"Ham. 'O Jephthah, judge of Israel,' what a treasure hadst thou!"Pol. What treasure had he, my lord?"Ham. Why 'One fair daughter, and no more, the which he loved passing well.'"Pol. Still on my daughter [aside]."Ham. Am I not i' the right, old Jephthah?"Pol. If you call me Jephthah, my lord, I have a daughter that I love passing well."Ham. Nay, that follows not."Pol. What follows then, my lord?"Ham. Why, 'As by lot, God wot.'"
"Ham. 'O Jephthah, judge of Israel,' what a treasure hadst thou!
"Pol. What treasure had he, my lord?
"Ham. Why 'One fair daughter, and no more, the which he loved passing well.'
"Pol. Still on my daughter [aside].
"Ham. Am I not i' the right, old Jephthah?
"Pol. If you call me Jephthah, my lord, I have a daughter that I love passing well.
"Ham. Nay, that follows not.
"Pol. What follows then, my lord?
"Ham. Why, 'As by lot, God wot.'"
Here Hamlet again mystifies Polonius about his daughter, quoting from an old English ballad. Jephthah is pilloried in history as the man who sacrificed his daughter in payment for his worldly success. Shakespeare also refers to him in '3 Henry VI,' v, 1, 91: "To keep that oath were more impiety than Jephthah's when he sacrificed his daughter." Hamlet dubs Polonius "Jephthah," because he believes that he has paid for political preferment by yielding his daughter to the King. And when Polonius says that, if he is to be called Jephthah, he admits that like Jephthah he loves his daughter, Hamlet replies in characteristic vein, "Nay, that follows not"; meaning that it follows instead that like Jephthah he has sacrificed her. But when Polonius presses him to say what does follow, he conceals his real meaning, as his custom is, and diverts the old man's mind by answering the line from the ballad. As was the case with regard to Ophelia, Hamlet is reluctant to make the open charge against her father.
Thus in every instance in which Hamlet comes in contact with Ophelia, or refers to her, his actions and his words consistently point to the fact that he renounces her because he believes her to have thrust him aside while engaging in an intrigue with the King. And the fact that from this point of view there is a connected story of their relations told by the several interviews above discussed, that Hamlet's conduct and language in them all are adequately explained, and that a single belief of his accounts for each of them, is strong confirmation of the theory's correctness. It is in harmony with the general scheme of the drama also, all of whose important movements hinge on "purposes mistook"; and it furnishes Hamlet with an adequate motive for his treatment of Ophelia, and removes from him the stigma of mere brutishness or insanity. Coleridge well says that there must have been "some profound heart truth" under the story, and the theory herein advanced seems to disclose it.
David A. McKnight.
Washington, D. C., February 26, 1898.
"When a man's verses cannot be understood, nor a man's good wit seconded with the forward child understanding, it strikes a man more dead than a great reckoning in a little room."--Touchstone.
The phantasmal lords of life of the poem 'Experience,' which we considered at the close of the last paper, were presumably suggested to Emerson by the following lines from Tennyson's 'Mystic,' published in 1830 (Emerson imported these early volumets of young Tennyson, and never tired of praising them to his friends):--
"Always there stood before him, night and day,Of wayward vary-colored circumstanceThe imperishable presences serene,Colossal, without form, or sense, or sound,Dim shadows but unwaning presencesFour-faced to four corners of the sky."
"Always there stood before him, night and day,
Of wayward vary-colored circumstance
The imperishable presences serene,
Colossal, without form, or sense, or sound,
Dim shadows but unwaning presences
Four-faced to four corners of the sky."
The "silent congregated hours," "daughters of time, divinely tall," with "severe and youthful brows," in this same poem of Tennyson gave Emerson his "daughters of Time, the hypocritic Days," congregated in procession. Tennyson's mystic, who hears "time flowing in the middle of the night" recalls Emerson's 'Two Rivers,' in which the living All, the Infinite Soul, is figured as a stream flowing through eternity:--
"I hear the spending of the stream,Through years, through men, through nature fleet,Through love and thought, through power and dream."
"I hear the spending of the stream,
Through years, through men, through nature fleet,
Through love and thought, through power and dream."
At the close of the poem 'Wealth' there is a bit of scientific nature-ethics which is a little obscure. The greater part of the poem is a series of graphic pictures, detailing the process of world-development through the geologic ages down to the advent of man. Suddenly, at the end,--just as at the end of the prose essay on the same subject,--he remembers his manners and makes his bow to the august Soul, kindles a light in the Geissler tube of nature, sets it aglow interiorly with spiritual law:--
"But, though light-headed man forget,Remembering Matter pays her debt:Still, through her motes and masses, drawElectric thrills and ties of Law,Which bind the strength of Nature wildTo the conscience of a child."
"But, though light-headed man forget,
Remembering Matter pays her debt:
Still, through her motes and masses, draw
Electric thrills and ties of Law,
Which bind the strength of Nature wild
To the conscience of a child."
The logical link connecting this part with the rest has dropped out in the poem, but is clear enough in the essay. The lines mean simply this: that, though man may forget to obey the laws of the universe, Nature never forgets her debt of obedience; she bites and stings the transgressor and caresses and soothes him who obeys. In her own submission to law she has that artlessness and quasi-moral sense that affines her to the moral nature of a child. The "awful victors" and "Eternal Rights" of 'Voluntaries' are only "remembering Matter" in another mask: with all their innocent obedience they are themselves terrible executors:--
"They reach no term, they never sleep,In equal strength through space abide;Though, feigning dwarfs, they crouch and creep,The strong they slay, the swift outstride."
"They reach no term, they never sleep,
In equal strength through space abide;
Though, feigning dwarfs, they crouch and creep,
The strong they slay, the swift outstride."
In the following high pantheistic strain the seer chants the old rune that God is all:--
"The living Heaven thy prayers respect,House at once and architect,Quarrying man's rejected hours,Builds therewith eternal towers;Sole and self-commanded works,Fears not undermining days,Grows by decays,And, by the famous might that lurksIn reaction and recoil,Makes flame to freeze and ice to boil;Forging, through swart arms of Offence,The silver seat of Innocence."--'Spiritual Laws.'
