A Handbook to the Works of Browning Part 34

The Lyric deals specially with the imperfections of human judgment. "You have overrated my small faults, you have failed to detect the greater ones."

8. "TWO CAMELS" is directed against asceticism. "An ill-fed animal breaks down in the fulfilment of its task. A man who deprives himself of natural joys, not for the sake of his fellow-men, but for his own, is also unfitted for the obligations of Life. For he cannot instruct others in its use and abuse. Nor, being thus ignorant of earth, can he conceive of heaven."

The Lyric shows how the Finite may prefigure the Infinite, by ill.u.s.trations derived from science and from love.

9. "CHERRIES" ill.u.s.trates the axiom that a gift must be measured, not by itself, but by the faculty of the giver, and by the amount of loving care which he has bestowed upon it. Man's general performance is to be judged from the same point of view.

The Lyric connects itself with the argument less closely and less seriously in this case than in the foregoing ones. The speaker has striven to master the art of poetry, and found life too short for it.

"He contents himself with doing little, only because doing nothing is worse. But when he turns from verse-making to making love, or, as the sense implies, seeks to express in love what he has failed to express in poetry, all limitations of time and power are suspended; every moment's realization is absolute and lasting."

10. "PLOT-CULTURE" is a distinct statement of the belief in a purely personal relation between G.o.d and man. It justifies every experience which bears moral fruit, however immoral from human points of view; and refers both the individual and his critic to the final harvest, on which alone the Divine judgment will be pa.s.sed.

The Lyric repeats the image in which this idea is clothed, more directly than the idea itself. A lover pleads permission to love with his whole being--with Sense as well as with Soul.

11. "A PILLAR AT SEBZEVAR" lays down the proposition that the pursuit of knowledge is invariably disappointing: while love is always, and in itself, a gain.

The Lyric modifies this idea into the advocacy of a silent love: one which reveals itself without declaration.

12. "A BEAN-STRIPE: ALSO APPLE-EATING" is a summary of Mr. Browning's religious and practical beliefs. We cannot, it says, determine the prevailing colour of any human life, though we have before us a balanced record of its bright and dark days. For light or darkness is only absolute in so far as the human spirit can isolate or, as it were, stand still within, it. Every living experience, actual or remembered, takes something of its hue from those which precede or follow it: now catching the reflection of the adjoining lights and shades; now brighter or darker by contrast with them. The act of living fuses black and white into grey; and as we grasp the melting whole in one backward glance, its blackness strikes most on the sense of one man, its whiteness on that of another.

Ferishtah admits that there are lives which seem to be, perhaps are, stained with a black so deep that no intervening whiteness can affect it; and he declares that this possibility of absolute human suffering is a constant chastener to his own joys. But when called upon to reconcile the avowed optimism of his views with the actual as well as sympathetic experience of such suffering, he shows that he does not really believe in it. One race, he argues, will flourish under conditions which another would regard as incompatible with life; and the philosophers who most cry down the value of life are sometimes the least willing to renounce it. He cannot resist the conviction that the same compensating laws are at work everywhere.

In explanation of the fact, that nothing given in our experience affords a stable truth--that the black or white of one moment is always the darker or lighter grey of another--Ferishtah refers his disciples to the will of G.o.d. Our very scheme of goodness is a fiction, which man the impotent cannot, G.o.d the all-powerful does not, convert into reality.

But it is a fiction created by G.o.d within the human mind, that it may work for truth there; so also is it with the fict.i.tious conceptions which blend the qualities of man with those of G.o.d. To the objection

"A power, confessed past knowledge, nay, past thought, --Thus thought and known!" (vol. xvi. p. 84.)

Ferishtah replies that to know the power by its operation, is all we _need_ in the case of a human benefactor or lord: all we _can_ in the case of those natural forces which we recognize in every act of our life. And when reminded that the sense of indebtedness implies a debtor--one ready to receive his due: and that we need look no farther for the recipient than the great men who have benefited our race: his answer is, that such grat.i.tude to his fellow-men would be grat.i.tude to himself, in whose perception half their greatness lies. "He might as well thank the starlight for the impressions of colour, which have been supplied by his own brain."

The Lyric disclaims, in the name of one of the world's workers, all excessive--_i.e._, loving recognition of his work. The speaker has not striven for the world's sake, nor sought his ideals there. "Those who have done so may claim its love. For himself he asks only a just judgment on what he has achieved."

