Chapter 9
There are others which give a most touching picture of extreme piety in extreme old age. And there are still others which are both love poems and religious poems at the same time.
LV
Thou knowest that I know that thou dost know How, to enjoy thee, I did come more near. Thou knowest, I know thou knowest--I am here. Would we had given our greetings long ago. If true the hope thou hast to me revealed, If true the plighting of a sacred troth, Let the wall fall that stands between us both, For griefs are doubled when they are concealed. If, loved one,--if I only loved in thee What thou thyself dost love,--'tis to this end The spirit with his belovéd is allied. The things thy face inspires and teaches me Mortality doth little comprehend. Before we understand we must have died.
LI
Give me the time when loose the reins I flung Upon the neck of galloping desire. Give me the angel face that now among The angels,--tempers Heaven with its fire. Give the quick step that now is grown so old, The ready tears--the blaze at thy behest, If thou dost seek indeed, O Love! to hold Again thy reign of terror in my breast. If it be true that thou dost only live Upon the sweet and bitter pains of man Surely a weak old man small food can give Whose years strike deeper than thine arrows can. Upon life's farthest limit I have stood-- What folly to make fire of burnt wood.
The occasion of the following was probably some more than wonted favor shown to him by Vittoria.
XXVI.
Great joy no less than grief doth murder men. The thief, even at the gallows, may be killed If, while through every vein with fear he's chilled, Sudden reprieve do set him free again.
Thus hath this bounty from you in my pain Through all my griefs and sufferings fiercely thrilled, Coming from a breast with sovereign mercy filled, And more than weeping, cleft my heart in twain.
Good news, like bad, may bring the taker death. The heart is rent as with the sharpest knife, Be it pressure or expansion cause the rift. Let thy great beauty which God cherisheth Limit my joy if it desire my life-- The unworthy dies beneath so great a gift.
XXVIII
The heart is not the life of love like mine. The love I love thee with has none of it. For hearts to sin and mortal thought incline And for love's habitation are unfit. God, when our souls were parted from Him, made Of me an eye--of thee, splendor and light. Even in the parts of thee which are to fade Thou hast the glory; I have only sight. Fire from its heat you may not analyze, Nor worship from eternal beauty take, Which deifies the lover as he bows. Thou hast that Paradise all within thine eyes Where first I loved thee. 'T is for that love's sake My soul's on fire with thine, beneath thy brows.
The German musicians of the seventeenth century used to write voluntaries for the organ, using the shorthand of the older notation; they jotted down the formulas of the successive harmonies expressed in terms of the chords merely. The transitions and the musical explanation were left to the individual performer. And Michael Angelo has left behind him, as it were, the poetical equivalents of such shorthand musical formulas. The harmonies are wonderful. The successions show a great grasp of comprehension, but you cannot play them without filling them out.
"Is that music, after all," one may ask, "which leaves so much to the performer, and is that poetry, after all, which leaves so much to the reader?" It seems you must be a Kapellmeister or a student, or dilettante of some sort, before you can transpose and illustrate these hieroglyphics. There is some truth in this criticism, and the modesty of purpose in the poems is the only answer to it. They claim no comment. Comment claims them. Call them not poetry if you will. They are a window which looks in upon the most extraordinary nature of modern times,--a nature whose susceptibility to impressions of form through the eye allies it to classical times; a nature which on the emotional side belongs to our own day.
Is it a wonder that this man was venerated with an almost superstitious regard in Italy, and in the sixteenth century? His creations were touched with a superhuman beauty which his contemporaries felt, yet charged with a profoundly human meaning which they could not fathom. No one epoch has held the key to him. There lives not a man and there never has lived a man who could say, "I fully understand Michael Angelo's works." It will be said that the same is true of all the very greatest artists, and so it is in a measure. But as to the others, that truth comes as an afterthought and an admission. As to Michael Angelo, it is primary and overwhelming impression. "We are not sure that we comprehend him," say the centuries as they pass, "but of this we are sure: _Simil ne maggior uom non nacque mai_."
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THE FOURTH CANTO OF THE INFERNO
There are many great works of fiction where the interest lies in the situation and development of the characters or in the wrought-up climax of the action, and where it is necessary to read the whole work before one can feel the force of the catastrophe. But Dante's poem is a series of disconnected scenes, held together only by the slender thread of the itinerary. The scenes vary in length from a line or two to a page or two; and the power of them comes, one may say, not at all from their connection with each other, but entirely from the language in which they are given.
A work of this kind is hard to translate because verbal felicities, to use a mild term, are untranslatable. What English words can render the mystery of that unknown voice that calls out of the deep,--
"Onorate 'l altissimo poeta, Torna sua ombra che era dipartita"?
