Part 18 (1/2)

The two series of _Dramatic Idyls_ included some conspicuous successes

The classical poems _Pheidippides_, _Echetlos_, _Pan and Luna_, idyls heroic and ain and again Browning's syallantry in action, with self-devotion to a worthy cause, was never more vividly rendered than in the first of these poeraceful brother of the Breton sailor who saved a fleet for France; but the vision of majestical Pan in ”the cool of a cleft” exalts our human heroism into relation with the divine benevolence, and the reward of release froher than a holiday with the ”belle Aurore” Victory and then domestic love is the huifts of the Gods are better than our hopes and it proves to be victory and death:

He flung down his shi+eld, Ran like fire once more: and the space 'twixt the Fennel-field And Athens was stubble again, a field which a fire runs through, Till in he broke: ”Rejoice, we conquer!” Like wine through clay, Joy in his blood bursting his heart, he died--the bliss!

The companion poem of Marathon, the story of the nahshare, is not less inspiring The unknown chanitude of mind, so brilliant as he flashes in the van, in the rear, is like the incarnated genius of the soil, which hides itself in the furrow and flashes into the harvest; and it is his glory to be obscured for ever by his deed--”the great deed ne'er grows silian num est”--of Pan and Luna astonishes by its vehement sensuousness and its frank chastity; and while the beauty of the Girl-moon and the terror of her betrayal are realised with the utination, we are made to feel that all which happens is the transaction of a significant dreaend

In contrast with these classical pieces, _Halbert and Hob_ reads like a frag of the life of forlorn and monstrous creatures, cave-dwellers, who are less men than beasts Yet father and son are indeed ainst paternity is the touch of the finger of God upon huh old Halbert sits dead,

With an outburst blackening still the old bad fighting face,

and young Hob henceforth goes tottering,with a 's ue, only ”apparent failures”; there was in them that spark of divine illuuished Positive misdeeds, the presence of a wild crew of evil passions, do not suffice to 's faith or hope falter It is the absence of human virtue which appals him; if the salt have lost its savour ith shall it be salted? This it is which condemns to a swift, and what the poem represents as a just, abolishiven her children to the wolves, and has thereby proved the complete nullity of her womanhood For her there is no possible rederound Ivan acts merely as the instinctive dooe Pope, who, as the veil of life grows thin, is feeling after the law above human law, justifies the wielder of the axe, which has been no instrueance but simply an exponent of the wholesome vitality of earth The objection that carpenters and joiners, who assu the earth of o a period of confinement at the pleasure of the Czar in a Crihly sensible, and wholly inappropriate, belonging, as it does, to a plane of thought and feeling other than that in which the poe to fail in admiration of that admired final tableau in which the for a toy Kreranted that the excellent ho done so si a fellow-creature, proceeds tranquilly to other innocent pleasures and duties; we do not require the ostentatious theatrical group, with liht effects on the Kremlin and the honey-coloured beard, displayed for our benefit just before the curtain is rung down[142]

[Illustration: SPECIMEN OF BROWNING'S HANDWRITING

_From a letter to DS CURTIS, Esq_]

_Martin Relph_ is a story of life-long remorse, self-conde the supernatural, and yet terribly real, in the figure of the strange old ht May day, inhis ulcerated heart to the spectators who form for him a kind of posterity One instant's failure in the probation of life, one o, has conde of the purgatorial ony of pain annually renewed at the season when the earth rejoices Only a high-strung delicate spirit is capable of such a perennial passion of penitence _Ned Bratts_ may be described as a companion, but a contrasted piece It is a story of sudden conversion and of penitence taking an ihly effective form The humour of the poem, which is excellent of its kind, researth The Bedford Court House on the sweltering Midsu of piety and the cow-house conventicle, the Judges at high jinks upon the bench--to whom, all in a muck-sweat and ablaze with the fervour of conversion, enter Black Ned, the stout publican, and big Tab, his slut of a wife,--these are drawn after the broad British style of hueration of the characteristic lines with, at tiht belief in the invisible, here is genuine conviction driven home by the Spirit of God and the terror of hell-fire Black Ned and the slut Tabby as yet may not seem the most suitable additions to the co

