The Norton Anthology of English literature. Volume 2

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TH E BISHO P ORDER S HI S TOM B / 126 1 Some tripod, thyrsus, with a vase or so, The Saviour at his sermon on the mount, 60 Saint Praxed in a glory, and one Pan Ready to twitch the Nymph's last garment off, And Moses with the tables9 . . . but I know Ye mark0 me not! What do they whisper thee, heed Child of my bowels, Anselm? Ah, ye hope 65 To revel down my villas while I gasp Bricked o'er with beggar's moldy travertine0 Italian limestone Which Gandolf from his tomb-top chuckles at! Nay, boys, ye love me�all of jasper, then! 'Tis jasper ye stand pledged to, lest I grieve 70 My bath must needs be left behind, alas! One block, pure green as a pistachio nut, There's plenty jasper somewhere in the world� And have I not Saint Praxed's ear to pray Horses for ye, and brown Greek manuscripts, 75 And mistresses with great smooth marbly limbs? �That's if ye carve my epitaph aright, Choice Latin, picked phrase, Tully's1 every word, No gaudy ware like Gandolf's second line� Tully, my masters? Ulpian2 serves his need! so And then how I shall lie through centuries, And hear the blessed mutter of the mass, And see God made and eaten all day long,3 And feel the steady candle flame, and taste Good strong thick stupefying incense-smoke! 85 For as I lie here, hours of the dead night, Dying in state and by such slow degrees, I fold my arms as if they clasped a crook,0 bishop's staff And stretch my feet forth straight as stone can point, And let the bedclothes, for a mortcloth,4 drop 90 Into great laps and folds of sculptor's-work: And as yon tapers dwindle, and strange thoughts Grow, with a certain humming in my ears, About the life before I lived this life, And this life too, popes, cardinals, and priests, 95 Saint Praxed at his sermon on the mount,5 Your tall pale mother with her talking eyes, And new-found agate urns as fresh as day, And marble's language, Latin pure, discreet

�Aha, ELUCESCEBAT6 quoth our friend?

9. The sculpture would consist of a mixture of ists of classical Latin prose. pagan and Christian iconography. "Tripod": seat 2. Late Latin author of legal commentaries (d. on which the Oracle of Delphi made prophecies. 228 C.E.) ; not a mode! of good style. "Thyrsus": a staff twined with ivy that was carried, 3. Reference to the doctrine of transubstantiation. according to Greek mythology, by Dionysus, god of 4. Rich cloth spread over a dead body or coffin. wine and fertility. "Glory": halo. "Tables": the stone 5. The bishop is confusing St. Praxed (a woman) tablets on which the Ten Commandments were with Jesus�an indication that his mind is wan- written. Such intermingling of pagan and Chris-dering. tian traditions, characteristic of the Renaissance, 6. He was illustrious (Latin); word from Gandolf's had been attacked in 1841 in Contrasts, a book on epitaph. The bishop considers the form of the verb architecture by A. W. Pugin, a Roman Catholic. to be in "gaudy" bad taste (line 78). If the epitaph 1 . I.e., Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-4 3 B.C.E.) , had been copied from Cicero instead of from orator and statesman who was one of the great styl-Ulpian, the word would have been elucebat.

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1262 / ROBERT BROWNING

100 No Tully, said I, Ulpian at the best!

Evil and brief hath been my pilgrimage.7

All lapis, all, sons! Else I give the Pope

My villas! Will ye ever eat my heart?

Ever your eyes were as a lizard's quick,

105 They glitter like your mother's for my soul, Or ye would heighten my impoverished frieze,

Piece out its starved design, and fill my vase

With grapes, and add a vizor and a Term,8

And to the tripod ye would tie a lynx9

i io That in his struggle throws the thyrsus down,

To comfort me on my entablature1

Whereon I am to lie till I must ask

"Do I live, am I dead?" There, leave me, there!

For ye have stabbed me with ingratitude

us To death�ye wish it�God, ye wish it! Stone� Gritstone,2 a-crumble! Clammy squares which sweat

As if the corpse they keep were oozing through�

And no more lapis to delight the world!

Well go! I bless ye. Fewer tapers there,

120 But in a row: and, going, turn your backs

�Aye, like departing altar-ministrants,

And leave me in my church, the church for peace,

That I may watch at leisure if he leers�

Old Gandolf, at me, from his onion-stone,

125 As still he envied me, so fair she was!

1844 1845

A Toccata of Galuppi's1

Oh, Galuppi, Baldassaro, this is very sad to find!

I can hardly misconceive you; it would prove me deaf and blind;

But although I take your meaning, 'tis with such a heavy mind!

Here you come with your old music, and here's all the good it brings.

What, they lived once thus at Venice where the merchants were the kings,

Where Saint Mark's is, where the Doges used to wed the sea with rings?2

7. Cf. Genesis 47.9. performs his composition for an audience. From 8. Statue of Terminus, the Roman god of bound-line 20 onward we hear snippets of conversation aries, usually represented without arms. "Vizor": from members of this audience as they respond to part of a helmet, often represented in sculpture. the different moods of the piece, and then, in lines 9. An animal that traditionally accompanied Bac-3S�43, Galuppi's own imagined musings. "Tocchus. cata": according to Grove's Dictionary of Music, a 1. Horizontal platform supporting a statue or "touch-piece, or a composition intended to exhibit effigy-the touch and execution of the performer." The 2. Coarse sandstone. same authority states that "no particular compo1. For the main speaker of this poem, Browning sition was taken as the basis of the poem." invents a 19th-century English scientist, who is lis-2. An annual ceremony in which the doge, the tening to music by the Italian composer Baldassaro Venetian chief magistrate, threw a ring into the Galuppi (1706�1785). The music evokes for the water to symbolize the bond between his city, with scientist visions of 18th-century Venice, including its maritime empire, and the sea. an imaginary scene of a party at which Galuppi

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A TOCCATA OF GALUPPI'S / 126 3

Aye, because the sea's the street there; and 'tis arched by . . . what you call

. . . Shylock's bridge3 with houses on it, where they kept the carnival:

I was never out of England�it's as if I saw it all.

4

Did young people take their pleasure when the sea was warm in May?

Balls and masks" begun at midnight, burning ever to midday, masquerades

When they made up fresh adventures for the morrow, do you say?

5

Was a lady such a lady, cheeks so round and lips so red�

On her neck the small face buoyant, like a bellflower on its bed,

O'er the breast's superb abundance where a man might base his head?

6

Well, and it was graceful of them�they'd break talk off and afford

�She, to bite her mask's black velvet�he, to finger on his sword,

While you sat and played toccatas, stately at the clavichord?4

7

What? Those lesser thirds so plaintive, sixths diminished, sigh on sigh,

Told them something? Those suspensions, those solutions�"Must we die?"

Those commiserating sevenths�"Life might last! we can but try!"

8

"Were you happy?"�"Yes."�"And are you still as happy?"�"Yes. And you?"

�"Then, more kisses!"�"Did I stop them, when a million seemed so few?"

Hark, the dominant's persistence till it must be answered to!

9

So, an octave struck the answer.5 Oh, they praised you, I dare say!

"Brave Galuppi! that was music; good alike at grave and gay!

1 can always leave off talking when I hear a master play!"

10

Then they left you for their pleasure: till in due time, one by one,

Some with lives that came to nothing, some with deeds as well undone,

Death stepped tacitly and took them where they never see the sun.

11

But when I sit down to reason, think to take my stand nor swerve,

While I triumph o'er a secret wrung from nature's close reserve,

In you come with your cold music till I creep through every nerve.

12

Yes, you, like a ghostly cricket, creaking where a house was burned:

"Dust and ashes, dead and done with, Venice spent what Venice earned.

The soul, doubtless, is immortal�where a soul can be discerned.

3. The Rialto, a bridge over the Grand Canal. devices used by Galuppi to produce alternating 4. A keyboard instrument whose strings are struck moods in his music, conflict in each instance being by metal hammers. Its mechanism resembles that resolved into harmony. Thus the "dominant" (the of a piano, but its sound is more like that of a harp-fifth note of the scale), after being persistently sichord. sounded, is answered by a resolving chord (lines 5. The terms in these lines refer to the technical 24-25).

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126 4 / ROBERT BROWNING

r3 "Yours for instance: you know physics, something of geology,

Mathematics are your pastime; souls shall rise in their degree;

Butterflies may dread extinction�you'll not die, it cannot be!

14

"As for Venice and her people, merely born to bloom and drop,

Here on earth they bore their fruitage, mirth and folly were the crop:

What of soul was left, I wonder, when the kissing had to stop?

15

"Dust and ashes!" So you creak it, and I want" the heart to scold. lack

Dear dead women, with such hair, too�what's become of all the gold

Used to hang and brush their bosoms? I feel chilly and grown old.

ca. 1847 1855

Love among the Ruins

1

Where the quiet-colored end of evening smiles,

Miles and miles

On the solitary pastures where our sheep

Half-asleep 5 Tinkle homeward through the twilight, stray or stop

As they crop�

Was the site once of a city great and gay

(So they say),

Of our country's very capital, its prince

10 Ages since

Held his court in, gathered councils, wielding far

Peace or war.

2

Now�the country does not even boast a tree,

As you see,

15 To distinguish slopes of verdure, certain rills

From the hills

Intersect and give a name to (else they run

Into one), Where the domed and daring palace shot its spires

20 Up like fires

O'er the hundred-gated circuit of a wall

Bounding all, Made of marble, men might march on nor be pressed,

Twelve abreast. 3

25 And such plenty and perfection, see, of grass

Never was!

Such a carpet as, this summertime, o'erspreads

And embeds

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LOV E AMONG TH E RUIN S / 126 5 Every vestige of the city, guessed alone, 30 Stock or stone� Where a multitude of men breathed joy and woe Long ago; Lust of glory pricked their hearts up, dread of shame Struck them tame; 35 And that glory and that shame alike, the gold Bought and sold. 4 Now�the single little turret that remains On the plains, By the caper overrooted, by the gourd 40 Overscored, While the patching houseleek's1 head of blossom winks Through the chinks� Marks the basement whence a tower in ancient time Sprang sublime, 45 And a burning ring, all round, the chariots traced As they raced, And the monarch and his minions and his dames Viewed the games. 5 And I know, while thus the quiet-colored eve 50 Smiles to leave To their folding, all our many-tinkling fleece In such peace, And the slopes and rills in undistinguished gray Melt away� 55 That a girl with eager eyes and yellow hair Waits me there In the turret whence the charioteers caught soul For the goal,

When the king looked, where she looks now, breathless, dumb 60 Till I come.

6 But he looked upon the city, every side, Far and wide, All the mountains topped with temples, all the glades' Colonnades, 65 All the causeys,2 bridges, aqueducts�and then, All the men! When I do come, she will speak not, she will stand, Either hand On my shoulder, give her eyes the first embrace 70 Of my face, Ere we rush, ere we extinguish sight and speech Each on each.

I. Common European plant with petals clustered 2. Causeways or roads raised above low ground, in the shape of rosettes.

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126 6 / ROBERT BROWNING

4

In one year they sent a million fighters forth

South and north,

75 And they built their gods a brazen0 pillar high brass

As the sky,

Yet reserved a thousand chariots in full force�

Gold, of course.

Oh heart! oh blood that freezes, blood that burns!

so Earth's returns

For whole centuries of folly, noise, and sin!

Shut them in,

With their triumphs and their glories and the rest!

Love is best.

1853 1855

"Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came"1

(See Edgar's Song in "Lear")

My first thought was, he lied in every word,

That hoary cripple, with malicious eye

Askance0 to watch the working of his lie squinting sidewise

On mine, and mouth scarce able to afford

Suppression of the glee, that pursed and scored

Its edge, at one more victim gained thereby.

What else should he be set for, with his staff?

