R460718A. Pippa Passes.
The People’s Journal, 18 July 1846, pp. 38–40.
As reprinted in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 13, 398–400.
When a Poet—who by the cheapness of the form of his publication seems to invite the great public, and not the “fit and few” purchasers of the luxurious quartos that were—affixes to his series of Dramatic Poems such a title as Bells and Pomegranates, one of two consequences is natural: either that he shall be disregarded by the people as one speaking in parables not worth the unriddling, or that he shall be followed by some Interpreter, who shall invite the distant, and smooth the path for the timid, by pointing out what there is great, what there is beautiful, in works veiled—though the veil sparkle with fine gold and rubies—from the common gaze. To dismiss Mr. Browning as a writer who must needs be “put out of court,” because of a few strange individualities, is what, we imagine, no one would now think of doing. The days of slashing at a free rhyme or a plethoric stanza, of making an end of a conceit by sarcasm, are over. Perhaps we are grown too blindly loving and tolerant; not, however, in the present case, when we set about doing our poor best to display one of our noblest contemporary geniuses in all its strength of variety and passion. To talk to our friends of Mr. Browning’s Poems is a labour of love:—nor can it be unaccompanied with profit to all, unless the whole art of song, and the whole train of generous emotions it can excite, are to become a dead letter; or the Critic be as far from rightly appreciating his author as was the Edinburgh Reviewer, who thought he had “snuffed out” Wordsworth, with a bitterly-brief “This will never do.”
Mr. Browning is not clear. His obscurities, however, do not arise from affectation, but from the over-richness of a mind embossed and encrusted, so to say, with the learning and imagery of all schools, of all countries, of all periods—reflective rather than impulsive; and working rather by the accumulation than by the digestion of his materials. There is no want of originality, no purpose prepense to puzzle or to teaze, still less to “come over” the vulgar multitude with the Charlatan’s robe decked with mystical signs, which, in nine cases out of ten, are only made of tawdry tinsel. There is much of the man and his training in the explanation of his symbolical title, prefixed to the last of his series—The Soul’s Tragedy.
“I only meant,” says he, “to indicate an endeavour towards something like an alternation, or mixture of music with discoursing, sound with sense, poetry with thought, which looks too ambitious so expressed, so the symbol was preferred. It is little to the purpose that such is actually one of the most familiar of the many Rabbinical (and Patristic) acceptations of the phrase; because I confess that, letting authority alone, I supposed the bare words in such juxtaposition would sufficiently convey the desired meaning.”
How, then, shall we best deal with a writer at once so difficult, so full of meaning, and so sincere? By translation rather than criticism; by dilution as well as analysis. This manner of proceeding will make it impossible for us, in any attainable space, to lay before the reader the argument of all these eight pamphlets, every one of which is “full as an egg.” Nor, let us further premise, is there any family likeness in the class of subject, or scene, or story—however impossible it be (here we come upon a characteristic) for Mr. Browning to deny himself the introduction of some character almost superhuman in its grandeur, or delicacy, or depth. In one tale we are among the silk-winders of the Trevisan country; in another with our faces set towards the cedars of Lebanon: here dealing with the ambitions of a maiden sovereign; there with the ancestral pride of an English nobleman. In the Dramatic Romances and Lyrics, to which two numbers of the series are devoted, almost every clime, and country, and emotion, is touched. Now the scene is the Spanish cloister, with its miserable jealousies and rancorous hatreds; now the French tilt-yard, with the struggle betwixt the slanderous Count Gauthier and the loyal Count Gismond; now the quaint German town of Hamelin, with the pie-bald piper who charmed thence the rats; now the cell of the Poisoner of Old Paris, who could deal about sudden death in
A signet, a fan, mount, a filigree-basket;
now the tent of Saul, with the Rebellious Monarch wrapped in the mantle of his darkness, and leaning against the central prop. Enough: we have not indicated half the “changes of view” which our Magician can call up! Let us contentedly stand by as showman; and, with the best of our poor eloquence, describe one or two.
Here is “Pippa Passes”—a drama of dramas. The scene is laid in the Trevisan country, on the borders of the Italian Tyrol—a land of “corn, and wine, and oil”—of the mulberry and the chestnut, and gourds which lean over the crumbling whitish walls, and golden maize in the fields; with the great Lombard plain stretching along the horizon like a sea. There are haggard, dilapidated towns, too—Bassano, with its ivy-grown ramparts; Asolo, with its silk mills and silk winders—the noise of which, early in a morning, is as merry an awakening as can call up the slothful English traveller. At Asolo the silk-winders have one holiday in the year—on New Year’s Day—and our tale begins with an orphan-girl, Pippa, the best of the crew, as yet innocent and hopeful, springing out of her bed in “a large, mean, airy chamber,” and anxiously reckoning with herself how she is to get the most enjoyment out of this solitary holiday. The poor child!—there is a touch [p. 39→] of poetry and ambition in her fancies, which might have been hardly natural, save in an Italian, who, however cowardly, weak, or vicious, is rarely other than picturesque. She somehow feels—this poor Pippa—that she is nothing—of no use, of no comfort to any one in the world of Asolo. It is at once her plague and her immunity! But Youth has its own aids and helps. It can “make believe;” and Pippa will for this one day be of as much consequence as her neighbours—talking of whom with a certain half-arch, half-wistful curiosity, she sets forth on her ramble;—singing as she goes snatches of old ditties, hymns, quaint proverbs, carols in which some scrap of old legendary wisdom is hidden, and the like. We must follow her past the houses of some among the persons she has artlessly counted over to herself.
The first mansion Pippa passes is the green-house or shrub-house to the palace of Ottima, whose husband, Luca Gaddi, was a great silk proprietor; an aged, jealous, and tedious man. To him she had been unfaithful, for the sake of one Sebald, a German, whom the husband had rescued from starvation, and engaged to teach Ottima music. The two have crowned their shame by murdering the old man on New Year’s Eve, and are standing together: the wretched woman already finding it needful to dissuade her Paramour from certain remorseful thoughts and misgivings, by talking over their past risks, and painting sumptuously their present security, and the “goods laid up in store for many years.” What pictures we have in a few of their speeches! leaving, of course, the passionate ones untouched. Throwing open the window, and looking wearily out, Sebald says—
——Ay, thus it used to be!
Ever your house was, I remember, shut
Till mid-day—I observed that as I strode
On mornings through the vale here. Country girls
Were noisy, washing garments in the brook;
Herds drove the slow white oxen up the hills—
But no—your house was mute, would ope no eye,
And wisely. You were plotting one thing there,
Nature another outside. I looked up,
Rough, white wood shutters, rusty iron bars,
Silent as death, blind in a flood of light—
Oh! I remember.
And again, the woman’s eye (for the eye of Crime is ever cognizant) is arrested—even while she is talking the most fondly, and pouring the wine—by a passing figure.
“There trudges on his business from the Duomo,
Benet the Capuchin, with his brown hood
And bare feet—always in one place at church,
Close under the stone wall by the south entry:
I used to take him for a brown cold piece
Of the wall’s self, as out of it he rose
To let me pass. At first, I say, I used—
Now—so has that dumb figure fastened on me—
I rather should account the plastered wall
A piece of him, so chilly does it strike!”
As the dialogue proceeds, the Temptress almost succeeds in making her fellow-criminal forget the horror of his deed in the fascination of her beauty—when at that instant, without, the hymn of the little beggar-girl is heard—as Pippa passes the shrub-house, “All’s right with the world,” she sings, so long as “God’s in the heaven!” The child’s carol of contented trustfulness and cheerful religion sounds like a message of doom to the half-conscious man, already drunk and satiated with crime. He turns upon Ottima, he upbraids her rudely with having driven him to such straits—threatens, in the misery of his frenzy, to murder her—and the scene closes on his madness. So ends the first mission of the Angel Voice!
Noon, now, is coming on;—Pippa has left the shrub-house with its bloody secrets behind her, and is approaching a group of young sculptors and painters from Venice, who are lounging about a window, with a balcony, hard by a pomegranate clump. Among them are an Englishman, and Schramm, a dreamy German with a pipe in his mouth. Here, too, is mischief going on. The comrade of these wild fellows, Jules, a French artist, has affronted them—rebuked the sensuality of their careless youth by the spirituality of his ambition to live for the loftiest ends of Art alone. Such a coxcomb must be punished, brought down to their own level. Why should one no better clad than themselves dare to set up for superior virtue and refinement? They have planned a cunning vengeance, and are now waiting to see the event. It is this. They began to avenge themselves on his high-flown devotion to better aims than their debasing ones, by tormenting the poetical boy’s vanity—and thus generously: “Now,” owns one of the talkers near the pomegranate clump, “I happened to hear of a young Greek—real Greek—girl at Malamocco, white and quiet as an apparition, and fourteen years at farthest, daughter, so she swears, of that hag Natalia, who helps us to models at three lire an hour.” So poor “Jules received a scented letter—somebody had seen his Tydeus at the Academy—bade him persevere, would make herself known to him ere long. In his first answer he proposed marrying his monitress.” This is their wedding-day; and the malicious crew, having crammed the poor half-idiotic girl with a rhyme, by repeating which she is to disenchant the cheated Jules—are waiting to see the pair return from church. They come—“the bridegroom, half his hair in storm and half in calm, patted down over the left temple, like a frothy cup one blows on to cool it, and the same old blouse he murders the marble in.” One of the better-natured mischief-mongers hopes that the puppet who has been hired for the unworthy scheme, “won’t take it for earnest.” She looks pale;—in part uneasy, lest she should say her rhyme wrong—in part made aware by the earnest passion of her husband that she has done a grave thing—grave and irrevocable. That stillness, and that ghost-like paleness of hers, become so frightful, that the Bridegroom addresses her in rhapsodical passion; conjuring her, now that he has won her, not to melt away, nor to change before his eyes, but to remain by his side—to encourage him to new triumphs,—the Muse who has praised his old attempts! Phene is still mute: Jules becomes more impassioned—fears she will die. At last she begins to speak—so perplexed, she confesses, by his outburst of energy, that she has half forgotten what she had been engaged to repeat—a confession that Hatred not Love had palmed off a bride upon the poet-sculptor. She gets through her task stammeringly: for the superior nature of him to whom she has been united already exercises over her a certain unexplained influence. But at last all is made clear. It is clear to Jules how he has been tricked, and by whom—what sort of a creature he has married—but it is clear, too, to so noble-hearted a fellow as he is, that the poor girl must not be left to misery. The money hoarded for his two years’ journey in pursuit of Art shall be given to her. He cares for study no more! She shall not fall into bad hands, though she has been the instrument by which his hope has been broken to pieces—the “dew of his youth” dried up. He is breaking from her— [p. 40→] half-maddened, yet even in his misery greater than his tormentors—when Pippa passes, this time with a quaint ballad touching on Love’s true sacrifices and doings (very difficult, I must own, to understand clearly). The strain, however, rouses all the chivalrousness of a soul disposed to chivalry—exalts yet higher the poetry of an ambition which had failed owing to its poetical trustfulness. “Shall I call myself an Artist,” says he, “who think so much of breathing spirit into clay and marble, if I will not labour to kindle a spark of divine faith and love and virtue in a human soul?” He pauses—relents—will brave the ridicule—embrace the labour—do honour to the duty God has committed to him, though by the hands of Evil ones—will save and educate Phene—make of the wife in jest a wife in earnest—take her from among the foul crew with him. He says—
But I told you—did I not?—
Ere night we travel for your land—some isle
With the sea’s silence on it! Stand aside!
I do but break these paltry models up
To begin Art afresh.
With this good purpose Jules vanishes. Such is the second good deed of Pippa’s New Year’s Day ramble!
We must “bate at noon:” lest in unthreading this somewhat tangled skein of beautiful illustrations, we tire the patience of our friends, thus disobeying the sagacious precept of the good Quaker preacher—“Better lacking than loathing.” Some other week, possibly, we may see Pippa to the end of her holiday; or else turn our reading-glass on some other among Mr. Browning’s inventions. One last word in fairness. Let no one look into them who merely cares for easy-going verse, with the sense on the surface; and the rhythm making a music to step or dance to, and the imagery reviving old associations. Here, almost every phrase or figure is suggestive; the metre is full of broken and suspended cadences, and the store of allusions collected from sources remote and recondite. But those who are not deterred from a pleasure by the prospect of some labour cannot study these Bells and Pomegranates without being made nobler and better by their lesson. There is a room and a mission for the Mystical, no less than for the Clear, Poets!
Henry Fothergill Chorley
Reviewed:
Bells & Pomegranates. No. I. Pippa Passes (RB), London: Edward Moxon, 1841.
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