An Introduction to the Study of Browning Part 17

_Cenciaja_, the only blank verse piece in the volume, is of the nature of a note or appendix to Sh.e.l.ley's "superb achievement" _The Cenci_. It serves to explain the allusion to the case of Paolo Santa Croce (_Cenci_, Act V. sc. iv.). Browning obtained the facts from a MS. volume of memorials of Italian crime, in the possession of Sir John Simeon, who published it in the series of the Philobiblon Society.[53]

_Filippo Baldinucci on the Privilege of Burial_, a grotesque and humorously-told "reminiscence of A.D. 1670," is, up to stanza 35, the versification of an anecdote recorded by Baldinucci, the artist and art critic (1624-1696), in his History of Painters. The incident with which it concludes is imaginary.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 51: The jocose vindictiveness with which Browning returns again and again to the a.s.sault of the bad grammar and worse rhetoric of Byron's once so much belauded address to the ocean is very amusing. The above is only one out of four or five instances.]

[Footnote 52: It is worth comparing _A Forgiveness_ with a poem of very similar motive by Leconte de Lisle: _Le Jugement de Komor_ (_Poemes Barbares_). Each is a fine example of its author, in just those qualities for which both poets are eminent: originality and subtlety of subject, pregnant picturesqueness of phrase and situation, and grimly tragic power. The contrast no less than the likeness which exists between them will be evident on a comparison of the two poems.]

[Footnote 53: In reference to the t.i.tle _Cenciaja_, and the Italian proverb which follows it, _Ogni cencio vuol entrare in bucato_, Browning stated, in a letter to Mr. H.B. Forman (printed in his _Sh.e.l.ley_, 1880, ii. 419), that "'aia' is generally an acc.u.mulative yet depreciative termination: 'Cenciaja'--a bundle of rags--a trifle. The proverb means, 'Every poor creature will be pressing into the company of his betters,'

and I used it to deprecate the notion that I intended anything of the kind."]

25. THE AGAMEMNON OF aeSCHYLUS.

[Published in October, 1877 (_Poetical Works_, 1889, Vol.

XIII. pp. 259-357).]

Browning prefaces his transcript of the _Agamemnon_ with a brief introduction, in which he thus sets forth his theory of translation:--

"If, because of the immense fame of the following Tragedy, I wished to acquaint myself with it, and could only do so by the help of a translator, I should require him to be literal at every cost save that of absolute violence to our language.

The use of certain allowable constructions which, happening to be out of daily favour, are all the more appropriate to archaic workmanship, is no violence: but I would be tolerant for once,--in the case of so immensely famous an original,--of even a clumsy attempt to furnish me with the very turn of each phrase in as Greek a fashion as English will bear: while, with respect to amplifications and embellishments, anything rather than, with the good farmer, experience that most signal of mortifications, 'to gape for aeschylus and get Theognis.' I should especially decline,--what may appear to brighten up a pa.s.sage,--the employment of a new word for some old one--[Greek: phonos], or [Greek: megas], or [Greek: telos], with its congeners, recurring four times in three lines.... Further,--if I obtained a mere strict bald version of thing by thing, or at least word pregnant with thing, I should hardly look for an impossible transmission of the reputed magniloquence and sonority of the Greek; and this with the less regret, inasmuch as there is abundant musicality elsewhere, but nowhere else than in his poem the ideas of the poet. And lastly, when presented with these ideas I should expect the result to prove very hard reading indeed if it were meant to resemble aeschylus."

Every condition here laid down has been carried out with unflinching courage. Browning has rendered word by word and line by line; with, indeed, some slight inevitable expansion in the rhymed choruses, very slight, infinitely slighter than every other translator has found needful. Throughout, there are numberless instances of minute and happy accuracy of phrase, re-creations of the very thoughts of aeschylus. An incomparable dexterity is shown in fitting phrase upon phrase, forcing line to bear the exact weight of line, rendering detail by detail. But for this very reason, as a consequence of this very virtue, there is no denying that Browning's version is certainly "very hard reading," so hard reading that it is sometimes necessary to turn to the Greek in order to fully understand the English. Browning has antic.i.p.ated, but not altogether answered, this objection. For, besides those pa.s.sages which in their fidelity to every "minute particular," simply reproduce the obscurity of the original, there is much that seems either obscure or harsh, and is so simply because it gives "the turn of each phrase," not merely "in as Greek a fashion as English will bear," but beyond it: phrases which are native to Greek, foreign to English. The choruses, which are attempted in metre as close as English can come to Greek metre, suggest the force, but not the dignity of the original; and seem often to be content to drop much of the poem by the way in getting at "the ideas of the poet." It is a t.i.tan's version of an Olympian, and it is thus no doubt the scholar rather than the general reader who will find most to please him in "this attempt to give our language the similitude of Greek by close and sustained grappling, word to word, with so sublime and difficult a masterpiece."[54]

