An Introduction to the Study of Browning Part 15

1-177).]

_Red Cotton Night-Cap Country_ is a story of real life, true in all its facts, and studied at the place where it had occurred a few years before: St. Aubin, in Normandy (the St. Rambert of the poem). It is the story of the life of Antoine Mellerio, the Paris jeweller, whose tragic death occurred at St. Aubin on the 13th April 1870. A suit concerning his will, decided only in the summer of 1872, supplied Browning with the materials of his tragedy. In the first proof of the poem the real names of persons and places were given; but they were changed before publication, and are now in every case fict.i.tious. The second edition of Mrs. Orr's _Handbook_ contains a list of the real names, which I subjoin.[49]

The book is dedicated to Miss Thackeray (Mrs. Richmond Ritchie), and the whole story is supposed to be told to her (as in substance it was) by Browning, who has thus given to the poem a tone of pleasant colloquialism. Told as it is, it becomes in part a dramatic monologue of which the _dramatis persona_ is Robert Browning. It is full of quiet, sometimes grim, humour; of picturesque and witty touches; of pungency and irony. Its manner, the humorous telling of a tragic tale, is a little after the pattern of Carlyle. In such a setting the tragic episodes, sometimes all but heroic, sometimes almost grotesque, have all the impressiveness of contrast.

The story itself, in the main, is a sordid enough tragedy: like several of Browning's later books, it is a study in evil. The two characters who fill the stage of this little history are tragic comedians; they, too, are "real creatures, exquisitely fantastical, strangely exposed to the world by a lurid catastrophe, who teach us that fiction, if it can imagine events and persons more agreeable to the taste it has educated, can read us no such furrowing lesson in life." The character of Miranda, the sinner who would reconcile sin with salvation, is drawn with special subtlety; a.n.a.lysed, dissected rather, with the unerring scalpel of the experienced operator. Miranda is swayed through life by two opposing tendencies, for he is of mixed Castilian and French blood. He is mastered at once by two pa.s.sions, earthly and religious, illicit love and Catholic devotion: he cannot let go the one and he will not let go the other; he would enjoy himself on the "Turf" without abandoning the shelter of the "Towers." His life is spent in trying to effect a compromise between the two antagonistic powers which finally pull down his house of life. Clara, his mistress-wife, is a mirror of himself; she humours him, manages him, perhaps on his own lines of inclination.

"'But--loved him?' Friend, I do not praise her love!

True love works never for the loved one so, Nor spares skin-surface, smoothening truth away, Love bids touch truth, endure truth, and embrace Truth, though, embracing truth, love crush itself.

'Wors.h.i.+p not me, but G.o.d!' the angels urge!"

This man and woman are a.n.a.lysed with exquisite skill; but they are not in the strict sense inventions, creations: we understand rather than see them. Only towards the end, where the facts leave freer play for the poetic impulse, do they rise into sharp vividness of dramatic life and speech. Nothing in the poem equals in intensity the great soliloquy of Miranda before his strange and suicidal leap, and the speech of Clara to the "Cousinry." Here we pa.s.s at a bound from chronicling to creation. As a narrative, _Red Cotton Night-Cap Country_ has all the interest of a novel, with the concentration and higher pitch of poetry. Less ingenious and philosophical than _Prince Hohenstiel-Schw.a.n.gau_ and _Fifine at the Fair_, it is far more intimately human, more closely concerned with "man's thoughts and loves and hates," with the manifestations of his eager and uneasy spirit, in strange shapes, on miry roads, in dubious twilights. Of all Browning's works it is perhaps the easiest to read; no tale could be more straightforward, no language more lucid, no verse more free from harshness or irregularity, The versification, indeed, is exceptionally smooth and measured, seldom rising into strong pa.s.sion, but never running into volubility. Here and there are short pa.s.sages, which I can scarcely detach for quotation, with a singular charm of vague remote music. The final summary of Clara and Miranda, excellent and convenient alike, may be severed without much damage from the context.

"Clara, I hold the happier specimen,-- It may be, through that artist-preference For work complete, inferiorly proposed, To incompletion, though it aim aright.

Morally, no! Aspire, break bounds! I say, Endeavour to be good, and better still, And best! Success is nought, endeavour's all.

But intellect adjusts the means to ends, Tries the low thing, and leaves it done, at least; No prejudice to high thing, intellect Would do and will do, only give the means.

Miranda, in my picture-gallery, Presents a Blake; be Clara--Meissonnier!

Merely considered so, by artist, mind!

For, break through Art and rise to poetry, Bring Art to tremble nearer, touch enough The verge of vastness to inform our soul What orb makes transit through the dark above, And there's the triumph!--there the incomplete, More than completion, matches the immense,-- Then, Michelagnolo against the world!"

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 49: Page 2. _The Firm Miranda_--Mellerio Brothers. Page 4.

_St. Rambert_--St Aubin; _Joyeux, Joyous Gard_--Lion, Lionesse. Page 6.

_Vire_--Caen. Page 25. _St. Rambertese_--St. Aubinese. Page 29.

_Londres_--Douvres; _London_--Dover; _La Roche_--Courcelle; _Monlieu_--Bernieres; _Villeneuve_--Langrune; _Pons_--Luc; _La Ravissante_--La Delivrande. Page 33. _Raimbaux_--Bayeux. Page 34.

_Morillon_--Hugonin; _Mirecourt_--Bonnechose; _Miranda_--Mellerio. Page 35. _New York_--Madrid. Page 41. _Clairvaux_--Tailleville. Page 42.

_Madrilene_--Turinese. Page 43. _Gonthier_--Beny; _Rousseau_--Voltaire; _Leonce_--Antoine. Page 52. _Of "Firm Miranda, London and New York"_--"Mellerio Brothers"--Meller, people say. Page 79. _Rare Vissante_--Del Yvrande; _Aldabert_--Regn.o.bert. Page 80.

_Eldobert_--Ragnebert; _Mailleville_--Beaudoin. Page 81.

_Chaumont_--Quelen; _Vertgalant_--Talleyrand. Page 89.

_Ravissantish_--Delivrandish. Page 101. _Clara de Millefleurs_--Anna de Beaupre; _Coliseum Street_--Miromesnil Street. Page 110.

_Steiner_--Mayer; _Commercy_--Larocy; _Sierck_--Metz. Page 111.

_Muhlhausen_--Debacker. Page 112, _Carlino Centofanti_--Miranda di Mongino. Page 121. _Portugal_--Italy. Page 125. "_Gustave_"--"Alfred."

Page 135. _Vaillant_--Meriel. Page 149. _Thirty-three_--Twenty-five.

152. _Beaumont_--Pasquier. Page 167. _Sceaux_--Garges. Page 203. _Luc de la Maison Rouge_--Jean de la Becquetiere; _Claise_--Vire; _Maude_--Anne.

Page 204. _Dionysius_--Eliezer; _Scolastica_--Elizabeth. Page 214.

_Twentieth_--Thirteenth. Page 241. _Fricquot_--"Picot."--Mrs. Orr's _Handbook_, Second Edition, pp. 261-2.]

22. ARISTOPHANES' APOLOGY: including a Transcript from Euripides; being the Last Adventure of Balaustion.

[Published in April, 1875. (_Poetical Works_, 1889, Vol.

XIII. pp. 1-258).]

_Aristophanes' Apology_, as its sub-t.i.tle indicates, is a kind of sequel to _Balaustion's Adventure_. It is the record, in Balaustion's words, of an adventure which happened to her after her marriage with Euthukles. On the day when the news of Euripides' death reached Athens, as Balaustion and her husband were sitting at home, toward nightfall, Aristophanes, coming home with his revellers from the banquet which followed his triumph in the play of _Thesmophoriazousai_, burst in upon them.

"There stood in person Aristophanes.

And no ign.o.ble presence! On the bulge Of the clear baldness,--all his head one brow,-- True, the veins swelled, blue net-work, and there surged A red from cheek to temple, then retired As if the dark-leaved chaplet damped a flame,-- Was never nursed by temperance or health.

But huge the eyeb.a.l.l.s rolled black native fire, Imperiously triumphant: nostrils wide Waited their incense; while the pursed mouth's pout Aggressive, while the beak supreme above, While the head, face, nay, pillared throat thrown back, Beard whitening under like a vinous foam, These made a glory, of such insolence-- I thought,--such domineering deity Hephaistos might have carved to cut the brine For his gay brother's prow, imbrue that path Which, purpling, recognized the conqueror.

Impudent and majestic: drunk, perhaps, But that's religion; sense too plainly snuffed: Still, sensuality was grown a rite."

He, too, has just heard of Euripides' death, and an impulse, part sympathy, part mockery, has brought him to the "house friendly to Euripides." The revellers retire abashed before Balaustion; he alone remains. From the extraordinary and only too natural gabble and garbage of his opening words, he quickly pa.s.ses to a more or less serious explanation and defence of his conduct toward the dead poet; to an exposition, in fact, of his aims and doings as a writer of comedy. When his "apology" is ended, Balaustion replies, censuring him pretty severely, making adroit use of the licence of a "stranger" and a woman, and defending Euripides against him. For a further (and the best) defence, she reads the whole of the _Herakles_, which Browning here translates. Aristophanes, naturally, is not convinced; impressed he must have been, to have borne so long a reading without demur: he flings them a s.n.a.t.c.h of song, finding in his impromptu a hint for a new play, the _Frogs_, and is gone. And now, a year after, as the couple return to Rhodes from a disgraced and dismantled Athens, Balaustion dictates to Euthukles her recollection of the "adventure," for the double purpose of putting the past events on record, and of eluding the urgency of the present sorrow.

