Chapter 28

The lyrical supplement to Fancy 12 somewhat obscures the idea on which it turns, by presenting it from a different point of view. But here, as in the remainder of the book, we must regard the Lyric as suggested by the argument, not necessarily as part of it.

The EPILOGUE is a vision of present and future, in which the woe and conflict of our mortal existence are absorbed in the widening glory of an eternal day. The vision comes to one cradled in the happiness of love; and he is startled from it by a presentiment that it has been an illusion created by his happiness. But we know that from Mr. Browning's point of view, Love, even in its illusions, may be accepted as a messenger of truth.

Index to names and titles in "Ferishtah's Fancies;"--

P. 12. "Shah Abbas." An historical personage used fictitiously.

P. 15. "Story of Tahmasp." Fictitious.

P. 16. "Ishak son of Absal." Fictitious.

P. 20. "The householder of Shiraz." Fictitious.

P. 32. "Mihrab Shah." Fictitious.

P. 36. "Simorgh." A fabulous creature in Persian mythology.

P. 40. The "Pilgrim's soldier-guide." Fictitious.

P. 41. "Raksh." Rustum's horse in the "Shah Nemeh." (Firdausi's "Epic of Kings.")

P. 50. (_Anglicé_), "Does Job serve God for nought?" Hebrew word at p. 51, line 2, "M[=e] El[=o]h[=i]m": "from God."

P. 54. "Mushtari." The planet Jupiter.

P. 65. "Hudhud." Fabulous bird of Solomon.

P. 68. "Sitara." Persian for "a star."

P. 85. "Shalim Shah." Persian for "King of kings."

P. 86. "Rustem," "Gew," "Gudarz," "Sindokht," "Sulayman," "Kawah." Heroes in the "Shah Nemeh."

P. 87. The "Seven Thrones." Ursa Major. "Zurah." Venus. "Parwin." The Pleiades. "Mubid." A kind of mage.

P. 88. "Zerdusht." "Zoroaster."

"PARLEYINGS WITH CERTAIN PEOPLE OF IMPORTANCE IN THEIR DAY."

This volume occupies, even more than its predecessor, a distinctive position in Mr. Browning's work. It does not discard his old dramatic methods, but in a manner it inverts them; Mr. Browning has summoned his group of men not for the sake of drawing their portraits, but that they might help him to draw his own. It seems as if the accumulated convictions which find vent in the "parleyings" could no longer endure even the form of dramatic disguise; and they appear in them in all the force of direct reiterated statement, and all the freshness of novel points of view. And the portrait is in some degree a biography; it is full of reminiscences. The "people" with whom Mr. Browning parleys, important in their day, virtually unknown in ours, are with one exception his old familiar friends: men whose works connect themselves with the intellectual sympathies and the imaginative pleasures of his very earliest youth. The parleyings are:

I. "With Bernard de Mandeville." II. "With Daniel Bartoli." III. "With Christopher Smart." IV. "With George Bubb Dodington." V. "With Francis Furini." VI. "With Gerard de Lairesse." VII. "With Charles Avison."

They are enclosed between a Prologue and an Epilogue both dramatic and fanciful, but scarcely less expressive of the author's mental personality than the body of the work.

"Apollo and the Fates." "Fust and his Friends."

In "Apollo and the Fates" the fanciful, or rather fantastic element preponderates. It represents Apollo as descending into the realms of darkness and pleading with the Fate Sisters for the life of Admetus, the thread of which Atropos is about to clip; and shows how he obtained for him a conditional reprieve by intoxicating the sisters with wine. The sequel to this incident has been given in Mr. Browning's transcript from "Alkestis"; and the present poem is introduced by references to that work of Euripides, to the "Eumenides" of Æschylus and to Homer's "Hymn to Mercury": the general sense of the passages indicated being this:--

Euripides.--"Admetus--whom, cheating the fates, I saved from death."

Æschylus (to Apollo).--"Aye, such were your feats in the house of Pheres, where you persuaded the fates to make a mortal immortal: you it was destroyed the ancient arrangement and deceived the goddesses with wine."