"The living Heaven thy prayers respect,
House at once and architect,
Quarrying man's rejected hours,
Builds therewith eternal towers;
Sole and self-commanded works,
Fears not undermining days,
Grows by decays,
And, by the famous might that lurks
In reaction and recoil,
Makes flame to freeze and ice to boil;
Forging, through swart arms of Offence,
The silver seat of Innocence."
--'Spiritual Laws.'
When the Living Universe builds a house, it builds it out of its own soul substance; while man sleeps and loiters, the Unconscious ceaselessly toils. In the phrase "grows by decays," Emerson embodies, I believe, the law of the conservation of energy. The magazine of divine power is exhaustless; does energy sink out of sight here, it is only to reappear yonder; the tree decays, but out of its fertilizing substance new plants may spring up; the coal under the steam boiler of the locomotive is consumed, but the swart goblin has lost no whit of his might: he just slips darkling up into the steam, makes the driving-rods his swift-shuttling arms, and, grasping with his steel fingers the felloes of the wheel, whirls you half a thousand miles over the green bulge of the earth ere set of sun, The mystic Power grows by decays; and also, by "the famous might that lurks in reaction and recoil," reconciles apparent antinomies and opposites, and is the agent that visits evil upon the head of the evil doer and mercy upon the merciful. If a heavy body be rolled up an inclined plane, it acquires potential and kinetic energy just equal to the force expended in getting it there, and in reaction develops such a famous might that, if massive enough, it will knock you down if you stand in its way. If you lift the big pendulum of the clock in the corner, you also confer latent, or reactionary, energy upon it. Only it is of course hyperbolical for the poet to say that reaction is potent enough to actually freeze flame and make ice boil your kettle. That is only one of Emerson's rhetorical Chinese crackers, his startling thaumaturgic way of illustrating his thesis.
The key-thought of the essay 'Spiritual Laws,' to which the occult lines we are considering were prefixed, is, Be noble; for, if you are not, your face and life will, by the law of reaction and return, publish your lapse. Punishment and reward are fruits that ripen unsuspected in the deeds of men.
The pertinency and application of many of Emerson's titles are not at once apparent.
In 'Merops' the bard affirms that in his high philosophical soarings he cares not whether he can at once ticket his intuitions and perceptions with names or not. Merops was changed into an eagle, says Ovid, and placed among the constellations,--hence, I suppose, is selected by Emerson as a good type of the kind of soaring thinker he is describing. That he also has in mind that Merops was the putative father of Phaëthon is shown perhaps by the allusion (in the last stanza) to Phaëthon's mishap:--
"Space grants beyond his fated roadNo inch to the god of day,And copious language still bestowedOne word, no more, to say."
"Space grants beyond his fated road
No inch to the god of day,
And copious language still bestowed
One word, no more, to say."
'Alphonso of Castile' is a dramatic monologue containing a whimsical suggestion for compounding a Man out of ordinary weak-timbered manikins by killing nine in ten of them and "stuffing nine brains in one hat." It is put into the mouth of Alphonso, King of Castile, born in 1221, calledEl Sabio, "The Wise." He was a man who suffered much in his life. He wrote a famous code of laws, and first made the Castilian a national language by causing the Bible to be translated into it. Emerson chooses him as the vehicle of his own whimsey about the condensed homunculus chiefly on account of one famous sentence attributed to him: "Had I been present at the creation, I could have given some useful hints for the better ordering of the universe." Emerson, in his rhymed soliloquy, put into Alphonso's mouth, sarcastically twits Nature with her depleted stocks, her run-out strains of lemons, figs, roses, and men. The remedy proposed in the case of man, and outlined above, has the true Emerson-Swift bouquet, is colored and veined with a right Shakespearian scorn of the mob.
'Mithridates' is a monologue put into the mouth of Mithridates the Great, King of Pontus, who is said to have discovered an antidote for poisons which made him poison-proof against his many enemies:--
"I cannot spare water or wine,Tobacco-leaf, or poppy, or rose;From the earth-poles to the line,All between that works or grows,Everything is kin of mine.Give me agates for my meat;Give me cantharids to eat;From air and ocean bring me foods,From all zones and altitudes."
"I cannot spare water or wine,
Tobacco-leaf, or poppy, or rose;
From the earth-poles to the line,
All between that works or grows,
Everything is kin of mine.
Give me agates for my meat;
Give me cantharids to eat;
From air and ocean bring me foods,
From all zones and altitudes."
As late as 1787 "mithridate" was the name for an antidote against poison included in the London pharmacopœia. In Jonson's 'Every Man in his Humour,' Kitely, thinking he is poisoned, calls for mithridate and oil. It was composed of many ingredients and given in the form of electuaries. In our modern pharmacopoeias we have plenty of antidotes against virulent poisons;e. g., atropine for the deadly amanita mushroom. And counter-poisons are often used, as the tincture of foxglove for aconite, atropine for morphia, or morphia for belladonna. According to the tradition, Mithridates gradually inured his system to counter-poisons, and became poison-proof. At any rate, Emerson uses him for his metaphor, which, in untropical speech, is this: "lam tired of the nambypamby and goody-goody; give me things strong and rank; give me evil for a change and a spur.
"Too long shut in strait and few,Thinly dieted on dew,I will use the world, and sift it,To a thousand humors shift it,As you spin a cherry.O doleful ghosts and goblins merry!O all you virtues, methods, mights,Means, appliances, delights,Reputed wrongs and braggart rights,Smug routine, and things allowed,Minorities, things under cloud!Hither! take me, use me, fill me,Vein and artery, though ye kill me!"
"Too long shut in strait and few,
Thinly dieted on dew,
I will use the world, and sift it,
To a thousand humors shift it,
As you spin a cherry.
O doleful ghosts and goblins merry!
O all you virtues, methods, mights,
Means, appliances, delights,
Reputed wrongs and braggart rights,
Smug routine, and things allowed,
Minorities, things under cloud!
