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A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) by Mrs. Sutherland Orr

M >> Mrs. Sutherland Orr >> A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.)




"Saul." ("Dramatic Lyrics." Published in part in "Dramatic
Romances and Lyrics," 1845; wholly, in "Men and Women,"
1855.)

"Epilogue." ("Dramatis Personae." 1864.)

"Fears and Scruples." ("Pacchiarotto and other Poems." 1876.)

The religious sentiment in "SAUL" anticipates Christianity. It begins
with the expression of an exalted human tenderness, and ends in a
prophetic vision of Divine Love, as manifested in Christ. The speaker is
David. He has been sent into the presence of Saul to sing and play to
him; for Saul is in the agony of that recurring spiritual conflict from
which only David's song can deliver him; and when the boy-shepherd has
crept his way into the darkness of the tent, he sees the monarch with
arms outstretched against its poles, dumb, sightless, and stark, like
the serpent in the solitude of the forest awaiting its transformation.

David tells his story, re-enacting the scene which it describes, in
strong, simple, picturesque words which rise naturally into the language
of prophecy. He tells how first he tried the influence of pastoral
tunes: those which call the sheep back to the pen, and stir the sense of
insect and bird; how he passed to the song of the reapers--their
challenge to mutual help and fellowship; to the warrior's march; the
burial and marriage chants; the chorus of the Levites advancing towards
the altar; and how at this moment Saul sent forth a groan, though the
lights which leapt from the jewels of his turban were his only sign of
motion. Then--the tale continues--David changes his theme. He sings of
the goodness of human life, as attested by the joyousness of youth, the
gratitude of old age. He sings of labour and success, of hope and
fulfilment, of high ambitions and of great deeds; of the great king in
whom are centred all the gifts and the powers of human nature--of Saul
himself. And at these words the tense body relaxes, the arms cross
themselves on the breast. But the eyes of Saul still gaze vacantly
before him, without consciousness of life, without desire for it.

David's song has poured forth the full cup of material existence; he has
yet to infuse into it that draught of "Soul Wine" which shall make it
desirable. In a fresh burst of inspiration, he challenges his hearer to
follow him beyond the grave. "The tree is known by its fruits; life by
its results. Life, like the palm fruit, must be crushed before its wine
can flow. Saul will die. But his passion and his power will thrill the
generations to come. His achievements will live in the hearts of his
people; for whom their record, though covering the whole face of a rock,
will still seem incomplete." And as the "Soul Wine" works, as the vision
of this earthly immortality unfolds itself before the sufferer's sight,
he becomes a king again. The old attitude and expression assert
themselves. The hand is gently laid on the young singer's forehead; the
eyes fix themselves in grave scrutiny upon him.

Then the heart of David goes out to the suffering monarch in filial,
pitying tenderness; and he yearns to give him more than this present
life--a new life equal to it in goodness, and which shall be
everlasting.

And the yearning converts itself into prophecy. What he, as man, can
desire for his fellow-man, God will surely give. What he would suffer
for those he loves, surely God would suffer. Human nature in its power
of love would otherwise outstrip the Divine. He cries for the weakness
to be engrafted upon strength, the human to be manifested in the Divine.
And exulting in the consciousness that his cry is answered, he hails the
advent of Christ. He bids Saul "see" that a Face like his who now speaks
to him awaits him at the threshold of an eternal life; that a Hand like
his hand opens to him its gates.

David's prophecy has rung through the universe; and as he seeks his home
in the darkness, unseen "cohorts" press everywhere upon him. A
tumultuous expectation is filling earth and hell and heaven. The Hand
guides him through the tumult. He sees it die out in the birth of the
young day. But the hushed voices of nature attest the new dispensation.
The seal of the new promise is on the face of the earth.


The EPILOGUE is spoken by three different persons, and embodies as many
phases of the religious life. The "FIRST SPEAKER, _as David_,"
represents the old Testament Theism, with its solemn celebrations, its
pompous worship, and the strong material faith which bowed down the
thousands as one man, before the visible glory of the Lord.

The "SECOND SPEAKER, _as Renan_" represents nineteenth-century
scepticism, and the longing of the heart for the old belief which
scientific reason has dispelled. This belief is symbolized by a "Face"
which once looked down from heights of glory upon men; by a star which
shone down upon them in responsive life and love. The face has vanished
into darkness. The star, gradually receding, has lost itself in the
multitude of the lesser lights of heaven. And centuries roll past while
the forsaken watchers vainly question the heavenly vault for the sign of
love no longer visible there.

