R850117A. Ferishtah’s Fancies.
The Church of England Pulpit and Ecclesiastical Review, 17 January 1885, pp. 35–36.
Robert Browning is, we think it may be fairly said, the first dramatic poet of the age in this England of ours, by right of his pathetic “Blot on the ’Scutcheon,” and his graceful “Colombe’s Birthday.” “Strafford,” his first somewhat spasmodic effort, has fine effects, but wars, in our judgment, against the truth of history, and is a little too disjointed, a kind of literary earthquake or volcanic eruption. Unlike the Laureate, Mr. Browning wrote plays in his youth and poems in his advancing years; and in honest truth we must needs say that the ardour and passion of youth are not very conspicuous in Lord Tennyson’s plays, however rugged may be the versification and careful the historical study of the subjects. Mr. Browning having poured himself out copiously and lovingly in his deeply pathetic and most beautiful “Paracelsus,” and all his highly dramatic utterances, lyrical sometimes in form but always essentially dramatic in spirit, has now given us a series of metrical apologues and disquisitions on philosophical and theological themes, the supposed utterances of an Eastern sage, with the apt motto from “King Lear,” “You, Sir, I entertain for one of my hundred, only I do not like the fashion of your garments; you will say that they are Persian, but let them be changed.” And these are interlinked by certain amatory, decidedly amatory, stanzas, in which the character of eastern passion is held, we suppose to be reflected. But it is manifestly the ethical, rather than the poetical, value of his strains to which the writer here desires to draw attention. We discern comparatively little of the passionate intensity of his earlier ditties; here all is curt, measured and decidedly distinct. There is not much occasion to complain of obscurity.
After a fanciful and semi-comic introduction, the supposed eastern sage is represented to have first noted from the feeling of young ravens by an eagle in the absence of their mother who has died untimely, that man’s duty is not only to sit and wait, like the unfledged ravens in the nest, but to minister to the wants of the weak, like the succouring eagle. Next, we are taught to learn, from the contentment of a degraded vizier with his lot as melon-seller, always to make the best of things under the most unhappy circumstances. Then follows a section called Shah Abbas, the outcome of which appears to be that faith in that which is good and noble, though slightly incredible, if it ministers to love, is always better than mere cold unbelief. “The Family” follows,—a defence of prayer as an instinct and necessity of man’s nature. The burden lies on the objector to prove that it cannot profit. The Incarnation is the next theme, treated of a little flippantly perhaps, but with honest intent, in a section called “The Sun,” good as far as it goes, expressing the truth that man cannot conceive of any higher agency, that is not akin to that of man. Then follows Mirab Shah, written to demonstrate the value of pain as exciting human sympathy and pity. “A Camel-Driver,” No. 7, is a somewhat sophistical endeavour to show that as it would be unreasonable to punish a camel at the end of a journey for an offence committed at the journey’s beginning, so the righteous Judge of all is not likely to punish past offences in a future life. Was there ever such a non sequitur? It cannot be needful to tell Mr. Browning that man is not only not a forgetful and unreasoning camel, but that, on the contrary, he is morally (and often physically) the outcome of his thoughts and deeds. No. 8, “Two Camels” is deigned to teach us the folly of harsh asceticism, and the wisdom of lawful enjoyment, by a clever and amusing tale. Thankfulness for small mercies is inculcated in No. 9, “Cherries.” No. 10, “Plot-culture,” is open to considerable demur, and looks rather like a plea for undue self-indulgence; and the little poem which follows it is queer, to say the least. “A Pillar at Sebrevah” enforces the poet’s favourite thesis, not to despise the day of small things. “A Bean-strife and Apple-eating” shows rather lengthily that life is a tangled web of good and evil, light and darkness. The singer opines that light predominates, but is not sure that he may not wear rose coloured spectacles, because he is always in love. The epilogue expresses the same idea, more poetically, being a defence of hopeful optimism, but always on the amatory plea. The world is supposed to moan and groan,
All of life’s a cry just of weariness and woe, love.
But a circle is kept round the poet’s imagination by his ardour, which excludes the sight of evil, as “the moon’s might frees a space from cloud.”
Only, at heart’s utmost—joy and triumph—terror
Sadden turns the blood to ice: a chill wind disencharms
All the late enchantment! What, if all be error,
If the halo irised round my head be, love, thine arms!
All a fond delusion, after all. Here we seem forbidden to take the poet seriously. At least he leaves himself a saving clause, a loophole of escape from orthodox conclusions, as did Lord Tennyson of old, in his “In Memoriam,” in the somewhat offensive lines—
Leave thou thy sister, when she prays,
Her early heaven, her happy views.
Christianity, once for all, does not want to be patronised by Mr. Gigadibs, the literary man, or anybody. The sun’s existence asks no demonstration from astronomers. Nor can Christian thinkers accept the position assigned them in this epilogue when they are made to cry.
How of the field’s fortune? That concerned our Leader!
[Christ the Lord, presumably].
Led we struck our stroke, nor cared for doing, left or right,
Each, as on his own head, failer or succeeder,
Lay the blame or lit the praise: no care for cowards, fight!
Fogland is not our ideal. We think there is something better than fighting in the dark for thinking men; but this may be the attitude of many noble hearts, and, any way, it is better to fight than to run away.
We will not say that Robert Browning seems to us to have cloven the mask of truth in the very centre upon this occasion, but his aim is fair, the arrows are well loosed from the string, and if some fly rather wide, others sit in an inner rim of the circle. The singer is still young with the exhaustless youth of genius, and his muse has all the force and freedom of an earlier day, less pathos but greater perspicacity
Reviewed:
Ferishtah’s Fancies (RB), London: Smith, Elder, 1884.
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