R460425A. Luria and A Soul’s Tragedy.
The Examiner, 25 April 1846, pp. 259–260.
As reprinted in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 12, 384–387.
Luria is a tragedy of one day: its acts being the five different periods of morning, noon, afternoon, evening, and night. But into the day which consummates a life may be crowded a life’s experiences and passions; and this is aimed at in Luria.
It has Mr. Browning’s defects. Too much philosophy for passion, and too much passion for philosophy, are the Scylla and Charibdis through which this admirable writer and true poet winds too often a dangerous and difficult way. “The Sirens wait him singing song for song;” the music near and from afar blend confusedly; and the poet misses his way in the straits of metaphysics, the metaphysician in the vortex of poetry. But there is no wreck: Harbour is found. Obstructions at the starting matter less, where the provisioning is for a long and important voyage.
We do not recollect better writing in any of Mr. Browning’s books than we have found in Luria. The scene is laid in Italy, and the period seems the close of the war at the commencement of the 15th century, when Pisa lost her independance in the struggle with Florence. The action transpires at the Florentine camp between the rival towns, where Luria, a Moor, is in command. The custom of such command has been by Shakespeare, incidentally, made familiar and immortal; but in this Moor of Florence the custom constitutes the tragedy. The jealousies of those Italian republics against their own children; the cold indifference with which they profited by the service of foreign leaders, and trampled on them when their work was done; furnish the material which is wrought by the poet.
The foreigner, no child of mine,
Shall henceforth lead my troops, reach height by height
The glory, then descend into the shame;
So shall rebellion be less guilt in him,
And punishment the easier task for me.
This is the language and policy of Florence. To which Luria is meant to answer that both language and policy are false; that it is better to provide for present faith than against possible falsehood; that belief is better than disbelief; that nations being the handiwork of men, individual greatness should be their greatest care; that a people is but the attempt of many, to rise to the completer life of one:
And those who live as models for the mass
Are singly of more value than they all.
Thus the catastrophe is the death of the Moor: yet not for his punishment, but for the punishment of Florence.
The reader will not need to be told that in such a design as this, if treated by a genuine writer, the matter to be “heard and learned” touches questions that are vital still. The mistake of those Italian republics survived the ruin it occasioned, and affects the happiness of nations and of men to this hour. But it is more to our present purpose to shew how the writer ascends to his argument, than to indicate what various thought and weighty purpose it includes.
Braccio is the Commissary of the Republic of Florence, deputed to the Camp of Luria; and states her case, and her claim to reward truth by treachery, thus:
Let friend trust friend, and love demand its like,
And gratitude be claimed for benefits,—
There’s grace in that—and when the fresh heart breaks
The new brain proves a martyr, what of it?
Where is the matter of one moth the more
Singed in the candle at a summer’s end?
But Florence is no simple John or James
To have his toy, his fancy, his conceit,
That he’s the one excepted man by fate,
And, when fate shows him he’s mistaken there,
Die with all good men’s praise, and yield his place
To Paul and George, intent to try their chance;
Florence exists because these pass away;
She’s a contrivance to supply a type
Of Man which men’s deficiencies refuse;
She binds so many, she grows out of them—
Stands steady o’er their numbers though they change
And pass away .. there’s always what upholds,
Always enough to fashion the great show!
As, see, yon hanging city in the sun
Of shapely cloud substantially the same!
A thousand vapours rise and sink again,
Are interfused, and live their life and die,—
Yet ever hangs the steady show i’ the air
Under the sun’s straight influence: that is well!
That is worth Heaven to hold, and God to bless!
And so is Florence,—the unseen sun above,
That draws and holds suspended all of us—
Binds transient mists and vapours into one
Differing from each and better than they all.
And shall she dare to stake this permanence
On any one man’s faith? Man’s heart is weak,
And its temptations many: let her prove
Each servant to the very uttermost
Before she grant him her reward, I say!