Hither! take me, use me, fill me,
Vein and artery, though ye kill me!"
In brief, "I have run the gauntlet of experience, sounded all the depths of passion, joy, woe, evil. I am dipped in Styx, more invulnerable than Siegfried, and strong now to use the world and be used by it." The mood of the poem is the wild longing that sometimes comes over the good man to break loose and have his fling, come what may, cry,Vive la bagatelle!or run amuck and tilt at all he meets. It is needless to say that the staid Emerson never carried this mood farther than to smoke a cigar now and then, or take an Adirondack outing. His contemporary, the untrammelled Whitman, could both preach and practise (within the bounds of reason) the Mithridatic doctrine; and he was a more many-sided and symmetrical man in consequence.
The last two lines of 'Mithridates,' as printed from the autograph copy, were,--
"God! I will not be an owl,But sun me in the Capitol."
"God! I will not be an owl,
But sun me in the Capitol."
These lines Emerson wisely dropped.
'Forerunners' ("Long I followed happy guides)" mean one's brave hopes and ideals of good to come, our dreams and aspirations. The lines
"No speed of mine availsTo hunt upon their shining trails"
"No speed of mine avails
To hunt upon their shining trails"
Thoreau evidently utilized as text for his well-known fable in 'Walden' of the lost hound, bay horse, and turtle-dove.
The portrait of Hermione, the patient-sweet wife of Leontes in 'The Winter's Tale' of Shakespeare, serves Emerson, in his poem 'Hermione,' as the model of a perfect wife, and a more acceptable one to this age than Chaucer's abject Griselda. Such a lady as Shakespeare's Hermione, beautiful in person and of rare self-control and virtue, is an adumbration or epitome of the universal beauty. Looking at nature, the American poet finds the features of his Hermione there: "mountains and the misty plains, Her colossal portraiture." I suppose that this sketch, tender and delicately toned as if with a silver point, is autobiographical, and is a shadowing forth of the character of Emerson's first wife, the ethereal souled Ellen Tucker, who died of consumption after only a year and a half of married life. When her "meteor glances came," he says, he was "hermit vowed to books and gloom," and dwelling alone. In the lines
"The chains of kindThe distant bind;Deed thou doest she must do,"
"The chains of kind
The distant bind;
Deed thou doest she must do,"
he anticipates (does he not?) the telepathy of our days,--kindred minds seeking similar places and thinking like thoughts, although in this case, to be sure, the kindred soul is thought of as merged with the inorganic world,--the winds and waterfalls and twilight nooks.
Search the whole world through, you shall find no predecessor of Emerson the poet. The only verse resembling his in general style is that of the enigmatic 'Phoenix and the Turtle,' attributed to Shakespeare, and much admired by Emerson:--
"Let the bird of loudest lay,On the sole Arabian tree.Herald sad and trumpet be,To whose sound chaste wings obey."
"Let the bird of loudest lay,
On the sole Arabian tree.
Herald sad and trumpet be,
To whose sound chaste wings obey."
Emerson's verses have also a slight Persian tinge now and then, caught from his studies of Saadi and Hafiz. In his fine lyric cry 'Bacchus,' in which he calls for a wine of life, a cup of divine soma or amrita, that shall sinew his brain and exalt all his powers of thought and action to a godlike pitch,--
"Bring me wine, but wine which never grewIn the belly of the grape,· · · ·That I intoxicated,And by the draught assimilated,May float at pleasure through all natures;· · · ·Quickened so, will I unlockEvery crypt of every rock,"--
"Bring me wine, but wine which never grew
In the belly of the grape,
· · · ·
That I intoxicated,
And by the draught assimilated,
May float at pleasure through all natures;
· · · ·
Quickened so, will I unlock
Every crypt of every rock,"--
he unconsciously gave his lines, I think, the outward form of some verses by Hafiz, in which that singer intimates that, give him the right kind of wine, and he can perform wonders as if with Solomon's ring or Jemschid's wine-cup mirror. Emerson himself in one of his early editions gives a spirited verse translation of Hafiz's poem. Mr. William R. Alger ('Specimens of Oriental Poetry,' Boston, 1856) translates Hafiz thus:--
"Bring me wine! By my puissant armThe thick net of deceit and of harmWhich the priests have spread over the worldShall be rent and in laughter be hurled.Bring me wine! I the earth will subdue.Bring me wine! I the heaven will storm through.Bring me wine, bring it quick, make no halt!To the throne of both worlds will I vault.All is in the red streamlet divine.Bring me wine! O my host, bring me wine!"
"Bring me wine! By my puissant arm
The thick net of deceit and of harm
Which the priests have spread over the world
Shall be rent and in laughter be hurled.
Bring me wine! I the earth will subdue.
Bring me wine! I the heaven will storm through.
Bring me wine, bring it quick, make no halt!
To the throne of both worlds will I vault.
All is in the red streamlet divine.
Bring me wine! O my host, bring me wine!"
'Etienne de la Boéce' gets its title (with Emersonian variations) from the name of one of Montaigne's most intimate friends,--Estienne de la Boëtie. Montaigne tells us about him in Chapter xxvii of his Essays, affirming that he would have accomplished miracles, had he lived. He died when only thirty-three at Bordeaux (1563). His scholarship was solid, his translations from the Greek excellent. He was so eager to read Greek that he copied whole volumes with his own hand. A French critic says, "Les qualités qui brillaient en lui imprimaient à toute sa personne un cachet distingué et un charme sévère." Yet he seems to have been something of an imitator of his great friend; and it is in this aspect of his life that Emerson regards him, using him, perhaps somewhat unjustly to his powers and developing genius, as the type of a too imitative disciple:--
"I serve you not, if you I follow,Shadowlike, o'er hill and hollow;· · · ·Vainly valiant, you have missedThe manhood that should yours resist."
"I serve you not, if you I follow,
Shadowlike, o'er hill and hollow;
· · · ·
Vainly valiant, you have missed
The manhood that should yours resist."
