—*1* The date of birth differs in the biographies, it beingvariously given as 1400, 1406, 1410, and 1412. But thelatter appears to be the one generally accepted.*2* It was customary, on entering a convent, to change thebaptismal name for some other.—
“It is said that Fra Filippo was much addicted to the pleasures of sense, insomuch that he would give all he possessed to secure the gratification of whatever inclination might at the moment be predominant; . . . It was known that, while occupied in the pursuit of his pleasures, the works undertaken by him received little or none of his attention; for which reason Cosimo de’ Medici, wishing him to execute a work in his own palace, shut him up, that he might not waste his time in running about; but having endured this confinement for two days, he then made ropes with the sheets of his bed, which he cut to pieces for that purpose, and so having let himself down from a window, escaped, and for several days gave himself up to his amusements. When Cosimo found that the painter had disappeared, he caused him to be sought, and Fra Filippo at last returned to his work, but from that time forward Cosimo gave him liberty to go in and out at his pleasure, repenting greatly of having previously shut him up, when he considered the danger that Fra Filippo had incurred by his folly in descending from the window; and ever afterwards laboring to keep him to his work by kindness only, he was by this means much more promptly and effectually served by the painter, and was wont to say that the excellencies of rare genius were as forms of light and not beasts of burden.”
The speaker imagines the head of a beautiful girl he knows, “painted upon a background of pale gold, such as the Tuscan’s early art prefers”, and details the picture as he would have it.
The Bishop orders his Tomb at St. Praxed’s Church. * {Rome, 15—.}
—* First published in ‘Hood’s Magazine’, March, 1845, No.III., vol. iii., pp. 237-239, under the title ‘The Tomb atSt. Praxed’s (Rome, 15—)’.“This poem and ‘The Flight of the Duchess’ were sent byBrowning to help make up the numbers of the magazine whileHood lay dying.”—Furnivall’s ‘Bibliography of RobertBrowning’, p. 48.—
The dying Bishop pleads with his natural sons that they give him the sumptuous tomb they stand pledged to,—such a tomb as will excite the envy of his old enemy Gandolf, who cheated him out of a favorite niche in St. Praxed’s Church, by dying before him, and securing it for his tomb.
It is not necessary to suppose that the natural sons are present. His, perhaps, delirious mind is occupied with the precious marbles and stones and other luxuries he has loved to much, and with his old rival and enemy, Gandolf.
John Ruskin, in his ‘Modern Painters’ (Vol. IV., chap. XX., Section 32), remarks:—
“Robert Browning is unerring in every sentence he writes of the Middle Ages; always vital, right, and profound; so that in the matter of art, . . .there is hardly a principle connected with the mediaeval temper, that he has not struck upon in those seemingly careless and too rugged rhymes of his. There is a curious instance, by the way, in a short poem *1* referring to this very subject of tomb and image sculpture; all illustrating just one of those phases of local human character which, though belonging to Shakespeare’s own age, he {Shakespeare} never noticed, because it was specially Italian and un-English; connected also closely with the influence of mountains on the heart, and therefore with our immediate inquiries.*2* I mean the kind of admiration with which a southern artist regarded the STONE he worked in; and the pride which populace or priest took in the possession of precious mountain substance, worked into the pavements of their cathedrals, and the shafts of their tombs.
—*1* ‘The Bishop orders his Tomb in St. Praxed’s Church’.*2* ‘The Mountain Glory’, the subject of the chapter from whichthis is taken.—
“Observe, Shakespeare, in the midst of architecture and tombs of wood, or freestone, or brass, naturally thinks of GOLD as the best enriching and ennobling substance for them; in the midst also of the fever of the Renaissance he writes, as every one else did, in praise of precisely the most vicious master of that school— Giulio Romano*; but the modern poet, living much in Italy, and quit of the Renaissance influence, is able fully to enter into the Italian feeling, and to see the evil of the Renaissance tendency, not because he is greater than Shakespeare, but because he is in another element, and has seen other things. . . .
