Chapter 29

It may be wondered why Mr. Browning treats the shallower political cunning as merely a foil to the deeper, instead of opposing to it something better than both: but he finds the natural contrast to the half-successful schemer in the wholly triumphant one: and the second picture, like the first, has been drawn from life. It is that of the late Lord Beaconsfield--as Mr. Browning sees him.

With FRANCIS FURINI is a defence of the study of the nude, based on the life and work of this Florentine painter (born 1600), who at the age of forty also became a priest. According to his biographer, Filippo Baldinucci,[128] Furini was not only a skilful artist, but a conscientious priest, and a good man. No reproach attached to him but that he attained a special charm of colouring through the practice of painting very young women undraped; and we may infer that he repented this from the current report that when he felt himself dying he entreated those about him to have his pictures burnt. But Baldinucci also relates that he had a specious answer ready for whoever remonstrated with him on thus endangering his soul. The answer, which he frankly quotes, is by no means "specious" in the sense in which it is made; and Mr. Browning cannot believe that a man so inspired by the true artistic passion as those words imply, could in any circumstances become ashamed of the acts to which they refer. "If," Furini says, "those scrupulous persons only knew what is the agony of endeavour with which the artist strives at faithfully imitating what he sees, they would also know how little room this leaves in him for the intrusion of alien" (immoral) "thoughts." Mr. Browning goes farther still. He asserts not only the innocence, but the religiousness, of the painter's art when directed towards the marvels of the female form. He declares its exercise, so directed, to be a subject, not of shame in the sight of the Creator, but of thanksgiving to Him, and also the best form in which human thanks can be conveyed; and he employs all the vividness of his illustration and all the force of his invective against the so-called artist who sees in the Divineness of female beauty only incitement to low desires; in the art which seeks to reproduce it only a cloak for their indulgence. His argument is very strong, and would be unanswerable, but for the touch of speciousness which Baldinucci by anticipation detects in it: Mr. Browning--as did Furini--regards the breach of formal chastity exclusively from the artist's point of view. But he may also argue that this will in the long run determine that of the spectator and that the model herself is from the first amenable to it.

Mr. Browning lays stress upon the technical skill which results from the close copying of nature, and by virtue of which Furini must be styled a good painter, whether or not a great one: and though he has never underrated the positive value of technical skill, we do not feel that in this third page of the "parleyings" he gives to the inspiring thought as high a relative place as in his earlier works. The old convictions reappear at pages 182-3 of vol. xvi., when he asserts the danger in which the skilled hand may involve the artistic soul, by stifling its insight into the spiritual essence of fleshly things or silencing its testimony to it; when, too, he admits that not the least worthy of the "sacred" ones have been thus betrayed. He still, however, maintains that the true offender against Art will ever be the mock artist--the Philistine--who sees cause of offence in it.

After proclaiming the religiousness of Art, Furini is called upon to unfold his theology: and he then passes to a confession of faith in which Mr. Browning's known personal Theism is contrasted with the scientific doctrines of Evolution. The Scientist and the Believer would as he distinguishes them join issue on the value of the artistic study of man, since man is for both of them the one essential object of knowledge; but the study (artistic or scientific) is, Mr. Browning considers, unrepaying in the one case, while it yields all necessary results in the other. According to the scientist, Man reigns supreme by his intelligence; according to the Believer, he is subject to all the helplessness of his ignorance. In reasoning, therefore, each from his own consciousness, the one finds his starting point at the summit of creation, the other virtually at the bottom of it. The Scientist acknowledges no mind beyond that of man; he seeks the impulse to life within itself, and can therefore only track it through the descending scale of being into the region of inorganic atoms and blind force. The _believer_ refers that impulse to a conscious external First Cause, and is content to live surrounded by its mystery, entrenched within the facts of his own existence, guided (i.e., drawn upwards) by the progressive revelations which these convey to him.

It is so that Furini has lived and learned. He has found his lesson in the study of the human frame. There, as on a rock of experience, he has planted his foot, finding confusion and instability wherever he projected this beyond it; striking out sparks of knowledge at every stamp on the firm ground. He has learned that the Cause of Life is external, because he has seen how the soul permeates and impels the body, how it makes it an instrument of its own raptures and a sharer in them; and he believes that that which caused the soul and thus gifted it will ultimately silence the spiritual conflict with Evil and perfect Its own creation. He believes this because Evil has revealed itself to him as the necessary complement of Good--the antitype through which alone the type defines itself; as a condition of knowledge; as a test of what is right; as a motive to life and virtue so indispensable that it must exist as illusion if it did not exist as fact; because, therefore, its existence cannot detract from the goodness of the First Cause or the promise which that contains.