The cry breaks upon the night, full of awful greeting, proclamation, prophecy, and leaves the reader standing next to Virgil, afraid now to lift up his eyes to the poet. Awe breathes in the cadence of the words themselves. And so with many of the most splendid lines in Dante, the meaning inheres in the very Italian words. They alone shine with the idea. They alone satisfy the spiritual vision.
Of all the greatest poets, Dante is most foreign to the genius of the English race. From the point of view of English-speaking people, he is lacking in humor. It might seem at first blush as if the argument of his poem were a sufficient warrant for seriousness; but his seriousness is of a nature strange to northern nations. There is in it a gaunt and sallow earnestness which appears to us inhuman.
In the treatment of the supernatural the Teutonic nations have generally preserved a touch of humor. This is so intrinsically true to the Teutonic way of feeling that the humor seems to go with and to heighten the terror of the supernatural. When Hamlet, in the scene on the midnight terrace, addresses the ghost as "old mole," "old truepenny," etc., we may be sure that he is in a frenzy of excitement and apprehension. Perhaps the explanation of this mixture of humor and terror, is that when the mind feels itself shaken to its foundations by the immediate presence of the supernatural,--palsied, as it were, with fear,--there comes to its rescue, and as an antidote to the fear itself, a reserve of humor, almost of levity. Staggered by the unknown, the mind opposes it with the homely and the familiar. The northern nations were too much afraid of ghosts to take them seriously. The sight of one made a man afraid he should lose his wits if he gave way to his fright. Thus it has come about that in the sincerest terror of the north there is a touch of grotesque humor; and this touch we miss in Dante. The hundred cantos of his poem are unrelieved by a single scene of comedy. The strain of exalted tragedy is maintained throughout. His jests and wit are not of the laughing kind. Sometimes they are grim and terrible, sometimes playful, but always serious and full of meaning. This lack of humor becomes very palpable in a translation, where it is not disguised by the transcendent beauty of Dante's style.
There is another difficulty peculiar to the translating of Dante into English. English is essentially a diffuse and prodigal language. The great English writers have written with a free hand, prolific, excursive, diffuse. Shakespeare, Sir Thomas Browne, Sir Walter Scott, Robert Browning, all the typical writers of English, have been many-worded. They have been men who said everything that came into their heads, and trusted to their genius to make their writings readable. The eighteenth century in England, with all its striving after classical precision, has left behind it no great laconic English classic who stands in the first rank. Our own Emerson is concise enough, but he is disconnected and prophetic. Dante is not only concise, but logical, deductive, prone to ratiocination. He set down nothing that he had not thought of a thousand times, and conned over, arranged, and digested. We have in English no prototype for such condensation. There is no native work in the language written in anything which approaches the style of Dante.
My heavy sleep a sullen thunder broke, So that I shook myself, springing upright, Like one awakened by a sudden stroke, And gazed with fixed eyes and new-rested sight Slowly about me,--awful privilege,-- To know the place that held me, if I might. In truth I found myself upon the edge That girds the valley of the dreadful pit, Circling the infinite wailing with its ledge. Dark, deep, and cloudy, to the depths of it Eye could not probe, and though I bent mine low, It helped my vain conjecture not a whit. "Let us go down to the blind world below," Began the poet, with a face like death, "I shall go first, thou second." "Say not so," Cried I when I again could find my breath, For I had seen the whiteness of his face, "How shall I come if thee it frighteneth?" And he replied: "The anguish of the place And those that dwell there thus hath painted me With pity, not with fear. But come apace; The spur of the journey pricks us." Thus did he Enter himself, and take me in with him, Into the first great circle's mystery That winds the deep abyss about the brim.
Here there came borne upon the winds to us, Not cries, but sighs that filled the concave dim, And kept the eternal breezes tremulous. The cause is grief, but grief unlinked to pain, That makes the unnumbered peoples suffer thus. I saw great crowds of children, women, men, Wheeling below. "Thou dost not seek to know What spirits are these thou seest?" Thus again My master spoke. "But ere we further go, Thou must be sure that these feel not the weight Of sin. They well deserved,--and yet not so.-- They had not baptism, which is the gate Of Faith,--thou holdest. If they lived before The days of Christ, though sinless, in that state God they might never worthily adore. And I myself am such an one as these. For this shortcoming--on no other score-- We are lost, and most of all our torment is That lost to hope we live in strong desire." Grief seized my heart to hear these words of his, Because most splendid souls and hearts of fire I recognized, hung in that Limbo there. "Tell me, my master dear, tell me, my sire," Cried I at last, with eager hope to share That all-convincing faith,--"but went there not One,--once,--from hence,--made happy though it were Through his own merit or another's lot?" "I was new come into this place," said he, Who seemed to guess the purport of my thought, "When Him whose brows were bound with Victory I saw come conquering through this prison dark. He set the shade of our first parent free, With Abel, and the builder of the ark, And him that gave the laws immutable, And Abraham, obedient patriarch, David the king, and ancient Israel, His father and his children at his side, And the wife Rachel that he loved so well, And gave them Paradise,--and before these men None tasted of salvation that have died."