Probably most Americans, if asked to explain the relevancy of the title of Emerson's poem 'Guy,' would be unable to answer offhand. The verses celebrate the lucky man:--
"The common waters fellAs costly wine into his well.The zephyr in his garden rolledFrom plum-trees vegetable gold.Stream could not so perversely windBut corn of Guy's was there to grind."
"The common waters fell
As costly wine into his well.
The zephyr in his garden rolled
From plum-trees vegetable gold.
Stream could not so perversely wind
But corn of Guy's was there to grind."
The reference, of course, is to a man well known in England,--Thomas Guy (d. 1724), founder of Guy's Hospital in London. He was the George Peabody of his day. Beginning life as a bookseller, he made a good deal of money in printing Bibles, but acquired most of his enormous fortune by financial speculations. He was extremely economical; for example, always ate his dinner on his shop counter, first spreading out a newspaper to catch the crumbs. His charities were boundless. To his hospital he gave $1,000,000; and at his death his will was found to contain an enormous number of special benefactions, including bequests to over ninety cousins. Emerson in his poem compares Guy to Polycrates, who was King of Samos some five hundred years before Christ. He says that Polycrates "chained the sunshine and the breeze"; that is, the very elements seemed to be in his pay. This run of luck was without a break up to his death; his fleet of a hundred ships was the largest then known; he conquered all his enemies, and amassed great treasure. His ally, Amasis, King of Egypt, was so alarmed at his prosperity, fearing the envy of the gods, that he advised him to make some noteworthy sacrifice. The story goes that Polycrates accordingly threw his emerald signet-ring into the sea, but it came back to his kitchens in the belly of a large fish, as in the Arabian Nights story. The fears of Amasis were finally justified; for the Persian satrap Orœtes enticed Polycrates to the mainland, and crucified him.
'Xenophanes' embodies poetically the doctrine of the earnest old Greek agnostic and monist of that name, that God, or the All, is uncreated, immovable, and one,--not immovable in its parts, but as a whole, and just because it is all. Xenophanes saw the grandeur and incomprehensibility of the universe, he violently opposed what seemed to him the disgraceful polytheism of Homer, and anticipated the modern atomic theory and the doctrine of the unity of life as revealed by the spectroscope and the discovery of the conservation and mutual convertibility of forces. Or, as Emerson puts it in his haunting numbers,--
"By fate, not option, frugal Nature gaveOne scent to hyson and to wall-flower,One sound to pine-groves and to waterfalls,One aspect to the desert and the lake.It was her stern necessity."
"By fate, not option, frugal Nature gave
One scent to hyson and to wall-flower,
One sound to pine-groves and to waterfalls,
One aspect to the desert and the lake.
It was her stern necessity."
The title of the poem 'Hamatreya' seemed at first to baffle a perfect and indubitable explanation. The word can be found in no English or foreign dictionary that the largest libraries afford. We are indebted, however, to Col. T. W. Higginson (The Critic, Feb. 18, 1888) for not only giving us a clew to the title, but for pointing out the portion of the Vishnu Purana (Wilson's translation, 1840) on which Emerson based his 'Earth Song' in 'Hamatreya,' and, in fact, got the hint for the whole poem; namely, at the close of Book IV. Maitreya is a disciple of Parasara, who relates to Maitreya the Vishnu Purana. Among other things he tells Maitreya of a chant of the Earth, who said, "When I hear a king sending word to another by his ambassador, 'This earth is mine: immediately resign your pretensions to it,' I am moved to violent laughter at first; but it soon subsides in pity for the infatuated fool." Again, the Purana says, "Earth laughs, as if smiling with autumnal flowers, to behold her kings unable to effect the subjugation of themselves"; which is Emerson's
"Earth laughs in flowers, to see her boastful boysEarth-proud, proud of the earth which is not theirs."
"Earth laughs in flowers, to see her boastful boys
Earth-proud, proud of the earth which is not theirs."
And again: "These were the verses, Maitreya, which Earth recited, and by listening to which ambition fades away, like snow before the sun." Here are Emerson's lines:--
"When I heard the Earth-song,I was no longer brave;My avarice cooledLike lust in the chill of the grave."
"When I heard the Earth-song,
I was no longer brave;
My avarice cooled
Like lust in the chill of the grave."
Colonel Higginson suggests that Emerson may also have had in mind, in writing 'Hamatreya,' Psalm, xlix. 11. As he rightly says, the title evidently is meant to give a hint of the Hindoo source of the argument of the poem. It is in line with the uniform custom of Emerson in giving historical catch-words, especially proper names, as his titles. After an exhaustive search through all the Hindoo scriptures, I have reached a conviction which approaches absolute certainty that Hamatreya is Emerson's imperfect recollection of Maitreya or that he purposely coined the word. Emerson, it is nearly certain, read the Vishnu Purana, translated by H. H. Wilson (a large and costly work), by the copy then in the Harvard Library or the Boston Athenaeum, perhaps taking brief notes, but omitting to write down "Maitreya." In his exhaustive index of proper names, appended to the Vishnu Purana, Wilson has no such word as Hamatreya, nor does it occur anywhere in the book. To clinch the argument, Prof. Charles R. Lanman, the well-known Sanskrit scholar of Harvard University, writes me that "Hamatreya is not a Sanskrit word." "The Atreyas," he says, "were the descendants of Atri." "It is an easy mistake to makeHamatreyaout ofMaitreya. I really think you will have to assume a simple slip here."
Emerson is not wilfully obscure. But he comes dangerously near to being so in the demand he often makes upon his readers for out-of-the-way knowledge. 'Casella' is the title of an Emersonian quatrain,--
"Test of the poet is knowledge of love,For Eros is older than Saturn or Jove.Never was poet, of late or of yore,Who was not tremulous with love-lore."
"Test of the poet is knowledge of love,
For Eros is older than Saturn or Jove.
Never was poet, of late or of yore,
Who was not tremulous with love-lore."