What, save to waylay with his lies, ensnare

All travelers who might find him posted there,

And ask the road? I guessed what skull-like laugh

Would break, what crutch 'gin� write my epitaph would begin to

For pastime in the dusty thoroughfare,

If at his counsel I should turn aside

Into that ominous tract which, all agree,

Hides the Dark Tower. Yet acquiescingly

1. Browning stated that this poem "came upon me nightmarelike as in 20th-century writings such as as a kind of dream," and that it was written in one T. S. Eliot's "The Hollow Men" (1925) or Franz day. Although the poem was among those of his Kafka's "In the Penal Colony" (1919). own writings that pleased him most, he was reluc-The lines from Shakespeare's King Lear 3.4 tant to explain what the dream (or nightmare) sig-(lines 1 58�60), from which the title is taken, are nified. He once agreed with a friend's suggestion spoken when Lear is about to enter a hovel on the that the meaning might be expressed in the state-heath, and Edgar, feigning madness, chants the ment: "He that endureth to the end shall be saved" fragment of a song reminiscent of quests and chal( cf. Matthew 24.13). Most readers have responded lenges in fairy tales: "Child Roland to the dark to the poem in this way, finding in the story of tower come, / His word was still, 'Fie, fo, and fum; Roland's quest an inspiring expression of defiance / I smell the blood of a British man." "Childe": a and courage. Other readers find that the poem youth of gentle birth, usually a candidate for expresses despair more than enduring hope, and it knighthood. is at least true that the landscape is as grim and

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"CHILDE ROLAND TO THE DARK TOWER CAME" / 1267

I did turn as he pointed: neither pride

Nor hope rekindling at the end descried,

So much as gladness that some end might be.

4

For, what with my whole world-wide wandering,

20 What with my search drawn out through years, my hope

Dwindled into a ghost not fit to cope

With that obstreperous joy success would bring,

I hardly tried now to rebuke the spring

My heart made, finding failure in its scope.

5

25 As when a sick man very near to death Seems dead indeed, and feels begin and end

The tears and takes the farewell of each friend,

And hears one bid the other go, draw breath Freelier outside ("since all is o'er," he saith, 30 "And the blow fallen no grieving can amend"),

6

While some discuss if near the other graves

Be room enough for this, and when a day

Suits best for carrying the corpse away,

With care about the banners, scarves and staves:2

35 And still the man hears all, and only craves He may not shame such tender love and stay.

7

Thus, I had so long suffered in this quest,

Heard failure prophesied so oft, been writ

So many times among "The Band"�to wit,

40 The knights who to the Dark Tower's search addressed

Their steps�that just to fail as they, seemed best,

And all the doubt was now�should I be fit?

8

So, quiet as despair, I turned from him,

That hateful cripple, out of his highway

45 Into the path he pointed. All the day

Had been a dreary one at best, and dim

Was settling to its close, yet shot one grim Red leer to see the plain catch its estray.3

9

For mark! no sooner was I fairly found

50 Pledged to the plain, after a pace or two, Than, pausing to throw backward a last view

O'er the safe road, 'twas gone; gray plain all round:

Nothing but plain to the horizon's bound.

I might go on; naught else remained to do.

2. The trappings of an imagined funeral. 3. Literally, a domestic animal that has strayed away from its home.

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1268 / ROBERT BROWNING

27

55 So, on I went. I think I never saw

Such starved ignoble nature; nothing throve:

For flowers�as well expect a cedar grove! But, cockle, spurge,4 according to their law Might propagate their kind, with none to awe,

60 You'd think; a burr had been a treasure trove.

11

No! penury, inertness and grimace,

In some strange sort, were the land's portion. "See

Or shut your eyes," said Nature peevishly, "It nothing skills:5 I cannot help my case;

65 'Tis the Last Judgment's fire must cure this place,

Calcine6 its clods and set my prisoners free."

12

If there pushed any ragged thistle stalk Above its mates, the head was chopped; the bents7

Were jealous else. What made those holes and rents 70 In the dock's0 harsh swarth leaves, bruised as to balk coarse plant All hope of greenness? 'tis a brute must walk Pashing0 their life out, with a brute's intents. smashing

T3 As for the grass, it grew as scant as hair

In leprosy; thin dry blades pricked the mud

75 Which underneath looked kneaded up with blood. One stiff blind horse, his every bone a-stare,

Stood stupefied, however he came there:

Thrust out past service from the devil's stud!

14

Alive? he might be dead for aught I know, so With that red gaunt and colloped0 neck a-strain, ridgedAnd shut eyes underneath the rusty mane;

Seldom went such grotesqueness with such woe;

I never saw a brute I hated so;

He must be wicked to deserve such pain.

15

85 I shut my eyes and turned them on my heart.

As a man calls for wine before he fights,

I asked one draught of earlier, happier sights,

Ere fitly I could hope to play my part.

Think first, fight afterwards�the soldier's art:

90 One taste of the old time sets all to rights.

16

Not it! I fancied Cuthbert's reddening face

Beneath its garniture of curly gold,

4. A bitter-juiced weed. "Cockle": a weed that 6. Turn to powder by heat. bears burrs. 7. Coarse stiff grasses. 5. I.e., it is no use.

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"CHILDE ROLAND TO THE DARK TOWER CAME" / 126 9

Dear fellow, till I almost felt him fold An arm in mine to fix me to the place, That way he used. Alas, one night's disgrace!

Out went my heart's new fire and left it cold.

17

Giles then, the soul of honor�there he stands Frank as ten years ago when knighted first. What honest man should dare (he said) he durst.

Good�but the scene shifts�faugh! what hangman hands Pin to his breast a parchment? His own bands Read it. Poor traitor, spit upon and cursed!

18

Better this present than a past like that; Back therefore to my darkening path again! No sound, no sight as far as eye could strain.

Will the night send a howlet� or a bat? mvl I asked: when something on the dismal flat Came to arrest my thoughts and change their train.

19

A sudden little river crossed my path As unexpected as a serpent comes. No sluggish tide congenial to the glooms;

This, as it frothed by, might have been a bath For the fiend's glowing hoof�to see the wrath Of its black eddy bespate0 with flakes and spumes. bespattered

20

So petty yet so spiteful! All along, Low scrubby alders kneeled down over it; Drenched willows flung them headlong in a fit

Of mute despair, a suicidal throng: The river which had done them all the wrong, Whate'er that was, rolled by, deterred no whit.

21

Which, while I forded�good saints, how I feared To set my foot upon a dead man's cheek, Each step, or feel the spear I thrust to seek

For hollows, tangled in his hair or beard! �It may have been a water rat I speared, But, ugh! it sounded like a baby's shriek.

22

Glad was I when I reached the other bank. Now for a better country. Vain presage! Who were the strugglers, what war did they wage,

Whose savage trample thus could pad the dank Soil to a plash?� Toads in a poisoned tank, puddle Or wild cats in a red-hot iron cage�

23 The fight must so have seemed in that fell cirque.0 dreadful arena What penned them there, with all the plain to choose?

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1270 / ROBERT BROWNING

135 No footprint leading to that horrid mews,8 None out of it. Mad brewage set to work Their brains, no doubt, like galley slaves the Turk

Pits for his pastime, Christians against Jews.

M And more than that�a furlong on�why, there! 140 What bad use was that engine for, that wheel, Or brake,9 not wheel�that harrow fit to reel Men's bodies out like silk? with all the air Of Tophet's0 tool, on earth left unaware, hell's Or brought to sharpen its rusty teeth of steel.

25

145 Then came a bit of stubbed ground, once a wood, Next a marsh, it would seem, and now mere earth Desperate and done with; (so a fool finds mirth,

Makes a thing and then mars it, till his mood Changes and off he goes!) within a rood1 150 Bog, clay and rubble, sand and stark black dearth.

26

Now blotches rankling, colored gay and grim, Now patches where some leanness of the soil's Broke into moss or substances like boils;

Then came some palsied oak, a cleft in him 155 Like a distorted mouth that splits its rim Gaping at death, and dies while it recoils.

And just as far as ever from the end! Naught in the distance but the evening, naught To point my footstep further! At the thought,

160 A great black bird, Apollyon's2 bosom friend, Sailed past, nor beat his wide wing dragon-penned3 That brushed my cap�perchance the guide I sought.

28

For, looking up, aware I somehow grew, 'Spite of the dusk, the plain had given place

165 All round to mountains�with such name to grace Mere ugly heights and heaps now stolen in view. How thus they had surprised me�solve it, you!

How to get from them was no clearer case.

29

Yet half I seemed to recognize some trick 170 Of mischief happened to me, God knows when� In a bad dream perhaps. Here ended, then, Progress this way. When, in the very nick

8. Enclosed stable yard. 2. In Revelation 9.11 Apollyon is "the angel of the 9. A toothed machine used for separating the bottomless pit." In Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress fibers of flax or hemp; here an instrument of tor-(1678) he is a hideous "monster"; "he had wings ture. like a dragon." 1. I.e., a short distance (6�8 yards). 3. With wings or pinions like those of a dragon.

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FRA LIPPO LIPPI / 1271

Of giving up, one time more, came a click As when a trap shuts�you're inside the den!

3� 175 Burningly it came on me all at once, This was the place! those two hills on the right, Crouched like two bulls locked horn in horn in fight; While to the left, a tall scalped mountain . . . Dunce, Dotard, a-dozing at the very nonce,0 moment iso After a life spent training for the sight!

31

What in the midst lay but the Tower itself? The round squat turret, blind as the fool's heart,"1 Built of brown stone, without a counterpart

In the whole world. The tempest's mocking elf 185 Points to the shipman thus the unseen shelf He strikes on, only when the timbers start.0 separate; come loose

32

Not see? because of night perhaps?�why, day Came back again for that! before it left, The dying sunset kindled through a cleft:

190 The hills, like giants at a hunting, lay, Chin upon hand, to see the game at bay� "Now stab and end the creature�to the heft!"5

33 Not hear? when noise was everywhere! it tolled Increasing like a bell. Names in my ears

195 Of all the lost adventurers my peers� How such a one was strong, and such was bold, And such was fortunate, yet each of old

Lost, lost! one moment knelled the woe of years.

34 There they stood, ranged along the hillsides, met 200 To view the last of me, a living frame

For one more picture! in a sheet of flame I saw them and I knew them all. And yet Dauntless the slug-horn6 to my lips I set,

And blew. "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came."

1852 1855

Fra Lippo Lippi1

I am poor brother Lippo, by your leave! You need not clap your torches to my face.

4. Cf. Psalm 14.1: "The fool hath said in his heart. mean a kind of trumpet or horn. Browning fol- There is no God." lowed Chatterton's example, although the original 5. Handle of dagger or sword. meaning would also be relevant here. 6. The war cry or slogan of a clan about to engage 1. This monologue portrays the dawn of the in battle (Scottish). In 1770, however, the poet Renaissance in Italy at a point when the medieval Thomas Chatterton was misled into using it to attitude toward life and art was about to be dis

.

1272 / ROBERT BROWNING

Zooks,2 what's to blame? you think you see a monk! What, 'tis past midnight, and you go the rounds, 5 And here you catch me at an alley's end Where sportive ladies leave their doors ajar? The Carmine's3 my cloister: hunt it up, Do�harry out, if you must show your zeal, Whatever rat, there, haps on his wrong hole, 10 And nip each softling of a wee white mouse, Weke, weke, that's crept to keep him company! Aha, you know your betters! Then, you'll take Your hand away that's fiddling on my throat, And please to know me likewise. Who am I? 15 Why, one, sir, who is lodging with a friend Three streets off�he's a certain . . . how d'ye call? Master�a . . . Cosimo of the Medici,4 I' the house that caps the corner. Boh! you were best! Remember and tell me, the day you're hanged, 20 How you affected such a gullet's gripe!5 But you,6 sir, it concerns you that your knaves Pick up a manner nor discredit you: Zooks, are we pilchards,0 that they sweep the streets small fish And count fair prize what comes into this net? 25 He's Judas to a tittle, that man is!7 Just such a face! Why, sir, you make amends. Lord, I'm not angry! Bid your hangdogs go Drink out this quarter-florin8 to the health Of the munificent House that harbors me 30 (And many more beside, lads! more beside!) And all's come square again. I'd like his face� His, elbowing on his comrade in the door With the pike and lantern�for the slave that holds John Baptist's head a-dangle by the hair 35 With one hand ("Look you, now," as who should say) And his weapon in the other, yet unwiped! It's not your chance to have a bit of chalk, A wood-coal� or the like? or you should see! piece of charcoal Yes, I'm the painter, since you style me so. 40 What, brother Lippo's doings, up and down, You know them and they take you? like enough! I saw the proper twinkle in your eye� 'Tell you, I liked your looks at very first. Let's sit and set things straight now, hip to haunch.

placed by a fresh appreciation of earthly pleasures. It was from Giorgio Vasari's Lives of the Painters (1550) that Browning derived most of his information about the life of the Florentine painter and friar Lippo Lippi (1406-1469), but the theory of art propounded by Lippi in the poem was developed by the poet.

