Stories from Browning

Preface

These studies are in no sense meant to be a substitute for the poems they sketch. They are intended for a stimulus and a help; and if, to any degree, they succeed in introducing the reader to Browning himself and in clearing away the cryptic and esoteric atmosphere which too much surrounds the conception of his genius in the popular mind, they have not been written in vain.

H. C. Grumbine.

WoosTER, Ohio, February, 1914.

Contents

INTRODUCTION xi

THE POWER OF MENTAL SUGGESTION PippA Passes 3

CONCERNING LOVE

Introduction

The business of the reader of poetry is not very different from that of the reader of prose. It is different only in the extent to which prose differs from poetry; and the chief difference between prose and poetry lies in emotional reaction and appeal to the imagination. But, broadly speaking, the same mental faculties are exercised in the reading of poetry and the reading of prose. Thus considered, the matter sifts itself down to a question of psychology. While the same mental faculties are exercised in the reading of poetry and the reading of prose, they are exercised in different degrees, the difference being commensurate with the difference in the two forms of expression. That difference is one of emphasis and not of kind. Roughly speaking, the conspicuous element of prose is its intellectual content; while, on the other hand, the predominant element of poetry is its emotional content.

Another way of saying the same thing, and perhaps a simpler way, is this : Every form of literary expression, whether poetry or prose, has a meaning. That is its one indispensable feature. That is its carrying quality or reason for existence. The meaning of prose, at least of its severer forms, is intellectual; the meaning of poetry is largely emotional. Just as the function of exposition is to make plain xii INTRODUCTION

and of argumentation to convince, so the purpose of the lyric is to convey a mood; and this is true no less, and only in degree, of the epic, the tragedy, the comedy. The mood of the lyric is brief, but intense; the mood of epic, tragedy, and comedy is ex* tended and, withal, varied and sustained. It may then be said that the meaning of prose is first of all intellectual, and that the meaning of poetry is first of all emotional.

We are concerned here with poetry, and with poetry of various kinds. We want to know how to read poetry. If the foregoing considerations are just, we are in a position to approach poetry in an attitude of mind that will greatly simplify matters. In deriving its meaning we need to make our mood receptive; we need to subdue our feeling to the feeling of the poem; we must divest ourselves of prejudice, of alien predisposition. In short, we must make ourselves, for the time being at least, a welltuned instrument for the poet to play upon.

This receptive attitude is a condition of mental alertness and sympathy. It puts to sleep the emotional faculty until the understanding has been illuminated. But the emotions, once awakened by a clear call of the true message of the poem, will contain themselves in thorough poise and discipline until the message has been judicially weighed and appraised.

A striking proof of the emotional complexion of poetry is seen in that feature which, with the average reader, serves to distinguish it from prose. With the world, what is rhyme and metre is by that very token also poetry. The reasoning is not, in the

INTRODUCTION xiii

long run, erroneous; for if poetry be poetry, then rhyme and metre are its essential characteristics, and are so for the reason that they are the language of emotion. Emotion, pure and simple, whenever it expresses itself without words, is rhythmical. Witness sobbing, laughter, and the cries of birds and animals. According as speech is least reasoned and most emotional, to that extent will it be rhythmical; to that extent, it may be added, will there be a recurrence of similar sounds, or rhymes. Does not laughter rhyme? Does not sobbing rhyme? Rhyme and metre are not ornamental adjuncts or accessories. They are an outgrowth — a natural expression, in the literal root-meaning of the term. The verse of poetry proves its emotional content; and not only that, but that its emotional feature is its dominating feature.