This lament assumes that Theism, having grown into Christianity, must
disappear with it; and the pathetic sense of bereavement gives way to
shuddering awe, as the farther significance of the sceptical position
reveals itself. _Man_ becomes the summit of creation; the sole successor
to the vacant throne of God.

The "THIRD SPEAKER," Mr. Browning himself, corrects both the material
faith of the Old Testament, and the scientific doubt of the nineteenth
century, by the idea of a more mystical and individual intercourse
between God and man. Observers have noted in the Arctic Seas that the
whole field of waters seem constantly hastening towards some central
point of rock, to envelope it in their playfulness and their force; in
the blackness they have borrowed from the nether world, or the radiance
they have caught from heaven; then tearing it up by the roots, to sweep
onwards towards another peak, and make _it_ their centre for the time
being. So do the forces of life and nature circle round the individual
man, doing in each the work of experience, reproducing for each the
Divine Face which is inspired by the spirit of creation. And, as the
speaker declares, he needs no "Temple," because the world is that. Nor,
as he implies, needs he look beyond the range of his own being for the
lost Divinity.

"That one Face, far from vanish, rather grows,
Or decomposes but to recompose,
Become my universe that feels and knows!" (vol. vii. p. 255.)


"FEARS AND SCRUPLES" illustrates this personal religion in an opposite
manner. It is the expression of a tender and very simple religious
feeling, saddened by the obscurity which surrounds its object, and still
more by the impossibility of proving to other minds that this object is
a real one. It is described as the devotion to an unseen friend, known
only by his letters and reported deeds, but whom one loves as by
instinct, believes in without testimony, and trusts to as accepting the
allegiance of the smaller being, and sure sooner or later to acknowledge
it In the present case the days are going by. No sign of acknowledgment
has been given. Sceptics assure the believer that his faith rests on
letters which were forged, on actions which others equally have
performed; he can only yearn for some word or token which would enable
him to shut their mouth. But when some one hints that the friend is only
concealing himself to test his power of vision, and will punish him if
he does not see; and another objects that this would prove the friend a
monster; he crushes the objector with a word: "and what if the friend be
GOD?"

The next group is fuller and still more characteristic: for it displays
the love of Art in its special conditions, and, at the same time, in its
union with all the general human instincts in which artistic emotion can
be merged. We find it in its relation to the general love of life in

"Fra Lippo Lippi." ("Men and Women." 1855.)

In its relation to the spiritual sense of existence in

"Abt Vogler." ("Dramatis Personae." 1864.)

As a transformation of human tenderness in

"Pictor Ignotus." ("Men and Women." Published in "Dramatic
Romances and Lyrics." 1845.)

In its directly sensuous effects in

"The Bishop orders his Tomb at Saint Praxed's Church." ("Men
and Women." Published as "The Tomb at Saint Praxed's" in
"Dramatic Romances and Lyrics." 1845.)[72]

In its associative power in

"A Toccata of Galuppi's." ("Dramatic Lyrics." Published in
"Men and Women." 1855.)

In its representative power in

"The Guardian-Angel: a Picture at Fano." ("Dramatic Lyrics."
Published in "Men and Women." 1855.)

"Eurydice to Orpheus: a Picture by Leighton." ("Dramatis
Personae." 1864.)

"A Face." ("Dramatis Personae." 1864.)


"FRA LIPPO LIPPI" is a lively monologue, supposed to be uttered by that
friar himself, on the occasion of a night frolic in which he has been
surprised. Cosmo dei Medici had locked him up in one room of the palace
till some pictures he was painting for him should be finished;[73] and
on this particular night he has found the confinement intolerable. He
has whipped his bed clothes into a rope, scrambled down from his window,
and run after a girlish face which laughingly invited him from the
street; and was about to return from the equivocal neighbourhood into
which the fun had led him, when his monkish dress caught the attention
of the guard, and he was captured and called to account. He proceeds to
give a sketch of his life and opinions, which supplies a fair excuse for
the escapade. The facts he relates are, including this one, historical.