2. A shortened version of Gadzooles, a mild oath now obscure in meaning but perhaps resembling a phrase still in use: "God's truth." 3. Santa Maria del Carmine, a church and cloister of the Carmelite order of friars to which Lippi belonged.

4. Lippi's patron, a banker and virtual ruler of Florence (1389-1464). 5. I.e., how you had the arrogance to choke the gullet of someone with my connections. 6. The officer in charge of the patrol of policemen or watchmen. 7. I.e., one of the watchmen has a face that would serve as a model for a painting of Judas. "To a tittle": to a tee; absolutely. 8. I.e., buy a drink worth a quarter of a florin (the florin was a gold coin first minted in Florence).

.

FR A LIPP O LIPP I / 127 3 45 Here's spring come, and the nights one makes up bands To roam the town and sing out carnival,9 And I've been three weeks shut within my mew,� private den A-painting for the great man, saints and saints And saints again. I could not paint all night� 50 Ouf! I leaned out of window for fresh air. There came a hurry of feet and little feet, A sweep of lute-strings, laughs, and whifts of song� Flower o' the broom, Take away love, and our earth is a tomb! 55 Flower o' the qiunce, I let Lisa go, and what good in life since?1 Flower o' the thyme�and so on. Round they went. Scarce had they turned the corner when a titter

Like the skipping of rabbits by moonlight�three slim shapes,

60 And a face that looked up . . . zooks, sir, flesh and blood, That's all I'm made of! Into shreds it went, Curtain and counterpane and coverlet, All the bed-furniture�a dozen knots, There was a ladder! Down I let myself,

65 Hands and feet, scrambling somehow, and so dropped, And after them. I came up with the fun Hard by Saint Laurence,2 hail fellow, well met�

Flower o' the rose, If I've been merry, what matter who knows!

70 And so as I was stealing back again To get to bed and have a bit of sleep Ere I rise up tomorrow and go work On Jerome knocking at his poor old breast With his great round stone to subdue the flesh,3

75 You snap me of the sudden. Ah, I see! Though your eye twinkles still, you shake your head� Mine's shaved�a monk, you say�the sting's in that! If Master Cosimo announced himself, Mum's the word naturally; but a monk!

so Come, what am I a beast for? tell us, now! I was a baby when my mother died And father died and left me in the street. I starved there, God knows how, a year or two On fig skins, melon parings, rinds and shucks,

85 Refuse and rubbish. One fine frosty day, My stomach being empty as your hat, The wind doubled me up and down I went. Old Aunt Lapaccia trussed me with one hand (Its fellow0 was a stinger as I knew), i.e., her other hand

90 And so along the wall, over the bridge, By the straight cut to the convent. Six words there, While I stood munching my first bread that month:

9. Season of revelry before the commencement of next to. Lent. 3. A picture of Saint Jerome (ca. 340-420), whose 1. This and other interspersed flower songs are ascetic observances were hardly a congenial sub- called stornelli in Italy. ject for a painter such as Lippi. 2. San Lorenzo, a church in Florence. "Hard by":

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127 4 / ROBERT BROWNING

"So, boy, you're minded," quoth the good fat father Wiping his own mouth, 'twas refection time0� mealtime

95 "To quit this very miserable world? Will you renounce" . . . "the mouthful of bread?" thought I; By no means! Brief, they made a monk of me; I did renounce the world, its pride and greed, Palace, farm, villa, shop, and banking house,

100 Trash, such as these poor devils of Medici Have given their hearts to�all at eight years old. Well, sir, 1 found in time, you may be sure, 'Twas not for nothing�the good bellyful, The warm serge and the rope that goes all round,4

105 And day-long blessed idleness beside! "Let's see what the urchin's fit for"�that came next. Not overmuch their way, I must confess. Such a to-do! They tried me with their books: Lord, they'd have taught me Latin in pure waste!

i io Flower o' the clove, All the Latin I construe is "amo," I love!

But, mind you, when a boy starves in the streets Eight years together, as my fortune was, Watching folk's faces to know who will fling

115 The bit of half-stripped grape bunch he desires, And who will curse or kick him for his pains� Which gentleman processional and fine, Holding a candle to the Sacrament, Will wink and let him lift a plate and catch

120 The droppings of the wax to sell again, Or holla for the Eight0 and have him whipped� Florentine magistrates How say I?�nay, which dog bites, which lets drop His bone from the heap of offal in the street� Why, soul and sense of him grow sharp alike,

125 He learns the look of things, and none the less For admonition from the hunger-pinch. I had a store of such remarks, be sure, Which, after I found leisure, turned to use. I drew men's faces on my copybooks,

130 Scrawled them within the antiphonary's marge,5 Joined legs and arms to the long music-notes, Found eyes and nose and chin for A's and B's, And made a string of pictures of the world Betwixt the ins and outs of verb and noun,

135 On the wall, the bench, the door. The monks looked black. "Nay," quoth the Prior,6 "turn him out, d' ye say? In no wise. Lose a crow and catch a lark.

What if at last we get our man of parts,0 skill, genius We Carmelites, like those Camaldolese MO And Preaching Friars,7 to do our church up fine And put the front on it that ought to be!"

4. The material ("serge") and belt ("rope") of a 6. Head of a Carmelite convent. monk's clothing. 7. Benedictine and Dominican religious orders, 5. Margin of a music book used for choral singing. respectively.

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8. 9. 1. FRA LIPPO LIPPI / 1275

And hereupon he bade me daub away. Thank you! my head being crammed, the walls a blank, Never was such prompt disemburdening.

145 First, every sort of monk, the black and white, I drew them, fat and lean: then, folk at church, From good old gossips waiting to confess Their cribs0 of barrel droppings, candle ends� petty thefts To the breathless fellow at the altar-foot,

150 Fresh from his murder, safe8 and sitting there With the little children round him in a row Of admiration, half for his beard and half For that white anger of his victim's son Shaking a fist at him with one fierce arm,

155 Signing himself with the other because of Christ (Whose sad face on the cross sees only this After the passion0 of a thousand years) sufferings Till some poor girl, her apron o'er her head (Which the intense eyes looked through), came at eve

160 On tiptoe, said a word, dropped in a loaf, Her pair of earrings and a bunch of flowers (The brute took growling), prayed, and so was gone. I painted all, then cried " 'Tis ask and have; Choose, for more's ready!"�laid the ladder flat,

165 And showed my covered bit of cloister wall. The monks closed in a circle and praised loud Till checked, taught what to see and not to see, Being simple bodies�"That's the very man! Look at the boy who stoops to pat the dog!

170 That woman's like the Prior's niece who comes To care about his asthma: it's the life!" But there my triumph's straw-fire flared and funked;9 Their betters took their turn to see and say: The Prior and the learned pulled a face

175 And stopped all that in no time. "How? what's here? Quite from the mark of painting, bless us all! Faces, arms, legs and bodies like the true As much as pea and pea! it's devil's game! Your business is not to catch men with show,

iso With homage to the perishable clay, But lift them over it, ignore it all, Make them forget there's such a thing as flesh. Your business is to paint the souls of men� Man's soul, and it's a fire, smoke . . . no, it's not . . .

185 It's vapor done up like a newborn babe� (In that shape when you die it leaves your mouth) It's . . . well, what matters talking, it's the soul! Give us no more of body than shows soul! Here's Giotto,1 with his Saint a-praising God, 190 That sets us praising�why not stop with him?

Having claimed sanctuary in the church. stylized pictures of religious subjects were admired Went up in smoke. as models of pre-Renaissance art. Great Florentine painter (1276�1337), whose

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1276 / ROBERT BROWNING

Why put all thoughts of praise out of our head With wonder at lines, colors, and what not? Paint the soul, never mind the legs and arms! Rub all out, try at it a second time. 195 Oh, that white smallish female with the breasts, She's just� my niece . . . Herodias,2 I would say� exactly like Who went and danced and got men's heads cut off! Have it all out!" Now, is this sense, I ask? A fine way to paint soul, by painting body 200 So ill, the eye can't stop there, must go further And can't fare worse! Thus, yellow does for white When what you put for yellow's simply black, And any sort of meaning looks intense When all beside itself means and looks naught. 205 Why can't a painter lift each foot in turn, Left foot and right foot, go a double step, Make his flesh liker and his soul more like, Both in their order? Take the prettiest face, The Prior's niece . . . patron-saint�is it so pretty 210 You can't discover if it means hope, fear, Sorrow or joy? won't beauty go with these? Suppose I've made her eyes all right and blue, Can't I take breath and try to add life's flash, And then add soul and heighten them threefold? 215 Or say there's beauty with no soul at all�( I never saw it�put the case the same�) If you get simple beauty and naught else, You get about the best thing God invents:

That's somewhat: and you'll find the soul you have missed,

220 Within yourself, when you return him thanks. "Rub all out!" Well, well, there's my life, in short, And so the thing has gone on ever since. I'm grown a man no doubt, I've broken bounds: You should not take a fellow eight years old

225 And make him swear to never kiss the girls. I'm my own master, paint now as I please� Having a friend, you see, in the Corner-house!3 Lord, it's fast holding by the rings in front� Those great rings serve more purposes than just

230 To plant a flag in, or tie up a horse! And yet the old schooling sticks, the old grave eyes Are peeping o'er my shoulder as I work, The heads shake still�"It's art's decline, my son! You're not of the true painters, great and old;

235 Brother Angelico's the man, you'll find; Brother Lorenzo4 stands his single peer: Fag on� at flesh, you'll never make the third!" work hard Flower o' the -pine,

2. i.e., Salome (her mother was Herodias, the 3. The Medici palace. sister-in-law oi King Herod). Because John the 4. Fra Angelico (1387�1455) and Lorenzo Mon- Baptist had aroused her mother's displeasure, Sal-aco (1370�1425), whose paintings were in the ome asked for his head on a platter after she approved traditional manner. danced (Matthew 14.6-11).

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FRA LIPPO LIPPI / 1277

You keep your mistr . . . manners, and I'll stick to mine!

240 Fm not the third, then: bless us, they must know! Don't you think they're the likeliest to know, They with their Latin? So, I swallow my rage, Clench my teeth, suck my lips in tight, and paint To please them�sometimes do and sometimes don't;

245 For, doing most, there's pretty sure to come A turn, some warm eve finds me at my saints� A laugh, a cry, the business of the world�

(Flower o' the peach, Death for us all, and his own life for each!)

250 And my whole soul revolves, the cup runs over, The world and life's too big to pass for a dream, And I do these wild things in sheer despite, And play the fooleries you catch me at, In pure rage! The old mill-horse, out at grass

255 After hard years, throws up his stiff heels so, Although the miller does not preach to him The only good of grass is to make chaff.0 straw What would men have? Do they like grass or no' � iMay they or mayn't they? all I want's the thing

260 Settled forever one way. As it is, You tell too many lies and hurt yourself: You don't like what you only like too much, You do like what, if given you at your word, You find abundantly detestable.

265 For me, I think I speak as I was taught; I always see the garden6 and God there A-making man's wife: and, my lesson learned, The value and significance of flesh, I can't unlearn ten minutes afterwards.

270 You understand me: I'm a beast, I know. But see, now�why, I see as certainly As that the morning star's about to shine, What will hap some day. We've a youngster here Comes to our convent, studies what I do,

275 Slouches and stares and lets no atom drop: His name is Guidi7�he'll not mind the monks� They call him Hulking Tom, he lets them talk� He picks my practice up�he'll paint apace, I hope so�though I never live so long,

280 I know what's sure to follow. You be judge! You speak no Latin more than I, belike; However, you're my man, you've seen the world �The beauty and the wonder and the power, The shapes of things, their colors, lights and shades,

5. I.e., while horses are allowed to enjoy playing 7. Guidi or Masaccio (1401�1428), a painter who in the grass, human beings are taught by the may have been Lippi's master rather than his pupil, Church that physical experience is valuable only in although Browning, in a letter to the press in 1870, its relation to their future condition in the afterlife. argued that Lippi had been born earlier. Like The biblical text "all flesh is as grass" (I Peter 1.24) Lippi. Masaccio was in revolt against the medieval lurks within Lippi's question. theory of art. His frescoes in the chapel of Santa 6. I.e., Eden. Maria del Carmine are considered his masterpiece.

