A Handbook to the Works of Browning Part 26

"THE FLIGHT OF THE d.u.c.h.eSS" is the adventure of a young girl, who was brought out of a convent to marry a certain Duke. The Duke was narrow-hearted, pompous, and self-sufficient; the mother who shared his home, a sickly woman, as ungenial as himself. The young wife, on the other hand, was a bright, stirring creature, who would have been the suns.h.i.+ne of a labourer's home. She pined amidst the dreariness and the formality of her conjugal existence, and seized the first opportunity of escape from it. A retainer of the Duke's, whose chivalry her position had aroused, connived at her escape, and tells the story of it.

The Duke had decreed a hunt. Custom prescribed that his wife should attend it. She had excused herself on the plea of her ill-health; and he was riding forth in no amiable mood, when an old gipsy woman, well known in the neighbourhood, accosted him with the usual prayer for alms. He was curtly dismissing her, when she mentioned her desire to pay her respects to the young d.u.c.h.ess. It then occurred to him that the sight of this ragged crone, and the chronicle of her woes, might be an excellent medicine for his "froward," ungrateful wife, and teach her to know when she was well off; and after speaking in confidence with the old woman, he bade him who recounts the adventure escort her into the lady's presence. The interview took place. The d.u.c.h.ess accompanied her visitor to the castle gate, ordered her palfrey to be saddled, mounted it with the gipsy behind her, and bounded away, never to return. The attendant had watched and obeyed her as in a dream. She left in his hand, in grat.i.tude for what she knew he felt for her, a little plait of hair.

These are the real facts of the story. But we have also its ideal possibilities, as reflected by the imagination of the narrator. He had seen the gipsy metamorphosed as she received the Duke's command, from a ragged, decrepit crone into a stately woman, whose clothing bore the appearance of wealth; and as he mounted guard on the balcony which commanded the d.u.c.h.ess's room, he saw the wonder grow. A sound as of music first attracted his attention; and as he looked in at the window he saw the d.u.c.h.ess sitting at the feet of a real gipsy-queen: her head upturned--her whole being expanding--as the gipsy's hands waved over her, and the gipsy's eyes, preternaturally dilated, poured their floods of life into her own. Then the music broke up into words, and he knew what hope and promise that fainting spirit was drinking in: for he heard what the gipsy said. She was telling the young d.u.c.h.ess that she was one of themselves--that she bore their mystic mark in the two veins which met and parted on her brow--that after fiery trial she should return to her tribe, and be s.h.i.+elded by their devotion for evermore. She was telling her how good a thing is love--how strong and beautiful the double existence of those whom love has welded together--how full of restful memories the old age of those who have lived in and for it--how sure and gentle their awakening into the better world.... Here the words again lost themselves in music, and he understood no more. When the two appeared at the castle gate, the gipsy had shrunk back into her original character; but the d.u.c.h.ess remained transformed. She had become, in her turn, a queen.

The suggestion of her gipsy origin forms a connecting link between the real and the ideal aspects of the d.u.c.h.ess's flight. We might imagine her fervid nature as being affected by the message of deliverance precisely in the manner described: while the beautified image of her deliverer transferred itself through some magnetic influence to the spectator's mind from her own. He does not, however, present himself as a probable subject for such impressions. He is a jovial, matter-of-fact person, in spite of the vein of sentiment which runs through him; and the imaginative part of his narrative was more probably the result of a huntsman's breakfast which had found its way into his brain. As in the case of Childe Roland, the poetic truth of the d.u.c.h.ess's romance is incompatible with rational explanation, and independent of it. Various dramatic details complete the story.

SATIRICAL OR HUMOROUS POEMS.

Humour is a constant characteristic of Mr. Browning's work,[90] and it sometimes takes the form of direct and intentional satire; but his sympathy with human beings and his hopeful view of their future destiny, are opposed to any development of the satirical mood. The impression of sympathy will even neutralize the satire, in poems in which the latter is directly and conciously conveyed: as, for instance, in "Caliban upon Setebos," and "The Bishop orders his Tomb at Saint Praxed's Church." Of grim or serious satire, there is, I think, only one specimen among his works: the first part of

"Holy-Cross Day." ("Dramatic Romances." Published in "Men and Women," 1855.)

