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

Fire is in the Flint. (Ferishtah’s Fancies– opening words of the fifth lyric.)

Flight of the Duchess, The. (Dramatic Romances and Lyrics, 1845 – in Bells and Pomegranates, VII.). When Mr Browning was little more than a child, he heard a woman one Guy Fawkes’ Day sing in the street a strange song, whose burden was, “Following the Queen of the Gipsies, O!” The singular refrain haunted his memory for many years, and out of it was ultimately born this poem. There is a strange fascination in the mysterious story, which is told by an old huntsman, who has spent his life in the service of a Duke and his mother at their castle in a land of the North which is an appanage of the German Kaiser. The young Duke’s father died when he was a child, and his mother took him in early life to Paris, where they remained till the youth grew to manhood. Returning to the old castle with his head full of mediæval fancies, the Duke upset everybody by his revivals of outlandish customs and feudal fashions, and this in a manner which irritated every one concerned. In course of time the Duchess found a wife for her son – a young, warm-hearted girl from a convent, who won the affection of the servants of the castle, but was treated with coldness and severity by its lord and his “hell-cat” of a mother. Chilled by the want of affection, and neglected by those whose care it should have been to make her happy, the girl sickened, and was visibly pining away. It occurred to the Duke to revive, amongst other old customs, those connected with the hunting of the stag, and a great hunting party on mediæval lines was arranged. In the course of his researches into the customs of mediæval hunting, he discovered that the lady of the castle had a special office to perform when the stag was killed. The authorities said the dame must prick forth on her jennet and preside at the disembowelling. But the poor, mewed-up little duchess, secluded from all the pleasures of life, did not care to be brought out just to play a part in a ceremony for which she had no heart, and thanking the Duke for the intended honour, begged to be excused on account of her ill-health; and so the Duke had to give way, but he sent his mother to scold her. When the hunt began the Duke was sulky and disheartened; as he rode down the valley he met a troop of gipsies on their march, and from the company an old witch came forth to greet the huntsmen. Sidling up to the Duke, she began to whine and make her appeal for the usual gifts. She said she desired to pay her duty to the beautiful new Duchess, at which the Duke was struck by the idea that he might use the old crone as a means to frighten his wife and make her more submissive, so he bade the huntsman who tells the story conduct the gipsy to the young Duchess. The old hag promised to engage in the project with hearty goodwill, and, quickened by the sight of a purse as the sign of a forthcoming reward, she hobbled off to the castle, and the Duke rejoined his party. The huntsman had a sweetheart at the castle named Jacynth, who conducted the crone to the lady’s chamber while he waited without. And now began the mysteries of that eventful day. The maid protested she never could tell what it was that made her fall asleep of a sudden as soon as the gipsy was introduced to her mistress. The huntsman had waited on the balcony for some considerable time, when his attention was arrested by a low musical sound in the chamber of his lady; then he pushed aside the lattice, pulled the curtain, and saw Jacynth asleep along the floor. In the midst of the room, on a chair of state, was the gipsy, transformed to a queen, with her face bent over the lady’s head, who was seated at her knees, her face intent on that of the crone. Wondering whether the old woman was banning or blessing the Duchess, he was about to spring in to the rescue, when he was stopped by the strange expression on her face. She was drinking in “Life’s pure fire” from the old woman, was becoming transformed by some powerful influence that seemed to stream from the elder to the younger woman; her very tresses shared in the pleasure, her cheeks burned and her eyes glistened. The influence reached the soul of the retainer, and he fell under the potent spell as he listened to the gipsy’s words as she told the Duchess she had discovered she was of their race by infallible signs. At last he came to know that his mistress was being bewitched, and he ran to the portal, where