Chapter xv
, is an account of Saul's disobedience and punishment. The choosing of Saul to be king is described in _I Samuel_, Chapters ix and x.
292. _Sabaoth._ The word means "hosts" and is ordinarily used in the phrase "The Lord of hosts." It represents the omnipotence of God.
303. _Nor leave up nor down_, etc. At the end of stanza xv, the thought that had come to David was that God had proved supreme in all the ways in which a human being could test knowledge and power, but that in the one way of love the creature might surpass the Creator. At line 302 he has come to believe in the infinitude of God's love as well as in the infinitude of His power. It is interesting to note that George Eliot in _Silas Marner_ gives to ignorant Dolly Winthrop an experience and a philosophy of life almost identical with those of Browning's David.
307-312. A prophecy of the revelation of the divine in the human, the coming of God in the person of Christ. It is the human in the divine that men seek and love. In the Old Testament days such an idea, though foretold and longed for, could be but vaguely conceived except in moments of especial insight in the minds of poet-prophets like David. Mr. Herford (_Robert Browning_, p. 120) says of this passage:
"David is occupied with no speculative question, but with the practical problem of saving a ruined soul; and neither logical ingenuity nor divine suggestion, but the inherent spiritual significance of the situation, urges his thought along the lonely path of prophecy. The love for the old King, which prompted him to try all the hidden paths of his soul in quest of healing, becomes a lighted torch by which he tracks out the meaning of the world and the still unrevealed purposes of God; until the energy of thought culminates in vision and the Christ stands full before his eyes."
313-335. In this stanza David represents all existences, good and evil spirits, all animals, all forms of nature, as stirred by the great news of the future manifestation of the love of God as shown in Christ.
MY STAR
A love lyric generally supposed to refer to Mrs. Browning.
4. _The angled spar._ A prism. In looking at a prism the colors one sees are determined by the point of view. The idea of the poem is amplified in "One Word More," stanzas xvi-xviii.
TWO IN THE CAMPAGNA
The Campagna, a plain around the city of Rome, was in ancient times the seat of many cities; it is now dotted with ruins. "There is a solemnity and beauty about the Campagna entirely its own. To the reflective mind, this ghost of old Rome is full of suggestion; its vast, almost limitless extent as it seems to the traveler; its abundant herbage and floral wealth in early spring; its desolation, its crumbling monuments, and its evidences of a vanished civilization, fill the mind with a sweet sadness, which readily awakens the longing for the infinite spoken of in the poem." (Berdoe, _Browning Cyclopædia_, p. 553.)
6. _I touched a thought._ The elusive thought which he fancifully pursues from point to point in the surrounding landscape finds statement in lines 34-60. Of these lines Sharp (_Life of Browning_, p. 159) says, "There is a gulf which not the profoundest search can fathom, which not the strongest-winged love can overreach: the gulf of individuality. It is those who have loved most deeply who recognize most acutely this always pathetic and often terrifying isolation of the soul. None save the weak can believe in the absolute union of two spirits ... No man, no poet assuredly, could love as Browning loved, and fail to be aware, often with vague anger and bitterness, no doubt, of this insuperable isolation even when spirit seemed to leap to spirit, in the touch of a kiss, in the evanishing sigh of some one or other exquisite moment."
IN THREE DAYS
"Another poem of waiting love is 'In Three Days.' And this has the spirit of a true love lyric in it. It reads like a personal thing; it breathes exaltation; it is quick, hurried, and thrilled. The delicate fears of chance and changes in the three days, or in the years to come, belong of right and nature to the waiting, and are subtly varied and condensed. It is, however, the thoughtful love of a man who can be metaphysical in love." (Stopford Brooke, _The Poetry of Robert Browning_, p. 253.)
THE GUARDIAN ANGEL
_Fano._ This poem was written in the summer of 1848 after a visit of three days at Fano. It is addressed to Alfred Domett, one of Browning's warm friends, who was at that time in New Zealand on the Wairoa River. For a vivid description of him see Browning's "Waring." The picture at Fano, the details of which are fully brought out in the poem, has been reproduced in _Illustrations to Browning's Poems_, Part I, published by the Browning Society. Mrs. Browning (_Letters_ i, 380) speaks of it as "a divine picture of Guercino's worth going all that way to see."
6. _Another child for tending._ With a longing for guidance and protection Browning imagines himself as a child under the guardianship of the angel.
16. _Like that child._ The child in the picture looks into the heavens. Browning would look only at the gracious face of the angel.
46. _My angel._ Cf. "My love," l. 54. Both refer to Mrs. Browning.
MEMORABILIA
_Pauline_ (1832) has many references to Shelley; note especially lines 151-229; 1020-1031. Browning's "Essay on Shelley" appeared in 1852. "Memorabilia" was composed in 1853-4.
18-28. That later in life Browning "came to think unfavorably of Shelley as a man and to esteem him less highly as a poet" is shown by a letter written to Dr. Furnivall: "For myself I painfully contrast my notions of Shelley the _man_ and Shelley, well, even the _poet_, with what they were sixty years ago." (Quoted by Mr. Dowden: _Robert Browning_, p. 10.) Mr. Browning declined an invitation to be president of the Shelley Society. For a discussion of Shelley's influence on Browning see _Poet-Lore_, Volume VII, January, 1895.
INCIDENT OF THE FRENCH CAMP
Ratisbon, a city of Bavaria, was stormed by Napoleon in 1809. The story told in the poem is a true one, but its hero was a man, not a boy.
MY LAST DUCHESS
The original title in _Dramatic Lyrics_, 1842, was "Italy." It is a poem of the Italian Renaissance. Frà Pandolf and Claus of Innsbruck are, however, imaginary artists.
THE BOY AND THE ANGEL
There is no known original for the story of Theocrite, but it is in accord with the Roman Catholic belief that angels watch over human beings and are interested in their affairs. In the last line is the fundamental lesson of the poem. Compare the thought of Pippa in the song "All service ranks the same with God." See Leigh Hunt's "King Robert of Sicily" (in _A Jar of Honey_, ch. vi.) and Longfellow's "King Robert of Sicily" (in _Tales of a Wayside Inn_) for an analogous legend.
THE PIED PIPER OF HAMELIN
This poem was written to amuse little Willie Macready who was ill and wished a poem for which he could make illustrations. There are many legends that deal with the refusal of a reward promised to a magician for some stipulated service. Mr. Berdoe (_Browning Cyclopædia_, p. 339) says that the story given here is based on an account by Verstegan in his _Restitution of Decayed Intelligence_ (1634). Verstegan gives "Bunting" as the name of the piper; the town, as Hamelin in Brunswick on the Weser; and the mountain into which the children were led as the Köppenberg.
THE FLIGHT OF THE DUCHESS
When Mr. Browning was little more than a child he heard a woman one Guy Fawkes's Day sing, in the street a strange song whose burden was "Following the Queen of the Gypsies, O!" The singular refrain haunted his memory for many years, and out of it was ultimately born this poem.
6-31. The Duke's medieval castle was apparently in Northern Germany, near the sea.
78. _Rough-foot merlin._ A species of hawk formerly trained to pursue other birds and game. A "falcon-lanner" is a long-tailed hawk. The word, when used in falconry, is restricted to the female hawk, which is larger than the male.
101. _Struck at himself._ Amazed at his own importance.
130. _Urochs._ The aurochs, the European bison, a species nearly extinct but preserved in the forests of Lithuania and the Caucasus. The "buffle" is the buffalo.
135-153. Compare this lady with the one in "My Last Duchess."
216. _Well, early in autumn._ In writing "The Flight of the Duchess" Browning was interrupted by a friend on some important business which temporarily drove the story out of the poet's mind. Some months after the publication of the first part in _Hood's Magazine_, April, 1845, he was staying at Bettisfield Park in Shropshire when someone in commenting on the early approach of winter said that already the deer had to break the ice in the pond. This chance phrase roused the poet's fancy, and when he returned home he completed his poem.
238. _St. Hubert._ Before his conversion St. Hubert had been passionately fond of hunting; hence he became the patron saint of hunters.
240-247. "The jerkin" or short coat; the "trunk-hose," or full breeches extending from the waist to the middle of the thigh; the big rimless hats with broad projections back and front and highly ornamented, were medieval articles of attire revived by the Duke for his "Middle Age" hunting party.
249. _Venerers, Prickers, and Verderers_ are ancient names for huntsmen, horsemen, and preservers of venison.
263. _Horns wind a mort._ Horns announce the death of the stag; "at siege" probably means "brought to the appointed station." Possibly it means "at bay," in which case "wind a mort" must mean "announce that the death of the stag is imminent."
264. _Prick forth._ Spur her horse forth. She was to ride a jennet, a small Spanish horse known in the Middle Ages.
315. _Quince-tinct._ Tincture of quince was used as a cosmetic.
322. _Fifty-part canon._ "Mr. Browning explained that a 'canon, in music, is a piece wherein the subject is repeated in various keys, and being strictly obeyed in the repetition, becomes the canon, the imperative law to what follows.' Fifty of such parts would be indeed a notable peal; to manage three is enough of an achievement for a good musician." Berdoe, _Browning Cyclopædia_: page 180.
480. _The band-roll._ Her head was ornamented with a band on which were strung Persian coins.
533. _Gor-crow's flappers._ Wings of carrion crow.
581. _Like the spots._ Effects of phosphorescence.
845. _I have seen my little lady._ It is not clear where or when he saw her. Possibly he refers only to his revived memory of her.
852. _And ... floats me._ This construction is what is known as the "ethical dative." The old servant merely says in jocose fashion that telling his story has made his blood course more rapidly and freely.
A GRAMMARIAN'S FUNERAL
_The Revival of Learning._ The Revival of Learning, or the Renaissance, began as early as the tenth century. Its period of most rapid progress was from the twelfth century to the fifteenth. One phase of the interest in the revival of learning was the effort to restore Latin to its ancient purity. The word "grammarian" was more widely inclusive than now, meaning one who devoted himself to general learning. Of this poem Dr. Burton in "Renaissance Pictures in Browning" (_Poet-Lore_, Vol. x, pp. 60-76, No. 1, 1898) says: "I know of no lyric of the poet's more representative of his peculiar and virile strength than this, in that it makes vibrant and thoroughly emotional an apparently unemotional theme. In relation to the Renaissance, the revival of learning, the moral is the higher inspiration derived from the new wine of the classics, so that what in later times has cooled down too often to a dry-as-dust study of the husks of knowledge is shown to be, at the start, a veritable reveling in the delights of the fruit."