Mr. Browning here expresses for the first time his feeling towards the "Religion of Humanity;" and though this was more or less to be inferred from his general religious views, it affords, as now stated, a new, as well as valuable, ill.u.s.tration of them. The Theistic philosophy which makes the individual the centre of the universe, is, perhaps, nowhere in his works, so distinctly set forth as in this latest of them. But nowhere either has he more distinctly declared that the fullest realization of the individual life is self-sacrifice.

"Renounce joy for my fellows sake? That's joy Beyond joy;"

(_Two Camels_, vol. xvi p. 50.)

The lyrical supplement to Fancy 12 somewhat obscures the idea on which it turns, by presenting it from a different point of view. But here, as in the remainder of the book, we must regard the Lyric as suggested by the argument, not necessarily as part of it.

The EPILOGUE is a vision of present and future, in which the woe and conflict of our mortal existence are absorbed in the widening glory of an eternal day. The vision comes to one cradled in the happiness of love; and he is startled from it by a presentiment that it has been an illusion created by his happiness. But we know that from Mr. Browning's point of view, Love, even in its illusions, may be accepted as a messenger of truth.

Index to names and t.i.tles in "Ferishtah's Fancies;"--

P. 12. "Shah Abbas." An historical personage used fict.i.tiously.

P. 15. "Story of Tahmasp." Fict.i.tious.

P. 16. "Ishak son of Absal." Fict.i.tious.

P. 20. "The householder of Shiraz." Fict.i.tious.

P. 32. "Mihrab Shah." Fict.i.tious.

P. 36. "Simorgh." A fabulous creature in Persian mythology.

P. 40. The "Pilgrim's soldier-guide." Fict.i.tious.

P. 41. "Raksh." Rustum's horse in the "Shah Nemeh."

(Firdausi's "Epic of Kings.")

P. 50. (_Anglice_), "Does Job serve G.o.d for nought?" Hebrew word at p. 51, line 2, "M[=e] El[=o]h[=i]m": "from G.o.d."

P. 54. "Mushtari." The planet Jupiter.

P. 65. "Hudhud." Fabulous bird of Solomon.

P. 68. "Sitara." Persian for "a star."

P. 85. "Shalim Shah." Persian for "King of kings."

P. 86. "Rustem," "Gew," "Gudarz," "Sindokht," "Sulayman,"

"Kawah." Heroes in the "Shah Nemeh."

P. 87. The "Seven Thrones." Ursa Major. "Zurah." Venus.

"Parwin." The Pleiades. "Mubid." A kind of mage.

P. 88. "Zerdusht." "Zoroaster."

"PARLEYINGS WITH CERTAIN PEOPLE OF IMPORTANCE IN THEIR DAY."

This volume occupies, even more than its predecessor, a distinctive position in Mr. Browning's work. It does not discard his old dramatic methods, but in a manner it inverts them; Mr. Browning has summoned his group of men not for the sake of drawing their portraits, but that they might help him to draw his own. It seems as if the acc.u.mulated convictions which find vent in the "parleyings" could no longer endure even the form of dramatic disguise; and they appear in them in all the force of direct reiterated statement, and all the freshness of novel points of view. And the portrait is in some degree a biography; it is full of reminiscences. The "people" with whom Mr. Browning parleys, important in their day, virtually unknown in ours, are with one exception his old familiar friends: men whose works connect themselves with the intellectual sympathies and the imaginative pleasures of his very earliest youth. The parleyings are:

I. "With Bernard de Mandeville."

II. "With Daniel Bartoli."

III. "With Christopher Smart."

IV. "With George Bubb Dodington."

V. "With Francis Furini."

VI. "With Gerard de Lairesse."

VII. "With Charles Avison."

They are enclosed between a Prologue and an Epilogue both dramatic and fanciful, but scarcely less expressive of the author's mental personality than the body of the work.

"Apollo and the Fates."

"Fust and his Friends."

In "Apollo and the Fates" the fanciful, or rather fantastic element preponderates. It represents Apollo as descending into the realms of darkness and pleading with the Fate Sisters for the life of Admetus, the thread of which Atropos is about to clip; and shows how he obtained for him a conditional reprieve by intoxicating the sisters with wine. The sequel to this incident has been given in Mr. Browning's transcript from "Alkestis"; and the present poem is introduced by references to that work of Euripides, to the "Eumenides" of aeschylus and to Homer's "Hymn to Mercury": the general sense of the pa.s.sages indicated being this:--

Euripides.--"Admetus--whom, cheating the fates, I saved from death."