Browning and the Dramatic Monologue Part 9

Do I stand and stare? All's blue....

"Meanwhile greet me--'friend, good fellow, Gentle Will,' my merry men!

As for making Envy yellow With 'Next Poet'--(Manners, Ben!)"

It is difficult to imagine any other situation, any other place, any other group of friends, chosen by Browning, that would have been more favorable to the frank unfolding by Shakespeare of the motives which underlie his work and his character. This any one may recognize, whatever his opinions may be regarding the success of this monologue.

The poem is meaningless without a grasp of the situation. "Manners, Ben!"

at the close is a protest against Ben's drinking too soon. Is this a delicate hint at Ben's habits? Or was his beginning to drink a method by which Browning suggests a comment of Ben's to the effect that Shakespeare talked too much?

Browning here brings out the true Shakespeare spirit, not, of course, to the satisfaction of those who have their hobbies and systems and consider Shakespeare the only poet, but to others who wish to comprehend the real man.

Douglas Jerrold has indicated the situation of his series of monologues in the t.i.tle, "Mrs. Caudle's Curtain Lectures." The mind easily pictures an old-fashioned bed, the draperies drawn around it, with Mr. and Mrs. Caudle retired to rest. Mrs. Caudle seizes this moment when she has her busy spouse at her mercy. Before she falls asleep, she refers to his various shortcomings and fully discusses future contingencies or consequences of his evil deeds as a kind of slumber song for poor Caudle. The imagination distinctly sees Caudle holding himself still, trying to go to sleep. No word can relieve the tension of his mind, and Mrs. Caudle monopolizes all the conversation. Caudle is exercising those powers which Epictetus says that "G.o.d has given us by which we can keep ourselves calm and reposeful, as Socrates did, without change of face under the most trying circ.u.mstances."

A study of any monologue will furnish an ill.u.s.tration of situation, but we are naturally, in the study of the subject, led back again to Browning.

In his "Andrea del Sarto," we are introduced to a scene common in the lives of artists. It has grown too dark to paint, and, dropping his brush, the painter sits in the gray twilight and talks with his wife, who serves him as a model, and muses over his work and his life. No one can fully appreciate the poem who has not been in a studio at some such moment when the artist stopped work and came out of his absorption to talk to those dear to him. At such a time the artist will be personal, will criticize himself severely, and throw out hints of what he has tried to do, of his higher aims, visions, and possibilities, and, while showing appreciation of what other artists have said of him, will recognize, also, the mistakes and failures of his art or life. It is the unfolding of a sensitive soul, a transition from a world of ideals, imaginations, and visions, to one of reality.

Nowhere else in poetry has any author so fully caught the essence of such an hour. Nowhere else can there be found art criticism equal to this self-revelation of the artist who is called "the faultless painter." What a revelation! What might he have done! What has he been! What a woman is beside him, his greatest curse, but one whose willing slave he recognizes himself to be! What a weak acquiescence, and what a fall!

Notice also the abrupt beginning: "But do not let us quarrel any more."

She is asking ostensibly for money for her "cousin," but really, to pay the gambling debts of one of her lovers. He grants her request, but pleads that she stay with him in his loneliness and promises to work harder, and again and again in his criticism of himself, of his very perfection, even while he shows Raphael's weakness in drawing, he hints that there is something in the others not in him. In fact, he recognizes one of the deepest principles of life, as well as art, and exclaims,

"Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp, Or what's heaven for? All is silver-gray, Placid and perfect with my art: the worse!"

He reveals his deep grief, how he dare not venture abroad all day lest the French n.o.bles in the city should recognize him and deal with him for having used for himself--or rather for his wife, to build her a house, at her entreaty--the money which had been given by Francis for the purchase of pictures and for his return to Paris. And yet we find a weak soul's acquiescence in fate--

"All is as G.o.d o'errules."

How sympathetically does Browning reproduce the painter's point of view in--

"... why, there's my picture ready made, There's what we painters call our harmony!

A common grayness silvers everything,-- All in a twilight."

Or again:

"... let me sit The gray remainder of the evening out."

While this poem is recognized as a great art criticism, its spirit can be realized only by one recognizing the dramatic situation and appreciating the delicate suggestions of the atmosphere of a studio and of time and place in relation to an artist's life.

One of the finest situations in Browning's verse is that in "La Saisiaz."

The poet has an appointment to climb a mountain with one of his friends, a Miss Smith, daughter of one of the firm of Smith, Elder & Co., but when the time comes, she is dead. The other, himself, keeps the appointment, walks up alone, and pausing on the height, utters aloud his reflections upon the immortality of the soul.

The poem is none the less a monologue because it is Browning himself that speaks, and because the friend of whom and to whom he speaks has just pa.s.sed to the unseen world. She whom he had expected as his companion in this climb is so near to him as to be almost literally realized as a listener. The poem fulfils the conditions of a monologue: a living soul intensely realizing a thought and situation with relation to another soul.

It is hardly possible to exaggerate the importance of situation in art. It is the situation that gives us the background. An isolated object can hardly be made the subject of a work of art. Art is relation, and shows the kinship of things. "It is where the bird is," said Hunt, "that makes the bird."

V. TIME AND CONNECTION

The monologue touches only indirectly the progressive development of character as regards time. It deals with only one instant, the present, which reflects the past and the future. But for this very reason its aspect differs from that of the drama, since it focuses attention upon the instant and reveals motives, possibilities, and even results. The monologue is not "still-life" in any sense of the word. In an instant's flash it may show the turning point of a life.

The most important words in the study of a monologue are usually the first. As a monologue is a sudden vision of a life, it of course breaks into the continuity of thought or discussion. The first words are nearly always spoken in answer to something previously said or in reference to some event or circ.u.mstance which is only suggested, yet which must be definitely imagined. One of the most important questions for the student to settle is the connection of what is printed with what is not printed.

When does a character begin to speak, that is, in answer to what,--as a result of what event, act, or word?

For this reason the first words of a monologue must usually be delivered slowly and emphatically, if auditors are to be given a clue to the processes of the thought. The inflections and other modulations of the voice in uttering the first words must always directly suggest the connection with what precedes.

"Rabbi Ben Ezra" begins abruptly: "Grow old along with me!" This poem has already been discussed with reference to the necessity of conceiving the listener, but we must also apprehend the thought which the listener has uttered before we can get the speaker's point of view. The young man has, no doubt, expressed pity or regret for the old man's isolation, for the loss of all his friends, and must have remarked something about how gloomy a thing it is to grow old. This is the cause of the older man's outburst of joyous expostulation amounting almost to a rebuke. Now the reader must realize this, must make it appear in the emphasis which he gives to the first words of the Rabbi: that is, he must so render these words as to bring the ideas of the Rabbi in opposition to those of the young man. The ant.i.thesis to what has been said or implied gives the keynote of the poem, whether we are interpreting it to another or endeavoring to understand it for ourselves.

We perceive here a striking contrast between the dramatic monologue and the story. The story may begin, "Once upon a time," but the monologue as a part of real life must suggest a direct continuity of thought and also of contact with human beings. Even a play may introduce characters, gradually lead up to a collision, and make emphatic an outbreak of pa.s.sion, but the monologue must, as a rule, break in at once with the specific answer of a definite character in a living situation to a definite thought which has been uttered by another. The reader must receive an impression of the character at the moment, but in relation to a continuous succession of ideas.

Accordingly, the right starting of the monologue is of vital importance.

In a story we often wait a long while for it to unfold. But except in the first preliminary reading, one cannot read on in the monologue, hoping that the meaning will gradually become clear. When a reader fully understands the meaning, he must turn and express this at the very beginning. The very first phrase must be colored by the whole.

Frequently the settling of the connection of the thought is the most difficult part in the study of a monologue, yet, on account of the unique difference of this type of literature from a story and other literary forms, the study of the beginning is apt to be overlooked. The reader must first find out where he is. I was once in search of Bishopsgate Street in London, and meeting, in a very narrow part of a narrow street a unique old man, who reminded me of Ralph Nickleby, I asked him to tell me the way.

He looked me straight in the eye and said, "Where are you now?" I told him I thought I was in Threadneedle Street. "Right," and then he pointed out the street, which was only a few steps away, but which I had been seeking for some time in vain. He was wise, for unless I knew where I was, he could not direct me.

In the study of a monologue, if we will find exactly where we are, many difficult questions will be settled at once; and the interpreter by pausing and using care can make clear, through the emphatic interpretation of the first sentences, a vast number of points which would otherwise be of great difficulty.

Mr. Macfadyen has well said, "Much of the apparent obscurity of Browning is due to his habit of climbing up a precipice of thought, and then kicking away the ladder by which he climbed."

The opening of Browning's "Fra Lippo Lippi" requires a conception of night and a sudden surprise--

"I am poor brother Lippo, by your leave!

You need not clap your torches to my face.

Zooks, what's to blame? you think you see a monk!"

These words cannot be given excitedly or dramatically without realizing the role the police are playing, their rough handling of Lippo, and their discovery that they have seized a monk at an unseemly hour of the night and not in a respectable part of the city. We must identify ourselves with Lippo and feel the torches of the police in the face, and the hand "fiddling" on his throat. This whole situation must be as definitely conceived as if a part of a play. The reference to "Cosimo of the Medici"

should be spoken very suggestively, and we should feel with Lippo the consequent relief that resulted, and the dismay also of the police on finding they have in hand an artist friend of the greatest man in Florence. "Boh! you were best!" means that the hands of the policeman have been released from his throat.

All this dramatic action, however, must be secondary to the conception of the character of the monk-painter. Almost immediately, in the very midst of the excitement, possibly with reference to the very fellow who had grasped his throat, the artist, with the true spirit of a painter, exclaims,

"He's Judas to a t.i.ttle, that man is!

Just such a face!"

and as the chief of the squad of police sends his watchmen away, the painter's heart once more awakes and discovers a picture, and he says, almost to himself:

"I'd like his face-- His, elbowing on his comrade in the door With the pike and lantern,--for the slave that holds John Baptist's head a-dangle by the hair With one hand ('Look you, now,' as who should say) And his weapon in the other, yet unwiped!

It's not your chance to have a bit of chalk, A wood-coal or the like? or you should see!

Yes, I'm the painter, since you style me so.

What, brother Lippo's doings, up and down, You know them, and they take you? like enough!

I saw the proper twinkle in your eye-- 'Tell you, I liked your looks at very first.

Let's sit and set things straight now, hip to haunch."

Thus the monologue is introduced, and with a captain of a night-watch in Florence as listener, this great painter, who tried to paint things truly, pours out his critical reflections,--

"A fine way to paint soul, by painting body So ill, the eye can't stop there, must go further And can't fare worse!"