Domizia is a noble Florentine lady, also deputed (by the procurement of Braccio, who desires to counterplot her plotting) to the camp. She is there as the spy of the Republic on Braccio and Luria both; but has undertaken the office as a blind to her own more secret purpose, of avenging family wrongs on the Republic by inciting Luria to rebellion. While she thus adjures him to the condign punishment of the country which is about to reward his services by ignominy, she would seem to state the truth as against the deceptive reasoning of Braccio—
Inconsciously to the augustest end
Thou has arisen: second not to him
In rank so much as time, who first ordained
The Florence thou are to destroy, should be—
Yet him a star, too, guided, who broke first
The pride of lonely power, the life apart,
And made the eminences, each to each,
Lean o’er the level world and let it lie,
Safe from the thunder henceforth ’neath their arms—
So the few famous men of old combined
And let the multitude rise underneath
And reach them and unite—so Florence grew:
Braccio speaks well, it was well worth the price.
But when the sheltered many grew in pride
And grudged their station to the glorious ones,
Who, greater than their kind, are truly great
Only in voluntary servitude—
Which they who, being less, would fain be more,
And so accept not, then are least of all—
Time was for thee to rise, and thou art here.
—But between these Florentines stands the Moor, with a truth and a reason unattained by either. He is there to punish Florence, but not by a falsehood like her own. Upon this the pathos of the feeling turns; and here the tragedy is not less effective than in an Italian subtlety of thought which gives it colour and character.
There is something extremely affecting in the half despairing hope which seems to possess the Moor at the opening of the tragedy, of the possibility of his being adopted by Florence for services of peace, when he shall have placed her in safety beyond the reach of war.
Peace follows it!
Florence at peace, and the calm studious heads
Come out again, the penetrating eyes;
As if a spell broke, all’s resumed, each art
You boast, more vivid that it slept awhile!
’Gainst the glad heaven, o’er the white palace-front
The interrupted scaffold climbs anew;
The walls are peopled by the Painter’s brush;
The Statue to its niche ascends to dwell;
The Present’s noise and trouble have retired
And left the eternal Past to rule once more.
You speak its speech and read its records plain,
Greece lives with you, each Roman breathes your friend,
—But Luria,—where will then be Luria’s place?
His earlier home, the drear vastness of his East, seems very lone and silent to him after this crowded and brilliant Florence; but how shall his nature blend with theirs? his “expansive and explosive race” mingle and fraternize with those absorbing, concentrating men? He dares to think it possible:
The sea heaves up, hangs loaded o’er the land,
Breaks there and buries its tumultuous strength;
Horror, and silence, and a pause awhile;
Lo, inland glides the gulf-stream, miles away,
In rapture of assent, subdued and still,
’Neath those strange banks, those unimagined skies!
Yet, should it not be so, his task will still have been worthily done:
Your servant has performed his task—enough!
You ordered, he has executed: good!
Now walk the streets in holiday attire,
Congratulate your friends, till noon strikes fierce,
Then form bright groups beneath the Duomo’s shade!
The ground-work of the character, in short, is a passionate yearning to the country whose service he has entered, and whose policy dooms him to shame. We first hear of him thus, by the Secretary of Braccio:
He speaks (I would not listen if I could)
Reads, orders, counsels;—but he rests sometimes,—
I see him stand and eat, sleep stretched an hour
On the lynx-skins, yonder; hold his bared black arms
Into the sun from the tent-opening; laugh
When his horse drops the forage from his teeth
And neighs to hear him hum his Moorish songs:
That man believes in Florence as the Saint
Tied to the wheel believes in God!