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 54: J.A. Symonds, _Academy_, Nov. 10, 1877.]

26. LA SAISIAZ: THE TWO POETS OF CROISIC.

[Published in May, 1878. _La Saisiaz_ (written November, 1877), pp. 1-82; _The Two Poets of Croisic_, pp. 83-201.

(_Poetical Works_, 1889, Vol. XIV. pp. 153-204, 205-279).]

In _La Saisiaz_ Browning reasons of G.o.d and the soul, of life here and of life to come. The poem is addressed to a friend of old date, who died suddenly while she was staying with Browning and his sister, in the summer of 1877, at a villa called La Saisiaz (The Sun) in the mountains near Geneva. The first twenty pages tell the touching story; the rest of the poem records the argument which it called forth. "Was ending ending once and always, when you died?" Browning asks himself, and he attempts to answer the question, not on traditional grounds, or on the authority of a creed, but by honest reasoning. He a.s.sumes two postulates, and two only, that G.o.d exists and that the soul exists; and he proceeds to show, very forcibly, the unsatisfactory nature of life if consciousness ends with death, and its completely satisfactory nature if the soul's existence continues.

"Without the want, Life, now human, would be brutish: just that hope, however scant, Makes the actual life worth leading; take the hope therein away, All we have to do is surely not endure another day.

This life has its hopes for this life, hopes that promise joy: life done-- Out of all the hopes, how many had complete fulfilment? none.

'But the soul is not the body': and the breath is not the flute; Both together make the music: either marred and all is mute."

This hypothesis is purely personal, and as such he holds it. But, to his own mind at least, he finds that

"Sorrow did and joy did nowise,--life well weighed--preponderate.

By necessity ordained thus? I shall bear as best I can; By a cause all-good, all-wise, all-potent? No, as I am man!"

Yet, if only the a.s.sumption of a future life may be made, he will thankfully acquiesce in an earthly failure, which will then be only relative, and the earnest of a heavenly gain. Having arrived at this point, Browning proceeds to argue out the question yet further, under the form of a dialogue between "Fancy" (or the soul's instinct) and "Reason." He here shows that not merely is life explicable only as a probation, but that probation is only possible under our present conditions, in our present uncertainty. If it were made certain that there is a future life in which we shall be punished or rewarded, according as we do evil or good, we should have no choice of action, hence no virtue in doing what were so manifestly to our own advantage.

Again, if we were made certain of this future life of higher faculties and greater happiness, should we hesitate to rush to it at the first touch of sorrow, before our time? He ends, therefore, with a "hope--no more than hope, but hope--no less than hope," which amounts practically to the a.s.surance that, as he puts it in the last line--

"He at least believed in Soul, was very sure of G.o.d!"

_The Two Poets of Croisic_ is a comedy in narrative, dealing mainly with the true tale of Paul Desforges-Maillard, whose story furnished Piron with the matter of his _Metromanie_. The first of the "two poets" is one Rene Gentilhomme, born 1610, once page to the Prince of Conde, afterwards court-poet to Louis XIII. His story, by an easy transition, leads into the richer record of Desforges, which Browning gives with not a few variations, evidently intentional, from the facts of the case.

Paul-Briand Maillard, self-surnamed Desforges, was born at Croisic, April 24, 1699: he died at the age of seventy-three. His memory has survived that of better poets on account of the famous hoax which he played on the Paris of his day, including no less a person than Voltaire. The first part of the story is told pretty literally in Browning's pages:--how Desforges, unsuccessful as a poet in his own person, a.s.sumed the t.i.tle of a woman, and as Mlle. Malcrais de la Vigne (his verses being copied by an obliging cousin, Mme. Mondoret) obtained an immediate and astonishing reputation. The sequel is somewhat altered.

