A Handbook to the Works of Browning Part 14

Not death to him: for as he gazed on the rough-hewn block, a form emerged upon his mental sight--a form which he interpreted as that of the G.o.ddess Eidothee.[53] And as his soul received it from that of the dead master, his hand carried it out."

Mr. Browning's whole theory of artistic perception is contained in the foregoing lines; but he proceeds to enforce it in another way. "The life thus evoked from death, the beauty from ugliness, is the gain of each special soul--its permanent conquest over matter. The mode of effecting this is the special secret of every soul; and this Don Juan defines as its chemic secret, the law of its affinities, the law of its actions and reactions. Where one, he says, lights force, another draws forth pity; where one finds food for self-indulgence, another acquires strength for self-sacrifice. One blows life's ashes into rose-coloured flame, another into less heavenly hues. Love will have reached its height when the secret of each soul has become the knowledge of all; and the many-coloured rays of individual experience are fused in the white light of universal truth."

Here again Don Juan imagines a retort. Elvire makes short work of his poetic theories, and declares that this professed interest in souls is a mere pretext for the gratification of sense. "Whom in heaven's name is he trying to take in?" He entreats music to take his part. "It alone can pierce the mists of falsehood which intervene between the soul and truth. And now, as they stroll homewards in the light of the setting sun, all things seem charged with those deeper harmonies--with those vital truths of existence which words are powerless to convey. Elvire, however, has no soul for music, and her husband must have recourse to words."

The case between them may, he thinks, be stated in this question, "How do we rise from falseness into truth?" "We do so after the fas.h.i.+on of the swimmer who brings his nostrils to the level of the upper air, but leaves the rest of his body under water--by the act of self-immersion in the very element from which we wish to escape. Truth is to the aspiring soul as the upper air to the swimmer: the breath of life. But if the swimmer attempts to free his head and arms, he goes under more completely than before. If the soul strives to escape from the grosser atmosphere into the higher, she shares the same fate. Her truthward yearnings plunge her only deeper into falsehood. Body and soul must alike surrender themselves to an element in which they cannot breathe, for this element can alone sustain them. But through the act of plunging we float up again, with a deeper disgust at the briny taste we have brought back; with a deeper faith in the life above, and a deeper confidence in ourselves, whom the coa.r.s.er element has proved unable to submerge."

"Suppose again, that as we paddle with our hands under water, we grasp at something which seems a soul. The piece of falsity slips through our fingers, but by the mechanical reaction just described, it sends us upwards into the realm of truth. This is precisely what Fifine has done.

Of the earth earthy as she is, she has driven you and me into the realms of abstract truth. We have thus no right to despise her" This discourse is interrupted by a contemptuous allusion to a pa.s.sage in "Childe Harold," (fourth canto), in which the human intelligence is challenged to humble itself before the ocean.

Elvire is still dissatisfied. The suspicious fact remains, that whatever experience her husband desires to gain, it is always a woman who must supply it. This he frankly admits; and he gives his reason. "Women lend themselves to experiment; men do not. Men are egotists, and absorb whatever comes in their way. Women, whether Fifines or Elvires, allow themselves to be absorbed. You master men only by reducing yourself to their level. You captivate women by showing yourself at your best. Their power of hero-wors.h.i.+p is ill.u.s.trated by the act of the dolphin, 'True woman creature,' which bore the s.h.i.+p-wrecked Arion to the Corinthian coast. Men are not only wanting in true love: their best powers are called forth by hate. They resemble the vine, first 'stung' into 'fertility' by the browsing goat, which nibbled away its tendrils, and gained the 'indignant wine' by the process. In their feminine characteristics Elvire stands far higher than Fifine; but Fifine is for that very reason more useful as a means of education; for Elvire may be trusted implicitly; Fifine teaches one to take care of himself. They are to each other as the strong s.h.i.+p and the little rotten bark." This comparison is suggested by a boatman whom they lately saw adventurously pus.h.i.+ng his way through shoal and sandbank because he would not wait for the tide.

Don Juan begs leave to speak one word more in defence of Fifine and her masquerading tribe; it will recall his early eulogium on her frankness.

"All men are actors: but these alone do not deceive. All you are expected to applaud in them is the excellence of the avowed sham."

Don Juan has thus developed his theory that soul is attainable through flesh, truth through falsehood, the real through what only seems; and, as he thinks, justified the conclusion that a man's spiritual life is advanced by every experience, moral or immoral, which comes in his way.

