R650200A. Dramatis Personæ.
The New Monthly Magazine, February 1865, pp. 186–194.
Listed in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 31, 358.
It used to be the fashion to say that Robert Browning could not be understood at all. Those of his admirers who are blind to his peculiarities now say that he can be understood with ease. Between the two extremes lies the truth. To say that his thoughts are quickly fathomed is indeed no compliment to him; and saying it will send no earnest reader to his pages. He requires careful study: the trouble without which no good thing is to be got at. To say that he does not is to compare his work with the work of his weaker contemporaries—
Things done, that took the eye and had the price,
O’er which, from level stand,
The low world laid its hand,
Found straightway to its mind, could value in a trice.
The student and beholder must spend much time in rightly valuing that which the artist has fashioned. A single hearing of “Mirella” will give no true idea of Gounod’s genius: Holman Hunt is not to be known by a rapid survey of “The After-Glow in Egypt.” Nor is Mr. Browning to be judged by a careless reading of two or three of his poems. To read them once is as if we were to go by night to see a cathedral. There would come to us immediately some sense of its grandeur and of its mystery. We should see the outline of its towers and spire. But the tracery of its front, the colouring of its windows, the play of shadow and sunshine among its sculptured stones, we should wholly lose. To see these to perfection we must walk round the church many times, and watch it by different lights. To learn the strength and beauty of Mr. Browning’s poems they must be read many times, and in many moods. More than this: it requires differing intellects justly to discern his abounding beauties. The minds of men, in ever-varying forms, are mirrored in his works. The reflection that pleases one may not please the other. Or, if it please because of its beauty, bounded vision will prevent the recognition of its truth. There is a delicate tinge of melancholy in the lines of “Evelyn Hope,” that may seem too fanciful to those who can duly estimate the pathos and passion of “In a Year;” lovers of the gentle Pippa may not admire the erring and impulsive Mildred; those who feel such lusty life as beats through the frame of Fra Lippo Lippi may know little of the resignation of Andrea del Sarto; while followers in the steps of Blougram, the modern materialist Bishop, will hardly understand the hopes and fears that filled the heart of the Greek poet, Cleon.
We do not purpose to consider, in this paper, each poem in “Dramatis Personæ.” We shall seek rather to notice some of the characteristics of the book. Throughout the book there runs, we think, one air; and upon [p. 187→] it there are many variations. It is not present to the exclusion of other airs; but it is oftenest and plainest heard.
When pain ends, gain ends, too,—
that might be the motto. Mr. Browning contends that by enduring sorrow—sometimes by suffering wrong—a man may learn more than he can ever learn by pleasure and prosperity. “Is there nought better than to enjoy?” he is for ever asking. And the answer he gives in varying forms, whose essence is always the same.
Calm years, exacting their accompt
Of pain, mature the mind.
He says this in “James Lee.” And the old Jew, Rabbi Ben Ezra, who finds his strength in quietness and confidence, thus exhorts to courage and endurance:
Be our joys three-parts pain!
Strive, and hold cheap the strain;
Learn, nor account the pang; dare, never grudge the throe.
And Abt Vogler,* with his much-loved music always in his thoughts, giving strange turns to his phrases, asks:
Why rushed the discords in, but that harmony should be prized?
The abbot believes that our failure here is but “a triumph’s evidence for the fulness of the days;” and in God’s will that we shall strain and strive through all the years of our life he is content to acquiesce. In his words there is the expression of simple contentment, as in the words of Rabbi Ben Ezra there is the expression of quiet joy. The old Jew is persuaded that, good as the days have proved to him already, “the best is yet to be.” He deems that wisdom comes with age, that of God’s plan for working the world “youth shows but half,” and that we must patiently endure His act, “see all, nor be afraid.” A sermon—and a better one than we are often fortunate enough to listen to—may be read in the noble lines of “Rabbi Ben Ezra.” An optimist, the old strong-hearted Jew has been called; and happy he must have been. We should do well to copy his unfaltering courage, to learn a lesson from his unquestioning faith and his undisturbed repose. But the lesson is hard to learn in our time, when so many can but “faintly trust the larger hope,” and mount with such uncertain steps
the great world’s altar stairs,
That slope through darkness up to God.
