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

Festus. (Paracelsus.) The old and faithful friend of Paracelsus, who believes in him from the first. He is the husband of Michal, and both influence the mind of the hero of medicine for good at various stages of his career.

Fifine at the Fair. (1872.) The key-note of the work is given in the quotation before the Prologue, which is the motto of the poem, from Molière’s Don Juan, Act I., Sc. 3. There is a certain historic basis for the character of the Don Juan of European legend. In Seville, in the time of Peter the Cruel, lived Don Juan Tenorio, the prince of libertines. He attempted to abduct Giralda, daughter of the governor of Seville: the consequence was a duel, in which the lady’s father was killed. The sensual excesses of Don Juan had destroyed his faith, and he defied the spirit-world so far as to visit the tomb of the murdered man and challenge his statue to follow him to supper. The statue accepted the invitation, and appeared amongst the guests at the meal, and carried the blaspheming sceptic to hell. “As a dramatic type,” says the author of the article “Don Juan,” in the Encyclopædia Britannica, “Don Juan is essentially the impersonation of the scepticism that results from sensuality, and is thus the complement of Faust, whose scepticism is the result of speculation.” The Prologue describes a swimmer far out at sea, disporting himself under the noon-sun; as he floats, a beautiful butterfly hovers above him, a creature of the sky, as he for the time a creature of the water; neither can unite with the other, for neither can exchange elements; still, if we cannot fly, the next best thing is to swim, – a half-way house, as it were, between the world of spirit and that of grosser earth. Poetry is in this sense, a substitute for heaven: whatever the heaven-dwellers are, the poets seem; what deeds they do, the poets dream. Does the soul of his departed wife hover over him in this way, and look with pity on the mimicry of her airy flight? he wonders. (Mrs. Browning died eleven years before Fifine was published.) – The scenery of the poem is that of the neighbourhood of Pornic, a seaside town in the department of the Loire, in Brittany, the little town being twenty-seven miles distant from Nantes. It is noted for its sea bathing and mineral waters, and, like many other places in Brittany, possesses some curious Druidical and other architectural remains. Mr. Browning, while staying at Pornic with his family, saw the gipsy woman who suggested to him the idea of Fifine. He selected her as a type of the sensual woman, in contrast to the spiritual type of womanhood. The poem deals with incidents connected with Pornic fair. Don Juan, addressing his wife Elvire, says: “Let us see the strolling players and the fun of the fair! Who would have supposed that the night could effect such a change? Yesterday all was rough and raw – mere tubs, poles and hoarding; now this morning all is gay as a butterfly, the scaffolding has burst out in colour like a flower-bed in full bloom. Nobody saw them enter the village, but that is the way of these tumblers, they like to steal a march and exhibit their spectacle only when the show is ready. Had any one wandered about the place at night he would have seen the sober caravan which was the bud that blossomed to-day into all this gaiety. An airy structure pitched beneath the tower appeared in the morning surmounted by a red pennon fluttering in the air, and frantic to be free. To be free! – the fever of the flag finds a response in my soul, my heart fires up for liberty from the restraints of law, I would lead the bohemian life these players lead. Why is it that disgraced people, those who have burst the bonds of conventional life, always seem to enjoy their existence more than others? They seem conscious of possessing a secret which sets them out of reach of our praise or blame; now and again they return to us because they must have our money, just as a bird must bear off a bit of rag filched from mankind to work up into his nest. But why need they do that? We think much of our reputation and family honour, but these people for a penny or two will display themselves undraped to any visitor. You may tell the showman that his six-legged sheep is an imposition, – he does not care, he values his good name at nothing. But offer to make these mountebanks respectable, promise them any reward you like to forsake their ways, to work and live as the rest of the world, and your offer will not tempt them. What is the compensatory unknown joy which turns dross to gold in their case? You sigh,” says the speaker to his wife, “you shake your head: what have I said to distress you? Fifine, the gipsy beauty of the show, will illustrate my meaning: this woman is to me a queen, a sexless, bloodless sprite; yet she has conquered me. I want to understand how. There is a honeyed intoxication in the Eastern lily, which lures insects to their death for its own nourishment: is that a flaw in the flower? Wiser are we not to be tempted by such dangerous delights; we may admire and keep clear of them: not poison lilies, but the rose, the daisy, or