He now relates a dream by which, as he says, those abstract reflections have been in part inspired; in reality, it continues, and in some degree refutes them. The dream came to him this morning when he had played himself to sleep with Schumann's Carnival; having chosen this piece because his brain was burdened with many thoughts and fancies which, better than any other, it would enable him to work off; and as he tells this, he enlarges on the faculty of music to register, as well as express, every pa.s.sing emotion of the human soul. He notes also the constant recurrence of the same old themes, and the caprice of taste which strives as constantly to convert them into something new.

The dream carries him to Venice, and he awakes, in fancy, on some pinnacle above St. Mark's Square, overlooking the Carnival. Here his power of artistic divination--alias of human sympathy, is called into play; for the men and women below him all wear the semblance of some human deformity, of some animal type, or of some grotesque embodiment of human feeling or pa.s.sion. He throws himself into their midst, and these monstrosities disappear. The human a.s.serts itself; the brute-like becomes softened away; what imperfection remains creates pity rather than disgust. He finds that by s.h.i.+fting his point of view, he can see even necessary qualities in what otherwise struck him as faults.

Another change takes place: one felt more easily than defined; and he becomes aware that he is looking not on Venice, but on the world, and that what seemed her Carnival is in reality the masquerade of life. The change goes on. Halls and temples are transformed beneath his gaze. The systems which they represent: religions, philosophies, moralities, and theories of art, collapse before him, re-form and collapse again. He sees that the deepest truth can only build on sand, though itself is stationed on a rock; and can only a.s.sert its substance in the often changing forms of error. The vision seems to declare that change is the Law of Life.

"Not so," it was about to say. "That law is permanence." The scene has resembled the forming and reforming, the blending and melting asunder of a pile of sunset clouds. Like these, when the sun has set, it is subsiding into a fixed repose, a stern and colourless uniformity.

Temple, tower, and dwelling-house a.s.sume the form of one solitary granite pile, a Druid monument. This monument, as Mr. Browning describes it,[54] consists really of two, so standing or lying as to form part of each other. The one cross-shaped is supposed to have been sepulchral, or in some other way sacred to death. The latter, on which he mainly dwells, was, until lately, the centre of a rude nature-wors.h.i.+p, and is therefore consecrated to life. It symbolizes life in its most active and most perennial form. It means the force which aspires to heaven, and the strength which is rooted in the earth. It means that impulse of all being towards something outside itself, which is constant amidst all change, uniform amidst all variety. It means the last word of the scheme of creation, and therefore also the first. It repeats and concludes the utterance already sounding in the spectator's ear:--

"... 'All's change, but permanence as well.'

--Grave note whence--list aloft!--harmonics sound, that mean: Truth inside, and outside, truth also; and between Each, falsehood that is change, as truth is permanence.

The individual soul works through the shows of sense, (Which, ever proving false, still promise to be true) Up to an outer soul as individual too; And, through the fleeting, lives to die into the fixed, And reach at length 'G.o.d, man, or both together mixed,'"[55]

(p. 332.)

The condition of this monument, its history, the conjectures to which it has given rise, are described in a humorous spirit which belies its mystic significance; but that significance is imbedded in the very conception of the poem, and distinctly expressed in the author's subsequent words. The words which I have just quoted contain the whole philosophy of "Fifine at the Fair" as viewed on its metaphysical side.

They declare the changing relations of the soul to some fixed eternal truth foreshadowed in the impulses of sense. They are the burden of Don Juan's argument even when he is defending what is wrong. They are the constantly recurring keynote of what the author has meant to say.

Don Juan draws also a new and more moral lesson from this final vision of his dream. "Inconstancy is not justified by natural law, for it means unripeness of soul. The ripe soul evolves the Infinite from a fixed point. It finds the many in the one. Elvire is the _one_ who includes the _many_. Elvire is the ocean: while Fifine is but the foam-flake which the ocean can multiply at pleasure. Elvire shall henceforth suffice to him."

But here, as elsewhere, he makes a great mistake: that of confusing nature with the individual man. Her instability supplied him with no excuse for being inconstant, and her permanence gives him no motive for constancy; and he proves this in another moment by breaking bounds no longer in word only, but in deed. It turns out that he had put gold as well as silver into Fifine's tambourine. The result, intended or not, has been a letter slipped into his hand. He claims five minutes to go and "clear the matter up;" exceeds the time, and on returning finds his punishment in an empty home.