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127 8 / ROBERT BROWNING

285 Changes, surprises�and God made it all! �For what? Do you feel thankful, aye or no, For this fair town's face, yonder river's line, The mountain round it and the sky above, Much more the figures of man, woman, child,

290 These are the frame to? What's it all about? To be passed over, despised? or dwelt upon, Wondered at? oh, this last of course!�you say. But why not do as well as say�paint these Just as they are, careless what comes of it?

295 God's works�paint any one, and count it crime To let a truth slip. Don't object, "His works Are here already; nature is complete: Suppose you reproduce her�(which you can't) There's no advantage! You must beat her, then."

300 For, don't you mark?� we're made so that we love observe First when we see them painted, things we have passed Perhaps a hundred times nor cared to see; And so they are better, painted�better to us, Which is the same thing. Art was given for that; 305 God uses us to help each other so,

Lending our minds out. Have you noticed, now, Your cullion's� hanging face? A bit of chalk, rascal's And trust me but you should, though! How much more,

If I drew higher things with the same truth!

310 That were to take the Prior's pulpit-place, Interpret God to all of you! Oh, oh, It makes me mad to see what men shall do And we in our graves! This world's no blot for us, Nor blank; it means intensely, and means good:

315 To find its meaning is my meat and drink. "Aye, but you don't so instigate to prayer!" Strikes in the Prior: "when your meaning's plain It does not say to folk�remember matins, Or, mind you fast next Friday!" Why, for this

320 What need of art at all? A skull and bones, Two bits of stick nailed crosswise, or, what's best, A bell to chime the hour with, does as well. I painted a Saint Laurence8 six months since At Prato, splashed the fresco9 in fine style:

325 "How looks my painting, now the scaffold's down?" I ask a brother: "Hugely," he returns� "Already not one phiz� of your three slaves face Who turn the Deacon off his toasted side,

But it's scratched and prodded to our heart's content,

330 The pious people have so eased their own With coming to say prayers there in a rage: We get on fast to see the bricks beneath. Expect another job this time next year,

8. A scene representing the fiery martyrdom of be painted quickly before the plaster dries. Prato Saint Laurence. is a town near Florence. 9. Painted on a freshly plastered surface. It must

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FRA LIPPO LIPPI / 1279

For pity and religion grow i' the crowd� 335 Your painting serves its purpose!" Hang the fools!

�That is�you'll not mistake an idle word Spoke in a huff by a poor monk, God wot,0 knmvs Tasting the air this spicy night which turns The unaccustomed head like Chianti wine!

340 Oh, the church knows! don't misreport me, now! It's natural a poor monk out of bounds Should have his apt word to excuse himself: And hearken how I plot to make amends. I have bethought me: I shall paint a piece

345 .. . There's for you! Give me six months, then go, see Something in Sant' Ambrogio's!' Bless the nuns! They want a cast o' my office.2 I shall paint God in the midst, Madonna and her babe, Ringed by a bowery flowery angel brood,

350 Lilies and vestments and white faces, sweet As puff on puff of grated orris-root3 When ladies crowd to Church at midsummer. And then i' the front, of course a saint or two� Saint John, because he saves the Florentines,

355 Saint Ambrose, who puts down in black and white The convent's friends and gives them a long day, And Job,4 I must have him there past mistake, The man of Uz (and Us without the z, Painters who need his patience). Well, all these

360 Secured at their devotion, up shall come Out of a corner when you least expect, As one by a dark stair into a great light, Music and talking, who but Lippo! I!�

Mazed,0 motionless and moonstruck�I'm the man! confused

365 Back I shrink�what is this I see and hear? I, caught up with my monk's things by mistake, My old serge gown and rope that goes all round, I, in this presence, this pure company! Where's a hole, where's a corner for escape?

370 Then steps a sweet angelic slip of a thing Forward, puts out a soft palm�"Not so fast!" �Addresses the celestial presence, "nay� He made you and devised you, after all, Though he's none of you! Could Saint John there draw�

375 His camel-hair5 make up a painting-brush? We come to brother Lippo for all that,

Iste perfecit opus!"6 So, all smile�

I shuffle sideways with my blushing face

1. A convent church in Florence. 2. Sample of my work. The completed painting, which Browning saw in Florence, is Lippi's Coronation of the Virgin (1441). 3. A powder (like talcum) made from sweet- smelling roots of a flower. 4. The prosperous man who endured immense suffering without once questioning God's will (see the book of Job).

5. Cf. Mark 1.6: "And John was clothed with camel's hair." 6. This man made the work! (Latin). In this painting, as later completed, these words appear beside a figure that Browning took to be Lippi's self- portrait.

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128 0 / ROBERT BROWNING

Under the cover of a hundred wings

380 Thrown like a spread of kirtles0 when you're gay skirts And play hot cockles,7 all the doors being shut, Till, wholly unexpected, in there pops The hothead husband! Thus I scuttle off To some safe bench behind, not letting go

385 The palm of her, the little lily thing That spoke the good word for me in the nick, Like the Prior's niece . . . Saint Lucy, I would say. And so all's saved for me, and for the church A pretty picture gained. Go, six months hence!

390 Your hand, sir, and good-by: no lights, no lights! The street's hushed, and I know my own way back, Don't fear me! There's the gray beginning. Zooks!

ca. 1853 1855

Andrea del Sarto1

(called "The Faultless Painter")

But do not let us quarrel any more, No, my Lucrezia; bear with me for once: Sit down and all shall happen as you wish. You turn your face, but does it bring your heart? I'll work then for your friend's friend, never fear, Treat his own subject after his own way, Fix his own time, accept too his own price, And shut the money into this small hand When next it takes mine. Will it? tenderly? Oh, I'll content him�but tomorrow, Love! I often am much wearier than you think, This evening more than usual, and it seems As if�forgive now�should you let me sit Here by the window with your hand in mine And look a half-hour forth on Fiesole,2

Both of one mind, as married people use,� usually are Quietly, quietly the evening through, I might get up tomorrow to my work Cheerful and fresh as ever. Let us try. Tomorrow, how you shall be glad for this! Your soft hand is a woman of itself,

7. A game in which a player wears a blindfold. to the more exalted character, should ever appear I. This portrait of Andrea del Sarto (1486-1531) in him." was derived from a biography written by his pupil Browning also follows Vasari's account of Giorgio Vasari, author of The Lives of the Painters Andrea's marriage to a beautiful widow, Lucrezia, (1550). Vasari's account seeks to explain why his "an artful woman w ho made him do as she pleased Florentine master, one of the most skillful painters in all things." Vasari reports that Andrea's "immodof the Renaissance, never altogether fulfilled the erate love for her soon caused him to neglect the promise he had shown early in his career and why studies demanded hv his art" and that this infatuhe had never arrived (in Vasari's opinion) at the ation had "more influence over him than the glory level of such artists as Raphael. Vasari noted that and honor towards which he had begun to make Andrea suffered from "a certain timidity of mind such hopeful advances." . . . which rendered it impossible that those evi-2. A suburb on the hills overlooking Florence. dences of ardor and animation, which are proper

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ANDREA DEL SARTO / 1281

And mine the man's bared breast she curls inside. Don't count the time lost, neither; you must serve For each of the five pictures we require:

25 It saves0 a model. So! keep looking so � saves the expense of My serpentining beauty, rounds on rounds!3 �How could you ever prick those perfect ears, Even to put the pearl there! oh, so sweet� My face, my moon, my everybody's moon,

30 Which everybody looks on and calls his, And, I suppose, is looked on by in turn, While she looks�no one's: very dear, no less.4 You smile? why, there's my picture ready made, There's what we painters call our harmony!

35 A common grayness silvers everything5� All in a twilight, you and I alike �You, at the point of your first pride in me (That's gone you know)�but I, at every point; My youth, my hope, my art, being all toned down

40 To yonder sober pleasant Fiesole. There's the bell clinking from the chapel top; That length of convent wall across the way Holds the trees safer, huddled more inside; The last monk leaves the garden; days decrease, 45 And autumn grows, autumn in everything. Eh? the whole seems to fall into a shape As if I saw alike my work and self And all that I was born to be and do, A twilight-piece. Love, we are in God's hand. 50 How strange now, looks the life he makes us lead; So free we seem, so fettered fast we are! I feel he laid the fetter: let it lie! This chamber for example�turn your head� All that's behind us! You don't understand 55 Nor care to understand about my art, But you can hear at least when people speak: And that cartoon,0 the second from the door drawing �It is the thing, Love! so such things should be � Behold Madonna!�I am bold to say. 60 I can do with my pencil what I know, What I see, what at bottom of my heart I wish for, if I ever wish so deep� Do easily, too�when I say, perfectly, 1 do not boast, perhaps: yourself are judge, 65 Who listened to the Legate's6 talk last week, And just as much they used to say in France. At any rate 'tis easy, all of it! No sketches first, no studies, that's long past: I do what many dream of, all their lives, 70 �Dream? strive to do, and agonize to do,

3. Coils of hair like the coils of a serpent. 5. The predominant color in many of Andrea's 4. Her affections are centered on no one person, paintings is silver gray, not even on her husband, yet she is nevertheless 6. A deputy of the pope, dear to him.

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1282 / ROBERT BROWNING

And fail in doing. I could count twenty such On twice your fingers, and not leave this town, Who strive�you don't know how the others strive To paint a little thing like that you smeared

75 Carelessly passing with your robes afloat� Yet do much less, so much less, Someone7 says (I know his name, no matter)�so much less! Well, less is more, Lucrezia: I am judged. There burns a truer light of God in them,

so In their vexed beating stuffed and stopped-up brain, Heart, or whate'er else, than goes on to prompt This low-pulsed forthright craftsman's hand of mine. Their works drop groundward, but themselves, I know, Reach many a time a heaven that's shut to me,

85 Enter and take their place there sure enough, Though they come back and cannot tell the world. My works are nearer heaven, but I sit here. The sudden blood of these men! at a word� Praise them, it boils, or blame them, it boils too.

90 I, painting from myself and to myself, Know what I do, am unmoved by men's blame Or their praise either. Somebody remarks Morello's8 outline there is wrongly traced, His hue mistaken; what of that? or else,

95 Rightly traced and well ordered; what of that? Speak as they please, what does the mountain care? Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp, Or what's a heaven for? All is silver-gray Placid and perfect with my art: the worse!

IOO I know both what I want and what might gain, And yet how profitless to know, to sigh "Had I been two, another and myself, Our head would have o'erlooked the world!" No doubt. Yonder's a work now, of that famous youth

105 The Urbinate9 who died five years ago. ('Tis copied,' George Vasari sent it me.) Well, I can fancy how he did it all, Pouring his soul, with kings and popes to see, Reaching, that heaven might so replenish him,

110 Above and through his art�for it gives way; That arm is wrongly put�and there again� A fault to pardon in the drawing's lines, Its body, so to speak: its soul is right, He means right�that, a child may understand.

115 Still, what an arm! and I could alter it: But all the play, the insight and the stretch� Out of me, out of me! And wherefore out? Had you enjoined them on me, given me soul, We might have risen to Rafael, I and you!

7. Probably the artist Michelangelo (1475�1564). 1. In saying that the painting is a copy, Andrea 8. A mountain peak outside Florence. may perhaps be concerned to prevent Lucrezia 9. Raphael (1483-1520), or Raffaello Sanzio, from selling it. born at Urbino.

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ANDREA DEL SARTO / 1283

120 Nay, Love, you did give all I asked, I think� More than I merit, yes, by many times. But had you�oh, with the same perfect brow, And perfect eyes, and more than perfect mouth, And the low voice my soul hears, as a bird

125 The fowler's pipe,2 and follows to the snare� Had you, with these the same, but brought a mind! Some women do so. Had the mouth there urged "God and the glory! never care for gain. The present by the future, what is that?

130 Live for fame, side by side with Agnolo!� Michelangelo Rafael is waiting: up to God, all three!" I might have done it for you. So it seems: Perhaps not. All is as God overrules. Reside, incentives come from the soul's self;

135 The rest avail not. Why do I need you? What wife had Rafael, or has Agnolo? In this world, who can do a thing, will not; And who would do it, cannot, I perceive: Yet the will's somewhat0�somewhat, too, the power� of some importance

HO And thus we half-men struggle. At the end, God, I conclude, compensates, punishes. 'Tis safer for me, if the award be strict, That I am something underrated here. Poor this long while, despised, to speak the truth.

