exactly alike in every particular, so no two souls are ever cast in one mould. The very markings of our finger tips differ in every hand, and so each soul has its own language, which must be learned by whomsoever would discover its secret. And here science avails not; soul grammars and lexicons are not written for its tongue. A face, a glance, a word will do; but it must be the right glance, and the true open-sesame. The face which has spoken to us, the soul visitant who has penetrated to our solitude, the book, the deed which has formed the bond between us, speaks not to others as it spoke to us; and the face which is enshrined in our heart of hearts, to them is “the daub John bought at a sale.” “Is not she Jane? Then who is she?” asks the stranger who intermeddleth not with our joys. But when that face is confessed to be one to lose youth for, to occupy age with the dream of, to meet death with; then, half in rapture, half in rage, we say, “Take it, I pray; it is only a duplicate!”
Lilith. (Adam, Lilith, and Eve.) “According to the Gnostic and Rosicrucian mediæval doctrine, the creation of woman was not originally intended. She is the offspring of man’s own impure fancy, and, as the Hermetists say, ‘an obtrusion.’... First ‘Virgo,’ the celestial virgin of the Zodiac, she became ‘Virgo-Scorpio.’ But in evolving his second companion, man had unwittingly endowed her with his own share of spirituality; and the new being whom his ‘imagination’ had called into life became his ‘saviour’ from the snares of Eve-Lilith, the first Eve, who had a greater share of matter in her composition than the primitive ‘spiritual man.’”—Madame Blavatsky’s Isis Unveiled, vol. ii., p. 445.
Lost Leader, The. (Dramatic Romances and Lyrics, in Bells and Pomegranates, No. VII., 1845; Poems, 1849; Dramatic Lyrics, 1868.) A great leader of a party has deserted the cause, fallen away from his early ideals and forsaken the teaching which has inspired disciples who loved and honoured him. They are sorrowful not so much for their own loss as for the moral deterioration he has himself suffered. The poem is a very popular one, and is generally considered to refer to Wordsworth, who in his youth had strong Liberal sympathies, but lost them, as Mr. John Morley says in his introduction to Wordsworth’s poems:—“As years began to dull the old penetration of a mind which had once approached, like other youths, the shield of human nature from the golden side, and had been eager to ‘clear a passage for just government,’ Wordsworth lost his interest in progress. Waterloo may be taken for the date at which his social grasp began to fail, and with it his poetic glow. He opposed Catholic emancipation as stubbornly as Eldon, and the Reform Bill as bitterly as Croker. For the practical reform of his day, even in education, for which he had always spoken up, Wordsworth was not a force.” Browning used to see a good deal of Wordsworth when he was a young man, but there was no friendship between them. Wordsworth treated with contempt Browning’s republican sympathies—a contempt heightened, as is usually the case with those who have lapsed from their former ideals, by the remembrance that he had once professed to follow them. But, though the poem has undoubted reference to Wordsworth, it has a certain application also to Southey, Charles Kingsley, and others, who in youth were Radicals and in old age became rigidly Conservative. Browning told Walter Thornbury that Wordsworth was “the lost leader,” though he said “the portrait was purposely disguised a little; used, in short, as an artist uses a model, retaining certain characteristic traits and discarding the rest” (Notes and Queries, 5th series, vol. i., p. 213.) There is a letter published in Mr. Grosart’s edition of Wordsworth’s Prose Works, which is conclusive on this point:—