Mr. Stopford Brooke in _The Poetry of Browning_, p. 155, says, "This is the artist at work, and I doubt whether all the laborious prose written, in history and criticism, on the revival of learning, will ever express better than this short poem the inexhaustible thirst of the Renaissance in its pursuit of knowledge, or the enthusiasm of the pupils of a New Scholar for his desperate strife to know in a short life the very center of the universe."
3. _Leave we the common crofts._ As the procession starts up the hill they leave behind them the small farms and little villages of the plain.
8. _Rock-row._ Day is just breaking over the rocky summits of the mountains.
9. _There, man's thought._ The smoking crater of a volcano, described as a censer from which rise the fumes of incense, portends an outbreak of subterranean fire. The speaker fancifully considers this an appropriate spot in which to bury the scholar whose passionate eagerness of thought chafed continually against the bounds of custom and ignorance and human weakness.
14. _Sepulture._ Pronounced here, _sepúlture_. A burial place or tomb.
25. _Step to a tune._ Here and in various other places, as lines 41, 73, 76, etc., are directions to the pallbearers.
34. _Lyric Apollo._ The god Apollo was the ideal of manly beauty. The Grammarian was, it seems, endowed with rare charm of face and form.
35. _Long he lived nameless._ Youth had passed before the Grammarian really entered upon his quest for knowledge. But he did not despair. His vanishing of youth was but a signal to "leave play for work."
45. _Grappled with the world._ The world of knowledge, especially ancient learning, which was recovered slowly and with difficulty.
49. _Theirs._ He wishes to study the "shaping" or writings of poets and sages.
50. _Gowned._ Put on the scholastic gown.
64. _Queasy._ Sick at the stomach. He could not get knowledge enough to make him feel a distaste for it.
65-68. "It" in l. 66 refers to l. 67. The "it" in l. 68 refers to "such a life," l. 65.
70. _Fancy the fabric._ Under the figure of making a complete plan before beginning to build a house, he describes the Grammarian's purpose to know the whole scheme of life before he lived out any part of it.
86. _Calculus_ and _tussis_ (l. 88) are diseases, the stone and bronchitis, that attacked him.
95. _Soul-hydroptic._ "Hydroptic" is a rare word for "thirsty."
103. _God's task_, etc. He neglected the body, magnified the mind, and believed that the full realization of his aspirations would come in "the heavenly period."
113. _That low man_. This comparison between the "low man" and the "high man" could be effectively illustrated from "Andrea del Sarto." Andrea is the "low man" who with his skillful hand "goes on adding one to one" till he attains his "hundred," or excellence of technique. But the other painters, the ones with the "truer light of God" in them, reach the heaven above and take their place there although what they see transcends the power of their art to tell. They miss the "unit" of an adequate technique, but they gain the "million" of spiritual insight.
129. _Hoti ... Oun ... De._ Points in Greek grammar concerning which there was much learned discussion.
"CHILDE ROLAND TO THE DARK TOWER CAME"
Mrs. Orr (_Handbook of Browning's Works_, p. 274) says of this poem: "We can connect no idea of definite pursuit or attainment with a series of facts so dream-like 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." And she adds in a note: "I may venture to state that these picturesque materials included a tower which Mr. Browning once saw in the Carrara Mountains, a painting which caught his eye years later in Paris; and the figure of a horse in the tapestry in his own drawing-room--welded together in the remembrance of the line from '_King Lear_,' which forms the heading of the poem." The possible allegorical signification of the poem has been the subject of much, and often of singularly futile discussion. Dr. Furnivall said he had asked Browning if it was an allegory, and in answer had on three separate occasions received an emphatic statement that it was simply a dramatic creation called forth by a line of Shakspere's. (Porter-Clarke, _Study Programmes_, p. 406.) Yet allegorical interpretations continue to be made. According to one line of interpretation the pilgrim is a "truth-seeker, misdirected by the lying spirit" (the hoary cripple), and when he blows the slug-horn it is as a warning to others that he has failed in his quest, and that the way to the dark tower is the way of destruction and death. (Berdoe, _Browning Cyclopædia_, p. 105) According to other readings of the tale the blast which the pilgrim blows at the end of his quest is one of "spiritual victory and incitement to others." When the Rev. John S. Chadwick visited the poet and asked him if constancy to an ideal--"He that endureth to the end shall be saved"--was not a sufficient understanding of the central purpose of the poem, Browning said: "Yes, just about that." With constancy to an ideal as the central purpose, the details of this poem, without being minutely interpreted, may yet serve as a representation of the depression, the hopelessness, the dullness and deadness of soul, the doubt and terror even of the man who travels the last stages of a difficult journey to a long-sought but unknown goal. His victory consists in the unfaltering persistence of his search. The "squat tower," when he reaches it, is prosaic and ugly, but finding it is after all not the essential point. The essential element of his success is that, encircled by the last temptations to despair, he holds heart and brain steady, and carries out his quest to its last detail. (See an article in _The Critic_, May 3, 1886, by Mr. Arlo Bates, in opposition to any definite allegory. Mr. Nettleship in _Robert Browning_ [p. 89] devotes a chapter to a paraphrase and an allegorical explanation.)
Mr. Herford (_Life of Browning_, p. 94) calls the poem "a great romantic legend" and emphasizes its intensity and boldness of invention. He compares its "horror-world" with that of Coleridge in "The Ancient Mariner." "What 'The Ancient Mariner' is in the poetry of the mysterious terrors and splendors of the sea, that 'Childe Roland' is in the poetry of bodeful horror, of haunted desolation, of waste and plague, ragged distortion, and rotting ugliness in landscape. The Childe, like the Mariner, advances through an atmosphere and scenery of steadily gathering menace."
Mr. Chesterton says of the scenery: "It is ... the poetry of the shabby and hungry aspect of the earth itself. Daring poets who wished to escape from the conventional gardens and orchards had long been in the habit of celebrating the poetry of rugged and gloomy landscapes, but Browning is not content with this. He insists on celebrating the poetry of mean landscapes. That sense of scrubbiness in nature, as of a man unshaved, had never been conveyed with this enthusiasm and primeval gusto before." (_Robert Browning_, p. 159.)
HOW IT STRIKES A CONTEMPORARY
This poem is the story of an obscure poet in the Spanish city of Valladolid. It brings out his actual life and the townfolk's misinterpretations of it. Reports multiply upon themselves and take new meanings till the harmless poet is generally accounted the King's spy and the real agent of all royal edicts, the town's master, in fact. The interest which, as a poet, he takes in all manifestations of life is popularly supposed to be the alertness of a secret agent of the government. The reams of poetry he writes are transformed into letters of information to the King. Rumor translates the poet's perfectly decent, regular, meager life into secret sybaritic extravagances.
7. _Though none did._ His suit had once been fashionable, but, though still serviceable, was of a sort no longer worn by his fellow townsmen.
25. _The coffee-roaster's brazier._ The coffee is roasted in a dish that is made to revolve over the coals in an open pan or basin.
74. _Beyond the Jewry._ Beyond the Jew's quarter, a squalid portion of the city.
90. _The Corregidor._ The Spanish title for a magistrate.
104. _Here had been._ The poet, misconceived by his generation, poor, and lonely, has yet a great spiritual personality. Men see the old coat. God, the King for whom he works, sees his real nature; hence heavenly guards attend when this man comes to die.
115. _The Prado._ The chief fashionable promenade of Madrid.
FRA LIPPO LIPPI
Fra Lippo Lippi was born in Florence in 1406. See Vasari's _Lives of the Painters_ for the account of his life on which Browning based his poem. (Vasari's account is quoted in Cooke's _Browning Guide Book_.)
2. _You need not clap your torches._ Throughout this lively dramatic monologue it is important to mark every indication of the words or gestures of the auditors; for instance, in lines 13, 18, 26, etc.
7. _The Carmine._ Fra Lippo Lippi's entrance into the monastery of the friars del Carmine and his education there are described later in the poem. He lived there till he was twenty-six. He had no vocation for the life of a monk and wished to devote himself to painting. He apparently left the monastery on good terms with the friars.
17. _Master--a Cosimo of the Medici._ Cosimo de Medici (1389-1464) was a rich Florentine banker and statesman. He was a magnificent patron of art and literature. The old Medici palace (l. 17), now known as _Palazzo Riccardi_, is on the corner of the _Via Cavour_ and the _Via Gori_. The church of _San Lorenzo_ (the "Saint Laurence" of l. 67) is a short distance farther west on the Via Gori.
22. _Pick up a manner_. The painter protests against the rough usage to which he has been subjected.
23. _Zooks._ An interjection formerly written "gadzooks." _Pilchards_ are a common cheap fish of the Mediterranean and are taken in seines.
28. _Quarter-florin._ The florin was a gold coin of Florence. It was first struck off in the twelfth century and was called a florin because it had a flower stamped on one side.
31. _I'd like his face._ The painter cannot look upon the crowd of men about him without seeing faces he would like to draw. One man would do as a model for Judas. Another would do well in a picture Fra Lippo's imagination quickly conjures up of a slave holding the head of John the Baptist by the hair. In Fra Lippo's real picture of the beheading of John the Baptist the head is brought in by Salome, the daughter of Herodias, on a great platter.
46. _Carnival._ The days preceding Lent. A period marked by much gaiety, street revelry, masking, etc.
53. _Flower o' the broom._ These flower songs, called _stornelli_, are improvised by the peasants at their work. "The _stornelli_ consists of three lines. The first line usually contains the name of a flower which sets the rhyme and is five syllables long. Then the love theme is told in two lines of eleven syllables each, agreeing by rhyme, assonance, or repetition with the first." (Porter and Clarke note in Camberwell Edition.) Browning does not follow the model strictly.
73. _Jerome._ St. Jerome was one of the Fathers of the Christian Church. During a part of his early life he was given up to worldly pleasures, and for this he did penance by living for a number of years in a cave in a desert region. The penitent St. Jerome was a popular devotional subject in early Christian art. "The scene is generally a wild rocky solitude; St. Jerome, half-naked, emaciated, with matted hair and beard, is seen on his knees before a crucifix, beating his breast with a stone." (Mrs. Jameson, _Sacred and Legendary Art_, i, 308.)
80. _What am I a beast for?_ If you had happened, says Fra Lippo, to catch Cosimo in a frolic like this, of course you would have said nothing; but you think a monk is a beast if he indulges in these nocturnal pleasures. Yet why should the fact that I break monastic rules make you consider me a beast? Just let me tell you how I happened to become a monk.
83. _I starved there._ Note the vivid picture of the life of a street gamin here and in lines 112-126.
88. _Aunt Lapaccia._ Vasari says, "The child was for some time under the care of a certain Mona Lapaccia, his aunt, who brought him up with very great difficulty till he had attained his eighth year, when, being no longer able to support the burden of his maintenance, she placed him in the above-named convent of the Carmelites." "Trussed," means "firmly seized."