145 I dared not, do you know, leave home all day, For fear of chancing on the Paris lords. The best is when they pass and look aside; But they speak sometimes; I must bear it all. Well may they speak! That Francis,3 that first time,

150 And that long festal year at Fontainebleau! I surely then could sometimes leave the ground, Put on the glory, Rafael's daily wear, In that humane great monarch's golden look� One finger in his beard or twisted curl

155 Over his mouth's good mark that made the smile, One arm about my shoulder, round my neck, The jingle of his gold chain in my ear, I painting proudly with his breath on me, All his court round him, seeing with his eyes,

160 Such frank French eyes, and such a fire of souls Profuse, my hand kept plying by those hearts� And, best of all, this, this, this face beyond, This in the background, waiting on my work, To crown the issue with a last reward!

165 A good time, was it not, my kingly days? And had you not grown restless . . . but I know� 'Tis done and past; 'twas right, my instinct said;

2. Whistle or call used by hunters to lure wildfowl painting. On returning to Florence, however, into range. Andrea is reputed to have stolen some funds 3. King Francis 1 of France (1494�1547; reigned entrusted to him by Francis; and to please Lucrezia I 51 5�47) had invited Andrea to his court at Fon-he built a house with the money. Now he is afraid tainebleau and warmly encouraged him in his of being insulted by "Paris lords" on the streets.

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1284 / ROBERT BROWNING

Too live the life grew, golden and not gray, And I'm the weak-eyed bat no sun should tempt

170 Out of the grange0 whose four walls make his world. farmhouse How could it end in any other way? You called me, and I came home to your heart. The triumph was�to reach and stay there; since I reached it ere the triumph, what is lost?

17? Let my hands frame your face in your hair's gold, You beautiful Lucrezia that are mine! "Rafael did this, Andrea painted that; The Roman's is the better when you pray, But still the other's Virgin was his wife�"

180 Men will excuse me. I am glad to judge Both pictures in your presence; clearer grows My better fortune, I resolve to think. For, do you know, Lucrezia, as God lives, Said one day Agnolo, his very self,

185 To Rafael .. . I have known it all these years . . . (When the young man was flaming out his thoughts Upon a palace wall for Rome to see, Too lifted up in heart because of it) "Friend, there's a certain sorry little scrub

190 Goes up and down our Florence, none cares how, Who, were he set to plan and execute As you are, pricked on by your popes and kings, Would bring the sweat into that brow of yours!" To Rafael's�And indeed the arm is wrong.

195 I hardly dare . . . yet, only you to see, Give the chalk here�quick, thus the line should go! Aye, but the soul! he's Rafael! rub it out! Still, all I care for, if he spoke the truth, (What he? why, who but Michel Agnolo?

200 Do you forget already words like those?) If really there was such a chance, so lost� Is, whether you're�not grateful�but more pleased. Well, let me think so. And you smile indeed! This hour has been an hour! Another smile?

205 If you would sit thus by me every night I should work better, do you comprehend? I mean that I should earn more, give you more. See, it is settled dusk now; there's a star; Morello's gone, the watch-lights show the wall,

210 The cue-owls4 speak the name we call them by. Come from the window, love�come in, at last, Inside the melancholy little house We built to be so gay with. God is just. King Francis may forgive me: oft at nights

215 When I look up from painting, eyes tired out, The walls become illumined, brick from brick Distinct, instead of mortar, fierce bright gold, That gold of his I did cement them with!

4. Scops owls; the term is Browning's coinage from the Italian chili or ciit, a name that imitates their cry.

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ANDREA DEL SARTO / 1285

Let us but love each other. Must you go?

220 That Cousin here again? he waits outside? Must see you�you, and not with me? Those loans? More gaming debts to pay?5 you smiled for that? Well, let smiles buy me! have you more to spend? While hand and eye and something of a heart

225 Are left me, work's my ware, and what's it worth? I'll pay my fancy. Only let me sit The gray remainder of the evening out, Idle, you call it, and muse perfectly How I could paint, were I but back in France,

230 One picture, just one more�the Virgin's face, Not yours this time! I want you at my side To hear them�that is, Michel Agnolo� Judge all I do and tell you of its worth. Will you? Tomorrow, satisfy your friend.

235 I take the subjects for his corridor, Finish the portrait out of hand�there, there, And throw him in another thing or two If he demurs; the whole should prove enough To pay for this same Cousin's freak.0 Beside, whim 240 What's better and what's all I care about, Get you the thirteen scudi� for the ruff! Italian coins Love, does that please you? Ah, but what does he, The Cousin! What does he to please you more?

I am grown peaceful as old age tonight.

245 I regret little, I would change still less. Since there my past life lies, why alter it? The very wrong to Francis!�it is true I took his coin, was tempted and complied, And built this house and sinned, and all is said.

250 My father and my mother died of want.6 Well, had I riches of my own? you see How one gets rich! Let each one bear his lot. They were born poor, lived poor, and poor they died: And I have labored somewhat in my time

255 And not been paid profusely. Some good son Paint my two hundred pictures�let him try! No doubt, there's something strikes a balance. Yes, You loved me quite enough, it seems tonight. This must suffice me here. What would one have?

260 In heaven, perhaps, new chances, one more chance� Four great walls in the New Jerusalem,7 Meted on each side by the angel's reed,� measuring rod

For Leonard,8 Rafael, Agnolo and me To cover�the three first without a wife,

5. Lucrezia's "Cousin" (or lover or friend) owes 6. According to Vasari, Andrea's infatuation for gambling debts to a creditor. Andrea has already Lucrezia prompted him to stop supporting his contracted (lines 5�10) to pay off these debts by poverty-stricken parents. painting some pictures according to the creditor's 7. Cf. Revelation 21.10�21. specifications. Now he agrees to pay off further 8. Leonardo da Vinci (1452�1 5 19). debts.

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128 6 / ROBERT BROWNING

265 While I have mine! So�still they overcome Because there's still Lucrezia�as I choose.

Again the Cousin's whistle! Go, my Love.

ca. 1853 1855

A Grammarian's Funeral1

Shortly after the Revival of Learning in Europe

Let us begin and carry up this corpse, Singing together. Leave we the common crofts,2 the vulgar thorpes0 villages Each in its tether3 5 Sleeping safe on the bosom of the plain, Cared for till cock-crow: Look out if yonder be not day again Rimming the rock-row! That's the appropriate country; there, man's thought, io Rarer, intenser, Self-gathered for an outbreak, as it ought, Chafes in the censer.4 Leave we the unlettered plain5 its herd and crop; Seek we sepulture0 burial place 15 On a tall mountain, citied to the top, Crowded with culture! All the peaks soar, but one the rest excels; Clouds overcome it; No! yonder sparkle is the citadel's 20 Circling its summit. Thither our path lies; wind we up the heights: Wait ye the warning? Our low life was the level's and the night's; He's for the morning. 25 Step to a tune, square chests, erect each head, Ware the beholders!6 This is our master, famous, calm, and dead, Borne on our shoulders.

Sleep, crop and herd! sleep, darkling thorpe and croft, so Safe from the weather! He, whom we convoy to his grave aloft, Singing together,

1. The speaker is one of the students who are ing. bearing the body of their scholarly master to the 2. Small tracts of land farmed by peasants. mountaintop for burial. No specific model for the 3. Restricted to a narrow sphere like an animal grammarian has been identified. Browning seems tied to a stake. to have had in mind the kind of early Renaissance 4. Container in which incense is burned. scholar whose devotion to the Greek language 5. Flatlands at the base of the mountain that are made it possible for others to enjoy the more rec-populated by illiterate shepherds and peasants. ognizably significant aspects of the revival of learn-6. Let the beholders beware!

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A GRAMMARIAN'S FUNERAL / 128 7

He was a man born with thy face and throat, Lyric Apollo!7 35 Long he lived nameless: how should spring take note Winter would follow? Till lo, the little touch, and youth was gone! Cramped and diminished, Moaned he, "New measures, other feet anon! 40 My dance is finished?" No, that's the world's way: (keep the mountain-side, Make for the city!) He knew the signal, and stepped on with pride Over men's pity; 45 Left play for work, and grappled with the world Bent on escaping: "What's in the scroll," quoth he, "thou keepest furled? Show me their shaping, Theirs who most studied man, the bard and sage� 50 Give!"�So, he gowned him,8 Straight0 got by heart that book to its last page: immediately Learned, we found him. Yea, but we found him bald too, eyes like lead, Accents uncertain: 55 "Time to taste life," another would have said, "Up with the curtain!" This man said rather, "Actual life comes next? Patience a moment! Grant I have mastered learning's crabbed text, 60 Still there's the comment.9 Let me know all! Prate not of most or least, Painful or easy! Even to the crumbs I'd fain� eat up the feast, gladly Aye, nor feel queasy." 65 Oh, such a life as he resolved to live, When he had learned it, When he had gathered all books had to give! Sooner, he spurned it. Image the whole, then execute the parts� 70 Fancy the fabric Quite, ere you build, ere steel strike fire from quartz, Ere mortar dab brick! (Here's the town gate reached: there's the market place Gaping before us.) 75 Yea, this in him was the peculiar grace (Hearten our chorus!) That before living he'd learn how to live� No end to learning: Earn the means first�God surely will contrive so Use for our earning.

7. Classical god of music and poetry; the embod-8. Dressed in academic gown; became a scholar. iment of male beauty. 9. Commentaries or annotations on a text.

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128 8 / ROBERT BROWNING

Others mistrust and say, "But time escapes: Live now or never!" He said, "What's time? Leave Now for dogs and apes! Man has Forever." 85 Back to his book then: deeper drooped his head: Calculus' racked him: Leaden before, his eyes grew dross of lead: Tussis� attacked him. a cough "Now, master, take a little rest!"�not he! 90 (Caution redoubled, Step two abreast, the way winds narrowly!) Not a whit troubled Back to his studies, fresher than at first, Fierce as a dragon 95 He (soul-hydroptic2 with a sacred thirst) Sucked at the flagon. Oh, if we draw a circle premature, Heedless of far gain, Greedy for quick returns of profit, sure IOO Bad is our bargain! Was it not great? did not he throw on God (He loves the burthen)� God's task to make the heavenly period Perfect the earthen? 105 Did not he magnify the mind, show clear Just what it all meant? He would not discount life, as fools do here, Paid by installment. He ventured neck or nothing�heaven's success 110 Found, or earth's failure: "Wilt thou trust death or not?" He answered "Yes: Hence with life's pale lure!" That low man seeks a little thing to do, Sees it and does it: in This high man, with a great thing to pursue, Dies ere he knows it. That low man goes on adding one to one, His hundred's soon hit: This high man, aiming at a million, 120 Misses an unit.3 That, has the world here�should he need the next, Let the world mind him! This, throws himself on God, and unperplexed Seeking shall find him. 125 So, with the throttling hands of death at strife, Ground he at grammar; Still, through the rattle, parts of speech were rife: While he could stammer

1. A gallstone or other hard inorganic mass within 3. A small item, such as some trifling worldly plea- the body. sure. 2. Insatiably thirsty.

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KARSHISH, THE ARAB PHYSICIAN / 128 9

He settled Hoti's business�let it be!� 130 Properly based Oun� Gave us the doctrine of the enclitic De,4 Dead from the waist down. Well, here's the platform, here's the proper place: Hail to your purlieus,0 regions 135 All ye highfliers of the feathered race, Swallows and curlews! Here's the top peak; the multitude below Live, for they can, there: This man decided not to Live but Know� 140 Bury this man there? Here�here's his place, where meteors shoot, clouds form, Lightnings are loosened, Stars come and go! Let joy break with the storm, Peace let the dew send! 145 Lofty designs must close in like effects: Loftily lying, Leave him�still loftier than the world suspects, Living and dying.

ca. 1854 1855

An Epistle Containing the Strange Medical Experience of Karshish, the Arab Physician1

Karshish, the picker-up of learning's crumbs, The not-incurious in God's handiwork (This man's-flesh he hath admirably made, Blown like a bubble, kneaded like a paste,

5 To coop up and keep down on earth a space0 for a time That puff of vapor from his mouth, man's soul2) �To Abib, all-sagacious in our art, Breeder in me of what poor skill I boast, Like me inquisitive how pricks and cracks

io Befall the flesh through too much stress and strain, Whereby the wily vapor fain would slip Back and rejoin its source before the term,� And aptest in contrivance (under God) To baffle it by deftly stopping such:�

4. "Hoti," "Oun," and "De": Greek particles mean-developments he has encountered. Most recently ing "that," "then," and "toward." "Enclitic": in he has been intrigued by the story of Lazarus, a Jew effect (and literally, in the case of de) a suffix. In who is reputed to have died and been miraculously an 1863 letter Browning commented to Tennyson brought back to life by a "Nazarene physician" (as that he wanted his grammarian to have been work-Jesus is called here) many years earlier (cf. John ing on "the biggest of the littlenesses." 11.1�44). Karshish's letter is addressed from Beth1. The letter is written in 66 C.E., just before the lehem to Abib, formerly his science teacher and Romans invaded Palestine. During a journey now his colleague and friend. Both scientists are across the country, Karshish, whose name in Ara-imaginary characters. bic means "one who gathers" (or roughly, "the 2. Karshish is referring to the old belief that the picker-up of learning's crumbs"), has been col-soul leaves the body with one's last breath, in the lecting information on medical and scientific form of a vapor.