Homer.--"The Fates are three virgin sisters,--winged and white-haired,--dwelling below Parnassus: they feed on honey, and so get drunk, and readily tell the truth. If deprived of it they delude."

Mr. Browning, however, varies the legend, first by making the Fates find truth in the fumes of wine; and, secondly, by assuming that they never knew an inspiring drunkenness until they tasted it: profoundly intoxicating as their (fermented) honey must have been.

Apollo urges his request that Admetus, now threatened with premature death, may live out the appointed seventy years. The Fates retort on him by exclamations on the worthlessness of such a boon. They enumerate the follies and miseries which beset the successive stages of man's earthly career, and maintain that its only brightness lies in the delusive sunshine, the glamour of hope, with which he (Apollo) gilds it. Apollo owns that human happiness may rest upon illusion, but undertakes to show that man holds the magic within himself; and to that end persuades the sisters to drain a bowl of wine which he has brought with him. In the moment's intoxication the scales fall from their eyes, and they see that life is good. They see that if its earlier course means conflict, old age is its recorded victory. They see it enriched by the joys which are only remembered as by the good which only might have been. They praise the Actual and still more the Potential--the infinite possibilities to which Man is born and which imagination alone can anticipate; and joining hands with Apollo in a delirious dance, proclaim the discovery of the lost secret: _Fancy compounded with Fact._

This philosophy is, however, ill-suited to the dark ministers of fate; and an oracular explosion from the earth's depths startles them back into sobriety; in which condition they repudiate the new knowledge which has been born of them, flinging it back on their accomplice with various expressions of disgust. They admit, nevertheless, that the web of human destiny often defeats their spinning; its intended good and evil change places with each other; the true significance of life is only revealed by death; and though they still refuse to yield to Apollo's demand, they compromise with it: Admetus shall live, if someone else will voluntarily die for him. It is true they neutralize their concession by deriding the idea of such a devoted person being found; and Apollo also shows himself a stranger to the decrees of the higher powers by making wrong guesses as to the event; but the whole episode is conceived in a humorous and very human spirit which especially reveals itself in the attitude of the contending parties towards each other. The Fates display throughout a proper contempt for what they regard as the showy but unsubstantial personality of the young god; and the natural antagonism of light and darkness, hope and despair, is as amusingly parodied in the mock deference and ill-disguised aversion with which he approaches them. Apollo finally vindicates Mr. Browning's optimistic theism by claiming the gifts of Bacchus, youngest of the gods, for the beneficent purpose and anterior wisdom of Zeus.

The one serious idea which runs through the poem is conveyed in its tribute to the power of wine: in other words, to the value of imagination as supplement to and interpreter of fact. Its partial, tentative, and yet efficient illumining of the dark places of life is vividly illustrated by Apollo: and he only changes his imagery when he speaks of Reason as doing the same work. It is the imaginative, not the scientific "reason" which Mr. Browning invokes as help in the perplexities of experience;[122] as it is the spiritual, and not scientific "experience" on which, in the subsequent discussions, he will so emphatically take his stand.[123]

In the first "parleying" Mr. Browning invokes the wisdom of BERNARD DE MANDEVILLE on certain problems of life: mainly those of the existence of evil and the limitations of human knowledge; and the optimistic views in which he believes Dr. Mandeville to concur with him are brought to bear on the more gloomy philosophy of Carlyle, some well-known utterances of whom are brought forward for confutation. The chief points of the argument are as follows:--

Carlyle complains that God never intervenes to check the tyranny of evil, so that it not only prevails in the present life, but for any sure indications which exist to the contrary may still do so in the life to come. It would be something, he thinks, if even triumphant wrong were checked, although (here we must read between the lines) this would be tantamount to the condoning of evil in all its less developed forms; better still if he who has the power to do so habitually crushed it at the birth.

