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

Laboratory, The: Ancien Regime. First appeared in Hood’s Magazine, June 1844, to which it was contributed to help Hood in his illness; afterwards published in Dramatic Romances and Lyrics (Bells and Pomegranates, VII.) This poem and The Confessional were printed together, and entitled France and Spain. Mr. Arthur Symons reminds us that Rossetti’s first water-colour was an illustration of this poem, and has for subject and title the line “Which is the poison to poison her, prithee?” The keynote of the poem is jealousy, a distorted love-frenzy that impels to the rival’s extinction. The story is told in the most powerful and concentrated manner. The jealous woman’s whole soul is compressed into her words and actions; her emotion is visible; her voice, subdued yet full of energy, is audible in every line. The woman is a Brinvilliers, who has secured an interview with an alchemist in his laboratory, that she may purchase a deadly poison for her rival. We gather from the first verse that the poison consisted principally of arsenic. The “faint smokes curling whitely,” to protect the chemist from which it was necessary to wear a glass mask, sufficiently supplement our knowledge of the old poisoner’s art to enable us to indicate its nature. The patience of the woman, who in her eagerness for her rival’s death has no desire to hurry the manufacture of the means of it, is powerfully described. She is content to watch the chemist at his deadly work, asking questions in a dainty manner about the secrets of his art. She has all the ideas of “a big dose” which the uninitiated think requisite for big patients. “She’s not little – no minion like me!” “What, only a drop?” she asks. She is anxious to know if it hurts the victim. Is it likely to injure herself too? Reassured on that point, the glass mask is removed, and for reward the old man has all her jewels and gold to his fill. He may kiss her besides, and on the mouth if he will. There is a very remarkable instance in the second verse of the use made of antithesis by the poet. The proper emphasis can only be given when we rightly apprehend the ideas which oppose each other in the lines —

“He is with her, and they know that I knowWhere they are, what they do: they believe my tears flowWhile they laugh, laugh at me, at me fled to the drearEmpty church, to pray God in, for them! – I am here.”

The antithesis of the several sets of ideas is the only safe guide to the emphasis —he as opposed to her, tears to laughter, me to them, the church to the laboratory.12 Although the effects of some of the deadliest poisons were well known to the ancients, their detection and recovery from the body by chemical means is a branch of science of only modern discovery. The Greeks and Romans were well acquainted with mercury, arsenic, henbane, aconite and hemlock. The art of poisoning was brought to great perfection in India; but, though dissection of the living and the dead was practised by the Alexandrian School in the third century B.C., the Greek and Roman physicians were quite incapable of such a knowledge of pathology as would enable them to detect any but the coarsest signs of poisoning in a dead body. Much less were they able to detect or recover by analysis the particular poison used by the criminal. It is not surprising that, under such circumstances, professional poisoners usually escaped punishment. In the fourteenth century arsenic was generally employed. Of the great schools of poisoners which flourished in Italy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Venice was the earliest. Troublesome people were removed by the Council of Ten by means of convenient poisons. Toffana and others combined poisoning with the art of cookery; and T. Baptist Porta, in his book on “Natural Magic,” under the section of cooking, shows that the trades of poisoner and cook were often combined. Toffana was the greatest of all the seventeenth-century poisoners. She made solutions of arsenic of various strengths, and sold them in phials under the name of “Naples Water” or “Acquetta di Napol.” It is said that she poisoned six hundred persons, including Popes Pius III. and Clement XIV. There was practically no fear of detection, and the liquid was sold openly to any one willing to pay the price for a deadly compound; the purpose for which it could alone be employed being perfectly well understood. Mr. Browning’s poem introduces us to a laboratory, where an arsenical preparation is being prepared. The glass mask refered to in the first line was used to protect the purchaser from the white, deadly smoke which the mineral gave off. The poison for which the lady paid so lavishly could be prepared nowadays by any chemist’s apprentice for a few pence; but, plentiful as it is, it is comparatively rarely used by criminals, as the same apprentice could infallibly detect it in the body after death, and reproduce in a test tube the very same poison used by the criminal.

