IX.

ON DECK.

She makes the final sacrifice to her husband's happiness, and leaves him. But in so doing she pays a last tribute to the omnipotence of love. She knows there is nothing in her that will claim a place in his remembrance. She knows also that if he had loved her, it might be otherwise. Love could have transformed her in his sight as it has transfigured him in hers. Their positions might even have been reversed. If one touch of such a love as hers could ever come to her in a thought of his, he might turn into a being as ill-favoured as herself. She would neither know nor care, since joy would have killed her.

We learn from the two last monologues, especially the last, that James Lee's wife was a plain woman. This may throw some light on the situation.

"THE WORST OF IT" is the cry of anguish of a man whose wife has been false to him, and who sees in her transgression only the injury she has inflicted on herself, and his own indirect part in its infliction. The strain of suppressed personal suffering betrays itself in his very endeavour to prove that he has not been wronged: that it was his fault, not hers, if his love maddened her, and the vows by which he had bound her were such as she could not keep. But the burden of his lament--"the worst of it" all--is, that her purity was once his salvation, her past kindness has for ever glorified his life; that she is dishonoured, and through him, and that no gratitude of his, no power of his, can rescue her from that dishonour. In his passionate tenderness he strives to pacify her conscience, and again, as earnestly to arouse it. "Her account is not with him who absolves her, but with the world which does not; with her endangered womanhood, her jeopardized hope of Heaven." He implores her for her own sake to return to virtue though not to him. For himself he renounces her even in Paradise. He "will pass nor turn" his "face" if they meet there.

The pathos of "TOO LATE" is all conveyed in its title. The loved woman is dead. She was the wife of another man than he who mourns for her. But so long as there was life there was hope. The lover might, he feels, have learned to compromise with the obstacles to his happiness. Some shock of circumstance might have rolled them away. If the loved one spurned him once, he had of late been earning her friendship. She might in time have discovered that the so-called poet whom she had preferred to him was a mere lay-figure whom her fancy had draped. But all this is at an end. Hope and opportunity are alike gone. He remains to condemn his own quiescence in what was perhaps not inevitable; in what proved no more for her happiness than for his. The husband is probably writing her epitaph.

"Too Late" expresses an attachment as individual as it is complete. "Edith" was not considered a beauty. She was not one even in her lover's eyes. This fact, and the manner in which he shows it, give a characteristic force to the situation.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 32: The classification of this poem is open to the obvious objection that it is not a monologue; but a dialogue or alternation of monologues, in which the second speaker, Balaustion (who is also the narrator), is, for the time being, as real as the first. Its conception is, however, expressed in the first title; and the arguments and descriptions which Balaustion supplies only contribute to the vividness with which Aristophanes and his defence are brought before us. "Aristophanes' Apology" is identical in spirit with the other poems of this group.]

[Footnote 33: This incident is founded on fact. It is related in Plutarch's Lives, that after the defeat of Nicias, all those of the captives who could recite something from Euripides were kindly treated by the Syracusans.]

[Footnote 34: The name signifies celebration of the festival of the Thesmophoria. This was held by women only, in honour of Ceres and Proserpine.]

[Footnote 35: The chorus of each new play was supplied to its author by the Government, when considered worth the outlay. Sketches of this and other plays alluded to in the course of the work may be read in the first volume of Mahaffy's "History of Classical Greek Literature."]

[Footnote 36: The plays were performed at the lesser and greater festivals of Bacchus; this, the Lenaia, being the smaller one. Hence, the presence of priest as well as archon at the ensuing banquet]

[Footnote 37: The failure here alluded to is his Ploutos or Plutus--an inoffensive but tame comedy written when Aristophanes was advanced in years, and of which the ill-success has been imputed to this fact. Mr. Browning, however, treats it as a proof that the author's ingrained habit of coarse fun had unfitted him for the more serious treatment of human life.]

[Footnote 38: Figures placed above the entrance of Athenian houses, and symbolizing the double life. It was held as sacrilege to deface them, as had been recently and mysteriously done.]

[Footnote 39: Introducing him into the play, as in the disguise of a disreputable woman.]

[Footnote 40: Aristophanes' comedy of the "Clouds" was written especially at Socrates, who stood up unconcernedly in the theatre that the many strangers present might understand what was intended.]

[Footnote 41: Mr. Mahaffy's description of the "Clouds" contains an account of this defeat, which sets forth the amusing conceit and sophistry of Aristophanes' explanation of it. He alludes here to the prevailing custom of several dramatic writers competing for a prize.]

[Footnote 42: Whirligig is a parody of the word "vortex." Vortex itself is used in derision of Socrates, who is represented in the "Clouds" as setting up this non-rational force in the place of Zeus--the clouds themselves being subordinate divinities.]

[Footnote 43: Saperdion was a famous Hetaira, the Empousa, a mythological monster. Kimberic or Cimberic means transparent.]

[Footnote 44: A pure libel on this play, which is noted for its novel and successful attempt to represent humour without indecency. Aristophanes here alludes to the prevailing custom of concluding every group of three tragedies with a play in which the chorus consisted of Satyrs: a custom which Euripides broke through.]

[Footnote 45: The inverted commas include here, as elsewhere in the Apology, only the very condensed substance of Mr. Browning's words.]

[Footnote 46: Tin-islands. Scilly Islands, loosely speaking, Great Britain.]

[Footnote 47: A demagogue of bad character attacked by Aristophanes: a big fellow and great coward.]

[Footnote 48: White was the Greek colour of victory. This passage, not easily paraphrased, is a poetic recognition of the latent sympathy of Aristophanes with the good cause.]

[Footnote 49: A game said to be of Sicilian origin and played in many ways. Details of it may be found in Becker's "Charikles," vol. ii.]

[Footnote 50: Thamyris of Thrace, said to have been blinded by the Muses for contending with them in song. The incident is given in the "Iliad," and was treated again by Sophocles, as Aristophanes also relates.]

[Footnote 51: This also is historical.]

[Footnote 52: Grote's "History of Greece," vol. iii. p. 265.]

[Footnote 53: Eidotheé or Eidothea, is the daughter of Proteus--the old man of the sea. A legend concerning her is found in the 4th book of the Odyssey.]

[Footnote 54: There is such a monument at Pornic.]

[Footnote 55: These words are taken from a line in the Prometheus of Æschylus.]

[Footnote 56: Mr. Browning desires me to say that he has been wrong in associating this custom with the little temple by the river Clitumnus which he describes from personal knowledge. That to which the tradition refers stood by the lake of Nemi.]

[Footnote 57: The Cardinal himself reviewed this poem, not disapprovingly, in a catholic publication of the time]

[Footnote 58: This refers to the popular Neapolitan belief that a crystallized drop of the blood of the patron saint, Januarius, is miraculously liquefied on given occasions.]

[Footnote 59: The "Iketides" (Suppliants), mentioned in Section XVIII., is a Tragedy by Æschylus, the earliest extant: and of which the text is especially incomplete: hence, halting, and "maimed."]

[Footnote 60: This poem, like "Aristophanes' Apology," belongs in spirit more than in form to its particular group. Each contains a dialogue, and in the present case we have a defence, though not a specious one of the judgment attained]

[Footnote 61: We recognize the _cogito ergo sum_ of Descartes.]

[Footnote 62: The narrator, in a parenthetic statement, imputes a doctrine to St. John, which is an unconscious approach on Mr. Browning's part to the "animism" of some ancient and mediæval philosophies. It carries the idea of the Trinity into the individual life, by subjecting this to three souls, the lowest of which reigns over the body, and is that which "Does:" the second and third being respectively that which "Knows" and "Is." The reference to the "glossa of Theotypas" is part of the fiction.]

[Footnote 63: The present Riccardi palace in the Via Larga was built by Cosmo dei Medici in 1430; and remained in the possession of the Medici till 1659, when it was sold to Marchese Riccardi. The original Riccardi palace in the Piazza S. S. Annunziata is now (since 1870) Palazzo Antinori.

In my first edition, the "crime" is wrongly interpreted as the murder of Alexander, Duke of Florence, in 1536; and the confusion, I regret to find, increased by a wrong figure (8 for 5), which has slipped into the date.]

[Footnote 64: Mr. Browning possesses or possessed pictures by all the artists mentioned in this connection.]

[Footnote 65: (Verses 26, 27, 28.) "Bigordi" is the family name of Domenico called "Ghirlandajo," from the family trade of wreath-making. "Sandro" stands for Alessandro Botticelli. "Lippino" was son of Fra Lippo Lippi. Mr. Browning alludes to him as "wronged," because others were credited with some of his best work. "Lorenzo Monaco" (the monk) was a contemporary, or nearly so, of Fra Angelico, but more severe in manner. "Pollajolo" was both painter and sculptor. "Margheritone of Arezzo" was one of the earlier Old Masters, and died, as Vasari states, "infastidito" (deeply annoyed), by the success of Giotto and the "new school." Hence the funeral garb in which Mr. Browning depicts him.]

[Footnote 66: The "magic" symbolized is that of genuine poetry; but the magician, or "mage," is an historical person; and the special feat imputed to him was recorded of other magicians in the Middle Ages, if not of himself.

"Johannes Teutonicus, a canon of Halberstadt in Germany, after he had performed a number of prestigious feats almost incredible, was transported by the Devil in the likeness of a black horse, and was both seen and heard upon one and the same Christmas day to say Mass in Halberstadt, in Mayntz, and in Cologne" ("Heywood's Hierarchy," bk. iv., p. 253).

The "prestigious feat" of causing flowers to appear in winter was a common one. "In the year 876, the Emperor Lewis then reigning, there was one Zedechias, by religion a Jew, by profession a physician, but indeed a magician. In the midst of winter, in the Emperor's palace, he suddenly caused a most pleasant and delightful garden to appear, with all sorts of trees, plants, herbs, and flowers, together with the singing of all sorts of birds, to be seen and heard." (Delrio, "Disquisitio Magicæ," bk. i., chap, iv., and elsewhere; and many other authorities.)]

[Footnote 67: "Wine of Cyprus." The quotation heading the poem qualifies it as 'wine for the superiors in age and station.']

[Footnote 68: Such as Wordsworth assumed to have been in use with Shakespeare.]

[Footnote 69: This is told in the tales of the Troubadours.]

[Footnote 70: Published, simultaneously, in Mr. Fox's "Monthly Repository." The song in "Pippa Passes" beginning "A king lived long ago," and the verses introduced in "James Lee's Wife," were also first published in this Magazine, edited by the generous and very earliest encourager of Mr. Browning's boyish attempts at poetry.]

[Footnote 71: These verses were written when Mr. Browning was twenty-three.]

EMOTIONAL POEMS (CONTINUED).

RELIGIOUS, ARTISTIC, AND EXPRESSIVE OF THE FIERCER EMOTIONS.

The emotions which, after that of love, are most strongly represented in Mr. Browning's works are the RELIGIOUS and the ARTISTIC: emotions closely allied in every nature in which they happen to co-exist, and which are so in their proper degree in Mr. Browning's; the proof of this being that two poems which I have placed in the Artistic group almost equally fit into the Religious. But the religious poems impress us more by their beauty than by their number, if we limit it to those which are directly inspired by this particular emotion. Religious questions have occupied, as we have seen, some of Mr. Browning's most important reflective poems. Religious belief forms the undercurrent of many of the emotional poems. And it was natural therefore, that religious feeling should not often lay hold of him in a more exclusive form. It does so only in three cases; those of

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

"Epilogue." ("Dramatis Personæ." 1864.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In its relation to the spiritual sense of existence in

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

As a transformation of human tenderness in

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

In its directly sensuous effects in

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

In its associative power in

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

In its representative power in

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

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

"A Face." ("Dramatis Personæ." 1864.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Other strongly dramatic details complete the picture.[76]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hatred, born of jealousy, has its fullest expression in the "SOLILOQUY OF THE SPANISH CLOISTER" ("Dramatic Lyrics." Published in "Bells and Pomegranates." 1842 to 1845): a venomous outbreak of jealous hatred, directed by one monk against another whom he is watching at some innocent occupation. The speaker has no ground of complaint against Brother Lawrence, except that his life _is_ innocent: that he is orderly and clean, that he loves his garden, is free from debasing superstitions, and keeps his passions, if he has any, in check. But that, precisely, is a rebuke and an exasperation to the fierce, coarse nature of this other man; and he declares to himself, that if hate could kill, Brother Lawrence would not live long. Meanwhile, as we also hear, he spites him when he can, and fondly dreams of tripping him up somewhere, or somehow, on his way to the better world. He is turning over some pithy expedients, when the vesper bell cuts short his meditations.

WRATH, as inspired by a desperate sense of wrong, finds utterance in "THE CONFESSIONAL." ("Dramatic Lyrics." Published in "Bells and Pomegranates." 1842 to 1845.) A loved and loving girl has been made the instrument of her lover's destruction. He held a treasonable secret, which the Church was anxious to possess; and her priest has assured her that if this is fully revealed to him, he will, by prayer and fasting, purge its guilt from the young man's soul. She obtains the desired knowledge, reveals it, and joyfully anticipates the result. When next she sees her lover, he is on the scaffold. They have stifled her denunciations in a prison-cell. Her body is wrenched with torture, as her soul with anguish. She is scarcely human any more. But she hurls at them unceasingly a cry which will yet reach the world. "Their Pope and their saints, their heaven and their hell, their--everything they teach, and everything they say, is lies, and again lies."

"A FORGIVENESS" ("Pacchiarotto, and other Poems," 1876) might serve equally as a study for jealousy, self-reproach, contempt, and revenge; the love which is made to underlie these feelings, and the forgiveness with which it will be crowned.

It is a story told in confession. He who tells it had once a wife, who was dearer to him than anything else in the world. He had also public duties, which he discharged with diligence and with success; but it was the thought of the wife's love which nerved him to the fulfilment of these duties, and which rewarded it.

One day he discovered that she was unfaithful to him. A man (whose face was but imperfectly concealed) was stealing away from his house as he returned to it; and the wife, confronting him at the same moment, bade him kill her, but spare the man she loved. He did not kill her--then: for she had turned his love into contempt. He despised her too much to inflict even a lesser punishment, which should compromise the dignity, or disturb the outward calmness, of his life. But from that moment their union was a form; and while he worked as those do who have something to forget, and she shared the position which his labours procured for him, an impassable, if unseen, gulf lay between them.

Three years had passed, when suddenly, one night, the wife begged to speak with her husband alone. Her request was granted; and then the truth broke forth. She loved--had loved--no one but him; but she was jealous of his devotion to the State. She imagined herself second to it in his affections; and it was the jealousy in her which had made her strive to arouse it in him. That other man had been nothing to her but a tool. Her secret, she now knew, was killing her. Conscience forbade her to elude her punishment by death. She therefore spoke.

"Would she write this?" he asked; and he dictated to her the confession she had just made, in the terms most humiliating to him who was intended to hear it.

"Could she but write it in her blood!" This, too, was possible. He put into her hand a dainty Eastern weapon, one prick of which, he said, would draw so much blood as was required. It did more than this, for it was poisoned. But, before she died, she knew that her explanation had raised her husband's contempt into hatred, and that the revenge of which she was now found worthy had quenched the hatred in forgiveness.

"She lies as erst beloved" (the narrative concludes) "in the church of him who hears this confession; whom his grate conceals as little as that cloak once did--whom vengeance overtakes at last."

The poisoned dagger, which was the instrument of revenge--the pledge of forgiveness--is spoken of as part of a collection preserved in the so-called study, which was the scene of the interview; and the speaker dwells at some length on the impression of deadly purpose combined with loving artistic care, which their varied form and fantastic richness convey. This collection is actually in Mr. Browning's possession; and he values it, perhaps, for the reason he imputes to its imagined owner: that those who are accustomed to the slower processes of thought, like to play with the suggestions of prompt (if murderous) action; as the soldier, tired of wielding the sword, will play with paper and pen.

HISTORICAL POEMS, OR POEMS FOUNDED ON FACT.

Many of Mr. Browning's poems are founded on fact, whether historical, or merely of known occurrence; but few of them can be classed by their historic quality, because it is seldom their most important. In "Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau," for instance, we have a chapter in recent history: but we only read it as an abstract discussion, to which a chapter in history has given rise; and in "Pacchiarotto, and how he worked in Distemper," and "Filippo Baldinucci on the Privilege of Burial" (published in the same volume), we find two incidents, each of them true, and each full of historic significance; but which owe all their vitality to the critical and humorous spirit, in which Mr. Browning has described them. The small list of poems which are historical more than anything else, might be recruited from the Dramatic Idyls; but, for various reasons, this publication must stand alone; and even here, it is often difficult to disengage the actual fact, from the imaginary conditions in which it appears. Our present group is therefore reduced to--

"Red Cott