—* ‘Winter’s Tale’, V. 2. 106.—
“I know no other piece of modern English, prose or poetry, in which there is so much told, as in these lines {‘The Bishop orders his Tomb’}, of the Renaissance spirit,—its worldliness, inconsistency, pride, hypocrisy, ignorance of itself, love of art, of luxury, and of good Latin. It is nearly all that I said of the Central Renaissance in thirty pages of the ‘Stones of Venice’ put into as many lines, Browning’s being also the antecedent work. The worst of it is that this kind of concentrated writing needs so much SOLUTION before the reader can fairly get the good of it, that people’s patience fails them, and they give the thing up as insoluble; though, truly, it ought to be to the current of common thought like Saladin’s talisman, dipped in clear water, not soluble altogether, but making the element medicinable.”
Professor Dowden, in regard to Mr. Browning’s doctrines on the subject of art, remarks:—
“It is always in an unfavorable light that he depicts the virtuoso or collector, who, conscious of no unsatisfied aspirations such as those which make the artist’s joy and sorrow, rests in the visible products of art, and looks up to nothing above or beyond them. . . . The unbelieving and worldly spirit of the dying Bishop, who orders his tomb at St. Praxed’s, his sense of the vanity of the world simply because the world is passing out of his reach, the regretful memory of the pleasures of his youth, the envious spite towards Gandolf, who robbed him of the best position for a tomb, and the dread lest his reputed sons should play him false and fail to carry out his designs, are united with a perfect appreciation of Renaissance art, and a luxurious satisfaction, which even a death-bed cannot destroy, in the splendor of voluptuous form and color. The great lump of lapis lazuli,
“‘Big as a Jew’s head cut off at the nape,Blue as a vein o’er the Madonna’s breast’,
must poise between his sculptured knees; the black basalt must contrast with the bas-relief in bronze below:—
“‘St. Praxed in a glory, and one PanReady to twitch the Nymph’s last garment off’;
the inscription must be ‘choice Latin, picked phrase, Tully’s every word’.”
The speaker is listening to a Toccata of Galuppi’s, and the music tells him of how they lived once in Venice, where the merchants were the kings. He was never out of England, yet it’s as if he SAW it all, through what is addressed to the ear alone.
But the music does more than reflect the life of mirth and folly which was led in the gay and voluptuous city. It has an undertone of sadness; its lesser thirds so plaintive, its sixths diminished, sigh on sigh, tell the votaries of pleasure something; its suspensions, its solutions, its commiserating sevenths, awaken in them the question of their hold on life. That question the music answers.
(After he has been extemporizing upon the musical instrument of his invention.)
The Abbe Georg Joseph Vogler was born at Wuerzburg (Bavaria), June 15, 1749; appointed Kappelmeister to the King of Sweden, in 1786. While in this capacity, the “musical instrument of his invention”, called the Orchestrion, was constructed; * went to London with his organ, in 1790, and gave a series of successful concerts, realizing some 1200 Pounds, and making a name as an organist; commissioned to reconstruct the organ of the Pantheon on the plan of his Orchestrion; and later, received like commissions at Copenhagen and at Neu Ruppin in Prussia; founded a school of music at Copenhagen, and published there many works; in 1807 was appointed by the Grand Duke, Louis I., Kappelmeister at Darmstadt; founded there his last school, two of his pupils being Weber and Meyerbeer; died in 1814. Browning presents Vogler as a great extemporizer, in which character he appears to have been the most famous. For a further account, see Miss Eleanor Marx’s paper on the Abbe Vogler, from which the above facts have been derived (‘Browning Soc. Papers’, Pt. III., pp. 339-343). Her authorities are Fetis’s ‘Biogr. Univ. des Musiciens’ and Nisard’s ‘Vie de l’Abbe Vogler’.