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1290 / ROBERT BROWNING

15 The vagrant0 Scholar to his Sage at home wandering Sends greeting (health and knowledge, fame with peace) Three samples of true snakestone3�rarer still, One of the other sort, the melon-shaped, (But fitter, pounded fine, for charms than drugs)

20 And writeth now the twenty-second time.

My journeyings were brought to Jericho:4 Thus I resume. Who studious in our art Shall count a little labor unrepaid? I have shed sweat enough, left flesh and bone

25 On many a flinty furlong of this land. Also, the country-side is all on fire With rumors of a marching hitherward: Some say Vespasian5 cometh, some, his son. A black lynx snarled and pricked a tufted ear;

30 Lust of my blood inflamed his yellow balls:0 eyeballs I cried and threw my staff and he was gone. Twice have the robbers stripped and beaten me, And once a town declared me for a spy; But at the end, I reach Jerusalem,

35 Since this poor covert where I pass the night, This Bethany,6 lies scarce the distance thence A man with plague-sores at the third degree Runs till he drops down dead. Thou laughest here! 'Sooth,7 it elates me, thus reposed and safe,

40 To void the stuffing of my travel-scrip0 small bag And share with thee whatever Jewry yields. A viscid choler is observable In tertians,8 I was nearly bold to say; And falling-sickness0 hath a happier cure epilepsy

45 Than our school wots� of: there's a spider here knows Weaves no web, watches on the ledge of tombs, Sprinkled with mottles on an ash-gray back; Take five and drop them . . . but who knows his mind, The Syrian runagate0 I trust this to? renegade

so His service payeth me a sublimate9 Blown up his nose to help the ailing eye. Best wait: I reach Jerusalem at morn, There set in order my experiences, Gather what most deserves, and give thee all�

55 Or I might add, Judea's gum-tragacanth' Scales off in purer flakes, shines clearer-grained, Cracks 'twixt the pestle and the porphyry,2 In fine0 exceeds our produce. Scalp-disease conclusion Confounds me, crossing so with leprosy�

3. A stone used to treat snake bites. 7. Forsooth; in truth. 4. I.e., in the last letters. 8. A sticky bile is observable in fevers occurring 5. The Roman commander (9�79 C.E.; emperor, every other day. 69�79) who invaded Palestine in 66. His son Titus 9. I.e., pays me for a medicine. destroyed Jerusalem four years later. 1. A salve derived from a plant. 6. The small village where Lazarus lives, located 2. A hard rock against which the substance is two miles east of Jerusalem. pounded with a pestle.

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KARSHISH , TH E ARA B PHYSICIA N / 129 1 60 Thou hadst admired one sort I gained at Zoar' But zeal outruns discretion. Here I end. Yet stay: my Syrian blinketh gratefully, Protesteth his devotion is my price� Suppose I write what harms not, though he steal? 65 I half resolve to tell thee, yet I blush, What set me off a-writing first of all. An itch I had, a sting to write, a tang! For, be it this town's barrenness�or else The Man" had something in the look of him� Lazarus 70 His case has struck me far more than 'tis worth. So, pardon if�(lest presently I lose In the great press of novelty at hand The care and pains this somehow stole from me) I bid thee take the thing while fresh in mind, 75 Almost in sight�for, wilt thou have the truth? The very man is gone from me but now, Whose ailment is the subject of discourse. Thus then, and let thy better wit help all! Tis but a case of mania�subinduced4 so By epilepsy, at the turning-point Of trance prolonged unduly some three days: When, by the exhibition0 of some drug administration Or spell, exorcization, stroke of art Unknown to me and which 'twere well to know, 85 The evil thing out-breaking all at once Left the man whole and sound of body indeed,� But, flinging (so to speak) life's gates too wide, Making a clear house of it too suddenly, The first conceit0 that entered might inscribe idea 90 Whatever it was minded on the wall So plainly at that vantage, as it were, (First come, first served) that nothing subsequent Attaineth to erase those fancy-scrawls The just-returned and new-established soul 95 Hath gotten now so thoroughly by heart That henceforth she will read or� these or none. either And first�the man's own firm conviction rests That he was dead (in fact they buried him) �That he was dead and then restored to life IOO By a Nazarene physician of his tribe: �'Sayeth,0 the same bade "Rise," and he did rise. he says "Such cases are diurnal,"5 thou wilt cry. Not so this figment!�not, that such a fume,6 Instead of giving way to time and health,

105 Should eat itself into the life of life, As saffron7 tingeth flesh, blood, bones and all!

Town north of the Dead Sea. 6. A vapor standing for a hallucinated belief. Brought about as a result of something else. 7. Yellow-colored dye made from the plant of the Occur every day. same name, also used as a spice.

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129 2 / ROBERT BROWNING For see, how he takes up the after-life. The man�it is one Lazarus a Jew, Sanguine,0 proportioned, fifty years of age, The body's habit wholly laudable,0As much, indeed, beyond the common health As he were made and put aside to show. Think, could we penetrate by any drug And bathe the wearied soul and worried flesh, And bring it clear and fair, by three days' sleep! Whence has the man the balm that brightens all? This grown man eyes the world now like a child. Some elders of his tribe, I should premise,0Led in their friend, obedient as a sheep, To bear my inquisition. While they spoke, Now sharply, now with sorrow,�told the case,� He listened not except I spoke to him, But folded his two hands and let them talk, Watching the flies that buzzed: and yet no fool. And that's a sample how his years must go. Look, if a beggar, in fixed middle-life, Should find a treasure,�can he use the same With straitened habits and with tastes starved small, And take at once to his impoverished brain The sudden element that changes things, That sets the undreamed-of rapture at his hand And puts the cheap old joy in the scorned dust? Is he not such an one as moves to mirth"� Warily parsimonious, when no need, Wasteful as drunkenness at undue times? All prudent counsel as to what befits The golden mean, is lost on such an one: The man's fantastic will is the man's law. So here�we call the treasure knowledge, say, Increased beyond the fleshly faculty� Heaven opened to a soul while yet on earth, Earth forced on a soul's use while seeing heaven: The man is witless0 of the size, the sum, The value in proportion of all things, Or whether it be little or be much. Discourse to him of prodigious armaments Assembled to besiege his city now, And of the passing of a mule with gourds� 'Tis one! Then take it on the other side, Speak of some trifling fact,�he will gaze rapt With stupor at its very littleness (Far as I see), as if in that indeed He caught prodigious import, whole results; And so will turn to us the bystanders In ever the same stupor (note this point) That we too see not with his opened eyes. Wonder and doubt come wrongly into play, Preposterously, at cross-purposes. Should his child sicken unto death,�why, look robust healthy say at first makes us laugh unknowing

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KARSHISH, THE ARAB PHYSICIAN / 129 3

160 For scarce abatement of his cheerfulness,

Or pretermission" of the daily craft!

interruption

While a word, gesture, glance from that same child

At play or in the school or laid asleep,

Will startle him to an agony of fear,

165 Exasperation, just as like. Demand

The reason why�" 'tis but a word," object�

"A gesture"�he regards thee as our lord8

Who lived there in the pyramid alone,

Looked at us (dost thou mind?) when, being young,

170 We both would unadvisedly recite

Some charm's beginning, from that book of his,

Able to bid the sun throb wide and burst

All into stars, as suns grown old are wont.

Thou and the child have each a veil alike

175 Thrown o'er your heads, from under which ye both

Stretch your blind hands and trifle with a match

Over a mine of Greek fire,9 did ye know!

He holds on firmly to some thread of life�

(It is the life to lead perforcedly)

i8o Which runs across some vast distracting orb

Of glory on either side that meager thread,

Which, conscious of, he must not enter yet�

The spiritual life around the earthly life:

The law of that is known to him as this,1

185 His heart and brain move there, his feet stay here.

So is the man perplexed with impulses

Sudden to start off crosswise, not straight on,

Proclaiming what is right and wrong across,

And not along, this black thread through the blaze�

190 "It should be" balked by "here it cannot be."

And oft the man's soul springs into his face

As if he saw again and heard again

His sage that bade him "Rise" and he did rise.

Something, a word, a tick o' the blood0 within beat

pulse

195 Admonishes: then back he sinks at once

To ashes, who was very fire before,

In sedulous recurrence to his trade

Whereby he earneth him the daily bread;

And studiously the humbler for that pride,

200 Professedly the faultier that0 he knows because

God's secret, while he holds the thread of life.

Indeed the especial marking of the man

Is prone submission to the heavenly will�

Seeing it, what it is, and why it is.

205 'Sayeth, he will wait patient to the last

For that same death which must restore his being

To equilibrium, body loosening soul

Divorced even now by premature full growth:

8. A magician or wise man under whom Karshish I. I.e., he knows the law of the spiritual life as well and Abib had studied. as that of the earthly life. 9. Weapon made of sulfur, naphtha, and saltpeter.

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129 4 / ROBERT BROWNING

He will live, nay, it pleaseth him to live

210 So long as God please, and just how God please. He even seeketh not to please God more (Which meaneth, otherwise) than as God please. Hence, I perceive not he affects0 to preach aspires The doctrine of his sect whate'er it be,

215 Make proselytes as madmen thirst to do: How can he give his neighbor the real ground, His own conviction? Ardent as he is� Call his great truth a lie, why, still the old "Be it as God please" reassureth him.

220 I probed the sore2 as thy disciple should: "How, beast," said I, "this stolid carelessness Sufficeth thee, when Rome is on her march To stamp out like a little spark thy town, Thy tribe, thy crazy tale and thee at once?"

225 He merely looked with his large eyes on me. The man is apathetic, you deduce? Contrariwise, he loves both old and young, Able and weak, affects3 the very brutes And birds�how say I? flowers of the field�

230 As a wise workman recognizes tools In a master's workshop, loving what they make. Thus is the man, as harmless as a Iamb: Only impatient, let him do his best, At ignorance and carelessness and sin� 235 An indignation which is promptly curbed: As when in certain travels I have feigned To be an ignoramus in our art According to some preconceived design, And happed to hear the land's practitioners 240 Steeped in conceit sublimed4 by ignorance, Prattle fantastically on disease, Its cause and cure�and I must hold my peace!

Thou wilt object�Why have I not ere this Sought out the sage himself, the Nazarene

245 Who wrought this cure, inquiring at the source, Conferring with the frankness that befits? Alas! it grieveth me, the learned leech0 doctor Perished in a tumult many years ago, Accused,�our learning's fate,�of wizardry,

250 Rebellion, to the setting up a rule And creed prodigious as described to me. His death, which happened when the earthquake fell5 (Prefiguring, as soon appeared, the loss To occult learning in our lord the sage

255 Who lived there in the pyramid alone) Was wrought by the mad people�that's their wont! On vain recourse, as I conjecture it,

2. Investigated the case. 5. The earthquake at the time of Christ's crucifix3. Has affection for. ion (reported in Matthew 27.51). 4. Exalted. "Conceit": foolish fancy.

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KARSHISH, THE ARAB PHYSICIAN / 129 5

To his tried virtue, for miraculous help�

How could he stop the earthquake? That's their way!

260 The other imputations must be lies: But take one, though 1 loathe to give it thee,

In mere respect for any good man's fame.

(And after all, our patient Lazarus

Is stark mad; should we count on what he says?