From these considerations it is to be gathered that, while the meaning of poetry is largely emotional, that meaning always has an intellectual basis. This is usually indicated in the title; and, of course, it charges every line. At places in the course of the poem, usually at the beginning and the end, or at the beginning and the end of stanzas and sections, it appears in the form of phrases and sentences of condensed and summarized meaning. These, when brought together, form the argument; and this, when still further condensed, constitutes the central idea. The orderly arrangement of the steps in the argument indicates the thought-progression. This is the philosophy of the poem, or its teaching. This is the trunk of the tree upon which and from which grows its foliage, its flower xiv INTRODUCTION

and fruitage of emotional appeal. To vary the figure, one may say that a poem should not be like a Christmas tree; that is to say, a dead branch whose tinsel and glitter is a thing superadded. The first thing to do in reading a poem is to see where the trunk is rooted; how stout and fine the trunk and branches are; how symmetrically they are formed. The next thing to do is to climb the trunk and branches for their flowers and fruit.

"Pippa Passes," one of Browning's most pleasing poems, may serve as a specific case. The intellectual element of this "drama" is to be extracted by applying to it such questions as the following: What is the significance of the title "Pippa Passes "? In what respects is this poem a "drama"? What is its story? What is its central idea? By what technical means is the central idea developed? The emotional values of the poem are to be appreciated by appraising the central idea for its justice and propriety; by appraising the portraiture of character for its life-likeness, or verisimilitude; by analyzing the technique of plotting, the apportionment and emphasis of the material, the creation and satisfaction of the feeling of suspense; by weighing the verbal and metrical adroitness, by noting the novelty of execution, and the muscular temper of the author's personality. These questions will not be answered seriatim, but in block, or somewhat in the order in which they present themselves to the discerning reader.

The Power of Mental Suggestion

The Power of Mental Suggestion

The "Introduction" to this drama is a song by Pippa "a girl from the silk-mills" of Asolo. It is New Year's Day, and, as she sings, she springs out of bed. The sun is rising. It is her one and only holiday of the year. What shall she do with it? How shall she use it? She resolves to make it an inspiration for the whole year round. Her plan is to impersonate the happiest persons in Asolo. Ottima and Sebald shall have her morning; Jules and Phene shall have the noonday; Luigi and his mother, the evening-time; and Monsignor, the night. Ottima and Sebald are happy lovers; Jules and Phene are bride and groom, and this is their wedding-day; Luigi and his mother are a pattern of true contentment; and Monsignor is a holy man of God — an ensample of divine peace. The sun has risen and casts a bright reflection on the ceiling of her bedroom from the water in her ewer. How the sunbeam breaks and dances as she pours the water and laves face and hands ! How brightly it lightens her turban-flowers in the window, causing each blossom to laugh through the pane and solicit the bee ! Her thoughts revert to the Jiappiest in Asolo. She will be no less loved this day than happy Ottima in the great stone house, all glass in front, on the hillside yonder, where Sebald is wont to steal for clandestine assignations while old Luca, her husband, yet reposes; and, like Ottima, she, too, will "face the spitefullest of talkers" in the town. But this is a foolish love, and "only day's first ojffer." It is better to be the chaste bride Phene to the bridegroom Jules, coming out of Passagno church at noon and faring toward their house that "looks over Orcana valley" — Phene, with "pale snow-pure cheek and black bright tresses, blacker than all except the black eyelash," "flower-like" Phene!

Oh, save that brow its virgin dimness. Keep that foot its lady primness. Let those ankles never swerve From their exquisite reserve!

But

Lovers grow cold, men learn to hate their wives. And only parents' love can last our lives.

She will enjoy the mother-love for Luigi, watching mother and son repair at eve to a

ruined turret, where they talk, Calmer than lovers, yet more kind than friends.

But best of all is God's love. Why should not God's love befall? That will be reserved for the night, when that "holy and beloved priest," Monsignor, comes to "the Palace by the Dome" to "bless the home of his dead brother." This is her resolve; and she hallows it with the thought that

All service ranks the same with God.

Oh yes ! God will bless her on this holiday. So she sallies forth, singing, and possessed of the sweet assurance that she, no doubt, will be as "useful to men and dear to God as they," the happiest lovers and the most beloved in Asolo.

The scene shifts to the interior of old Luca's shrub house, where are Luca's wife, Ottima, and her paramour, the German Sebald. Sebald sings a drinking song. All is dark inside save f or a " blood-red beam through the shutter's chink." They grope their way to the window, half hid by tall geraniums. They push back the lattice to let in the day, and look at the familiar prospect of hills and a brook in the foreground, of Saint Mark's, Padua, and Vicenza in the far distance. Presently Sebald espies the plant he "bruised in getting through the lattice yestereve"; and his "elbow's mark i' the dust o' the sill"; and his guilt seizes him.

Say, once and always, Luca was a wittol, I am his cut-throat, you are . . .

Ottima offers him wine, white and black. But he spurns the black for the horror of its color. It reminds him of the clotted blood of his victim. Presently there appears outside Benet theCapuchin, "with his brown hood and bare feet," trudging on his business from the Duomo. — No, not the bloody wine, but the white! They fall to a rehearsal of the ways in which they used to trick the doting old husband, Luca Gaddi. Remorse again overtakes Sebald, and this time loathing for her who spurred him on to the murder. She proposes that they go in and lift the body from the place where it fell. She dresses her hair in the dusty pane for a lookingglass and, displaying her naked beauty, tries to e STORIES FROM BROWNING

rouse him from the depths of his remorse. He would give her neck, each splendid shoulder, both those breasts of hers, if this murder were undone and Luca alive again. As a poor, starved music teacher he had first come to the house — had been fed there and clothed. And then this guilt. He would commit ten crimes greater, so this crime were wiped out. But, urges Ottima, were not our joys worth it — our wild ecstasies one glad July night? She presses against him. Her hair falls. He does it up, is crowning her with it his "spirit's arbitress," when — Pippa passes without, singing, —

God 's in his heaven — All's right with the world.

Another wave of remorse, revealing Ottima in all her wicked horror, sweeps over him. He will pay the price of his crime. God 's in his heaven ! She pleads that he kill her first. But he expires amid her prayers.

The morning is passing into noon, and Pippa is passing from the scene of the suicide to Orcana. Foreign students of painting and sculpture, from Venice, are assembled opposite the house of Jules, a young French statuary, at Passagno. It is the wedding-day of Jules and Phene. It is ten o'clock, and the marriage is now taking place in the church near by. Among the students are .Gottlieb and Schramm. They have hidden themselves, one beneath a window, three or four others behind a pomegranate clump, and another in the balcony. They are talking excitedly about a trap they have set for Jules. Accessory to the plot is a rhyming rake, an Englishman, Bluphocks by name, who now, however, is absent. Another rhymester, Lutwyche, a painter, is among the company. Their purpose here is to witness the cHmax of a heartless practical joke they have concocted, of which Jules is the butt and Phene the helpless accomplice. Phene is a Greek model and purports to be the daughter of Natalia, procuress of models and vice. But Jules has been kept in ignorance of the girl's shame; and she, having no soul, is unmindful of it. The students are envious of their fellow, Jules, whom they take to be an ineffectual prig, but who has incurred their dislike as much by shunning their "debasing habits" as by his romantic aspirations in art. By forged letters, which appear to have come from Phene and which paint the supposed writer as a devotee of art and devoted admirer of Jules's statues, they have tricked the young sculptor into an agreement to marry his imagined admirer. He is to "wed her on trust," and only to speak to her after marriage. In her young beauty — she is but fourteen — he sees the realization of his artistic ideals; and she, being of extreme simplicity of mind, proves a pliant tool in the hands of Natalia and the students. The marriage over, they return to Jules's studio, hand in hand. He shows her his books and statues and his great love for his work. Frightened by her blank unresponsive mien, he bids her speak to him, and is astounded to find her outward beauty unmatched by a soul. She speaks as prompted by the students, repeating a cynical rhyme by Lutwyche, which reveals the detestable fraud. Jules is about to dismiss her with gold — to the end, he declares, that thereby she keep herself "out of Natalia's clutches." He will go to Venice to root out the "gang" who have tricked him. Now he must leave her, perhaps forever, yet perhaps — if he survive — to meet her again, "since the world is wide." Just then, Pippa passes, singing a song of pure ennobling love; and, in a flash, his purpose changes. He will be the uplifting influence which the song celebrates; he will evoke from Phene a soul. She shall be his Psyche, not of marble, but of flesh and spirit. He will begin Art afresh and be a sculptor of the soul.

Pippa now passes from Orcana to the Turret. Two or three of the Austrian Police are seen loitering with Bluphocks, an English vagabond, just in view of the Turret. It has grown evening. The Police are there on the lookout for Luigi, suspected of being in league with the Carbonari. Bluphocks is there in their service, and also on a mission of his own, given him, he avers, by the Bishop's Intendant of the Duomo. He has seen Pippa pass; and it is for her that he has been watching with a "pocket-full of zwanzigers." He is a cynical dog; atheist, too; and rhymester of irreverent quips. His business is to seduce Pippa, pretty little silkweaver of Asolo, to the Intendant's guilty ends. The Police withdraw to examine Luigi's passport, to which is added in cipher a warrant for his arrest. Bluphocks, also their spy, makes a signal; and Luigi, with his mother, is seen entering the Turret on the hill.

All is hushed. The echoes deal weirdly with their voices. Dusk shadows assume to Luigi's sick imagination the forms of the Carbonari conspirators. There, too, shines the face of old Franz, the Austrian king. "Come down and meet your fate," cries Luigi. The mother protests, trying to dissuade him from his purpose of assassination. No, he repHes; "lam rich, young, healthy." I have been feasted and fortunate. The more reason I should go and do it. . . . " Too much have I enjoyed these fifteen years of mine, to leave myself excuse for longer life." He will trust to his youth, his fine dress. Unaccompanied, he will pass unsuspected to the royal presence in Vienna and avenge for his partisans the Austrian tyranny. Chiara will come in June, pleads the mother; she will come as she promised. And the boy is about to yield to this soft persuasion; but at that moment is heard from without the voice of Pippa singing of a king great and just, who ruled in a far-past golden age, suppressing wrong and basking in the love of all good men. Luigi is resolved. Tyranny, as he sees it, must be wiped out; and he goes to do the deed.

The dusk darkens into night. Pippa is passing "from the Turret to the Bishop's Brother's house, close to the Duomo S. Maria," where some poor girls are sitting on the steps. The girls are exchanging wishes. One would have wings like a swallow and fly away. Another relates how she has been feasted by a graybeard older than her grandfather and how he laughed to see her write bad names on the table with a finger dipped in wine; she would have the experience repeated. Another has her turn; she would be back at the old cottage home in the country, with new milk to drink, apples to eat, and plenty of sleep. They have been stationed there at the Intendant's orders to lure Pippa into conversation, until Bluphocks shall come to carry out his work of seduction.

Monsignor, the Bishop, has fallen heir to the Palace by the Duomo and has come to visit it. For his reception Maffeo the Intendant has prepared a feast. There are many gentlemen in waiting, but these are soon dismissed in order that certain suspicious accounts of the estate may be sifted. Monsignor is the youngest of three brothers and the last of a line of vicious and unprincipled noblemen; but from his boyhood he lived apart from his family, in the service of the church. The accounts show a suspiciously large sum paid the Intendant on a certain third of December by the late incumbent in the estate, Monsignor's elder brother. Monsignor would have that point cleared up. Moreover, there was a child, born fourteen years before to Monsignor's eldest brother, barring the late incumbent from the succession. What has become of that child .f^ How has Maffeo come into possession of the wealth which to all appearances is his — a certain villa, a certain podere — in addition to the moneys which the accounts disclose .^^ He is cautioned to confess and to confess quietly, as he must sooner or later, since the Pontiff, Monsignor's superior, enjoins not only Maffeo's arrest and punishment but, "as guardian of the infant's heritage for the Church," the recovery of that heritage parcel by parcel, by every searching means. Was the child murdered.? And by whom? And why.? Was she murdered in infancy by Maffeo at the instigation of Monsignor's late brother? The next room is filled with men awaiting a signal from Monsignor, and Maffeo may as well confess quietly.

"Did you throttle or stab my brother's infant? Come now!" By one desperate ruse the Intendant tries to escape. Monsignor is not the simple dolt his late brother was. Maffeo knows that — has known it all along; and, instead of playing to Monsignor 's advantage as well as to the advantage of Monsignor's late brother, by murdering the infant, Maffeo has had her brought up in secret, and her name is Felippa, "a little black-eyed pretty singing Felippa, gay silk- winding girl." Monsignor certainly cannot succeed to the estate — not now. But — in consideration of undisturbed possession of his "present havings and holdings," for which he has the late incumbent's "hand and seal," and in consideration also of his unhindered escape across the Alps, Maffeo engages to make way with the girl — not in the ordinary manner, but in a way quite as efficacious: "At Rome the courtesans perish off every three years, and I can entice her thither — have indeed begun operations already." The abductor has been engaged in the person of Bluphocks, who poses as an English nobleman; and his accomplices — certain loose women — have been arranged for. "Is it a bargain?" ... At this juncture Pippa passes, singing of her childhood and her trust in God. The horror of the proposal overwhelms whatever disappointment Monsignor may have felt at Pippa's survival. Springing up quickly, he summons his guards from their station in the next room to bind the villain hand and foot: and

12 STORIES FROM BROT\nS[ING

Monsignor, whom Pippa thinks "holy," is delivered from a great temptation.

Pippa's holiday is over. She reenters her room, musing on her New Year experiences. The girls' coarse chatter by the Duomo steps about Bluphocks's alleged preference for her and his presents, should she have him, rings in her ears; then the to-do of the Intendant's arrest recurs to her mind. How foolish, she thinks, her effort to imagine the lives of those others whom she took to be the happiest. But she must be content and go to rest. Even her flowers are asleep. And amid confused visions of the day's happenings and a fading consciousness of the day's failure as compared with her bright aspirations, she prays —

God bless me! ...

All service ranks the same with God.

This bald narrative brings to the surface a number of things. It easily answers the question concerning the significance of the title, "Pippa Passes." She passes out of her plain little room early on the morning of New Year's Day to do her best for her own happiness in the sight of God. She will make that best a service to God. For a moment she passes into the guilty life of Ottima and Sebald, and serves God by quickening their consciences. This happens in the early morning. At noon, passing into the life of Jules, she fires him with sudden resolve to evoke a soul and fashion love. At evening, passing into the life of Luigi, the Carbonari conspirator, she electrifies into quick action his plot against the Austrian government. At night.

PIPPA PASSES IS

passing the window where the Bishop's Intendant is carefully planning her shame and ruin, she sings the song of her own innocence, and strengthens Monsignor the Bishop in the moment of his temptation.

The central idea and purpose of the poem may be gathered up in these sentences: God overrules all things for the best. "God's in his heaven — all's right with the world. . . . All service ranks the same with God." A life of innocence and purity is a powerful, though an unconscious influence in the lives of others.

The poem is a drama, as the sub-title states; but a drama in a peculiar sense. In the introduction and conclusion it is a lyrical soliloquy, and not, like so many of Browning's other poems, — "Saul," for instance, — a dramatic lyric or monologue. But the dramatic element is featured by the impassioned dialogue of the ensuing four acts; it is featured still further by the play of varied and contrasted feeling on the part of the dramatis personce, that feeling ranging from the illicit lust of Ottima and Sebald to its eventuation in murder and suicide; from the horse-play of the foreign students with Jules and Phene, to Jules's heroic resolve; from the aiffectionate concern of Luigi's mother for his safety, to his fanatical self-sacrifice for the Carbonari; from the vicious sacrilege of Bluphocks the pander, to the loose talk of the girls at the Duomo; from the rascality of Maffeo the Intendant, to Monsignor's deliverance from a great temptation. Most dramatic of all, productive as it is of amazed wonder at the ways of unsophisticated innocence on the one hand and the sad, bad ways of the world on the other, is the contrast between Pippa's unspoilt idealization of the "happiest in Asolo " and their real sinful or unhappy character. To this we assent as a truth of life. To offset this^ and to hearten us, is the teaching of the unconscious power of innocence. We assent to this teaching with a feeling of deep satisfaction. We are enlisted on the side of the abiding and triumphant moral forces of the world. In a word, the poem stirs us deeply and leaves us edified and fortified in our views of life. To say that we have been thus stirred is to point out the emotional dynamic of the poem.

The aesthetic elements of a poem (and we might say broadly, of anything) are closely bound up with their intellectual elements on the one hand and their emotional elements on the other. Is it not true that what strikes the mind as just, proper, and felicitous in form and structure — in the arrangement of parts, in the creation of suspense, in character-portrayal, in motivation of incident and situation — solicits our admiration.^ And is it not true that admiration is a pleasant feeling? What, then, are the aesthetic values of complete efficiency .^^ Efficiency is a thing perceived and amenable to exposition; and the clearer the perception, the greater the delight attending it; and the greater the efficiency, the keener the aesthetic rapture reacting upon the perception of it.

In "Pippa Passes" there is not, it is true, the same chain of causation in the flow of incident that we find in one of Shakespeare's great tragedies or comedies — "Othello" or "As You Like It"; which is to say that the sequence of incidents is not inevitable. It is not a matter of necessity that Pippa's singing should cause Sebald's suicide, Jules's self-effacement, Luigi's patriotic resolve, Monsignor's withstanding of temptation. But these things are highly probable; and it is satisfying to see that they are so.

The same is true of the characterization. The remark of Edmund Clarence Stedman ^ that "Pippa reasons like a Paracelsus in pantalets," is a just remark; but, since the influence of innocence as pictured is highly probable, her precocious moralizing is not disconcerting even to the strictest realist.

Not on the side of lack in verisimilitude, then, is the poem deficient. Whatever deficiency may appear in individual characterization is abundantly made up — is far overbalanced — by the life-like portrayal of a group of characters; as well as by the portrayal of a tense psychological moment with the individual.

Take the latter case first. In each of the four stories — first, that of Ottima and Sebald; second, that of Jules and Phene; third, that of Luigi and his mother; fourth, that of Monsignor and the Intendant — it is the climax that is presented; and it is not a train of physical incidents that is portrayed, but a psychological situation. And the portrayal is human and thoroughly life-like.

What constitutes life-likeness in the depiction of a group of characters .^^ Do men when thrown to-

* Victorian Poets, p. 318.

gether act and speak as if with a preconceived purpose and looking forward to a foregone conclusion? So they seem to do in "Hamlet," "Lear," and "Othello." In Shakespeare at his best there are few loose ends of dialogue and incident. And that is well, since the plot is the principal thing in the plays. In "Pippa Passes," on the other hand, there are some touches that appear to be wholly episodical. And they are acceptable on the grounds hinted at : the poem is not the unraveling of an intricate plot; it is rather the elaboration of a state of mind. Life is not a plot, but a mingled web of many irrelevancies. So is thought. So is feeling. What but to suggest something of this can be the purpose of Bluphocks's agile rhyming, and of the idle chatter of the girls on the steps of the Duomo? It is precisely touches like these which accomplish verisimilitude by suggesting a transcript of heterogeneous life. Consequently, the poem reads like conversation overheard. And the reader feels himself to be what in life he nearly always is, not a creator of the destinies of others, but a looker-on, an eavesdropper, a receiver of stolen gossip.

The careful reader of "Pippa Passes" observes readily that he is not dealing with a plot in the ordinary sense of the word. The fate of Ottima, of Phene, of Luigi, of Monsignor — the "Happiest Four" in Asolo — do concern him immensely; but it is the fate of Pippa that concerns him most of all. And his interest broadens and deepens as the day wears on, and the impact of her life upon those others is sensibly felt. How shocking, and yet edifying, is the contrast of her trust in their superior happiness with the reahty in each case. What a rehef to find her safe in her room and still unsuspecting and unharmed by the sinister machinations of Maffeo and Bluphocks at the close of the day. Our relief is the evidence of our concern, our suspense.