the violet, for me, – it is Elvire, not Fifine, I love. You ask how does this woman explain my thought? When Louis the Eleventh lay dying he had a procession of the famous women of all time made to pass before him: Helen of Troy, who magically brought men to acquiesce in their own destruction; next was Cleopatra, all the wonder of her body dominated by her high and haughty soul, and trampling on her lovers; then the saint of Pornic church who saves the shipwrecked sailors, and who thinks in her innocence that Cleopatra has given away her clothes to the poor; then comes my gipsy beauty Fifine, with her tambourine. Suppose you, Elvire, in spirit join this procession; then you confront yourself, and I will show you how you beat each personage there – even this Fifine, whom I will reward with a franc that you may study her. You draw back your skirts from such filth as you consider her to be; though, born perhaps as pure and sensitive as any other woman, she can afford to bear your scorn possibly, – we know such people often thus minister to age and the wants of sick parents. Her ogre husband, with his brute-beast face, takes the money she has earned by her exhibiting herself to us as she passes into the tent. I want to make you see the beauty of the mind underlying the form in all these women. No creature is made so mean but boasts an inward worth: this Fifine, a mere sand-grain on the shore, reflects some ray of sunshine. Say that there was no worst of degradation spared this woman, yet she makes no pretence – she is absolutely truthful, she assumes not to be Helen or the Pornic Saint, she only offers to exhibit herself to you for money.” The wife is not deceived by all this sophistry; Fifine’s attraction for the man lies in the fact, not that she possesses some hidden beauty of soul, but some unconcealed physical charms which awaken desire in him because they are not his own. What is one’s own is safe, and so despised; any waif which is a neighbour’s is for the time more desirable, – “Give you the sun to keep, you would want to steal a boor’s rushlight or a child’s squib.” He explains that this is always women’s way about such matters – they cannot be made to comprehend mental analysis. He reminds her how at great cost and a year’s anxiety he had purchased a Rafael; he gloated over his prize for a week, and then had more relish in turning over leaf by leaf Doré’s last picture-book. Suppose the picture reproached him with inconstancy, he would reply that he knew the picture was his own; anxiety had given place to confidence, and were the house on fire, he would risk his life to save it, though he were knee deep in Doré’s engravings. He tells his wife she is to him as the Rafael, the Fifines are as Doré’s wood engravings. Elvire is the precious wife, her face fits into the cleft in the heart of him, to him she is perfection; but is she perfect to her mirror? He thinks not. Where, then, is her beauty? In his soul. He cannot explain the reason, any more than naming the notes will explain a symphony or describing lines will call up the idea of a picture. Still there is reason in our choice of each other. It is principally the effort of one soul to seek its own completion – that which shall aid its development – in another’s. As the artist’s soul sees the form he is about to create in the marble block, so does the lover see in his choice that which will draw out his soul-picture into concrete perfection. The world of sense has no real value for any of us, save in so far as our souls can detect and appropriate it. It is the idea which gives worth to that on which it is exercised. The value of all externals to the soul is just in proportion to its own power of transmuting them into food for its own growth. The soul flame is maintained not only by gums and spices, but straw and rottenness may feed it; if the soul has power to extract from evil things that which supports its life, what matters the straw so long as the ash is left behind? and so of the conquests of the soul, its power to evoke the good from the ungainly and the partial, gives us courage to ignore the failures and the slips of our lives. The pupil does not all at once evoke the masterpiece from the marble – he puts his idea in plaster by the side of the Master’s statue. If the scholar at last evoke Eidotheé, the Master is to thank. “To love” in its intensest form means to yearn to invest another soul with the accumulated treasures of our own. The chemic force exerted by one soul in transmuting coarse things to beautiful is aided by another’s flame. Each may continue to supplement the other, till the red, green, blue and yellow imperfections may be fused into achromatic white, the perfect light-ray. Soul is discernible by soul, and soul is evoked by soul – Elvire by Don Juan. The wife objects that he abdicates soul’s empire and accepts the rule of sense: man has left the monarch’s throne, and lies in the kennel a brute. Searching for soul through all womankind, you find no face so vile but sense may extract from it some good for soul. This fine-spun theory, this elaborate sophistry, she declares, is merely an ingenious excuse for sensuality: —