This at least, we seem intended to infer. For Elvire has already startled him by a.s.suming the likeness of a phantom, and he gives her leave, in case he breaks his word, to vanish away altogether. The story ends here; but its epilogue "The Householder" depicts a widowed husband, grotesquely miserable, fetched home by his departed wife; and his ident.i.ty with Don Juan seems unmistakable. This scene is more humorous than pathetic, as befits the dramatic spirit of the poem; but the most serious purport and most comprehensive meaning of "Fifine at the Fair" are summed up in its closing words. The "householder" is composing his epitaph, and his wife thus concludes it: "Love is all, and Death is nought."

"PRINCE HOHENSTIEL-SCHw.a.n.gAU, SAVIOUR OF SOCIETY."

"Prince Hohenstiel-Schw.a.n.gau" is a defence of the doctrine of expediency: and the monologue is supposed to be carried on by the late Emperor of the French, under this feigned name. Louis Napoleon is musing over past and present, and blending them with each other in a waking dream. He seems in exile again. But the events of his reign are all, or for the most part behind him, and they have earned for him the t.i.tle of "inscrutable." A young lady of an adventurous type has crossed his path, in the appropriate region of Leicester Square. Some adroit flattery on her side has disposed him to confidence, and he is proving to her, over tea and cigars, that he is not so "inscrutable" after all; or, if he be, that the key to the enigma is a simple one. "This wearer of crinoline seems destined to play Oedipus to the Sphinx he is supposed to be;" or better still, as he gallantly adds, the "Lais" for whose sake he will unveil the mystery unasked. The situation he thus a.s.sumes is not dignified; but as Mr. Browning probably felt, his choice of a _confidante_ suits the nature of what he has to tell, as well as the circ.u.mstances in which he tells it. Politically, he has lived from hand to mouth. So in a different way has she. A very trifling incident enables him to ill.u.s.trate his confession, which will proceed without interruption on the listener's part.

They are sitting at a table with writing materials upon it. Among these lies a piece of waste-paper. Prince Hohenstiel descries upon it two blots, takes up a pen, and draws a line from one to the other. This simple, half-mechanical act is, as he declares, a type of his whole life; it contains the word of the enigma. His constant principle has been: not to strive at creating anything new; not to risk marring what already existed; but to adapt what he found half made and to continue it. In other words, he has been a sustainer or "saviour," not a reformer of society.

Many pages are devoted to the statement and vindication of this fact, and they contain everything that can be said, from a religious or practical point of view, in favour of taking the world as we find it.

Prince Hohenstiel's first argument is: that he has not the genius of a reformer, and it is a man's first duty to his Creator to do that only which he can do best; his second: that sweeping reforms are in themselves opposed to the creative plan, because they sacrifice everything to one leading idea, and aim at reducing to one pattern those human activities which G.o.d has intended to be multiform; the third and strongest: that the scheme of existence with all its apparent evils is G.o.d's work, and no man can improve upon it. There have been, he admits, revolutions in the moral as well as the physical world; and inspired reformers, who were born to carry them on; but these men are rare and portentous as the physical agencies to which they correspond, and whether "dervish (desert-spectre), swordsman, saint, lawgiver," or "lyrist," appear only when the time is ripe for them. Meanwhile, the great machine advances by means of the minute springs, the revolving wheel-work, of individual lives. Let each of these be content with its limited sphere. G.o.d is with each and all.

And Prince Hohenstiel has another and still stronger reason for not desiring to tamper with the existing order of things. He finds it good.

He loves existence as he knows it, with its mysteries and its beauties; its complex causes and incalculable effects; the good it extracts from evil; the virtue it evolves from suffering. He reveres that Temple of G.o.d's own building, from which deploys the ever varying procession of human life. If the temple be intricate in its internal construction, if its architectural fancies impede our pa.s.sage; if they make us stumble or even fall; his invariable advice is this: "Throw light on the stumbling-blocks; fix your torch above them at such points as the architect approves. But do not burn them away." He considers himself therefore, not a very great man, but a useful one: one possessing on a small scale the patience of an Atlas, if not the showy courage of a Hercules: one whose small achievements pave the way for the great ones.