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* Abt Vogler’s tune, extemporised in the instrument of his invention, may be found in some ecclesiastical music-books. Mr. Browning exactly describes it.
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Though told in a lighter strain than are the thoughts of Rabbi Ben Ezra, the tale of “Gold Hair,”—a legend of Pornic, by the Loire—has a darker moral. “Gold Hair” is the story of a girl who was supposed by her friends to be too good for this life, and whose only fault, as they believed, was that “she knew her gold hair’s worth.” Dying, she begged [p. 188→] that in her coffin her hair might be left untouched; and her wish was granted. Years afterwards, when the pavement of Pornic Church was to be repaired, a mass of louis d’or—the price of her secret fall—were found wrapped in the folds of her mouldering hair. The priest, to whom the strange news was brought, dismissed it from his mind with the comment,
Saints tumble to earth with so slight a tilt!
But Mr. Browning has other words for us, suggested by this discovery of sin in one who had been held to be so pure. He has hitherto hurried on with his story, and hurriedly we may have read it; but now he pulls us up with an old and forgotten truth, very forcibly expressed:
Why deliver this horrible verse,
As the text of a sermon which now I preach?
Evil or Good may be better or worse
In the human heart; but the mixture of each
Is a marvel and a curse.
These weighty lines deserve to be noted, for they are characteristic of Mr. Browning. As the lime-light, used in a theatre, can cast a dazzling glow over the well-worn scenery of the stage, so can Mr. Browning flash new life and meaning into a truth which previously his readers had ignored. We know that in the human heart there is good as well as evil; but in individual cases we are apt to forget it. We are apt to forget that no man is entirely wicked; that no man is altogether holy; that in every soul—and ever striving each against the other with more or less earnestness—are the evil and the good, whose mixture is at once the greatest marvel of our life and its bitterest curse.
There is a poem called “Dîs Aliter Visum; or, Le Byron de nos Jours,” which tells the story of two wasted lives. A married woman, who is still young, meets an eminent writer at a ball, and blames him because he did not ask her to marry him ten years before, when he was a man of middle age who “knew too much,” and she was an innocent girl who loved “with faculties to seek.”
There was a morning when they walked together up the cliff-road of a French watering-place, and he considered her “a pretty thoughtful thing,” whose love he would like to gain if that were possible. All accomplished as he was, he deemed that love was better than art, poetry, and music. The girl by his side in that cliff-walk was better than the saints of Ingres, the songs of Heine, or the music of Schumann. She might be his wife. He did not fear a refusal, for in offering himself he would offer a great name. The lady in the ball-room says to the writer—and says it truly—that these were his thoughts when they walked side by side ten years ago:
She might take me as I take her.
Perfect the hour would pass. Alas!
Climb high, love high! What matter? Still,
Feet, feelings, must descend the hill;
An hour’s perfection can’t recur.
He feared that she would tire of him; that she would ask if all his equals [p. 189→] had the stains of fifty years; that she would prefer the young man’s “Love me, or I die,” to the old man’s request for the loan of youth, and sight, and touch. It might be a charitable deed, on her part, to oil his grating wheels of life; but it would be pleasanter for her if the wheels needed no oil, going on swiftly and smoothly by themselves. And if, indeed, it might happen that the young girl should repent of her choice, it would be better for him not to put the choice in her way. And, thinking thus, he asked her nothing, took his last look at the old church on the cliff and at the sea and sky, then brought her down into the town, where they parted. Years afterwards, she married for money, and with a certain “Stephanie” he dragged a weary life. Now, as the girl of ten years ago talks to him at the ball, her husband solaces himself over the card-table, and “Stephanie’s vogue has had its day.” Bitterly the poet is reproached for his folly. Why had he not tried to win the young-hearted girl? In all she saw or heard around her—in the sea, in the grey old church, in the crosses and tombstones, in the swallow’s call—God seemed to show her that there was a worthier thing to live for than the moment’s pleasure; that there was a way—the way of love—by which earth could teach the uses of heaven. But their chance is lost. The Present is dark enough, and they dare not look into the Future.