117. _Which gentlemen_, etc. Gentlemen clad in fine ecclesiastical robes walk in the religious procession and carry tall wax candles or torches; the drippings from these candles the street-urchin wishes to catch in order to sell them again, but it is against the law, and the fine gentlemen if not kindly disposed may call in the magistrates ("The Eight") and have the boy whipped.
130. _The antiphonary's marge._ He scrawled his sketches on the margins of the book used by the choir, and he made faces out of the notes, which were then square with long stems.
139. _We Carmelites._ The three orders of monks, the Carmelites, the Camaldolese, and the Dominicans (called "Preaching Brothers" by Pope Innocent III) owned various monasteries and churches, and were each ambitious to possess the greatest sacred paintings.
145-163. These lines describe the different figures painted on the wall by Fra Lippo when the prior bade him "daub away." The monks dressed in black or white according to the garb of their orders; the old women waiting to confess small thefts; the row of admiring little children gazing at a bearded fellow, a murderer who, still breathing hard with the run that has brought him in safety to the altar steps, defies the "white anger" of his victim's son, who has followed him into the church; the girl who loves the brute of a murderer, and brings him flowers, food, and her earrings to aid him when he shall escape--all these are painted on the wall. Then the young artist took down the ladder by means of which he had reached the bit of cloister-wall where he had been recording his observations of life, and called the monks to see.
156. _Whose sad face._ The purpose of Christ's suffering ("passion") on the cross was to bring love into the world, but after a thousand years of his teaching his image looks down upon theft, anger, murder.
172. _My triumph's straw-fire._ Lippo's triumph was as short-lived as a fire of straw. The monks were delighted with the realism of the painting, but when the Prior and the critics came they declared that such "homage to the perishable clay" was a mere "devil's game." The business of the painter, they said, was to ignore the body and paint the soul.
184. _Man's soul._ Note the difficulty the Prior experiences when he tries to describe the "soul" he wishes the artist to paint. Lines 185-186 represent an old superstition.
189-198. In contrast to the homely realism of Fra Lippo's picture of ordinary people are the idealism, the religious symbolism, of the pictures of Giotto, a painter a century and a half earlier than Fra Lippo, and the greatest master of the early school of Italian art.
198-214. An exposition of Fra Lippo's idea of painting. He says that it is nonsense to ignore the body in order to make the soul preëminent, that the painter should go a "double step" and paint both body and soul. He may make the face of a girl as lovely and life-like as possible, and at the same time show her soul in her face.
215-220. A defense of the value of beauty for its own sake. Cf. Keats, "Ode to a Grecian Urn," and the beginning of his "Endymion." Fra Lippo Lippi has been long out of convent limitations, but he cannot forget how certain the monks were that he had chosen the wrong path, and that he could never equal the great painter, Fra Angelico (1389-1455), who, kneeling in adoration, painted lovely saints and angels, nor even Lorenzo Monaca, a Florentine painter with the same tendencies as Angelico.
257. _Out at grass._ _Grass_ in this passage stands for enjoyment of life as opposed to asceticism.
276. _Guidi._ Tommaso Guidi, ordinarily known as Masaccio, or Tomassacio, Slovenly or Hulking Tom. Browning followed good authority in making Masaccio a pupil of Fra Lippo Lippi, but in point of fact he was probably the master whose works Fra Lippo studied. Lübke (_History of Art_ ii, 207) says of Guidi: "In his exceedingly short life he rapidly traversed the various stages of development of earlier art, and pressed on with a bold confidence to a greatness and power of vision which have rendered his works the characteristic ones of an epoch, and his example a decisive influence in all the art of the fifteenth century.... Almost every master in the fifteenth century ... studied these great works and learned from them. One of the first of these masters was Fra Lippo Lippi." The important point is that Fra Lippo and Masaccio were both pioneers in the new art which took infinite pains in the representation of the body. Masaccio is said to have been the first Italian artist to paint a nude figure.
323. _A Saint Laurence ... at Prato._ Prato a town near Florence, attracted many artists in the fifteenth century, so that one finds there many specimens of Early Renaissance painting. Some of the most important of Fra Lippo Lippi's large works are in the Cathedral at Prato.
326-334. The people have been so enraged at the slaves who are pictured as assisting in the martyrdom of St. Laurence that the faces of these slaves have been scratched from the wall. The monks think the picture a huge success because it has thus roused religious zeal.
339. _Chianti wine._ A famous wine named from Chianti, a mountain group near Siena, Italy.
346. _Sant Ambrogio's._ The picture described here is the "Coronation of the Virgin" now in the _Accademia delle Belle Arti_ of Florence. _Sant' Ambrogio_ is a Florentine church named after St. Ambrose, a Bishop of Milan.
354. _St. John._ The Baptist. Note the reference to camel's hair raiment in l. 375. _The Battistero_, the original cathedral of Florence, was dedicated to John the Baptist. Some say the reliefs on one of its famous bronze doors represent scenes from his life. To this church all children born in Florence are brought to be baptized.
357. _Job._ See _Job_ i, 1.
360. _Up shall come._ Artists not infrequently painted their own portraits in their pictures. In the "Coronation of the Virgin" Fra Lippo's round tonsured head is seen in the lower right hand corner.
377. _Iste perfecit opus._ "This one did the work."
381. _Hot cockles._ An old English game in which a blind-folded player tries to guess the names of those who touch or strike him.
ANDREA DEL SARTO
Andrea del Sarto's father was a tailor (_Sarto_) and so the son was nicknamed "The Tailor's Andrew." He was born in 1486. His first paintings were seven frescoes in the Church of the Annunziata in Florence. They were "marvelous productions for a youth who was little over twenty, and remain Andrea's most charming and attractive works." (Julia Cartwright, _The Painters of Florence_.) Algernon Charles Swinburne in _Essays and Studies_ ("Notes and Designs on the Old Masters at Florence") says of Andrea's early paintings in comparison with his later work: "These are the first fruits of his flowering manhood, when the bright and buoyant genius in him had free play and large delight in its handiwork; when the fresh interest of invention was still his, and the dramatic sense, the pleasure in the play of life, the power of motion and variety; before the old strength of sight and of flight had passed from weary wing and clouding eye, the old pride and energy of enjoyment had gone out of hand and heart.
"How the change fell upon him, and how it wrought, anyone may see who compares his later with his earlier work.... The time came when another than Salome [referring to Andrea del Sarto's picture of Salome dancing before Herod] was to dance before the eyes of the painter; and she required of him the head of no man, but his own soul; and he paid the forfeit into her hands.... In Mr. Browning's noblest poem--his noblest, it seems to me--the whole tragedy is distilled into the right words, the whole man raised up and reclothed with flesh. One point only is but lightly touched upon--missed it could not be by an eye so sharp and skillful--the effect upon his art of the poisonous solvent of love. How his life was corroded by it, and his soul burnt into dead ashes we are shown in full, but we are not shown in full what as a painter he was before, what as a painter he might have been without it."
The bare facts of this poem are taken from Vasari's _Lives of the Painters_. Vasari, once a pupil of Andrea del Sarto, hated Lucrezia and in his account spared no details of her evil influence. Later chronicles give a somewhat more favorable view of her, but the main facts of the story remain undisputed. Of the origin of the poem, Mrs. Andrew Crosse (see "John Kenyon and His Friends" in _Temple Bar Magazine_, April, 1900) writes; "When the Brownings were living in Florence, Kenyon had begged them to procure him a copy of the portrait in the Pitti of Andrea del Sarto and his wife. Mr. Browning was unable to get the copy made with any promise of satisfaction, and so wrote the exquisite poem of Andrea del Sarto--and sent it to Kenyon!" For another literary presentation of Andrea del Sarto see _Andre del Sarto_, a play by Alfred de Musset.
15. _Fiesole_. A town on a hill above the Arno about three miles northwest of Florence. See _Pippa Passes_.
40. _We are in God's hand._ Andrea's fatalistic view of life aids him in escaping the poignancy of remorse.
65. _The Legate's talk._ The representative of the Pope praised Andrea's work. For the high esteem accorded Andrea when he was in Paris at the court of Francis I, see lines 149-161.
82. _This low-pulsed forthright craftsman's hand._ Eugene Muntz (quoted in _Masters of Art_ series, in the number entitled "Andrea del Sarto") says of Andrea's skill: "No painter has excelled him in the rendering of flesh.... No painter, moreover, has surpassed him in his grasp of the infinite resources of the palette. All the secrets of richness, softness, and _morbidenza_, all the mysteries of _pastoso_ and _sfumato_ were his. It is not then as a technician that we must deny Andrea del Sarto the right to rank with the very greatest. It is as an artist (using the word in its highest sense) that he falls below them, for he was lacking in the loftier qualities of imagination, sentiment, and, worst of all, conviction." _Histoire de l'Art pendent la Renaissance_.
93. _Morello_. A mountain of the Apennines and visible from Florence.
98. _Or what's a heaven for._ According to Browning's theory, perfection gained and rested in means stagnation. Aspiration toward the unattainable is the condition of growth. The artist who can satisfy himself with such themes as can be completely expressed by his art, is on a low level of experience and attainment.
105. _The Urbinate._ Raphael Sanzio of Urbino, one of the greatest of Italian painters. He died in 1520; hence the date of this poem is supposed to be 1525.
136. _Agnolo._ Michael Agnolo (less correctly, Angelo), 1475-1566, great both as sculptor and painter.
149. _Francis._ Francis I of France was a patron of the arts. When Andrea was thirty-two and had been married five years, King Francis sent for him to come to Fontainebleau, the most sumptuous of the French royal palaces. Andrea greatly enjoyed the splendor and hospitality of the French court, and he was happy in his successful work, when Lucrezia called him home. He obtained a vacation of two months and took with him money with which to make purchases for the French king. This money he used to buy a house for Lucrezia.
241. _Scudi._ Italian coins worth about ninety-six cents each.
261. _Four great walls._ _Revelation_, xxi, 15-17.
263. _Leonardo._ Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519), one of the greatest of Italian painters.
THE BISHOP ORDERS HIS TOMB AT ST. PRAXED'S CHURCH
There is an old church in Rome named in honor of St. Praxed or Praxedes. The Bishop's Tomb, however, "is entirely fictitious, although something which is made to stand for it is now shown to credulous sightseers." (Mrs. Orr, _Handbook to Robert Browning's Works_, p. 247.)
