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

Poetics. (Asolando, 1889.) The singer says the foolish call their Love “My rose,” “My swan,” or they compare her to the maid-moon blessing the earth below. He will have none of this: he tells the rose there is no balm like breath; bids the swan bend its neck its best, – his love’s is the whiter curve. Let the moon be the moon, – he is not afraid to place his Love beside it. She is her human self, and no lower words will describe her.

Polyxena. (King Victor and King Charles.) The wife of King Charles: full of resolution, and instinctively sees the right thing, and does it at the appropriate moment. Her “noble and right woman’s manliness,” as Mr. Browning calls it, enables her to counteract her husband’s weakness and to clear his mental vision. Magnanimous and loyal to all, especially to herself and truth, she is one of the poet’s finest female characters.

Pompilia. (The Ring and the Book.) She was the wife of Count Guido Franceschini, and he killed her, with her foster-parents, when she escaped from his cruel treatment and fled to Rome with the good priest Caponsacchi. She is Browning’s noblest and most beautiful female character. There is an excellent study of Pompilia in Poet Lore, vol. i., p. 263. The keynote of her character is found in the line of the poem —

“I knew the right place by foot’s feel;I took it, and tread firm there.”

Ponte dell’ Angelo (Venice) == The Angel’s Bridge. (Asolando, 1889.) Boverio, in his Annals, 1552, n. 69, relates this legend of Our Lady. It is recorded at length in The Glories of Mary, by St. Alphonsus Liguori (p. 192), a curious work which contains a great number of such stories, which have for their moral the efficacy of prayers to Our Lady as a protection from the devil. On one of the large canals at Venice is a house with the figure of an angel guarding it from harm. Once upon a time (says Father Boverio in his Annals) this house belonged to a lawyer, who was a cruel oppressor of all who sought his advice; never was such an extortionate rascal, though a devout one. On one occasion, after a particularly lucrative week, he determined to ask some holy man to dinner, as he could not get the memory of a widow whom he had wronged out of his mind; so he invited the chief of the Capucins to disinfect his house by his holy presence. The monk duly presented himself, and was informed that a most admirable helpmate in the house was an ape, who worked for him indefatigably. The host leaves his guest for awhile, that he may go below to see how the dinner progresses. No sooner had the lawyer left the room than the monk, by the instinct which saints possess for detecting the devil under every disguise, adjures the ape to come out of his hiding-place and show himself in propriâ personâ. Satan stands forth, and explains that he is there to convey to hell the lawyer who plagued the widows and orphans by his exactions. The monk asks how it came to pass that he had so long delayed God’s commission by acting as servant where he should have been a minister of justice. The devil explains that the lawyer had placed himself under the Virgin’s protection by the prayers which he never intermitted; thus the man is armed in mail, and cannot be lugged off to hell while saying, “Save me, Madonna!” If he should discontinue that prayer, Satan would pounce on him at once. He waits, therefore, hoping to catch him napping. The holy man adjures him to vanish. The fiend says he cannot leave the house without doing some damage to prove that his errand had been fulfilled. The saint bade him make his exit through the wall, and leave a gap in the stone for every one to see, which, having duly been done, the monk goes downstairs to dinner with a good appetite. The host asks what has become of the ape, whose assistance he requires, and is terrified to see his guest wringing blood from the table napkin. It is explained that the miracle is performed to show him how he has wrung blood from his clients, and the host is bidden to go down on his knees and swear to make restitution. The man consents, and absolution following, he is forthwith taken upstairs to see the hole in the wall left by the devil exorcised by his saintship. The lawyer fears that Satan may use the aperture of exit for an entry to his dwelling at a future time, when the Capucin bids him erect the figure of an angel and place it by the aperture, which holy sign will frighten the fiend away. And this is why the house by the bridge has the angel on the escutcheon, and why the bridge itself is called the Angel’s Bridge, though Mr. Browning thinks the Devil’s Bridge would have been as good a name for it.

Pope, The. (The Ring and the Book.) The final appeal in the Franceschini murder case being to the Pope, he has to decide the fate of the Count. He reviews the whole case in the tenth book, and gives his decision for the execution of the murderers. Browning’s old men are some of his greatest creations, and The Pope is perhaps the finest of such conceptions. There is an excellent essay on The Pope in Poet Lore, vol i., p. 309, by Professor Shackford.