The poems we have hitherto considered deal with the lives of common men and women. We shall soon have to speak of three works differing entirely from these; but before we do so, something must be said of “James Lee,” the story of a love that grew greater on the one side, while it dwindled to nothing on the other. “James Lee” is divided into nine parts, the first of which shows us how, as husband and wife sit at the window, a dim fear rises in the woman’s mind:
Look in my eyes!
Wilt thou change, too?
Should I fear surprise?
Shall I find aught new
In the old and dear,
In the good and true,
With the changing year?*
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* The words have been set to music, very successfully, by Virginia Gabriel. Feb.—vol. cxxxiii. no. dxxx.
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They sit again together. This time it is by the fireside. The wife is brooding over her chance of losing her husband’s love. She looks at the burning logs, the shipwreck wood of oak and pine, and thinks of the sailors who trusted themselves on a sea that might be stormy, or still. They took their chance; she must do the same.
God help you, sailors, at your need!
Spare the curse!
For some ships, safe in port indeed,
Rot and rust,
Run to dust,
All through worms i’ the wood, which crept,
Gnawed our hearts out while we slept:
That is worse!
In the doorway of their house—on the south coast of France—she [p. 190→] stands; and, with fears ever growing in her troubled mind, sees in the motions of the trees a likeness to her need and sorrow. Nature has become an orchestra, mournfully to accompany her mournful song. The fig-tree, that leaned to catch the salt air, has closed its five fingers. The vines are writhing in rows. And watching them, she says:
My heart shrivels up, and my spirit shrinks curled.
Husband and wife now walk by the beach together. He has done her wrong; but she is quiet, and can reason with him. She knew him, she says, before they married—knew how uncertain he was, how faithless he might be:
You were just weak earth, I knew:
With much in you waste, with many a weed,
And plenty of passions run to seed,
But a little good grain too.
Had he not found her his, to help him on in his life:
To watch the olive and wait the vine,
And wonder when rivers of oil and wine
Would flow, as the Book assures?
The struggle between his lessening fondness and her ever-increasing passion is carried on; but with no hope for her now. At last they are to separate. She sails for distant parts as a Sister of Charity; but her love will last as long as her life. And from the vessel’s deck she tells him that if she saw but one sign, howsoever small, of a returning affection, of his old fondness coming back, he might indeed fade to a thing like her:
And your hair grow these coarse hanks of hair,
And your skin this bark of a gnarled tree,—
You might turn myself: should I know or care,
When I should be dead of joy, James Lee?
And thus the poem ends: powerful in its portrayal of a love that injury only serves to increase; detailed in its portrayal of doubt, fear, despair, growing darker, step by step.
We leave it—with its wonderful word-pictures of the coasts and waters of France; with its frightful presentment of a heart strained but unbroken—to go back over eighteen hundred years, and to find ourselves in the distant desert, where Saint John lies dying.
We read the contents of an old Greek parchment. It is the account of a “Death in the Desert,” written by Pamphylax the Antiochene, or rather by Mr. Browning for him. The parchment tells how that Pamphylax, seeing the old Apostle was very near his death, desired yet to have some words with him. First, however, it was necessary to restore him; and to this end Pamphylax laid a lappet of a linen robe over the old man’s forehead; Valens, a companion, broke a ball of nard to make perfume; the boy who was with them chafed his hands; and Xanthus, having dropped a drop of wine, began a prayer:
It is the Xanthus that escaped to Rome,
Was burned, and could not write the chronicle. [p. 191→]
These efforts to restore him were not made in the secret chamber of the rock, where he had been sixty days bedded on camel-skin:
But in the midmost grotto; since noon’s light
Reached them there a little, and we would not lose
The last of what might happen on his face.