We did not pause while he was talking then, But held our constant course along the track, Where spirits thickly thronged the wooded glen. And we had reached a point whence to turn back Had not been far, when I, still touched with fear, Perceived a fire, that, struggling with the black, Made conquest of a luminous hemisphere. The place was distant still, but I could see Clustered about the fire, as we drew near, Figures of an austere nobility. "Thou who dost honor science and love art, Pray who are these, whose potent dignity Doth eminently set them thus apart?" The poet answered me, "The honored fame That made their lives illustrious touched the heart Of God to advance them." Then a voice there came, "Honor the mighty poet;" and again, "His shade returns,--do honor to his name." And when the voice had finished its refrain, I saw four giant shadows coming on. They seemed nor sad nor joyous in their mien. And my good master said: "See him, my son, That bears the sword and walks before the rest, And seems the father of the three,--that one Is Homer, sovran poet. The satirist Horace comes next; third, Ovid; and the last Is Lucan. The lone voice that name expressed That each doth share with me; therefore they haste To greet and do me honor;--nor do they wrong."
Thus did I see the assembled school who graced The master of the most exalted song, That like an eagle soars above the rest. When they had talked together, though not long, They turned to me, nodding as to a guest. At which my master smiled, but yet more high They lifted me in honor. At their behest I went with them as of their company, And made the sixth among those mighty wits.
Thus towards the light we walked in colloquy Of things my silence wisely here omits, As there 'twas sweet to speak them, till we came To where a seven times circled castle sits, Whose walls are watered by a lovely stream. This we crossed over as it had been dry, Passing the seven gates that guard the same, And reached a meadow, green as Arcady. People were there with deep, slow-moving eyes Whose looks were weighted with authority. Scant was their speech, but rich in melodies. The walls receding left a pasture fair, A place all full of light and of great size, So we could see each spirit that was there. And straight before my eyes upon the green Were shown to me the souls of those that were, Great spirits it exalts me to have seen. Electra with her comrades I descried, I saw Æneas, and knew Hector keen, And in full armor Cæsar, falcon-eyed, Camilla and the Amazonian queen, King Latin with Lavinia at his side, Brutus that did avenge the Tarquin's sin, Lucrece, Cornelia, Martia Julia, And by himself the lonely Saladin.
The Master of all thinkers next I saw Amid the philosophic family. All eyes were turned on him with reverent awe; Plato and Socrates were next his knee, Then Heraclitus and Empedocles, Thales and Anaxagoras, and he That based the world on chance; and next to these, Zeno, Diogenes, and that good leech The herb-collector, Dioscorides. Orpheus I saw, Livy and Tully, each Flanked by old Seneca's deep moral lore, Euclid and Ptolemy, and within their reach Hippocrates and Avicenna's store, The sage that wrote the master commentary, Averois, with Galen and a score Of great physicians. But my pen were weary Depicting all of that majestic plain Splendid with many an antique dignitary. My theme doth drive me on, and words are vain To give the thought the thing itself conveys. The six of us were now cut down to twain. My guardian led me forth by other ways, Far from the quiet of that trembling wind, And from the gentle shining of those rays, To places where all light was left behind.
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ROBERT BROWNING
There is a period in the advance of any great man's influence between the moment when he appears and the moment when he has become historical, during which it is difficult to give any succinct account of him. We are ourselves a part of the thing we would describe. The element which we attempt to isolate for purposes of study is still living within us. Our science becomes tinged with autobiography. Such must be the fate of any essay on Browning written at the present time.
The generation to whom his works were unmeaning has hardly passed away. The generation he spoke for still lives. His influence seems still to be expanding. The literature of Browning dictionaries, phrase-books, treatises, and philosophical studies grows daily. Mr. Cooke in his Guide to Browning (1893) gives a condensed catalogue of the best books and essays on Browning, which covers many finely printed pages. This class of book--the text-book--is not the product of impulse. The text-book is a commercial article and follows the demand as closely as the reaper follows the crop. We can tell the acreage under cultivation by looking over the account books of the makers of farm implements. Thousands of people are now studying Browning, following in his footsteps, reading lives of his heroes, and hunting up the subjects he treated.
