A Handbook to the Works of Browning Part 25

And yet he believes. He summons her to justify his belief. He claims of her a genuine miracle--a miracle of power, which will silence scepticism, and re-establish the royalty of the Church--a miracle of mercy, which will wipe away the past; reconcile duty and love; give Clara into his hands as his pure and lawful wife. "She is to carry him through the air to the s.p.a.ce before her church as she was herself conveyed there...." Then come the leap and the catastrophe.

He had by a second will bequeathed all his possessions to the Church, reserving in them a life-interest for his virtual wife; and when the cousinry swooped down on what they thought their prey, Madame Mulhausen could receive them and their condolences with the indignant scorn which their greed and cruelty deserved. They disputed the will on the alleged plea of the testator's insanity. The trial was interrupted by the events of 1870, but finally settled in the lady's favour; the verdict being uncompromising as to her moral, as well as legal claim to the inheritance.

Mr. Browning had lately stood outside the grounds of Clairvaux, and seen its lady pa.s.s. She was insignificant in face and expression; and he was reduced to accounting for the power she had exercised, by that very fact. She seemed a blank surface, on which a man could inscribe, or fancy he was inscribing, himself; and it is a matter of fact that, whether from strength of will, or from the absence of it, she presented such a surface to her lover's hand. She humoured his every inclination, complied with his every wish. And because she did no more than this, and also no less, Mr. Browning p.r.o.nounces her far from the best of women, but by no means one of the worst. The two had, after all, up to a certain point, redeemed each other.

The t.i.tle of the book arose as follows. The narrative is addressed (as the volume is dedicated) to Miss Annie Thackeray; and its supposed occasion is that of a meeting which took place at St. Rambert--actually St. Aubin--between her and Mr. Browning, in the summer of 1872. She had laughingly called the district "White Cotton Night-Cap Country," from its sleepy appearance, and the universal white cap of even its male inhabitants. Mr. Browning, being acquainted with the tragedy of Clairvaux, thought "_Red_ Cotton Night-Cap Country" would be a more appropriate name; and adopted it for his story, as Miss Thackeray had adopted hers for one which she promised to write. But he represents himself as playing at first with the idea; and as leading the listener's mind, from the suggestions of white night-caps to those of the red one: and null the outward calmness of the neighbouring country, to the tragic possibilities which that calmness conceals.

The supplementary heading, "Turf and Towers," must have been inspired by the literal facts of the case; but it supplies an a.n.a.logy for the contrasted influences which fought for Miranda's soul. The "tower"

represents the militant or religious life. The "turf," the self-indulgent; and the figure appears and reappears at every stage of the man's career. The attempt at compromise is symbolized by a pavilion: a structure aping solidity, but only planted on the turf. The final attempt at union is spoken of as an underground pa.s.sage connecting the two, and by which the fortress may be entered instead of scaled. The difficulty of making one's way through life amidst the ruins of old beliefs and the fanciful overgrowth in which time has clothed them; the equal danger of destroying too much and clearing away too little; also find their place in the allegory.

The possible friend and adviser, to whom Miranda is referred at vol.

xii. p. 122, was M. Joseph Milsand, who always at that time pa.s.sed the bathing season at St. Aubin.[80]

"THE INN ALb.u.m" is a tragedy in eight parts or scenes: the dialogue interspersed with description; and carried on by four persons not named.

It is chiefly enacted in the parlour of a country inn; and the Inn "Alb.u.m," in spite of its grotesque or prosaic character, becomes an important instrument in it.

Four years before the tragedy occurred--so we learn from the dialogue--a gentlemanly adventurer of uncertain age had won and abused the affections of a motherless girl, whom he thought too simple to resent the treachery. He was mistaken in this; for her nature was as proud as it was confiding; and her indignation when she learned that he had not intended marriage was such as to surprise him into offering it. She rejected the offer with contempt. He went his way, mortified and embittered. A month later she had buried herself in a secluded and squalid village, as wife of the old, poor, overworked, and hopelessly narrow-minded clergyman, whose cure it was. She abstained, however, for his own sake, from making any painful disclosures to her husband; and the daily and hourly expiation brought no peace with it; for she remained in her deceiver's power.

