R641000A. Dramatis Personæ.
The Eclectic and Congregational Review, October 1864, pp. 372–389.
Listed in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 31, 344.
[Also reviewed in this article was Enoch Arden, &c. by Alfred Tennyson; this we omit.]
We are out-growning our classics in this go-a-head age; years ago, not so many years neither, you might safely quote a Greek or Roman legend to any man with a good coat on his back—not to speak of the large army of “poor scholars” who had only very old and greasy ones. Now crowds of well-dressed and (as the phrase goes) well-educated people know no more who Tithonus was than who is the present Grand Lama. How can such people be expected to read Dramatis Personæ? The Laureate perplexes them occasionally, but he is on the whole intelligible. Mr. Browning, on the contrary, is decidedly hard. Reading many of his poems is like solving difficult cubic equations; after you’ve worked a long time there are still impossible roots, “irrational quantities” which defy your best efforts at solution. Reading many of Browning’s poems is like coming suddenly into the midst of a conversation of two or three “æsthetic” young men who love to test one another with paradoxes. You might keep up with them perhaps, though the effort would be [p. 373→] painful, if you began with them and started fair: as it is, you know neither what the discussion is about nor the jargon in which it is carried on; all you can do is to admire the bright flashes of thought struck out, as it were, by chance, and to linger over the sweet flowers of fancy which are scattered here, there, and everywhere, as if the arguers were pelting one another with roses. Browning has none of Tennyson’s sweetness: he is coarser too—striving thereby to appear stronger. The wonderful rhythm of the Laureate is here replaced by a seemingly studied roughness—we say seemingly studied, because, at rare intervals, it gives place to a little bit of exquisite melody, as if some wild wind that had been all day scolding, shattering, tearing, were suddenly to blow across an Æolian harp. Again, Tennyson is always Tennyson; it is no use his trying (as in Will Waterproof) to be anybody else. His manner is always recognizable whatever his subject. But Browning, on the other hand, is a many-sided poet, a sort of mocking-bird among the bards. Here, for instance, is a bit of exaggerated Keats:—
Oh good gigantic smile o’ the brown old earth,
This autumn morning! How he sets his bones
To bask i’ the sun, and thrusts out knees and feet
For the ripple to run over in its mirth;
Listening the while, where on the heap of stones
The white breast of the sea-lark twitters sweet.
Very beautiful in its way, keeping close to that “modern Greek” style, which, in a somewhat unclassical way, gives life and thought to nature. The opening scene of A Death in the Desert, the most finished thing in the whole volume, is like Tennyson in his Œnone manner.
St. John lies a-dying in a cave in the desert.
I said, if one should wet his lips with wine
And slip the broadest plantain-leaf we find,
Or else the lappet of a linen robe
Into the water vessel, lay it right,
And cool his forehead just above the eyes,
The while a brother, kneeling either side,
Should clasp each hand and try to make it warm,
He is not so far gone but he might speak.
Three grown brethren and a boy are watching, while
Beyond and half-way up the mouth o’ the cave
The Bactrian convert, having his desire,
Kept watch, and made pretence to graze a goat
That gave us milk, on rags of various herb,
So that if any thief or soldier passed
(Because the persecution was aware)
Yielding the goat up promptly with his life,
Such man might pass on, joyful at a prize,
Nor care to pry into the cool o’ the cave. [p. 374→]
But neither the drop of wine, nor the damp cloth, nor a ball of rard which Valens breaks, avail to make him more than
——turn
And smile a little as a sleeper does
If any dear one call him, touch his face—
And smiles and loves, and will not be disturbed.
At last the boy,
Stung by the splendour of a sudden thought,
fetches from their crypt “the seventh plate of graven lead,” and reads from it, “I am the resurrection and the life.” Whereat the dying man sits up, and begins to talk, comparing himself to a burnt-out stick, on which if you breathe, the spark runs back and spreads itself through the whole length where the fire was. He dwells on the thought that when the ashes which keep awhile his semblance are scattered, no one will be left who saw and handled the Word of Life. Then, he speaks of the difficulties which grew up as doubters multiplied, and tells how he answered them. This is his answer (for instance) to the cavil, “Why have miracles ceased?”
I say that as the babe you feed awhile
Becomes a boy and fit to feed himself,
So minds at first must be spoon-fed with truth:
When they can eat, babe’s nurture is withdrawn.
I fed the babe whether it would or no:
I bid the boy or feed himself or starve.
I cried once, “That ye may believe in Christ,
Behold this blind man shall receive his sight.”