Mr. Browning (alias Mandeville) replies by the parable of a garden in which beneficent and noxious plants grow side by side. "You must either," he declares, "admit--which you do not--that both good and evil were chance sown, or refer their joint presence to some necessary or pre-ordained connection between them. In the latter case you may use your judgment in pruning away the too great exuberance of the noxious plant, but if you destroy it once for all, you have frustrated the intentions of him who placed it there."

Carlyle reminds his opponent of that other parable, according to which it was an enemy who surreptitiously sowed the tares of evil, and these grow because no one can pull them out. Divine power and foresight are, in his opinion, incompatible with either theory, and both of these mistaken efforts on man's part to "cram" the infinite within the limits of his own mind and understand what passes understanding. He deprecates the folly of linking divine and human together on the strength of the short space which they may tread side by side, and the anthropomorphic spirit which subjects the one to the other by presenting the illimitable in human form.

Mr. Browning defends his position by an illustration of the use (as also abuse) of symbols spiritual and material; Carlyle retorts somewhat impatiently that in thinking of God we have no need of symbolism; we know Him as Immensity, Eternity, and other abstract qualities, and to fancy Him under human attributes is superfluous; and Mr. Browning dismisses this theology, with the intellectual curiosities and intellectual discontents which he knows in the present case to have accompanied it, in a modification of the Promethean myth--such a one as the more "human" Euripides might have imagined. "When the sun's light first broke upon the earth, and everywhere in and on this there was life, man was the only creature which did not rejoice: for he said, I alone am incomplete in my completeness; I am subject to a power which I alone have the intellect to recognize, hence the desire to grasp. I do not aspire to penetrate the hidden essence, the underlying mystery of the sun's force; but I crave possession of one beam of its light wherewith to render palpable to myself its unseen action in the universe. And Prometheus then revealed to him the 'artifice' of the burning-glass, through which henceforward he might enslave the sun's rays to his service while disrobing them of the essential brilliancy which no human sight could endure."

In the material uses of the burning-glass we have a parallel for the value of an intellectual or religious symbol. This too is a gathering point for impressions otherwise too diffuse; or, inversely conceived, a sign guiding the mental vision through spaces which would otherwise be blank. Its reduced or microcosmic presentment of facts too large for man's mental grasp suggests also an answer to those who bemoan the limitations of human knowledge. Characteristic remarks on this subject occur at the beginning of the poem.

Bernard de Mandeville figures throughout the "parleying" as author of "The Fable of the Bees"; and it is in this work that Mr. Browning discovers their special ground of sympathy. "The Fable of the Bees," also entitled "Private Vices Public Benefits," and again "The Grumbling Hive, or Knaves turned Honest," is meant to show that self-indulgence and self-seeking carried even to the extent of vice are required to stimulate the activities and secure the material well-being of a community. The doctrine, as originally set forth, had at least an appearance of cynicism, and is throughout not free from conscious or unconscious sophistry; and though the theological condemnation evoked by it was nothing short of insane, we cannot wonder that the morality of the author's purpose was impugned. He defends this, however, in successive additions to the work, asserting and re-asserting, by statement and illustration, that his object has been to expose the vices inherent to human society--in no sense to justify them; and Mr. Browning fully accepts the vindication and even regards it as superfluous. He sees nothing, either in the fable itself or the commentary first attached to it, which may not equally be covered by the Christian doctrine of original sin, or the philosophic acceptance of evil as a necessary concomitant, or condition, of good: and finds fresh guarantees for a sound moral intention in the bright humour and sound practical sense in which the book abounds. This judgment was formed (as I have already implied) very early in Mr. Browning's life, even before the appearance of "Pauline," and supplies a curious comment on any impression of mental immaturity which his own work of that period may have produced.

Bernard de Mandeville was a Dutch physician, born at Dort in the second half of the last century, but who settled in England after taking his degree. He published, besides "The Fable of the Bees," some works of a more professional kind. His name, as we know it, must have been Anglicized.