Voltaire's revenge when the cheat was discovered, so far from being prompt and immediate, was treacherously dissimulated, and its accomplishment deferred for more than one long-subsequent occasion.

Desforges lived to have the last word, in a.s.sisting at the first representation of Piron's _Metromanie_, in which Voltaire's humiliation and the Croisic poet's clever trick are perpetuated for as long as that sprightly and popular comedy shall be remembered.

In his graphic and condensed version of the tale, Browning has used a poet's licence to heighten the effect and increase the piquancy of the narrative. The poem is written in _ottava rima_, but, very singularly, there is not one double rhyme from beginning to end. It is difficult to see why Browning, a finer master of grotesque compound rhymes than Byron, should have so carefully avoided them in a metre which, as in Byron's hands, owes no little of its effect to a clever introduction of such rhymes. The lines (again of set purpose, it is evident) overlap one another without an end-pause where in Italian it is almost universal, namely, after the sixth line. The result of the innovation is far from successful: it destroys the flow of the verse and gives it an air of abruptness. Of the liveliness, vivacity and pungency of the tale, no idea can be given by quotation: two of the stanzas in which the moral is enforced, the two finest, perhaps, in the poem, are, however, severable from their context:--

"Who knows most, doubts most; entertaining hope, Means recognizing fear; the keener sense Of all comprised within our actual scope Recoils from aught beyond earth's dim and dense.

Who, grown familiar with the sky, will grope Henceforward among groundlings? That's offence Just as indubitably: stars abound O'erhead, but then--what flowers made glad the ground!

So, force is sorrow, and each sorrow, force: What then? since Swiftness gives the charioteer The palm, his hope be in the vivid horse Whose neck G.o.d clothed with thunder, not the steer Sluggish and safe! Yoke Hatred, Crime, Remorse, Despair: but ever 'mid the whirling fear, Let, through the tumult, break the poet's face Radiant, a.s.sured his wild slaves win the race!"

The poem is followed by an exquisite Epilogue, one of the most delicately graceful and witty and tender of Browning's lyrics. The briefer Prologue is not less beautiful:--

"Such a starved bank of moss Till, that May-morn, Blue ran the flash across: Violets were born!

Sky--what a scowl of cloud Till, near and far, Ray on ray split the shroud: Splendid, a star!

World--how it walled about Life with disgrace Till G.o.d's own smile came out: That was thy face!"

27. DRAMATIC IDYLS.

[Published in May 1879 (_Poetical Works_, 1889, Vol. XV. pp.

1-80).]

In the _Dramatic Idyls_ Browning may almost be said to have broken new ground. His idyls are short poems of pa.s.sionate action, presenting in a graphic and concentrated way a single episode or tragic crisis. Not only by their concreteness and popular effectiveness, their extraordinary vigour of conception and expression, are they distinguished from much of Browning's later writing: they have in addition this significant novelty of interest, that here for the first time Browning has found subjects for his poetry among the poor, that here for the first time he has painted, with all his close and imaginative realism, the human comedy of the lower cla.s.ses. That he has never done so before, though rather surprising, comes, I suppose, from his preponderating interest in intellectual problems, and from the difficulty of finding such among what Leon Cladel has called _tragiques histoires plebeiennes_. But the happy instinct has at last come to him, and we are permitted to watch the humours of that delicious pair of sinners saved, "Publican Black Ned Bratts and Tabby his big wife too," as a relief to the less pleasant and profitable spectacle of His Majesty Napoleon III., or of even the two poets of Croisic. All the poems in the volume (with the exception of a notable and n.o.ble protest against vivisection, in the form of a touching little true tale of a dog) are connected together by a single motive, on which every poem plays a new variation. The motto of the book might be:--

"There is a tide in the affairs of men, Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune; Omitted, all the voyage of his life Is bound in shallows and in miseries."

This idea of a turning-point or testing-time in the lives of men is more or less expressed or implied in very much of Browning's poetry, but nowhere is it expressed so completely, so concisely, or so consecutively, as here. In _Martin Relph_ (which "embodies," says Mrs.