The reference is to Dante's friend Casella ("Casella mio"), whom he meets in Purgatory, and who sweetly sings (as of yore on earth he was wont) a canzone by Dante himself,--"Amor, che nella mente mi ragiona." Emerson's favorite poet, Milton, in his sonnet to Henry Lawes, alludes, as Mr. Norton points out, to this friendship:--
"Dante shall give fame leave to set thee higherThan his Casella, whom he wooed to singMet in the milder shades of Purgatory."
"Dante shall give fame leave to set thee higher
Than his Casella, whom he wooed to sing
Met in the milder shades of Purgatory."
The titleἀδάκρυν νεμόνται αἰῶνα[Transliteration: adakrun nemontai aiona] is from Pindar, I believe. Emerson took it fromThe Dial, where (July, '43) it appears as the motto to a poem by Charles A. Dana on 'Manhood.' It means, literally, "They pass a tearless life"; or, very freely rendered, "They live a life of smiles,"--a sentiment explained by the first lines,--
"A new commandment, said the smiling Muse,I give my darling son, Thou shalt not preach."
"A new commandment, said the smiling Muse,I give my darling son, Thou shalt not preach."
Even in so slight a matter as choosing a name for his verses 'To Rhea,' Emerson's philosophical belief is glimpsed; for Rhea was the mother of gods, and such he believed all women to be. The thought of this remarkable poem, which its author feigns to have received from the thousand chattering tongues of the poplar-tree, is extremely subtle and somewhat difficult to formulate. The analysis is this. If you, a wife, have lost your supremacy in your husband's affections, take a strange and noble revenge, not by hating, but, in a kind of calm altruistic despair, endowing him with all the gifts and blessings at your command. The poem is headed 'To Rhea' (Rhea being the wife of the cruel Saturn, who devoured his own children) as to a wife whose husband had merely "drank of Cupid's nectar cup," married her from sex-instinct alone, and then, the "bandages of purple light" fallen from "his eyes," treated her with indifference. But she continues to love him; and more the poet gives her the advice just noted, illustrating by the supposed case of a god loving a mortal maid, and warily knowing that she, with her inferior ideals, can never adequately requite his love, yet nobly endowing her with all gifts and graces, which are the hostages he pawns for freedom from "his thrall." He does this in an altruistic spirit, in order by her to "model newer races" and "carry man to new degrees of power and comeliness." But what thrall? We must walk warily here. In order not to seem to give his verses an autobiographical cast (although the god, the "wise Immortal," of them is really such a type as the seer Emerson himself), he withdraws into dim recesses and speaks in subtlest metaphors. The thrall, I think, is the bondage a lover or husband is in to his beloved, in whom the solecisms and disenchantments of possession have supplanted the poetic illusions of romantic love. The man of supreme wisdom, by the magic of self-sacrifice and boundless profusion of gifts turns the trap or prison in which nature has caught him into a bower of Eden. By the road of generosity he escapes. He cunningly builds up in her mind gratitude and friendship in place of the lost romanticism. There is in this treatment of love a touch of the coldblooded philosophy of the Emersonian critique of friendship. But if it is not a marriage of ideal kind, such as that of the Brownings, which he celebrates, he at least embodies in his verse the shrewd love-philosophy of the practical-poetical Englishman, united to the average woman for the furtherance of the ends of the species.
Mr. George Brown, in his Emerson primer, thinks that the key-thought of 'Rhea' is in these lines from 'The World-Soul' about the gods:--
"To him who scorns their charitiesTheir arms fly open wide."
"To him who scorns their charitiesTheir arms fly open wide."
But the parallelism somewhat halts. For mark: In the one case Napoleon's maxim is embodied, that God is on the side of the strongest battalions. The one who scorns the favoritisms and alms of Heaven, and yet, will he nill he, receives its aid, is really the strong God himself in mask, the noble and resolute man executing his will in time and space. But in the case supposed in 'Rhea,' of husband and wife, the ones who scorn love are those not deserving of gifts at all (although Nature finds her account in them), but persons who receive gifts in charity from one altruistically nobler than themselves. It is just this idea of sublime self-sacrifice that gives to 'Rhea' its strange subtlety and its uniqueness among poems on love. There is a consolatory under-thought in the palimpsest, too. By his illustration of the god and the mortal maid the poet wishes Rhea to divine that, if wives make moan over husbands' lost love, husbands no less often have reason to lament the cooled affection of wives.
The central idea in 'Uriel' is that there is no such thing as evil. This thesis is put into the mouth of Uriel, one of the seven archangels, because he was the "interpreter" of God's will. So Milton says, in thelocus classicuson Uriel in Book III of 'Paradise Lost.' He also says he was
"The sharpest-sighted spirit of all in heav'n."
His station was in the all-viewing sun. Uriel, in Milton, tells how, when the universe was yet chaos,
"Or ever the wild Time coined itselfInto calendar months and days,"
"Or ever the wild Time coined itselfInto calendar months and days,"
he saw the worlds a-forming,--earth, sun, and stars. Emerson (or "Sayd") takes Milton at his word, and leads us back into that dark backward and abysm of time, and lets us overhear a conversation between Uriel and the other seraphs. At his speech "the gods shook," because if there is no sin, if all comes round to good, even a lie, then good-bye gods, hells and heavens, and their punishments. But note that, though the All turns your wrong to good in the end, yet you, an individual, suffer for your wrongdoing.
In a genial paper in theAndover Reviewfor March, 1887, Dr. C. C. Everett says that Dr. Hedge suggested to him that 'Uriel' probably took its origin in the discussions of the Boston Association of Ministers on the theme (then rife), "There is no line in nature": all is circular, and by the law of reaction every deed returns upon the doer. At any rate, it was written in 1838, soon after his Divinity School Address. ('Emerson in Concord,' by Edward Emerson.)
The god of boundaries in ancient Rome--Terminus--gives his name to the cheeriest of monodies or anchoring songs sung by the gayest of old sailors on the sea of eternity, and at last approaching port. Terminus, like Hermes, the Greek god of bounds, was shown in his statues without hands or feet, to indicate that he never moved. Was Emerson a little rusty in his classical lore, or did he boldly and knowingly defy classical verities when he says the divinity came to him "in his fatal rounds"? He seems to have attributed to Terminus patrolling functions like those of his own New England village fence-viewers. Or, rather, speaking in noble and more adequate terms, has he not added to the world's mythologies a new and poetical deity,--the god of the bounds of human life, a kind of avant-courier or Death's dragoman to announce to men their approaching end? 'Terminus' was written about 1866, when Emerson was in or near his sixty-third year, and sixteen years before his death.William Sloane Kennedy.
