The Browning Cyclopædia: A Guide to the Study of the Works of Robert Browning

Notes. – “Quis separabit?” who shall separate? King Francis– François I. The gallery of this king is the most striking one in the palace. Diane, the gallery of Diana, the goddess. Primatice == Primaticcio, who designed some of the decorations of the Galerie de François I. Salamander sign: the emblem of Francis I., often repeated in the decorations. Florentine Le Roux == Rossi, the Florentine artist. Fontainebleau: its Château Royal is very famous. “Juno strikes Ixion,” who attempted to seduce her. Avon, a village near Fontainebleau.

Croisic. The scene of the Two Poets of Croisic. Le Croisic is a seaport on the southern coast of Brittany, with about 2500 inhabitants, and is a fashionable watering-place. It has a considerable industry in sardine fishing.

Cunizza, called Palma in Sordello, till, at the close of the poem the heroine’s historical name is given. She was the sister of Ezzelino III. Dante places her in Paradise (ix. 32). Longfellow, in his translation of the Divine Comedy, has the following note concerning her: “Cunizza was the sister of Azzolino di Romano. Her story is told by Rolandino, Liber Chronicorum, in Muratori (Rer. Ital. Script., viii. 173). He says that she was first married to Richard of St. Boniface; and soon after had an intrigue with Sordello – as already mentioned (Purg. vi., Note 74). Afterwards she wandered about the world with a soldier of Treviso, named Bonius, ‘taking much solace,’ says the old chronicler, ‘and spending much money’ (multa habendo solatia, et maximas faciendo expensas). After the death of Bonius, she was married to a nobleman of Braganza; and finally, and for a third time, to a gentleman of Verona. The Ottimo alone among the commentators takes up the defence of Cunizza, and says: ‘This lady lived lovingly in dress, song, and sport; but consented not to any impropriety or unlawful act; and she passed her life in enjoyment, as Solomon says in Ecclesiastes,’ alluding probably to the first verse of the second chapter – “I said in my heart, Go to now, I will prove thee with mirth; therefore enjoy pleasure; and behold, this is also vanity.”

“Dance, Yellows and Whites and Reds.” A beautiful lyric at the end of “Gerard de Lairesse,” in Parleyings with Certain People of Importance in their Day, begins with this line. It originally appeared in a little book published for the Edinburgh University Union Fancy Fair, in 1886.

Daniel Bartoli. Parleyings with Certain People of Importance in their Day: 1887. [The Man.] “Born at Ferrara in 1608, died at Rome in 1685. He was a learned Jesuit, and his great work was a history of his Order, in six volumes, published at various times. It is enriched with facts drawn from the Vatican records, from English colleges, and from memoirs sent him by friends in England; and is crowded with stories of miracles which are difficult of digestion by ordinary readers. His style is highly esteemed by Italians for its purity and precision, and his life was perfectly correct and virtuous” (Pall Mall Gazette, Jan. 18th, 1887). “His eloquence was wonderful, and his renown as a sacred orator became universal. He wrote many essays on scientific subjects; and although some of his theories have been refuted by Galileo, they are still cited as models of the didactic style, in which he excelled. His works on moral science and philology are numerous. Died 1684.” (Imp. Dict. Biog.)