For a while their efforts at restoration were unavailing; till the boy,
Stung by the splendour of a sudden thought,
ran hastily into the secret chamber, fetched therefrom a plate of graven lead; and, pressing his finger on the deeper dints, spoke the words: “I am the Resurrection and the Life.” Saint John opened his eyes at once, and soon began to speak; but he had had, it seemed, some dream or vision. With doubts even then thrown upon the Truth he had proclaimed, with Antichrist already in the world, he had feared that in the coming years Faith would all but pass away. A time of indifference, a time of doubt, a time of denial; that was to be the course which the ages would take. And he could see his brethren of the later times:
——conversing, each new face,
Either in fields, of yellow summer eves,
On islets yet unnamed amid the sea;
Or pace for shelter, ’neath a portico,
Out of the crowd in some enormous town
Where now the lark sings in a solitude;
Or muse upon blank heaps of stone and sand
Idly conjectured to be Ephesus:
And no one asks his fellow any more
“Where is the promise of His coming?” but
“Was He revealed in any of His lives,
As Power, as Love, and Influencing Soul?”
And one says that our mind receives but what it holds. And another wishes to go back to the birth of things, and prove that the will, intelligence, and love which man often thinks he finds, he, in fact, only gives. As S. John anticipates these objections—the wisdom of the nineteenth century—he strengthens to his task:
Nay, do not give me wine, for I am strong.
But place my gospel where I put my hands.
And the doubts and difficulties of our day are answered and overcome. Gradually S. John leads up from teaching that might be pagan to the teaching of Christ Himself. Having had his say about the unbelief of later times, he falls back and dies. And, says Pamphylax:
——’Twas about noon, the day
Somewhat declining: we five buried him
That eve, and then, dividing, went five ways,
And I, disguised, returned to Ephesus.
How entirely has the writer thrown himself into the scene and situation! As in a picture, we see the hot desert, the grotto where S. John is laid, the figures of his devoted followers, Pamphylax, Valens, Xanthus, and the [p. 192→] boy. Near the cave’s mouth—for it is a time of persecution—a Bactrian convert,
A wild, childish man,
Who could not write nor speak, but only loved,
keeps watch, while he who taught him what things had been done in Jerusalem utters his last charge. And the apostle dies, and quietly is buried, “the day somewhat declining.” No sign of him may now be seen. His followers are scattered. The cave’s mouth is filled with sand. And he lies, as in the old days at Jerusalem, breast to breast with the Everlasting Son of the Father.
There is a great gulf—but we must try to cross it—between the sublime truths that fall from the lips of S. John and the questions that Caliban asks, and fain would answer, touching the nature of Setebos, his dam’s god, who “dwelleth i’ the cold o’ the moon.” It would be dangerous, thinks Caliban, to talk of Setebos where Setebos might see or hear. Therefore, “in the pit’s much-mire,” and kicking both his feet in the cool slush, he will enjoy his speculations, and “let the rank tongue blossom into speech.” Setebos “made all we see and us in spite.”
He did in envy, listlessness, or sport,
Make what Himself would fain, in a manner, be—
Weaker in most points, stronger in a few,
Worthy, and yet mere playthings all the while,
Things He admires and mocks too—that is it!
Being powerful, Setebos uses his power as it pleases Him. Caliban himself would do the same—nay, he does it now, so far as he can.
’Thinketh such 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.
As it likes me each time I do: so He.
So, likening himself to one of the crabs—now allowed to pass, now stoned—Caliban thinks his fate endurable, and supposes that because it is so the god must be good in the main, and placable, if His mind and ways were guessed. Yet because He can show His strength, and does show it at times, Caliban must greatly fear Him. There is a something over Setebos; a Quiet that feels neither joy nor grief, but doth all that It hath a mind to do. But for the Quiet—so inoffensive and careless—why should Caliban care? It is Setebos only that plagues or pleases him. He only is worth thinking about. His mother, Sycorax, was of a different opinion. She held that the Quiet made all things, “which Setebos vexed only.” Setebos must be borne with for a time—He, and the evil and the good He sends. One thing comforts Caliban:
’Believeth with the life, the pain shall stop.
His dam held different, that after death
He both plagued enemies and feasted friends:
Idly! He doth His worst in this our life, [p. 193→]
Saving last pain for worst,—with which, an end.
Meanwhile, the best way to escape His ire
Is, not to seem too happy.
