An Introduction to the Study of Robert Browning's Poetry Part 19

Behold, we know not anything; I can but trust that good shall fall At last--far off--at last, to all, And every winter change to spring."

Rabbi Ben Ezra.

Accompany me, my young friend, in my survey of life from youth to old age.

The present life does not rise to its best and then decline to its worst; "the best is yet to be, the last of life, for which the first was made."

The indecisions, perplexities, and yearnings, the hopes and fears of youth, I do not remonstrate against. They are the conditions of vitality and growth, distinguish man's life from the limited completeness of the "low kinds" of creation, "finished and finite clods untroubled by a spark"; and should be prized as inseparable from his high rank in existence.

Life would have nothing to boast of, were man formed but to experience an unalloyed joy, to find always and never to seek. Care irks not the crop-full bird, and doubt frets not the maw-crammed beast.

But man is disturbed by a divine spark which is his t.i.tle to a nearer relationship with G.o.d who gives than with his creatures that receive.

The rebuffs he meets with should be welcomed. Life's true success is secured through obstacles, and seeming failures, and unfulfilled aspirations. He is but a brute whose soul is conformed to his flesh, whose spirit works for the play of arms and legs.

The test of the body's worth should be, the extent to which it can project the soul on its lone way.

But we must not calculate soul-profits all the time.

Gifts of every kind which belong to our nature should prove their use, their own good in themselves. I own that the past was for me profuse of power on every side, of perfection at every turn, which my eyes and ears took in, and my brain treasured up.

The heart should beat in harmony with this life, and feel how good it is to live and learn, and see the whole design. I who once saw only Power, now see Love perfect also, and am thankful that I was a man, and trust what my Maker will do with me.

This flesh is pleasant, and the soul can repose in it, after its own activities. It is the solid land to which it can return when wearied with its flights; and we often wish, in our yearnings for rest, that we might hold some prize to match those manifold possessions of the brute, might gain most as we should do best; but the realization of such a wish is not compatible with the dignity of our nature.

Flesh and soul must be mutually subservient; one must not be merely subjected to the other, not even the inferior to the superior.

Let us cry, "All good things are ours, nor soul helps flesh more, now, than flesh helps soul."

Let, then, youth enter into its heritage, and use and enjoy it; let it then pa.s.s into an approved manhood, "for aye removed from the developed brute; a G.o.d, though in the germ"; let it pa.s.s fearless and unperplexed as to what weapons to select, what armor to indue for the battle which awaits that approved manhood.

Youth ended, let what it has resulted in, be taken account of; wherein it succeeded, wherein it failed; and having proved the past, let it face the future, satisfied in acting to-morrow what is learned to-day.

As it was better that youth should awkwardly strive TOWARD making, than repose in what it found made, so is it better that age, exempt from strife, should know, than tempt further. As in youth, age was waited for, so in age, wait for death, without fear, and with the absolute soul-knowledge which is independent of the reasoning intellect of youth. It is this absolute soul-knowledge which severs great minds from small, rather than intellectual power.

Human judgments differ. Whom shall my soul believe?

One conclusion may, at least, be rested in: a man's true success must not be estimated by things done, which had their price in the world; but by that which the world's coa.r.s.e thumb and finger failed to plumb; by his immature instincts and unsure purposes which weighed not as his work in the world's estimation, yet went toward making up the main amount of his real worth; by thoughts which could not be contained in narrow acts, by fancies which would not submit to the bonds of language; by all that he strived after and could not attain, by all that was ignored by men with only finite and realizable aims: such are G.o.d's standards of his worth.

All the true acquisitions of the soul, all the reflected results of its energizing after the unattainable in this life, all that has truly BEEN, belong to the absolute, and are permanent amid all earth's changes. It is, indeed, through these changes, through the dance of plastic circ.u.mstance, that the permanent is secured. They are the machinery, the Divine Potter's wheel, which gives the soul its bent, tries it, and turns it forth a cup for the Master's lips, sufficiently impressed.

"So take and use Thy work!

Amend what flaws may lurk, What strain o' the stuff, what warpings past the aim!

My times be in Thy hand!

Perfect the cup as planned!

Let age approve of youth, and death complete the same."

The following account of Rabbi Ben Ezra, I take from Dr. F. J. Furnivall's 'Bibliography of Rober Browning'

('Browning Soc. Papers', Part II., p. 162):--

"Rabbi Ben Ezra, or Ibn Ezra, was a learned Jew, 1092-1167 A.D.

Ibn Ezra and Maimonides, whom he is said to have visited in Egypt, were two of the four great Philosophers or Lights of the Jews in the Middle Ages. Ibn Ezra was born at Toledo in Spain, about 1092 or 1093 A.D., or in 1088 according to Graetz, 'Geschichte der Juden', vi. 198. He was poor, but studied hard, composed poems wherewith to 'Adorn my own, my Hebrew nation', married, had a son Isaac (a poet too), travelled to Africa, the Holy Land, Rome in 1140, Persia, India, Italy, France, England.