[The Poem.] The poet tells the narrator of saintly legends that he has a saint worth worshipping whose history is not legendary at all, but very plain fact. It is her story which is told in the poem, and not that of Bartoli. The minister of a certain king had managed to induce a certain duke to yield two of his dukedoms to the king at his death. The promise was a verbal one, but the duke was to sign the deed of gift which deprived him of his rights when it was duly prepared by the lawyers. While this was in progress the duke met at his sister’s house a good and beautiful girl, the daughter of an apothecary. He proposed to marry her, and was accepted, notwithstanding the opposition of his family. The banns were duly published, and the marriage ceremony was soon to follow. Meanwhile this turn in the duke’s affairs came to the ear of the crafty minister of the king, who promptly informed his royal master that the assignment of the dukedoms might not proceed so smoothly under the altered circumstances. “I bar the abomination – nuptial me no such nuptials!” exclaimed the king. The minister hinted that caution must be used, lest by offending the duke the dukedoms might be lost. The next day the preliminary banquet, at which all the lady’s friends were present, took place; when lo – a thunderclap! – the king’s minister was announced, and the lady was requested to meet him at a private interview. She was informed that the duke must at once sign the paper which the minister held in his hand, ceding to the king the promised estates, or the king would withhold his consent to the marriage and the lady would be placed in strict seclusion. Should he, however, sign the deed of gift without delay, the king would give his consent to the marriage, and accord the bride a high place at court; and the druggist’s daughter would become not only the duke’s wife but the king’s favourite. They returned to the dining-room, and the lady, addressing the duke, who sat in mute bewilderment at the head of the table, made known the king’s commands. She told him that she knew he loved her for herself alone, and was conscious that her own love was equal to his. She bade him read the shameful document which the king had sent, and begged him to bid her destroy it. She implored him not to part with his dukedoms, which had been given him by God, though by doing so he might make her his wife: if, however, he could so far forget his duty as to yield to these demands, he would, in doing so, forfeit her love. The duke was furious, but could not be brought to yield to the lady’s request, and she left the place never to meet again. Next day she sent him back the jewellery he had given her. This story was told to a fervid, noble-hearted lord, who forthwith in a boyish way loved the lady. When he grew to be a man he married her, dropped from camp and court into obscurity, but was happy, till ere long his lady died. He would gladly have followed, but had to be content with turning saint, like those of whom Bartoli wrote. The poet next philosophises on the life which the duke might have led after this crisis in his history. He would sooner or later reflect sadly on the beautiful luminary which had once illumined his path: he could fancy her mocking him as false to Love; he would reflect how, with all his lineage and his bravery, he had failed at the test, but would recognise that it was not the true man who failed, not the ducal self which quailed before the monarch’s frown while the more royal Love stood near him to inspire him; – some day that true self would, by the strength of that good woman’s love, be raised from the grave of shame which covered it, and he would be hers once more.

Notes. – vi., Pari passu: with equal pace, together. xv., “Saint Scholastica … in Paynimrie”: she lived about the year 543. She was sister to St. Benedict, and consecrated herself to God from her earliest youth. The legend referred to is not given, either in Butler’s Lives of the Saints, or Mrs. Jameson’s Legends of the Monastic Orders. Paynimrie means the land of the infidel. xvi., Trogalia: sweetmeats and candies.

Dante is magnificently described in Sordello (Book I., lines 374-80): —

“Dante, pacer of the shoreWhere glutted hell disgorgeth filthiest gloom,Unbitten by its whirring sulphur-spume —Or whence the grieved and obscure waters slopeInto a darkness quieted by hope;Plucker of amaranths grown beneath God’s eyeIn gracious twilights where His chosen lie.”

Date et Dabitur. “Give, and it shall be given unto you.” (See The Twins.)

David. (See Saul, and Epilogue to Dramatis Personæ: First Speaker).

Deaf and Dumb. A group by Woolner (1862). How a glory may arise from a defect is the keynote of this poem. A prism interposed in the course of a ray of sunlight breaks it into the glory of the seven colours of the spectrum; the prism is an obstruction to the white light, but the rainbow tints which are seen in consequence of the obstacle reveal to us the secret of the sunbeam. So the obstruction of deafness or dumbness often greatly enhances the beauty of the features, as in the group of statuary which forms the subject of the poem, and which was exhibited at the International Exhibition of 1862. The children were Constance and Arthur, the son and daughter of Sir Thomas Fairbairn.