Lady and the Painter, The. (Asolando: 1889.) A lady visiting an artist who has a picture on his easel of a nude female figure, protests against the irreverence to womanhood involved in his inducing a young woman to strip and stand stark-naked as his model. Before replying, he asks the lady what it is that clings half-savage-like around her hat. She, thinking he is admiring her headgear, tells him they are “wild-bird wings, and that the Paris fashion-books say that next year the skirts of women’s dresses are to be feathered too. Owls, hawks, jays and swallows are most in vogue.” Asking if he may speak plainly, and having been answered that he may, he tells Lady Blanche that it would be more to her credit to strip off all her bird-spoils and stand naked to help art, like his poor model, as a type of purest womanhood. “You, clothed with murder of His best of harmless beings, what have you to teach?” The poem is directed against the savage and wicked custom of wearing the plumage of birds, by which millions of God’s beautiful creatures are doomed annually to slaughter; by wearing gloves made of skins stripped from the living bodies of animals (if report be true); and by the use of sealskin and other animal coverings, which necessitates the wholesale slaughter of countless thousands of happy creatures in Arctic seas. I recently asked Miss Frances Power Cobbe – the noble lady who was a friend of Mr. Browning, and who has devoted her life and splendid literary talents to befriending dumb animals and protesting against cruelty in high places – to furnish me with some account of the agitation against the foolish habit of wearing bird-plumage in women’s bonnets. I have received from Miss Cobbe the following particulars: “The Plumage League began December 1885. It started with a letter in the Times, December 18th, 1885 (quoted in extenso in the Zoophilist, January 1886, p. 164), by the Rev. F. O. Morris, embodying one from Lady Mount Temple. Before May 1886 a long list of names (given in the Zoophilist) were given as patrons of the League, including Lady Mount Temple, Duchess of Sutherland, Lady Londesborough, Lady Sudeley, Hon. Mrs. R. C. Boyle, Louisa Marchioness of Waterford, Princess Christian, Lady Burdett Coutts, Lady Eastlake, Lady John Manners, Lady Tennyson, Lady Herbert of Lea, and about forty other ladies of rank. I should say that the League was originated by Lady Mount Temple and the Rev. F. O. Morris. There is another society in existence for the same purpose, working in London – the Birds’ Protection Society – one of whose local secretaries lately applied to me for a subscription.”

Lady Carlisle, Lucy Percy. (Strafford.) She was the daughter of the ninth Earl of Northumberland, and did her utmost to save Strafford’s life.

Lapaccia. Mona Lapaccia was Fra Lippo Lippi’s aunt, the sister of his father, who brought him up till he was eight years old, when, being no longer able to maintain him, she took him to the Carmelite Convent.

La Saisiaz (A. E. S., Sept. 14th, 1877). – Mr. Browning was staying during the autumn of 1877, with his sister, amongst the mountains near Geneva, at a villa called “La Saisiaz,” which in the Savoyard dialect means “The Sun.” They were accompanied on this occasion by Miss Ann Egerton Smith. The happiness of the visit to this beautiful spot was marred by the sudden death of Miss Smith, from heart disease, on the night of September 14th. The poem is the result of the poet’s musings on death, God, the soul, and the future state. It is one of Mr. Browning’s noblest and most beautiful utterances on the great questions of the Supreme Being and the ultimate destiny of the soul of man. It is Theism of the loftiest kind, and the grounds on which it is based are as philosophical as they are poetically expressed. The work has often been compared with the In Memoriam of Tennyson. The powerful optimism, the robust confidence and devout faith in the infinite love and wisdom of the Supreme Being, are in each poem emphasized again and again. After several pages of description of the scenery of the locality, Mr. Browning imagines that a spirit of the place bade him question, and promised answer, of the problems of existence —

“Does the soul survive the body? Is there God’s self – no or yes?”