Orr, "a vague remembrance of something read by Mr. Browning when he was himself a boy") we have an instance of the tide "omitted," and a terrible picture of the remorse which follows. Martin Relph has the chance presented to him of saving two lives, that of the girl he loves and of his rival whom she loves. The chance is but of an instant's duration. He hesitates, and the moment is for ever lost. In that one moment his true soul, with its instinctive selfishness, has leapt to light, and the knowledge of it torments him with an inextinguishable agony. In _Ivan Ivanovitch_ (founded on a popular Russian story of a woman throwing her children to the wolves to save her own life) we have a twofold ill.u.s.tration of the theme. The testing-moment comes to the mother, Louscha, and again to Ivan Ivanovitch. While the woman fails terribly in her duty, and meets a terrible reward, the man rises to a strange and awful n.o.bility of action, and "acts for G.o.d." _Halbert and Hob_, a grim little tragedy (suggested by a pa.s.sage in the Nicomachean Ethics of Aristotle), presents us with the same idea in a singularly concrete form. The crisis has a saving effect, but it is an incomplete, an unwilling or irresistible, act of grace, and it bears but sorry fruit. In _Ned Bratts_ (suggested by the story of "Old Tod," in Bunyan's _Life and Death of Mr. Badman_[55]) we have a prompt and quite hurried taking of the tide: the sudden conversion, repentance, and expiation of the "worst couple, rogue and quean, unhanged." _Pheidippides_ (the legend of the runner who brought the news of Marathon to Athens, and died in the utterance) ill.u.s.trates the idea in a more obvious but less individual way.

Perhaps for sheer perfection of art, for fundamental tragedy, for a quality of compa.s.sionate and unflinching imaginative vision, nothing in the book quite comes up to _Halbert and Hob_. There is hardly in Browning a more elemental touch than that of: "A boy threw stones: he picked them up and stored them in his breast." _Martin Relph_, besides being a fine tale splendidly told, is among the most masterly of all renderings of remorse, of the terrors and torments of conscience. Every word is like a drop of agony wrung out of a tortured soul. _Ivan Ivanovitch_ is, as a narrative, still finer: as a piece of story-telling Browning has perhaps never excelled it. Nothing could be more graphic and exciting than the description of the approach of the wolves: the effective change from iambs to anapaests gives their very motion.

"Was that--wind?

Anyhow, Droug starts, stops, back go his ears, he snuffs, Snorts,--never such a snort! then plunges, knows the sough's Only the wind: yet, no--our breath goes up too straight!

Still the low sound,--less low, loud, louder, at a rate There's no mistaking more! Shall I lean out--look--learn The truth whatever it be? Pad, pad! At last, I turn-- 'Tis the regular pad of the wolves in pursuit of the life in the sledge!

An army they are: close-packed they press like the thrust of a wedge: They increase as they hunt: for I see, through the pine-trunks ranged each side, Slip forth new fiend and fiend, make wider and still more wide The four-footed steady advance. The foremost--none may pa.s.s: They are elders and lead the line, eye and eye--green-glowing bra.s.s!

But a long way distant still. Droug, save us! He does his best: Yet they gain on us, gain, till they reach,--one reaches....

How utter the rest?"

The setting of the story, the vast motionless Russian landscape, the village life, the men and women, has a singular expressiveness; and the revelation of the woman's character, the exposure of her culpable weakness, seen in the very excuses by which she endeavours to justify herself, is brought about with singularly masterly art. There are moments of essential drama, not least significantly in the last lines, above all in those two pregnant words: "_How otherwise_? asked he."

_Ned Bratts_ takes almost the same position among Browning's humorous poems that _Ivan Ivanovitch_ does among his narratives. It is a whole comedy in itself. Surroundings and atmosphere are called up with perfect art and the subtlest sympathy. What opening could be a better preparation for the heated and grotesque utterances of Ned Bratts than the wonderful description of the hot day? It serves to put us into precisely the right mood for seeing and feeling the comic tragedy that follows. d.i.c.kens himself never painted a more riotously realistic scene, nor delineated a better ruffian than the murderous rascal precariously converted by Bunyan and his book.

In the midst of these realistic tragedies and comedies, _Pheidippides_, with its clear Greek outline and charm and heroical grace, stands finely contrasted. The measure is of Browning's invention, and is finely appropriate to the character of the poem.