If a defence of Browning's work were to include all he has written since the date when Edmund Gosse said his books were chiefly valuable as keeping alive popular interest in the poet, and as leading fresh generations of readers to what he had already published, it would needs begin as far back as 1868; and considering the amount of work done since that time would require at least a volume to do the subject justice.
Fortunately it has long been admitted that Homer sometimes nods, though not with such awful effect as was said to attend the nods of Jove--Hence, in spite of Mr. Gosse's undoubted eminence as a critic, we may dare to assume that in this particular instance he fell into the ancient and distinguished trick of nodding.
If Mr. Gosse were right, it would practically put on a par with a mere advertising scheme many poems which have now become household favorites. Take, for example, 'Hervé Riel.' Think of the blue-eyed Breton hero whom all the world has learned to love through Browning, tolerated as nothing more than an index finger to 'The Pied Piper of Hamelin!' Take, too, such poems, as 'Donald,' whose dastardly sportsmanship is so vividly portrayed that it has the power to arouse strong emotion in strong men, who have been known literally to break down in the middle of it through excess of feeling; 'Ivan Ivanovitch,' in which is embodied such fear and horror that weak hearts cannot stand the strain of hearing it read; the story of the dog Tray who rescued a drowning doll with the same promptitude as he did a drowning child--at the relation of whose noble deeds the eyes of little children grow eager with excitement and sympathy. And where is there in any poet's work, a more vivid bit of tragedy than 'A Forgiveness!'
And would not an unfillable gap be left in the ranks of our friends of the imaginative world if Balaustion were blotted out? The exquisite lyric girl, brave, tender and with a mind in which wisdom and wit are fair playfellows.
As Carlyle might say, "Verily, verily Mr. Gosse, thou hast out-Homered Homer, and thy nod hath taken upon itself very much the semblance of a snore."
These and many others which might be mentioned as having appeared since the date when Mr. Gosse autocratically put up the bars to the poet's genius are now so universally accepted that any defence of them would be absurd.
There are again others whose tenure of fame is still hanging in the balance like 'The Red Cotton Night-cap Country,' 'The Inn Album,' 'Aristophanes' Apology,' 'Fifine at the Fair'; but as they have had already some able defenders, I shall not attempt any defence of them further than to say, in passing, that the longer I know them, and the more I read them, the more I am impressed with their masterly portrayal of human motives as they either reflect a given social environment or work contrary to it. Only a genius of the greatest power could have grasped and moulded into palpitating life beings of the calibre of the brilliant complex and illogical Aristophanes, or the dunderheaded, well meaning and equally illogical Miranda and set them to act out their little parts in a living historical environment--one in decadent Athens with her petty political and literary rivalries and dying religion; the other in ultramontane France where superstition and materialism were fighting for the mastery. Such art as is illustrated in these poems on in 'Fifine at the Fair' or in 'The Inn Album,' may not be of the kind to give one direct ideals for the conduct of life; but it represents the most splendid realism from which as from life itself deep moral lessons may be drawn. There is an actuality of realism in these poems of Browning's that puts into the shade, that of the great apostle of realism, Zola, for his realism too often presents what I venture to call obverse idealism--evil apotheosized, not evil struggling toward good as it invariably appears in life.
Among the poet's later works, 'Ferishtah's Fancies' and 'The Parleyings with Certain People of Importance in Their Day' have perhaps been more obscured by mists of non-appreciation than any others. I shall, therefore, confine myself for the present to making here and there a rift in these mists in the hope that some glimpses of the splendor of the giant form behind them may be gained.
Without particularizing either critics or criticism, it may be said that criticism of these poems divides itself into the usual three branches,--one which objects to their philosophy, one which objects to their art, one which finds them difficult of comprehension at all. This last criticism may easily be disposed of by admitting it as in part true. The mind whose highest reaches of poetic inspiration are ministered unto by such simple and easily understandable lyrics as 'Twinkle, twinkle little star' might not at once grasp the significance of the Parleying with George Bubb Dodington. Indeed, it may be surmised that some minds might sing upon the starry heights with Hegel and fathom the doctrine of the equivalence of being and non-being and yet be led into a slough of despond by this same cantankerous George.
But a poetical slough of despond may be transfigured in the twinkling of an eye--after a proper amount of study and hard thinking--into an elevated plateau with prospects upon every side, grand or terrible or smiling.
Are we never to feel spurred to any poetical pleasure more vigorous than dilly-dallying with Keats while we feast our eyes upon the wideness of the seas? Or lazily floating in a lotus land with Tennyson, say, among the meadows of the Musketaquid, in canoes with silken cushions? Beauty and peace is the reward of such poetical pleasures. They fall upon the spirit like the "sweet sound that breathes upon a bank of violets, stealing and giving odor," but shall we never return from the land where it is always afternoon? Is it only in such a land as this that we realize the true power of emotion? Rather does it conduce to the slumber of emotion; for progress is the law of feeling as it is the law of life, and many times we feel,--yes--feel--with tremendous rushes of enthusiasm like climbing Matterhorns with great iron nails in our shoes, with historical and archaeological, and philosophical Alpen-stocks in our hands, and when we reach the summit what unsuspected beauties become ours.
Advancing a step more seriously into the subject, I may say that these two series of poems form the key-stone to Browning's whole work. They are like a final synthesis of the problems of existence which he has previously made analyses of from myriad points of view in his dramatic presentation of character. It has been said that in these poems his philosophy loses its intuitional and assured point of view, to become hard-headed and doubting. But does not a careful comparison with his early work disprove this assertion?
In his two early poems, 'Pauline' and 'Paracelsus,' before the poet's personality became merged in that of his characters, he presents us with his poetic creed and his theory of the universe in no mistakable terms. In 'Pauline' we get a direct glimpse of the poet's own artistic temperament, and may literally put our fingers upon those qualities which were to be a large influence in moulding his work.
As described by himself the poet of 'Pauline' was
"Made up of an intensest lifeOf a most clear idea of consciousnessOf self, distinct from all its qualities,From all affections, passions, feelings, powers;And thus far it exists, if tracked, in all:But linked in me to self-supremacy,Existing as a centre to all things,Most potent to create and rule and callUpon all things to minister to it."
"Made up of an intensest life
Of a most clear idea of consciousness
Of self, distinct from all its qualities,
From all affections, passions, feelings, powers;
And thus far it exists, if tracked, in all:
But linked in me to self-supremacy,
Existing as a centre to all things,
Most potent to create and rule and call
Upon all things to minister to it."
This sense of an over-consciousness is the mark of an objective poet--one who sympathizes with all the emotions and aspirations of humanity,--interprets their actions through the light of this sympathy, and at the same time keeps his own individuality distinct. The poet of this poem discovers that he can no longer lose himself with enthusiasm in any phase of life; but what does that mean to a soul constituted as his? It means that the way has been cleared for the birth of that greater, broader love of the fully developed artist-soul which, while entering into sympathy with all phases of life, finds its true complement only in an ideal of absolute Love.
This picture of the artist aspiring toward the absolute by means of his large human sympathy may be supplemented by the theory of man's relation to the universe involved in 'Paracelsus' where it is shown that the Absolute cannot be fully realized by mankind either through knowledge or love. Aprile's doctrine has an element of fatalism in it. He sees and loves God in imperfection, but does not seem to have much notion of progress. On the other hand, Paracelsus sees God only in perfected Mankind, until he is really made wise to know that
"Even hate is but a mask of love'sTo see a good in evil and a hopeIn ill success,"
"Even hate is but a mask of love's
To see a good in evil and a hope
In ill success,"
and so is led to combine his own former standpoint with Aprile's by perceiving God and God's love in progress from lesser to ever greater good, and that evil and failure are the spurs that send man onwards to a future where joy climbs its heights "forever and forever."
From this point in his work Browning, like the Hindu Brahmah, becomes manifest not as himself, but in his creations. The poet whose portrait we get in 'Pauline' is the same poet who sympathetically presents a whole world of human experiences to us, keeping his own individuality for the most part intact, and the philosopher whose portrait is drawn in 'Paracelsus' is the same who interprets these human experiences in the light of the great life-theories therein presented.
But as the creations of Brahmah return into himself, so the human experiences Browning has entered into artistic sympathy with return to enrich his completed view of the problems of life, when like his own Rabbi Ben Ezra, he reaches the last of life for which "the first was planned" in these 'Fancies' and 'Parleyings'.
Though these two groups of poems undoubtedly express the poet's own mature conclusions, they yet preserve the dramatic form. Several things are gained in this way. First, the poems are saved from didacticism, for the poet expresses his opinion as an individual and not as a seer, trying to implant his theories in the minds of disciples. Second, variety is given and the mind is stimulated by having opposite points of view presented, while the thought is infused with a certain amount of emotional force through the heat of argument.
It has, of course, been objected that philosophical and ethical problems are not fit subjects for discussion in poetry. It should be remembered, however, that there is one point the critic of Æsthetics has not yet learned to realize; namely, that the law of evolution is differentiation, in art as well as in cosmic, organic, and social life. It is just as prejudiced and unforeseeing in these days to limit poetry to this or that subject, or say that nothing is dramatic that does not deal with immediate action, as it would have been for Homer to declare that no poem would ever be worthy the name that did not contain a catalogue of ships.
These facts exist! We have dramas dealing merely with action, dramas, in which character development is of prime importance; dramas, wherein action and character are entirely synchronous; and those in which the action means more than appears upon the surface, like Hauptmann's 'Sunken Bell,' or Ibsen's 'Master Builder,' then why not dramas of thought and dramas of mood when the brain and heart become the stage of action instead of an actual stage. Surely, such dramas are a natural development of this Nineteenth Century. As the man in 'Half Rome' says
"Facts are facts and lie not, and the question 'How came that purse i' the poke o' you admits of no reply.'" Art has a great many forms of drama in its poke already, so we would better be careful how we make authoritative statements on the subject.
Another advantage, gained from the dramatic form and this is most important, is that the poet has been enabled by means of it to hold the mirror up to the turmoil of thought that has racked the brains and hearts of the last half of the Nineteenth Century. Victorian England in its thought phases lives just as surely in these poems as Renaissance Italy in its art phases in 'Fra Lippo Lippi,' 'Andrea del Sarto,' 'Pictor Ignotus' and 'The Bishop orders his Tomb at St. Praxed's;' and this is true though the first series is cast in the form of Persian Fables and the second, in the form of Parleyings with worthies of past centuries.
We who have grown up under the dispensation, so to speak, of the doctrine of evolution, now acknowledged to be the guiding principle in every department of knowledge find it hard to enter into the spirit of that mid-century Sturm and Drang period which resulted upon the publication of Darwin's 'Origin of Species.' This book is the landmark of the century, and commemorates at once the triumph of knowledge, and its failure. The triumph of science in the realm of phenomena, its failure to pierce into the ultimate causes of these phenomena. What a hard fight scientific methods of investigating the phenomena of nature and life had had up to that time, in the teeth of opposition from the less instructed religious world, has been summarized for us in the fascinating pages of Andrew D. White's 'Warfare Between Theology and Science.' One by one, Science won the outposts held by prejudice and conservatism. It had to be admitted that the earth was not flat and that it did not float upon an infinite sea supported on the back of a tortoise. It had to be admitted, even, that it did not occupy the chief seat in the synagogue of the firmament, but went rolling about the sun like any common little asteroid. Finally, the great guns of science were trained upon man himself and he was forced to retire from his lofty position of Lord of Creation to the much more humble one of outcome of creation.