In solemn troops and sweet societies;

but when a pair of lusty sinners desire nothing so ed, and that forthwith, we may take it that they are resolved, as ”Christmas” was, to quit the City of Destruction; and the saints above have learnt not to be fastidious as they bend over repentant rogues

Thanks to the grace of God and John Bunyan's book, husband and wife triuallows; ”they were lovely and pleasant in their lives, and in their death they were not divided” A wise econo cannot be gainsaid, the final perseverance of these interesting converts, had they lingered on the pilgriht have been less of a certainty

Browning's e in _Clive_ The circuht at by the reader, which quickens his attention and keeps him on the alert; this device is, of course, not in itself difficult, but to e skill; it is a device proper to the dramatic or quasi-dramatic form; the speaker, who is by noof his own character, and at the same time to set forth the character of the hero of his tale; the narrative must tend to a moment of culmination, a crisis; and that this should involve a paradox--Clive's fear, in the present instance, being not that the antagonist's pistol, presented at his head, should be discharged but rather that it should be reives the poet an opportunity for some subtle or some passionate casuistry The effect of the whole is that of a stream or a shock from an electric battery of mind, for which the story serves as a conductor It is not a sihly complex species of narrative In _Muleykeh_, one of the , as it does, the poetry of the rapture of swift h-hearted passion, the narrative leads up to a supreh a paradox of the heart Shall Hoseyn recover his stolen Pearl of a steed, but recover her dishonoured in the race, or abandon her to the captor with her glory untarnished? It is he hirief, for to perfect love, pride in the supremacy of the beloved is e, as Ivan's violation of laas obedience to law, so Hoseyn's loss is Hoseyn's gain In each case Browning's casuistry is not argumentative; it lies in an appeal to some passion or some intuition that is above our coht, and his power of uplifting his reader for even a ift as a poet

We can return safely enough to the coround, but we return with a possession which instructs the heart

A mood of acquiescence, which does not displace the moods of aspiration and of corowing faht for truth, and had now found all that earth was likely to yield him, of which not the least important part was a conviction that norance He was now disposed to accept what seemed to be the providential order that truth and error should le in our earthly life, that truth should be served by illusion; he would not rearrange the disposition of things if he could