DANIEL BARTOLI was a Jesuit and historian of his order. Mr. Browning characterizes him in a footnote as "a learned and ingenious writer," and while acknowledging his blindness in matters of faith would gladly testify to his penetration in those of knowledge;[124] but the Don's editor, Angelo Cerutti, declares in the same note that his historical work so overflows with superstition and is so crammed with accounts of prodigious miracles as to make the reading it an infliction; and the saint-worship involved in this kind of narrative is the supposed text of the "parleying." Mr. Browning claims Don Bartoli's allegiance for a secular saint: a woman more divine in her non-miraculous virtues than some at least of those whom the Church has canonized, and whose existence has the merit of not being legendary. The saint in question was Marianne Pajot, daughter of the apothecary of Gaston Duke of Orleans; and her story, as Mr. Browning relates it, a well-known episode in the lives of Charles IV., Duke of Lorraine, and the Marquis de Lassay.

Charles of Lorraine fell violently in love with Marianne Pajot, whom he met at the "Luxembourg" when visiting Madame d'Orleans, his sister. She was "so fair, so modest, so virtuous, and so witty" that he did not hesitate to offer her his hand; and they were man and wife so far as legal formalities could make them when the Monarch (Louis XIV.) intervened. Charles had by a recent treaty made Louis his heir. This threatened no obstacle to his union, since a clause in the marriage contract barred all claims to succession on the part of the children who might be born of it. But "Madame" resented the mésalliance; she joined her persuasions with those of the Minister le Tellier; and the latter persuaded the young King, not absolutely to prevent the marriage, but to turn it to account. A paper was drawn up pledging the Duke to fresh concessions, and the bride was challenged in the King's name to obtain his signature to it. On this condition she was to be recognized as Duchess with all the honours due to her rank; failing this, she was to be banished to a convent. The alternative was offered to her at the nuptial banquet, at which le Tellier had appeared--a carriage and military escort awaiting him outside. She emphatically declined taking part in so disgraceful a compact:[125] and after doing her best to allay the Duke's wrath (which was for the moment terrible), calmly allowed the Minister to lead her away, leaving all the bystanders in tears. A few days later Marianne returned the jewels which Charles had given her, saying, it was not suitable that she should keep them "since she had not the honour of being his wife." He seems to have resigned her without farther protest.

De Lassay was much impressed by this occurrence, though at the time only ten years old. He too conceived an attachment for Marianne Pajot, and married her, being already a widower, at the age of twenty-three. Their union, dissolved a few years later by her death, was one of unclouded happiness on his part, of unmixed devotion on hers; and the moral dignity by which she had subjugated this somewhat weak and excitable nature was equally attested by the intensity of her husband's sorrow and by its transitoriness. The military and still more amorous adventures of the Marquis de Lassay make him a conspicuous figure in the annals of French Court life. He is indirectly connected with our own through a somewhat pale and artificial passion for Sophia Dorothea, the young Princess of Hanover, whose husband became ultimately George I. Mr. Browning indicates the later as well as earlier stages of de Lassay's career; he only follows that of the Duke of Lorraine into an imaginary though not impossible development. Charles had shown himself a being of smaller spiritual stature than his intended wife; and it was only too likely, Mr. Browning thinks, that the diamonds which should have graced her neck soon sparkled on that of some venal beauty whose challenge to his admiration proceeded from the opposite pole of womanhood. Nevertheless he feels kindly towards him. The nobler love was not dishonoured by the more ignoble fancy, since it could not be touched by it. Duke Charles was still faithful as a man may be.

With CHRISTOPHER SMART is an interrogative comment on the strange mental vicissitudes of this mediocre poet, whose one inspired work, "A Song to David," was produced in a mad-house[126]. Of this "Song" Rossetti has said (I quote the "Athenæum" of Feb. 19, 1887) in a published letter to Mr. Caine, "This wonderful poem of Smart's is the only great _accomplished_ poem of the last century. The _un_accomplished ones are Chatterton's--of course I mean earlier than Blake or Coleridge, and without reckoning so exceptional a genius as Burns. A masterpiece of rich imagery, exhaustive resources, and reverberant sound." How Mr. Browning was impressed by such a work of genius, springing up from the dead level of the author's own and his contemporary life, he describes in a simile.