I cry now, “Urgest thou, for I am shrewd
And smile at stories, how John’s word could cure—
Repeat that miracle and take my faith?
I say, that miracle was duly wrought
When, save for it, no faith was possible.
Whether a change were wrought i’ the shows o’ the world,
Whether the change came from our minds which see
Of the shows o’ the world so much as and no more
Than God wills for his purpose—(what do I
See now, suppose you, there where you see rock
Round us?)—I know not; such was the effect,
So faith grew, making void more miracles
Because too much: they would compel, not help.
I say the acknowledgment of God in Christ
Accepted by thy reason, solves for thee
All questions in the earth and out of it,
And has so far advanced thee to be wise.
Would’st thou improve this to re-prove the proved?
In life’s mere minute, with power to use that proof,
Leave knowledge, and revert to how it sprung?
Thou has’t it; use it and forthwith, or die.”
We have quoted this passage at full length, because it con- [p. 375→] tains such an excellent protest against sensationalism, and such a lucid statement of (we fancy) Mr. Browning’s own view on the vexed question of miracles. The whole piece is argumentative in the same style; no attempt to describe the dying of St. John. He lifts off from men’s souls this,
Burden of the latest time,
and would consent even to tarry another hundred years, if there is any other doubt
Wherein my brothers struggling need a hand.
But he was dead .. and we five buried him
That eve. …
and he, the narrator, says
Lest the memory of this go quite
Seeing that I to-morrow fight the beasts
I tell the same to Phœbus, whom believe!
Cerinthus reads the MS., and is musing on it, when one adds that Christ must either be the illimitable God, or of all men wretchedest and most lost, seeing that He said He lived, and died to grow incorporate with all righteous souls—each one with His”—with which anti-Arian argument this remarkable poem ends.
About Too Late there is the same doubt as about James Lee, and others. You are not certain that you are following the poet’s meaning; you can’t help fancying you are putting in an unauthorized explanation of your own. This feeling is provoking enough in the case of poor Edgar Poe, though, in reading him, you have the consolation that very possibly he had no particular meaning himself. Mr. Browning has a meaning you are sure, but have you caught it? In Too Late the lady married the wrong person, jilting the true poet and man of mind; she dies six years afterwards; her husband, the poor weak creature
Who rhymed her his rubbish nobody read,
Loved her, and doved her,
is “tagging her epitaph;” while the strong man who should have had her is wild with mad sorrow and self-reproach, that he let her go so easily—
I ought to have done more
Why men do more to deserve a friend,
Be rid of a foe, grow rich, grow wise,
Nor folding their arms stare fate in the face.
But in the last stanza the lady stands before him,
Warm too and white too: would this wine
Had washed all over that body of yours
Ere I drank it, and you down with it, thus. [p. 376→]
Is it her spirit? or has she not died at all, but only run away from her husband; or is the marriage merely an idie dream? Who shall say? We can “e’en just sort oursen” (as they say in the North), and affix whichever meaning jumps best with our frame of mind at the time of reading.
Abt Vogler to his organ is a fine wild laudation of music. We quoted largely from it three months ago. All poet’s and painter’s work is at best “triumphant art.”—
But here is the finger of God, a flash of the will that can,
Existent behind all laws, that made them, and lo! they are;
And I know not if save in this, such a gift be allowed to man,
That out of three sounds he frame, not a fourth sound, but a star.
Consider it well: each tone of our scale in itself is nought;
* * * * * *
Give it to me to use; I mix it with two in my thought;
And, there! ye have heard and seen; consider and bow the head.
There are wonderful lines in the piece; but why should Mr. Browning have chosen to write it in rhyming “longs and shorts,” with an accentuation too, which, by its utter unclassicalness, will not tend to increase our faith in the possibility of reproducing in English the classical metres.
Who can tell us what James Lee means? A girl, wofully ill-taught—for she goes dead against all the dear old familiar classic metaphors, when she says,
The vines writhe in rows, each impaled on its snake,
(these are French vines; which somewhat, perhaps, excuses the very unpleasant figure)—finds her lover (a painter-lover, seemingly) growing cold,
This turns to a fault,—there! there!
That I do love, watch too long;
And wait too well, and weary and wear,
And ’tis all an old story, and my despair
Fit subject for some new song.
She communes with the wind along the sea-shore:—
Still ailing, wind? wilt be appeased or no?
Which needs the other’s office, thou or I?
Dost want to be disburdened of a woe,
And can, in truth, my voice untie
Its links, and let it go?
Art thou a dumb wronged thing that would be righted,
Entrusting thus thy cause to me? Forbear.