This constant assertion of the necessity of evil would land Mr. Browning in a dilemma, if the axiom were presented by him in any character of dogmatic truth: since it claims priority for certain laws of thought over a Being which, if Omnipotent, must have created them. But the anomaly disappears in the more floating outlines of a poetic personal experience; and Mr. Browning (alias Furini) once more assures us that what he "knows" of the nature and mode of action of the First Cause he knows for himself only. How it operates for others is of the essence of the mystery which enfolds him. Whether even the means of his own instruction is reality or illusion, fiction or fact, is beyond his ken; he is satisfied that it should be so.

Mr. Browning reverts to his defence of the nude in the description of a picture--exhibited last year at the Grosvenor Gallery--the subject of which he offers to Furini for treatment in the manner described.[129]

With GERARD DE LAIRESSE is a critical reminiscence of the unreal and mythological in art, and its immediate subject a Belgian painter, born at Liege, but who nourished at Amsterdam in the second half of the seventeenth century. De Lairesse was a man of varied artistic culture as well as versatile skill; but he was saturated with the pseudo-classical spirit of the later period of the renaissance; and landscape itself scarcely existed for him but as a setting for mythological incident or a subject for embellishment by it. This is curiously apparent in a treatise on the Art of Painting, which he composed, and, by a form of dictation, also illustrated, when at the age of fifty he had lost his sight. An English version of this fell into Mr. Browning's hands while he was yet a child, and the deep and, at the time, delightful impression which it made upon him is the motive of the present poem. Foremost in his memory is an imaginary "Walk,"[130] in which the exercise of fancy which the author practises and, Mr. Browning tells us, enjoins, is strikingly displayed by his "conjecturing" Phaeton's tomb from the evidence of a carved thunderbolt in an empty sepulchre, and the remains of the "Chariot of the Sun" from a piece of broken wheel and some similar fragment buried in the adjoining ground.

The remembrance converts itself into a question: the poet's fancy no longer peoples the earth with gods and goddesses; has his insight become less vivid? has the poetic spirit gone back? The answer is unwavering; retrogression is not in the creative plan. The poet does not go back. He is still as of yore a seer; he has only changed in this, that his chosen visions are of the soul; their objects are no longer visible unrealities, but the realities which are unseen. He can still, if he pleases, evoke those as these, and Mr. Browning proceeds to show it by calling up a series of dissolving views representing another "walk."

A majestic and varied landscape unfolds before us in the changing lights of a long summer's day; and at each appropriate artistic moment becomes the background of a mythological, idyllic, or semi-mythical scene. In the early dawn we see Prometheus amidst departing thunders chained to his rock:[131] the glutted, yet still hungering vulture cowering beside him; in the dews of morning, Artemis triumphant in her double character of huntress-queen and goddess of sudden death; in the heats of noon, Lyda and the Satyr, enacting the pathetic story of his passion and her indifference;[132] in the lengthening shadows, the approaching shock of the armies of Darius and Alexander;[133]--in the falling night, a dim, silent, deprecating figure: in other words, a ghost.

And here Mr. Browning bids the "fooling" stop; for he has touched the point of extreme divergence between the classic spirit and his own. The pallid vision which he repels speaks dumbly of pagan regret for what is past, of pagan hopelessness of the to-come. _His_ religion, as we are again reminded, is one of hope. Let us, he says, do and not dream, look forward and not back; ascend the tree of existence into its ripening glory, not hastening over leaf or blossom, not dallying with them; leave Greek lore buried in its own ashes, and accept the evidence of life itself that extinction is impossible; that death--mystery though it is, calamity though it may be--ends nothing which has once begun. We may then greet the spring which we do not live to see in other words than those of the Greek bard; and the words suggested are those of a dainty lyric, in which the note of gladness seems to break with a little sob, and rings, perhaps, on that account the truer.[134]

With CHARLES AVISON might be called a reverie on music and musicians, but for the extraordinary vividness of the images and emotions which it conveys. It was induced, Mr. Browning tells us, by a picturesque little incident which set his thoughts vibrating to the impressions of the word "March": and supplies a parable for their instinctive flight into a discredited and forgotten past. They have been feeling for a piece of march-music; they have bridged the gulf which separates the school of Wagner and Brahms from that of Handel or Buononcini; they alight on Charles Avison's "Grand March."[135] It is a simple continuous air, such as hearts could beat to in the olden time, though flat and somewhat thin, and unrelieved by those caprices of modulation which are essential to modern ears; and as it repeats itself in Mr. Browning's brain, the persistent melody gains force from its very persistence: till it fills with the sound, as it were glows with the aerial clashings, of many martial instruments, till it strides in the lengthening, drum-accentuated motion of many marching feet. He ponders the fact that such melody has lost its power, and asks himself why this must be: since the once perfected can never be surpassed, and the music of Charles Avison was in its own day as inspiring and inspired--in other words, as perfect--as that for which it has been cast aside.