He is exploring a large house. He goes from room to room, finding everywhere evidence of decent taste and sufficient, but moderate, expenditure: nothing to repel and nothing to attract him in what he sees. He suddenly enters the chapel; and here all richness is massed, all fancy is embodied, art of all styles and periods is blended to one perfection. He passes from it into another suite of rooms, half fearful of fresh surprise; and decent mediocrity, respectable commonplace again meet him on every side. Thus, it seems to him, was the imagination of Christopher Smart for one moment transfigured by the flames of madness to resume for ever afterwards the prosaic character of its sanity; and he now asks the author of "A Song to David" how one who had thus touched the absolute in art could so decline from it. He assumes that the madness had but revealed the poet: whether or not the fiery outbreak was due to force suppressed or to particles of brain substance disturbed. Why was he after as before silent?

It might be urged in answer that the full glory of that vision did not return--that the strength and beauty of the universe never came to him again with so direct a message for the eye and ear of his fellow men. But, Mr. Browning continues, impressions of strength and beauty are only the materials of knowledge. They contain the lesson of life. And that lesson is not given in the reiterated vision of what is beautiful, but in the patient conversion into knowledge and motive of such impressions of beauty--in other words, of strength or power--as Man's natural existence affords. The poet's privilege, as the poet's duty, is not merely to impart the pleasure, but to aid the process of instruction. He only suggests the explanation to disclaim it in Smart's name.

These arguments are very typical of Mr. Browning's philosophy of Art: of his conviction that Art has no mission, its intuitions have no authority, distinct from moral and intellectual truth. He concludes the little sermon by denouncing that impatience of Fancy which would grasp the end of things before the beginning, and scale the heights of Knowledge, while rejecting Experience, through which, as by a ladder, we scale them step by step.

The lines in "Paracelsus," vol. ii., p. 36, which are in this view so appropriate to the case of Christopher Smart, bore reference to him. The main facts of his life may be found in any biographical dictionary.

With GEORGE BUBB DODINGTON is a lesson in the philosophy of intrigue, or the art of imposing on our fellow men. It is addressed to Bubb Dodington[127] as to an ambitious, obsequious, unscrupulous, and only partially successful courtier; and undertakes to show that, being (more or less) a knave, his conduct also proclaimed him a fool, and lost him the rewards of knavery. Mr. Browning does not concern himself with the moralities of the case; these, for the time being, are put out of court. He assumes, for the purposes of the discussion, that everyone is selfish and no one need be sincere, and that "George" was justified in labouring for his own advancement and cheating others, if possible, into subservience to it; but he argues that the aim being right, the means employed were wrong, and could only result in failure.

The argument begins and ends in the proposition, in itself a truism but which receives here a novel significance, that nothing in creation obeys its like, and that he who would mount by the backs of his fellow men must show some reason why they should lend them. In the olden time, we are reminded, such reasons were supplied by physical force; later, force was superseded by intelligence, _i.e._, wit or cunning; and this must now be supplemented by something deeper, because it has become the property of so many persons as to place no one person at an advantage. Bubb Dodington's methods have been those of simple cunning, and therefore they have not availed him. The multitude whom he cajoled have seen through his cajoleries, and have resented in these both the attempt to deceive them and the pretension--unfounded as it proved--to exalt himself at their expense.

How then can the multitude be deceived into subservience?--By the pretence of indifference to them. An impostor is always supposed to be in earnest. The commonplace impostor is so: he has staked everything on the appearance of being sincere. He, on the other hand, who is reckless in mendacity, who cheats with a laughing eye; who, while silently strenuous in a given cause, appears to take seriously neither it, himself, nor those on whom both depend, irresistibly strikes the vulgar as moved by something greater than himself or they. A "quack" he may be, but like the spiritualistic quack, he invokes the belief in the Supernatural, and perhaps shares it. He has the secret which Bubb Dodington had not.