Pope, The, and the Net. (Asolando, 1889.) It is generally supposed that this poem refers to Pope Sixtus V. Mr. Browning possibly obtained the idea from Leti’s well-known biography of the Pope, which is full of fables. Dr. Furnivall, however, thinks that Mr. Browning invented the story. It is said that the character of Sixtus V. suits the poem better than any other. The pope in question – Felice Peretti – was born in 1521, of poor parents, but the story of his having been a swineherd in his youth seems to be mere legend. The Encyclopædia Britannica (9th edition) says he was created cardinal in 1570, when he lived in strict retirement; affecting, it is said, to be in a precarious state of health. According to the usual story, which is probably at least exaggerated, this dissimulation greatly contributed to his unexpected elevation to the papacy on the next vacancy (April 24th, 1585). “Sixtus V. left the reputation of a zealous and austere pope – with the pernicious qualities inseparable from such a character in his age – of a stern and terrible, but just and magnanimous temporal magistrate, of a great sovereign in an age of great sovereigns, of a man always aiming at the highest things, and whose great faults were but the exaggerations of great virtues.” The best view of his character is that given by Ranke. Mr. Browning makes his Pope to be the son of a fisherman, who, on his elevation to the cardinalate, kept his fisher-father’s net in his palace-hall on a coat-of-arms, as token of his humility. When, however, he became Pope, the net was removed because it had caught the fish.

Popularity. (Men and Women, vol. ii., 1855.) This poem is a tribute to Keats. Shelley and Keats soon displaced Pope and Byron from the mind of the youthful poet who gave us Pauline: it is not difficult to trace in that first work of Browning’s the influence of both. When, as a boy, he made acquaintance with the then little-known works of Keats, we can guess, even if biographers had not told us, how the author of Endymion and The Eve of St. Agnes would charm the young poet’s soul. “Remember,” he says here, “one man saw you, knew you, and named a star!” Then he fancies him as a fisherman on Tyrian seas, plundering the ocean of her purple dye: kings’ houses shall be made glorious and their persons beautiful with the product of the coloured conchs. Then he sees merchants bottling the extract and selling it to the world. They eat turtle and drink claret, but who fished up the murex? How does he live? What mean food had John Keats all his struggling life? He taught men to paint their ideas in glowing word-tints and images luxuriant. These men gorge, while the man who ransacked the ocean of thought and the world of fancy is left to starve.

Notes. – Verse 6, Tyrian shells: the genera Murex and Purpura have a gland called the “adrectal gland, which secretes a colourless liquid, which turns purple upon exposure to the atmosphere, and was used by the ancients as a dye” (Encyc. Brit.). It was a discovery of the Phœnicians, and was known to the Greeks in the Homeric age. The juice collected from the shells was placed in salt, and heated in metal vessels; then the wool or silk was dyed in it. Tyrian purple wool in Cæsar’s time cost £43 10s. a pound. Purple robes were used from very early times as a mark of dignity. Tyre was a very ancient city of Phœnicia, with great harbours and very splendid buildings. Astarte: the Venus of the Greeks and Romans, a powerful Syrian divinity. She had a great temple at Hieropolis, in Syria, with three hundred priests. v. 12, Hobbs, Nobbs, Stokes, and Nokes: fancy names, of course – meaning the men who profit by other men’s labours. They bottle and sell the precious things for which the brave fisherman risks his life and spends his days and nights, after all receiving but a miserable fraction of the gain. v. 13, Murex: the genus of molluscs from which the Tyrian purple dye was obtained. It was of the class Gastropoda, order Azygobranchia, sub-order Siphonochlamyda, *Rachiglossa, family Muricidæ. Purpura also was used (hence purple), of the same sub-order – family Buccinidæ. “What porridge had John Keats?” John Keats, the poet, was born Oct. 29th, 1795, and died of consumption in Rome, Feb. 23rd, 1821, when only twenty-six years old. His Ode to a Nightingale will serve to immortalise him, even if he had written nothing else. After this his best poems are his Endymion, Hyperion, and the Eve of St. Agnes. His straitened circumstances and his ill-health made him hysterical and fretful; but though he was certainly cruelly used by his reviewers, it is only a ridiculous legend that he was killed by an article against him in the Quarterly Review. Bitter reviews of our books do not introduce to our lungs the microbes of tuberculosis.