Ruskin says of this poem: "Robert Browning is unerring in every sentence he writes of the Middle Ages--always vital, right, and profound, so that in the matter of art, with which we are specially concerned, there is hardly a principle connected with the medieval temper that he has not struck upon in these seemingly careless and too rugged lines of his.... I know no other piece of modern English prose or poetry in which there is so much told, as in these lines, of the Renaissance spirit--its worldliness, inconsistency, pride, hypocrisy, ignorance of itself, love of art, of luxury, and of good Latin. It is nearly all that I have said of the central Renaissance, in thirty pages of 'The Stones of Venice,' put into as many lines, Browning's also being the antecedent work." (_Modern Painters_, Vol. iv, pp. 337-9.) "It was inevitable that the great period of the Renaissance should produce men of the type of the Bishop of St. Praxed; it would be grossly unfair to set him down as the type of the churchmen of his time." Berdoe, _Browning Cyclopædia_, p. 81.
1. _Vanity, saith the preacher, vanity._ Cf. ll. 8-9, 51-52, as illustrative of the religious professionalism of the Bishop's talk. He drops into the ecclesiastical conception of life and death, and into the phraseology of his order.
21. _Epistle-side._ The right-hand side facing the altar, where the epistle is read by the priest acting as celebrant, the gospel being read from the other side by the priest acting as assistant.
29. _Peach-blossom marble._ This rosy marble delights the Bishop as much as the pale cheap onion-stone offends him. The lapis-lazuli, a rich blue stone (l. 42), the antique-black (Nero-antico), a rare black marble (l. 34), the beautiful green jasper (l. 68), the elaborate carving planned for the bronze frieze (l. 56-62, 106-111), show not only that the Bishop covets what is costly, but that his highly cultivated taste knows real beauty.
34. _That conflagration._ The eagerness of the Bishop for the lump of the lapis-lazuli has made him steal even from his own church.
41. _Olive-frail._ A basket made of rushes, used for packing olives.
57. _Those Pans and Nymphs._ The underlying paganism of the Bishop produces a strangely incongruous mixture on his tomb--the Savior, St. Praxed, Moses, Pan, and the Nymphs.
58. _Thyrsus._ The ivy-coiled staff or spear stuck in a pine-cone, symbol of the Bacchic orgy.
68. _Travertine._ A white limestone, the name being a corruption of Tiburninus, from Tibur, now Tivoli, near Rome, whence this stone comes.
77. _Choice Latin._ The Bishop's scholarship was as good as his taste in marbles. The _Elucescebat_ ("he was illustrious") of l. 99 Browning called "dog-latin" and he called "Ulpian, the golden jurist, a copper latinist." (See letter to D. G. Rossetti. Quoted by A. J. George, _Select Poems of Browning_, p. 366.) Tully's Latin was Cicero's (Marcus Tullius Cicero), the purest classic style. The Grammarian in "The Grammarian's Funeral" was equally intense on a point of elegance or correctness in the ancient languages.
80-84. The Bishop rejoices in all that has to do with the forms and ceremonies of the church. Note in ll. 119-121 his insistence on form and order.
91. _Strange thoughts._ From this point on the Bishop's mind seems to wander.
108. _A visor and a Term._ The visor is a mask. A term is any bust or half-statue not placed upon but incorporated with, and as it were immediately springing out of, the square pillar which serves as its pedestal.
CLEON
The quotation preceding this poem is from _Acts_ xvii, 28, and is, in full, "As certain also of your own poets have said, 'For we are also his offspring.'" The poet thus referred to by Paul was Aratus, a Greek poet from Tarsus, Paul's own city. The Cleon and Protus of Browning's poem are not historical characters, but they are representative of the tone of thought and inquiry on the part of the Greek philosophers at the time of Paul. Lines 1-158 give an account of the achievements of Cleon, a man who has attained eminence in the various realms of poetry, philosophy, painting, and sculpture. He is not in any one accomplishment equal to the great poets, musicians, or artists of the past, and yet he represents progress because he is able to enter into sympathy with the great achievements in all these realms.
1. _Sprinkled isles._ Presumably the Sporades, the "scattered isles."
4. _Profits in his Tyranny._ Free government [in Greece] having superseded the old hereditary sovereignties, all who obtained absolute power in a state were called tyrants, or rather despots; for the term indicates the irregular way in which the power was given rather than the way in which it was exercised. Tyrants might be mild in exercise of authority, and, like Protus, liberal in their patronage of the arts.
8. _Gift after gift._ Protus, a patron of the arts, shows his appreciation of the work of Cleon by many royal gifts. Chief among the slaves, black and white, sent by Protus, is one white woman in a bright yellow wool robe, who is especially commissioned to present a beautiful cup. Lines 136-8 are also descriptive of this girl.
41. _Zeus._ The chief of the Grecian gods.
47. _That epos._ An epic poem by Cleon engraved on golden plates.
51. _The image of the sun-god on the phare._ Cleon has made a statue of Apollo for a lighthouse. _Phare_ is from the island of Pharos where there was a famous lighthouse.
53. _The Poecile._ The Portico of Athens painted with battle pictures by Polygnotus.
69. _For music._ "In Greek music the scales were called moods or modes and were subject to great variation in the arrangement of tones and semitones." (Porter-Clarke, note in Camberwell edition.)
82. _The checkered pavement._ This pavement of black and white marble in an elaborate pattern of various sorts of four-sided figures was a gift to Cleon from his own nation.
100-112. The similitude is involved but fairly clear. The water that touches the sphere here and there, one point at a time, as the sphere is revolved, represents the power of great geniuses who, each at one point, have reached great heights. The air that fills the sphere represents the composite modern mind that synthesizes the parts into a great whole.
132. _Drupe._ Any stone-fruit. The contrast is between the wild plum and the cultivated plum.
139. _Homer._ The poet to whom very ancient tradition assigns the authorship of the _Iliad_ and the _Odyssey_. _Terpander_, the father of Greek music, flourished about 700-650 B.C. Phidias, a famous Athenian sculptor, lived 500-432 B.C. His friend was Pericles, the ruler of Athens.
304. _Sappho._ A Greek poetess. She wrote about 600 B.C.
305. _Æschylus_, a Greek tragic poet, 525-456 B.C.
340. _Paulus._ Paul died about 64 A.D. The date of this poem is therefore about the last quarter of the first century A.D. Cleon had heard so vaguely about the Christian religion that he did not know the difference between Christ and Paul. The "doctrine" spoken of in the last line was the Christian teaching concerning immortality. The Greek, Cleon, had felt a longing to believe in another existence in which man would have unlimited capability for joy, but Zeus had revealed no such doctrine, and the cultivated Greek was not ready to receive it at the hands of a man like Paul.
ONE WORD MORE
A poem directly addressed to Mrs. Browning. It was originally appended to the collection of Poems called _Men and Women_. For other tributes by great poets to their wives see Wordsworth's "She was a phantom of delight," and "O dearer far than life and light are dear;" and Tennyson's "Dear, near and true." Mrs. Browning's love for her husband had found passionate expression in _Sonnets from the Portuguese_.
2. _Naming me._ Giving a name to the volume for me.
5-31. Raphael's "lady of the sonnets" was Margharita (La Fornarina), the baker's daughter, whose likeness appears in several of his most celebrated pictures. The Madonnas enumerated in ll. 22-25 are the Sistine Madonna, now in the Dresden Gallery; the Madonna di Foligno, so called because it had been painted as a votive offering for Sigismund Corti of Foligno; the Madonna del Granduca (Petti Palace, Florence) in which the Madonna is represented as appearing to a votary in a vision; and probably the Madonna called La Belle Jardiniere in the Louvre. There is no evidence that Raphael wrote more than one sonnet, or three at most. The "century of sonnets" attributed to him by Browning "is probably an example of poetical license." The volume Guido Reni treasured and left to his heir was a volume with a hundred designs by Raphael. (Berdoe, _Browning Cyclopædia_, p. 297)
32-57. Dante's chief work was his great poem, the _Inferno_, in which were caustic sketches of evil men of various sorts. The sketch in the lines 35-41 is made up from two descriptions (_Inferno_, Cantos 32, 33) of traitors, the one to his country, the other to a familiar friend. The second of these was still alive when Dante wrote (W. M. Rossetti, _Academy_, Jan. 10, 1891). Beatrice, or Bice, was the woman Dante loved. It was on the first anniversary of her death that he began to draw the angel. Dante tells of this in the _Vita Nuovo_, xxxv, and there describes the interruption of the "people of importance."
63-4. To Raphael painting is an art that has become his nature; to Dante, poetry is an art that has become his nature. But this one time, for the woman of his love, each chooses the art in which he may have some natural skill but for which he has had no technical training.
73-108. The "artist's sorrow" as contrasted with the "man's joy" is illustrated from the experiences of Moses in conducting the children of Israel out of Egypt (_Exodus_ xvii). His achievement savors of disrelish because of the grumbling unbelief of the people, and because of the ungracious irritation into which he has been betrayed even when taxing his God-given power to the utmost in their behalf. He must hold steadily to his majesty as a prophet or he cannot control and so serve the crowd, but he covets the man's joy of doing supreme service to the woman whom he loves.
97. _Sinai-forehead's cloven brilliance._ _Exodus_ xix, 9, 16; xxxiv, 30.
101. _Jethro's daughter._ Zipporah, the wife of Moses. _Exodus_ ii, 16, 21.
121. _He who works in fresco._ The fresco painter uses large free strokes of the brush. But in order to give something distinctive to the lady of his love he will try painting tiny illuminations on the margins of her missal.
143. _Be how I speak._ That is, he usually writes dramatically, giving the experience and uttering the words of the characters he has created, such as the Arab physician, Karshish; the Greek Cleon; Norbert, the man whom the Queen loved in "In a Balcony"; the painter, Fra Lippo Lippi; the heroic pilgrim, Childe Roland; the painter, Andrea del Sarto. But now, for once, he speaks in his own person, directly to the woman he loves.
144-156. In Florence they had seen the new moon, a mere crescent over the hill Fiesole, and had watched its growth till it hung, round and full, over the church of San Miniato. Now, in London, the moon is in its last quarter.
163. _Zoroaster._ Founder of the Irano-Persian religion, the chief god of which, Varuna, was the god of light and of the illuminated night-heaven.
164. _Galileo._ A celebrated Italian astronomer (1564-1642).
165. _Dumb to Homer._ Homer celebrated the moon in the "Hymn to Diana." Keats wrote much about the moon and the hero of his poem "Endymion" was represented as in love with the moon.
172-179. See _Exodus_ xxiv.