We may cla.s.s as playful satires (which I give in the order of their importance):

"Pacchiarotto, and how he worked in Distemper." (1876.)

"Filippo Baldinucci on the Privilege of Burial."

("Pacchiarotto, and other Poems." 1876.)

"Up at a Villa--Down in the City." ("Dramatic Lyrics."

Published in "Men and Women." 1855.)

"Another Way of Love." ("Dramatic Lyrics." Published in "Men and Women." 1855.)

We have a purely humorous picture in

"Garden Fancies, II. Sibrandus Schafnaburgensis." ("Dramatic Lyrics." Published in "Dramatic Romances and Lyrics." 1845.)

"HOLY-CROSS DAY" was the occasion of an "Annual Christian Sermon,"

which the Jews in Rome were forced to attend; and the poem which bears this t.i.tle is prefaced by an extract from an imaginary "Diary by a Bishop's Secretary," dated 1600; and expatiating on the merciful purpose, and regenerating effect of this sermon. What the a.s.sembled Jews may have really felt about it, Mr. Browning sets forth in the words of one of the congregation.

This man describes the hustling and bustling, the crowding and packing--the suppressed stir as of human vermin imprisoned in a small s.p.a.ce; the sham groans, and sham conversions which follow in their due course; and as he thus dwells on his national and personal degradation, his tone has the bitter irony of one who has both realized and accepted it. But the irony recoils on those who have inflicted the degradation--on the so-called Christians who would throttle the Jew's creed while they "gut" his purse, and make him the instrument of their own sins; and is soon lost in the emotion of a pathetic and solemn prayer; the supposed death-bed utterance of Rabbi Ben Ezra.

The prayer is an invocation to the justice, and to the sympathy of Christ. It claims His help against the enemies who are also His own. It concedes, as possible, that He was in truth the Messiah, crucified by the nation of which He claimed a crown. But it points to His Christian followers as inflicting on Him a still deeper outrage: a belief which the lips profess, and which the life derides and discredits. It urges, in the Jew's behalf, the ignorance, the fear, in which the deed was done; the bitter sufferings by which it has been expiated. It pleads his long endurance, as testimony to the fact, that he withstands Barabbas now, as he withstood Christ "then;" that he strives to wrest Christ's name from the "Devil's crew," though the shadow of His face be upon him.

The invocation concludes with an expression of joyful confidence in G.o.d and the future.

(Giacomo) "PACCHIAROTTO" was a painter of Siena.[91] His story is told in the "Commentary on the Life of Sodoma" by the editors of Vasari; Florence, 1855; and this contains all, or nearly all, the incidents of Mr. Browning's "Pacchiarotto," as well as others of a similar kind but of later occurrence, which are not mentioned in it.

This painter was a restless, aggressive personage, with a craze for reform; and a conspicuous member of the "Bardotti:" a society of uncommissioned reformers, whose occupation was to cry down abuses, and prescribe wholesale theoretical measures for removing them. (Hence their t.i.tle; which signifies "spare" horses or "freed" ones: they walk by the side of the waggon while others drudge at, and drag it along). But he discovered that men would not be reformed; and bethought himself, after a time, of a new manner of testifying to the truth. He selected a room in his own house, whitewashed it (we conclude); and, working in "distemper" or fresco, painted it with men and women of every condition and kind. He then harangued these on their various shortcomings. They answered him, as he imagined, in a humble and apologetic manner; and he then proceeded to denounce their excuses, and strip the mask from their sophistries and hypocrisies--doing so with every appearance of success.

But he presumed too much on his victory. A famine had broken out in Siena. The magistrates were, of course, held responsible for it. The Bardotti a.s.sembled, and prescribed the fitting remedies. Everything would come right if only the existing social order was turned topsy-turvy, and men were released from every tie. Pacchiarotto was conspicuous by his eloquence. But when he denounced the chief of the munic.i.p.al force, and hinted that if the right man were in the right place, that officer would be he, all the other "spare horses" rushed upon him and he was obliged to run for his life. The first hiding-place which presented itself was a sepulchre, in which a corpse had just been laid. He squeezed himself into this, and crawled forth from it at at the end of two days, starving, covered with vermin, and thoroughly converted to the policy of living and letting live. The authentic part of the narrative concludes with his admission into a neighbouring convent (the Osservanza) where he was cleansed and fed. But Mr. Browning allows Fancy the just employment of telling how the Superior improved the occasion, and how his lesson was received.