he met her, so altered and so beautiful that he felt that whatever had happened was for the best and he had nothing to do but take her commands. He was hers to live or to die, and he preceded his mistress, followed by the gipsy, who had shrunk again to her proper stature. They went to the courtyard, where, as he was desired, he saddled the Duchess’s palfrey, which his mistress mounted with the crone behind her; then, putting a little plait of hair into the servant’s hand, the Duchess rode off, and they lost her. As the old retainer tells the tale, thirty years have passed since the flight took place. No search was made for the lady; the Duke’s pride was wounded, and he would not seek her, and made small inquiry about her. The man says he must see his master through this life, and then he will scrape together his earnings and travel to the land of the gipsies, to find his lady or hear the last of her. Has all this an allegorical meaning? Many have tried to find such in this remarkable poem. But Browning does not teach by allegory: he rather prefers to let events as they actually happen tell their own lessons to minds awakened to receive them. It is not at all difficult, without resorting to allegorical interpretation, to discover what the poem teaches. And in the first place we are taught that a human soul cannot thrive without the living sympathy of its kind. The Duchess was withering under the chill neglect of the hateful mother-in-law and her contemptible son. The bewitchment of the gipsy was the charm of love – the strong, passionate love of a great human heart, enshrined though it was in a witch-like and decrepit frame. The outpouring of the old woman’s sympathy on this friendless girl sufficed to transfigure the crone till she became to the huntsman a young and a beautiful queen herself. In the supreme act of perfectly loving, the woman herself became lovely; for there is no rejuvenescence like that which comes from loving others and helping the weak. Then we learn that, as the Duchess seemed to be imbibing new life from the gipsy queen, virtue goes forth from every true lover of his kind, and degrees of rank, education, and station, are no barriers to the magnetism which streams forth from a human heart, however humble, towards another human heart, however highly placed. Life without love is a living death, and the Duchess no more did wrong when she rode off with the gipsy who saw the signs of her people in the marks on her forehead than the flowers do wrong when they bloom at the invitation of the Spring. The sign which the gipsy saw was that of a soul capable of responding to a heart yearning to help it. The girl had a right to human love; she had a right to seek it in a gipsy heart when she could find it nowhere else. In the sermon by Canon Wilberforce preached before the British Medical Association, at their meeting at Bournemouth in 1891, speaking of the power of Jesus over human diseases, the preacher said, “The secret of this power was His perfect sympathy. He violated or suspended no natural laws… His healings were an influential outpouring of that inherent divine life which is latent and in some degree operative in every man, but which existed in fulness and perfection of operation only in Him. Is not this the force of the word “compassion” used of Him? The verb σπλαγχνίζομαι is not found in any former Greek author. It indicates, so far as language can express it, a forceful movement of the whole inward nature towards its object, and personal identification with it. It indicates that compassion and love are not superficial emotions, but dynamic forces.” Mrs. Owen, of Cheltenham, read a paper at the meeting of the Browning Society, Nov. 24th, 1882, entitled “What is ‘The Flight of the Duchess?’” in which it was suggested that the Duke represents our gross self; the huntsman represents the simple human nature that may either rise with the Duchess or sink with the Duke, – the better man. The Duchess represents the soul, the highest part of our complex nature. The huntsman aids the Duchess (the soul) to free herself from the coarse, low, earth-nature, the Duke. So that the ‘Flight of the Duchess’ is “the supreme moment when the soul shakes off the bondage of self and finds its true freedom in others.” The paper is published in the Browning Society’s Transactions (Part iv., p. 49*), and is well worthy of study by those who seek a deeper spiritual meaning in “this mystic study of redeemed womanhood” than its primary sense conveys.