He was inclined to hold by the simple certainties of our present life and to be content with these as provisional truths, or as temporary illusions which lead on towards the truth In the _Pisgah Sights_ of the _Pacchiarotto_ volu to the hour of death But old age in reality is an earlier stage in the process of dying, and with all his ardour and his energy, Browning was being detached from the contentions and from some of the hopes and aspirations of life And because he was detached he could take the world to his heart, though in a different tee; he could lis that are near, because their claim upon his passions had diminished while their claim upon his tenderness had increased He could smile amiably, for to the mood of acquiescence a suhts of love, and reaniination, and could love love with the devotion of an old s that have been Some of an old man's jests inative passion in _Asolando_, and in both volumes, and still more clearly in _Ferishtah's Fancies_ may be seen an old man's spirit of acquiescence, or to use a catch-word of Matthew Arnold, the epoch of concentration which follows an epoch of expansion But the es of earth is like the embrace, with a pathos in its ardour, which precedes a farewell Froer on the one hand of settling down to browse contentedly in the paddock of our earthly life, and on the other hand the danger of ignoring our li to ”thrust in earth eternity's concerns” In his earlier years he had chiefly feared the first of these two dangers, and even while pointing out, as in _Paracelsus_, the errors of the seeker for absolute knowledge or for absolute love, he had felt a certain syressors He had valued rasps of guess, which pull the uesses, such hopes were as precious to him as ever, but he set more store than formerly by the certainties--certainties even if illusions--of the general heart ofdivinely imposed upon us; we cannot do better than to accept them; but we must accept them only as provisional, as part of our education on earth, as a needful rung of the ladder by which we s And the faith which leads to such acquiescence also results in the acceptance of hopes as things not be struggled for but rested in as a substantial portion of the divine order of our lives In autuhtly attuned these pellucid halcyon days of the Indian su's seventy-first year (1883), he shows nothing of his boisterous huhts of experience The prop of Israel, the htened master, ”Eximious Jochanan Ben Sabbathai,” when his last hour is at hand has to confess that all his wisdom of life lies in his theoric; in practice he is still an infant; striving presuel, now that he comes to die he is hardly a man And Solo extorts the confession that an itch of vanity still tickles and teazes him; the Queen of Sheba, seeker for wisdom and patroness of culture, after all likes wisdo men tall and proper, and prefers to the solution of the riddles of life by elderly monarchs one ses that her dignified reserve was the cloak of passion, and Eve acknowledges that her profession of love was transferred to the wrong man; both ladies recover their self-possession and resuentleh what is transparent These are harifts in this volume, that looks pale beside its predecessors, are one or two short lyrics of love, which continue the series of his latest lyrical poeraceful epilogue to _The Two Poets of Croisic_, and continued in the songs of _Ferishtah's Fancies_ and _Asolando_--not the least valuable part of the work of his elder years His strength in this voluainst immoral conceptions of the Deity uttered by Ixion from his wheel of torture Rather than obey an immoral supreo”--and such is the cry of Browning's victihteousness he is himself superior to the evil God who afflicts hihteousness is a moral quality, and no creation of his own consciousness but rather imposed upon it as an eternal law, he rises past Zeus to the Potency above him, after which even the undeveloped sense of a Caliban blindly felt when he discovered a Quiet above the bitter God Setebos; but the Quiet of Caliban is a negation of those evil attributes of the supreross heart, not the energy of righteousness which Ixion demands in his transcendent ”Potency” Into this poeination; some of his matured wisdom entered into _Jochanan Hakkadosh_, of which, however, the contents are insufficient to sustain the length The saint and sage of Israel has at the close of his life found no solution of the riddle of existence Lover, bard, soldier, statist, he has obtained in each of his careers only doubts and dissatisfaction Twelve enerosity of his ad him no clearer illumination--still all is vanity and vexation of spirit Only at the last, when by so the past and anticipating the future is granted hi to solve the riddle he accepts it He sees froah how life, with all its confusions and contrarieties, is the school which educates the soul and fits it for further wayfaring The ultimate faith of Jochanan the Saint had been already expressed by Browning:

Over the ball of it, Peering and prying, How I see all of it, Life there, outlying!

Roughness and smoothness, shi+ne and defilement, Grace and uncouthness: One reconcilee is unable so to impart the secret that Tsaddik's mind shall really embrace it

The spirit of the saint of Israel is also the spirit of that wise Dervish of Browning's invention (1884), the Persian Ferishtah The volu, as becomes a master ould make his lessons easy to children, teaches by parables and pictures In reading _Ferishtah's Fancies_ we ht suppose that ere in the Interpreter's House, and that the Interpreter hi a moral with the robin that has a spider in hisin a fourfold method towards her chickens The discourses of the Dervish are in the ical or philosophical; the lyrics, which are interposed between the discourses or discussions, are aht be taken for aical sense Browning reverses the order of such poetry; he gives us first his doctrine concerning life or God, and gives it clothed in a parable; then in a lyric the subject is retracted into the sphere of huy condenses itself into a corresponding truth respecting the love of hout the series of poems it is not a Persian Dervish who is the speaker and teacher; we hear the authentic voice of the Dervish born in Ca The doctrine set forth is the doctrine of Browning; the manner of speech is the ery are often Oriental; the ideas are those of a Western thinker; yet no sense of discordance is produced The parable of the starving ravens fed by an eagle serves happily as an induction; let us become not waiters on providence, but workers with providence; and to feed hungry souls is even ry bodies:

I starve in soul: So ate In towns, not woods--to Ispahan forthwith!

Such is the lesson of energetic charity And the lesson for the acceptance of providential gifts is that put in words by the poor melon-seller, once the Shah's Prime Minister--words spoken in the spirit of the afflicted Job--”Shall we receive good at the hand of God and shall we not receive evil?”[143] Or rather--Shall not our hearts even in the ratitude at the re proceeds, under a transparent veil of Oriental fable, to consider the story of the life of Christ Do we believe in that tale of wonder in the full sense of the word belief?