Thus far the imaginary speaker so resembles Mr. Browning himself, that we forget for the moment that we are not dealing with him; and his vicarious testimony to the value of human life lands him, at page 145, in a personal protest against the folly which under cover of poetry seeks to run it down. He lashes out against the "bard" who can rave about inanimate nature as something greater than man; and who talks of the "unutterable" impressions conveyed by the ocean, as greater than the intelligence and sympathy, the definite thoughts and feelings which _can_ be uttered. The lines from "Childe Harold" which will be satirized in "Fifine at the Fair" are clearly haunting him here. But we shall now pa.s.s on to more historic ground.

It is a natural result of these opinions that Prince Hohenstiel-Schw.a.n.gau regards life as the one boon which contains every other; and that the material prosperity of his people has been the first object by which his "sustaining" policy was inspired. He does not deny that even within the limits thus imposed, some choice of cause or system seemed open to him. "It seemed open to him to choose between religion and free-thought, between monarchy and government by the people: and to throw his energies entirely into one scale or the other, instead of weighting one and the other by turns. It could justly have been urged that the simpler aim is included in the more complex, and that he would promote the interests of his subjects by serving them from the wider, rather than from the narrower point of view."

"But what is true in theory is not always so in practice. He has loved a cause, and believed in it--the cause of united Italy; and so long as he was free to express sympathy with this--so long, his critics say, as he was a mere voice, with air to float in, and no obstacle to bar his way--he expressed it from the bottom of his soul. But with the power to act--with the firm ground wheron to act--came also the responsibilities of action: the circ.u.mstance by which it must be controlled. He saw the wants of his people; the eyes which craved light alone, and the mouths which craved only bread. He felt that the ideal must yield to the real, the remote to what was near; and the work of Italian deliverance remained incomplete. It was his very devotion to the one principle which brought the reproach of vacillation upon him."

"He broke faith with his people too"--so his critics continue--"for he supplied food to their bodies; but withheld the promised liberties of speech and writing which would have brought nourishment to their souls."

And again he answers that he gave them what they wanted most. He gave them that which would enable them to acquire freedom of soul, and without which such freedom would have been useless.

He concedes something, however, to reformers by declaring, as his final excuse, that he would not have thus yielded to circ.u.mstances if the average life of man were a hundred years instead of twenty; for, given sufficient time, all adverse circ.u.mstance may be overcome. "The body dies if it be thwarted. Mind--in other words, intellectual truth--triumphs through opposition. Envy, hatred, and stupidity, are to it as the rocks which obstruct the descending stream, and toss it in jewelled spray above the chasm by which it is confined. Abstract thinkers have therefore their rights also; and it is well that those, in some respects, greater and better men than he, who are engaged in the improvement of the world, should find success enough to justify their hopes; failure enough to impose caution on their endeavours."

The Prince confesses once for all, that since improvement is so necessarily limited; since the higher life is incompatible with life in the flesh: he is content to wait for the higher life and make the best he can of the lower. But if anyone declares that this quiescent att.i.tude means indolence or sleep, his judgment is on a par with that which was once pa.s.sed on the famous statue of the Laoc.o.o.n. Some artist had covered the accessories of the group, and left only the contorted central figure, with nothing to explain its contortions. One man said as he looked upon it,

"... I think the gesture strives Against some obstacle we cannot see." (p. 172.)

Every other spectator p.r.o.nounced the "gesture" a yawn.

Prince Hohenstiel gives us a second proof that he is not without belief in the ideal. He accepts the doctrine of evolution: though not in its scientific sense. He likes the idea of having felt his way up to humanity (as he now feels his way in it) through progressive forms of existence; he being always himself, and nowise the thing he dwelt in. He likes to account in this manner for the feeling of kins.h.i.+p which attracts him to all created things. It also completes his vision of mankind as fining off at the summit into isolated peaks, but held together at the base by its common natural life; and thus confirms him in the impression that the personal needs and mutual obligations of the natural life are paramount.

As he concludes this part of his harangue, an amused consciousness steals over him that he has been was.h.i.+ng himself very white; and that his self-defence has been princ.i.p.ally self-praise--at least, to his listener's ears. So he proceeds to show that his arguments were just, by showing how easily, being blamed for the one course of action, he might have been no less censured for the opposite. He imagines that his life has been written by some romancing historian of the Thiers and Victor Hugo type; and that in this version, practical wisdom, or SAGACITY, is made to suggest everything which he has really done, while he unwisely obeys the dictates of ideal virtue and does everything which he did not.

Hohenstiel-Schw.a.n.gau (France) had made him her head-servant: president of the a.s.sembly which she had elected to serve her; and he knew that his fellow-servants were working for their own ends, while he alone was faithful to his bond. He, doubtless, had his dreams, conjured up by SAGACITY, of pouncing upon the unfaithful ones, denouncing them to his mistress, the State, and begging her to allow him to do their work as well as his own, till such time as the danger was past, and her desire for a more popular government could be fulfilled. But in so doing he would have deceived her, and he chose the truth. He knew that he had no right to subst.i.tute himself for the mult.i.tude, his knowledge for their ignorance, his will for theirs; since wise and foolish were alike of G.o.d's creating, and each had his own place and purpose in the general scheme. (Here and through the following pages, 176-7, the real and the imaginary Prince appear merged into each other.) He performed his strict duty, and left things to their natural course.

His position grew worse and worse. His fellow-servants made no secret of their plans--to be carried into execution when his time of service should have expired, and his controlling hand been removed from them.

Each had his own mine of tyranny--whether Popedom, Socialism, or other--which he meant to spring on the people fancying itself free. The Head Servant was silent. They took fright at his silence. "It meant mischief." "It meant counterplot." "It meant some stroke of State." "He must be braved and bullied. His re-election must be prevented; the sword of office must be wrested from his grasp."

At length his time expired, and _then_ he acted and spoke. He made no "stroke of State." He stepped down from his eminence; laid his authority in the people's hand; proved to it its danger, and proposed that Hohenstiel-Schw.a.n.gau should give him the needful authority for protecting her. The proposal was unanimously accepted; and he justified his own judgment and that of his country by chastising every disturber of the public peace, and reducing alike knaves and fools to silence and submission. But now SAGACITY found fault: "he had not taken the evil in time; he might have nipped it in the bud, and saved life and liberty by so doing: he had waited till it was full grown, and the cost in life and liberty had been enormous." He replied that he had been checked by his allegiance to the law; and that rather than strain the law, however slightly, he was bound to see it broken.

And so, the record continues, he worked and acted to the end. He had received his authority from the people; he governed first for them.

(Here again, and at the following page 184, we seem to recognize the real Hohenstiel or Louis Napoleon, rather than the imaginary.) He walked reverently--superst.i.tiously, if spectators will--in the path marked out for him, ever fearing to imperil what was good in the existing order of things; but casting all fear aside when an obvious evil cried out for correction. Hohenstiel-Schw.a.n.gau--herself a republic--had attacked the liberties of Rome, and destroyed them with siege and slaughter. On his accession to power, he found this "infamy triumphant."

SAGACITY suggested that he should leave it untouched. "It was no work of his; he was not answerable for its existence. It had its political advantages for his own country."

But he would not hear of such a course. There was a canker in the body politic, requiring to be cut out; and he cut it out: though the patient roared, the wound bled, and the operator was abused by friend and foe.

"Why so rough and precipitate?" again SAGACITY interposed, "though the right were on your side? Why not temporize, persuade, even threaten, before coming to blows?"

"Yes," was the reply, "and see the evil strengthen while you look on."

SAGACITY defended her advice on larger grounds; and here too he was at issue with her. Hohenstiel-Schw.a.n.gau had a pa.s.sion for fighting. She would fight for anything, or for nothing, merely to show that she knew how. Give her a year's peace after any war, and she was once more ready for the fray. Prince Hohenstiel and SAGACITY both agreed that this evil temper must be destroyed; but SAGACITY advised him to undermine--Prince Hohenstiel chose to combat it.

SAGACITY said, "Here is an interval of peace. Prolong it, make it delightful; but do so under cover of intending to cut it short. If you would induce a fierce mountain tribe to come down from its fortress and settle in the plain, you do not bid it destroy the fortress. You bid it enjoy life in the city, and remember that it runs no risk in doing so, because it has its fortress to fall back upon at the first hint of danger. And the time will come when it can hear with equanimity that the fortress has gone to ruin, and that fighting is no longer in fas.h.i.+on.

The mountain tribe will have learned to love the fatness of the valley, while thinking of those mother ribs of its mountain fastness which are ever waiting to prop up its life. Just so put a wooden sword into the hand of the Hohenstieler, and let him brag of war, learning meanwhile the value of peace."

"Not so," the Prince replied; "my people shall not be cheated into virtue. Truth is the one good thing. I will tell them the truth. I will tell them that war, for war's sake, is d.a.m.nable; that glory at its best is shame, since its image is a gilded bubble which a resolute hand might p.r.i.c.k, but the breath of a foolish mult.i.tude buoys up beyond its reach."