Death in the Desert, A. (Dramatis Personæ, 1864.) John, the disciple whom Jesus loved, who lay on His breast at the last sad paschal supper, who stood by the cross, and received from the lips of his Lord His only earthly possession – His mother; John, the writer of the Gospel which bears his name, and of the letters which breathe the spirit of the incarnated love which was to transform a world lying in wickedness; the seer of the awful visions of Patmos – the tremendous Apocalypse which closes the Christian revelation – lay dying in the desert; recalled from exile after the death of Domitian from the isle of the Sporades, the volcanic formation of which, with its daily scenes of smoke, brimstone, fire, and streams of molten lava, had aided the apostle to imagine the day of doom, when the angel should cry, “Time shall be no longer.” The beloved disciple, who had borne the message of Divine love through the cities of Asia Minor, had founded churches, established bishoprics, and had laboured by spoken and written word, and even more effectually by his beautiful and gentle life, to extend the kingdom of God and of His Christ, now worn out with incessant labours, and bent with the weight of well-nigh a hundred years, the last of the men who had seen the Lord, the final link which bound the youthful Church to its apostolic days, lies dying in a cave, hiding from the bloody hands of those who breathed out threatenings and slaughter against the followers of Christ. Companioned by five converts who tenderly nursed the dying saint, he had been brought from the secret recess in the rock where they had hidden him from the pursuers into the midmost grotto, where the light of noon just reached a little, and enabled them to watch

“The last of what might happen on his face.”

And at the entrance of the cave there kept faithful watch the Bactrian convert, pretending to graze a goat, so that if thief or soldier passed they might have booty without prying into the cave. The dying man lies unconscious, but his attendants think it possible to rouse him that he may speak to them before he departs: they wet his lips with wine, cool his forehead with water, chafe his hands, diffuse the aromatic odour of the spikenard through the cave, and pray; but still he sleeps. Then the boy, inspired by a happy thought, brings the plate of graven lead on which are the words of John’s gospel, “I am the Resurrection and the Life,” and having found the place, he presses the aged man’s finger on the line, and repeats it in his ear. Then he opened his eyes, sat up, and looked at them; and no one spoke, save the watcher without, signalling from time to time that they were safe. And first, the beloved one said, “If one told me there were James and Peter, I could believe! So is my soul withdrawn into its depths.” – “Let be awhile!” – And then —

“It is longSince James and Peter had release by death,And I am only he, your brother John,Who saw and heard, and could remember all.”

He reminds them how in Patmos isle he had seen the Lord in His awful splendour; how in his early life he saw and handled with his hands the Word of Life. Soon it will be that none will say “I saw.” And already – for the years were long – men had disputed, murmured and misbelieved, or had set up antichrists; and remembering what had happened to the faith in his own days, he could well foresee that unborn people in strange lands would one day ask —

“Was John at all, and did he say he saw?”

“What can I say to assure them?” he asks; the story of Christ’s life and death was not mere history to him: “It is,” he cries, – “is, here and now.” Not only are the events of the gospel history present before his eyes, so that he apprehends nought else; but not less plainly, not less firmly printed on his soul, are the more mysterious truths of God’s eternal presence in the world visibly contending with wrong and sin; and, as the wrong and sin are manifest to his soul-sight, so equally does he see the need, yet transiency of both. But matters, which to his spiritualised vision were clear, must be placed before his followers through some medium which shall, like an optic glass, segregate them, diminish them into clearness; and so he bids them stand before that fact, that Life and Death of Jesus Christ, till it spreads apart like a star, growing and opening out on all sides till it becomes their only world, as it is his. “For all of life,” he says, “is summed up in the prize of learning love, and having learnt it, to hold it and truth, despite the world in arms against the holder. We can need no second proof of God’s love for man. Man having once learned the use of fire, would not part with the gift for purple or for gold. Were the worth of Christ as plain, he could not give up Christ. To test man, the proofs of Christianity shift; he cannot grasp that fact as he grasps the fact of fire and its worth.” He asks his disciples why they say it was easier to believe in Christ once than now – easier when He walked the earth with those He loved? “But,” says John, who had seen all, – the transfiguration, the walking on the sea, the raising of the dead to life, – “could it be possible the man who had seen these things should ever part from them?” Yes, it was! The torchlight, the noise, the sudden inrush of the Roman soldiers, on the night of the betrayal, caused even him, John, the beloved disciple, to forsake Him and fly. Yet he had gained the truth, and the truth grew in his soul, so that he was enabled to impress it so indelibly on others, that children and women who had never seen the least of the sights he had seen would clasp their cross with a light laugh, and wrap the burning robe of martyrdom round them, giving thanks to God the while. But in the mind of man the laws of development are ever at work, and questioners of the truth arose, and it was necessary that he should re-state the Lord’s life and work in various ways, to rectify mistakes. God has operated in the way of Power, later in the way of Love, and last of all in Influence on Soul: men do not ask now, “Where is the promise of His coming?” but —

“Was He revealed in any of His lives,As Power, as Love, as Influencing Soul?”