Three years went by. The elderly adventurer then fell in with a young, wealthy, and inexperienced man, who had loved the same woman, and whose honourable addresses had been declined for his sake; and he acquired over this youth an influence almost as strong as that which he had exercised over the young girl. He found him grieving over his disappointment, and undertook to teach him how to forget it; became his master in the art of dissipation; helped to empty his pockets while he filled his own; and finally induced him to form a mercenary engagement to a cousin whom he did not love. When the story opens, the young man has come to visit his bride-elect in her country home; and his Mephistopheles has followed him, under a transparent pretext, to secure a last chance of winning money from him at cards. The presence of the latter is to be a secret, because he is too ill-famed a personage to be admitted into the lady's house; so they have arrived on the eve of the appointed day, and put up at a village inn on the outskirts of the cousin's estate. There they have spent the night in play. There also the luck has turned; and the usual winner has lost ten thousand pounds. His friend insists on cancelling the debt. He affects to scout the idea.

"The money shall, by some means or other, be paid."

The discussion is renewed with the same result, as they loiter near the station, at which the younger will presently make a feint of arriving; and for the first time he asks the elder why, with such abilities as his, he has made no mark in life. The latter replies that he found and lost his opportunity four years ago, in a woman, who, he feels more and more, would have quickened his energies to better ends. He then, with tolerable frankness, relates his story. The younger follows with his own. But, for a reason which explains itself at the time, the connection between the two escapes them.

The woman herself next appears on the scene, and with her, the girl cousin. They are friends of old; and the married one has emerged from her seclusion at the entreaty of the betrothed, to pa.s.s judgment on her intended husband. The young girl is not satisfied with her own feeling towards him whom she has promised to marry; though she has no misgiving as to his sentiments towards her. She is to bring him for inspection to the inn. And the friend, entering its parlour alone, is confronted by her former lover, who has temporarily returned there.

A stormy dialogue ensues. She denounces him as the destroyer, ever lying in wait for her soul. He taunts her with the malignant hatred with which for years past from the height of her own prosperity she has been weighing down his. She retorts in a powerful description of the love with which he once inspired her, of the living death in which she has been expiating her mistake. And as he listens, the old feeling in him revives, and he kneels to her, imploring that she will break her bonds, and secure their joint happiness by flying with him. She sees nothing, however, in this, but a second attempt to ensnare her; and is repulsing the entreaty with the scorn which she believes it to deserve, when the younger man bursts merrily into the room. A wave of angry pain pa.s.ses over him as he recognizes the heroine of his own romance, and hastily infers from the circ.u.mstances in which he finds her, that he has been the victim of a double deception. The truth gradually shapes itself in his mind; but meanwhile the older man has grasped the situation, and determined to make capital of it--to avenge his rebuff and to rid himself of his debt at the same time. He begs the lady to leave the room for a few moments, handing her, for her entertainment, the inn "alb.u.m,"

over which he and his friend were exchanging jokes a few hours ago; and in which he has, at this moment, inscribed some lines. The purport of these is that this young man loves her; and that unless she responds to his advances, the secret of her past life shall be revealed to her husband.

Alone with the younger man, he exhausts himself in coa.r.s.e libels against the woman, of whom that morning only he was speaking, as the lost opportunity of his life; bids him ask of her what he desires, and have it; and calls on him to admit, that in preserving him from marrying her, and placing her nevertheless at his disposal, he will have earned his grat.i.tude, and paid the value of the ten thousand pounds.

When the woman returns, the alb.u.m in her hand, the calm of death is upon her. She has lived prepared for this emergency, provided also with the means of escaping from it. But she will not die without entreating her young admirer to shake off, before it is too late, the evil influence to which both, though in different ways, have succ.u.mbed; and her dignity, her kindness, the instinctive reverence, and now chivalrous pity, with which she has inspired him carry all before them. He renews his declaration; implores her to accept him as her husband, if she is free--her friend if she is not; her husband even if the relation she is living in be something less than marriage; to exact any delay, to impose any probation, so that in the end she accepts him.

She replies by putting her hand into his, _to remain there_, as she says, _till death shall part them_. The older man, who has just re-entered the room, congratulates them on having arrived at so sensible an understanding. The woman, now very pale, contrives to point to the fatal entry in the alb.u.m which she still grasps; and asks her friend--after quoting the writer's words--how, but in her own way, the mouth of such a one could have been stopped.