Porphyria’s Lover. (Published first in Mr. Fox’s Monthly Repository in 1836, over the signature “Z.” Reprinted as II. “Madhouse Cells,” in Dramatic Lyrics, Bells and Pomegranates, 1842.) In the midst of a storm at night, to a man sitting alone by a burnt-out fire in his room, enters the woman whom he loves, but of whose love he has never been sure in return. She glides in, shuts out the storm, kneels by the dull grate and makes a cheerful blaze, takes off her dripping cloak, lets down her damp hair, sits by his side, speaks to him, puts her arm around him, rests his cheek on her bosom, and murmuring that she loves him, gives herself to him for ever. At last, then, he knows it; his heart swells with joyful surprise, he realises the tremendous wealth of which he is thus suddenly possessed; and lest change should ever come, lest the wealth should ever be squandered, the possession ever be lost, he will kill her that moment: and so, as she reposes there, he winds her beautiful long hair in a cord thrice round her little throat, and she is strangled – painlessly, he knows, but his unalterably, because dead. And God, he says, has watched them as they sat the night through, and He has not said a word! This poem was Browning’s first monologue.

Potter’s Wheel, The. The figure of the potter’s wheel in Rabbi Ben Ezra is taken from Isaiah lxiv. 8, Jeremiah xviii. 2-6, and Romans ix. 20, 21. See a similar use of the figure in Quarles’ Emblems (Book III., Emblem 5).

Pretty Woman, A. (Men and Women, 1855; Dramatic Lyrics, 1868.) Here is a beautiful woman – simply a beauty, nothing more. What, then, is not that enough? Why cannot we let her just adorn the world like a beautiful flower? Why do we demand more of her than to gladden us with her charms? So the craftsman makes a rose of gold petals with rubies in its cup, all his fine things merely effacing the rose which grew in the garden. The best way to grace a rose is to leave it; not gather it, smell it, kiss it, wear it, and then throw it away. Leave the pretty woman just to beautify the world, – it needs it!

Prince Berthold. (Colombe’s Birthday.) He claims, by right, the duchy which is held by Colombe.

Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau, Saviour of Society (1871). Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau represents the Emperor Napoleon III. Hohenstiel-Schwangau represents France. The name is formed from that of one of the Bavarian royal castles called Hohen-Schwangau. Visitors to the Ober-Ammergau Passion Play will remember the beautiful and luxurious castles which the mad king built and furnished in so costly a manner in the midst of the picturesque scenery of the Bavarian Alps. The poem deals with the subjective processes which Browning supposed animated Napoleon III. in his character as Saviour of Society. Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau is not precisely a soul-portrait of the Emperor Napoleon III. Mr. Browning does not draw portraits – he analyses characters. He has therefore used the Emperor as a model is used by an artist. The artist does not simply paint the model’s portrait, he uses him for a higher purpose of art. Mrs. Browning was greatly interested in Louis Napoleon, enthusiastically entered into the spirit of his ambitions, and considered him as “the Saviour of Society.” She loved Italy so passionately that the destroyer of the power of Austria over the land which she loved could not fail to win her admiration; and this, probably, was the chief reason of her esteem for him. Her poem Napoleon III. in Italy should be read in this connection; each verse ends “Emperor Evermore.” She says: —

“We meet thee, O Napoleon, at this heightAt last, and find thee great enough to praise.Receive the poet’s chrism, which smells beyondThe priest’s, and pass thy ways!An English poet warns thee to maintainGod’s word, not England’s; – let His truth be true,And all men liars! with His truth respondTo all men’s lie.”

She goes on to call him “Sublime Deliverer,” and praises him for that “he came to deliver Italy.”

[The Man.] For some of my younger readers, who may not be familiar with the career of the late Emperor of France, it may be necessary to remind them of the following facts in his history. He was born at Paris on April 20th, 1808. The revolution of 1830, which dethroned the Bourbons, first launched Louis Napoleon on his eventful career. With his elder brother he joined the Italian bands who were in revolt against the pope. This revolt was suppressed by Austrian soldiers. The law banishing the Bonapartes exiled him on his return to Paris, and he came to England at the age of twenty-three. In a few weeks he went to Switzerland, and wrote an essay on that country. Returning to France, he was arrested and sent to America by Louis Philippe in 1836. He returned to Switzerland next year, but shortly after left for England again, living this time in Carlton Terrace. In 1840 he made his descent upon France; his party were shot or imprisoned, Louis being condemned to perpetual imprisonment in the castle of Ham, on the Somme. He escaped after six years, and once more went to London, living at 10, King Street, St. James’s. When Louis Philippe died, in 1848, Louis went to France and offered himself to the provisional government. He was ordered to withdraw from France, which he did. In April 1848 he acted as a special constable in London at the time of the Chartist disturbances. Soon after, he was elected in France to the Assembly, in three departments. In December 1848 he was elected president of the Republic by above five million votes. On the 2nd December, 1851, he executed the coup d’état, and soon after was made Emperor by the votes of nearly eight million persons. For eighteen years Louis Napoleon was sovereign of France. He married Eugénie de Montigo, Countess of Teba, Jan. 30th, 1853. On the 4th June was fought the battle of Magenta, for the liberation of Italy; and he entered Milan the next morning in company with Victor Emmanuel. He met the Emperor of Austria at Villafranca on July 11th, and the preliminaries of peace were arranged. He was hurried into the war with Germany by the clerical party at court in 1870, his advisers seeing no hope for the permanence of his dynasty but in a successful war. At the defeat of Sedan he was made prisoner, with ninety thousand men. He was incarcerated at Wilhelmshöhe, near Cassel, from which he subsequently retired to England. He lived with the Empress at Chislehurst, dying there on Jan. 9th, 1873.

