The Browning Cyclopaedia Part 14

"His genius was jocular, but, when disposed, he could be very serious."--Article _Shakespeare_, Jeremy Collier's _Historical, etc., Dictionary_, 2nd edition, 1701. "You, sir, I entertain you for one of my Hundred; only, I do not like the fashion of your garments: you will say, they are Persian; but let them be changed."--_King Lear_, Act III., sc. vi.

The work embraces the following collection of poems:--Prologue. 1. "The Eagle." 2. "The Melon-seller." 3. "Shah Abbas." 4. "The Family." 5. "The Sun." 6. "Mihrab Shah." 7. "A Camel-driver." 8. "Two Camels." 9.

"Cherries." 10. "Plot Culture." 11. "A Pillar at Sebzevah." 12. "A Bean Stripe: also Apple Eating." Epilogue. There was a real personage named Ferishtah, a celebrated Persian historian, born about 1570. He is one of the most trustworthy of the Oriental historians. Several portions of his work have been translated into English. He has, however, no connection with the subject-matter of Mr. Browning's book, but it is probable that his name suggested itself to the poet as a good one for his work. We have here Mr. Browning in a dervish's robe, philosophising in a Persian atmosphere, yet talking the most perfect Browningese, just as do the Pope in the _Ring and the Book_ and the rabbis in the Jewish poems. Age, experience, and the calm philosophy of a religious mind, are required for the poet's highest teaching. It matters little, these being given, whether the philosophers wear the tiara of the pope, the robe of the dervish, or the gaberdine of the Jew: the philosophy is the same. The aim is "to justify the ways of G.o.d to men," and to make reasonable an exalted Christian Theism. Three great Eastern cla.s.sics--_The Fables of Bidpai_, Firdausi's _Shah-Nameh_, and the Book of Job--are the sources of the inspiration of the pages of _Ferishtah's Fancies_. Both the _Shah-Nahmeh_ and the _Fables of Bidpai_, or _Pilpay_ as they are commonly termed, are published in the _Chandos Cla.s.sics_. Bidpai is supposed to be the author of a famous collection of Hindu fables. The name Bidpai occurs in their Arabic version. Their origin was doubtless the _Pantcha Tantra_, or "Five Sections," a great collection of fables. The _Hitopadesa_ is another such collection. The fables were translated into Pehlvi in the sixth century.

Then the Persian fables were translated into Arabic, and were transmitted to Europe. They were translated into Greek in the eleventh century, then into Hebrew and Latin, afterwards into nearly every European tongue. We must go to Firdausi, the Persian author of that "standing wonder in poetic literature," the _Shah Nameh_, for an explanation of several allusions in the poem. This great chronicle, the Persian Book of Kings, is a history of Persia in sixty thousand verses. The poem is as familiar to every Persian as our own great epics to us, and the use Mr. Browning makes of it in this work is managed in the most natural manner. This we shall notice more particularly in dealing with the separate poems which compose the volume.

In a letter to a friend, Browning wrote:--"I hope and believe that one or two careful readings of the poem will make its sense clear enough. Above all, pray allow for the poet's inventiveness in any case, and do not suppose there is more than a thin disguise of a few Persian names and allusions. There was no such poet as Ferishtah--the stories are all inventions.... The Hebrew quotations are put in for a purpose, as a direct acknowledgment that certain doctrines may be found in the Old Book, which the concocters of novel schools of morality put forth as discoveries of their own."

=Festus.= (_Paracelsus._) The old and faithful friend of Paracelsus, who believes in him from the first. He is the husband of Michal, and both influence the mind of the hero of medicine for good at various stages of his career.

=Fifine at the Fair.= (1872.) The key-note of the work is given in the quotation before the Prologue, which is the motto of the poem, from Moliere's _Don Juan_, Act I., Sc. 3. There is a certain historic basis for the character of the Don Juan of European legend. In Seville, in the time of Peter the Cruel, lived Don Juan Tenorio, the prince of libertines. He attempted to abduct Giralda, daughter of the governor of Seville: the consequence was a duel, in which the lady's father was killed. The sensual excesses of Don Juan had destroyed his faith, and he defied the spirit-world so far as to visit the tomb of the murdered man and challenge his statue to follow him to supper. The statue accepted the invitation, and appeared amongst the guests at the meal, and carried the blaspheming sceptic to h.e.l.l. "As a dramatic type," says the author of the article "Don Juan," in the _Encyclopaedia Britannica_, "Don Juan is essentially the impersonation of the scepticism that results from sensuality, and is thus the complement of Faust, whose scepticism is the result of speculation."

The Prologue describes a swimmer far out at sea, disporting himself under the noon-sun; as he floats, a beautiful b.u.t.terfly hovers above him, a creature of the sky, as he for the time a creature of the water; neither can unite with the other, for neither can exchange elements; still, if we cannot fly, the next best thing is to swim,--a half-way house, as it were, between the world of spirit and that of grosser earth. Poetry is in this sense, a subst.i.tute for heaven: whatever the heaven-dwellers are, the poets seem; what deeds they do, the poets dream. Does the soul of his departed wife hover over him in this way, and look with pity on the mimicry of her airy flight? he wonders. (Mrs. Browning died eleven years before _Fifine_ was published.)--The scenery of the poem is that of the neighbourhood of p.o.r.nic, a seaside town in the department of the Loire, in Brittany, the little town being twenty-seven miles distant from Nantes. It is noted for its sea bathing and mineral waters, and, like many other places in Brittany, possesses some curious Druidical and other architectural remains. Mr. Browning, while staying at p.o.r.nic with his family, saw the gipsy woman who suggested to him the idea of Fifine. He selected her as a type of the sensual woman, in contrast to the spiritual type of womanhood. The poem deals with incidents connected with p.o.r.nic fair. Don Juan, addressing his wife Elvire, says: "Let us see the strolling players and the fun of the fair! Who would have supposed that the night could effect such a change? Yesterday all was rough and raw--mere tubs, poles and h.o.a.rding; now this morning all is gay as a b.u.t.terfly, the scaffolding has burst out in colour like a flower-bed in full bloom. n.o.body saw them enter the village, but that is the way of these tumblers, they like to steal a march and exhibit their spectacle only when the show is ready. Had any one wandered about the place at night he would have seen the sober caravan which was the bud that blossomed to-day into all this gaiety. An airy structure pitched beneath the tower appeared in the morning surmounted by a red pennon fluttering in the air, and frantic to be free. To be free!--the fever of the flag finds a response in my soul, my heart fires up for liberty from the restraints of law, I would lead the bohemian life these players lead. Why is it that disgraced people, those who have burst the bonds of conventional life, always seem to enjoy their existence more than others? They seem conscious of possessing a secret which sets them out of reach of our praise or blame; now and again they return to us because they must have our money, just as a bird must bear off a bit of rag filched from mankind to work up into his nest. But why need they do that? We think much of our reputation and family honour, but these people for a penny or two will display themselves undraped to any visitor. You may tell the showman that his six-legged sheep is an imposition,--he does not care, he values his good name at nothing. But offer to make these mountebanks respectable, promise them any reward you like to forsake their ways, to work and live as the rest of the world, and your offer will not tempt them. What is the compensatory unknown joy which turns dross to gold in their case? "You sigh," says the speaker to his wife, "you shake your head: what have I said to distress you? Fifine, the gipsy beauty of the show, will ill.u.s.trate my meaning: this woman is to me a queen, a s.e.xless, bloodless sprite; yet she has conquered me. I want to understand how. There is a honeyed intoxication in the Eastern lily, which lures insects to their death for its own nourishment: is that a flaw in the flower? Wiser are we not to be tempted by such dangerous delights; we may admire and keep clear of them: not poison lilies, but the rose, the daisy, or the violet, for me,--it is Elvire, not Fifine, I love. You ask how does this woman explain my thought? When Louis the Eleventh lay dying he had a procession of the famous women of all time made to pa.s.s before him: Helen of Troy, who magically brought men to acquiesce in their own destruction; next was Cleopatra, all the wonder of her body dominated by her high and haughty soul, and trampling on her lovers; then the saint of p.o.r.nic church who saves the shipwrecked sailors, and who thinks in her innocence that Cleopatra has given away her clothes to the poor; then comes my gipsy beauty Fifine, with her tambourine. Suppose you, Elvire, in spirit join this procession; then you confront yourself, and I will show you how you beat each personage there--even this Fifine, whom I will reward with a franc that you may study her. You draw back your skirts from such filth as you consider her to be; though, born perhaps as pure and sensitive as any other woman, she can afford to bear your scorn possibly,--we know such people often thus minister to age and the wants of sick parents. Her ogre husband, with his brute-beast face, takes the money she has earned by her exhibiting herself to us as she pa.s.ses into the tent. I want to make you see the beauty of the mind underlying the form in all these women. No creature is made so mean but boasts an inward worth: this Fifine, a mere sand-grain on the sh.o.r.e, reflects some ray of sunshine. Say that there was no worst of degradation spared this woman, yet she makes no pretence--she is absolutely truthful, she a.s.sumes not to be Helen or the p.o.r.nic Saint, she only offers to exhibit herself to you for money." The wife is not deceived by all this sophistry; Fifine's attraction for the man lies in the fact, not that she possesses some hidden beauty of soul, but some unconcealed physical charms which awaken desire in him because they are not his own. What is one's own is safe, and so despised; any waif which is a neighbour's is for the time more desirable,--"Give you the sun to keep, you would want to steal a boor's rushlight or a child's squib." He explains that this is always women's way about such matters--they cannot be made to comprehend mental a.n.a.lysis. He reminds her how at great cost and a year's anxiety he had purchased a Rafael; he gloated over his prize for a week, and then had more relish in turning over leaf by leaf Dore's last picture-book. Suppose the picture reproached him with inconstancy, he would reply that he knew the picture was his own; anxiety had given place to confidence, and were the house on fire, he would risk his life to save it, though he were knee deep in Dore's engravings. He tells his wife she is to him as the Rafael, the Fifines are as Dore's wood engravings. Elvire is the precious wife, her face fits into the cleft in the heart of him, to him she is perfection; but is she perfect to her mirror? He thinks not.

Where, then, is her beauty? In his soul. He cannot explain the reason, any more than naming the notes will explain a symphony or describing lines will call up the idea of a picture. Still there is reason in our choice of each other. It is princ.i.p.ally the effort of one soul to seek its own completion--that which shall aid its development--in another's. As the artist's soul sees the form he is about to create in the marble block, so does the lover see in his choice that which will draw out his soul-picture into concrete perfection. The world of sense has no real value for any of us, save in so far as our souls can detect and appropriate it. It is the idea which gives worth to that on which it is exercised. The value of all externals to the soul is just in proportion to its own power of trans.m.u.ting them into food for its own growth. The soul flame is maintained not only by gums and spices, but straw and rottenness may feed it; if the soul has power to extract from evil things that which supports its life, what matters the straw so long as the ash is left behind? and so of the conquests of the soul, its power to evoke the good from the ungainly and the partial, gives us courage to ignore the failures and the slips of our lives. The pupil does not all at once evoke the masterpiece from the marble--he puts his idea in plaster by the side of the Master's statue. If the scholar at last evoke Eidothee, the Master is to thank. "To love" in its intensest form means to yearn to invest another soul with the acc.u.mulated treasures of our own. The chemic force exerted by one soul in trans.m.u.ting coa.r.s.e things to beautiful is aided by another's flame. Each may continue to supplement the other, till the red, green, blue and yellow imperfections may be fused into achromatic white, the perfect light-ray.

Soul is discernible by soul, and soul is evoked by soul--Elvire by Don Juan. The wife objects that he abdicates soul's empire and accepts the rule of sense: man has left the monarch's throne, and lies in the kennel a brute. Searching for soul through all womankind, you find no face so vile but sense may extract from it some good for soul. This fine-spun theory, this elaborate sophistry, she declares, is merely an ingenious excuse for sensuality:--

"Be frank--who is it you deceive-- Yourself, or me, or G.o.d?"