ABT VOGLER
Abbé (or Abt) Vogler (1749-1814) was a Catholic priest well known a century ago as an organist and a composer. He founded three schools of music, one at Mannheim, one at Stockholm, and one at Darmstadt. He was especially noted for his organ recitals, as many as 7000 tickets having been sold for a single recital in Amsterdam. In 1798 it was said that he had then given over a thousand organ concerts. His knowledge of acoustics and his consequent skill in combining the stops enabled him to bring much power and variety from organs with fewer pipes than were generally considered necessary. The remodeling and simplification of organs was one of his most eagerly pursued activities. He not only rearranged the pipes, but he introduced free reeds. Through some skillful Swedish organ-builders he was at last enabled to have an organ small enough to be portable and constructed according to his ideas. This he called an "orchestrion." Of Vogler's power as an organist Rinck says, "His organ playing was grand, effective in the utmost degree." It was, however, when he was improvising that his power was most astonishing. Once at a musical soirée Vogler and Beethoven extemporized alternately, each giving the other a theme, and Gansbacher records the pitch of enthusiasm to which he was roused by Vogler's masterly playing. Three of Voglers most famous pupils at Darmstadt were Meyerbeer, Gansbacher, and Carl Maria von Weber. The last of these gives an attractive picture of the musician extemporizing in the old church at Darmstadt. "Never," says Weber, "did Vogler in his extemporization drink more deeply at the source of all beauty, than when before his three dear boys, as he liked to call us, he drew from the organ angelic voices and word of thunder." Browning's poem records the experiences of the musician in one of these moods of rapturous creation.
The argument of the poem is thus given by Mr. Stopford Brooke in _The Poetry of Robert Browning_, page 149:
"When Solomon pronounced the Name of God, all the spirits, good and bad, assembled to do His will and build His palace. And when I, Abt Vogler, touched the keys, I called the Spirits of Sound to me, and they have built my palace of music; and to inhabit it all the Great Dead came back till in the vision I made a perfect music. Nay, for a moment, I touched in it the infinite perfection; but now it is gone; I cannot bring it back. Had I painted it, had I written it, I might have explained it. But in music out of the sounds something emerges which is above the sounds, and that ineffable thing I touched and lost. I took the well-known sounds of earth, and out of them came a fourth sound, nay not a sound--but a star. This was a flash of God's will which opened the Eternal to me for a moment; and I shall find it again in the eternal life. Therefore, from the achievement of earth and the failure of it, I turn to God, and in Him I see that every image, thought, impulse, and dream of knowledge or beauty--which, coming whence we know not, flit before us in human life, breathe for a moment, and then depart; which, like my music, build a sudden palace in imagination; which abide for an instant and dissolve, but which memory and hope retain as a ground of aspiration--are not lost to us though they seem to die in their immediate passage. Their music has its home in the Will of God and we shall find them completed there."
3. _Solomon._ In Jewish legend it is said that Solomon had power over angels and demons through a seal on which "the most great name of God was engraved."
13. _And one would bury his brow._ This description of the foundations of the palace is not unlike Milton's account of the work of the fallen angels in building the palace in hell. (_Paradise Lost_, I, 170.) That "fabric huge" was as magical in its construction as the palace of Abt Vogler, for, though it was not built by music, it
"Rose like an exhalation with the sound Of Dulcet Symphonies and voices sweet."
16. _Nether Springs._ Remotest origins.
23. _Rome's dome._ The illumination of St. Peter's was formerly one of the customary spectacles on the evening of Easter Sunday. "At Ave-Maria we drove to Piazza of St. Peter's. The lighting of the lanternoni, or large paper lanterns, each of which looks like a globe of ethereal fire, had been going on for an hour, and by the time we arrived there was nearly completed.... The whole of this immense church--its columns, capitals, cornices, and pediments--the beautiful swell of the lofty dome ... all were designed in lines of fire, and the vast sweep of the circling colonnades ... was resplendent with the same beautiful light." (C. A. Eaton, _Rome in the Nineteenth Century_, II, 208.)
23. _Space to spire._ From the wide opening between the colonnades to the cross on the top of the lantern surmounting the dome.
34. _Protoplast._ Used apparently for protoplasm, a substance constituting the physical basis of life in all plants and animals.
39. Into his musical palace came the wonderful Dead in a glorified form, and also Presences fresh from the Protoplast, while, for the moment, he himself in the ardor of musical creation felt himself raised to the level of these exalted ones.
53. _Consider it well._ On the mystery of musical creation and on its permanence see Cardinal Newman's sermon on "The Theory of Development in Christian Doctrine." (Quoted in part, in Berdoe's _Browning Cyclopædia_.)
57. _Palace of music._ Cf. the description of the glowing banquet-room in Keats's "Lamia":
"A haunting music, sole perhaps and lone Supportress of the faery-roof, made moan Throughout, as fearful the whole charm might perish."
The damsel with the dulcimer in Coleridge's "Kubla Khan" sings of Mount Abora, and the poet says:
"Could I revive within me Her sympathy and song To such a deep delight 'twould win me That with music loud and long I would build that dome in air, That sunny dome, those caves of ice! And all who heard should see them there."
In Tennyson's "Gareth and Lynette" (l. 270), Merlin says to Gareth in describing Camelot,
"For and ye heard a music, like enow They are building still, seeing the city is built To music, therefore never built at all, And therefore built forever."
There are also more ancient accounts of this union of music and architecture. Amphion, King of Thebes, played on his lyre till the stones moved of their own accord into the wall he was building. When King Laomedan built the walls of Troy, Apollo's lyre did similar service to that of Amphion in Thebes. For an interesting account of "Voice Figures" see _The Century Magazine_, May 1891.
64. _What was, shall be._ For this faith in the actual permanence of what seemed so evanescent, compare Adelaide Procter's "Lost Chord."
69. _There shall never be one lost good._ Whatever of good has existed must always exist. Evil, being self-destructive, finally "is null, is naught." This is the Hegelian doctrine. Walt Whitman said on reading Hegel, "Roaming in thought over the Universe I saw the little that is Good steadily hastening towards immortality. And the vast all that is called Evil I saw hastening to merge itself and become lost and dead." (Berdoe, _Browning Cyclopædia_, page 40.)
81. _A triumph's evidence._ Failure in high heroic attempts seems to point forward to some more favorable future where noble effort is crowned with due success. Cf. "Cleon," lines 186-7:
"Imperfection means perfection hid, Reserved in part to grace the after time."
96. _The C Major of this life._ The musical terms in this passage are fully explained by Mrs. Turnbull and Miss Omerod in _Browning Society Papers_. Symbolically this line describes the musician as he comes back to everyday life, proud because of the vision that has been granted him, but with a consciousness that experiences so exalted are not for "human nature's daily food," and that their true function is to send one back to ordinary pains and pleasures with a new acquiescence.
(In _The Browning Society Papers_ are Mrs. Turnbull's "Abt Vogler," and three papers by Miss Helen Omerod: (1) "Abt Vogler the Man." (2) "Some Notes on Browning's Poems relating to Music." (3) "Andrea del Sarto and Abt Vogler.")
RABBI BEN EZRA
Ben Ezra was an eminent Jewish Rabbi of the Middle Ages. His _Commentaries_ on the books of the Old Testament are of great value. Mr. A. J. Campbell, who has studied Browning's poem in connection with the writings of the real Rabbi Ben Ezra, thinks that the distinctive features of the Rabbi of the poem, and the philosophy ascribed to him, were drawn from the works of the historical Rabbi, the keynote of whose teaching was that the essential life of man is the life of the soul, and that age is more important than youth. (Berdoe, _Browning Cyclopædia_. Cf. also Berdoe, _Browning's Message to His Times_, pp. 157-172.)
1. _Grow old along with me._ Cf. _Saul_, lines 161-162. See Matthew Arnold's "'Tis time to grow old" for a beautiful statement of the pessimistic attitude toward old age.
7-15. It would be folly, says the Rabbi, to object to the unreasoning ambitions, the fluctuations of desire, the hopes and fears of youth. In fact (ll. 16-30), he counts these very aspirations toward the impossible, this very state of mental and spiritual unrest and doubt, a proof of the spark of divinity which separates men from beasts and allies them to God. It is a characteristic Browning doctrine that conflict, struggle, the pangs and throes of learning, are the stimuli through which character develops.
40-42. Cf. _Saul_, l. 295.
49-72. In lines 43-48 the Rabbi had urged the subservience of the body to the soul, but in these lines he shows that the life of the flesh is not to be underestimated, that ideal progress comes from a just alliance Of the soul and the body. See Tennyson's "St. Simeon Stylites" for an account of the ascetic ideal in its lowest form.
81. _Adventure brave and new._ In "Prospice" death is reckoned an adversary to be courageously met and overcome. Here the Rabbi is represented as fearless and unperplexed as he contemplates the new life he will lead after death. In both poems we find unquestioning belief in an active and progressive and happy life after death.
85. _Youth ended, I shall try_, etc. Compare Tennyson's "By an Evolutionist."
87. _Leave the fire ashes._ In this figure the "fire" stands for the conflicts of life, the "gold" for whatever has proved of permanent worth, and the "ashes" for whatever has failed to stand the test of time and experience.
92. _A certain moment._ The moment between the fading of the sunset glory and the shutting down of evening darkness is here selected as the moment in which to appraise the work of the day. In the application of the simile to the life of man (lines 97-102) the "moment" apparently refers to old age when man has leisure and wisdom to appraise the Past.
102. _The Future._ The life of his "adventure brave and new" after death.
109-111. In "Old Pictures in Florence" Browning applies this idea to the development of art. As soon as men were content to repose in the perfection of Greek art (the thing "found made") stagnation ensued; the new life of art came when men strove for something new and original, even though their first attempts were crude ("acts uncouth").
120. _Nor let thee feel alone._ The solitude of age gives a chance for unhampered thought.
133-150. One of the things he has learned is that any judgment to be fair must take into account instincts, efforts, desires, as well as accomplishment.
151-186. This metaphor of the wheel is found in _Isaiah_ lxiv, 8; _Jeremiah_ xviii, 2-6; _Romans_ ix, 21. Throughout this metaphor as Browning uses it, man seems to be "passive clay" in the hands of the potter, and under the power of the "machinery" the potter uses to give the soul its bent. The tone of the whole poem is, however, one of strenuous endeavor. Ardor, effort, progress, are the keynotes of life from youth to age. But life is finally counted a divine training for the service of God, and in this training the pious Rabbi sees joined the will of man and the care and guidance of God.
157. _All that is_, etc. Cf. "Abt Vogler," ll. 69-80.
CALIBAN UPON SETEBOS
The idea of this poem was evolved from Shakspere's Caliban, a strange, misshapen, fish-like being, one of the servants of Prospero in _The Tempest_. He was the son of a foul witch who had potent ministers and could control moon and tides, but could not undo her own hateful sorceries, and who worshiped a god called Setebos. Morally, Shakspere's Caliban was insensible to kindness, had bestial passions, was cowardly, vengeful, superstitious. He had keen animal instincts and knew the island well. He understood Prospero in some measure; learned to talk, to know the stars, to compose poetry, and took pleasure in music.