To a large proportion of mankind it seemed as if, should these things be admitted as truth, the whole fabric of society must fall to pieces and religion become a mockery. Those who felt so fought, as for their life, against the conclusions of science. There was a large minority, however, which, intellectually constrained to accept the conclusions of science, yet differed much in temperament and were by consequence, affected in very different ways by the new truths. There were men like Matthew Arnold who no longer believed in the revelations of the past, yet who clung to the beauty of religious forms, in despair at the thought of the wilderness life would be without them. There were others like George Eliot, who became positivists, and gained comfort only in the thought of a religion of humanity and an immortality of nothing more tangible than human influence. There were those like William Morris who accepted cheerfully this life as being all and who devoted their energies to making it as lovely as possible and working to make it more lovely for the future. There were still others, like Clifford, entirely hopeless, but who like Childe Roland put the slug horn to their lips, and lived brave, noble lives in the certainty of coming annihilation; a divine melancholy seized upon some, such as we see reflected in much of Tennyson's verse.
But there were a few who beheld the triumph of science undismayed, for they saw that her sway could not pass beyond the realm of phenomena, that the failure of the intellect to penetrate behind the mysteries of nature and life must be the saving of religion. Herbert Spencer is among scientists undoubtedly the greatest of this type of mind. Whatever misunderstandings and vituperations he may have been subjected to, from the positivist who thinks him inconsistent for his religious tone to the religionist who dubs him an atheist, the fact still remains that his was the genius that stood out against the advancing flood of materialism saying "Thus far shalt thou go and no farther." He it was who declared that underlying phenomena was an Infinite power that transcended all human faculties of imagination, and that this fact was the most certain intuition of the human mind.
So great an upheaval of thought, changing, as it finally has, man's whole outlook upon the universe from one more or less static with fixed codes of morals and standards of art to one that is dynamic and progressive, brought in its wake the consideration of many ethical as well as philosophical problems.
Nothing bears upon the grounds of moral action more disastrously than blind fatalism, and while there have been many evil forms of this doctrine in the past there has probably been none worse than the modern form because it seems to have scientific sanction in the doctrines of the conservation of energy, the persistence of heredity and the survival of the fittest, and tends to positive atrophy of the will. Even wise and thoughtful men now-a-days take such a philosophic view of events that they hesitate to throw in their voice on either side in the solution of a national problem because things are bound to follow the laws of development either way. This is equivalent to admitting that you are simply a heap of burnt out ashes in the furnace of life, and that you have no longer any part to play in the combustion that leads to progress. In the first of 'Ferishtah's Fancies,' a strong plea is made for those human impulses that lead to action. The will to serve the world is the true force from God. Every man, though he be the last link in a chain of causes over which he had no control, can at least have a determining influence upon the direction in which the next link shall be forged. Ferishtah appears upon the scene, himself, a fatalist, leaving himself wholly in God's hands until he is taught by the dream God sent him that man's part is to act as he saw the eagle act, succouring the helpless, not to play the part of the helpless birdlings who were taken care of. Another phase of the same thought is touched upon in 'A Camel Driver.' The discussion turns upon punishment and the point is, if, as Ferishtah declares, the sinner is not to be punished eternally, then why should man trouble himself to punish him. The answer amounts to this. Man must regard sin from the human point of view as something evil and to be got rid of and must, therefore, will to work for its annihilation. It follows then that the sinner should be punished as that is a means for teaching him to cease sinning.
Another doctrine upon which the Nineteenth Century belief in progress as the law of life has set its seal is that of the pursuit of happiness, or the striving for the greatest good of the whole number including oneself. With this Browning shows himself in full sympathy in 'Two Camels,' wherein Ferishtah contends that only through the development of individual happiness and the experiencing of many forms of joyousness can one help others to happiness and joyousness, while in 'Plot Culture,' the enjoyment of human emotion as a means of developing the soul is emphasized.
The relations of good and evil have also had to be re-considered in the light of Nineteenth Century thought, the dualism of the past not being compatible with the evolutionary doctrine that good and evil are relative, a phrase which we sometimes forget must be understood in two ways:--first, that good and evil are relative to the state of society in which they exist, and what may be good in one phase of society, may become evil in a more developed phase. Second, were it not for evil, we should never be able to appreciate the superiority of good and so to work for good, and in working for it to bring about progress. To his pupil worried over the problem of evil Ferishtah points out in 'Mihrab Shah' that evil in the form of bodily suffering has given rise to the beautiful sentiments of pity and sympathy. But though it be recognized that good comes of evil, shall evil be encouraged? No! Ferishtah declares, Man bound by man's conditions is obliged to estimate as "fair or foul Right, wrong, good, evil, what man's faculty adjudges such," therefore the man will do all he can to relieve the suffering of poor Mihrab Shah with a fig-plaster. The answers, then, that Browning gives to the ethical problems of the century growing out of the acceptance of modern scientific doctrines, are, in brief, that man shall use that will-power of which he feels himself possessed, and which really distinguishes him from the brute creation, in working against whatever appears to him evil; while the good for which he shall work is the greatest happiness of all.
What of the philosophical doctrines to which Browning gives expression in the remaining poems of the group? We find it insisted upon in 'Cherries', 'The Sun', in 'A Bean Stripe also Apple Eating', and especially in that remarkable poem 'A Pillar at Sebzevar' that knowledge fails. Knowledge the golden is but lacquered ignorance, as gain to be mistrusted. Curiously, enough, this contention of Browning's has been the cause of most of the criticisms against him as a philosopher, yet as far as I have been able to discover, there has been no deep thinker of this century, and there have been many in other centuries, who has not held in some form or another the opinion that intellect was unable to solve the mysterious problems of the universe. Even the metaphysicians who build very wonderful air castles onà prioriideas declare that these ideas cannot be matters of mere intellectual perception, but must be intuitions of the higher reason. Browning, however, does not rest in the assertion that the intellect fails. He draws immense comfort from this failure of knowledge. Though it is to be distrusted as gain, it is not to be mistrusted as means to gain. "Friend" quoth Ferishtah in 'A Pillar at Sebzevar'