He is weak, but “weakness never needs be falseness.” He will go to the foundations of his faith; he will take stock – see how he stands in the matter of belief and doubt; will fight the question out without fence or self-deception. It shall not satisfy him to say that a second life is necessary to give value to the present, or that pleasure, if not permanent, turns to pain; in the presence of that recent death there must be rigid honesty, and it does not satisfy him to know there’s ever some one lives though we be dead. Such a thought is repugnant to him, – not that repugnance matters if it be all the truth. He must, however, ask if there be any prospect of supplemental happiness? In the face of the strong bodies yoked to stunted souls, and the spirits that would soar were they not tethered by a fleshly chain; of the hindering helps, and the hindrances which are really helps in disguise, – the fact remains that hindered we are. However the fact be explained, life is a burthen; at best, more or less, in its whole amount is it curse or blessing? He thinks he has courage enough to fairly ask this question, and accept the answer of reason. He has questioned, and has been answered. Now, a question presupposes two things: that which questions and answers must exist. “I think, therefore I am” (Cogito, ergo sum), said Descartes. (And this is about the only thing in life of which we can be certain. Matter may be all illusion; as Bishop Berkeley said, we may be living in one long dream. But at least it takes a mind to do that. We therefore are; soul is, whatever else is not.) The second thing presupposed is, that the fact of being answered is proof that there must be a force outside itself:

“Actual ere its own beginning, operative through its course,Unaffected by its end, – that this thing likewise needs must be.”

Here, then, are two facts: the last we may call God; the first, Soul. If an objector demands that he shall prove these facts his answer is that, recognising they surpass his power of proving these facts, proves them such to him:

“Ask the rush if it suspectsWhence and how the stream which floats it had a rise, and where and howFalls or flows on still!”

If the rush could think and speak, it would say it only knows that it floats and is, and that an external stream bears it onward. What may happen to it the rush knows not: it may be wrecked, or it may land on shore and take root again; but this is mere surmise, not knowledge. Can we have better foundation for believing that, because we doubtless are, we shall as doubtless be? Men say we have, “because God seems good and wise.” But there reigns wrong in life. “God seems powerful,” they say; “why, then, are right and wrong at strife?” “Anyhow, we want a future life,” say men; “without it life would be brutish.” But wanting a thing, and hoping for it, are not proofs that our aspirations will be gratified; out of all our hopes, how many have had complete fulfilment? None. But “we believe,” men sigh. So far as others are concerned the poet will not speak – he knows not. But he knows not what he is himself, which nevertheless is an ignorance which is no barrier to his knowing that he exists and can recognise what gives him pain or pleasure. What others are or are not is surmise; his own experience is knowledge. To his own experience, then, he appeals. He has lived, done, suffered, loved, hated, learned and taught this: there is no reconciling wisdom with a distracted world, no reconciling goodness with evil if it is to finally triumph, no reconciling power if the aim is to fail; if – and he only speaks for himself, his own convictions, and not for any other man’s – if you hinder him from assuming that earth is a school-time and life a place of probation, all is chaos to him; he cannot say how these arguments and reasons may affect other men; he reiterates that he speaks for himself alone, because to colour-blind men the grass which is green to him may be red, – who is to decide which uses the proper term, supposing only two men existed, and one called grass green, the other red? So God must be the referee in His own case. The earth, as a school, is perhaps different for each individual; our pains and pleasures no more tally than our colour-sense. The poet, therefore, recognises that for him the world is his world, and no other man’s; he is to judge what it means for himself. He will therefore proceed to estimate the world as it seems to him, exactly as he would judge of an artisan’s work, – is it a success or a failure? Was God’s will or His power in fault when the vapours shrouded the blue heaven, and the flowers fell at the breath of the dragon? Death waits on every rose-bloom, pain upon every pleasure, shadow on every brightness. We cannot love, but death lurks hard by; cannot learn sympathy unless men suffer pain. If he is told that all this is necessity, he will bear it as best he can; if, on the other hand, you say it has been ordained by a Cause all-good, all-wise, all-potent, he protests as a man he will not acquiesce if, at the same time, you tell him that this life is all:

“No, as I am man, I mourn the poverty I must impute:Goodness, wisdom, power, all bounded, each a human attribute!”