It will thus be seen that the book consists of two distinct parts. There is, first, the apology of Aristophanes, second, the translation of the play of Euripides. _Herakles_, or, as it is more generally known, _Hercules Furens_, is rendered completely and consecutively, in blank verse and varied choric measures. It is not, as was the case with _Alkestis_ worked into the body of the poem; not welded, but inserted.

We have thus, while losing the commentary, the advantage of a detached transcript, with a lyrical rendering of the lyrical parts of the play.

These are given with a constant vigour and closeness, often with a rare beauty (as in the famous "Ode bewailing Age," and that other on the labours of Herakles). Precisely the same characteristics that we have found in the translation of the _Alkestis_ are here again to be found, and all that I said on the former, considered apart from its setting, may be applied to the latter. We have the same literalness (again with a few apparent exceptions), the same insistence on the root-meaning of words, the same graphic force and vivifying touch, the same general clearness and charm.

The original part of the book is of far closer texture and more remarkable order than "the amber which embalms _Alkestis_" the first adventure of Balaustion; but it has less human emotion, less general appeal. It is nothing less than a resuscitation of the old controversy between Aristophanes and Euripides; a resuscitation, not only of the controversy, but of the combatants. "Local colour" is laid on with an unsparing hand, though it cannot be said that the atmosphere is really Greek. There is hardly a line, there is never a page, without an allusion to some recondite thing: Athenian customs, Greek names, the plays of Euripides, above all, the plays of Aristophanes. "Every line of the poem," it has been truly said, "shows Mr. Browning as soaked and steeped in the comedies as was Bunyan in his Bible." The result is a vast, shapeless thing, splendidly and grotesquely alive, but alive with the obscure and tangled life of the jungle.

Browning's att.i.tude towards the controversy, the side he takes as champion of Euripides, is distinctly shown, not merely in Balaustion's statement and defence, but in the whole conduct of the piece.

Aristophanes, though on his own defence, is set in a decidedly unfavourable light; and no one, judging from Browning's work, can doubt as to his opinion of the relative qualities of the two great poets. It is possible even to say there is a partiality in the presentment. But it must be remembered on the other hand that Browning is not concerned simply with the question of art, but with the whole bearings, artistic and ethical, of the contest; and it must be remembered that the aim of Comedy is intrinsically lower and more limited than that of Tragedy, that it is destructive, disintegrating, negative, concerned with smaller issues and more temporary questions; and that Euripides may reasonably be held a better teacher, a keener, above all a more helpful, reader of the riddle of life, than his mighty a.s.sailant. This is how Aristophanes has been described, by one who should know:--

"He is an aggregate of many men, all of a certain greatness.

We may build up a conception of his powers if we mount Rabelais upon Hudibras, lift him with the songfulness of Sh.e.l.ley, give him a vein of Heinrich Heine, and cover him with the mantle of the Anti-Jacobin, adding (that there may be some Irish in him) a dash of Grattan, before he is in motion."[50]

Now the "t.i.tanic pamphleteer" is more recognisable in Browning's most vivid portrait than the "lyric poet of aerial delicacy" who in some strange fas.h.i.+on, beyond his own wildest metamorphoses, distracted and idealised the otherwise congruous figure. Not that this is overlooked or forgotten: it is brought out admirably in several places, notably in the fine song put into the mouth of Aristophanes at the close; but it is scarcely so prominent as lovers of him could desire. It is possible, too, that Browning somewhat over-accentuates his earnestness; not his fundamental earnestness, but the extent to which he remembered and exhibited it. "My soul bade fight": yes, but "laugh," too, and laugh for laughter's as well as fight for principle's sake. This, again, is merely a matter of detail, of shading. There can be little doubt that the whole general outline of the man is right, none whatever that it is a living and breathing outline. His apology is presented in Browning's familiar manner of genuine feeling tempered with sophistry. As a piece of dramatic art it is worthy to stand beside his famous earlier apologies; and it has value too as a contribution to criticism, to a vital knowledge of the Attic drama and the work and personality of Aristophanes and Euripides, and to a better understanding of the drama as a criticism of life.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 50: George Meredith, _On the Idea of Comedy_.]