Don Juan would reply by an ill.u.s.tration from music, which can penetrate more subtly than words: he would show how we may rise out of the false into the true, out of the dark into the brightness above the dense and dim regions where doubt is bred. Bathing in the sea that morning, out in mid-channel, he was standing in the water with head back, chin up, body and limbs below--he kept himself alive by breath in the nostrils, high and dry; ever and again a wavelet or a ripple would threaten life, then back went the head, and all was safe. But did he try to ascend breast high, wave arms free of tether, to be in the air and leave the water, under he went again; before he had mastered his lesson he had plenty of water in mouth and eyes. "I compare this," he says, "to the spirit's efforts to rise out of the medium which sustains it." He was upborne by that which he beat against, too gross an element to live in, were it not for the dose of life-breath in the soul. Our business is with the sea, not with the air, so we must endure the false below while we bathe in this life. It is by practice with the false that we reach the true. We gain confidence, and learn the trick of doing what we will--sink or rise. His senses do not reel when a billow breaks over him; he grasps at a wave that will not be grasped at all, but glides through the fingers--still the failure to grasp the water sends the head above, far beyond the wave he tried to hold:--

"So with this work o' the world,"

we try to grasp a soul, catch at it, think we have a prize; it eludes us, yet the soul helped ours to mount. He seizes Elvire by grasping at Fifine.

Not even this specious reasoning deceives the wife. It is an ugly fact that the wave grasped at is a woman. He replies that a woman can be absorbed into the man: women _grow_ you, men at best _depend_ upon you. A rill that empties itself into the sea can never be separated from it. That is woman. Man takes all and gives nought. To raise men you must stoop to teach them, learn their ignorance, stifle your soul in their mediocrities; but to govern women you must abandon stratagem, cast away disguise, and reveal your best self at your uttermost. When the music of Arion attracted the dolphins to the doomed man, one of them bore him on its back to the coast, and so saved his life; revealing his best to this "true woman-creature," he was saved from the men who would have killed him for gain. A man never puts out his whole self in love--this is reserved for hate. You do not get the best out of a man by nourishing his root, but by pruning his branch; as wine came through goats, which, browsing on the tendrils of the grape, "stung the stock to fertility," and so gained "the indignant wine--wrath of the red press." Mites of men are sore that G.o.d made mites at all; love avails not from such men-animalculae to coax a virile thought, but touch the elf with hate, and the insect swells to thrice its bulk "and cuckoo-spits some rose!" Nothing is to be gained from ruling men; women take nothing, and give all. Elvire and Fifine, in their degree, are alike in this respect. "To have secured a woman's faith in me is to have centred my soul on a fact. Falseness and change I see all around me; I expect truth because Fifine knows me much more than Elvire does." To this his wife replies, "Why not only she? There can be for each but one Best, which abolishes the simply Good and Better. Why not be content with the Elvire, who subst.i.tutes belief in truth, in your own soul, for the falseness which you fear? By toil and effort the boatman may do with pole and oars what by waiting a few hours the rising water would do for him without his labour; but men affect unusual ways,--Elvire could do far better for you all that you expect from Fifine." To this he replies that "a voyage may be too safe; there is no excitement, no experiment when wind and tide do all the needful work. Then may not our hate of falsehood be that which charms us in these actors who confess 'A lie is all we do or say'? Everything has a false outside, stage-play is honest cheating. The poet never dreams; prose-folk always do." Then he tells how his thought had recently sought expression in music rather than in words--as he played Schumann's _Carnival_, and reflected that in the masque of life and banquet of the world we have ever the same things in a new guise, the difficulty was ever to conquer commonplace and spice the same old viands and games. His fancies bore him to a pinnacle above St. Mark's at Venice, in Carnival time; he gazed down on a prodigious Fair, the men and women were disguised as beasts, birds, and fishes. Descending into the crowd, disgust gave way to pity; the people were not so beast-like, but much more human, than when he viewed them from the height, and he began to contemplate them with a delight akin to that which animates the chemist when he untwines the composite substance, traces effect back to cause, and then constructs from its elements the complex and complete. So did he get to know the thing he was, while contemplating in that Carnival the thing he was not. Thus Venice Square became the world, the masquerade was life, the disgust at the pageant was due to the distance from which it was contemplated, when he learned that the proper goal for wisdom is the ground and not the sky, he discovered how _wisely balanced are our hates and loves_, and how peace and good come from strife and evil. It is no business of ours to fret about what should be, but we should accept and welcome what is--_is_, that is to say, for the hour, for change is the law even of the religions by which man approaches G.o.d. His temples fade to recompose into other fanes. And not only temples, but the domes of learning and the seats of science are subject to the same law. Yet Religion has always her true temple-type; Truth, though founded in a rock, builds on sands; churches and colleges that grow to nothing always reappear as something; some building, round or square or polygonal, we shall always have. But leave the buildings, and let us look at the booths in the Fair. History keeps a stall, Morality and Art set up their shops.

They acquiesce in law, and adapt themselves to the times; and so, as from a distance the scene is contemplated as a whole, the multiform subsides in haze, the buildings, distinct in the broad light of day, merge and lose their individuality in a common shape. See this Druid monument: how does its construction strike you? How came this cross here? Learning cannot enlighten us. It meant something when it was erected which is lost now, yet the people of the place respect it and are persuaded that what a thing meant once it must still mean. They thought it had some reference to the Creator of the world, and was there to remind them that the world came not of itself. And so, with all the change in religions, there is an imperial chord which subsists and underlies the mists of music. In all the change there is permanence as a substratum. Truth inside and truth outside, but falsehood is between each; it is the falsehood which is change, the truth is the permanence. There is an unchanging truth to which man in all his waverings is constant. This Druid monument said what it had to say to its own age; it never promised to help our dream. Don Juan and his wife having now completed their walk, he proposes to return home to end where they began; as we were nursed into life, death's bosom receives us at last, and that is final, for death is defeat. Our limbs came with our need of them, our souls grew by mastering the lessons of life; but when death comes, the soul, which ruled by right while the bodily powers remained, loses its right to rule. And so the soul has run its round. Love ends too where love began, and goes back to permanence; each step aside (from Elvire to Fifine, for example) proves divergency in vain:

"Inconstancy means raw, 'tis faith alone means ripe."