_Thou thoughtest_, etc. A quotation from _Psalms_ 1, 21. This sentence is the keynote of Caliban's theological speculations.
1. _Will_. For "he will" instead of "I will." Through most of the poem Caliban speaks of himself in the third person as a child does. But note lines 68-97, where Caliban rises to unusual mental heights under the stimulus of the gourd-fruit-mash and uses the first person. How is it in ll. 100-108, 135-136, 160?
1-23. This portion of Caliban's soliloquy and the portion in lines 284-295 give the setting for his speculations. The hot, still summer day creates a mood in which Caliban's ideas flow out easily into speech. The thunderstorm at the end abruptly calls him back from his speculations to his normal state of subservience and superstitious fear.
24. _Setebos._ The god of the Patagonians. When the natives were taken prisoners by Magellan, they "cryed upon their devil Setebos to help them." Eden, _History of Travaile_.
25. _He._ The pronoun of the third person when referring to Setebos is capitalized.
31. _It came of being ill at ease._ Each step in Caliban's reasoning proceeds from some personal experience or observation. In this case he reasons from the fish to Setebos. Caliban attributes to Setebos unlimited power to create and control in whatever is comparatively near at hand and changeable. But Caliban had been affected by the mystery of the starry heavens. The remoteness and fixedness of the stars had suggested a quiet, unalterable, passionless force beyond Setebos, who must, therefore, have limitations. He did not make the stars (l. 27), he cannot create a mate like himself (ll. 57-8), he cannot change his nature so as to be like the Quiet above him (ll. 144-5). Hence, like the fish, Setebos had a dissatisfied consciousness of a bliss he was not born for. Discontent with himself, spite, envy, restlessness, love of power as a means of distraction, are the motives that, according to Caliban's reasoning, actuated Setebos in his creation of the world.
45. _The fowls here, beast and creeping thing._ Browning's remarkably minute and accurate knowledge of small animals is well illustrated by this poem. For further illustration see _Saul_, the last soliloquy in _Pippa Passes_, and the lyric "Thus the Mayne glideth."
75. _Put case_, etc. In determining the natural attitude of Setebos toward his creations, the formula Caliban uses is, Caliban plus power equals Setebos. The illustration from the bird (ll. 75-97) shows cruelty, and unreasoning, capricious exercise of power. The caprice of Setebos is further emphasized in ll. 100-108.
117. _Hath cut a pipe._ In his attitude toward his creatures Setebos is envious of all human worth or happiness if it is for a moment unconscious of absolute dependence on him.
150. _Himself peeped late_, etc. As Caliban gets some poor solace out of imitating Prospero, so one reason for Setebos's creation of the world was a half-scornful attempt to delude himself into apparent content. His imitations, his "make believes," are the unwilling homage his weakness pays to the power of the Quiet.
170-184. The weaknesses of all living beings were special devices whereby Setebos could, through need and fear, torture and rule.
185-199. Setebos worked also out of pure ennui. He liked the exercise of power, he liked to use his "wit," and he needed distraction.
200-210. Setebos hates and favors human beings without discoverable reason.
211-285. It is impossible to discover a way to please Setebos. His favor goes by caprice as does Caliban's with the daring squirrel and the terrified urchin, who please one day, and, doing the same things the next, would bring down vengeance. The only philosophy at which Caliban can arrive is that it is best not to be too happy. Simulated misery is more likely to escape than any show of happiness.
MAY AND DEATH
In memory of Browning's cousin, James Silverthorne, the "Charles" of the poem. The "one plant" of the last two stanzas is supposed to be the _Spotted Persicaria_, "a common weed with purple stains upon its rather large leaves." According to popular tradition this plant grew beneath the Cross, and the stains were made by drops of blood from the Savior's wounds. (Berdoe, _Browning Cyclopædia_, page 268, quoting from Rev. H. Friend, _Flowers and Flower Lore_.)
PROSPICE
"Prospice" ("Look forward") was written in the autumn following Mrs. Browning's death. "It ends with the expression of his triumphant certainty of meeting her, and breaks forth at last into so great a cry of pure passion that ear and heart alike rejoice. Browning at his best, Browning in the central fire of his character, is in it." (Brooke, _The Poetry of Browning_, page 251.)
A FACE
"No poem in the volume of _Dramatis Personæ_ is connected with pictorial art, unless it be the few lines entitled 'A Face,' lines of which Emily Patmore, the poet's wife, was the subject, and written, as Browning seldom wrote, for the mere record of beauty. That 'little head of hers' is transferred to Browning's panel in the manner of an early Tuscan piece of ideal loveliness." (Dowden, _Life of Browning_.)
14. _Correggio._ A famous Italian painter of the Lombard school. These lines well describe his style.
O LYRIC LOVE
These are the closing lines of the first book of _The Ring and the Book_. The passage is generally and probably rightly interpreted as an invocation to the spirit of his wife.
A WALL
This poem was written and printed as the Prologue to _Pacchiarotto and How he Worked in Distemper_, published in 1876. It was, however, given the title "A Wall" when published in 1880 in _Selections from Robert Browning's Poems, Second Series_. The last two stanzas express one of the fundamental ideas of Browning's poetry. Under the figure of the wall with its pulsating robe of vines and the eagerness of the lover to penetrate to the life within the house, he sets forth his thought of the barrier between himself and a longed-for future life in heaven. The "forth to thee" is to be interpreted as referring to his wife.
HOUSE AND SHOP
Three of Browning's poems, "At the Mermaid," "House," and "Shop," refer with more or less explicitness to Shakspere. The last stanza in "House" contains a quotation from Wordsworth's "Scorn not the Sonnet" to the effect that in his sonnets Shakspere revealed the most intimate facts of his life. "At the Mermaid" and "House" both combat this idea. In "At the Mermaid" Browning in the person of Shakspere says:
"Which of you did I enable Once to slip within my breast, There to catalogue and label What I like least, what love best, Hope and fear, believe and doubt of, Seek and shun, respect--deride? Who has right to make a rout of Rarities he found inside?"
As applied to Browning the poems represent the indignation with which he regarded such personal revelations, such utterance of sighs and groans, as characterized Byron (the "Last King" of "At the Mermaid"); but they overstate the impersonal nature of Browning's own work which is frequently a very direct statement of his own emotions and views, while even from his dramatic work it is not difficult to find his "hopes and fears, beliefs and doubts." In stanzas 10-12 of "At the Mermaid," for example, just after he has protested against "leaving bosom's gate ajar," he fully sets forth the joy, the optimism, of his own outlook on life. "Shop" is an indirect protest against the assumption that Shakspere wrote mainly for money, caring merely for the material success of his work. (See _Poet-Lore_, Vol. III, pp. 216-221, April, 1889, for Browning's tribute to Shakspere.) More directly the poem represents the starved life of the man whom "shop," the business necessary to earn a living, occupies "each day and all day long" with no spirit-life behind.
HERVÉ RIEL
This poem was written during Browning's second visit to Le Croisic in Brittany, in September, 1867. It was published in _The Cornhill Magazine_, March, 1871, the proceeds of one hundred guineas being sent by Browning to the Paris Relief Fund, to provide food for the people after the siege of Paris. The story is historic. Mrs. Lemoyne, in 1884, read "Hervé Riel" to Browning and he then told her that it was his custom to learn all about the heroes and legends of any town that he stopped in and that he had thus, in going over the records of the town of St. Malo, come upon the story of Hervé Riel, which he narrated just as it happened in 1692, except that in reality the hero had a life holiday. "The facts of the story had been forgotten, and were denied at St. Malo; but the reports of the French Admiralty were looked up, and the facts established." (Dr. Furnivall quoted in Berdoe, _Browning Cyclopædia_.)
"GOOD TO FORGIVE"
This little poem was written and printed as the Prologue to _La Saisiaz_ in 1878, but in the _Selections_ it appeared as No. 3 of "Pisgah-Sights."
"SUCH A STARVED BANK OF MOSS"
Prefatory stanzas to _The Two Poets of Croisic_.
EPILOGUE TO THE TWO POETS OF CROISIC
This fate of the musician and the cricket has the same fundamental idea as the prefatory stanzas, the power of love to soften what is gruff and brighten what is somber in life.
64. _Music's son._ Goethe. The "Lotte" of the next line, the heroine of Goethe's _Sorrows of Werther_, was modeled in part on Charlotte Buff, with whom Goethe was at one time in love.
PHEIDIPPIDES
[Greek: Chairete, nikômen.] Rejoice we conquer!
2. _Dæmons._ In Greek mythology a superior order of beings between men and the gods.
4. _Her of the ægis and spear._ Athena, whose ægis was a scaly cloak or mantle bordered with serpents and bearing Medusa's head.
5. _Ye of the bow and the buskin._ Artemis or Diana, the huntress. Ancient statues represent her as wearing shoes laced to the ankle.
8. _Pan._ The god of nature, half goat and half man. To him was ascribed the power of causing sudden fright by his voice and appearance. He came suddenly into the midst of the Persians on the field of Marathon--so the legend runs--and threw them into such a "panic" that, for this reason, they lost the battle.
9. _Archons of Athens, topped by the tettix._ _Archon._ One of the nine rulers of Athens. _Tettix._ A grasshopper. "The Athenians sometimes wore golden grasshoppers in their hair as badges of honor, because these insects are supposed to spring from the ground, and thus they showed they were sprung from the original inhabitants of the country." (Berdoe, _Browning Cyclopædia_, p. 336.)
12. _Reach Sparta for aid._ The distance between Athens and Sparta is about 135 miles.
18. _Persia bids Athens proffer slaves'-tribute, water and earth._ The Persians sent to those states which they wished to subject, messengers who were to ask earth and water as symbols of submission.
19. _Eretria._ An important city on the island of Euboea.
20. _Hellas._ Greece.
38. _The moon, half-orbed._ Spartan troops finally came to Athens after the full moon.
47. _Filleted victim._ A victim whose head was decked with ribbons.
52. _Parnes._ Herodotus refers in this connection to the Parthenian mountain.
62. _Erebos._ Hades, the abode of shades or departed spirits.
83. _Fennel._ The Greek word Marathon means fennel.
89. _Miltiades._ One of the ten Athenian generals.
105. _Unforeseeing one._ The poet finishes the story, which he has hitherto allowed Pheidippides to tell for himself.
105. _Marathon day._ In the month of September, B. C. 490.
106. _Akropolis._ The stronghold of Athens.
MULÉYKEH
The love of the Arab for his horse is traditional. "The story is a common one and seems adapted from a Bedouin's anecdote told in Rollo Springfield's _The Horse and His Rider_." (Berdoe, _Browning Cyclopædia_, p. 280.)
WANTING IS--WHAT?
This poem is in the nature of a prelude to the group of poems published under the title _Jocoseria_, 1883. Each poem in this volume shows the lack of some element that would have brought the human action or experience to perfection.
8. _Comer._ The invocation probably refers to the spirit of love with its inspiring, transforming power.
"NEVER THE TIME AND THE PLACE"
This poem was published in _Jocoseria_ in 1883. It is doubtless to be grouped with the poems that refer directly to Mrs. Browning.
THE PATRIOT
Browning says that this poem has no direct historical reference. He calls it "An Old Story," because in all ages men have experienced this unjust reversal of public approval. The poem is merely an imaginative, dramatic representation of the fickleness of popular favor.
INSTANS TYRANNUS
The title of this poem means "Threatening Tyrant." It comes from Horace's "Ode on the Just Man," in _Odes_, III, 3, i. The just man is not frightened by the frown of the threatening tyrant--_non vullus instantis tyranni_. Archdeacon Farrar refers the incidents to persecution of the early Christians. The poem certainly deals with some period when the ruler of a great realm had unlimited power to follow out his most insignificant animosities, and when just men and just causes had no human recourse.
The general idea of the poem is clear and forcible, but there are many minor difficulties of interpretation.
6. _What was his force?_ An ironic question. The man groveled because he was powerless to resist, and (line 10) because resistance might bring even worse punishment.
11. _Were the object_, etc. If the man could be made rich, if his life could be crowded with pleasures, if there could be found relatives or friends whom he loved, then there would be obvious ways of hurting him, he would stand forth in sufficient importance to make the swing of the tyrant's hand effective. But as it is, the man's poverty and friendlessness and meagerness of life render it difficult to find out vulnerable points of attack. He remains hidden (_perdue_) and, like the midge of the egg of an insect (_nit_), is safe through his very insignificance.
21. _spilth._ That which is poured out profusely. The _flagon_ is a vessel with one handle and a long narrow neck or spout.
35. _Then a humor_, etc. The tyrant goes through various changes of mood in his attitude toward his enemy. In lines 35-43 he feels a moment of contemptuous compunction at the man's suffering, and recognizes the absurdity of a contest between a great king and a person as insignificant as a tricksy elf, a toad, or a rat. But in line 44 his mood turns. He perceives that the burden (_gravamen_) of the whole matter lies in the incredibly petty nature of this unconquerable, baffling opposition to his will. He sees how the situation would awaken the wonder of the great lords who abjectly obey his lightest word, but he concludes that, after all, the small becomes great if it vexes you.
53. _I soberly_, etc. Even the tyrant sees a kind of grotesque humor as he narrates first the elaborate plans to entrap and crush so seemingly powerless a foe, and then the striking reversal of position when the man proves to have God on his side, and the tyrant becomes the one to cower in fear.
THE ITALIAN IN ENGLAND
At the Congress of Vienna, in 1815, Lombardy and Venetia were assigned to Austria. Most of the inhabitants submitted to the foreign rule, but there were always small bands of patriots who stirred up revolutions against Austria. The chief revolution was that led by Mazzini in 1848, and when he was in exile he read this poem with much appreciation. In _Pippa Passes_ (1840), in the story of Luigi and the Austrian police, Browning had already given a picture based on Italy's struggle for freedom. In 1844 he visited Italy and then wrote "The Italian in England," which appeared in 1845. This poem does not represent a definite historic incident, but such a one as might have occurred in the life of some Italian patriot. For a similar feeling towards Italian independence see Mrs. Browning's _Casa Guidi Windows_ (written 1848-1851). For earlier poems see Byron's "Ode" beginning "O Venice, Venice, when thy marble walls," Shelley's "Lines Written Among the Euganean Hills," and the following sonnet by Wordsworth:
"Once did She hold the gorgeous east in fee; And was the safeguard of the west: the worth Of Venice did not fall below her birth, Venice, the eldest Child of Liberty. She was a maiden City, bright and free; No guile seduced, no force could violate; And, when she took unto herself a Mate, She must espouse the everlasting Sea. And what if she had seen those glories fade, Those titles vanish, and that strength decay; Yet shall some tribute of regret be paid When her long life hath reached its final day: Men are we, and must grieve when even the Shade Of that which once was great, is passed away."
8. _Charles._ Carlo Alberto, King of Sardinia. He had used severe measures against "Young Italy," the party founded by Mazzini.
19. _Metternich._ A noted Austrian diplomat and one of the most powerful enemies of Italian freedom.
75. _Duomo._ The most famous church in Padua.
78. _Tenebræ._ _Darkness._ A religious service commemorative of the crucifixion. Fifteen lighted candles are put out one at a time, symbolizing the growing darkness of the world up to the time of the crucifixion.
"ROUND US THE WILD CREATURES"
The first interlude in _Ferishtah's Fancies_. These interludes are love lyrics which follow the separate Fables and Fancies of the Persian Dervish Ferishtah, and state in terms of the affections the truth embodied in didactic or philosophical fashion in the fables. In the first fable, "The Eagle," the Dervish observes an eagle feeding some deserted ravens. His first inference is that men will be cared for as the ravens, without effort of their own; later he sees that men should be as eagles and provide for the weak. The Dervish at once seeks the largest sphere of human usefulness with the words
"And since men congregate In towns, not woods--to Ispahan forthwith!"
The lyric protests against the temptation to self-centered seclusion on the part of those who are entirely satisfied in each other's love.
PROLOGUE TO ASOLANDO
The volume of poems entitled _Asolando_ was, by a strange chance, published on the day of Browning's death. Most of these poems were written in 1888-1889. The book was dedicated to Mrs. Arthur Bronson. The "Prologue" should be compared with Wordsworth's "Ode on Intimations of Immortality."
13. _Chrysopras._ The ruby and the emerald of this passage stand for rich red and green. The chrysopras is also green (an apple green variety of Chalcedony), but the first part of the word is from the Greek [Greek: chrysos], "gold," and that may be the color intended here.
SUMMUM BONUM
The title means, The Chief Good. The poem came out in _Asolando_ in 1889.
EPILOGUE TO ASOLANDO
In the _Pall Mall Gazette_, Feb. 1, 1890 the following incident is given concerning the third stanza of this poem:
"One evening just before his death illness, the poet was reading this from a proof to his daughter-in-law and sister. He said: 'It almost looks like bragging to say this, and as if I ought to cancel it; but it's the simple truth; and as it's true, it shall stand.'"
Compare this poem and Tennyson's "Crossing the Bar."
PIPPA PASSES
Mrs. Sutherland Orr writes that while Browning was one day strolling through Dulwich Wood "the image flashed upon him of someone walking ... alone through life; one apparently too obscure to leave a trace of his or her passage, yet exercising a lasting though unconscious influence at every step of it; and the image shaped itself into the little silk-winder of Asolo, Felippa, or Pippa."
INTRODUCTION
_Asolo in the Trevisan._ Asolo, a fortified medieval town at the foot of a hill surmounted by the ruins of a castle, and situated in the center of the silk-growing and silk-spinning industries, is in the province of Treviso about thirty-three miles northwest of Venice.
62. _Monsignor._ A title conferred upon prelates in the Roman Catholic church. This Monsignor is the chief personage in Part III, or _Night_.
88. _Martagon._ A kind of lily with light purplish flowers. The common name is Turk's Cap. Perhaps that suggested to Browning his comparison to the round bunch of flesh on the head of a Turk bird, or turkey.
131. _Possagno church._ Designed by Canova, who was born at Possagno, an obscure village near Asolo.
181. _The Dome._ The Duomo, or Cathedral, in the center of the town. The palace of the Bishop's brother is close by.
MORNING
28. _St. Mark's._ There is an extensive view from Asolo. Venice, with its cupolas and steeples, is seen to the east. Ottima detects the belfry of the Church of St. Mark. The towns of Vicenza and Padua are also discernible.
59. _The Capuchin._ A branch of the Franciscan order of monks. Their habit is brown.
170. _Campanula chalice._ The flower of any one of a large genus of flowers with bell-shaped corollas.
INTERLUDE I
27. _El canibus nostris._ Virgil, _Eclogues_ iii, 67. "_Notior ut jam sit canibus non Delia nostris_"--"So that now not Delia's self is more familiar to our dogs." The boy Giovacchino of whose poetry they are making fun evidently had ideals not in harmony with the ways of these Venetian art students. These "dissolute, brutalized, heartless bunglers," as Jules calls them, attack with quick, clever, merciless tongues whatever savors of idealism, aspiration, purity. Their revenge for the scornful superiority manifested towards them by Jules is to secure, by a well-managed trick, a marriage between him and a paid model.
86. _Canova's gallery._ Possagno was the birthplace of the sculptor Canova, and the circular church there was designed by him. In the gallery at Possagno is his Psyche (_Psiche-fanciulla_, or Psyche the young girl); his Pietà (the mother with the dead Christ in her arms) is in the church.
111. _Malamocco._ A little town on an island near Venice.
111. _Alciphron._ A Greek writer (about 200 A. D.) of fictitious letters famous for the purity of their style and for the knowledge they give of Greek social customs.
115. _Lire._ Plural of lira, an Italian coin equal to 18.6 cents in our money.
117. _A scented letter._ Forged letters have represented this fourteen year old, ignorant model as delicate, shy, reserved, intellectually alert, with lofty poetic and artistic ideals.
117. _Tydeus._ One of the Seven Allies in the enterprise against Thebes. Jules is supposed to have modeled a statue of him for the Venetian Academy of Fine Arts. From Scene II, 14, we see that it is still in clay.
120. _Paolina._ Some actress at the Phenix, the leading theater of Venice.
140. _Hannibal Scratchy._ In jest they burlesque the name of Annibale Caracci, a famous Italian artist, and apply it to one of their number.
NOON
39. _This minion._ This favorite. Bessarion (1395-1472), a learned Greek cardinal, discovered a poem, "The Rape of Helen," written by a Greek epic poet, Coluthus, in the sixth century, and Bessarion's scribe copied it out on parchment with blue, red, and dark-brown lettering.
43. _Odyssey._ Homer's account of the adventures of Ulysses. The quoted passage is in the _Odyssey_, Bk. XXII, 10. When Ulysses reached home he wreaked vengeance on the suitors of his wife. Antinous was the first to fall. The story of the "bitter shaft" blotted out by a flower is symbolic of the story of the hatred of Lutwyche, which was robbed of its bitterness by Phene's love.