“Be frank – who is it you deceive —Yourself, or me, or God?”

Don Juan would reply by an illustration from music, which can penetrate more subtly than words: he would show how we may rise out of the false into the true, out of the dark into the brightness above the dense and dim regions where doubt is bred. Bathing in the sea that morning, out in mid-channel, he was standing in the water with head back, chin up, body and limbs below – he kept himself alive by breath in the nostrils, high and dry; ever and again a wavelet or a ripple would threaten life, then back went the head, and all was safe. But did he try to ascend breast high, wave arms free of tether, to be in the air and leave the water, under he went again; before he had mastered his lesson he had plenty of water in mouth and eyes. “I compare this,” he says, “to the spirit’s efforts to rise out of the medium which sustains it.” He was upborne by that which he beat against, too gross an element to live in, were it not for the dose of life-breath in the soul. Our business is with the sea, not with the air, so we must endure the false below while we bathe in this life. It is by practice with the false that we reach the true. We gain confidence, and learn the trick of doing what we will – sink or rise. His senses do not reel when a billow breaks over him; he grasps at a wave that will not be grasped at all, but glides through the fingers – still the failure to grasp the water sends the head above, far beyond the wave he tried to hold: —

“So with this work o’ the world,”

we try to grasp a soul, catch at it, think we have a prize; it eludes us, yet the soul helped ours to mount. He seizes Elvire by grasping at Fifine. Not even this specious reasoning deceives the wife. It is an ugly fact that the wave grasped at is a woman. He replies that a woman can be absorbed into the man: women grow you, men at best depend upon you. A rill that empties itself into the sea can never be separated from it. That is woman. Man takes all and gives nought. To raise men you must stoop to teach them, learn their ignorance, stifle your soul in their mediocrities; but to govern women you must abandon stratagem, cast away disguise, and reveal your best self at your uttermost. When the music of Arion attracted the dolphins to the doomed man, one of them bore him on its back to the coast, and so saved his life; revealing his best to this “true woman-creature,” he was saved from the men who would have killed him for gain. A man never puts out his whole self in love – this is reserved for hate. You do not get the best out of a man by nourishing his root, but by pruning his branch; as wine came through goats, which, browsing on the tendrils of the grape, “stung the stock to fertility,” and so gained “the indignant wine – wrath of the red press.” Mites of men are sore that God made mites at all; love avails not from such men-animalculæ to coax a virile thought, but touch the elf with hate, and the insect swells to thrice its bulk “and cuckoo-spits some rose!” Nothing is to be gained from ruling men; women take nothing, and give all. Elvire and Fifine, in their degree, are alike in this respect. “To have secured a woman’s faith in me is to have centred my soul on a fact. Falseness and change I see all around me; I expect truth because Fifine knows me much more than Elvire does.” To this his wife replies, “Why not only she? There can be for each but one Best, which abolishes the simply Good and Better. Why not be content with the Elvire, who substitutes belief in truth, in your own soul, for the falseness which you fear? By toil and effort the boatman may do with pole and oars what by waiting a few hours the rising water would do for him without his labour; but men affect unusual ways, – Elvire could do far better for you all that you expect from Fifine.” To this he replies that “a voyage may be too safe; there is no excitement, no experiment when wind and tide do all the needful work. Then may not our hate of falsehood be that which charms us in these actors who confess ‘A lie is all we do or say’? Everything has a false outside, stage-play is honest cheating. The poet never dreams; prose-folk always do.” Then he tells how his thought had recently sought expression in music rather than in words – as he played Schumann’s Carnival, and reflected that in the masque of life and banquet of the world we have ever the same things in a new guise, the difficulty was ever to conquer commonplace and spice the same old viands and games. His fancies bore him to a pinnacle above St. Mark’s at Venice, in Carnival time; he gazed down on a prodigious Fair, the men and women were disguised as beasts, birds, and fishes. Descending into the crowd, disgust gave way to pity; the people were not so beast-like, but much more human, than when he viewed them from the height, and he began to contemplate them with a delight akin to that which animates the chemist when he untwines the composite substance, traces effect back to cause, and then constructs from its elements the complex and complete. So did he get to know the thing he was, while contemplating in that Carnival the thing he was not. Thus Venice Square became the world, the masquerade was life, the disgust at the pageant was due to the distance from which it was contemplated, when he learned that the proper goal for wisdom is the ground and not the sky, he discovered how wisely balanced are our hates and loves, and how peace and good come from strife and evil. It is no business of ours to fret about what should be, but we should accept and welcome what is —is, that is to say, for the hour, for change is the law even of the religions by which man approaches God. His temples fade to recompose into other fanes. And not only temples, but the domes of learning and the seats of science are subject to the same law. Yet Religion has always her true temple-type; Truth, though founded in a rock, builds on sands; churches and colleges that grow to nothing always reappear as something; some building, round or square or polygonal, we shall always have. But leave the buildings, and let us look at the booths in the Fair. History keeps a stall, Morality and Art set up their shops. They acquiesce in law, and adapt themselves to the times; and so, as from a distance the scene is contemplated as a whole, the multiform subsides in haze, the buildings, distinct in the broad light of day, merge and lose their individuality in a common shape. See this Druid monument: how does its construction strike you? How came this cross here? Learning cannot enlighten us. It meant something when it was erected which is lost now, yet the people of the place respect it and are persuaded that what a thing meant once it must still mean. They thought it had some reference to the Creator of the world, and was there to remind them that the world came not of itself. And so, with all the change in religions, there is an imperial chord which subsists and underlies the mists of music. In all the change there is permanence as a substratum. Truth inside and truth outside, but falsehood is between each; it is the falsehood which is change, the truth is the permanence. There is an unchanging truth to which man in all his waverings is constant. This Druid monument said what it had to say to its own age; it never promised to help our dream. Don Juan and his wife having now completed their walk, he proposes to return home to end where they began; as we were nursed into life, death’s bosom receives us at last, and that is final, for death is defeat. Our limbs came with our need of them, our souls grew by mastering the lessons of life; but when death comes, the soul, which ruled by right while the bodily powers remained, loses its right to rule. And so the soul has run its round. Love ends too where love began, and goes back to permanence; each step aside (from Elvire to Fifine, for example) proves divergency in vain:

“Inconstancy means raw, ’tis faith alone means ripe.”

And as they reach their villa, he resolves to live and die a quiet married man, earning the approbation of the mayor, and unoccupied with soul problems, especially those of women. At that moment a letter is put into his hand: there has been some mistake, Fifine thinks – he has given her gold instead of silver; he will go and see about it, and is off. Five minutes was all the time he asked. He is absent much longer, and on his return Elvire has vanished.

The Epilogue describes the householder sitting desolate in his melancholy home, weary and stupid; he is suddenly surprised by the appearance of his lost wife, whose spirit has returned to claim him; he tells her how the time has dragged without her, “And was I so much better off up there?” quoth she. For decency, arrangements are made that the reunion may be in order; and so, the powers above and those below having been duly conciliated, husband and wife are once more united: “Love is all, and death is nought” – the final lesson of life.

The means whereby we may rise from the false to the true are never wanting to the earnest and faithful striver, this is the esoteric truth of Fifine at the Fair. The exoteric meaning may be “an apologia for the revolt of passion against social rules and fetters.” “Frenetic to be free,” like the pennon, is in this sense the concentration of its meaning. What was Browning’s object in this difficult and remarkable work? The question is not so difficult to answer as it appears at first sight. The poet is a soul analyst first, and a teacher next. He teaches admirably in scores of passages in Fifine, but his main idea has been to interpret the mental processes which he supposed might underlie the actions of such a selfish and heartless voluptuary as Don Juan. Not, of course, was there any idea of rehabilitating the character of the historic personage; but, as Browning held that every soul has something to say for itself, every man some ideal soul-advance at which he aims, however mistaken may be his methods, so he imagined that even this selfish libertine had his golden ideal, however deeply bedded in mire. He has not – like the great dramatists – sunk himself in his character, and striven thus to present the real man on his stage, but he has lent Don Juan his Browning soul for a while, that he may make his Apologia to the wife, whom he finds it very hard to deceive. Dr. Furnivall once asked the poet what his idea really was in the poem. The poet replied that his “fancy was to show morally how a Don Juan might justify himself partly by truth, somewhat by sophistry.” (Browning Society Papers, vol. ii., p. 242*.) See also vol. i., pp. 377, 379, pp. 18*, 61*, vol ii., p. 240*. Mr. Nettleship’s exhaustive analysis leaves nothing to be desired. (Essays, p. 221.)