—* “This was a very compact organ, in which four key-boardsof five octaves each, and a pedal board of thirty-six keys,with swell complete, were packed into a cube of nine feet.See Fetis’s ‘Biographie Universelle des Musiciens’.—G. Grove.”‘Note to Miss Marx’s Art. on Vogler’.—
Mrs. Turnbull, in her paper on ‘Abt Vogler’ (‘Browning Soc. Papers’, Pt. IV., pp. 469-476), has so well traced the argument of the monologue, that I cannot do better than quote the portion of her paper in which she presents it:—
“Abt Vogler has been extemporizing on his instrument, pouring out through it all his feelings of yearning and aspiration; and now, waking from his state of absorption, excited, and trembling with excess of emotion, he breaks out into the wish, ‘Would it might tarry!’ In verses {stanzas} one and two he compares the music he has made to a palace, which Solomon (as legends of the Koran relate) summoned all creatures, by the magic name on his ring, to raise for the princess he loved; so all the keys, joyfully submitting to the magic power of the master, combine to aid him, the low notes rushing in like demons to give him the base on which to build his airy structure; the high notes like angels throwing decoration of carving and tracery on pinnacle and flying buttress, till in verse three its outline, rising ever higher and higher, shows in the clouds like St. Peter’s dome, illuminated and towering into the vasty sky; and it seems as if his soul, upborne on the surging waves of music, had reached its highest elevation. But no. Influences from without, inexplicable, unexpected, join to enhance his own attempts; the heavens themselves seem to bow down and to flash forth inconceivable splendors on his amazed spirit, till the limitations of time and space are gone—‘there is no more near nor far’.
“. . .In this strange fusion of near and far, of heaven and earth, presences hover, spirits of those long dead or of those yet to be, lured by the power of music to return to life, or to begin it. Figures are dimly descried in the fervor and passion of music, even as of old in the glare and glow of the fiery furnace.
“Verses four and five are a bold attempt to describe the indescribable, to shadow forth that strange state of clairvoyance when the soul shakes itself free from all external impressions, which Vogel tells us was the case with Schubert, and which is true of all great composers— ‘whether in the body or out of the body, I cannot say’.
“In the sixth verse we come to a comparison of music with the other arts. Poetry, painting, and sculpture deal with actual form, and the tangible realities of life. They are subject to laws, and we know how they are produced; can watch the painting grow beneath the artist’s touches, or the poem take shape line by line.
“True it needs the soul of the artist to combine and to interfuse the elements with which he wishes to create any true work of art, but music is almost entirely independent of earthly element in which to clothe and embody itself. It does not allow of a realistic conception, but without intermediate means is in a direct line from God, and enables us to comprehend that Power which created all things out of nothing, with whom TO WILL and TO DO are one and the same.
“Schopenhauer says, ‘There is no sound in Nature fit to serve the musician as a model, or to supply him with more than an occasional suggestion for his sublime purpose. He approaches the original sources of existence more closely than all other artists, nay, even than Nature herself.’
“Heine has also noticed this element of miracle, which coincides exactly with Browning’s view expressed in the lines:—
“‘Here is the finger of God, a flash of the will that can,Existent behind all laws, that made them, and, lo, they are!’
Now, these seven verses contain the music of the poem; in the remaining ones we pass to Browning’s Platonic philosophy.
“In the eighth verse a sad thought of the banished music obtrudes— ‘never to be again’. So wrapt was he in the emotions evoked, he had no time to think of what tones called them up, and now all is past and gone. His magic palace, unlike that of Solomon, has ‘melted into air, into thin air’, and, ‘like the baseless fabric of a vision’, only the memory of it is left. . . . And, depressed by this saddest of human experiences, . . .he turns away impatient from the promise of more and better, to demand from God the same— the very same. Browning with magnificent assurance answers, ‘yes, you shall have the same’.
“‘Fool! all that is at all,Lasts ever, past recall.’“‘Ay, what was, shall be.’
“. . .the ineffable Name which built the palace of King Solomon, which builds houses not made with hands—houses of flesh which souls inhabit, craving for a heart and a love to fill them, can and will satisfy their longings; . . .I know no other words in the English language which compresses into small compass such a body of high and inclusive thought as verse nine. (1) God the sole changeless, to whom we turn with passionate desire as the one abiding-place, as we find how all things suffer loss and change, ourselves, alas! the greatest. (2) His power and love able and willing to satisfy the hearts of His creatures— the thought expatiated on by St. Augustine and George Herbert here crystallized in one line:—‘Doubt that Thy power can fill the heart that Thy power expands?’ (3) Then the magnificent declaration, ‘There shall never be one lost good’—the eternal nature of goodness, while its opposite evil. . .is a non-essential which shall one day pass away entirely, and be swallowed up of good. . . .
“Now follows an announcement, as by tongue of prophet or seer, that we shall at last find all our ideals complete in the mind of God, not put forth timorously, but with triumphant knowledge— knowledge gained by music whose creative power has for the moment revealed to us the permanent existence of these ideals.
“The sorrow and pain and failure which we are all called upon to suffer here, . . .are seen to be proofs and evidences of this great belief. Without the discords how should we learn to prize the harmony?
“Carried on the wings of music and high thought, we have ascended one of those Delectable mountains—Pisgah-peaks from which
“‘Our souls have sight of that immortal seaWhich brought us hither’;
and whence we can descry, however faintly, the land that is very far off to which we travel, and we would fain linger, nay, abide, on the mount, building there our tabernacles.
“But it cannot be. That fine air is difficult to breathe long, and life, with its rounds of custom and duty, recalls us. So we descend with the musician, through varying harmonies and sliding modulations. . .deadening the poignancy of the minor third in the more satisfying reassuring chord of the dominant ninth, which again finds its rest on the key-note—C major— the common chord, so sober and uninteresting that it well symbolizes the common level of life, the prosaic key-note to which unfortunately most of our lives are set.
“We return, however, strengthened and refreshed, braced to endure the wrongs which we know shall be one day righted, to acquiesce in the limited and imperfect conditions of earth, which we know shall be merged at last in heaven’s perfect round, and to accept with patience the renunciation demanded of us here, knowing
“‘All we have willed, or hoped, or dreamed of good shall exist.’”
In his ‘Introductory Address to the Browning Society’, the Rev. J. Kirkman, of Queen’s College, Cambridge, says of ‘Abt Volger’:—
“The spiritual transcendentalism of music, the inscrutable relation between the seen and the eternal, of which music alone unlocks the gate by inarticulate expression, has never had an articulate utterance from a poet before ‘Abt Vogler’. This is of a higher order of composition, quite nobler, than the merely fretful rebellion against the earthly condition imposed here below upon heavenly things, seen in ‘Master Hughes’ {of Saxe-Gotha}. In that and other places, I am not sure that persons of musical ATTAINMENT, as distinguished from musical SOUL AND SYMPATHY, do not rather find a professional gratification at the technicalities. . .than get conducted to ‘the law within the law’. But in ‘Abt Vogler’, the understanding is spell-bound, and carried on the wings of the emotions, as Ganymede in the soft down of the eagle, into the world of spirit. . . .
“The beautiful utterances of Richter alone approach to the value of Browning’s on music. Well does he deserve remembrance for the remark, that ‘Music is the only language incapable of expressing anything impure’, and for many others. They all {the poets quoted in the passage omitted above}, comparatively, speak FROM OUTSIDE; Browning speaks FROM INSIDE, as if an angel came to give all the hints we could receive,
“‘Of that imperial palace when we came.’
He speaks of music as Dante does of Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory, because he has been there. Even the musical Milton, whose best line is, ‘In linked sweetness long drawn out’, whose best special treatment of music is in the occasional poem, ‘At a solemn music’, has given us nothing of the nature of ‘Abt Vogler’. It should be perfectly learnt by heart; and it will be ever whispering analogies to the soul in daily life. Because, of course, the mystery of life and the mystery of music make one of the most fundamental transcendental harmonies breathed into our being.”
In the first stanza some one describes admiringly a writer of mushroom poems. In the second stanza another gives the genesis of a poem which becomes a nation’s heritage.
The speaker is one to whom Shelley is an almost ideal being. He can hardly think of him as a man of flesh and blood. He meets some one who has actually seen him and talked with him; and it’s all so strange to him, and he expresses so much surprise at it, that it moves the laughter of the other, and he breaks off and speaks of crossing a moor. Only a hand’s breadth of it shines alone ‘mid the blank miles round about; for there he picked up, and put inside his breast, a moulted feather, an eagle-feather. He forgets the rest. There is, in fact, nothing more for him to remember. The eagle-feather causes an isolated flash of association with the poet of the atmosphere, the winds, and the clouds,
“The meteoric poet of air and sea.”
The speaker, a Spaniard, it must be supposed, describes to his companion the only poet he knew in his life, who roamed along the promenades and through the by-streets and lanes and alleys of Valladolid, an old dog, bald and blindish, at his heels. He appeared interested in whatever he looked on, and his looks went everywhere, taking in the cobbler at his trade, the man slicing lemons into drink, the coffee-roaster’s brazier, and the boys turning its winch; books on stalls, strung-up fly-leaf ballads, posters by the wall;
“‘If any beat a horse, you felt he saw;If any cursed a woman, he took note.’Yet stared at nobody,—you stared at him,And found, less to your pleasure than surprise,He seemed to know you, and expect as much.”
Popular imagination is active as to who and what he is; perhaps a spy, or it may be “a recording chief-inquisitor, the town’s true master if the town but knew”, who by letters keeps “our Lord the King” well informed “of all thought, said, and acted”; but of the King’s approval of these letters there has been no evidence of any kind.
The speaker found no truth in one of the popular reports, namely, that this strange man lived in great luxury and splendor. On the contrary, he lived in the plainest, simplest manner; played a game of cribbage with his maid, in the evening, and, when the church clock struck ten, went straight off to bed. It seems that while the belief of the people was, that this man kept up a correspondence with their earthly Lord, the King, noting all that went on, the speaker, in the monologue is aware that it was the Heavenly King with whom he corresponded. In the last paragraph of his monologue he expresses the wish that he might have looked in, yet had haply been afraid, when this man came to die, and seen, ministering to him, the heavenly attendants,—
“who line the clean gay garret sides,And stood about the neat low truckle-bedWith the heavenly manner of relieving guard.Here had been, mark, the general-in-chief,Thro’ a whole campaign of the world’s life and death,Doing the King’s work all the dim day long,
And, now the day was won, relieved at once!”
He then adds that there was
“‘No further show or need of that old coat,You are sure, for one thing! Bless us, all the whileHow sprucely WE are dressed out, you and I!’”
we who are so inferior to that divine poet; but,
“A second, and the angels alter that.”
A poem in twelve books.
This monologue is addressed by a poet to a brother-poet whom he finds fault with for speaking naked thoughts instead of draping them in sights and sounds. If boys want images and melody, grown men, you think, want abstract thought. Far from it. The objects which throng our youth, we see and hear, quite as a matter of course. But what of it, if you could tell what they mean? The German Boehme, with his affinities for the abstract, never cared for plants until, one day, he noticed they could speak; that the daisy colloquized with the cowslip on SUCH themes! themes found extant in Jacob’s prose. But when life’s summer passes while reading prose in that tough book he wrote, getting some sense or other out of it, who helps, then, to repair our loss? Another Boehme, say you, with a tougher book and subtler abstract meanings of what roses say? Or some stout Mage like John of Halberstadt, who MADE THINGS Boehme WROTE THOUGHTS about? Ah, John’s the man for us! who instead of giving us the wise talk of roses, scatters all around us the roses themselves, pouring heaven into this shut house of life. So come, the harp back to your heart again, instead of speaking dry words across its strings. Your own boy-face bent over the finer chords, and following the cherub at the top that points to God with his paired half-moon wings, is a far better poem than your poem with all its naked thoughts.
The poet, it appears, speaks here in his own person. Sauntering about Paris, he comes upon the Doric little Morgue, the dead-house, where they show their drowned. He enters, and sees through the screen of glass, the bodies of three men who committed suicide, the day before, by drowning themselves in the Seine.