And as they reach their villa, he resolves to live and die a quiet married man, earning the approbation of the mayor, and unoccupied with soul problems, especially those of women. At that moment a letter is put into his hand: there has been some mistake, Fifine thinks--he has given her gold instead of silver; he will go and see about it, and is off. Five minutes was all the time he asked. He is absent much longer, and on his return Elvire has vanished.

The Epilogue describes the householder sitting desolate in his melancholy home, weary and stupid; he is suddenly surprised by the appearance of his lost wife, whose spirit has returned to claim him; he tells her how the time has dragged without her, "And was I so much better off up there?"

quoth she. For decency, arrangements are made that the reunion may be in order; and so, the powers above and those below having been duly conciliated, husband and wife are once more united: "Love is all, and death is nought"--the final lesson of life.

The means whereby we may rise from the false to the true are never wanting to the earnest and faithful striver, this is the esoteric truth of _Fifine at the Fair_. The exoteric meaning may be "an apologia for the revolt of pa.s.sion against social rules and fetters." "Frenetic to be free," like the pennon, is in this sense the concentration of its meaning. What was Browning's object in this difficult and remarkable work? The question is not so difficult to answer as it appears at first sight. The poet is a soul a.n.a.lyst first, and a teacher next. He teaches admirably in scores of pa.s.sages in _Fifine_, but his main idea has been to interpret the mental processes which he supposed might underlie the actions of such a selfish and heartless voluptuary as Don Juan. Not, of course, was there any idea of rehabilitating the character of the historic personage; but, as Browning held that every soul has something to say for itself, every man some ideal soul-advance at which he aims, however mistaken may be his methods, so he imagined that even this selfish libertine had his golden ideal, however deeply bedded in mire. He has not--like the great dramatists--sunk himself in his character, and striven thus to present the real man on his stage, but he has lent Don Juan his Browning soul for a while, that he may make his Apologia to the wife, whom he finds it very hard to deceive. Dr. Furnivall once asked the poet what his idea really was in the poem. The poet replied that his "fancy was to show morally how a Don Juan might justify himself partly by truth, somewhat by sophistry."

(_Browning Society Papers_, vol. ii., p. 242*.) See also vol. i., pp. 377, 379, pp. 18*, 61*, vol ii., p. 240*. Mr. Nettleship's exhaustive a.n.a.lysis leaves nothing to be desired. (_Essays_, p. 221.)

NOTES.--Verse ii., "_bateleurs and baladines_," conjurors and mountebanks.

Verse iv., "_Gawain to gaze upon the Grail_": Gawain was the son of King Lot and Margause, in the Arthurian legend of the Holy Grail. Verse xv., _almandines_, a variety of garnet. Verse xix., _sick Louis_: King Louis XI. of France. Verse xxv., _tricot_: a knitted vest. Verse xxvii., _Helen_: she was declared by some of the Greeks never to have been really present at Troy, and that Paris only carried off a phantom created by Hera: the real Helen, they said, was wafted by Hermes to Proteus in Egypt, whence she was taken home by Menelaus. Verse x.x.xvi., _pochade_, a rough sketch. Verse xlii., _Razzi_, a corruption of Bazzi, or properly Il Sodona, the Italian painter (1479-1549). Verse xlvii., _Gerome_, a French painter (born 1824): he exhibited a great picture at the Exposition of 1859, called "The Gladiators." Verse lii., _Eidothee_: a sea-G.o.ddess, daughter of Proteus, the old man of the sea. Verse lix., _Glumdalclich_, in _Gulliver's Travels_, was a girl nine years old, and "only forty feet high." "_Theosutos e broteios eper kekramene_," Greek for "G.o.d, man, or both together mixed," from the _Prometheus Bound of aeschylus_. Verse lx., _Chrysopras_: a precious stone, a variety of chalcedony, or perhaps beryl. Verse lxvii. cannot be understood without reference to the fourth canto of Byron's _Childe Harold_: the lines and words between inverted commas are taken from verse clx.x.x., and the argument is directed against Byron's teaching as therein expressed: this verse was particularly obnoxious to Mr. Browning, both on account of its sentiments and grammar (see under LA SAISIAZ, p. 247). Verse lxix., _Thala.s.sia_: sea-nymph, from the Greek word for the sea: _Triton_, a sea deity, a son of Neptune. Verse lxxviii., _Arion_: a Greek poet and musician: he was rescued from drowning on the back of a dolphin; his song to his lyre drew the creatures round the vessel, and one of them bore him to the sh.o.r.e. _Periander_, the tyrant of Corinth. "_Methymnaean hand_": Arion was born at Methymna, in Lesbos.

_Orthian_, of Orthia: this was a surname of Diana. _Taenarus_, the point of land to which the dolphin carried Arion, whence he travelled to the court of Periander. Verse lx.x.xii., "_See Horace to the boat_": the ode is the third of the First Book of Horace's Odes. Verse lx.x.xiii., "_The long walls of Athens_" (see under ARISTOPHANES' APOLOGY, p. 36). _Iostephanos_, violet crowned--a name of Athens. Verse xcviii., _Simulacra_, images or likenesses. Verse cxxiv., _protoplast_, the original, the thing first formed. Verse cxxv., _Moirai Trimorphoi_, the Tri-form Fates.

=Filippo Baldinucci= on the Privilege of Burial: A Reminiscence of A.D.

1676. (_Pacchiarotto and other Poems_, 1876.) Filippo Baldinucci was a distinguished Italian writer on the history of the arts. He was born at Florence in 1624, and died in 1696. His chief work is ent.i.tled _Notizie de Professori del Disegno da Cimabue in qua_ (_dal_ 1260 _sino al_ 1670), and was first published, in six vols. 4to, 1681-1728. The _Encyclopaedia Britannica_ says: "The capital defect of this work is the attempt to derive all Italian art from the schools of Florence." The incidents of the poem are historical, and are related in the account which Baldinucci gives of the painter Buti. Its subject is that of the persecution to which the Jews were subjected in Italy, as in other countries of Europe, and unhappily down to the present time in Russia. We have the story as told by a frank persecutor, who regrets that the altered state of the law no longer permits the actual pelting of the Jews. The good old times had departed, but in his youth they could play some capital tricks with "the crew," as he will narrate. There was a Jews' burying-place hard by San Frediano, in Florence. Just below the Blessed Olivet, and adjoining this cemetery, was "a good farmer's Christian field." The Jews hedged their ground round with bushes, to conceal their rites from Christian gaze, for the public road ran by one corner of it. The farmer, partly from devotion, partly to annoy the Jews, built a shrine in his vineyard, and employed the painter Buti to depict thereon the Virgin Mary, fixing the picture just where it would be most annoying to the Jews. They tried to bribe the owner of the shrine to turn the picture the other way, to remove its disturbing presence from spectators to whom it could do no good, and let it face the public road, frequented by a cla.s.s of Christians evidently much in need of religious supervision and restraint. The farmer agreed to remove the offending fresco in consideration of the bag of golden ducats offered; and he at once called the painter to cause Our Lady to face the other way.

Buti covers up the shrine with a h.o.a.rding, and sets to work. Meanwhile the Chief Rabbi's wife died, and was taken for burial to the cemetery. In pa.s.sing the shrine in the farmer's field the mourners became aware of a scurvy trick played upon them by the Christians; for the Virgin was removed according to the bargain, but a Crucifixion had been subst.i.tuted, and now confronted them. The cheated Jews protested, but in vain: there was nothing for them but to suffer. Next day, as the farmer and his artist friend sat laughing over the trick, the athletic young son of the Rabbi entered the studio, desiring to purchase the original oil painting of the Madonna from which the fresco of the shrine was painted. The artist was so frightened at his stalwart form, and so amazed at the request, that, taken unaware, he asked no more than the proper price! and Mary was borne in triumph to deck a Hebrew household. They thought a miracle had happened, and that the Jew had been converted; but the Israelite explained that the only miracle wrought was that which had restrained him from throttling the painter. The truth was, he had changed his views about art, and had reflected that, since cardinals hung up heathen G.o.ds and G.o.ddesses in their palaces, there was no reason why his picture of Mary should not be hung with Ledas and what not, and be judged on its merits, or, more probably, on its flaws! And he walked off with his picture.

=Fire is in the Flint.= (_Ferishtah's Fancies_--opening words of the fifth lyric.)

=Flight of the d.u.c.h.ess, The.= (_Dramatic Romances and Lyrics_, 1845--in _Bells and Pomegranates_, VII.). When Mr Browning was little more than a child, he heard a woman one Guy Fawkes' Day sing in the street a strange song, whose burden was, "Following the Queen of the Gipsies, O!" The singular refrain haunted his memory for many years, and out of it was ultimately born this poem. There is a strange fascination in the mysterious story, which is told by an old huntsman, who has spent his life in the service of a Duke and his mother at their castle in a land of the North which is an appanage of the German Kaiser. The young Duke's father died when he was a child, and his mother took him in early life to Paris, where they remained till the youth grew to manhood. Returning to the old castle with his head full of mediaeval fancies, the Duke upset everybody by his revivals of outlandish customs and feudal fashions, and this in a manner which irritated every one concerned. In course of time the d.u.c.h.ess found a wife for her son--a young, warm-hearted girl from a convent, who won the affection of the servants of the castle, but was treated with coldness and severity by its lord and his "h.e.l.l-cat" of a mother. Chilled by the want of affection, and neglected by those whose care it should have been to make her happy, the girl sickened, and was visibly pining away. It occurred to the Duke to revive, amongst other old customs, those connected with the hunting of the stag, and a great hunting party on mediaeval lines was arranged. In the course of his researches into the customs of mediaeval hunting, he discovered that the lady of the castle had a special office to perform when the stag was killed. The authorities said the dame must p.r.i.c.k forth on her jennet and preside at the disembowelling. But the poor, mewed-up little d.u.c.h.ess, secluded from all the pleasures of life, did not care to be brought out just to play a part in a ceremony for which she had no heart, and thanking the Duke for the intended honour, begged to be excused on account of her ill-health; and so the Duke had to give way, but he sent his mother to scold her. When the hunt began the Duke was sulky and disheartened; as he rode down the valley he met a troop of gipsies on their march, and from the company an old witch came forth to greet the huntsmen. Sidling up to the Duke, she began to whine and make her appeal for the usual gifts. She said she desired to pay her duty to the beautiful new d.u.c.h.ess, at which the Duke was struck by the idea that he might use the old crone as a means to frighten his wife and make her more submissive, so he bade the huntsman who tells the story conduct the gipsy to the young d.u.c.h.ess. The old hag promised to engage in the project with hearty goodwill, and, quickened by the sight of a purse as the sign of a forthcoming reward, she hobbled off to the castle, and the Duke rejoined his party. The huntsman had a sweetheart at the castle named Jacynth, who conducted the crone to the lady's chamber while he waited without. And now began the mysteries of that eventful day. The maid protested she never could tell what it was that made her fall asleep of a sudden as soon as the gipsy was introduced to her mistress. The huntsman had waited on the balcony for some considerable time, when his attention was arrested by a low musical sound in the chamber of his lady; then he pushed aside the lattice, pulled the curtain, and saw Jacynth asleep along the floor. In the midst of the room, on a chair of state, was the gipsy, transformed to a queen, with her face bent over the lady's head, who was seated at her knees, her face intent on that of the crone. Wondering whether the old woman was banning or blessing the d.u.c.h.ess, he was about to spring in to the rescue, when he was stopped by the strange expression on her face. She was drinking in "Life's pure fire" from the old woman, was becoming transformed by some powerful influence that seemed to stream from the elder to the younger woman; her very tresses shared in the pleasure, her cheeks burned and her eyes glistened. The influence reached the soul of the retainer, and he fell under the potent spell as he listened to the gipsy's words as she told the d.u.c.h.ess she had discovered she was of their race by infallible signs. At last he came to know that his mistress was being bewitched, and he ran to the portal, where he met her, so altered and so beautiful that he felt that whatever had happened was for the best and he had nothing to do but take her commands. He was hers to live or to die, and he preceded his mistress, followed by the gipsy, who had shrunk again to her proper stature. They went to the courtyard, where, as he was desired, he saddled the d.u.c.h.ess's palfrey, which his mistress mounted with the crone behind her; then, putting a little plait of hair into the servant's hand, the d.u.c.h.ess rode off, and they lost her. As the old retainer tells the tale, thirty years have pa.s.sed since the flight took place. No search was made for the lady; the Duke's pride was wounded, and he would not seek her, and made small inquiry about her. The man says he must see his master through this life, and then he will sc.r.a.pe together his earnings and travel to the land of the gipsies, to find his lady or hear the last of her. Has all this an allegorical meaning? Many have tried to find such in this remarkable poem. But Browning does not teach by allegory: he rather prefers to let events as they actually happen tell their own lessons to minds awakened to receive them. It is not at all difficult, without resorting to allegorical interpretation, to discover what the poem teaches. And in the first place we are taught that a human soul cannot thrive without the living sympathy of its kind. The d.u.c.h.ess was withering under the chill neglect of the hateful mother-in-law and her contemptible son. The bewitchment of the gipsy was the charm of love--the strong, pa.s.sionate love of a great human heart, enshrined though it was in a witch-like and decrepit frame. The outpouring of the old woman's sympathy on this friendless girl sufficed to transfigure the crone till she became to the huntsman a young and a beautiful queen herself. In the supreme act of perfectly loving, the woman herself became lovely; for there is no rejuvenescence like that which comes from loving others and helping the weak. Then we learn that, as the d.u.c.h.ess seemed to be imbibing new life from the gipsy queen, virtue goes forth from every true lover of his kind, and degrees of rank, education, and station, are no barriers to the magnetism which streams forth from a human heart, however humble, towards another human heart, however highly placed. Life without love is a living death, and the d.u.c.h.ess no more did wrong when she rode off with the gipsy who saw the signs of her people in the marks on her forehead than the flowers do wrong when they bloom at the invitation of the Spring. The sign which the gipsy saw was that of a soul capable of responding to a heart yearning to help it. The girl had a right to human love; she had a right to seek it in a gipsy heart when she could find it nowhere else. In the sermon by Canon Wilberforce preached before the British Medical a.s.sociation, at their meeting at Bournemouth in 1891, speaking of the power of Jesus over human diseases, the preacher said, "The secret of this power was His perfect sympathy. He violated or suspended no natural laws.... His healings were an influential outpouring of that inherent divine life which is latent and in some degree operative in every man, but which existed in fulness and perfection of operation only in Him. Is not this the force of the word "compa.s.sion" used of Him? The verb sp?a??????a? is not found in any former Greek author. It indicates, so far as language can express it, a forceful movement of the whole inward nature towards its object, and personal identification with it. It indicates that compa.s.sion and love are not superficial emotions, but dynamic forces." Mrs. Owen, of Cheltenham, read a paper at the meeting of the Browning Society, Nov. 24th, 1882, ent.i.tled "What is 'The Flight of the d.u.c.h.ess?'" in which it was suggested that the Duke represents our gross self; the huntsman represents the simple human nature that may either rise with the d.u.c.h.ess or sink with the Duke,--the better man. The d.u.c.h.ess represents the soul, the highest part of our complex nature. The huntsman aids the d.u.c.h.ess (the soul) to free herself from the coa.r.s.e, low, earth-nature, the Duke. So that the 'Flight of the d.u.c.h.ess' is "the supreme moment when the soul shakes off the bondage of self and finds its true freedom in others." The paper is published in the _Browning Society's Transactions_ (Part iv., p. 49*), and is well worthy of study by those who seek a deeper spiritual meaning in "this mystic study of redeemed womanhood" than its primary sense conveys.

NOTES.--Stanza iii., _merlin_, a species of hawk anciently much used in falconry; _falcon-lanner_, a species of long-tailed hawk. vi., _urochs_, wild bulls; _buffle_, buffalo. x., _St. Hubert_, before his conversion, was pa.s.sionately devoted to hunting: he is the patron saint of hunters; _venerers, p.r.i.c.kers, and verderers_, huntsmen, light hors.e.m.e.n, and preservers of the venison. xi., _wind a mort_, to sound a horn at the death of the stag; _a fifty-part canon_: Mr. Browning explained that "a canon, in music, is a piece wherein the subject is repeated in various keys, and, being strictly obeyed in the repet.i.tion, becomes the "canon"--the imperative law to what follows. Fifty of such parts would be indeed a notable peal; to manage three is enough of an achievement for a good musician." xiii., _hernshaw_, a heron; _fernshaw_, a fern-thicket; _helicat_, a hag; "_imps the wing of the hawk_": to "imp" means to insert a feather in the broken wing of a bird. xiv., _tomans_, Persian gold coins. xv., _gor-crow_, the carrion crow. xvii., _morion_, a kind of open helmet. _Orson the wood-knight_: twin-brother of Valentine; born in a wood near Orleans, and carried off by a bear, which suckled him with its cubs.

He became the terror of France, and was called "the wild man of the forest."

=Flower's Name, The.= (_Garden Fancies_, I.--_Dramatic Lyrics_.) [Published in _Hood's Magazine_, July 1844.] With very few exceptions, Browning did not contribute to magazines. At the request of Mr. Monckton Milnes (afterwards Lord Houghton), he sent _The Flower's Name_, _Tokay_ and _Sibrandus Schafnaburgensis_ to "help in making up some magazine numbers for poor Hood, then at the point of death from haemorrhage of the lungs, occasioned by the enlargement of the heart, which had been brought on by the wearing excitement of ceaseless and excessive literary toil." A lover visits a garden, and recalls a previous walk therein with the woman he loved; he remembers the flowers which she noticed, especially one whose name--"a soft, meandering Spanish name"--she gave him; he must learn Spanish "only for that slow, sweet name's sake." The very roses are only beautiful so far as they tell her footsteps.

=Flower Songs, Italian.= (_Fra Lippo Lippi._) The flower songs in this poem are of the description known as the _stornello_. This is not to be confounded with the _rispetto_, which consists of a stanza of inter-rhyming lines, ranging from six to ten in number. "The Luccan and Umbrian _stornello_ is much shorter, consisting indeed of a hemistich having some natural object which suggests the motive of the little poem.

The nearest approach to the Italian _stornello_ appears to be, not the _rispetto_, but the Welsh _triban_" (_Encyc. Brit._, xix. 272). See also notes to _Fra Lippo Lippi_.

=Flute-music with an Accompaniment.= (_Asolando_, 1889.) "Is not outside seeming real as substance inside?" A man hears a bird-like fluting; he wonders what sweet thoughts find expression in such sweet notes. Pa.s.sion must give birth to such expression. Love, no doubt! a.s.surance, contentment, sorrow and hope--he detects all these moods in the music, softened and mellowed by the interposing trees. His lady companion brushes away all his fancy-spun notions by telling the prosy fact that the music proceeds from a desk-drudge, who spends the hour of his luncheon with the _Youth's Complete Instructor how to Play the Flute_, the plain truth being that his hoa.r.s.e and husky tootlings have not the remotest relation to the romantic ideas with which her male companion has a.s.sociated them.

Distance has altered the sharps to flats; the missing bar was not due to "kissing interruption," but to a blunder in the playing. The man philosophises on this to the effect that, if fancy does everything for us, it matters little what may be the facts. If appearance produces the effect of reality, seeming is as good as being.

=Forgiveness, A.= (_Pacchiarotto, and other Poems_, 1876.) A man kneels in confession before a monk in a church. He tells the story of a life destroyed by an insane jealousy of his wife, who was innocent of any fault in the matter but some slight deception. The penitent was a statesman, happy in the love of wife and home, but neglectful of his duties to both in his absorption in the affairs of his sovereign. Returning home one night, he enters by the private garden way, and sees the veiled figure of a man flying from the house. Before him, as he turns to enter his door, he sees his wife, "stone-still, stone-white." "Kill me!" she cried. "The man is innocent; the fault is mine alone. I love him as I hate you. Strike!"

But he refrains from this speedy vengeance: henceforth they act a part before strangers--all goes on as though nothing had happened; alone, they never meet, never speak. Three years of this life pa.s.s, when one night the wife demands that the acting shall end; she will explain. "Follow me to my study," he replies. The wife begins, "Since I could die now...." and then tells him she had loved him and had lost him through a lie. She had thought he gave away his soul in statecraft; she strung herself therefore, to teach him that the first fool she threw a fond look upon would prize beyond life the treasure which he neglected. It was contempt for the woman which filled his mind now. At this avowal his feeling rose to hate. He made her write her confession in words which he dictated, and with her own blood, drawn by the point of a poisoned poniard. The monk was the woman's lover; the husband killed him also.

=Founder of the Feast, The.= This was the t.i.tle of some inedited lines by Browning, written in the alb.u.m presented to Mr. Arthur Chappell (of the St. James's Hall Sat.u.r.day and Monday Popular Concerts), April 5th, 1884.

They are printed in the Browning Society's _Notes and Queries_, vol. ii., p. 18*.

=Fra Lippo Lippi.= (_Men and Women_, 1855; Rome, 1853-54.) [THE MAN.] Fra Filippo Lippi (1412-69), the painter, was the son of a butcher in Florence. His mother died while he was a baby, and his father two years later than his mother. His aunt, Monna Lapaccia, took him to her home, but in 1420, when the boy was but eight years old, placed him in the community of the Carmelites of the Carmine in Florence. He stayed at the monastery till 1432, and there became a painter. He seems to have ultimately received a more or less complete dispensation from his religious vows. In 1452 he was appointed chaplain to the convent of S. Giovannino in Florence, and in 1457 he was made rector of S. Quirico at Legnaia. At this time he made a large income; but ever and again fell into poverty, probably on account of the numerous love affairs in which he was constantly indulging. Lippi died at Spoleto on or about Oct 8th, 1469.

Vasari, in his _Lives of the Painters_, tells the whole romantic story of his life.

[THE POEM.] Brother Lippo the painter, working for the munificent House of the Medici, has been mewed up in the Palace, painting saints for Cosimo dei Medici. Unable longer to tolerate the restraint (for he was a dissolute friar, with no vocation for the religious life), he has tied his sheets and counterpane together and let himself out of the window for a night's frolic with the girls whom he heard singing and skipping in the street below. He has been arrested by the watchmen of the city, who noticed his monastic garb, and did not consider it in accord with his present occupation. He is making his defence and bribing them to let him go. He tells them his history: how he was a baby when his mother and father died, and he was left starving in the street, picking up fig skins and melon parings, refuse and rubbish as his only food. One day he was taken to the monastery, and while munching his first bread that month was induced to "renounce the pomps and vanities of this wicked world," and so became a monk at eight years old. They tried him with books, and taught him some Latin; as his hard life had given him abundant opportunity for reading peoples' faces, he found he could draw them in his copybooks, and so began to make pictures everywhere. The Prior noticed this, and thought he detected genius, and would not hear of turning the boy out: he might become a great painter and "do our church up fine," he said. So the lad prospered; he began to draw the monks--the fat, the lean, the black, the white; then the folks at church. But he was too realistic in his work: his faces, arms and legs were too true to nature, and the Prior shook his head--

"And stopped all that in no time."