“Miracles, to prove doctrine,” John says, “go for nought, but love remains.” Then men ask, “Did not we ourselves imagine and make this love?” (That is to say, love having been discovered by mankind to be the noblest thing on earth, have not men created a God of Infinite Love, out of their own passionate imagining of what man’s love would be if perfectly developed?) “The mind of man can only receive what it holds – no more.” Man projects his own love heavenward, it falls back upon him in another shape – with another name and story added; this, he straightway says, is a gift from heaven. Man of old peopled heaven with gods, all of whom possessed man’s attributes; horses drew the sun from east to west. Now, we say the sun rises and sets as if impelled by a hand and will, and it is only thought of as so impelled because we ourselves have hands and wills. But the sun must be driven by some force which we do not understand; will and love we do understand. As man grows wiser the passions and faculties with which he adorned his deities are taken away: Jove of old had a brow, Juno had eyes; gradually there remained only Jove’s wrath and Juno’s pride; in process of time these went also, till now we recognise will and power and love alone. All these are at bottom the same – mere projections from the mind of the man himself. Having then stated the objections brought against the faith of Christ, St. John proceeds to meet them. “Man,” he says, “was made to grow, not stop; the help he needed in the earlier stages, being no longer required, is withdrawn; his new needs require new helps. When we plant seed in the ground we place twigs to show the spots where the germs lie hidden, so that they may not be trodden upon by careless steps. When the plants spring up we take the twigs away; they no longer have any use. It was thus with the growth of the gospel seed: miracles were required at first, but, when the plant had sprung up and borne fruit, had produced martyrs and heroes of the faith, what was the use of miracles any more? The fruit itself was surely sufficient testimony to the vitality of the seed. Minds at first must be spoon-fed with truth, as babes with milk; a boy we bid feed himself, or starve. So, at first, I wrought miracles that men might believe in Christ, because no faith were otherwise possible; miracles now would compel, not help. I say the way to solve all questions is to accept by the reason the Christ of God; the sole death is when a man’s loss comes to him from his gain, when – from the light given to him – he extracts darkness; from the knowledge poured upon him he produces ignorance; and from the manifestation of love elaborates the lack of love. Too much oil is the lamp’s death; it chokes with what would otherwise feed the flame. An overcharged stomach starves. The man who rejects Christ because he thinks the love of Christ is only a projection of his own is like a lamp that overswims with oil, a stomach overloaded with nurture; that man’s soul dies.” “But,” the objector may say, “You told your Christ-story incorrectly: what is the good of giving knowledge at all if you give it in a manner which will not stop the after-doubt? Why breed in us perplexity? why not tell the whole truth in proper words?” To this St. John replies, “Man of necessity must pass from mistake to fact; he is not perfect as God is, nor as is the beast; lower than God, he is higher than the beast, and higher because he progresses, – he yearns to gain truth, catching at mistake. The statuary has the idea in his mind, aspires to produce it, and so calls his shape from out the clay:

“Cries ever, ‘Now I have the thing I see’:Yet all the while goes changing what was wrought,From falsehood like the truth, to truth itself.”

Suppose he had complained, ‘I see no face, no breast, no feet’? It is only God who makes the live shape at a jet. Striving to reach his ideals, man grows; ceasing to strive, he forfeits his highest privileges, and entails the certainty of destruction. Progress is the essential law of man’s being, and progress by mistake, by failure, by unceasing effort, will lead him,

“Where law, life, joy, impulse are one thing!”

Such is the difficulty of the latest time; so does the aged saint answer it. He would remain on earth another hundred years, he says, to lend his struggling brothers his help to save them from the abyss. But even as he utters the loving desire, he is dead,

“Breast to breast with God, as once he lay.”