In the last stanza, he gives expression to his hopeful philosophy, which recognizes “some soul of goodness, in things evil”; * which sees in human nature, “potentiality of final deliverance from the evil in it, given only time enough for the work”. In this age of professed and often, no doubt, affected, agnosticism and pessimism, Browning is the foremost apostle of Hope. He, more than any other great author of the age, whether philosopher, or poet, or divine, has been inspired with the faith that
“a sun will pierceThe thickest cloud earth ever stretched;That, after Last, returns the First,Though a wide compass round be fetched;That what began best, can’t end worst,Nor what God blessed once, prove accurst.”—* ‘Henry V.’, IV. 1. 4.—
Compare with this, the following stanzas from Tennyson’s ‘In Memoriam’, Section 54:—
“Oh yet we trust that somehow goodWill be the final goal of ill,To pangs of nature, sins of will,Defects of doubt, and taints of blood.That nothing walks with aimless feet;That not one life shall be destroyed,Or cast as rubbish to the void,When God hath made the pile complete.
Behold, we know not anything;I can but trust that good shall fallAt last—far off—at last, to all,And every winter change to spring.”
Accompany me, my young friend, in my survey of life from youth to old age.
The present life does not rise to its best and then decline to its worst; “the best is yet to be, the last of life, for which the first was made.”
The indecisions, perplexities, and yearnings, the hopes and fears of youth, I do not remonstrate against. They are the conditions of vitality and growth, distinguish man’s life from the limited completeness of the “low kinds” of creation, “finished and finite clods untroubled by a spark”; and should be prized as inseparable from his high rank in existence.
Life would have nothing to boast of, were man formed but to experience an unalloyed joy, to find always and never to seek. Care irks not the crop-full bird, and doubt frets not the maw-crammed beast. But man is disturbed by a divine spark which is his title to a nearer relationship with God who gives than with his creatures that receive.
The rebuffs he meets with should be welcomed. Life’s true success is secured through obstacles, and seeming failures, and unfulfilled aspirations. He is but a brute whose soul is conformed to his flesh, whose spirit works for the play of arms and legs. The test of the body’s worth should be, the extent to which it can project the soul on its lone way.
But we must not calculate soul-profits all the time. Gifts of every kind which belong to our nature should prove their use, their own good in themselves. I own that the past was for me profuse of power on every side, of perfection at every turn, which my eyes and ears took in, and my brain treasured up. The heart should beat in harmony with this life, and feel how good it is to live and learn, and see the whole design. I who once saw only Power, now see Love perfect also, and am thankful that I was a man, and trust what my Maker will do with me.
This flesh is pleasant, and the soul can repose in it, after its own activities. It is the solid land to which it can return when wearied with its flights; and we often wish, in our yearnings for rest, that we might hold some prize to match those manifold possessions of the brute, might gain most as we should do best; but the realization of such a wish is not compatible with the dignity of our nature.
Flesh and soul must be mutually subservient; one must not be merely subjected to the other, not even the inferior to the superior. Let us cry, “All good things are ours, nor soul helps flesh more, now, than flesh helps soul.”
Let, then, youth enter into its heritage, and use and enjoy it; let it then pass into an approved manhood, “for aye removed from the developed brute; a God, though in the germ”; let it pass fearless and unperplexed as to what weapons to select, what armor to indue for the battle which awaits that approved manhood.
Youth ended, let what it has resulted in, be taken account of; wherein it succeeded, wherein it failed; and having proved the past, let it face the future, satisfied in acting to-morrow what is learned to-day.
As it was better that youth should awkwardly strive TOWARD making, than repose in what it found made, so is it better that age, exempt from strife, should know, than tempt further. As in youth, age was waited for, so in age, wait for death, without fear, and with the absolute soul-knowledge which is independent of the reasoning intellect of youth. It is this absolute soul-knowledge which severs great minds from small, rather than intellectual power.
Human judgments differ. Whom shall my soul believe? One conclusion may, at least, be rested in: a man’s true success must not be estimated by things done, which had their price in the world; but by that which the world’s coarse thumb and finger failed to plumb; by his immature instincts and unsure purposes which weighed not as his work in the world’s estimation, yet went toward making up the main amount of his real worth; by thoughts which could not be contained in narrow acts, by fancies which would not submit to the bonds of language; by all that he strived after and could not attain, by all that was ignored by men with only finite and realizable aims: such are God’s standards of his worth.