He finds his answer in the special relation of this art to the life of man. Music resembles painting and poetry in the essential characteristic that her province is not Mind but Soul--the swaying sea of emotion which underlies the firm ground of attainable, if often recondite, fact. All three have this in common with the activities of Mind that they strive for the same result; they aim at recording feeling as science registers facts. The two latter in some measure attain this end, because they deal with those definite moments of the soul's experience which share the nature of fact. But music dredges deeper in the emotional sea. She draws forth and embodies the more mysterious, more evanescent, more fluid realities of the soul's life; and so, effecting more than the sister arts, she yet succeeds less. Her forms remain; the spirit ebbs away from them. As, however, Mr. Browning's own experience has shown, the departed spirit may return--

"... Off they steal-- How gently, dawn-doomed phantoms! back come they Full-blooded with new crimson of broad day-- Passion made palpable once more." (P. 232.)

The revived passion may breathe under the name of another man; it may stir again in the utterance of one dead and forgotten; and Mr. Browning, borrowing the language of chemistry, invokes the reactive processes through which its many-coloured flamelets may spring to life.[136] He then passes by an insensible--because to him very natural--transition from the realities of feeling to those of thought, and to the underlying truth from which both series derive: and combats the idea that in thought, any more than in feeling, the present can disprove the past, the once true reveal itself as delusion. Time--otherwise growth--widens the range as it complicates the necessities of musical, _i.e._ emotional expression. It destroys the enfolding fictions which shield without concealing the earlier stages of intellectual truth. But the emotions were in existence before music began; and Truth was potentially "at full" within us when as it were reborn to grow and bud and blossom for the mind of man.[137] Therefore, he has said, addressing Avison's March, "Blare it forth, bold C Major!" and "Therefore," he continues, in a swift return of fancy:--

"... Bang the drums, Blow the trumps, Avison! March-motive? That's Truth which endures resetting. Sharps and flats, Lavish at need, shall dance athwart thy score When ophicleide and bombardon's uproar Mate the approaching trample, even now Big in the distance--or my ears deceive-- Of federated England, fitly weave March-music for the future!" (P. 237.)

The musical transformation is for a moment followed back to the days of Elizabethan plain-song, and then arrested at those of Avison, where he may be imagined as joining chorus with Bach in celebrating the struggle for English liberty. The closing stanzas are written to the music of Avison's March, which is also given[138] at the end of the poem, and throws a helpful light on its more technical parts.

FUST AND HIS FRIENDS is based on a version of the Faust legend which identifies the inventor of printing with Dr. Faust, and contains allusions to some of the incidents of Goethe's double poem: the magical drinking bout of the first part, and the appearance of the Grecian Helen in the second; but whereas the popular tradition makes Fust's great discovery the fruit of his alliance with the powers of Evil, Mr. Browning represents it as an act of atonement for the figurative devil-worship which was involved in a disorderly and ostentatious life. Fust has by his own admission sinned to this extent.[139] He has obeyed the father of lies. He has also accepted with thankfulness the chance of redeeming his soul by a signal service rendered to the cause of Truth. The process of engraving on gold, furtively witnessed in a Tuscan workshop, has suggested to him the manufacture of metallic types, and he has been for years secluded with the conception of his printing-press, and glowing visions of that winged word which should one day fly forth at his command. Complacent ignorance and stupidity have buzzed freely about him as he sat unaided and alone in what Mr. Browning poetically depicts as the prolonged travail of a portentous mental birth; and, as we are led to imagine, much well-meant remonstrance and advice rebounded from his closed door. But at the moment in question the door is open, for the work of Fust is complete. Seven "Friends" present themselves prepared to lecture him for his good and for that of their city (Mayence) which is endangered by his compact with the Devil; and the ensuing intensely humorous colloquy supplies him with the fitting occasion for distributing specimens of his new art and displaying the mechanism through which its apparent magic is achieved. He then pours forth his soul in an impassioned utterance, half soliloquy, half prayer, in which gratitude for his own redemption tempers the sense of triumph in the world-wide intellectual deliverance he has been privileged to effect, and becomes a tribute of adoration to that Absolute of Creative Knowledge, the law of which he has obeyed; which stirs in the unconsciousness of the ore and plant, and impels man to Its realization step by step in the ever-receding, ever-present vision of his own ignorance.