So when we see him first. Scrawling with charcoal on the wall of his tent, he is putting a kind of rude Moorish front to the then unfinished Duomo of Florence. Half effaced as the morning wears away, he repairs it; but it is wholly gone before the night; and with it his faith, though not his affection, for the Florentines. As the tragedy opened, he was on the eve of his last victory for Florence;—there remained but one blow, then impending, and struck successfully before the day closes, against the rival Pisan general Tiburzio;—and he is quite unconscious that at that “best minute of his brightest day,” with an adoring army at his back, and with eager and joyous Florence before his face to thank him, the black snares of Braccio are denouncing him to the saved Republic. His friend and fellow Moor, Husain, finds all his warnings laid to no better score than his fiercer Moorish instincts:
This hating people, that hate each other,
And in one blandness to us Moors unite—
Locked each to each like slippery snakes, I say,
Which still in all their tangles, hissing tongue
At threatening tail, ne’er do each other harm;
While any creature of a better blood,
They seem to fight for, while they circle safe
And never touch it,—pines without a wound,
Withers away before their eyes and breath.
But a warning not to be rejected reaches Luria on the eve of the battle. A stranger seeks him in his tent, discloses himself as Tiburzio, gives him a [p. 260→] letter (intercepted on the road to Florence) proving the treachery of the Florentines, and offers him Pisa and the Pisan army for purposes of just revenge. The scene is the most dramatic in the play. The brave courtesies of the warrior foes are well marked; and, in the magnanimity common to both, the distinction of Moor and Italian is yet finely preserved. Luria takes the letter, but will not break the seal.
Lur. And act on what I read? what act were fit?
If the firm-fixed foundation of my faith
In Florence, who to me stands for Mankind,
—If that breaks up, and disimprisoning
From the abyss … Ah friend, it cannot be!
You may be very sage, yet .. all the world
Having to fail, or your sagacity,
You do not wish to find yourself alone!
What would the world be worth? Whose love be sure?
The world remains—you are deceived!
Tib. Your hand!
I lead the vanguard.—If you fall, beside,
The better—I am left to speak! For me,
This was my duty, nor would I rejoice
If I could help, it misses its effect:
And after all you will look gallantly
Found dead here with that letter in your breast!
Lur. Tiburzio—I would see these people once
And test them ere I answer finally!
At your arrival let the trumpet sound:
If mine returns not then the wonted cry,
It means that I believe—am Pisa’s!
Tib. Well! [Exit.
The sad reflection comes when he is left alone:
My heart will have it he speaks true! My blood
Beats close to this Tiburzio as a friend;
If he had stept into my watch-tent, night
And the wide desert full of foes around,
I should have broke the bread and given the salt
Secure, and when my hour of watch was done
Taken my turn to sleep between his knees
Safe in the unclouded brow and honest cheek.
Oh, world where all things pass and nought abides,
Oh, life the long mutation—is it so?
Is it with life as with the body’s change?
—Where, e’en though better follow, good must pass,
Nor manhood’s strength can mate with boyhood’s grace,
Nor age’s wisdom in its turn find strength,
But silently the first gift dies away,
And though the new stays—never both at once!
But with it comes the higher confidence in right which never wholly leaves without its higher consolations, the nature that trusts to it:
Yes, that is better .. that is best of all!
Such faith stays when the wild belief would go!
Yes—when the desert creature’s heart, at fault
Amid the scattering tempest and its sands,
Betrays its steps into the pathless drift—
The calm instructed eye of man holds fast
By the sole bearing of the visible star,
Sure that when slow the whirling wreck subsides,
The boundaries, lost now, shall be found again,—
The palm trees and the pyramid over all!
Yes: I trust Florence—Pisa is deceived.
He tests the Florentines, and sees that they will fail him; as he shows them the letter he has become possessed of, Tiburzio’s trumpet sounds; he orders his own to make answer, tears the unopened paper, and rushes out to battle. This is strikingly dramatic.
The fourth and fifth acts, the evening and night of the eventful day, are devoted to his punishment of Florence: this being achieved by the simple and single-hearted nobleness with which he meets her meditated treachery. For, this becoming manifest, men bow and become enslaved to it; and Luria finds himself, being on the point of death, supreme once more.
Lur. So there’s one Florentine returns again!
Out of the genial morning company
One face is left to take into the night.
Again:
Lur. Another!—Luria goes not poorly forth!
If one could wait! The only fault’s with time:
All men become good creatures … but so slow!
Chief in the recovered company is the sturdy, honest, simple officer whom Luria had displaced in the Florentine command—good Puccio; but Domizia and even Braccio join it before the end. The Moor’s last instructions are given to Puccio, who, seeing what passionate care for Florence they include to the last, cannot believe he is taking flight for Pisa (as he had before imagined), and asks him where he is going:
Lur. Not so far, my Puccio,
But I shall get to hear and know and praise
(If you mind praise from your old captain yet)
Each happy blow you strike for Florence!
But has he a friend? asks honest Puccio.
Lur. One sure friend
Puc. Potent?
Lur. All potent.
Puc. And he is apprized?
Lur. He waits me.
This friend is Death. In the evening he had taken poison (all he had brought from his own land, he says, to help him), and at night he dies. But not till, schooled by the errors of others, his own mistake has also flashed upon him.
My own East!
How nearer God we were! He glows above
With scarce an intervention, presses close
And palpitatingly, His soul o’er ours!
We feel Him, nor by painful reason know!
The everlasting minute of creation
Is felt there; Now it is, as it was Then;
All changes at His instantaneous will,
Not by the operation of a law
Whose maker is elsewhere at other work!
His soul is still engaged upon his world—
Man’s praise can forward it, Man’s prayer suspend,
For is not God all-mighty?—To recast
The world, erase old things and make them new,
What costs it Him? So man breathes nobly there!
And inasmuch as feeling, the East’s gift,
Is quick and transient—comes, and lo, is gone—
While Northern Thought is slow and durable,
Oh! what a mission was reserved for me,
Who, born with a perception of the power
And use of the North’s thought for us of the East,
Should have stayed there and turned it to account,
Giving Thought’s character and permanence
To the too-transitory Feelings there—
Writing God’s messages in mortal words!
Instead of which, I leave my fated field
For this, where such a task is needed least,
Where all are born consummate in the art
I just perceive a chance of making mine,—
And then, deserting thus my early post,
I wonder that the men I come among
Mistake me!
This is writing of no ordinary kind; and if Mr. Browning’s tone of treatment were simpler, less remote, less abstrusely metaphysical, the stage would in him have found its noblest supporter in these latter days. When he divests himself of what clogs and obstructs him, and gets fairly into the region of uncontrollable emotion, he wields an extraordinary power over his subject and his readers. Few writers have equalled him in the intensity and individuality of his thoughts and emotions. As few have failed to surpass him in the ease and simplicity which are after all, perhaps, the highest charm of the highest order of poetry. But genius is to be thanked, not quarrelled with; and we may well doubt, in the case of such a writer as Mr. Browning, whether, if it had fewer faults, it would be so strong and original of its kind.
A Soul’s Tragedy is also dramatic: its first part comprising “what was called” the poetry of Chiappino’s Life, and the second its prose: each being so written. The piece is meant to wind up and conclude the dramatic series which Mr Browning has been for some years publishing with the title of Bells and Pomegranates: a title by which, he tells us in a brief preface, he meant to indicate “an endeavour towards something like an alternation, or mixture, of music with discoursing, sound with sense, and poetry with thought:” an endeavour exemplified excellently in this Soul’s Tragedy, and with a worldly wisdom and subtle perception of the differences which separate the real and unreal in poetry as well as prose, which will reward the pains it may cost the reader to arrive at it.
The book is dedicated to the author of the Imaginary Conversations. “I dedicate,” says Mr Browning, “these last attempts for the present at Dramatic poetry to a great Dramatic poet; ‘wishing what I write may be read by his light:’—if a phrase originally addressed, by not the least worthy of his contemporaries, to Shakespeare, may be applied here, by one whose sole privilege is in a grateful admiration, to Walter Savage Landor.”
[John Forster]
Reviewed:
Bells & Pomegranates. No. VIII. Luria; and A Soul’s Tragedy (RB), London: Edward Moxon, 1846.
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