All the true acquisitions of the soul, all the reflected results of its energizing after the unattainable in this life, all that has truly BEEN, belong to the absolute, and are permanent amid all earth’s changes. It is, indeed, through these changes, through the dance of plastic circumstance, that the permanent is secured. They are the machinery, the Divine Potter’s wheel, which gives the soul its bent, tries it, and turns it forth a cup for the Master’s lips, sufficiently impressed.
“So take and use Thy work!Amend what flaws may lurk,What strain o’ the stuff, what warpings past the aim!My times be in Thy hand!Perfect the cup as planned!Let age approve of youth, and death complete the same.”
The following account of Rabbi Ben Ezra, I take from Dr. F. J. Furnivall’s ‘Bibliography of Rober Browning’ (‘Browning Soc. Papers’, Part II., p. 162):—
“Rabbi Ben Ezra, or Ibn Ezra, was a learned Jew, 1092-1167 A.D. Ibn Ezra and Maimonides, whom he is said to have visited in Egypt, were two of the four great Philosophers or Lights of the Jews in the Middle Ages. Ibn Ezra was born at Toledo in Spain, about 1092 or 1093 A.D., or in 1088 according to Graetz, ‘Geschichte der Juden’, vi. 198. He was poor, but studied hard, composed poems wherewith to ‘Adorn my own, my Hebrew nation’, married, had a son Isaac (a poet too), travelled to Africa, the Holy Land, Rome in 1140, Persia, India, Italy, France, England. He wrote many treatises on Hebrew Grammar, astronomy, mathematics, &c., commentaries on the books of the Bible, &c.—many of them in Rome—and two pamphlets in England ‘for a certain Salomon of London’. Joseph of Maudeville was one of his English pupils. He died in 1167, at the age of 75, either in Kalahorra, on the frontier of Navarre, or in Rome. His commentary on Isaiah has been englished by M. Friedlaender, and published by the Society of Hebrew Literature, Truebner, 1873. From the Introduction to that book I take these details. Ibn Ezra believed in a future life. In his commentary on Isaiah 55:3, ‘AND YOUR SOUL SHALL LIVE’, he says, ‘That is, your soul shall live forever after the death of the body, or you will receive new life through Messiah, when you will return to the Divine Law.’ See also on Isaiah 39:18. Of the potter’s clay passage, Isaiah 29:16, he has only a translation, ‘Shall man be esteemed as the potter’s clay’, and no comment that could ever have given Browning a hint for his use of the metaphor in his poem, even if he had ever seen Ibn Ezra’s commentary. See Rabbi Ben Ezra’s fine ‘Song of Death’ in stanzas 12-20 of the grimly humorous Holy-Cross Day.”
—* “Grammarian” mustn’t be understood here in its restrictedmodern sense; it means rather one devoted to learning, orletters, in general.—Shortly after the revival of learning in Europe.
The devoted disciples of a dead grammarian are bearing his body up a mountain-side for burial on its lofty summit, “where meteors shoot, clouds form, lightnings are loosened, stars come and go! Lofty designs must close in like effects: loftily lying, leave him,— still loftier than the world suspects, living and dying”.
This poem is INFORMED throughout with the poet’s iterated doctrine in regard to earth life,—to the relativity of that life. The grammarian, in his hunger and thirst after knowledge and truth, thought not of time. “What’s time? Leave Now for dogs and apes! Man has Forever.” “Oh, if we draw a circle premature, heedless of far gain, greedy for quick returns of profit, sure bad is our bargain!”
The poem “exhibits something of the life of the Scaligers and the Casaubons, of many an early scholar, like Roger Bacon’s friend, Pierre de Maricourt, working at some region of knowledge, and content to labor without fame so long as he mastered thoroughly whatever he undertook” (‘Contemporary Rev.’, iv., 135).