No tongue can mend such pleadings; faith, requited
With falsehood—love, at last aware
Of scorn—hopes, early slighted.
* * I know not any tone
So fit as thine to falter forth a sorrow. [p. 377→]
This is very beautifully put, even if we insist on seeing the germ of it in Shelley’s Ode to the West Wind. And in this style the “lyrical drama” rolls on, helped forward by the somewhat irrelevant “headings,” to the short scenes into which it is broken up. The poor thing feels she is ugly, unworthy of him—she wishes a face would rise up, when he thought of her, like his face seems to her,
With eyes as dear in their due degree,
Much such a mouth, and as bright a brow,
’Till you saw yourself, while you cried “’tis she!”
And if one touch of such a love for me
Came in a word or look of yours.
Could I fancy “As I feel, thus feels He;”
Why, fade you might to a thing like me,
And your hair grow these coarse hanks of hair,
You might turn myself, should I know or care,
When I should be dead of joy, James Lee?
He is so handsome; his very hand so perfect that she must draw it; and, kissing it first, lays the red chalk between her lips,
With soul to help if the mere lips fail,
Kisses all right where the drawing ails,
Kisses fast the grace that somehow slips,
Still from one’s soulless finger-tips.
But she has sacrificed herself,
There is nothing to remember in me,
Nothing I ever said with a grace,
Nothing I did that you cared to see,
Nothing I was that deserves a place
In your mind, now I leave you, set you free.
The burden is sure unequally divided; the man suffers little or nothing, the woman breaks her heart; there are many James Lees, and many “little girls with the poor coarse hand,” of whom they tire sooner than they fancied they should.
All this and more comes from some young man’s pride
Of power to see—in failure and mistake,
Relinquishment, disgrace on every side—
Merely examples for his sake,
Helps to his path untried.
A cruel species of anatomy, which demands living “subjects,” and works chiefly on heart and nerves.
Such is our reading of James Lee; but it does not stand alone in the book as a doubtful poem. Obscurity is Mr. Browning’s “differentia.” Either he cannot help it, or he purposely affects it. We cannot say of him that he is a more imaginative poet than the Laureate, but he is certainly vastly more fanciful; and since (as we said) he does not stop to tell you the [p. 378→] beginning of his thought, you often get hopelessly lost amid an intricate maze of fancies and conceits. There is a precious truth in this from Rabbi Ben Ezra, which, our readers will remember, we gave at length last July. It is not what the world calls our “work” whereby we shall be judged, but by—
All instincts immature,
All purposes unsure,
That weighed not as his work, yet swelled the man’s amount:
Thoughts hardly to be packed
Into a narrow act,
Fancies that broke through language and escaped;
All I could never be,
All men ignored in me,
This I was worth to God, whose wheel the pitcher shaped.
We must leave our readers to guess, if they do not consult the volume, how this clay-and-potter view of man is dexterously made to work in with a free-will which ought always to be looking upward.
The longest poem in the book is Mr. Sludge the Medium; and we shall quote from it at some length, and give a full analysis of it with a view to show how plainly and with what direct purpose Browning can write when he thinks fit. A severe satire on our “civilisation” in this growth of absurd beliefs, which in America and England have gained so many adherents among educated people. To think that in the age of electric telegraphs and steam—everything, when men are making the Suez Canal, and fighting with “Monitors” and Whitworth guns, one should have to pause and confute such rubbish as that which Mr. Home’s votaries believed. Confuted it must be, and no one could have done the work better than Mr. Browning. His Mr. Sludge the Medium is a clever exposé of the absurdities of spiritualism. The medium and his master quarrel; the latter is indignant that Sludge has cheated him. Sludge at first implores mercy; says it was only this once; but soon, taking heart, turns the tables on his employer by threatening to explain in Greely’s newspaper, how the whole system of lies is worked out. The “investigator” gets frightened, offers ever so many V-notes, and will pay Sludge’s passage out to England if he’ll hold his tongue. Then follows from Sludge a justification of himself; how he was forced into being what he is by the intense folly of people in general. Men, ’cute enough in all things else, are duped the moment you talk of “the supernatural.” A party, after dinner, are talking of shares and five pound notes; a boy, listening through the keyhole, bursts in, and cries—“I’ve got a V-note;” he gets kicked, and is asked, “where did you steal it?” But if the same men are [p. 379→] talking about ghosts, the Cock Lane ghost, for instance, or John Wesley’s, and the boy says, “Sir, I saw a ghost,” straightway he is made much of:—
Tell it out!