He wrote many treatises on Hebrew Grammar, astronomy, mathematics, &c., commentaries on the books of the Bible, &c.--many of them in Rome--and two pamphlets in England 'for a certain Salomon of London'. Joseph of Maudeville was one of his English pupils.

He died in 1167, at the age of 75, either in Kalahorra, on the frontier of Navarre, or in Rome. His commentary on Isaiah has been englished by M. Friedlaender, and published by the Society of Hebrew Literature, Truebner, 1873.

From the Introduction to that book I take these details.

Ibn Ezra believed in a future life. In his commentary on Isaiah 55:3, 'AND YOUR SOUL SHALL LIVE', he says, 'That is, your soul shall live forever after the death of the body, or you will receive new life through Messiah, when you will return to the Divine Law.'

See also on Isaiah 39:18. Of the potter's clay pa.s.sage, Isaiah 29:16, he has only a translation, 'Shall man be esteemed as the potter's clay', and no comment that could ever have given Browning a hint for his use of the metaphor in his poem, even if he had ever seen Ibn Ezra's commentary. See Rabbi Ben Ezra's fine 'Song of Death'

in stanzas 12-20 of the grimly humorous Holy-Cross Day."

A Grammarian's Funeral.

-- * "Grammarian" mustn't be understood here in its restricted modern sense; it means rather one devoted to learning, or letters, in general.

Shortly after the revival of learning in Europe.

The devoted disciples of a dead grammarian are bearing his body up a mountain-side for burial on its lofty summit, "where meteors shoot, clouds form, lightnings are loosened, stars come and go!

Lofty designs must close in like effects: loftily lying, leave him,-- still loftier than the world suspects, living and dying".

This poem is INFORMED throughout with the poet's iterated doctrine in regard to earth life,--to the relativity of that life.

The grammarian, in his hunger and thirst after knowledge and truth, thought not of time. "What's time? Leave Now for dogs and apes!

Man has Forever." "Oh, if we draw a circle premature, heedless of far gain, greedy for quick returns of profit, sure bad is our bargain!"

The poem "exhibits something of the life of the Scaligers and the Casaubons, of many an early scholar, like Roger Bacon's friend, Pierre de Maricourt, working at some region of knowledge, and content to labor without fame so long as he mastered thoroughly whatever he undertook" ('Contemporary Rev.', iv., 135).

But the grammarian was true to one side only of Browning's philosophy of life. He disregarded the claims of the physical life, and became "soul-hydropic with a sacred thirst". *

-- * "Every l.u.s.t is a kind of hydropic distemper, and the more we drink the more we shall thirst."--Tillotson, quoted in 'Webster'.

The lyrico-dramatic verse of this monologue is especially noticeable.

There is a march in it, exhibiting the spirit with which the bearers of the corpse are conveying it up the mountain-side.

An Epistle containing the Strange Medical Experience of Karshish, the Arab Physician.

Karshish, the Arab physician, has been journeying in quest of knowledge pertaining to his art, and writes to his all-sagacious master, Abib, ostensibly about the specimens he has gathered of medicinal plants and minerals, and the observations he has made; but his real interest, which he endeavors to conceal by pa.s.sing to matters of greater import to him, as he would have his sage at home believe, is in what he p.r.o.nounces "a case of mania, subinduced by epilepsy".

His last letter brought his journeyings to Jericho. He is now on his way to Jerusalem, and has reached Bethany, where he pa.s.ses the night.

The case of mania which so interests him,--far more than he is willing to admit,--is that of Lazarus, whose firm conviction rests that he was dead (in fact they buried him) and then restored to life by a Nazarene physician of his tribe, who afterwards perished in a tumult. The man Lazarus is witless, he writes, of the relative value of all things. Vast armaments a.s.sembled to besiege his city, and the pa.s.sing of a mule with gourds, are all one to him; while at some trifling fact, he'll gaze, rapt with stupor, as if it had for him prodigious import. Should his child sicken unto death, why look for scarce abatement of his cheerfulness, or suspension of his daily craft; while a word, gesture, or glance from that same child at play or laid asleep, will start him to an agony of fear, exasperation, just as like! The law of the life, it seems, to which he was temporarily admitted, has become to him the law of this earthly life; his heart and brain move there, his feet stay here. He appears to be perfectly submissive to the heavenly will, and awaits patiently for death to restore his being to equilibrium. He is by no means apathetic, but loves both old and young, affects the very brutes and birds and flowers of the field. This man, so restored to life, regards his restorer as, who but G.o.d himself, Creator and Sustainer of the world, that came and dwelt in flesh on it awhile, taught, healed the sick, broke bread at his own house, then died!

Here Karshish breaks off and asks pardon for writing of such trivial matters, when there are so important ones to treat of, and states that he noticed on the margin of a pool blue-flowering borage abounding, the Aleppo sort, very nitrous. But he returns again to the subject, and tries to explain the peculiar interest, and awe, indeed, the man has inspired him with. Perhaps the journey's end, and his weariness, he thinks, may have had something to do with it.