Notes. – Stanza iii., merlin, a species of hawk anciently much used in falconry; falcon-lanner, a species of long-tailed hawk. vi., urochs, wild bulls; buffle, buffalo. x., St. Hubert, before his conversion, was passionately devoted to hunting: he is the patron saint of hunters; venerers, prickers, and verderers, huntsmen, light horsemen, and preservers of the venison. xi., wind a mort, to sound a horn at the death of the stag; a fifty-part canon: Mr. Browning explained that “a canon, in music, is a piece wherein the subject is repeated in various keys, and, being strictly obeyed in the repetition, becomes the “canon” – the imperative law to what follows. Fifty of such parts would be indeed a notable peal; to manage three is enough of an achievement for a good musician.” xiii., hernshaw, a heron; fernshaw, a fern-thicket; helicat, a hag; “imps the wing of the hawk”: to “imp” means to insert a feather in the broken wing of a bird. xiv., tomans, Persian gold coins. xv., gor-crow, the carrion crow. xvii., morion, a kind of open helmet. Orson the wood-knight: twin-brother of Valentine; born in a wood near Orleans, and carried off by a bear, which suckled him with its cubs. He became the terror of France, and was called “the wild man of the forest.”

Flower’s Name, The. (Garden Fancies, I. —Dramatic Lyrics.) [Published in Hood’s Magazine, July 1844.] With very few exceptions, Browning did not contribute to magazines. At the request of Mr. Monckton Milnes (afterwards Lord Houghton), he sent The Flower’s Name, Tokay and Sibrandus Schafnaburgensis to “help in making up some magazine numbers for poor Hood, then at the point of death from hæmorrhage of the lungs, occasioned by the enlargement of the heart, which had been brought on by the wearing excitement of ceaseless and excessive literary toil.” A lover visits a garden, and recalls a previous walk therein with the woman he loved; he remembers the flowers which she noticed, especially one whose name – “a soft, meandering Spanish name” – she gave him; he must learn Spanish “only for that slow, sweet name’s sake.” The very roses are only beautiful so far as they tell her footsteps.

Flower Songs, Italian. (Fra Lippo Lippi.) The flower songs in this poem are of the description known as the stornello. This is not to be confounded with the rispetto, which consists of a stanza of inter-rhyming lines, ranging from six to ten in number. “The Luccan and Umbrian stornello is much shorter, consisting indeed of a hemistich having some natural object which suggests the motive of the little poem. The nearest approach to the Italian stornello appears to be, not the rispetto, but the Welsh triban” (Encyc. Brit., xix. 272). See also notes to Fra Lippo Lippi.

Flute-music with an Accompaniment. (Asolando, 1889.) “Is not outside seeming real as substance inside?” A man hears a bird-like fluting; he wonders what sweet thoughts find expression in such sweet notes. Passion must give birth to such expression. Love, no doubt! Assurance, contentment, sorrow and hope – he detects all these moods in the music, softened and mellowed by the interposing trees. His lady companion brushes away all his fancy-spun notions by telling the prosy fact that the music proceeds from a desk-drudge, who spends the hour of his luncheon with the Youth’s Complete Instructor how to Play the Flute, the plain truth being that his hoarse and husky tootlings have not the remotest relation to the romantic ideas with which her male companion has associated them. Distance has altered the sharps to flats; the missing bar was not due to “kissing interruption,” but to a blunder in the playing. The man philosophises on this to the effect that, if fancy does everything for us, it matters little what may be the facts. If appearance produces the effect of reality, seeming is as good as being.

Forgiveness, A. (Pacchiarotto, and other Poems, 1876.) A man kneels in confession before a monk in a church. He tells the story of a life destroyed by an insane jealousy of his wife, who was innocent of any fault in the matter but some slight deception. The penitent was a statesman, happy in the love of wife and home, but neglectful of his duties to both in his absorption in the affairs of his sovereign. Returning home one night, he enters by the private garden way, and sees the veiled figure of a man flying from the house. Before him, as he turns to enter his door, he sees his wife, “stone-still, stone-white.” “Kill me!” she cried. “The man is innocent; the fault is mine alone. I love him as I hate you. Strike!” But he refrains from this speedy vengeance: henceforth they act a part before strangers – all goes on as though nothing had happened; alone, they never meet, never speak. Three years of this life pass, when one night the wife demands that the acting shall end; she will explain. “Follow me to my study,” he replies. The wife begins, “Since I could die now…” and then tells him she had loved him and had lost him through a lie. She had thought he gave away his soul in statecraft; she strung herself therefore, to teach him that the first fool she threw a fond look upon would prize beyond life the treasure which he neglected. It was contempt for the woman which filled his mind now. At this avowal his feeling rose to hate. He made her write her confession in words which he dictated, and with her own blood, drawn by the point of a poisoned poniard. The monk was the woman’s lover; the husband killed him also.

Founder of the Feast, The. This was the title of some inedited lines by Browning, written in the album presented to Mr. Arthur Chappell (of the St. James’s Hall Saturday and Monday Popular Concerts), April 5th, 1884. They are printed in the Browning Society’s Notes and Queries, vol. ii., p. 18*.

Fra Lippo Lippi. (Men and Women, 1855; Rome, 1853-54.) [The Man.] Fra Filippo Lippi (1412-69), the painter, was the son of a butcher in Florence. His mother died while he was a baby, and his father two years later than his mother. His aunt, Monna Lapaccia, took him to her home, but in 1420, when the boy was but eight years old, placed him in the community of the Carmelites of the Carmine in Florence. He stayed at the monastery till 1432, and there became a painter. He seems to have ultimately received a more or less complete dispensation from his religious vows. In 1452 he was appointed chaplain to the convent of S. Giovannino in Florence, and in 1457 he was made rector of S. Quirico at Legnaia. At this time he made a large income; but ever and again fell into poverty, probably on account of the numerous love affairs in which he was constantly indulging. Lippi died at Spoleto on or about Oct 8th, 1469. Vasari, in his Lives of the Painters, tells the whole romantic story of his life.

[The Poem.] Brother Lippo the painter, working for the munificent House of the Medici, has been mewed up in the Palace, painting saints for Cosimo dei Medici. Unable longer to tolerate the restraint (for he was a dissolute friar, with no vocation for the religious life), he has tied his sheets and counterpane together and let himself out of the window for a night’s frolic with the girls whom he heard singing and skipping in the street below. He has been arrested by the watchmen of the city, who noticed his monastic garb, and did not consider it in accord with his present occupation. He is making his defence and bribing them to let him go. He tells them his history: how he was a baby when his mother and father died, and he was left starving in the street, picking up fig skins and melon parings, refuse and rubbish as his only food. One day he was taken to the monastery, and while munching his first bread that month was induced to “renounce the pomps and vanities of this wicked world,” and so became a monk at eight years old. They tried him with books, and taught him some Latin; as his hard life had given him abundant opportunity for reading peoples’ faces, he found he could draw them in his copybooks, and so began to make pictures everywhere. The Prior noticed this, and thought he detected genius, and would not hear of turning the boy out: he might become a great painter and “do our church up fine,” he said. So the lad prospered; he began to draw the monks – the fat, the lean, the black, the white; then the folks at church. But he was too realistic in his work: his faces, arms and legs were too true to nature, and the Prior shook his head —

“And stopped all that in no time.”

He told him his business was to paint men’s souls and forget there was such a thing as flesh:

“Paint the soul, never mind the legs and arms!”

And so they made him rub all out. The painter asks if this was sense:

“A fine way to paint soul, by painting bodySo ill, the eye can’t stop there, must go furtherAnd can’t fare worse!”

He maintained that if we get beauty we get the best thing God invents. But he rubs out his picture and paints what they like, clenching his teeth with rage the while; but sometimes, when a warm evening finds him painting saints, the revolt is complete, and he plays the fooleries they have caught him at. He knows he is a beast, but he can appreciate the beauty, the wonder and the power in the shapes of things which God has made to make us thankful for them. They are not to be passed over and despised, but dwelt upon and wondered at, and painted too, for we must count it crime to let a truth slip. We are so made that we love things first when we see them painted, though we have passed them over unnoticed a hundred times before —

“And so they are better, painted – better to us.Art was given for that.”

“The world is no blot for us, nor blank; it means intensely, and means good.” “Ah, but,” says the Prior, “your work does not make people pray!” “But a skull and cross-bones are sufficient for that; you don’t need art at all.”… And then the poor monk begs the guard not to report him: he will make amends for the offence done to the Church; give him six months’ time, he will paint such a picture for a convent! It will please the nuns. “So six months hence. Good-bye! No lights: I know my way back!”

Notes. – “The Carmine’s my cloister,” the monastery of the friars Del Carmine, where Fra Lippo was brought up. “Cosimo of the Medici” (1389-1464), the great Florentine statesman, who was called the “Father of his country.” Saint Laurence == San Lorenzo at Florence, the church which contains the Medici tombs and several of Michael Angelo’s pictures. “Droppings of the wax to sell again”: in Catholic countries, where many wax torches are used, the wax drippings are carefully gathered by the poor boys to sell; in Spain they pick up even the ends of the wax vestas used by smokers at the bull fights for the same purpose. The Eight, the magistrates who governed Florence. Antiphonary, the Roman Service-Book, containing all that is sung in the choir – the antiphons, responses, etc.; it was compiled by Gregory the Great. Carmelites, monks of the Order of Mount Carmel in Syria; established in the twelfth century. Camaldolese, an order of monks founded by St. Romualdo in 1027; the name is derived from the family who owned the land on which the first monastery was built – the Campo Maldoli. “Preaching Friars”: the Dominicans, established by St. Dominic; the name of the “Brothers Preachers” or “Friars Preachers” was given them by Pope Innocent III. in 1215. Giotto, a great architect and painter (1266-1337); he was a friend of Dante. Brother Angelico == Fra Angelico; his real name was Giovanni da Fiesole; he was the famous religious painter, painting the soul and disregarding the flesh; he was said to paint some of his devotional pictures on his knees. Brother Lorenzo, Don Lorenzo. Monaco == the monk; he was a great painter, of the Order of the Camaldolese. Guidi == Tommaso Guidi or Masaccio, nicknamed Hulking Tom, was a painter, born 1401; he “laboured,” says the chronicler, in “nakeds.” “A St. Laurence at Prato,” near Florence, where are frescoes by Lippi: St. Laurence suffered martyrdom by being burned upon a gridiron; he bore it with such fortitude, says the legend, that he cried to his tormentors to turn him over, as he “was done on one side.” Chianti wine, a famous wine of Tuscany. Sant’ Ambrogio’s == Saint Ambrose’s at Florence. “I shall paint God in the midst, Madonna and her babe”: the beautiful picture of the Coronation of the Virgin in the Accademia delle Belle Arti at Florence is the one referred to in these lines. The Browning Society in 1882 published a very fine photograph of this great work, by Alinari Brothers of Florence. The flower songs in the poem are of the variety known as the stornelli; the peasants of Tuscany sing these songs at their work, “and as one ends a song another caps it with a fresh one, and so they go on vying with each other. These stornelli consist of three lines. The first usually contains the name of a flower, which sets the rhyme, and is five syllables long. Then the love theme is told in two lines of eleven syllables each, agreeing by rhyme, assonance, or repetition with the first.” [See Poet Lore, vol ii., p. 262. Miss R. H. Busk’s “Folk Songs of Italy,” and Miss Strettel’s “Spanish and Italian Folk Songs.”]

Francesco Romanelli (Beatrice Signorini), the artist who paints Artemisia’s portrait, which his wife destroys in a fit of jealousy.

Francis Furini, Parleyings with. (Parleyings with Certain People of Importance in their Day: 1887.) [The Man.] “Francis Furini was born in 1600 at Florence, and has been styled the ‘Albani’ and the ‘Guido’ of the Florentine school. At the age of forty he took orders, and until his death in 1649 remained an exemplary parish priest. In his earlier days he was especially famous for his painting of the nude figure; his drawing is remarkably graceful, but the colour is defective. One of his French biographers complains that he paints the nude too well to be quite proper, and points to the ‘Adam and Eve,’ in the Pitti Palace as a proof of this statement. Perhaps the painter thought so too, for there is a tradition that on his death-bed he desired all his undraped pictures to be collected and destroyed. His wishes were not carried out, and few private galleries at Florence are without pictures by him.” (Pall Mall Gazette, January 18th, 1887.)

[The Poem.] In the opening lines we are introduced to the good pastor, the painter-priest who lived two hundred and fifty years ago at Florence, and fed his flock with spiritual food while he helped their bodily necessities. The picture is a pleasant one, but the poet deals not with the pastor but the artist; and this painter of the nude has been selected by Browning as a text on which to express the sentiments of artists on the subject of, —

“The dearFleshly perfection of the human shape,”

as a gospel for mankind. When Mr. Browning writes on art we have, as Mr. Symons expresses it, “painting refined into song.” The lines in the seventh canto beginning —

“Bounteous God,Deviser and dispenser of all giftsTo soul through sense, – in art the soul upliftsMan’s best of thanks!”

aptly define the poet’s position in the passionate defence of the nude as his art-gospel. As we are intended to admire God’s handiwork in the “naked star,” so is “the naked female form” declared to be —