Don’t fear us! take your time and recollect!
Sit down first: try a glass of wine, my boy!
Does the boy blunder, blurt out this, blab that;
Break down in the other, as beginners will?
That’s the bad memory or the natural shock;
His very hesitating proves his honesty.
This is how “mediums” are made, and the process is well drawn out. The first half-lie, growing to a seven-feet thick lie; the impossibility of going back, of telling people you have made fools of them, “would you be more courageous?”
I lied, Sir,—there, I got up from my gorge
On offal in the gutter; and preferred
Your canvass-backs. I took the carver’s size,
Measured his modicum of intelligence,
Tickled him on the cockles of his heart
With a raven feather, and next week found myself
Sweet and clean, dining daintily, dizened smart,
Set on a stool buttressed by ladies’ knees,
Every soft smiler calling me her pet,
Encouraging my story to uncoil,
And creep out of its hole, inch after inch;
“How last night, I no sooner snug in bed,
Tucked up, just as they left me,—then came raps!
While a light whisked.” ..“Shaped somewhat like a star?”
“Well, like some sort of stars, ma’am.” “So we thought!
And any voice”? “Not yet.” “Try hard, next time,
If you can’t hear a voice; we think you may:
At least the Pennsylvanian medium did.”
Oh, next time comes the voice!—“Just as we hoped!”
Are not the hopers proud now, pleased, profuse
Of the natural acknowledgment? Of course!
So off we push, illy-oh-yo, trim the boat,
On we sweep with a cataract ahead,
We’re midway to the Horse-shoe: stop, who can,
The dance of bubbles gay about our prow!
Experiences become worth waiting for;
Spirits now speak up, tell their inmost mind,
And compliment the medium properly,
Concern themselves about his Sunday coat,
See rings on his hand with pleasure. Ask yourself
How you’d receive a course of treats like these!
It is easy work too, to fool men thus—
I’m spared all further trouble; all’s arranged;
Your circle does my business; I may rave
Like an epileptic dervish in the books,
Foam, fling myself flat, rend my clothes to shreds; [p. 380→]
No matter: lovers friends and countrymen
Will lay down spiritual laws, read wrong things right
By the rule of reverse. If Francis Verulam
Styles himself Bacon, spells the name beside
With a y and a k, says he drew breath in York,
Gave up the ghost in Wales, where Cromwell reigned,
(As, sir, we somewhat fear he was apt to say,
Before I found the useful book that knows,)
Why, what harm’s done? The circle smiles apace,
“It was not Bacon, after all, do you see!
We understand; the trick’s but natural:
Such spirits’ individuality
Is hard to put in evidence; they incline
To gibe and jeer, these undeveloped sorts.”
Or, else, the excuse is, that the medium is an imperfect one—
What’s a medium? he’s a means,
Good, bad, indifferent, still the only means
Spirits can speak by; he may misconceive,
Stutter and stammer—he’s their sludge and drudge,
Take him or leave him; they must hold their peace,
Or else, put up with having knowledge strained
To half-expression through his ignorance.
When people are determined to be made fools of, it is not easy to hinder them: for the grossest ignorance, the wildest mistakes, for everything a reason can be assigned, which more than satisfies the faithful—
In short, a hit proves much, a miss proves more;
and if an importunate sceptic comes in to the “select party of spiritualists,” why, he gets bullied for his pains—“shame! to outrage a poor boy, exposed by our good faith”—and has to slink off abashed. The medium is a cheat, but then it is the fools, his patrons, who make him so:—“It’s too bad, I say, ruining a soul so!” They lead him on from bad to worse. He, a poor excitable creature, has really had fancies, and heard noises in his ears, to which his vanity and their praises led him to assign a meaning, &c.
......Then, at last, urged by their importunities, he jogs the table—it is so easy to do a trick when you’ve practised it.....
Why, just this biscuit that I chip,
Did you ever watch a baker toss one flat
To the oven? Try and do it! Take my word,
Practise but half as much, while limbs are lithe,
To turn, shove, tilt a table, crack your joints,
Manage your feet, dispose your hands aright,
Work wires that twitch the curtains, play the glove
At the end of your slipper—then put out the lights,
And there, there, all you want you’ll get, I hope!
I found it slip, easy as an old shoe. [p. 381→]
It is the ethics of spiritualism with which we chiefly find fault. It makes all concerned cheats, intentional or not, and above all, it degrades our idea of God and spirit to a depth which to any old Greek would have been simply inconceivable. And then what working for base ends on our best feelings. Talk of tests, says the poet, how can you test the truth or falsehood of an experiment, how be on your guard against collusion,
When you are told that what produced the raps
Was just a certain child who died, you know,
And whose last breath you thought your lips had felt?
“Eh? That’s a capital point, ma’am,” Sludge begins
At your entreaty with your dearest dead,
“The little voice set lisping once again,
The tiny hand made feel for yours once more,
The poor lost image brought back, plain as dreams,
Which image, if a word had chanced recall,
The customary cloud would cross your eyes,
Your heart return the old tick, pay its pang!
A right mood for investigation, this!
One’s at one’s ease with Saul and Jonathan,
Pompey and Cæsar; but one’s own lost child....”
All the “little touches of truth” which mediums retail are, in Mr. Browning’s opinion, only “facts out of the drift of facts,” which any one who is always on the qui vive is sure to learn, nay which anybody who sits still and listens is pretty certain to pick up plenty of. He tells a story of a Roman cobbler who sat at his work all day—
Never asked questions, stopped to listen or look,
Nor lifted nose from lapstone; let the world
Roll round his three-legged stool, and news run in
The ears he hardly seemed to keep prick’d up.
Yet he hears so much that it is worth the Papal government’s while to keep him permanently in their pay.
He’d engage tell you some one little thing
Of some one man, which led to many more,
(Because one truth leads right to the world’s end,)
And make you that man’s master—when he dined
And on what dish, where walked to keep his health
And to what street. His trade was, throwing thus
His sense out, like an ant-eater’s long tongue,
Soft, innocent, warm, moist, impossible,
And when it was crusted o’er with creatures—slick,
Their juice enriched his palate.
Let us be thankful that the spy-system is so little developed among us, that human ant-eaters of this type are rare in these islands. They are the strength of continental despotisms, [p. 382→] political and religious. Among some races there would seem to be an innate love of playing the spy: Roman delatores, council of ten with their informers and informers on the informers, mouchards, secret police of all kinds, would fare but poorly did they not ply their craft in a congenial atmosphere. If anything could naturalize the spy system among us it would be the spread of spiritualism, the necessity laid on the operator and his medium of ferreting out scraps of information respecting those on whom they practise.
Very terrible is the cynicism in which Sludge grows up. His master supports him against all carping sceptics.
He may cheat at times;
That’s in the medium-nature, thus they’re made,
Vain and vindictive, cowards, prone to scratch.
And so all cats are; still a cat’s the beast,
You coax the strange electric sparks from out,
By rubbing back its fur; not so a dog,
Nor lion nor lamp; ’tis the cat’s nature, sir!
Why not the dog’s? Ask God, who made the beasts!
* * * * * *
He’s stuff to make a medium. Bless your soul
’Tis these hysteric hybrid half-and-halfs,
Equivocal worthless vermin yield the fire!
We must take such as we find them, ’ware their tricks,
Wanting their service.
“Cheat others if you can, me, if you dare!”
And, my wise sir, I dared
Did cheat you first, made you cheat others next.
You used me?
Have not I used you, taken full revenge?
And so he grows insolent in cynicism, scorning the fools he has to deal with, hating the “operator” who thinks he has been making a tool of him—
Don’t talk of gratitude to me! For what?
For being treated as a showman’s ape,
Encouraged to be wicked and make sport.
Fret or sulk, grin or whimper, any mood
So long as the ape be in it and no man—
Curse your superior, superintending sort,
Who, since you hate smoke, send up boys that climb
To cure your chimney, bid a medium lie
To sweep you truth down! Curse your women too,
Your insolent wives and daughters, that fire up
Or faint away if a male hand squeeze theirs,
Yet to encourage Sludge, may play with Sludge
As only a medium, only the kind of thing
They must humour, fondle .... Oh, to misconceive
Were too preposterous! But I’ve paid them out.
What a training! Well may poor Sludge exclaim:—
It’s too bad, I say, ruining a soul so! [p. 383→]
We have said a great deal anent “Mr. Sludge the Medium,” for it is plain sailing throughout (and, you know, gentle reader, we critics and commentators always eschew the difficult, the incomprehensible—this has been well exemplified in all the reviews of Dramatis Personæ—who has ventured to explain James Lee?); but, chiefly, because, in Mr. Sludge, the poet is enforcing a much-needed lesson. This hankering after the supernatural is growing stronger and stronger as the bands of true faith are, for many, being relaxed—your unbeliever is ever superstitious. Dives, who never felt duty nor acted up to responsibility, Dives it is who thinks “one who rose from the dead” will be a more potent teacher than Moses and the prophets. Mesmerism was an out-growth of the godlessness of the last century. Spiritualism fills the same place now. To think of “clergymen” taking the thing by the hand, and writing grave books about table-turning, and asking the spirit where some neighbour of loose life, recently dead, now is, while ladies faint as the answer, “I’d rather not say,” is rapped out—all this would be laughable were it not pitiable both in itself and in its results. Spiritualism leads Sludge to Fichteism, to a hard Calvinistic view of special providences—very much like the theory of the world which Caliban puts into the mouth of his god Setebos. Men are billiard-balls on the world-table.
Some unseen agency, outside the world
Prompteth its puppets to do this or that.
You talk of “private mercies,” of missing your handkerchief, and losing, while looking for it, the train.
Saving your precious self from what befel
The thirty-three whom Providence forgot.
Why should not I live by signs, and say that, if I spy Charles’s Wain at midnight, it warns me to have my hair cut to-morrow? Remember—
Sludge is of all importance to himself.
The creature really acts on his signs and omens, and sticks to it that they don’t fail oftener than other rules—for judging character at any rate. He is the child of Providence, and so must expect to find the suit and service which sons and heirs get; and if you ask,—
Shall the Heaven of Heavens stoop to such child’s play?
He tells you the old-world notion that Providence only dealt with the grand and vast is exploded, “modern discovery” shews us that— [p. 384→]
Great things are made of little things,
And little things go lessening till at last
Comes God behind them * * *
The small becomes the dreadful and immense.
The Name comes close behind a stomach-cyst
That simplest of creations, which just lives
And feels; and could do neither, we conclude,
If simplified still further one degree.
As to special providences—
You’d fain distinguish between gift and gift,
Washington’s oracle and Sludge’s itch
O’ the elbow when at whist he ought to trump?
With Sludge it’s too absurd? Fine, draw the line
Somewhere, but, sir, your somewhere is not mine.
It is a strange mental analysis, this, of a man who knows he’s cheating, takes a strange pleasure in it—says
There’s secret sweet self-sacrifice
In any desecration of one’s soul
To a worthy end;
and deems it a pity
To let truth’s lump rot stagnant for the lack
Of a timely helpful lie to leaven it.
You put a chalk egg under the hen; I’ve told my lie and seen truth follow—besides, I cheat in self-defence; everybody does it: my cheating, too, Mr. Operator, how it has “completed your life,” else so poor, so cabin’d, cribb’d, confined; “you’re supplemented, made a whole at last,” no more hard work for scanty pay, but abundance, both of realities and fancies, for you now. Further yet, all poetry, all history is a sham;
How many lies did it require to make
The portly truth you here present us with?
May well be asked of every writer; and why should not I, Sludge, invent too?
We said Mr. Sludge was plain: so he is compared to most of our modern Persius’s enigmatic oracular utterances: but even here it is not all clear. Does Mr. Browning, for instance, mean to deny all special providences, or is he only laughing at the way in which Sludge and Co. make such truths contemptible? We presume the latter: for our poet claims to be orthodox. Take his Legend of Pornic—about a beautiful girl of high degree, whose only fault was too much pride in her lovely golden hair, and who, dying, prayed that it might not be cut off when she was dead: they bury her; and years on years after some children playing in the church pick out a double louis d’or from a chink in her grave stone. The priest steps forward, [p. 385→] persuades them to search further, and they bring up thirty heavy gold coins. His reverence spends them in building a new altar, and says masses for her soul whom too great pride of beauty had hitherto kept out of heaven. Thus she is saved by a strange miracle: part of the very hair she set such store by is changed into veritable gold, and this gold applied to holy purposes accomplishes her release. It is a wild story, not modelled on a high type among expiation theories. Mr. Browning, however, shows himself, as we said, severely orthodox, giving us such lines as these:
The candid incline to surmise of late
That the Christian faith may be false, I find;
For our Essays and Reviews’ debate
Begins to tell on the public mind,
And Colenso’s words have weight:
I still, to suppose it true, for my part,
See reasons and reasons; thus, to begin,
’Tis the faith that launch’d point-blank her dart
At the head of a lie—taught Original Sin,
The corruption of man’s heart.
We have said that Sludge’s view of Providence somewhat resembles that indicated by Caliban in the piece called Natural Theology in the Island, in which Shakespeare’s “most delicate monster,” Prospero’s drudge, gives out his views as to the world’s government. There is a strange fascination in this poem: it is more finished, more easy to understand, and deals withal with far more important questions than many of the smaller pieces. And yet the feeling which comes over us as we read it is one of intense melancholy; we think of Romanism and Mormonism, and a great deal of our popular Protestantism, and feel what a grim satire the poet has been putting forth on us all. For Caliban upon Setebos, or, Natural Theology in the Island is a quaint homily on the text “thou thoughtest I was even such an one as thyself.” All human religions are, they tell us, necessarily anthropomorphic. Caliban’s God is in like manner Calibanish. Here is a picture of the monster in his study:
Will sprawl, now that the heat of day is best,
Flat on his belly in the pit’s much mire,
With elbows wide, fists clenched to prop his chin;
And, while he kicks both feet in the cool slush,
And feels about his spine small eft-things course,
Run in and out each arm, and make him laugh;
And now a flower drops with a bee inside,
And now a fruit to snap at, crash and crunch;
He talks to his own self, howe’er he please,
Touching that other whom his dam called God,
Because to talk of him vexes Prospero. [p. 386→]
Caliban thinks Setebos
Dwelleth i’ the cold of the morn,
he made it, and the sun to match—but not the stars; the stars otherwise. All this creating came of his being cold and ill at ease.
The “potter and clay” figure pleases Mr. Browning: here it is set forth with terrible cynicism.
He cannot make his mate—as well have made himself; so “in envy, listlessness or sport” he makes things weaker than himself in most points, stronger in a few—
Things he admires and mocks too—that is it.
Because, so brave, so better though they be,
It nothing skills if he begin to plague.
Just as if I, Caliban, “could make a live bird out of clay” and send him off to yon rock-top to nip me off the horns of the saucy grigs up there that won’t mind me. Well, if he snapped his clay leg in the work and lay stupid-like—why, I should laugh, and if he began to weep and beseech that I would
Bid his poor leg smart less or grow again,
why, according to my whim, I might give him three legs or pluck the other off,
And leave him.
Lessoned he was mine and merely clay . . . . . .
Were this no pleasure, lying in the thyme,
Drinking the mash, with brain become alive,
Making and marring clay at will? So he.
What a fearful insight into the origin of old idolatries, and even of old philosophies, this gives us. “The world, with all in it, is the play of the Divine being,” says one; “Everything, as fast as it is made is swept along into the furnace-throat of Siva, the creator and destroyer,” says another. A little humiliating to reflect that what we quietly accepted as grand half-truths, gleams of light vouchsafed to great minds in early times, may just as reasonably be regarded as “the whimsies of a reeling brain.” The theory used to be that man worked up from the savage to the civilized state—so said Horace and the Greeks before him. Christianity and natural religion alike seemed to have thoroughly overthrown this; but geology with its fossil Gauls and Danes is supposed to set it up again. Well, Caliban on Setebos goes a long way to pull it down once more. We see a savage who, in all he does and thinks, coarsely caricatures the being whom he hates; we see the way in which man may, nay, must degenerate, if removed from “the [p. 387→] influences of civilization”—from that subtle, refining, and vivifying element which makes a community so much more, for all purposes of progress and intellectual growth and even physical development, than a mere collection of individuals.
Caliban’s God is partly like himself, cruel, capricious, partly formed on recollections of his mother’s teaching, and scraps overheard from Prospero.
His wilfulness shows nor right nor wrong in Him,
Nor kind nor cruel, He is strong, and Lord,
Am strong myself compared to yonder crabs
That march now from the mountain to the sea;
Let twenty pass and stone the twenty first,
Loving not, hating not, just choosing so.
Say, the first straggler that boasts purple spots
Shall join the file one pincer twisted off,
Say, this bruised fellow shall receive a worm,
And two worms he whose nippers end in red;
As it likes me each time I do; so He,
Well then, supposeth he is good, i’ the main
Placable if his mind and ways were guessed
But rougher than his handiwork.
Many of his creations are “worthier than himself,” so he envies them—his only consolation being
That they unless through Him do nought at all.
Just as I might make an elder pipe which should give the exact scream of the jay, and so draw little birds within a stone’s throw; but if the pipe could talk and should begin to boast
I catch the birds,
I make the cry my maker cannot make
With his great round mouth.
Would I not smash it with my foot? So He.
We think it very fine when Herodotus says φθόνερον καὶ ταραχῶδες τὸ Θεῖον, how does the same view of the Godhead strike us when enunciated by Caliban?
The monster too has stumbled on that notion of an elder race of Gods to which the mythologies have accustomed us; he has his
What knows—that something over Setebos
That made Him, or He, may be, found and fought,
Worsted, drove off, and did to nothing, perchance.