They buried him that night, and the teller of the story returned, disguised, to Ephesus. St. John is said to have been banished into the Isle of Patmos, A.D. 97, by the order of Domitian. After this emperor had reigned fifteen years Nerva succeeded him (A.D. 99), and historians of the period wrote that “the Roman senate decreed that the honours paid to Domitian should cease, and such as were injuriously exiled should return to their native land and receive their substance again. It is also among the ancient traditions, that then John the Apostle returned from banishment and dwelt again at Ephesus.” Eusebius, quoting from Irenæus, says that John after his return from Patmos governed the churches in Asia, and remained with them in the time of Trajan. Irenæus also says that the Apostle carried on at Ephesus the work begun by Paul; Clement of Alexandria records the same thing. It is said that St. John died in peace at Ephesus in the third year of Trajan – that is, the hundredth of the Christian era, or the sixty-sixth from our Lord’s crucifixion, the saint being then about ninety-four years old; he was buried on a mountain without the town. A stately church stood formerly over this tomb, which is at present a Turkish mosque. The sojourn of the Apostle in Asia, a country governed by Magi and imbued with Zoroastrian ideas, and in those days full of Buddhist missionaries, may account for many things found in the Book of Revelation. Mr. Browning refers to this in the bracketed portion of the poem, commencing: —

“This is the doctrine he was wont to teach,How divers persons witness in each man,Three souls which make up one soul.”

They are described by Theosophists as “(1) The fluidic perisoul or astral body; (2) The soul or individual; and (3) The spirit, or Divine Father and life of his system.” (See The Perfect Way, Lecture I., 9.) These three souls make up, with the material body, the fourfold nature of man.

Notes. —Pamphylax the Antiochene, an imaginary person. Epsilon, Mu, Xi, letters of the Greek alphabet – e, m, and ch respectively. Xanthus and Valens, disciples of St. John. Bactrian, of Bactria, a province in Persia. “A ball of nard,” an unguent of spikenard, odorous and highly aromatic and restorative. Glossa, a commentary. Theotypas, a fictitious character. Prometheus, son of the Titan Iapetus and the Ocean-nymph Clymene, brother of Atlas, Menœtius, and Epimetheus, and father of Deucalion. When Zeus refused to mortals the use of fire, Prometheus stole it from Olympus, and brought it to men in a hollow reed. Zeus bound him to a pillar, with an eagle to consume in the daytime his liver, which grew again in the night. Æschylus, the earliest of the three great tragic poets of Greece, born at Eleusis, near Athens, B.C. 525. He wrote the Prometheus Bound. Ebion, the founder of the early sect of heretics called Ebionites. They held that the Mosaic law was binding on Christians, and believed Jesus to have been a mere man, though an ambassador from God and possessed of Divine power (Encyc. Dict.). Cerinthus raised great disturbances in obstinately defending an obligation of circumcision, and of abstaining from unclean meats in the New Law, and in extolling the angels as the authors of nature: this was before St. Paul wrote his Epistle to the Colossians, etc. He pretended that the God of the Jews was only an angel; that Jesus was born of Joseph and Mary, like other men. He taught that Christ flew away at the time of the crucifixion, and that Jesus in the human part of His nature alone suffered and rose again, Christ continuing always immortal and impassible. St. Irenæus relates that on one occasion, when St. John went to the public baths, he found that this heretic was within, and he refused to remain lest the bath which contained Cerinthus should fall upon his head.

“De Gustibus – ” [De Gustibus non disputandum– “there is no accounting for tastes.”] (Men and Women, 1855; Lyrics, 1863; Dramatic Lyrics, 1868.) Every lover of Nature finds some particular kind of scenery which most appeals to his heart, and to which his thoughts revert in moments of reflection and meditation. The poet tells the lover of trees that after death (if loves persist) his ghost will be found wandering in an English lane by a hazel coppice in beanflower and blackbird time. For his own part, he loves best in all the world the scenery of his beloved Italy – a castle on a precipice in “the wind-grieved Apennine”; and if ever he gets his head out of the grave and his spirit soars free, he will be away to the sunny South, by the cypress guarding the seaside home, where scorpions sprawl on frescoed walls; in “Italy, my Italy,” – which beloved name he declares will be found graven on his heart.

De Lorge. (The Glove.) Sir de Lorge was the knight who recovered his lady’s glove from the lions, amongst which she had cast it to test his courage, and then threw it in her face.