265 Perhaps not: though in writing to a leech

'Tis well to keep back nothing of a case.)

This man so cured regards the curer, then,

As�God forgive me! who but God himself,

Creator and sustainer of the world,

270 That came and dwelt in flesh on it awhile! �'Sayeth that such an one was born and lived,

Taught, healed the sick, broke bread at his own house,6

Then died, with Lazarus by, for aught I know,

And yet was . . . what I said nor choose repeat,

275 And must have so avouched himself, in fact,

In hearing of this very Lazarus

Who saith�but why all this of what he saith?

Why write of trivial matters, things of price

Calling at every moment for remark?

280 I noticed on the margin of a pool Blue-flowering borage, the Aleppo7 sort,

Aboundeth, very nitrous. It is strange!

Thy pardon for this long and tedious case,

Which, now that I review it, needs must seem

Unduly dwelt on, prolixly set forth!

Nor I myself discern in what is writ

Good cause for the peculiar interest

And awe indeed this man has touched me with.

Perhaps the journey's end, the weariness

290 Had wrought upon me first. I met him thus:

I crossed a ridge of short sharp broken hills

Like an old lion's cheek teeth. Out there came

A moon made like a face with certain spots

Multiform, manifold and menacing:

295 Then a wind rose behind me. So we met

In this old sleepy town at unaware,

The man and I. I send thee what is writ.

Regard it as a chance, a matter risked

To this ambiguous Syrian�he may lose,

Or steal, or give it thee with equal good,

Jerusalem's repose shall make amends

For time this letter wastes, thy time and mine;

Till when, once more thy pardon and farewell!

The very God! think, Abib; dost thou think?

305 So, the All-Great, were the All-Loving too�

So, through the thunder comes a human voice

6. John 12.1-2. 7. Town in northern Syria. "Borage": herb used medicinally that contains potassium nitrate.

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1296 /

310

ROBERT BROWNING

Saying, "O heart I made, a heart beats here!

Face, my hands fashioned, see it in myself!

Thou hast no power nor mayst 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.

1855

Caliban upon Setebos Shakespeare's Tempest provided Browning with the idea for his speaker (Caliban is Prospero's brutish slave, half-man, half-beast) and the subject of his musings (Setebos is briefly referred to in the play as the god of Caliban's mother, the witch Sycorax). From these beginnings Browning writes a poem that reflects on two closely related controversies of the Victorian period. The first concerned the nature of God and God's responsibility for the existence of pain in the world. The second debate, stimulated by the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species (1859), focused on humanity's origins and our relation to other beings.

As the poem's epigraph reveals, Browning is interested in the idea that the human conception of the divine is conditioned by our own limitations, or by our understanding of ourselves. Caliban, a lower being, draws his notion of the god who he believes dictates his fortunes from three main sources: his observations of life on the island, his own character, and his experiences with Prospero, his master. The first of these, his knowledge of the behavior and sufferings of animal life, gives rise to his "natural theology": that is, his tendency to understand the character of his god from evidences provided by nature rather than from the evidence of supernatural revelation. From his perceptions of his own motivations and the conduct of his earthly ruler comes Caliban's conception of Setebos's willful power. Caliban admires power and thinks of his god as a being who selects at random some creatures who are to be saved and others who are condemned to suffer. His musings thus connect in complex ways with key and pressing issues for the religious and scientific communities of the Victorian era: through the lens of this most unlikely philosopher, Browning raises the topics both of eternal salvation and of natural selection. Significantly, Caliban feels the need to posit a higher divine being, or presence, that exists "over Setebos": puzzling about this other deity, "the Quiet," Browning's speaker delves into fundamental questions of origin and the construction of myth.

An obstacle for the reader is Caliban's use of the third-person pronoun to refer to himself. Thus " 'Will sprawl" means "Caliban will sprawl" (an apostrophe before the verb usually indicates that Caliban is the implied subject). Setebos is also referred to in the third person but with an initial capital letter ("He").

Caliban upon Setebos

Or Natural Theology in the Island

"Thou thoughtest that I was altogether such a one as thyself."1

["Will sprawl, now that the heat of day is best,

Flat on his belly in the pit's much mire,

With elbows wide, fists clenched to prop his chin.

1. Psalm 50.21. The speaker is God.

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CALIBAN UPON SETEBOS / 129 7

And, while he kicks both feet in the cool slush, 5 And feels about his spine small eft-things� course, water lizards Run in and out each arm, and make him laugh: And while above his head a pompion0 plant, pumpkin Coating the cave-top as a brow its eye, Creeps down to touch and tickle hair and beard, 10 And now a flower drops with a bee inside, And now a fruit to snap at, catch and crunch� He looks out o'er yon sea which sunbeams cross And recross till they weave a spider web (Meshes of fire, some great fish breaks at times) is And talks to his own self, howe'er he please, Touching that other, whom his dam� called God. mother Because to talk about Him, vexes�ha, Could He but know! and time to vex is now, When talk is safer than in wintertime. 20 Moreover Prosper and Miranda2 sleep In confidence he drudges at their task, And it is good to cheat the pair, and gibe,� insult them Letting the rank tongue blossom into speech.] Setebos, Setebos, and Setebos! 25 'Thinketh, He dwelleth i' the cold o' the moon. 'Thinketh He made it, with the sun to match, But not the stars; the stars came otherwise; Only made clouds, winds, meteors, such as that: Also this isle, what lives and grows thereon, 30 And snaky sea which rounds and ends the same. 'Thinketh, it came of being ill at ease: He hated that He cannot change His cold, Nor cure its ache. 'Hath spied an icy fish That longed to 'scape the rock-stream where she lived, 35 And thaw herself within the lukewarm brine O' the lazy sea her stream thrusts far amid, A crystal spike 'twixt two warm walls of wave;' Only, she ever sickened, found repulse At the other kind of water, not her life, 40 (Green-dense and dim-delicious, bred o' the sun) Flounced back from bliss she was not born to breathe, And in her old bounds buried her despair, Hating and loving warmth alike: so He. 'Thinketh, He made thereat the sun, this isle, 45 Trees and the fowls here, beast and creeping thing. Yon otter, sleek-wet, black, lithe as a leech; Yon auk,� one fire-eye in a ball of foam, seabird That floats and feeds; a certain badger brown He hath watched hunt with that slant white-wedge eye

2. Prospero's daughter. 3. I.e., the thin stream of cold water that is driven into the warm ocean like a spike between walls.

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129 8 / ROBERT BROWNING

so By moonlight; and the pie� with the long tongue

magpie

That pricks deep into oakwarts for a worm,

And says a plain word when she finds her prize,

But will not eat the ants; the ants themselves

That build a wall of seeds and settled stalks

55 About their hole�He made all these and more,

Made all we see, and us, in spite: how else?

He could not, Himself, make a second self

To be His mate; as well have made Himself:

He would not make what he mislikes or slights,

6o An eyesore to Him, or not worth His pains:

But did, in envy, listlessness, or sport, Make what Himself would fain,0 in a manner, be� gladly

Weaker in most points, stronger in a few,

Worthy, and yet mere playthings all the while,

65 Things He admires and mocks too�that is it.

Because, so brave, so better though they be,

It nothing skills if He begin to plague.4

Look now, I melt a gourd-fruit into mash,

Add honeycomb and pods, I have perceived, 70 Which bite like finches when they bill and kiss� Then, when froth rises bladdery," drink up all,

bubbly

Quick, quick, till maggots scamper through my brain;

Last, throw me on my back i' the seeded thyme,

And wanton, wishing I were born a bird.

75 Put case, unable to be what I wish, I yet could make a live bird out of clay:

Would not I take clay, pinch my Caliban

Able to fly?�for, there, see, he hath wings,

And great comb like the hoopoe's5 to admire,

so And there, a sting to do his foes offense,

There, and I will that he begin to live,

Fly to yon rock-top, nip me off the horns

Of griggs" high up that make the merry din,

grasshoppers

Saucy through their veined wings, and mind me not.

85 In which feat, if his leg snapped, brittle clay,

And he lay stupid-like�why, I should laugh;

And if he, spying me, should fall to weep,

Beseech me to be good, repair his wrong,

Bid his poor leg smart less or grow again�

90 Well, as the chance were, this might take or else

Not take my fancy: I might hear his cry, And give the mankin" three sound legs for one,

little man

Or pluck the other off, leave him like an egg,

And lessoned" he was mine and merely clay.

thus taught

95 Were this no pleasure, lying in the thyme,

Drinking the mash, with brain become alive,

Making and marring clay at will? So He.

'Thinketh, such shows nor right nor wrong in Him,

Nor kind, nor cruel: He is strong and Lord.

IOO 'Am strong myself compared to yonder crabs

4. I.e., the superior virtues of Setebos's creatures 5. Bird with bright plumage. are no help to them if he decides to torture them.

.

CALIBAN UPON SETEBOS / 129 9

That march now from the mountain to the sea; 'Let twenty pass, and stone the twenty-first, Loving not, hating not, just choosing so. 'Say, the first straggler that boasts purple spots

105 Shall join the file, one pincer twisted off; 'Say, this bruised fellow shall receive a worm, And two worms he whose nippers end in red; As it likes me each time, I do: so He.

Well then, 'supposeth He is good i' the main,

110 Placable if His mind and ways were guessed, But rougher than His handiwork, be sure! Oh, He hath made things worthier than Himself, And envieth that, so helped, such things do more Than He who made them! What consoles but this?

in That they, unless through Him, do naught at all, And must submit: what other use in things? 'Hath cut a pipe of pithless elder-joint That, blown through, gives exact the scream o' the jay When from her wing you twitch the feathers blue:

120 Sound this, and little birds that hate the jay Flock within stone's throw, glad their foe is hurt: Put case such pipe could prattle and boast forsooth, "I catch the birds, I am the crafty thing, I make the cry my maker cannot make 125 With his great round mouth; he must blow through mine!" Would not I smash it with my foot? So He.

But wherefore rough, why cold and ill at ease? Aha, that is a question! Ask, for that, What knows�the something over Setebos 130 That made Him, or He, may be, found and fought, Worsted, drove off and did to nothing,0 perchance, completely overcame There may be something quiet o'er His head, Out of His reach, that feels nor0 joy nor grief, neither Since both derive from weakness in some way. 135 I joy because the quails come; would not joy Could I bring quails here when I have a mind: This Quiet, all it hath a mind to, doth. 'Esteemeth0 stars the outposts of its couch, he believes But never spends much thought nor care that way. no It may look up, work up�the worse for those It works on! 'Careth but for Setebos6 The many-handed as a cuttlefish, Who, making Himself feared through what He does. Looks up, first, and perceives he cannot soar 145 To what is quiet and hath happy life; Next looks down here, and out of very spite Makes this a bauble-world to ape yon real, These good things to match those as hips7 do grapes. 'Tis solace making baubles, aye, and sport.

6. Caliban's concern is to appease only Setebos, 7. Hard fruits produced by wild roses, not the other deity�the Quiet.

.

1300 / ROBERT BROWNING

150 Himself peeped late, eyed Prosper at his books Careless and lofty, lord now of the isle: Vexed, 'stitched a book of broad leaves, arrow-shaped, Wrote thereon, he knows what, prodigious words; Has peeled a wand and called it by a name;

155 Weareth at whiles for an enchanter's robe The eyed skin of a supple oncelot;8 And hath an ounce9 sleeker than youngling mole, A four-legged serpent he makes cower and couch, Now snarl, now hold its breath and mind his eye,

160 And saith she is Miranda and my wife: 'Keeps for his Ariel' a tall pouch-bill crane He bids go wade for fish and straight" disgorge; immediately Also a sea beast, lumpish, which he snared, Blinded the eyes of, and brought somewhat tame,

165 And split its toe-webs, and now pens the drudge In a hole o' the rock and calls him Caliban; A bitter heart that bides its time and bites. 'Plays thus at being Prosper in a way, Taketh his mirth with make-believes: so He.

170 His dam held that the Quiet made all things Which Setebos vexed only: 'holds not so. Who made them weak, meant weakness He might vex. Had He meant other, while His hand was in, Why not make horny eyes no thorn could prick,

175 Or plate my scalp with bone against the snow,

Or overscale my flesh 'neath joint and joint, Like an ore's0 armor? Aye�so spoil His sport! sea monster's He is the One now: only He doth all.