Speaking for himself he counts this show of things a failure if after this life there be no other; if the school is not to educate for another sphere, all its lessons are fruitless pain and toil. But, grant a second life, he heartily acquiesces; he sees triumph in misfortune’s worst assaults, and gain in all the loss. When was he so near to knowledge as when hampered by his recognised ignorance? Was not beauty made more precious by the deformities surrounding him? Did he not learn to love truth better when he contemplated the reign of falsehood? And for love, who knows what its value is till he has suffered by the death-pang? The poet here breaks off the argument to address the spirit of the lost friend, and express his hope that one day they may meet again: —

“Can it be, and must, and will it?”

Then he recalls his thoughts from the region of surmise, to which they have wandered, home to stern and sober fact. He needs not the old plausibilities of the “misery done to man” and the “injustice of God,” if another life compensate not for the ills of the present; he is prepared to take his stand as umpire to the champions Fancy and Reason, as they dispute the case between them. Fancy begins the amicable war by conceding that the surmise of life after death is as plain as a certainty, and acknowledges that there are now three facts – God, the soul, and the future life. Reason assents, sees there is definite advantage in the acknowledgment, admits the good of evil in the present life, detects the progress of everything towards good, and, as the next life must be an advance upon this one, suggests that, at the first cloud athwart man’s sky, he should not hesitate, but die. Fancy then increases its concession, and sees the necessity of a hell for the punishment of those who would act the butterfly before they have played out the worm. Thus we have five facts now – God, soul, earth, heaven and hell. Reason declares that more is required: are we to shut our eyes, stop our ears, and live here in a state of nescience, simply waiting for the life to come, which is to do everything for the soul? Fancy protests that this present stage of our existence has worth incalculable – that every moment spent here means so much loss or gain for that next life which on this life depends. We have now six plain facts established. Reason points out that Fancy has proved too much by appending a definite reward to every good action and a fixed punishment to every bad one. We lay down laws as stringent in the moral as the material world. If we say, “Would you live again, be just,” it is to put a necessity upon man as determined as the law of respiration – “Would you live now, regularly draw your breath.” If immortality were anything more than surmise, if heaven and hell were as plainly the consequences of our course of life here as a fall of a breach of the laws of gravity, then men would be compelled to do right and avoid evil. Probation would be gone, our freedom would be destroyed, neither merit nor discipline would remain —

“Thus have we come back full circle.”

The poet says he hopes, – he has no more than hope, but hope – no less than hope. Standing on the mountain, looking down upon the Lake of Geneva, his eye falls on the places where dwelt four great men: Rousseau, who lived at Geneva; Byron, lived at the villa called “Diodati,” at Geneva; and wrote the Prisoner of Chillon at Ouchy, on the Lake; Voltaire, who built himself a château at Fernex; Gibbon, who wrote the concluding portion of his great work at Lausanne. The somewhat obscure reference to the “pine tree of Makistos,” near the close of the poem, has caused considerable puzzling of brains amongst Browning students, none of whom have been able to assist me in solving the problem. So far as I am able to understand it, the solution seems to be this: The reference to Makistos is from the Agamemnon of Æschylus. The town of Makistos had a watch-tower on a neighbouring eminence, from which the beacon lights flashed the news of the fall of Troy to Greece. Clytemnestra says:

“sending a bright blaze from Ide,Beacon did beacon send,Pass on – the pine-tree – to Makistos’ watch-place.”

So the famous writers named as connected with that part of the Lake of Geneva contemplated by Mr. Browning, who were all Theists, passed on the pine-tree torch of Theism from age to age – Diodati, Rousseau, Gibbon, Byron, Voltaire, who —

“at least believed in Soul, was very sure of God.”

(Voltaire built a church at Ferney, over the portal of which he affixed the ostentatious inscription, “Deo erexit Voltaire.”) Many writers (Canon Cheyne for one, in the Origin of the Psalter, p. 410) have thought that by the lines beginning, “He there with the brand flamboyant,” etc., the poet referred to himself. Of course, any such idea is preposterous; the reference was to Voltaire. Mr. Browning, apart from the question of the egotism involved, could not say of himself, “he at least believed in soul.” There was no minimising of religious faith in the poet Still less could he speak of himself as “crowned by prose and verse.”

Notes. —Python, the Rock-snake, the typical genus of Pythonidæ; “Athanasius contra mundum” == Athanasius against the world. St. Athanasius, Bishop of Alexandria, and one of the most illustrious defenders of the Christian faith, was born about the year 297. In defending the Nicene Creed he had so much opposition to contend with from the Arian heretics that, in the words of Hooker, it was “the whole world against Athanasius, and Athanasius against it.”

Last Ride Together, The. (Men and Women, 1855; Romances, 1863; Dramatic Romances, 1868.) This poem is considered by many critics to be the noblest of all Browning’s love poems; for dramatic intensity, for power, for its exhibition of what Mr. Raleigh has aptly termed Browning’s “tremendous concentration of his power in excluding the object world and its relations,” the poem is certainly unequalled. It is a poem of unrequited love, in which there is nothing but the noblest resignation; a compliance with the decrees of fate, but with neither a shadow of disloyalty to the ideal, nor despair of the result of the dismissal to the lover’s own soul development. The woman may reject him, – there is no wounded pride; she does not love him, – he is not angry with her, nor annoyed that she fails to estimate him as highly as he estimates himself. He has the ideal in his heart; it shall be cherished as the occupant of his heart’s throne for ever – of the ideal he, at least, can never be deprived. This ideal shall be used to elevate and sublimate his desires, to expand his soul to the fruition of his boundless aspiration for human love, used till it transfigures the human in the man till it almost becomes Divine. And so – as he knows his fate – since all his life seemed meant for, fails – his whole heart rises up to bless the woman, to whom he gives back the hope she gave; he asks only its memory and her leave for one more last ride with him. It is granted:

“Who knows but the world may end to-night?”

(a line which no poet but Browning ever could have written. The force of the hour, the value of the quintessential moment as factors in the development of the soul, have never been set forth, even by Browning, with such startling power.) She lay for a moment on his breast, and then the ride began. He will not question how he might have succeeded better had he said this or that, done this or the other. She might not only not have loved him, she might have hated. He reflects that all men strive, but few succeed. He contrasts the petty done with the vast undone,

“What hand and brain went ever paired?What heart alike conceived and dared?What act proved all its thought had been?What will but felt the fleshly screen?”

And the meaning of it all, the reason of the struggle, the outcome of the effort? The poet alone can tell: he says what we feel. “But, poet,” he asks, “are you nearer your own sublime than we rhymeless ones? You sculptor, you man of music, have you attained your aims?” Then he consoles himself that if here we had perfect bliss, still there is the life beyond, and it is better to have a bliss to die with dim-descried —

“Earth being so good, would heaven seem best?”

What if for ever he rode on with her as now, “The instant made eternity”?

Lazarus, who was raised from the dead, is the real hero of the poem An Epistle.

Léonce Miranda. (Red Cotton Night-Cap Country.) The principal actor in the drama was the son and heir of a wealthy Paris jeweller. He formed an illicit connection with Clara de Millefleurs, and lived with her at St. Rambert, finally committing suicide from the tower on his estate. It is said that the real name of the firm of jewellers was “Meller Brothers,” and that Clara de Millefleurs was Anna de Beaupré.

Levi Lincoln Thaxter. Poet Lore, vol. i., p. 598 (1889), states that Mr. Browning wrote an inscription for the grave of Levi Lincoln Thaxter, a well known American Browning reader, on the Maine sea-coast. The inscription runs thus: – “Levi Lincoln Thaxter. Born in Watertown, Massachusetts, Feb. 1st, 1824. Died May 31st, 1884.

“Thou, whom these eyes saw never! Say friends trueWho say my soul, helped onward by my song,Though all unwittingly, has helped thee too?I gave of but the little that I knew;How were the gift requited, while alongLife’s path I pace, couldst thou make weakness strong!Help me with knowledge – for Life’s Old – Death’s New!”R. B. to L. L. T., April 1885.

Life in a Love. (Men and Women, 1855, Lyrics, 1863; Dramatic Lyrics, 1868.) A man is content to spend his whole life on the chance that the woman whose heart he pursues will one day cease to elude him. When the old hope is dashed to the ground, a new one springs up and flies straight to the same mark. And what if he fail of his purpose here? How can life be better expended than in devotion to one worthy ideal?