"It is a great mistake," this reverend person a.s.sures his guest--though one from which his own youth has not been free--"to imagine that any one man can preach another out of his folly. If such endeavours could succeed, heaven would have begun on earth. Whereas, every man's task is to leaven earth with heaven, by working towards the end to which his Master points, without dreaming that he can ever attain it. Man, in short, is to be not the 'spare horse,' but the 'mill-horse' plodding patiently round and round on the same spot."

And Pacchiarotto replies that his monitor's arguments are, by his own account, doomed to be ineffectual: but that he is addressing himself to one already convinced. He (Pacchiarotto) never was so by living man; but he has been convinced by a dead one. That corpse has seemed to ask him by its grin, why he should join it before his time because men are not all made on the same pattern: "Because, above, one's Jack and one--John." And the same grin has reminded him that this life is the rehearsal, not the real performance: just an hour's trial of who is fit, and who isn't, to play his part; that the parts are distributed by the author, whose purpose will be explained in proper time; and that when his brother has been cast for a fool's part, he is no sage who would persuade him to give it up. He is now going back to his paint-pot, and will mind his own business in future.

By an easy transition, Mr. Browning turns the laugh against his own critics, whom he professes to recognize on this May morning, as flocking into his garden in the guise of sweeps. He does not, he says, grudge them their fun or their one holiday of the year, the less so that their rattling and drumming may give him some inkling how music sounds; and he flings them, by way of a gift, the story he has just told, bidding them dance, and "dust" his "jacket" for a little while. But that done, he bids them clear off, lest his housemaid should compel them to do so. He has her authority for suspecting that in their professional character they bring more dirt into the house than they remove from it[92].

"FILIPPO BALDINUCCI" was the author of a history of art ("Notizie dei Professori del Disegno da Cimabue in qua"); and the incident which Mr.

Browning relates as "a reminiscence of A.D. 1670," appears there in a notice of the life of the painter Buti. (Vol. iii. p. 422.)

The Jewish burial ground in Florence was a small field at the foot of the Monte Oliveto. A path ascending the hill skirted its upper end, and at an angle of this stood a shrine with one side blank, the other adorned by a painting of the Virgin Mary. The painting was intended to catch the eye of all believers who approached from the neighbouring city-gate (Porta San Friano or Frediano); and was therefore so turned that it overlooked the Jewish cemetery at the same time. The Jews, objecting to this, negotiated for its removal with the owner of the ground; and his steward, acting in his name, received a hundred ducats as the price of his promise that the Virgin should be transferred to the opposite side of the shrine. The task was undertaken by Buti, but carried on in the privacy of a curtained scaffolding; and when the curtains were withdrawn, it was seen that the picture _had_ been transferred; but that a painting of the Crucifixion occupied its original place. Four Rabbis, the "sourest and ugliest" of the lot, were deputed to remonstrate with the steward; but this person coolly replied that they had no ground of complaint whatever. "His master had amply fulfilled his bond. Did they fancy their 'sordid' money had bought his freedom to do afterwards what he thought fit?" And he advised them to remove themselves before worse befell them. The Jews retired discomfited; and, as the writer hopes, took warning by what had happened, never again to tempt with their ill-earned wealth "the religious piety of good Christians."

Mr. Browning gives this story, with unimportant variations, in the manner of Baldinucci himself; and does full justice to the hostile and contemptuous spirit in which the att.i.tude of the Jews is described by him. But he also heightens the unconscious self-satire of the narrative by infusing into this att.i.tude a genuine dignity and pathos. He enlists all our sympathy by the Chief Rabbi's prayer that his people, so sorely tried in life, may be allowed rest from persecution in their graves; and he concludes with an imaginary incident which leaves them masters of the situation. On the day after what the historian calls this "pleasing occurrence," the son of the High Priest presented himself at Buti's shop, where he and the so-called "farmer" were still laughing over the event; and in tones of ominous mildness begged to purchase that pretty thing--the picture in oils, from which the fresco painting of the Virgin had been made. He was a Herculean young man, and Buti, who white and trembling had tried to slip out of his way, was so bewildered by the offer, that he asked only the proper price for his work. The farmer, however, broke forth in expressions of pious delight, "Mary had surely wrought a miracle, and _converted_ the Jew!"

The Jew turned like a trodden worm. "Truly," he replied, "a miracle has been wrought, by a power which no canvas yet possessed, in that I have resisted the desire to throttle you. But my purchase of your picture is not due to a miracle. It means simply that I have been cured of my prejudices in respect to art. Christians hang up pictures of heathen G.o.ds. Their 't.i.tians' paint them. A cardinal will value his Leda or his Ganymede beyond everything else which he possesses. If I express wonder at this sacrifice of the truth, I am told that the truth of a picture is in its drawing and painting, and that these are valued precisely because they _are_ true. Why then should not your Mary take her place among my Ledas and the rest; be judged as a picture, and, since--as I fear--Master Buti is not a t.i.tian, laughed at accordingly?"

"So now," the speaker concludes, "Jews buy what pictures they like, and hang them up where they please, and,"--with an inward groan--"no, boy, you must not pelt them." This warning, which is supposed to be addressed by the historian in his old age to a nephew with a turn for throwing stones, reveals the motive of the story: a sudden remembrance of the good old pious time, when Jews _might_ be pelted.

"UP AT A VILLA--DOWN IN THE CITY" is a lively description of the amus.e.m.e.nts of the city, and the dulness of villa life, as contrasted by an Italian of quality, who is bored to death in his country residence, but cannot afford the town. His account of the former gives a genuine impression of dreariness and monotony, for the villa is stuck on a mountain edge, where the summer is scorching and the winter bleak, where a "lean cypress" is the most conspicuous object in the foreground, and hills "smoked over" with "faint grey olive trees" fill in the back; where on hot days the silence is only broken by the shrill chirp of the cicala, and the whining of bees around some adjacent firs. But the other side of the picture, though sympathetically drawn, is a perfect parody of what it is meant to convey. For the speaker's ideal "city" might be a big village, with its primitive customs, and its life all concentrated in the market-place or square; and it is precisely in the square that he is ambitious to live. There the church-bells sound, and the diligence rattles in, and the travelling doctor draws teeth or gives pills; there the punch-show or the church procession displays itself, and the last proclamation of duke or archbishop is posted up. It is never too hot, because of the fountain always plas.h.i.+ng in the centre; and the bright white houses, and green blinds, and painted shop-signs are a perpetual diversion to the eye.... But alas! the price of food is prohibitive; and a man must live where he can.

"ANOTHER WAY OF LOVE" is the complement to "One Way of Love," and displays the opposite mood. The one lover patiently gathers June roses in case they may catch his lady's eye. The other grows tired of such patience even when devoted to himself; he tires of June roses, which are always red and sweet. His lady-love is bantering him on this frame of mind. It is true, she says, that such monotony is trying to a man's temper: there is no comfort in anything that can't be quarrelled with; and the person she addresses is free to "go." She reminds him, however, that June may repair her bower which his hand has rifled, and the next time "consider" which of two courses she prefers: to bestow her flowers on one who will accept their sweetness, or use her lightnings to kill the spider who is weaving his films about them.

"SIBRANDUS SCHAFNABURGENSIS" is apparently the name of an old pedant who has written a tiresome book; and the adventures of this book form the subject of the poem. Some wag relates how he read it a month ago, having come into the garden for that purpose; and then revenged himself by dropping it through a crevice in a tree, and enjoying a picnic lunch and a chapter of "Rabelais" on the gra.s.s close by. To-day, in a fit of compunction, he has raked the "treatise" out; but meanwhile it has blistered in the sun, and run all colours in the rain. Toadstools have grown in it; and all the creatures that creep have towzed it and browsed on it, and devoted bits of it to their different domestic use. It is altogether a melancholy sight. So the wag thinks his victim has sufficiently suffered, and carries it back to his book-shelf, to "dry-rot" there in all the comfort it deserves.

DESCRIPTIVE POEMS.

Mr. Browning's poems abound in descriptive pa.s.sages, and his power of word-painting is very vivid, as well as frequently employed. But we have here another instance of a quality diffused throughout his work, yet scarcely ever a.s.serting itself in a distinct form. The reason is, that he deals with men and women first--with nature afterwards; and that the details of a landscape have little meaning for him, except in reference to the mental or dramatic situation of which they form a part. This is very apparent in such lyrics or romances as: "By the Fire-side," "In a Gondola," and "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came." We find three poems only which might have been written for the sake of the picturesque impressions which they convey:

"De Gustibus--" ("Dramatic Lyrics." Published in "Men and Women." 1855.)