Fra Lippo Lippi had no vocation for the priesthood. He was enticed into
a Carmelite convent when a half-starved orphan of eight years old, ready
to subscribe to any arrangement which promised him enough to eat. There
he developed an extraordinary talent for drawing; and the Prior, glad to
turn it to account, gave him the cloisters and the church to paint. But
the rising artist had received his earliest inspirations in the streets.
His first practice had been gained in scrawling faces in his copybooks,
and expanding the notes of his musical texts into figures with arms and
legs. His conceptions were not sufficiently spiritual to satisfy the
Prior's ideal of Christian art. The men and women he painted were all
true to life. The simpler brethren were delighted as they recognized
each familar type. But the authorities looked grave at so much obtruding
of the flesh; and the Prior clearly laid down his theory that painting
was meant to inspire religious thoughts, and not to stifle them; and
must therefore show no more of the human body than was needed to image
forth the soul.

Fra Lippo Lippi comments freely and quaintly on the absurdity of showing
soul by means of bodies so ill-painted that no one can bear to dwell
upon them, as on the fallacy involved in all contempt for the earthly
life. "He will never believe that the world, with all its life and
beauty, is an unmeaning blank. He is sure, 'it means intensely and means
good.' He is sure, too, that to reproduce what is beautiful in it is
the mission of Art. If anyone objects, that the world being God's work,
Art cannot improve on it, and the painter will best leave it alone: he
answers that some things are the better for being painted; because, as
we are made, we love them best when we see them so. The artist has lent
his mind for us to see with. That is what Art means; what God wills in
giving it to us."

Nevertheless (he continues) he rubbed out his men and women; and though
now, with a Medici for his patron, he may paint as he likes, the old
schooling sticks to him.[74] And he works away at his saints, till
something comes to remind him that life is not a dream, and he kicks the
traces, as he has done now. He ends with a half-joking promise to make
the Church a gainer through his misconduct (supposing that the secret
has been kept from her), by a beautiful picture which he will paint by
way of atonement.

This picture, which he describes very humorously, is that of the
Coronation of the Virgin, now in the "Belle Arti" at Florence.[75]


ABT VOGLER is depicted at the moment when this composer of the last
century has "been extemporizing on the musical instrument of his
invention." His emotion has not yet subsided; and it is that of the
inspired musician, to whom harmonized sound is as the opening of a
heavenly world. His touch upon the keys has been as potent to charm, as
the utterance of that NAME which summoned into Solomon's presence the
creatures of Earth, Heaven, and Hell, and made them subservient to his
will. And the "slaves of the sound," whom he has conjured up, have
built him a palace more evanescent than Solomon's, but, as he describes
it, far more beautiful. They have laid its foundations below the earth.
They have carried its transparent walls up to the sky. They have tipped
each summit with meteoric fire. As earth strove upwards towards Heaven,
Heaven, in this enchanted structure, has yearned downwards towards the
earth. The great Dead came back; and those conceived for a happier
future walked before their time. New births of life and splendour united
far and near; the past, the present, and the to-come.

The vision has disappeared with the sounds which called it forth, and
the musician feels sorrowfully that it cannot be recalled: for the
effect was incommensurate with the cause; they had nothing in common
with each other. We can trace the processes of painting and verse; we
can explain their results. Art, however triumphant, is subject to
natural laws. But that which frames out of three notes of music "not a
fourth sound, but a star" is the Will, which is above law.

And, therefore, so Abt Vogler consoles himself, the music persists,
though it has passed from the sense of him who called it forth: for it
is an echo of the eternal life; a pledge of the reality of every
imagined good--of the continuance of whatever good has existed. Human
passion and aspiration are music sent up to Heaven, to be continued and
completed there. The secret of the scheme of creation is in the
musician's hands.

Having recognized this, Abt Vogler can subside, proudly and patiently,
on the common chord--the commonplace realities, of life.


"PICTOR IGNOTUS" (Florence, 15--), is the answer of an unknown painter
to the praise which he hears lavished on another man. He admits its
justice, but declares that he too could have deserved it; and his words
have all the bitterness of a suppressed longing which an unexpected
touch has set free. He, too, has dreamed of fame; and felt no limits to
his power of attaining it. But he saw, by some flash of intuition, that
it must be bought by the dishonour of his works; that, in order to bring
him fame, they must descend into the market, they must pass from hand to
hand; they must endure the shallowness of their purchasers' comments,
share in the pettiness of their lives. He has remained obscure, that his
creations might be guarded against this sacrilege. "He paints Madonnas
and saints in the twilight stillness of the cloister and the aisle; and
if his heart saddens at the endless repetition of the one heavenward
gaze, at least no merchant traffics in what he loves. There, where his
pictures have been born, mouldering in the dampness of the wall,
blackening in the smoke of the altar, amidst a silence broken only by
prayer, they may 'gently' and 'surely' die." He asks himself, as he
again subsides into mournful resignation, whether the applause of men
may not be neutralized at its best by the ignoble circumstances which it
entails.


"THE BISHOP ORDERS HIS TOMB AT SAINT PRAXED'S CHURCH" (Rome, 15--)
displays the artistic emotion in its least moral form: the love of the
merely beautiful as such; and it shows also how this may be degraded: by
connecting it in the mind of the given person, with the passion for
luxury, and the pride and jealousies of possession. The Bishop is at the
point of death. His sons (nominally nephews) are about him; and he is
urging on them anxious and minute directions for the tomb they are to
place for him in St. Praxed's church.

This tomb, as the Bishop has planned it, is a miracle of costliness and
beauty; for it is to secure him a double end: the indulgence of his own
tastes, and the humiliation of a former rival who lies modestly buried
in the same church. In the delirium of his weakness, these motives,
which we imagine always prominent, assume the strength of mania. His
limbs are already stiff; he feels himself growing into his own monument;
and his fancy revels in the sensations which will combine the calm of
death with the consciousness of sepulchral magnificence. He pleads, as
for dear life, with those who are to inherit his wealth, and who may at
their pleasure fulfil his last wishes or disregard them: that he may
have jasper for his tomb--basalt (black antique) for its slab--the
rosiest marble for its columns--the richest design for its bronze
frieze! A certain ball of lapis-lazuli (such as never yet was seen) is
to "poise" between his knees; and he gasps forth the secret of how he
saved this from the burning of his church, and buried it out of sight in
a vineyard, as if he were staking his very life on the revelation.

But in his heart he knows that his entreaties are useless: that his sons
will keep all they can; and the tone of entreaty is dashed with all the
petulance of foreseen disappointment. Weakness prevails at last. He
resigns himself to the inevitable; blesses his undutiful sons; and
dismisses them.

Other strongly dramatic details complete the picture.[76]


"A TOCCATA OF GALUPPI'S" is a fantastic little vision of bygone Venice,
evoked by the music of an old Venetian master, and filling us with the
sense of a joyous ephemeral existence, in which the glow of life is
already struck by the shuddering chill of annihilation. This sense is
created by the sounds, as Mr. Browning describes them: and their
directly expressive power must stand for what it is worth. Still, the
supposed effect is mainly that of association; and the listener's fancy
the medium through which it acts.


"A FACE" describes a beautiful head and throat in its pictorial
details--those which painting might reproduce.


"THE GUARDIAN-ANGEL" and "EURYDICE TO ORPHEUS" describe each an actual
picture in the emotions it expresses or conveys.

The former represents an angel, standing with outstretched wings by a
little child. The child is half kneeling on a kind of pedestal, while
the angel joins its hands in prayer: its gaze directed upward towards
the sky, from which cherubs are looking down. The picture was painted by
Guercino, and is now in the church of St. Augustine, at Fano, on the
Italian coast. Mr. Browning relates to an absent friend (who appears in
the "Dramatic Romances" as Waring) how he saw it in the company of his
own "angel;" and how it occurred to him to develop into a poem one of
the thoughts which the picture had "struck out." The thought resolves
itself into a feeling: the yearning for guidance and protection. The
poet dreams himself in the place of that praying child. The angel wings
cover his head: the angel hands upon his eyes press back the excess of
thought which has made his brain too big. He feels how thankfully those
eyes would rest on the "gracious face" instead of looking to the opening
sky beyond it; and how purely beautiful the world would seem when that
healing touch had been upon them.

The second was painted by F. Leighton. It represents Orpheus leading
Eurydice away from the infernal regions, but with an implied variation
on the story of her subsequent return to them. She was restored to
Orpheus on the condition of his not looking at her till they had reached
the upper world; and, as the legend goes, the condition proved too hard
for him to fulfil. But the face of Leighton's Eurydice wears an
intensity of longing which seems to challenge the forbidden look, and
make her responsible for it. The poem thus interprets the expression,
and translates it into words.


"ANDREA DEL SARTO" ("Men and Women," 1855) lays down the principle,
asserted by Mr. Browning as far back as in "Sordello," that the soul of
the true artist must exceed his technical powers; that in art, as in all
else, "a man's reach should exceed his grasp." And on this ground the
poem might be classed as critical. But it is still more an expression of
feeling; the lament of an artist who has fallen short of his ideal--of a
man who feels himself the slave of circumstance--of a lover who is
sacrificing his moral, and in some degree his artistic, conscience to a
woman who does not return his love. It is the harmonious utterance of a
many-sided sadness which has become identified with even the pleasures
of the man's life; and is hopeless, because he is resigned to it.

Andrea del Sarto was called the "faultless painter." His execution was
as easy as it was perfect; and Michael Angelo is reported to have said
to Raphael, of the insignificant little personage Andrea then was: that
he would bring the sweat to his (Raphael's) brow, if urged on in like
manner by popes and kings. But he lacked strength and loftiness of
purpose; and as Mr. Browning depicts him, is painfully conscious of
these deficiencies. He feels that even an ill-drawn picture of
Raphael's--and he has such a one before him--has qualities of strength
and inspiration which he cannot attain. His wife might have incited him
to nobler work; but Lucrezia is not the woman from whom such incentives
proceed; she values her husband's art for what it brings her. Remorse
has added itself in his soul to the sense of artistic failure. He has
not only abandoned the French Court, and, for Lucrezia's sake, broken
his promise to return to it; he has cheated his kind friend and patron,
Francis I., of the money with which he was entrusted by him for the
purchase of works of art. He has allowed his parents to die of want. All
this, and more, reflects itself in the monologue he is addressing to his
wife, but no conscious reproach is conveyed by it. She has consented to
sit by him at their window, with her hand in his, while he drinks in her
beauty, and finds in it rest and inspiration at the same time. She will
leave him presently for one she cares for more; but the spell is
deepening upon him. The Fiesole hills are melting away in the twilight;
the evening stillness is invading his whole soul. He scarcely even
desires to fight against the inevitable. Yet there might be despair in
his concluding words: "another chance may be given to him in heaven,
with Leonardo, Michael Angelo, and Raphael. But he will still have
Lucrezia, and therefore they will still conquer him."

The facts adduced are all matter of history; though a later chronicle
than that which Mr. Browning has used, is more favourable in its verdict
on Andrea's wife.

The fiercer emotions also play a part, though seldom an exclusive one,
in Mr. Browning's work. Jealousy forms the subject of

"THE LABORATORY." ("Dramatic Lyrics." Published in "Dramatic
Romances and Lyrics." 1845.)[77]

"MY LAST DUCHESS." ("Dramatic Romances." Published as "Italy"
in "Dramatic Lyrics." 1842.)

The first of these shows the passion as distorted love: the frenzy of a
woman who has been supplanted. The jealous wife (if wife she is) has
come to the laboratory to obtain a dose of poison, which she means to
administer to her rival; and she watches its preparation with an eager,
ferocious joy, dashed only by the fear of its being inadequate. The
quantity is minute; and it is (as we guess) the "magnificent" strength
of that other one which has won _him_ away.

In the second we find a jealousy which has no love in it; which means
the exactingness of self-love, and the tyranny of possession. A widowed
Duke of Ferrara is exhibiting the portrait of his former wife, to the
envoy of some nobleman whose daughter he proposes to marry; and his
comments on the countenance of his last Duchess plainly state what he
will expect of her successor. "That earnest, impassioned, and yet
smiling glance went alike to everyone. She who sent it, knew no
distinction of things or persons. Everything pleased her: everyone could
arouse her gratitude. And it seemed to her husband, from her manner of
showing it, that she ranked his gift, the 'gift of a
nine-hundred-years-old name,' with that of everyone else. It was below
his dignity to complain of this state of things, so he put an end to it.
He: 'gave commands;' and the smiles, too evenly dispensed, stopped all
together." He does not fear to admit, as he does parenthetically, that
there may have been some right on her side. This was below his concern.
The Duke touches, in conclusion, on the dowry which he will expect with
his second wife; and, with a suggestive carelessness, bids his guest
remark--as they are about to descend the staircase--a rare work in
bronze, which a noted sculptor has cast for him.

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