23. THE INN ALb.u.m.

[Published in November, 1875. (_Poetical Works_, 1889, Vol XII. pp. 179-311.) Translated into German in 1877: "_Das Fremdenbuch_ von Robert Browning. Aus dem Englischen von E.

Leo. Hamburg: W. Mauke Sohne."]

The story of _The Inn Alb.u.m_ is founded on fact, though it is not, like _Red Cotton Night-Cap Country_, an almost literal transcript from life.

The characters of the poem are four, all unnamed: a young "polished sn.o.b," an impoverished middle-aged n.o.bleman, a woman, whom he had seduced, and who is now married to a clergyman; and a young girl, her friend, who is betrothed to the younger of the two men. Of these characters, the only one whom Browning has invented is the girl, through whom, in his telling of the story, the tragedy is brought about. But he has softened the repulsiveness of the original tale, and has also brought it to a ringing close, not supplied by the bare facts. The career of the elder man, which came to an end in 1839, did not by any means terminate with the events recorded in the poem.

_The Inn Alb.u.m_ is a story of wrecked lives, lost hopes, of sordid and gloomy villainies; with only light enough in its darkness to make that darkness visible. It is profoundly sad; yet

"These things are life: And life, they say, is worthy of the Muse."

It would also be profoundly depressing but for the art which has wrung a grandeur out of grime, which has uplifted a story of mere vulgar evil to the height of tragedy. Out of materials that might be melodramatic, Browning has created a drama of humanity of which the impression is single, intense and overpowering. Notwithstanding the clash of physical catastrophe at the close, it is really a spiritual tragedy; and in it Browning has achieved that highest of achievements: the right, vivid and convincing presentment of human nature at its highest and lowest, at its extremes of possible action and emotion. It is not perfect: the colloquialism which truth and art alike demand sinks sometimes, though not in the great scenes, to the confines of a b.a.s.t.a.r.d realism. But in the main the poem is an excellent example of the higher imaginative realism, of the close, yet poetic or creative, treatment of life.

The four characters who play out the brief and fateful action of this drama in narrative (the poem is more nearly related in form to the pure drama than any other of Browning's poems not cast in the dramatic form) are creations, three of them at least, in a deeper sense than the characters in _Red Cotton Night-Cap Country_, or than the character in _Prince Hohenstiel-Schw.a.n.gau_. The "good gay girl," serving her unconscious purpose in the tragic action, is properly enough a mere sketch; but the two men and the elder woman are profoundly studied characters, struck into life and revealed to themselves, to one another and to us, at the supreme moment of a complex crisis. The elder man is one of Browning's most finished studies, and, morally, one of the worst characters even he has ever investigated. He is at once bad, clever and cynical, the combination, of all others, most noxious and most hopeless.

He prides himself above all things on his intellect; and it is evident that he has had the power to shape his course and to sway others. But now, at fifty, he knows himself to be a failure. The cause of it he traces mainly to a certain crisis of his life, when he won, only to abuse, the affections of a splendidly beautiful woman, whose equal splendour of soul he saw only when too late. It is significant of him that he never views his conduct as a crime, a wrong to the woman, but as a mistake on his part; and his att.i.tude is not that of remorse, but of one who has missed a chance. When, after four years, he meets unexpectedly the woman whom he has wronged and lost, the good and evil in him blaze out in a sudden and single flame of earnest appeal. In the fact that this pa.s.sionate appeal should be only half-sincere, or, if sincere, then only for the moment, that to her who hears it, it should seem wholly insincere, lies the intensity of the situation.

The character of the woman is less complex but not less consistent and convincing. Like the man, her development has been arrested and distorted by the cause which has made him too a wreck. Her love was single-hearted and over-mastering; its very force, in recoil, turned it into hate. Yoked to a soulless husband, whom she has married half in pity, half in despair, her whole nature has frozen; so that when we see her she is, while physically the same, spiritually the ghost of her former self. The subtlety of the picture is to show what she is now while making equally plain what she was in the past. She is a figure not so much pathetic as terrible.

Pathetic, despite its outer comedy, is the figure of the young man, the great rough, foolish, rich youth, tutored in evil by his Mephistopheles, but only, we fancy, skin-deep in it, slow of thought but quick of feeling, with his one and only love, never forgotten, and now found again in the very woman whom his "friend" has wronged. His last speech, with its clumsy yet genuine chivalry, its touching, broken words, its fine feeling and faltering expression, is one of the most pathetic things I know. Such a character, in its very absence of subtlety, is a triumph of Browning's, to whom intellectual simplicity must be the hardest of all dramatic a.s.sumptions.

24. PACCHIAROTTO, and how he worked in Distemper: with other poems.

[Published in July, 1876 (_Poetical Works_, 1889, Vol. XIV.

pp. 1-152).]