"Home-Thoughts, from Abroad." ("Dramatic Lyrics." Published in "Dramatic Romances and Lyrics." 1845.)

"The Englishman in Italy." ("Dramatic Romances." Published as "England in Italy" in "Dramatic Romances and Lyrics." 1845.) And even here we receive the picture with a lyric and dramatic colouring, which makes it much less one of facts than of a.s.sociations. It is also to be remarked that, in these poems, the a.s.sociations are of two opposite kinds, and Mr. Browning is in equal sympathy with both. He feels English scenery as an Englishman does: Italian, as an Italian might be supposed to, feel it.

"DE GUSTIBUS--" ill.u.s.trates the difference of tastes by the respective attractions of these two kinds of scenery, and of the ideas and images connected with them. Some one is apostrophizing a friend, whose ghost he is convinced will be found haunting an English lane, with its adjoining corn-field and hazel coppice: where in the early summer the blackbird sings, and the bean-flower scents the air. And he declares at the same time that Italy is the land of his own love, whether his home there be a castle in the Apennine, or some house on its southern sh.o.r.e; among "wind-grieved" heights, or on the edge of an opaque blue sea: amidst a drought and stillness in which the very cicala dies, and the cypress seems to rust; and scorpions drop and crawl from the peeling walls ...

and where "a bare-footed girl tumbles green melons on to the ground before you, as she gives news of the last attack on the Bourbon king."

"HOME-THOUGHTS, FROM ABROAD" is a longing reminiscence of an English April and May, with their young leaves and their blossoms, their suns.h.i.+ne and their dew, their song of the chaffinch and their rapturous music of the thrush. Appreciation is heightened by contrast; and the b.u.t.tercup--England's gift to her little children--is p.r.o.nounced far brighter than the "gaudy melon-flower" which the exiled Englishman has at this moment before him.

"THE ENGLISHMAN IN ITALY" is a vivid picture of Italian peasant-life on the plain of Sorrento: the occasion being an outbreak of the well-known hot wind--the "scirocco"--which, in this case, has brought with it a storm of rain. A little frightened peasant girl has taken refuge by the side of the Englishman, who is apparently lodging in her mother's cottage. And he is diverting her attention by describing his impressions of the last twenty-four hours: how everything looked before the rain; how he knew while yet in bed that the rain had come, by the rattling down of the quail-nets,[93] which were to be tugged into shelter, while girls ran on to the housetops to fetch the drying figs; how the black churning waters forbade the fishermen to go to sea (what strange creatures they bring home when they do go, and how the brown naked children, who look like so many shrimps, cling screaming about them at the sight); how all hands are now employed at the wine-making, and her brother is at this moment dancing bare-legged in a vat half as high as the house; how the bigger girls bring baskets of grapes, with eyes closed to keep out the rain; and how the smaller ones gather snails in the wet gra.s.s, which will appear with fried pumpkin at the labourer's supper; how, yesterday, he climbed Mount Calvano--that very brother of hers for his guide--his mule carrying him with dainty steps through the plain--past the woods--up a path ever wilder and stonier, where sorb and myrtle fall away, but lentisk and rosemary still cling to the face of the rock--the head and shoulders of some new mountain ever coming into view; how he emerged, at last, where there were mountains all around; below, the green sea; above, the crystal solitudes of heaven; and, down in that green sea, the slumbering Siren islands: the three which stand together, and the one which swam to meet them, but has always remained half-way. These, and other reminiscences, beguile the time till the storm has pa.s.sed, and the sun breaks over the great mountain which the Englishman has just described. He and little "Fortu"

can now go into the village, and see the preparations being made for to-morrow's feast--that of the Virgin of the Rosary--which primitive solemnity he also (by antic.i.p.ation) describes. He concludes with a brief allusion to the political scirocco which is blackening the English sky, and will not vanish so quickly as this has done; and thus hints at a reason, if the reader desires one, for his temporary rustication in a foreign land.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 72: First in "Hood's Magazine."]