This Browningism which we are disposed to laugh at is a most interesting secondary outcome of his influence. It has its roots in natural piety, and the educational value of it is very great.
Browning's individuality created for him a personal following, and he was able to respond to the call to leadership. Unlike Carlyle, he had something to give his disciples beside the immediate satisfaction of a spiritual need. He gave them not only meal but seed. In this he was like Emerson; but Emerson's little store of finest grain is of a different soil. Emerson lived in a cottage and saw the stars over his head through his skylight. Browning, on the other hand, loved pictures, places, music, men and women, and his works are like the house of a rich man,--a treasury of plunder from many provinces and many ages, whose manners and passions are vividly recalled to us. In Emerson's house there was not a peg to hang a note upon,--"this is his bookshelf, this his bed." But Browning's palace craves a catalogue. And a proper catalogue to such a palace becomes a liberal education.
Robert Browning was a strong, glowing, whole-souled human being, who enjoyed life more intensely than any Englishman since Walter Scott. He was born among books; and circumstances enabled him to follow his inclinations and become a writer,--a poet by profession. He was, from early youth to venerable age, a centre of bounding vitality, the very embodiment of spontaneous life; and the forms of poetry in which he so fully and so accurately expressed himself enable us to know him well. Indeed, only great poets are known so intimately as we know Robert Browning.
Religion was at the basis of his character, and it was the function of religious poetry that his work fulfilled. Inasmuch as no man invents his own theology, but takes it from the current world and moulds it to his needs, it was inevitable that Robert Browning should find and seize upon as his own all that was optimistic in Christian theology. Everything that was hopeful his spirit accepted; everything that was sunny and joyful and good for the brave soul he embraced. What was distressing he rejected or explained away. In the world of Robert Browning _everything_ was right.
The range of subject covered by his poems is wider than that of any other poet that ever lived; but the range of his ideas is exceedingly small. We need not apologize for treating Browning as a theologian and a doctor of philosophy, for he spent a long life in trying to show that a poet is always really both--and he has almost convinced us. The expositors and writers of text-books have had no difficulty in formulating his theology, for it is of the simplest kind; and his views on morality and art are logically a part of it. The "message" which poets are conventionally presumed to deliver, was, in Browning's case, a very definite creed, which may be found fully set forth in any one of twenty poems. Every line of his poetry is logically dedicated to it.
He believes that the development of the individual soul is the main end of existence. The strain and stress of life are incidental to growth, and therefore desirable. Development and growth mean a closer union with God. In fact, God is of not so much importance in Himself, but as the end towards which man tends. That irreverent person who said that Browning uses "God" as a pigment made an accurate criticism of his theology. In Browning, God is adjective to man. Browning believes that all conventional morality must be reviewed from the standpoint of how conduct affects the actor himself, and what effect it has on his individual growth. The province of art and of all thinking and working is to make these truths clear and to grapple with the problems they give rise to.
The first two fundamental beliefs of Browning--namely: (1) that, ultimately speaking, the most important matter in the world is the soul of a man; and (2) that a sense of effort is coincident with development--are probably true. We instinctively feel them to be true, and they seem to be receiving support from those quarters of research to which we look for light, however dim. In the application of his dogmas to specific cases in the field of ethics, Browning often reaches conclusions which are fair subjects for disagreement. Since most of our conventional morality is framed to repress the individual, he finds himself at war with it--in revolt against it. He is habitually pitted against it, and thus acquires modes of thought which sometimes lead him into paradox--at least, to conclusions at odds with his premises. It is in the course of exposition, and incidentally to his main purpose as a teacher of a few fundamental ideas, that Browning has created his masterpieces of poetry.
Never was there a man who in the course of a long life changed less. What as a boy he dreamed of doing, that he did. The thoughts of his earliest poems are the thoughts of his latest. His tales, his songs, his monologues, his dramas, his jests, his sermons, his rage, his prayer, are all upon the same theme: whatever fed his mind nourished these beliefs. His interest in the world was solely an interest in them. He saw them in history and in music; his travels and studies brought him back nothing else but proofs of them; the universe in each of its manifestations was a commentary upon them. His nature was the simplest, the most positive, the least given to abstract speculation, which England can show in his time. He was not a thinker, for he was never in doubt. He had recourse to disputation as a means of inculcating truth, but he used it like a lawyer arguing a case. His conclusions are fixed from the start. Standing, from his infancy, upon a faith as absolute as that of a martyr, he has never for one instant undergone the experience of doubt, and only knows that there is such a thing because he has met with it in other people. The force of his feelings is so much greater than his intellect that his mind serves his soul like a valet. Out of the whole cosmos he takes what belongs to him and sustains him, leaving the rest, or not noting it.