And in order to persuade the god that he strives hard, and envies Him, Caliban dances only on the darkest nights, and in the sunshine groans and curses. The reader will remember his words to Prospero:
You taught me language; and my profit on’t
Is, I know how to curse.
Very useful is the accomplishment of cursing. If Setebos overheard this speech of his, to appease Him he would cut a finger off, or let “the toothsome apple” rot upon the tree:
Hoping the while, since evils sometimes mend,
Warts rub away, and sores are cured with slime,
That some strange day, will either the Quiet catch
And conquer Setebos, or likelier He
Decrepit may doze, doze, as good as die.
While Caliban has been speaking the storm has gathered, The world is dark, crickets stop hissing, trees snap, and thunder follows. The “most credulous monster, most weak monster” shakes with terror. How appease the anger of the god?
Lo! ’lieth flat and loveth Setebos!
’Maketh his teeth meet through his upper lip,
’Will let those quails fly, ’will not eat this month
One little mess of whelks, so he may ’scape!
That is the end of it. Thus it is that the low mind can feel God’s anger, while knowing nothing of his goodness. “Thou thoughtest that I was altogether such an one as thyself:” that is the key-note and motto of it all. The Caliban of this elaborate work has been called “a stalking horse, from which the writer shoots at higher game.” Each for himself, as his need is, may surely learn a lesson from the dark gropings of Caliban. We shall not inquire here what is the number of Mr. Browning’s targets, nor what the correctness of his aim.
We have to consider, and that very briefly—for the subject of which it treats has been perhaps too early handled—yet another poem, yet another dramatic utterance. We mean “Sludge, the Medium,” A spiritualist having been detected in the act of cheating, and having with difficulty prevented his excited victim from strangling him, launches forth into a confession of his ways, but not of the error of them. There are so many excuses for the milder forms of deception: in this credulous world how many willing dupes! Wonders are sought after: why withhold them? Is it wrong to deceive, provided the deception hurt nobody? Is Sludge worse than other men? Who gets on without the helpful lie? Assuredly the poets do not, from Homer to the men of our day. And there is no need to mount to them. Look only at the writers of plain prose.
Each states the law and fact and face of the thing
Just as he’d have them, finds what he thinks fit,
Is blind to what mis-suits him, just records
What makes his case out, quite ignores the rest. [p. 194→]
And, asks Sludge, who finds fault with him for this? He is rather praised than blamed—by those who think as he does, who act as he does.
“A lie that is half a truth is ever the blackest of lies,” says Mr. Tennyson. But the world holds otherwise.
There’s plenty of “How did you contrive to grasp
The thread which led you through this labyrinth?
How on so slight a foundation found this tale,
Biography, narrative?” or, in other words,
“How many lies did it require to make
The portly truth you here present us with?”
It matters little to Sludge whether or not he is right; whether or not his patron—or his victim—is convinced. He believes in himself, and if he cannot make Hiram H. Horsefall believe in him, that is of little moment. Hiram H. Horsefall is not the only fool in the world: he is well aware of that. In other places and with other men he may yet succeed.
The poem, as we venture to think, is not so much directed against the spiritualists, as against the credulity of common men and women. Sludge has his knuckles rapped, to be sure, for the rogue that he is; and yet he is allowed to say some soft and kindly words about a child’s grave.
Mr. Browning, be it noticed, is not given to look upon the worst side of life and character. He has described bad men, and he has depicted misery. But the bad men have their good points, and the misery is not to last. A bird flapping its wings against the wires of its cage, and looking out so wistfully into free spaces that it cannot reach now—to that, man’s spirit may be likened.
I discern
Infinite passion, and the pain
Of finite hearts that yearn.
It may be that our imperfection is but perfection hid. The star-fish is whole, and can increase no more, The flower blooms quickly, and as quickly fades. It is not so with the mind of man, howsoever defiled.
For what begun best can’t end worst;
Nor what God blest once, prove accurst.
Such, at least, is a part of the teaching of Robert Browning.
T. Fred[erick]. Wedmore.
Reviewed:
Dramatis Personæ (RB), 2nd ed., London: Chapman & Hall, 1864.
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