50. _Almaign Kaiser._ The German Emperor. _Swart-green_ is really "black-green"; here it means the "dark-green" of bronze. The Emperor's truncheon is a short staff, the emblem of his office.
54. _Hippolyta._ The Queen of the Amazons on a fine horse from Numidia.
59. _Bay-filleted._ The bay or laurel with which victors were crowned was supposed to be an antidote against thunder because it was the tree of Apollo. Pliny says that Tiberius and some other Roman emperors wore a wreath of bay leaves as an amulet, especially in thunder-storms. (See Brewer, _Dictionary of Phrase and Fable_; also Byron, _Childe Harold_, IV, 41.)
61. _Hipparchus._ In B. C. 514 Harmodius and Aristogeiton conspired against the tyrants Hippias and Hipparchus, and carrying swords hid in myrtle, they slew Hipparchus. Cf. Byron, _Childe Harold_, III, 20.
"All that most endears Glory, is when the myrtle wreathes a sword Such as Harmodius drew on Athens' tyrant lord."
75. _Parsley._ An aromatic herb used in ancient time in crowns worn at feasts.
86. _Archetype._ The original pattern or model. Beautiful colors and shapes in flowers, in flames, trees, and fruit suggested to the poet the beauty of perfect human forms. The rosy bloom of the peach bending close over the bough and nestled among the leaves is sufficient to suggest rosy limbs, and from that suggestion comes the whole imaginative picture of the dryad, the nymph of the woods.
95. _Facile chalk._ Jules exults in the facility with which the artist, in any realm of art, manipulates his implements and his materials. His especial enthusiasm is for marble, which he has come to regard as an original, primitive substance, containing in itself all other substances. It may be made to seem as light and clear as air, as brilliant as diamonds. Sometimes as his chisel strikes, it seems to be metal. Again it seems to be actual flesh and blood. At moments when the sculptor works with swift intensity it seems to flush and glow like flame.
181. _I am a painter_, etc. The poem by Lutwyche is professedly "slow, involved, and mystical." But Jules gradually perceives the purport of the words. Lutwyche's hate is to have its most hideous possible aspect because it is to appear suddenly through Love's rose-braided mask.
272. _The Cornaro._ Catharine Cornaro was the wife of James, King of Cyprus. After his death she was induced to abdicate in favor of the Republic of Venice, which took possession of Cyprus in 1487. She was assigned a palace and court at Asolo. She was generous, kind, just, and deeply beloved. Her life seemed to hold all possible external conditions of happiness. The song is further explained in lines 275-279.
306. _Ancona._ A lovely city in eastern Italy.
INTERLUDE II
1. _Bluphocks._ Browning's note on this character reads, "He maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust." (_Matthew_ v, 45.)
2. _Your Bishop's Intendant._ The Bishop's Superintendent (whose real name is Maffeo) has charge of the estate the Bishop has just inherited from his brother. The money Bluphocks has is the bribe given him by Maffeo to destroy Pippa, who is really the heir to the estate. Maffeo expects the Bishop to reward him well for this service.
11. _Prussia Improper._ "The arm of land bounded on the north by the Baltic and on the south by Poland was long called 'Prussia Proper' to distinguish it from the other provinces of the kingdom. Königsberg is just over the boundary of Brandenberg." (Rolfe, _Select Poems of Browning_.)
14. _Chaldee._ A Semitic dialect.
21. _Celarent_, _Darii_, _Ferio_. Coined words used in logic to designate certain valid forms of syllogism.
24. _Posy._ A brief inscription or motto originally in verse, and suitable for a ring or some trinket.
25. _How Moses_, etc. For the story of Moses and the plagues of Egypt see _Exodus_ viii and x. For the story of Jonah (who was commanded, however, not to go to Tarshish) see _Jonah_ i. For Balaam and his ass see _Numbers_ xxii, 22.
33. _Bishop Beveridge._ There was a Bishop of that name, but of course Bluphocks is making a pun.
35. _Charon's wherry._ Charon was a god of hell. It was his business to carry the dead across the river Styx. People thus carried over the Stygian ferry paid Charon by a small coin put between their lips.
36. _Lupine-seed._ "In plant-lore 'lupine' means wolfish, and is suggestive of the Evil One." (Berdoe, _Browning Cyclopædia_.)
36. _Hecate's supper._ Hecate was a goddess of hell to whom offerings of food were made. An _obolus_ is a silver coin worth about fifteen cents.
39. _Zwanziger._ A twenty-kreuzer piece of money.
47. _Prince Metternich._ A celebrated Austrian statesman. (1773-1859.)
54. _Panurge._ A prominent character in _Gargantua and Pantagruel_ by Rabelais. Hertrippa is a magician who gives Panurge advice on the subject of marriage. Bluphocks is simply racking his brain for words to rhyme with "Pippa," so that he may write doggerel poetry to or about her. For "King Agrippa" see _Acts_ xxvi, 27.
77. _Carbonari._ All persons leaving a city had to have a passport officially signed giving the destination and the date of departure. Luigi had obtained such a passport for Vienna for that night. It was, however, suspected that this was a mere trick to give a wrong notion of his whereabouts. If the passport should prove to be a pretense, other suspicions against Luigi would be confirmed; it would be taken for granted that he belonged to the Carbonari, a secret society of Italian patriots; he would be arrested and sent to the prison at Spielberg. But if he should go to Vienna he is to be let alone. The officers are, of course, on the wrong track. If Luigi goes to Vienna it is to carry out his purpose of killing the tyrant. If he stays in Asolo it means that he has abandoned that purpose.
EVENING
6. _Lucius Junius._ This name comes easily to Luigi's lips because Lucius Junius Brutus inspired the Romans against Tarquin.
14. _Old Franz._ The Austrian Emperor, Francis, I. Luigi's fancy is caught by the echoes and the flowers, but they play into his dominant idea of the freedom of Italy.
19. _Pellicos._ Silvio Pellico was an Italian patriot who had suffered a long imprisonment in Spielberg Castle.
122. _Andrea_, etc. Three former Italian patriots who had conspired against Austria.
135-143. Note in these lines how little Luigi really understands of the point at issue. His emotional temperament has been stirred to the point of desperate action, but the "ground for killing the King" he hardly knows.
152. _Jupiter._ The largest of the planets. When a planet rises after midnight it becomes a morning star.
163. _Titian at Treviso._ Treviso is seventeen miles from Venice. Its cathedral contains a fine Annunciation by Titian which Luigi and his betrothed Chiara had planned to see together.
164. _A king lived long ago._ This song was published in 1835 and later adapted for this poem. The song has a great effect on Luigi because beside his mental picture of the hated Austrian ruler he now places his old folk-king who judged his people wisely, whose dignity and grace awed even a python, and whom the gods loved. The possibility of having good kings stirs his waning determination to rid the earth of evil ones.
INTERLUDE III
6. _The same treat._ The feast of the girl is made up of fig-peckers (birds that feed on figs), lampreys (eel-like fish esteemed a delicacy), and red wine from Breganze, a town noted for its wines.
17. _Spring's come_, etc. These girls are well differentiated. The "first girl" is set apart from the others by her superior refinement, by her longing for her country home, and by her unhappiness with Cecco. The "third girl" seems to be the leader in the plan against Pippa.
22. _Deuzans_, etc. Varieties of apples.
64. _Ortolans._ Birds about the size of larks, and an expensive delicacy.
66. _Polenta._ A coarse corn-meal pudding.
89. _Great rich handsome Englishman._ Bluphocks, who has been hired by the Intendant to lure Pippa into evil courses.
NIGHT
1. _Monsignor._ The Bishop has come from Messina in Sicily to take possession of his dead brother's estate. The "Ugo" to whom he speaks is the Intendant mentioned at the beginning of _Interlude II_.
4. _Benedicto benedicatur._ A form of blessing for the repast. "Let it be consecrated with a good saying."
9. _Assumption Day._ The festival of the Assumption of the Virgin into Heaven comes August 25.
36. _Jules._ This is the Jules of _Noon_. His history is thus carried on beyond the point where we left him at the close of his interview with Phene.
51. _Correggio._ An Italian artist (1494-1534).
72. _Podere._ (Plural, _poderi_.) A small farm or manor.
83. _Cesena._ An Episcopal city about twelve miles from Forli.
108. _Millet-cake._ A cake made of an Italian grain and eaten only by the poorest classes.
135. _Letter No. 3._ The information from Rome is based on a wrong assumption. The elder brother had an infant heir whom the second brother endeavored to put out of the way in order that he might himself inherit the estate. He hired Maffeo to destroy the child, and, according to the information from Rome, Maffeo did so. On this assumption Maffeo is to be arrested and the money and land given him by the second brother to keep the deed a secret are now to revert to the church.
154. _So old a story._ In reality Maffeo has been more astute than they thought. He did not kill the child but kept it ready to produce as the heir to the estates if the second brother at any time proved delinquent in the required payments.
174. _Let us understand one another._ He believes that when the Bishop sees himself about to lose the estate, he too will show himself ready for a bargain. The Bishop is simply to keep still and Maffeo will see that the heir--who is Pippa--shall be finally brought to shame and death. The Bishop is to have the estates, and Maffeo is to keep his ill-gotten gains and be given a chance to escape. The Bishop is apparently listening to the tempter when he hears Pippa's song. Its fresh lilting sweetness, and especially, perhaps, the wording of the last line, touch his heart and his conscience, and he suddenly orders Maffeo's arrest, at the same time uttering the prayer, "Have mercy upon me, O God."
EPILOGUE
7. _My Zanze._ Zanze was evidently the "third girl" who took Pippa in charge at the end of _Interlude III_.
30. _Monsignor's people._ Zanze was apparently talking to Pippa under the Monsignor's window. Pippa broke off the unwelcome talk by her song, and Zanze had hardly time to begin again when there came the noise of the arrest of Maffeo.
* * * * *
Transcriber's note
The following changes have been made to the text:
Page 44: "Rabbi Ben Erza" changed to "Rabbi Ben Ezra".
Page 89: Numbered line 25.
Page 199: Numbered line 90.
Page 323: Numbered line 5.
Page 392: "opposed such beginings" changed to "opposed such beginnings".
Page 395: "Baldasarre Galuppi" changed to "Baldassare Galuppi".
Page 417: "name to to the volume" changed to "name to the volume".
Page 419: "Voglers masterly playing" changed to "Vogler's masterly playing".
Page 423: "deveolpment of art" changed to "development of art".
Page 425: "Pacchiarotte" changed to "Pacchiarotto".
Page 436: "Chiari" changed to "Chiara".
Page 436: "Breganza" changed to "Breganze".