[The Poem.] The Prince is talking with Lais, an adventuress, in a room near Leicester Square. He is explaining that he has not been actuated in his past life by any desire to make anything new, but merely to conserve things, and carry on what he found ready for him: thus he has been a conserver, a saviour of society. He has lived to please himself, though he recognises God and considers himself as His instrument. God is not to every one the same; to the woman of the town with whom he is conversing, He is the Providence that helps her to pay her way. God is to all men just what they conceive him to be: a shopkeeper’s God and a king’s God differ, – it is just as they conceive Him. For his own part he has tried on a large scale to please himself; but he has an eye to another world also, so he must carry out God’s wishes so far as he understands them, – he must preserve what he found established. He thinks himself a great man because a great conservator of order. There have been changes by God’s acts, but he has held it his object in life to find out the good already existing, and preserve it. It is only the inspired man who can change society from round to square; he is himself only the man of the moment; if he succeeds, the inspired man will be the first to recognise the value of his work. He will touch nothing unless reverently; he has no higher hope than to reconcile good with hardly-quite-as-good; he will not risk a whiff of his cigar for Fourier and Comte, and all that ends in smoke. He thinks it best to be contented with what is bad but might be worse. For twenty years he has held the balance straight, and so has done good service to humanity; he has not trodden the world into a paste, that he might roll it out flat and smooth; it has been no part of his task to mend God’s mistakes. All else but what a man feels is nothing, and the thing on which he congratulates himself as a ruler of men is that everything he knows, feels, or can conceive, he can make his own. He thinks that God made all things for him, and himself for Him. To learn how to set foot decidedly on some one path to heaven makes it worth while to handle things tenderly; we might mend them, but also we might mar them; meanwhile they help on so far, and therefore his end is to save society. He has no novelties to offer, he creates nothing, has no desire to renew the age, – his task is to cooperate, not to chop and change. All the good we know comes from order; he will not interfere with evil, because good is brought about by its means. When a chemist wants a white substance, and knows that the dye can be obtained from black ingredients, what a fool he would be if he were to insist that these also should be white! The Prince does not disapprove this bad world, and has no faith in a perfectly good one here. Is there any question as to the wisdom of saving society? Did he work aright with the powers appointed him for this end? On reviewing his work he finds more hope than discouragement: what he found he left, what was tottering he kept stable. It is God’s part to work great changes. He discovered that a solitary great man was worth the world. It was his work to tend the cornfield, to feed the myriads of hungry men who sought for daily bread and nothing more. Was he to turn aside from that to play at horticulture, look after the cornflowers and rear the poppies? “I am Liberty, Philanthropy, Enlightenment, Patriotism,” cried each: “flaunt my flag alone!” He objected, “What about the myriads who have no flag at all?” If he had to choose between faith and freedom, aristocracy and democracy, or effecting the freedom of an oppressed nation, he would ask, “How many years on an average do men live in the world?” “Some score,” he is told. To this he replies, if he had a hundred years to live he might concentrate his energies on some great cause. But he has a cause, a flag and a faith: it is Italy. There was a time when he was voice and nothing more, but only like his censors; then he was full of great aims. Has he failed in promise or performance? He thinks in neither; he found that men wanted merely to be allowed to live, and so he consulted for his kind that have the eyes to see, the mouths to eat, the hands to work. Nature told him to care for himself alone in the conduct of his mind; he was to think as if man had never thought before, and act as if all creation watched him. Nature has evolved her man from the jelly-fish through various stages, till he has reached the headship of creation. He, too, the Prince, has been evolved, and can sympathise with all classes of men. Men in the main have little wants, not large; it was his duty to help the least wants first: if only he could live a hundred years instead of the average twenty, he could experiment at ease. Men want meat; they can’t chew Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason in exchange. Obstacles, he has discovered, are good for mankind; medicines are impeded in their action, and so are state remedies; it is not possible always to effect precisely what is intended, neither would it be always best in the long run. He illustrates this by a story of an artist’s trick he saw in Rome once. An artist had covered up the sons and serpents of a Laocoön group, leaving only the central figure, with nothing to show the purpose of his gesture; then a crowd was called to give their opinion of the gesture of the figure. Every one thought it showed a man yawning, except one man, who said “I think the gesture strives against some obstacle we cannot see.” Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau would like this far-sighted individual to write his history: he would be able to tell the world how he who was so misunderstood has tried to be a man. And here, he says, ends his autobiography. He will now give some idea to his companion (Lais, a not unsuitable auditor for his apologia) of what he might have been if his visions had become realities. Had his story been told by an historian of the Thiers-Hugo sort, he might have appeared thus. The nation chose the Assembly first to serve her, chose the President afterward chiefly to see that her servants did good service; when the time came that the head servant must vacate his place, and it was patent that his fellow-servants were all knaves or fools, seeing that everybody was working to serve his own purposes, that they were only waiting for the president’s term of office to expire, to see their own longings crowned, he appealed to the Assembly, showed how his fellow-servants had been plotting and scheming while he alone had been faithful to the nation which had trusted him, and suggested that he should be made “master for the moment.” Let him be entrusted with the utmost power they could confer upon him, he would use it faithfully. And the nation answered, with a shout, —