"So," exclaims the youth. And he flies at the man's throat, and strangles him.

She has only time to thank her deliverer; to tell him why his devotion is unavailing--to provide for his safety by writing in the alb.u.m from which he has torn the fatal page, that he has slain a man who would have outraged her: and that her last breath is spent in blessing him.

A merry voice is heard; and the young, light-hearted girl comes all unconscious to the scene of the tragedy. The curtain falls before she has entered upon it.

The betrayal of the lady, the transaction of which she becomes the subject, and her consequent suicide, are taken from an episode in English high life, which occurred in the present century.

"THE TWO POETS OF CROISIC" is an extract from the history of two writers of verse, whose respective works obtained from circ.u.mstances a brilliant but short-lived renown. It forms part of a reminiscence, supposed to be conjured up by a wood fire near which the narrator, with his wife, is sitting. The fire, as he describes it, is made of s.h.i.+p-wood: for it burns in all the beautiful colours which denote the presence of metallic substances and salts; and as his fancy reconstructs the s.h.i.+p, it also raises the vision of a distant coast well known to his companion and to himself. He sees Le Croisic--the little town it is--the poor village it was[81]--with its storm-tossed sea--its sandy strip of land, good only for the production of salt--its solitary Menhir, which recalls, and in some degree perpetuates, the wild life and the barbarous Druid wors.h.i.+p of old Breton times.[82] And in the bright-hued flames, which leap up and vanish before his bodily eyes, he sees also the two ephemeral reputations which flashed forth and expired there.

Rene Gentilhomme, born 1610, was a rhymer, as his father had been before him. He became page to the Prince of Conde, and occupied his spare time by writing complimentary verse. One day, as he was hammering at an ode, a violent storm broke out; and the lightning shattered a ducal crown in marble which stood on a pedestal in the room in which he sat. Conde was regarded as future King of France: for Louis XIII. was childless, and his brother Gaston believed to be so; in consideration of this fact, men called him "Duke." Rene took the incident as an omen, and turned his ode into a prophecy which he delivered to his master as the utterance of G.o.d. "The Prince's hopes were at an end: a Dauphin would be born in the ensuing year." A Dauphin was born; and Rene, who had at first been terrified at his own boldness, received the t.i.tle of Royal Poet, and the honours due to a seer. But he wrote little or no more; and he and the tiny volume which composed his works soon disappeared from sight.

The narrator, however, judges that this oblivion may not have been unsought, since one who had believed himself the object of a direct message from G.o.d, would have little taste for intercourse with his fellow men; and he suspends his story for a moment to ask himself how such a one would bear the weight of his experience; and how far the knowledge conveyed by it might be true. He decides (as we should expect) that a direct Revelation is forbidden by the laws of life; but that life is full of indirect messages from the unseen world; that all our "simulated thunder-claps," all our "counterfeited truths," all those glimpses of beauty which startle while they elude the soul, are messages of this kind: darts shot from the spirit world, which rebound as they touch, yet sting us to the consciousness of its existence. And so Rene Gentilhomme had had a true revelation, in what reminded him that there are things higher than rhyming and its rewards.

Paul Desforges Maillard was born nearly a century later, and wrote society verses till the age of thirty, when the desire for wider fame took possession of him. He competed for a prize which the Academy had offered to the poet who should best commemorate the progress made by the art of navigation during the last reign. His poem was returned. It was offered, through the agency of a friend, to a paper called "The Mercury." The editor, La Roque, praised the work in florid terms, but said he dared not offend the Academy; he, too, returned the MS. Paul, mistaking the polite fiction for truth, wrote back an angry tirade against the editor's cowardice; and the latter, retorting in as frank a fas.h.i.+on, told the writer that his poem was execrable, and that it was only consideration for his feelings which had hitherto prevented his hearing so.

At this juncture Paul's sister interposed. He was wrong, she declared, to proceed in such a point-blank manner. In cases like these, it was only wile which conquered. He must resume his incognito, and try, this time, the effect of a feminine disguise. She picked out and copied the feeblest of his songs or sonnets, and sent it to La Roque, as from a girl-novice who humbly sued for his literary protection. She was known by another name than her brother's (Mr. Browning explains why); the travesty was therefore complete. The poem was accepted; then another and another. The lady's fame grew. La Roque made her, by letter, a declaration of love. Voltaire also placed himself at her feet.

Paul now refused to efface himself any longer. The clever sister urged in vain that it was her petticoats which had conquered, and not his verse. He went to Paris to claim his honours, and introduce himself as the admired poetess to La Roque and Voltaire. Voltaire bitterly resented the joke; La Roque affected to enjoy it; but nevertheless advised its perpetrator to get out of Paris as fast as possible. The trick had answered for once. It would not be wise to repeat it. Again Paul disregarded his sister's advice, and reprinted the poems in his own name. "They had been praised and more than praised. The world could not eat its own printed words!"

He discovered, however, that the world _could_ eat its words; or, at least, forget them. The only fame--the speaker adds--which a great man cannot destroy, is that which he has had no hand in making. Paul's light, with his sister's, went out as did that of his predecessor.

Mr. Browning gives, in conclusion, a test by which the relative merit of any two real poets may be gauged. _The greater is he who leads the happier life_. To be a poet is to see and feel. To see and feel is to suffer. His is the truest poetic existence who enslaves his sufferings, and makes their strength his own. He who yokes them to his chariot shall win the race.[83]

"CENCIAJA" signifies matter relating to the "Cenci;"[84] and the poem describes an incident extraneous to the "Cenci" tragedy, but which strongly influenced its course. This incident was the murder of the widowed Marchesa dell' Oriolo, by her younger son, Paolo Santa Croce, who thus avenged her refusal to invest him with his elder brother's rights. He escaped the hands of justice, though only to perish in some other disastrous way. But the matricide had been committed on the very day which closed the trial of the Cenci family for the a.s.sa.s.sination of its Head; and it sealed Beatrice's fate. Her sentence seemed about to be remitted. The Pope now declared that she must die.

... "Paolo Santo Croce Murdered his mother also yestereve, And he is fled: she shall not flee at least!"

(vol. xiv. p. 104.)

The elder son of the Marchesa, Onofrio Marchese dell' Oriolo, was arrested on the strength of an ambiguous sc.r.a.p of writing, which appeared to implicate him in his brother's guilt; and subjected in prison to such a daily and day-long examination on the subject of this letter, that his mind gave way, and the desired avowal was extracted from him. He confessed to having implied, under reserves and conditions which practically neutralized the confession, his a.s.sent to his mother's death. He was beheaded accordingly; and the Governor of Rome, Taverna, who had conducted the inquisition, was rewarded by a Cardinal's hat.

Other motives were, however, involved in the proceeding than the Pope's quickened zeal for justice. He had entrusted the case to his nephew, Cardinal Aldobrandini; and it was known that the Cardinal and the Marchese had courted the same lady, and the latter unwisely flaunted the possession of a ring which was his pledge of victory.

This story, with other details which I have not s.p.a.ce to give, was taken from a contemporary Italian chronicle, of which some lines are literally transcribed.

The heretic of "THE HERETIC'S TRAGEDY" was Jacques du Bourg-Molay, last Grand Master of the Order of Knights Templars, and against whom preposterous accusations had been brought. This "Jacques," whom the speaker erroneously calls "John," and who might stand for any victim of middle-age fanaticism, was burned in Paris in 1314; and the "Interlude,"

we are told, "would seem to be a reminiscence of this event, as distorted by two centuries of refraction from Flemish brain to brain."

The scene is carried on by one singer, in a succession of verses, and by a chorus which takes up the last and most significant words of each verse; the organ accompanying in a plagal cadence,[85] which completes its effect. The chant is preceded by an admonition from the abbot, which lays down its text: that G.o.d is unchanging, and His justice as infinite as His mercy; and singer and chorus both denounce the impious heresy of "John:" who admitted only the love, and sinned the "Unknown Sin," in his confidence in it. How the logs are fired; how the victim roasts; amidst what hideous and fantastic torments the d.a.m.ned soul "flares forth into the dark" is quaintly and powerfully described.

ROMANTIC POEMS.