There may be something quiet o’er His head,
Out of his reach, that feels nor joy nor grief,
Since both derive from weakness in some way.
Perhaps, after all, what we see is only a bauble-world made by Setebos
Out of very spite to ape your real,
Taking His mirth with make-believes. [p. 388→]
. . Building up and destroying at his own pleasure. Therefore (mark the inference, it is at the root of all idolatries) propitiate Him. But how? I must judge of Him by myself: I spare the squirrel that steals a nut from under my thumb and bites stoutly when I threaten; and I spare the urchin which in its terror rolls up into a ball and pretends to be dead. The two ways please. So He …
Then comes out, too, the horrible fear which poisons the life of all heathens, aye, and of a good many Christians too. Caliban
Moans in the sun, gets under holes to laugh,
And never speaks his mind, save housed as now.
If he caught me here, I’d cut a finger off—
or, of my three kids burn the best, hoping the while that some day “the Quiet” will catch and carry our Setebos, or else he’ll grow decrepit and doze.
A thunder-storm interrupts his maunderings. He thinks “His raven hath told Him all.” .. “Fool to gibe at Him.” … And so he grovels, and vows not to taste a whelk for a month, so he may scape.
Very sad the feelings with which we rise from these wild fancies of the delicate monster. To think that, so many thousand years after Christ is come in the flesh, the God of such a vast number even of so-called Christians is more like to Setebos than to the Father of Lights, in Whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning.
One lovely little picture, just to cheer us before we bid farewell to Mr. Browning. We need it, just as one who had been looking an hour at Salvator Rosa, or Rembrandt, or Cattermole, might crave for a glimpse of Raphael or Fra Angelico. Here it is, pure Browning of the old sort ..
If one could have that little head of hers
Painted upon a background of pale gold,
Such as the Tuscan’s early art prefers!
No shade encroaching on the matchless mould
Of those two lips, which should be opening soft
In the pure profile, not as when she laughs,
For that spoils all; but rather as if aloft
Yon hyacinth, she loved so, leaned its staff’s
Burden of honey-coloured buds to kiss
And capture ’twixt the lips apart for this.
How very Browningish are those last three lines; quaint, imaginative, reckless, he is a true poet, and his place is high up towards the very top of Parnassus. But he is not Tennyson; neither will ever be popular with “the masses.” The Laureate’s simplicity is that of the most consummate art, uneducated people [p. 389→] don’t appreciate it; besides, he is allusive, and in this pushing age when the scarcely-washed are constantly forcing their way to the front, to be allusive is to cut yourself off from many of the most active “minds” of the day. It is a fashion to admire Tennyson among many who would be not a little puzzled to explain him. We believe that, of the two, Browning has perhaps the larger number of real worshippers. When a man does love him he loves him with a will. It is like a taste for olives, or green figs, or mulberries. Strange that southern fruits, in particular, should command this sort of partial yet more intense liking. One does not take the trouble to understand him for nothing; having read hard, as you must, for knowledge of what he means, you come to read him, to quote him, to think in his grooves for real affection’s sake. .. This last volume will, however, widen the base of the pedestal on which Mr. Browning’s fame stands. Mr. Sludge will approve itself to a good many who looked shyly on our poet heretofore; so will Caliban, and the Death in the Desert; while the old admirers will delight of course in James Lee and the like. .. The whole volume is worthy to stand by Enoch Arden. A grand year this in which two such volumes have been added to our “standard poets.”
And a grand work, too, that which these two great minds are doing, for, though Browning is not “popular,” though he must only look “fit audience to find and few,” yet of him and his likes we may say “custodiunt custodes,” they keep the thinkers going, preserve the intellectual salt of England from losing its savour and becoming prosaic. Such poets do not act directly on the masses, but they move those by whom the tens of thousands who every year grow up to the appreciation of something higher than Reynold’s Miscellany, are moved—they teach the teachers. And as for Tennyson, besides his large following of fair-weather friends, he has a growing circle of real worshippers who worship him with the understanding. He is becoming a power in the nation, already he influences not a few only, but a whole class—the young idlers, jeunesse dorée, so numerous in this age when so many men make fortunes, not for themselves, but for their children. He will never be popular like Burns; he can only affect the lower strata of society by infiltration through other men’s minds, but he is getting to hold the place which Byron held a generation and more ago; and he is better than Byron, his tone more wholesome, his influence a sign of
Sweeter manners, purer laws.
Reviewed:
Dramatis Personæ (RB), London: Chapman & Hall, 1864.
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