He owns, however, when the talk is resumed, that his happiness is not free from cloud: since the wings which he has given to truth will also aid the diffusion of falsehood; and the note of humour returns to the situation when this contingency asserts itself in the mind of some of the "friends." These worthies have passed through the descending scale of feeling proper to such persons on such an occasion. They have received Fust's invention as diabolical--as wonderful--as very simple after all; and now the fact stares them in the face that, printing being so simple, the Hussite may publish his heresies as well as the Churchman his truth, and the old sure remedy of burning him and his talk together will no longer avail. One of the two Divines on whom this impresses itself had indeed "been struck by it from the first."

The poem concludes with a joke on the name of Huss, which (I am told) is the Bohemian equivalent for "goose," and his reported prophecy of the advent and the triumph of Luther: which prophecy Fust re-echoes.[140]

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 121: We must remark that these arguments are not directed against Atheism and its naturalistic philosophy, which supplies, in Mr. Browning's judgment, a consistent, if erroneous, solution of the problem. They only attack the position of those who would retain the belief in a personal God, and yet divest Him of every quality which makes such a Being thinkable.]

[Footnote 122: It has been wrongly inferred from the passage in question that Mr. Browning admits the pretensions of science to solve the problems of the universe.]

[Footnote 123: The "goddess-sent plague" woven by Lachesis into the destiny of Admetus was a vengeance of Artemis which befell him on the day of his marriage. He had slighted her by omitting the usual sacrifice, and in punishment of this she sent a crowd of serpents to meet him in the nuptial chamber; but Apollo effected a reconciliation between them.]

[Footnote 124: He had, as a young man, so great an admiration for one of Bartoli's works, "De' Simboli trasportati al Morale," that when he travelled he always carried it with him.]

[Footnote 125: Her reply was that if she possessed any influence over M. de Lorraine she would never use it to make him do anything so contrary to his honour and to his interests; she already sufficiently reproached herself for the marriage to which his friendship for her had impelled him; and would rather be "Marianne" to the end of her days than become Duchess on such conditions The reply has been necessarily modified in Mr. Browning's more poetic rendering of the scene]

[Footnote 126: Indented,--for want of writing materials,--with a key on the wainscot of his cell.]

[Footnote 127: Created Lord Melcombe a year before his death: sufficiently known by his diary from March, 1748, to Feb., 1761. See its character in the Preface to the original edition by his relation, Henry Penruddocke Wyndham, 1784. Other notices will be found in "Edgeworth on Education," Belsham's "George II.," and Hawkins' "Life of Johnson."]

[Footnote 128: Furini is also honourably mentioned in Pilkington's "Dictionary of Painters," revised by Fuseli, and till the middle of the present century the authoritative work on the subject. It is stated in the edition of 1805 that "many of his paintings are in Florence, which are deemed to add honour to the valuable collections of the nobility of that city."]

[Footnote 129: The allusion in vol. xvi. p. 195, to the old artificer who could make men "believe" instead of merely "fancy" that what he presented to them was real, refers especially to the Greek painter Zeuxis; but it is suggested by the generally realistic character of Greek art.]

[Footnote 130: Described at p. 253 and onwards under the heading "Painter-like Beauty in the Open Air."]

[Footnote 131: The last line and a half of the eighth stanza was directly suggested by the tragedy of Æschylus; the thunderstorm by another version of the Promethean myth.]

[Footnote 132: See Shelley's translation from Moschus.]

[Footnote 133: Battle of Arbela.]

[Footnote 134: These lines were published in 1886 in the little volume entitled "The New Amphion."]

[Footnote 135: Organist of Newcastle about 1750; author of "An Essay on Musical Expression" and other works.]

[Footnote 136: The "Relfe" spoken of in this connection was Mr. Browning's music-master: a learned contrapuntist.]

[Footnote 137: In interpreting this passage I have somewhat exceeded the letter, but only to emphasize the spirit of Mr. Browning's words.]

[Footnote 138: From an MS. copy formerly in the possession of Mr. Browning's father.]

[Footnote 139: The wealth to which he alludes was justly imputed to him, as the real Fust was a goldsmith's son.]

[Footnote 140: The relation of John Fust to the popular legend is pleasantly set forth in Mr. Sutherland Edwards' little book, "The Faust Legend: Its Origin and Development."]

NOTE.

The following note shows Mr. Browning in a more pronounced attitude towards the opponents of the new Greek spelling than does that which, by his desire, I inserted in my first edition; but the last mood was in this case only a natural development of the first:--