He told him his business was to paint men's souls and forget there was such a thing as flesh:

"Paint the soul, never mind the legs and arms!"

And so they made him rub all out. The painter asks if this was sense:

"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!"

He maintained that if we get beauty we get the best thing G.o.d invents. But he rubs out his picture and paints what they like, clenching his teeth with rage the while; but sometimes, when a warm evening finds him painting saints, the revolt is complete, and he plays the fooleries they have caught him at. He knows he is a beast, but he can appreciate the beauty, the wonder and the power in the shapes of things which G.o.d has made to make us thankful for them. They are not to be pa.s.sed over and despised, but dwelt upon and wondered at, and painted too, for we must count it crime to let a truth slip. We are so made that we love things first when we see them painted, though we have pa.s.sed them over unnoticed a hundred times before--

"And so they are better, painted--better to us.

Art was given for that."

"The world is no blot for us, nor blank; it means intensely, and means good." "Ah, but," says the Prior, "your work does not make people pray!"

"But a skull and cross-bones are sufficient for that; you don't need art at all."... And then the poor monk begs the guard not to report him: he will make amends for the offence done to the Church; give him six months'

time, he will paint such a picture for a convent! It will please the nuns.

"So six months hence. Good-bye! No lights: I know my way back!"

NOTES.--"_The Carmine's my cloister_," the monastery of the friars Del Carmine, where Fra Lippo was brought up. "_Cosimo of the Medici_"

(1389-1464), the great Florentine statesman, who was called the "Father of his country." _Saint Laurence_ == San Lorenzo at Florence, the church which contains the Medici tombs and several of Michael Angelo's pictures.

"_Droppings of the wax to sell again_": in Catholic countries, where many wax torches are used, the wax drippings are carefully gathered by the poor boys to sell; in Spain they pick up even the ends of the wax vestas used by smokers at the bull fights for the same purpose. _The Eight_, the magistrates who governed Florence. _Antiphonary_, the Roman Service-Book, containing all that is sung in the choir--the antiphons, responses, etc.; it was compiled by Gregory the Great. _Carmelites_, monks of the Order of Mount Carmel in Syria; established in the twelfth century. _Camaldolese_, an order of monks founded by St. Romualdo in 1027; the name is derived from the family who owned the land on which the first monastery was built--the _Campo Maldoli_. "_Preaching Friars_": the Dominicans, established by St. Dominic; the name of the "Brothers Preachers" or "Friars Preachers" was given them by Pope Innocent III. in 1215. _Giotto_, a great architect and painter (1266-1337); he was a friend of Dante.

_Brother Angelico_ == Fra Angelico; his real name was Giovanni da Fiesole; he was the famous religious painter, painting the soul and disregarding the flesh; he was said to paint some of his devotional pictures on his knees. _Brother Lorenzo_, Don Lorenzo. _Monaco_ == the monk; he was a great painter, of the Order of the Camaldolese. _Guidi_ == Tommaso Guidi or Masaccio, nicknamed _Hulking Tom_, was a painter, born 1401; he "laboured," says the chronicler, in "nakeds." "_A St. Laurence at Prato_,"

near Florence, where are frescoes by Lippi: St. Laurence suffered martyrdom by being burned upon a gridiron; he bore it with such fort.i.tude, says the legend, that he cried to his tormentors to turn him over, as he "was done on one side." _Chianti wine_, a famous wine of Tuscany. _Sant'

Ambrogio's_ == Saint Ambrose's at Florence. "_I shall paint G.o.d in the midst, Madonna and her babe_": the beautiful picture of the Coronation of the Virgin in the Accademia delle Belle Arti at Florence is the one referred to in these lines. The Browning Society in 1882 published a very fine photograph of this great work, by Alinari Brothers of Florence. The flower songs in the poem are of the variety known as the _stornelli_; the peasants of Tuscany sing these songs at their work, "and as one ends a song another caps it with a fresh one, and so they go on vying with each other. These _stornelli_ consist of three lines. The first usually contains the name of a flower, which sets the rhyme, and is five syllables long. Then the love theme is told in two lines of eleven syllables each, agreeing by rhyme, a.s.sonance, or repet.i.tion with the first." [See _Poet Lore_, vol ii., p. 262. Miss R. H. Busk's "Folk Songs of Italy," and Miss Strettel's "Spanish and Italian Folk Songs."]

=Francesco Romanelli= (_Beatrice Signorini_), the artist who paints Artemisia's portrait, which his wife destroys in a fit of jealousy.

=Francis Furini, Parleyings with.= (_Parleyings with Certain People of Importance in their Day_: 1887.) [THE MAN.] "Francis Furini was born in 1600 at Florence, and has been styled the 'Albani' and the 'Guido' of the Florentine school. At the age of forty he took orders, and until his death in 1649 remained an exemplary parish priest. In his earlier days he was especially famous for his painting of the nude figure; his drawing is remarkably graceful, but the colour is defective. One of his French biographers complains that he paints the nude too well to be quite proper, and points to the 'Adam and Eve,' in the Pitti Palace as a proof of this statement. Perhaps the painter thought so too, for there is a tradition that on his death-bed he desired all his undraped pictures to be collected and destroyed. His wishes were not carried out, and few private galleries at Florence are without pictures by him." (_Pall Mall Gazette_, January 18th, 1887.)

[THE POEM.] In the opening lines we are introduced to the good pastor, the painter-priest who lived two hundred and fifty years ago at Florence, and fed his flock with spiritual food while he helped their bodily necessities. The picture is a pleasant one, but the poet deals not with the pastor but the artist; and this painter of the nude has been selected by Browning as a text on which to express the sentiments of artists on the subject of,--