But the grammarian was true to one side only of Browning’s philosophy of life. He disregarded the claims of the physical life, and became “soul-hydropic with a sacred thirst”. *
—* “Every lust is a kind of hydropic distemper, and the morewe drink the more we shall thirst.”—Tillotson, quoted in‘Webster’.—
The lyrico-dramatic verse of this monologue is especially noticeable. There is a march in it, exhibiting the spirit with which the bearers of the corpse are conveying it up the mountain-side.
Karshish, the Arab physician, has been journeying in quest of knowledge pertaining to his art, and writes to his all-sagacious master, Abib, ostensibly about the specimens he has gathered of medicinal plants and minerals, and the observations he has made; but his real interest, which he endeavors to conceal by passing to matters of greater import to him, as he would have his sage at home believe, is in what he pronounces “a case of mania, subinduced by epilepsy”. His last letter brought his journeyings to Jericho. He is now on his way to Jerusalem, and has reached Bethany, where he passes the night.
The case of mania which so interests him,—far more than he is willing to admit,—is that of Lazarus, whose firm conviction rests that he was dead (in fact they buried him) and then restored to life by a Nazarene physician of his tribe, who afterwards perished in a tumult. The man Lazarus is witless, he writes, of the relative value of all things. Vast armaments assembled to besiege his city, and the passing of a mule with gourds, are all one to him; while at some trifling fact, he’ll gaze, rapt with stupor, as if it had for him prodigious import. Should his child sicken unto death, why look for scarce abatement of his cheerfulness, or suspension of his daily craft; while a word, gesture, or glance from that same child at play or laid asleep, will start him to an agony of fear, exasperation, just as like! The law of the life, it seems, to which he was temporarily admitted, has become to him the law of this earthly life; his heart and brain move there, his feet stay here. He appears to be perfectly submissive to the heavenly will, and awaits patiently for death to restore his being to equilibrium. He is by no means apathetic, but loves both old and young, affects the very brutes and birds and flowers of the field. This man, so restored to life, regards his restorer as, who but God himself, Creator and Sustainer of the world, that came and dwelt in flesh on it awhile, taught, healed the sick, broke bread at his own house, then died! Here Karshish breaks off and asks pardon for writing of such trivial matters, when there are so important ones to treat of, and states that he noticed on the margin of a pool blue-flowering borage abounding, the Aleppo sort, very nitrous. But he returns again to the subject, and tries to explain the peculiar interest, and awe, indeed, the man has inspired him with. Perhaps the journey’s end, and his weariness, he thinks, may have had something to do with it. He then relates the weird circumstances under which he met him, and concludes by saying that the repose he will have at Jerusalem shall make amends for the time his letter wastes, his master’s and his own. Till when, once more thy pardon and farewell!
But in spite of himself, his suppressed interest in the strange case MUST have full expression, and he gives way to all reserve and ejaculates in a postscript:—
“The very God! think, Abib; dost thou think?So, the All-Great, were the All-Loving too—So, through the thunder comes a human voiceSaying, ‘O heart I made, a heart beats here!Face, my hands fashioned, see it in myself.Thou hast no power nor may’st conceive of mine,But love I gave thee, with myself to love,And thou must love me who have died for thee!’The madman saith He said so: it is strange.”
See before, p. 41 {about one-fifth into Part II of the Introduction}, some remarks on the psychological phase of the monologue.
“The monologue is a signal example of ‘emotional ratiocination’. There is a flash of ecstasy through the strangely cautious description of Karshish; every syllable is weighed and thoughtful, everywhere the lines swell into perfect feeling.”—Robert Buchanan.
“As an example of our poet’s dramatic power in getting right at the heart of a man, reading what is there written, and then looking through his eyes and revealing it all in the man’s own speech, nothing can be more complete in its inner soundings and outer-keeping, than the epistle containing the ‘Strange Medical Experience of Karshish, the Arab Physician’, who has been picking up the crumbs of learning on his travels in the Holy Land, and writes to Abib, the all-sagacious, at home. It is so solemnly real and so sagely fine.”—N. Brit. Rev., May, 1861.