“The trusty one! no tricksters any more!”

Up to the time when his term of office as president must expire he had let things go their own way, knowing all, seeing everything, but letting things develop. Not that this was unsuspected by his enemies: they guessed that he was meditating some stroke of state; they saw through him, as he through them, and were on their guard. He was re-elected, and there was uprising. “The knaves and fools, each trickster with his dupe,” dropped their masks, unfurled their flags, and brandished their weapons. Then fell his fist on the head of craft and greed and impudence; the fancy patriot, and the night hawk prowling for his prey, all alike were reduced to order and obedience. Of course it was demurred that he was too prodigal of life and liberty, too swift, too thorough; and Sagacity complained that he had let things go on unnoticed till severe measures had been required: he should have frustrated villainy in the egg; so for want of the by-blow had to come the butcher’s work. To all this he replies that his oath had restrained him; he had rather appealed to the people for the commission to act as he had done. And then began his sway; and his motto had been, Govern for the many first, think of the poor mean multitude, all mouths and eyes primarily, and then proceed to help the few, the better favoured. His aim had been to try to equalise things a little, and this by way of reverence. He did his work with might and main, and not a touch of fear, but with confidence in God who comes before and after; irresolute as he was at first, now that the cankers of society were laid bare before him, he wrenched them out without a touch of indecision. And so, when the Republic, violating its own highest principle, bade Hohenstiel-Schwangau (really France) fasten in the throat of a neighbour (Italy), and deprive her of liberty, in this he saw an infamy triumphant; and when he came into power, he saw, too, that it demanded his interference. Sagacity said, “Let the wrong stand over, – he was not to blame for the wrong, it was there before his time.” But he was prompt to act. Out came the canker, root and branch, with much abuse for him from friend and foe. Sagacity said he had been precipitate, rash, and rude, though in the right: he should have blown a trumpet-blast to let the wrong-doers know they must set their house in order. He replies that he would have broken another generation’s heart by the respite to the iniquity. And so the war came. “But France,” said Sagacity, “had ever been a fighter, and would continue to be so till the weary world interfered.” Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau recognises this, and says war for war’s sake is damnable. He will prevent the growth of this madness. This, however, does not imply that there shall be no war at all, when the wickedness he denounces comes from the neighbour. He will deliver Italy from the rule of Austria, smite her oppressor hip and thigh till he leaves her free from the Adriatic to the Alps. Sagacity suggests that this should not be all for nought: “there ought to be some honorarium paid – Savoy and Nice, for example.” But the Prince says “No; let there be war for the hate of war.” So Italy was free. But there were other points noteworthy and commendable in the man’s career: he was resolute, fearless, and true, and by his rule the world had proof a point was gained. He had shown he was the fittest man to rule; chance of birth and dice-throw had been outdone here. Sagacity often advised him to confirm the advance, and bade him wed the pick of the world; if he married a queen, he might tell the world that the old enthroned decrepitudes acknowledged that their knell had sounded, and that they were making peace with the new order. Or let him have a free wife for his free state. Sagacity desires to prop up the lie that the son derives his genius from the sire, but God does not work like this. He drops His seed of heavenly flame where He wills on earth; the rock all naked and unprepared is as likely to receive it as the accumulated store of faculties: