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

“Rent awayBy treason from my rightful pride of place,I was not destined to the shame below.A cleft had caught me.”

Revealing to him the bitterness of her position, hanging, as it were, over the brink of a yawning precipice, his old love for her is reawakened, and he kneels to the injured woman. He entreats her to fly with him to

“A certain refuge, solitary homeTo hide in.······Come with me, love, loved once, loved only, come,Blend loves there!”

But the woman sees through him, and says:

“Your smiles, your tears, prayers, curses move alikeMy crowned contempt.”

And while he is kneeling there, in bursts the young man, who has returned to say that his aunt declines to meet him. He is startled to see the lady to whom he had vainly offered his heart four years ago, and rushes to the conclusion that he too has been entrapped for some purpose. The fifth section of the poem opens with a scornful denunciation of the trick which he considers stands confessed in the scene which he beholds. “O you two base ones, male and female! Sir!” he exclaims; “half an hour ago I held your master for my best of friends, and four years since you seemed my heart’s one love!” The woman explains to him that she has been sent for simply to counsel his cousin on the question of her proposed marriage. She finds him innocent save in folly, and will so report. The elder man she bids to leave the youth, and leave unsullied the heart she rescues and would lay beside another’s. While she speaks the devil is tempting him to one more crime. He will turn affairs to his own advantage. He writes some lines in the album before him, closes the book, hands it to the indignant woman, and begs her to leave him alone with his friend while he discusses the situation. In the book which she receives he has written a note to her telling her that her young lover is still faithful to her, and threatening her that if she does not receive him on familiar terms the story of her past shame shall be exposed to her husband. Left alone with the young man, he opens out a scheme of infernal ingenuity, whereby at once he will pay his gambling debt and avenge himself for the contempt and scorn with which his unhappy victim has once more received the offer of his affection. He proposes to barter the woman who has unwittingly put herself into his power – to compel her to yield herself up to the man in exchange for the ten thousand pounds he cannot otherwise pay. He explains to him that she has deluded her parson husband – would have yielded to himself had he not determined to substitute his friend. “Make love to her; pick no phrase; prevent all misconception: there’s the fruit to pluck or let alone at pleasure!” He leaves the room, and in superb composure the intended victim enters. Captive of wickedness, she warns him: “Back, in God’s name!” “Sin no more!” she cries: “I am past sin now.” She implores him to break the fetters which have bound him to the evil influence which has destroyed her life. Her noble bearing under the terrible circumstances assures him of her innocence of any complicity in a trick. He tells her the man has told heaps of lies about her, which he had not believed. Blushing and stumbling in his speech, he contrives to let her know the use that was to be made of her. Not knowing if there were truth in what was told him of her marriage, he offers her his hand if she is free to accept it, – any way, to take him as her friend. She gives him her hand. At that moment the adversary returns. “You accept him?” he asks. “Till death us do part!” she answers. “But before death parts, read here the marriage licence which makes us one.” He then displays the awful words addressed to her in the fatal page she holds in her hand. She reads, and when she comes to the last line —

“Consent – you stop my mouth, the only way” —

turning to the young man, she pitifully asks, “How could mortal ‘stop it’?” “So!” he cries. “A tiger-flash, and death’s out and on him!” In the closing scene the wretched, hunted woman dies. She has secured her vindicator’s acquittal on the charge of murder by writing in the album that he has saved her from the villain, righteously slain, who would have outraged her. As she dies the young girl who was to have married the defender of the dead woman appears on the scene, and the tragedy closes. In Notes and Queries for March 25th, 1876, Dr. F. J. Furnivall thus mentions the incidents on which the poem is based: “The story told by Mr. Browning in this poem is, in its main outlines, a real one – that of Lord De Ros, once a friend of the great Duke of Wellington, and about whom there is much in the Greville Memoirs. The original story was, of course, too repulsive to be adhered to in all its details – of, first, the gambling lord producing the portrait of the lady he had seduced and abandoned, and offering his expected dupe, but real beater, an introduction to the lady as a bribe to induce him to wait for payment of the money he had won; secondly, the eager acceptance of the bribe by the younger gambler, and the suicide of the lady from horror at the base proposal of her old seducer. The story made a great sensation in London over thirty years ago. Readers of The Inn Album know how grandly Mr. Browning has lifted the base young gambler, through the renewal of that old love, which the poet has invented, into one of the most pathetic creations of modern time, and has spared the base old roué the degradation of the attempt to sell the love which was once his delight, and which, in the poem, he seeks to regain, with feelings one must hope are real, as the most prized possession of his life. As to the lady, the poet has covered her with no false glory or claim on our sympathy. From the first she was a law unto herself; she gratified her own impulses, and she reaped the fruit of this. Her seducer has made his confession of his punishment, and has attributed, instead of misery, comfort and ease to her. She has to tell him, and the young man who has given her his whole heart, that the supposed comfort and ease have been to her simply hell; and tell, too, why she cannot accept the true love that, under other conditions, would have been her way back to heaven and life. What, then, can be her end? No higher power has she ever sought. Self-contained, she has sinned and suffered. She can do no more. By her own hand she ends her life; and the curtain falls on the most profoundly touching and most powerful poem of modern times.” The young girl of the poem is the invention of the poet; the other characters took part in the actual tragedy. In his Memoirs, first series, Greville mentions Lord De Ros from time to time, and they travelled together in Italy. Under date of “Newmarket, March 29th, 1839,” Greville makes the following entry in the first volume of the second series of his Memoirs, concerning the death of his friend: “Poor De Ros expired last night soon after twelve, after a confinement of two or three months from the time he returned to England. His end was enviably tranquil, and he bore his protracted sufferings with astonishing fortitude and composure. Nothing ruffled his temper or disturbed his serenity. His faculties were unclouded, his memory retentive, his perceptions clear to the last; no murmur of impatience ever escaped him, no querulous word, no ebullition of anger or peevishness; he was uniformly patient, mild, indulgent, deeply sensible of kindness and attention, exacting nothing, considerate of others and apparently regardless of self, overflowing with affection and kindness of manner and language to all around him, and exerting all his moral and intellectual energies with a spirit and resolution that never flagged till within a few hours of his dissolution, when nature gave way, and he sank into a tranquil unconsciousness, in which life gently ebbed away. Whatever may have been the error of his life, he closed the scene with a philosophical dignity not unworthy of a sage, and with a serenity and sweetness of disposition of which Christianity itself could afford no more shining or delightful example. In him I have lost, ‘half lost before,’ the last and greatest of the friends of my youth; and I am left a more solitary and a sadder man.”

Instans Tyrannus == The Threatening Tyrant. (Men and Women, 1855; Dramatic Romances, 1868.) The title of this poem was suggested by Horace’s Ode on the Just Man (Od. iii. 3. 1): —

“Justum et tenacem propositi virum,Non civium ardor prava jubentium,Non vultus instantis tyranni,” etc.

(‘The just man, firm to his purpose, is not to be shaken from his fixed resolve by the fury of a mob laying upon him their impious behests, nor by the frown of a threatening tyrant, etc.’) These lines are said to have been repeated by the celebrated De Witte while he was subject to torture. When men or causes are suppressed by tyranny, the tyrant knows well in his heart that force alone, and not justice, enables him to crush opposition to his will; and he is the first to see, even if he do not acknowledge, the Divine Arm thrust forth from the heavens to protect his victims and avenge their wrongs. From some undefined cause a poor, contemptible man was the object of a tyrant’s hate: he struck him, tried to bribe him, tempted his blood and his flesh. Having tried every way to extinguish the man, he contrived thunder above and mine below him to destroy, as a rat in a hole, this friendless wretch, when suddenly the man saw God’s arm across the sky. The man

– “caught at God’s skirts, and prayed!So, I was afraid!”

[Archdeacon Farrar refers the incidents of this poem to the persecution of the early Christians. —Browning Society Papers, Pt VII., p. 22*.]

In Three Days. (Men and Women, 1855; Dramatic Lyrics, 1868.) A lover anticipates that in three days he shall see his lady. He is aware that three days may change his future, as has often been changed the history of the world in the time. He knows, too, that though three days may cast no shadow in his way, still the years to follow may bring changes and chances of unimagined end. He reiterates that in three days he shall see her, and fear of all that the future may have in store is absorbed in the blissful anticipation.

Italian in England, The. (Dramatic Romances and Lyrics, in Bells and Pomegranates, No. VII., 1845.) The incident is not historical, though something of the kind might well have happened to any of the Italian patriots in their revolt against the Austrian domination. A prominent Italian patriot is hiding from the Austrian oppressors of his country after an unsuccessful rising. He has taken refuge in England, and the poem tells how the Austrians pursued him everywhere, and how he would have been taken if a peasant girl, to whom he confessed his identity, had not preferred humanity and the love of her country to the gold she might have earned by delivering him to his pursuers. [Mazzini must have gone through many such experiences, and the poem was one which he very highly appreciated.] Hunted by the Austrian bloodhounds, hiding in an old aqueduct, up to the neck in ferns for three days, the pangs of hunger induced him to attract the attention of a peasant girl going to her work with her companions: he threw his glove, to strike her as she passed. Without giving any sign that could acquaint her friends with her object, she glanced round and saw him beckon; breaking a branch from a tree, so as to recognise the spot, she picked up the glove and rejoined her party. In an hour she returned alone. He had not intended to confide in the woman, but her noble face led him to confess he was the man on whose head a great price was set. He felt sure he would not be betrayed. He bade her bring paper, pen and ink, and carry his letter to Padua, to the cathedral; then proceed to a certain confessional which he mentions, and whisper his password. If it was answered in the terms he named, then she was to give the letter to the priest. She promised to do as he desired. In three days more she appeared again at his hiding-place. She told him she had a lover who could do much to aid him. She brought him drink and food. In four days the scouts gave up the search, and went in another direction. At last help arrived from his friends at Padua. He kissed the maiden’s hand, and laid his own in blessing on her head. When he took the boat from the seashore, on the night of his escape, she followed him to the vessel. He left, and never saw her more. And now that he is safe in England, he reflects that it is long since he had a thought for aught but Italy. Those whom he had trusted, those to whom he had looked for help, had made terms with the oppressors of his country; his presence in his own land would be awkward for his brethren. But there is one “in that dear, lost land” whose calm smile he would like to see; he would like to know of her future, her children’s ages and their names, to kiss once more the hand that saved him, and once again to lay his own in blessing on her head, and go his way. “But to business!”

Notes. —Metternich: the great Austrian diplomatist, and enemy of Italian independence. Charles: Carlo Alberto, King of Sardinia. He resorted to severe measures against the party known as “Young Italy,” founded by Mazzini. He died in 1849. Duomo, the cathedral. Tenebræ == darkness: the office of matins and lauds, for the three last days in Holy Week. Fifteen lighted candles are placed on a triangular stand, and at the conclusion of each psalm one is put out, till a single candle is left at the top of the triangle. The extinction of the other candles is said to figure the growing darkness of the world at the time of the Crucifixion. The last candle (which is not extinguished, but hidden behind the altar for a few moments) represents Christ over whom Death could not prevail.

Ivàn Ivànovitch. (Dramatic Idyls, First Series, 1879.) Ivàn Ivànovitch, or John Jackson, as his name would be in English, was skilled in the use of the axe, as the Russian workman is. Employed one day in his yard, in the village where he lived, suddenly over the snow-covered landscape came a burst of sledge bells, the sound of horse’s hoofs galloping; then a sledge appeared drawn by a horse, which fell down as it reached the place. What seemed a frozen corpse lay in the vehicle: it was Dmitri’s wife, without Dmitri and the children, who left the village a month ago. They restore the woman, who utters a loud and long scream, followed by sobs and gasps, as, with returning life, she takes in the fact that she is safe. “But yesterday!” she cries. “Oh, God the Father, Son and Holy Ghost, cannot You bring again my blessed yesterday? I had a child on either knee, and, dearer than the two, a babe close to my heart. Intercede, sweet Mother, with thy Son Almighty – undo all done last night!” Then she reminds them how, a month ago, she and her children had accompanied her husband, who had gone to work at a church many a league away: five of them in that sledge – Ivàn, herself, and three children. The work finished, they were about to return, when the village caught fire. Then Ivàn hurried his family into the sledge, and bade them hasten home while he remained to combat the flames. He bade them wrap round them every rug, and leave Droug, the old horse, to find his way home. They start; soon the night comes on; the moon rises. They pass a pine forest: a noise startles the horse – his ears go back, he snuffs, snorts, then plunges madly. Pad, pad, behind them are the wolves in pursuit – an army of them; every pine tree they pass adds a fiend to the pack; the eldest lead the way, their eyes green-glowing brass. The horse does his best; but the first of the band – that Satan-face – draws so near, his white teeth gleam, he is on the sledge – “perhaps her hands relaxed her grasp of her boy,” she says; “for he was gone.” The cursed crew fight for their share; they are too busy to pursue. She urges the horse to increased exertion. Alas! the pack is after them again; “Satan-face” is first, as before, and ravening for more. The mother fights with the monster, but the next boy is gone – plucked from the arms she clasped round him for protection. Another respite, while the fiends dispute for their share; but, as they fly over the snow, the leader of the pack tells his companions that their food is escaping; he leaves them to pick the bones, and – pad, pad! – is after the sledge again. All fight’s in vain: the green brass points, the dread fiend’s eyes, pierce to the woman’s brain – she falls on her back in the sledge; but, wedging in and in, past her neck, her breasts, her heart, Satan-face is away with her last, her baby boy. She remembered no more. And now she is at home – childless, but with her life. And Ivàn the woodsman sternly looks; the woman kneels. Solemnly he raises his axe, and one blow falls – headless she kneels on still —

“It had to be.I could no other: God it was bade ‘Act for Me!’”

He wipes his axe on a strip of bark, and returns silently to his work. The Jews, the gipsies, the whole crew, seethe and simmer, but say no word. Then comes the village priest, and with him the commune’s head, Stàrosta, wielder of life and death; they survey the corpse, they hear the story. The priest proclaimed

“Ivàn Ivànovitch God’s servant!”

“Amen!” murmured the crowd, and “left acquittal plain adjudged.” They told Ivàn he was free. “How otherwise?” he asked.

Notes. —Ivàn Ivànovitch is “an imaginary personage, who is the embodiment of the peculiarities of the Russian people, in the same way as John Bull represents the English and Johnny Crapaud the French character. He is described as a lazy, good-natured person.” (Webster’s Dict.) A verst is equal to about two-thirds of an English mile. Droug: the horse’s name means friend, and is pronounced “drook.” Pope should not be spelled with a capital; it is merely the Russian term for priest —papa, father. Pomeschìk means a landed proprietor. Stàrosta, the old man of the village, the overseer.

This is a variant of a Russian wolf-story which, in one form or another, we all heard in our childhood. The poet visited Russia in the course of his great tour in Europe in 1833, and he has told the familiar tale of the unhappy mother who saved her own life by throwing one after another of her children to the pursuing wolves, with all the local colouring and fidelity to the facts to which we are accustomed in the poet’s work. Not merely as a tale dramatically told are we to consider the poem; but – as might be expected – we must look upon it as a problem in mental pathology. The superficial observer, looking upon the mere facts, and not troubling very much about the psychology of the case, will at once condemn the unhappy mother, and execute her as promptly in his own mind as did Ivàn Ivànovitch with his axe. But rough and ready judgments, however necessary in the conduct of our daily life, are frequently unsound; and the voice of the people is about the last voice that should be listened to in such a case as this. If a man who is usually considered a sane and decent member of society suddenly does some abnormal and outrageous thing, we at once ask ourselves, “Is he mad?” If a mother, any mother, suddenly violates the maternal instinct in a flagrant manner, we immediately suspect her of mental derangement. The maternal instinct is the strongest thing in nature; the ties which bind a woman to her offspring are stronger, in the ordinary healthy mother, than the ties which bind a man to decent and ordinary observance of the laws of society. Old Bailey judgments are not to be employed in such a case as this; it is one for a specialist. And we apprehend there is not a competent authority in brain troubles living who would not acquit Louscha on the ground of insanity.

Ixion. (Jocoseria, 1883.) Ixion, in Greek mythology, was the son of Phlegyas and king of the Lapithæ. He married Dia, daughter of Deioneus, and promised to make his father-in-law certain bridal presents. To avoid the fulfilment of his promise, he invited him to a banquet, and when Deioneus came to the feast he cruelly murdered him. No one would purify him for the murder, and he was consequently shunned by all mankind. Zeus, however, took pity on him, and took him up to heaven and there purified him. At the table of the gods he fell in love with Hera (Juno), and afterwards attempted to seduce her. Ixion was banished from heaven, and by the command of Zeus was tied by Mercury to a wheel which perpetually revolved in the air. Ixion, condemned to eternal punishment, is in the poem described as defying Zeus after the manner of Prometheus. It is impossible to doubt that Mr. Browning intends to represent the popular idea of God and his own attitude towards the doctrine of eternal punishment. It is, however, only the caricature of God created by popular misconception at which the poet aims, whatever may have to be said of his opinions concerning eschatology. As Caliban thought there was a Quiet above Setebos, so Ixion appeals to the Potency over Zeus. The truth is intended that both unsophisticated man in the savage state and the highest type of cultured man agree in their theological beliefs so far as to acknowledge a Supreme Being of a higher character than the anthropomorphic God of popular worship. Of course both Caliban and Ixion talk Browningese. Ixion is represented as comparing himself with his torturer: —

“Behold us!Here the revenge of a God, there the amends of a Man” —

a man with bodily powers constantly renewed, to enable him to suffer. Above the torment is a rainbow of hope, built of the vapour, pain-wrung, which the light of heaven, in passing tinges with the colour of hope. Endowed with bodily powers intended to be God’s ministers, Ixion has been betrayed by them. But he was but man foiled by sense; he has endured enough suffering to teach him his error and his folly. “Why make the agony perpetual?” “To punish thee,” Zeus may reply. Ixion says he once was king of Thessaly: he had to punish crime. Had he been able to read the hearts of the criminals whom he sent to their doom, and had plainly seen repentance there, would he not have given them

“Life to retraverse the past, light to retrieve the misdeed?”

Zeus made man, with flaw or faultless: it was his work. Ixion had been admitted, all human as he was, to the company of the gods as their equal. He had faith in the good faith and the love of Zeus, and for acting upon it was cast from Olympus to Erebus. Man conceived Zeus as possessing his own virtues: he trusted, loved him because Zeus aspired to be equal in goodness to man. Ixion defies him, tells him he apes the man who made him; it is Zeus who is hollowness. The iris, born of Ixion’s tears, sweat and blood, bursting to vapour above, arching his torment, glorifies his pain; and man, even from hell’s triumph, may look up and rejoice. He rises from the wreck, past Zeus to the Potency above him —

“Thither I rise, whilst thou – Zeus, keep the godship and sink!”

The Zeus of the poem bears no relation whatever to the Christian’s God. The Potency over all is the All-Father, the God of Love, who yet, in Infinite Love, may punish rebellious man, who conceivably may reject His love, may never feel a touch of the repentance which Ixion declared he felt, who suffering and still sinning, hating and still rebelling, may conceivably be left to the consequences of the rebellion which knows no cessation, as the suffering no respite.

Notes. —Sisuphos, “the crafty”: son of Æolus, punished in the other world by being forced for ever to keep on rolling a block of stone to the top of a steep hill, only to see it roll again to the valley, and to start the toilsome task again. Tantalos, a wealthy king of Sipylus in Phrygia. He was a favourite of the gods, and allowed to share their meals; but he insulted them, and was thrown into Tartarus. He suffered from hunger and thirst, immersed in water up to the chin; when he opened his mouth the water dried up and the fruits suspended before him vanished into the air. Heré, in Greek mythology the same as Juno, queen of heaven and wife of Zeus or Jupiter. Thessaly, a country of Greece, bounded on the south by the southern parts of Greece, on the east by the Ægean, on the north by Macedonia and Mygdonia, and on the west by Illyricum and Epirus. Olumpos, a mountain in Thessaly. On the highest peak is the throne of Zeus, and it is there that he summons the assemblies of the gods. Erebos, in Greek mythology “the primeval darkness.” The word is usually applied to the lower regions, filled with impenetrable darkness. Tartaros-doomed == hell-doomed.