Notes. – Verse ii., “bateleurs and baladines,” conjurors and mountebanks. Verse iv., “Gawain to gaze upon the Grail”: Gawain was the son of King Lot and Margause, in the Arthurian legend of the Holy Grail. Verse xv., almandines, a variety of garnet. Verse xix., sick Louis: King Louis XI. of France. Verse xxv., tricot: a knitted vest. Verse xxvii., Helen: she was declared by some of the Greeks never to have been really present at Troy, and that Paris only carried off a phantom created by Hera: the real Helen, they said, was wafted by Hermes to Proteus in Egypt, whence she was taken home by Menelaus. Verse xxxvi., pochade, a rough sketch. Verse xlii., Razzi, a corruption of Bazzi, or properly Il Sodona, the Italian painter (1479-1549). Verse xlvii., Gerôme, a French painter (born 1824): he exhibited a great picture at the Exposition of 1859, called “The Gladiators.” Verse lii., Eidotheé: a sea-goddess, daughter of Proteus, the old man of the sea. Verse lix., Glumdalclich, in Gulliver’s Travels, was a girl nine years old, and “only forty feet high.” “Theosutos e broteios eper kekramene,” Greek for “God, man, or both together mixed,” from the Prometheus Bound of Æschylus. Verse lx., Chrysopras: a precious stone, a variety of chalcedony, or perhaps beryl. Verse lxvii. cannot be understood without reference to the fourth canto of Byron’s Childe Harold: the lines and words between inverted commas are taken from verse clxxx., and the argument is directed against Byron’s teaching as therein expressed: this verse was particularly obnoxious to Mr. Browning, both on account of its sentiments and grammar (see under La Saisiaz, p. 247). Verse lxix., Thalassia: sea-nymph, from the Greek word for the sea: Triton, a sea deity, a son of Neptune. Verse lxxviii., Arion: a Greek poet and musician: he was rescued from drowning on the back of a dolphin; his song to his lyre drew the creatures round the vessel, and one of them bore him to the shore. Periander, the tyrant of Corinth. “Methymnæan hand”: Arion was born at Methymna, in Lesbos. Orthian, of Orthia: this was a surname of Diana. Tænarus, the point of land to which the dolphin carried Arion, whence he travelled to the court of Periander. Verse lxxxii., “See Horace to the boat”: the ode is the third of the First Book of Horace’s Odes. Verse lxxxiii., “The long walls of Athens” (see under Aristophanes’ Apology, p. 36). Iostephanos, violet crowned – a name of Athens. Verse xcviii., Simulacra, images or likenesses. Verse cxxiv., protoplast, the original, the thing first formed. Verse cxxv., Moirai Trimorphoi, the Tri-form Fates.

Filippo Baldinucci on the Privilege of Burial: A Reminiscence of A.D. 1676. (Pacchiarotto and other Poems, 1876.) Filippo Baldinucci was a distinguished Italian writer on the history of the arts. He was born at Florence in 1624, and died in 1696. His chief work is entitled Notizie de Professori del Disegno da Cimabue in quà (dal 1260 sino al 1670), and was first published, in six vols. 4to, 1681-1728. The Encyclopædia Britannica says: “The capital defect of this work is the attempt to derive all Italian art from the schools of Florence.” The incidents of the poem are historical, and are related in the account which Baldinucci gives of the painter Buti. Its subject is that of the persecution to which the Jews were subjected in Italy, as in other countries of Europe, and unhappily down to the present time in Russia. We have the story as told by a frank persecutor, who regrets that the altered state of the law no longer permits the actual pelting of the Jews. The good old times had departed, but in his youth they could play some capital tricks with “the crew,” as he will narrate. There was a Jews’ burying-place hard by San Frediano, in Florence. Just below the Blessed Olivet, and adjoining this cemetery, was “a good farmer’s Christian field.” The Jews hedged their ground round with bushes, to conceal their rites from Christian gaze, for the public road ran by one corner of it. The farmer, partly from devotion, partly to annoy the Jews, built a shrine in his vineyard, and employed the painter Buti to depict thereon the Virgin Mary, fixing the picture just where it would be most annoying to the Jews. They tried to bribe the owner of the shrine to turn the picture the other way, to remove its disturbing presence from spectators to whom it could do no good, and let it face the public road, frequented by a class of Christians evidently much in need of religious supervision and restraint. The farmer agreed to remove the offending fresco in consideration of the bag of golden ducats offered; and he at once called the painter to cause Our Lady to face the other way. Buti covers up the shrine with a hoarding, and sets to work. Meanwhile the Chief Rabbi’s wife died, and was taken for burial to the cemetery. In passing the shrine in the farmer’s field the mourners became aware of a scurvy trick played upon them by the Christians; for the Virgin was removed according to the bargain, but a Crucifixion had been substituted, and now confronted them. The cheated Jews protested, but in vain: there was nothing for them but to suffer. Next day, as the farmer and his artist friend sat laughing over the trick, the athletic young son of the Rabbi entered the studio, desiring to purchase the original oil painting of the Madonna from which the fresco of the shrine was painted. The artist was so frightened at his stalwart form, and so amazed at the request, that, taken unaware, he asked no more than the proper price! and Mary was borne in triumph to deck a Hebrew household. They thought a miracle had happened, and that the Jew had been converted; but the Israelite explained that the only miracle wrought was that which had restrained him from throttling the painter. The truth was, he had changed his views about art, and had reflected that, since cardinals hung up heathen gods and goddesses in their palaces, there was no reason why his picture of Mary should not be hung with Ledas and what not, and be judged on its merits, or, more probably, on its flaws! And he walked off with his picture.