The prevalence of thought in Mr. Browning's poetry has created in many minds an impression that he is more a thinker than a poet: that his poems not only are each inspired by some leading idea, but have grown up in subservience to it; and those who hold this view both do him injustice as a poet, and underrate, however unconsciously, the intellectual value of what his work conveys. For in a poet's imagination, the thought and the thing--the idea and its image--grow up at the same time; each being a different aspect of the other.[86] He sees, therefore, the truths of Nature, as Nature herself gives them; while the thinker, who conceives an idea first, and finds an ill.u.s.tration for it afterwards, gives truth only as it presents itself to the human mind--in a more definite, but much narrower form. Mr.

Browning often _treats_ his subject as a pure thinker might, but he has always _conceived_ it as a poet; he has always seen in one flash, everything, whether moral or physical, visible or invisible, which the given situation could contain.[87] This fact may be recognized in many of the smaller poems, which, for that reason, I shall find it impossible to cla.s.s; but it is best displayed in a couple of longer ones, which I have placed under the head "Romantic." They are distinct from the majority of the "Dramatic Romances," although included in them. For with these the word "romantic" denotes an imaginary experience, which may be frankly supernatural, as in "The Boy and the Angel;" or only improbable, as in "Mesmerism;" or semi-historical and local, as in "In a Gondola;"

or simply human, and possible anywhere and anywhen, as in "The Last Ride Together;" or in "Dis aliter Visum," and "James Lee's Wife," which might be cla.s.sed with them. I am now using it to mark certain cases, in which the author's imagination has not brought itself to the test of _any_ consistent experience, but simply presents us with certain groups of material and mental--of real and ideal possibilities, which we may each interpret for ourselves. They occur in

"Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came." ("Dramatic Romances."

Published in "Men and Women." 1855.)

"The Flight of the d.u.c.h.ess." ("Dramatic Romances." Published in "Dramatic Romances and Lyrics." 1845.)[88]

The first of these has been taken by some intelligent critics to be a moralizing allegory; the second, a moralizing fairy-tale. They are, therefore, a useful type both of Mr. Browning's poetic genius, and of the misunderstanding, to which its constantly intellectual employment has exposed him.

"CHILDE ROLAND TO THE DARK TOWER CAME," describes a brave knight performing a pilgrimage, in which hitherto all who attempted it have failed. The way through which he struggles is unknown to him; its features are hideous; a deadly sense of difficulty and danger hangs over every step; and though Childe Roland's courage is pledged to the undertaking, the thought of failure at last comes to him as a relief. He reaches the goal just as failure appears inevitable. The plain has suddenly closed in; weird and unsightly eminences encompa.s.s him on every side. In one flash he perceives that he is in a trap; in another, that the tower stands before him; while round it, against the hill-sides, are ranged the "lost adventurers" who have preceded him--their names and story clanging loudly and more loudly in his ears--their forms revealed with ghastly clearness in the last fires of the setting sun.

So far the picture is consistent; but if we look below its surface discrepancies appear. The Tower is much nearer and more accessible than Childe Roland has thought; a sinister-looking man, of whom he asked the way, and who, as he believed, was deceiving him, has really put him on the right track; and as he describes the country through which he pa.s.ses, it becomes clear that half its horrors are created by his own heated imagination, or by some undefined influence in the place itself.

We are left in doubt whether those who have found failure in this quest, have not done so through the very act of attainment in it; and when, dauntless, Childe Roland sounds his slughorn and announces that he has come, we should not know, but that he lives to tell the tale, whether in doing this he incurs, or is escaping, the general doom. We can connect no idea of definite pursuit or attainment with a series of facts so dreamlike and so disjointed: still less extract from it a definite moral; and we are reduced to taking the poem as a simple work of fancy, built up of picturesque impressions which have, separately or collectively, produced themselves in the author's mind.[89]

But these picturesque impressions had, also, their ideal side, which Mr.

Browning as spontaneously reproduced; and we may all recognize under the semblance of the enchanted country and the adventurous knight, a poetic vision of life: with its conflicts, contradictions, and mockeries; its difficulties which give way when they seem most insuperable; its successes which look like failures, and its failures which look like success. The thing we may not do is to imagine that an intended lesson is conveyed by it.