'Saith, He may like, perchance, what profits Him.

i8o Aye, himself loves what does him good; but why? 'Gets good no otherwise. This blinded beast Loves whoso places flesh-meat on his nose, But, had he eyes, would want no help, but hate Or love, just as it liked him: He hath eyes.

185 Also it pleaseth Setebos to work, Use all His hands, and exercise much craft, By no means for the love of what is worked. Tasteth, himself, no finer good i' the world When all goes right, in this safe summertime,

190 And he wants little, hungers, aches not much, Than trying what to do with wit and strength. 'Falls to make something: 'piled yon pile of turfs, And squared and stuck there squares of soft white chalk, And, with a fish-tooth, scratched a moon on each,

195 And set up endwise certain spikes of tree, And crowned the whole with a sloth's skull a-top, Found dead i' the woods, too hard for one to kill.

8. Browning may have invented this term from the 9. A lynx or other wild feline of moderate size or Spanish oncela or from the French ocelot (i.e., a a snow leopard. leopard or spotted wildcat). 1. In The Tempest a spirit who serves Prospero.

.

CALIBAN UPON SETEBOS / 1301

No use at all i' the work, for work's sole sake; 'Shall some day knock it down again: so He.

200 'Saith He is terrible: watch His feats in proof! One hurricane will spoil six good months' hope. He hath a spite against me, that I know, Just as He favors Prosper, who knows why? So it is, all the same, as well I find.

205 'Wove wattles half the winter, fenced them firm With stone and stake to stop she-tortoises Crawling to lay their eggs here: well, one wave, Feeling the foot of Him upon its neck, Gaped as a snake does, lolled out its large tongue,

210 And licked the whole labor flat; so much for spite. 'Saw a ball0 flame down late (yonder it lies) meteorite Where, half an hour before, I slept i' the shade: Often they scatter sparkles: there is force! 'Dug up a newt He may have envied once

215 And turned to stone, shut up inside a stone. Please Him and hinder this?�What Prosper does?2 Aha, if He would tell me how! Not He! There is the sport: discover how or die! All need not die, for of the things o' the isle

220 Some flee afar, some dive, some run up trees; Those at His mercy�why, they please Him most When . . . when . . . well, never try the same way twice! Repeat what act has pleased, He may grow wroth. You must not know His ways, and play Him off,

225 Sure of the issue.0 'Doth the like himself: outcome 'Spareth a squirrel that it nothing fears But steals3 the nut from underneath my thumb, And when I threat, bites stoutly in defense: 'Spareth an urchin0 that contrariwise hedgehog

230 Curls up into a ball, pretending death For fright at my approach: the two ways please. But what would move my choler more than this, That either creature counted on its life Tomorrow and next day and all days to come,

235 Saying, forsooth, in the inmost of its heart, "Because he did so yesterday with me, And otherwise with such another brute, So must he do henceforth and always."�Aye? Would teach the reasoning couple what "must" means!

240 'Doth as he likes, or wherefore Lord? So He.

'Conceiveth all things will continue thus, And we shall have to live in fear of Him So long as He lives, keeps His strength: no change, If He have done His best, make no new world

245 To please Him more, so leave off watching this�

2. I.e., shall I please Setebos, as Prospero does, was punished? and thus prevent my being punished as the newt 3. I.e., that is fearless enough to steal.

.

130 2 / ROBERT BROWNING

If He surprise not even the Quiet's self Some strange day�or, suppose, grow into it As grubs grow butterflies: else, here are we, And there is He, and nowhere help at all.

250 'Believeth with the life, the pain shall stop. His dam held different, that after death He both plagued enemies and feasted friends: Idly!4 He doth His worst in this our life, Giving just respite lest we die through pain,

255 Saving last pain for worst�with which, an end. Meanwhile, the best way to escape His ire Is, not to seem too happy. 'Sees, himself, Yonder two flies, with purple films and pink, Bask on the pompion-bell above: kills both.

260 'Sees two black painful beetles roll their ball On head and tail as if to save their lives: Moves them the stick away they strive to clear.

Even so, 'would have Him misconceive, suppose This Caliban strives hard and ails no less,

265 And always, above all else, envies Him; Wherefore he mainly dances on dark nights, Moans in the sun, gets under holes to laugh, And never speaks his mind save housed as now: Outside, 'groans, curses. If He caught me here,

270 O'erheard this speech, and asked "What chucklest at?" 'Would, to appease Him, cut a finger off, Or of my three kid yearlings burn the best, Or let the toothsome apples rot on tree, Or push my tame beast for the ore to taste:

275 While myself lit a fire, and made a song And sung it, "What I hate, he consecrate To celebrate Thee and Thy state, no mate For Thee; what see for envy in poor me?"

Hoping the while, since evils sometimes mend,

280 Warts rub away and sores are cured with slime, That some strange day, will either the Quiet catch And conquer Setebos, or likelier He Decrepit may doze, doze, as good as die.

[What, what? A curtain o'er the world at once!

285 Crickets stop hissing; not a bird�or, yes, There scuds His raven5 that has told Him all! It was fool's play this prattling! Ha! The wind Shoulders the pillared dust, death's house o' the move,6 And fast invading fires begin! White blaze�

290 A tree's head snaps�and there, there, there, there, there, His thunder follows! Fool to gibe at Him! Lo! 'Lieth flat and loveth Setebos!

4. I.e., Caliban thinks his mother's opinion was news to Odin, the most powerful god. wrong or idle. Setebos's sport with his creatures is 6. The whirlwind stirs up a column of dust that confined to this world: there is no afterlife. Caliban associates with a house of death. 5. In Norse mythology ravens brought the daily

.

ABT VOGLER / 1303

'Maketh his teeth meet through his upper lip,

Will let those quails fly, will not eat this month One little mess of whelks,0 so he may scape!] shellfish

1860 1864

Abt Vogler1

(After He has Been Extemporizing Upon the Musical Instrument of His Invention2)

i

Would that the structure brave, the manifold music I build,

Bidding my organ obey, calling its keys to their work,

Claiming each slave of the sound, at a touch, as when Solomon willed

Armies of angels that soar, legions of demons that lurk,

Man, brute, reptile, fly�alien of end and of aim,

Adverse, each from the other heaven-high, hell-deep removed�

Should rush into sight at once as he named the ineffable Name,3

And pile him a palace straight,4 to pleasure the princess5 he loved!

2

Would it might tarry like his, the beautiful building of mine,

This which my keys in a crowd pressed and importuned to raise!

Ah, one and all, how they helped, would dispart0 now and now divide

combine,

Zealous to hasten the work, heighten their master his praise!

And one would bury his brow with a blind plunge down to hell,

Burrow awhile and build, broad on the roots of things,

Then up again swim into sight, having based me my palace well,

Founded it, fearless of flame, flat on the nether springs.

3

And another would mount and march, like the excellent minion he was,

Aye, another and yet another, one crowd but with many a crest,

Raising my rampired6 walls of gold as transparent as glass,

Eager to do and die, yield each his place to the rest:

For higher still and higher (as a runner tips with fire,

When a great illumination surprises a festal night�

Outlining round and round Rome's dome from space to spire)7

Up, the pinnacled glory reached, and the pride of my soul was in sight.

1. Georg Joseph Vogler (1749-1814), a German different from the brisk staccato rhythms of "A priest and musician, held the honorary title of Toccata of Galuppi's." Abbe or Abt (abbot). As a composer, teacher, and 2. A compact organ called the orchestrion. designer of musical instruments he was well 3. According to Jewish legend, King Solomon known in his own day, but he was most famous as (because he possessed a seal inscribed with the an extemporizer at the organ. Browning's soliloquy "ineffable Name" of God) had the power of comrepresents Vogler at the organ joyfully improvising pelling the demons of earth and air to perform his a piece of music and then reflecting on the ephem-bidding. eral existence of such a unique work of art and of 4. Immediately. its possible relation to God's purposes in heaven 5. Pharaoh's daughter (1 Kings 7.8). and on earth. 6. Firmly established. A characteristic feature of "Abt Vogler" is the use 7. On festival nights the dome of Saint Peter's in of exceptionally long sentences, densely packed Rome is illuminated by a series of lights ignited by with details, which may evoke the effects of rolling a torchbearer. organ music. The resulting movement is markedly

.

1304 / ROBERT BROWNING

4

In sight? Not half! for it seemed, it was certain, to match man's birth,

Nature in turn conceived, obeying an impulse as I;

And the emulous heaven yearned down, made effort to reach the earth,

As the earth had done her best, in my passion, to scale the sky:

Novel splendors burst forth, grew familiar and dwelt with mine,

Not a point nor peak but found and fixed its wandering star;

Meteor-moons, balls of blaze: and they did not pale nor pine,

For earth had attained to heaven, there was no more near nor far.

5

Nay more; for there wanted not who walked in the glare and glow,

Presences plain in the place; or, fresh from the Protoplast,8

Furnished for ages to come, when a kindlier wind should blow,

Lured now to begin and live, in a house to their liking at last;

Or else the wonderful Dead who have passed through the body and gone,

But were back once more to breathe in an old world worth their new:

What never had been, was now; what was, as it shall be anon;

And what is�shall I say, matched both? for I was made perfect too.

6

All through my keys that gave their sounds to a wish of my soul,

All through my soul that praised as its wish flowed visibly forth,

All through music and me! For think, had I painted the whole,

Why, there it had stood, to see, nor the process so wonderworth:

Had I written the same, made verse�still, effect proceeds from cause,

Ye know why the forms are fair, ye hear how the tale is told;

It is all triumphant art, but art in obedience to laws,

Painter and poet are proud in the artist-list enrolled�

7

But here is the finger of God, a flash of the will that can,

Existent behind all laws, that made them and, lo, they are!

And I know not if, save in this, such gift be allowed to man,

That out of three sounds he frame, not a fourth sound, but a star.9

Consider it well: each tone of our scale in itself is naught;

It is everywhere in the world�loud, soft, and all is said:

Give it to me to use! I mix it with two in my thought:

And, there! Ye have heard and seen: consider and bow the head!

8

Well, it is gone at last, the palace of music I reared;

Gone! and the good tears start, the praises that come too slow;

For one is assured at first, one scarce can say that he feared,

That he even gave it a thought, the gone thing was to go.

Never to be again! But many more of the kind

As good, nay, better perchance: is this your comfort to me?

To me, who must be saved because I cling with my mind

To the same, same self, same love, same God: aye, what was, shall be.

8. The original or archetypal form of a species. 9. I.e., the musician's combining of three notes "Presences": beings of the future, not yet existing, into a new harmonic unit is a creative act as miracwho are "lured" into life by the music (line 36). ulous as the creation of a star.

.

RABBI BEN EZRA / 1305

9

Therefore to whom turn I but to thee, the ineffable Name?

Builder and maker, thou, of houses not made with hands!1

What, have fear of change from thee who art ever the same?

Doubt that thy power can fill the heart that thy power expands?

There shall never be one lost good! What was, shall live as before;

The evil is null, is naught, is silence implying sound;

What was good shall be good, with, for evil, so much good more;

On the earth the broken arcs; in the heaven, a perfect round.

10

All we have willed or hoped or dreamed of good shall exist;

Not its semblance, but itself; no beauty, nor good, nor power

Whose voice has gone forth, but each survives for the melodist

When eternity affirms the conception of an hour.

The high that proved too high, the heroic for earth too hard,

The passion that left the ground to lose itself in the sky,

Are music sent up to God by the lover and the bard;

Enough that he heard it once: we shall hear it by-and-by.

it

And what is our failure here but a triumph's evidence

For the fullness of the days? Have we withered or agonized?

Why else was the pause prolonged but that singing might issue thence?

Why rushed the discords in but that harmony should be prized?

Sorrow is hard to bear, and doubt is slow to clear,

Each sufferer says his say, his scheme of the weal and woe:

But God has a few of us whom he whispers in the ear;

The rest may reason and welcome: 'tis we musicians know.

12

Well, it is earth with me; silence resumes her reign:

I will be patient and proud, and soberly acquiesce.

Give me the keys. I feel for the common chord again,

Sliding by semitones, till I sink to the minor�yes,

And I blunt it into a ninth,2 and I stand on alien ground,

Surveying awhile the heights I rolled from into the deep;

Which, hark, I have dared and done, for my resting place is found,

The C Major3 of this life: so, now I will try to sleep.

1864

Rabbi Ben Ezra1

Grow old along with me!

The best is yet to be,

1. Cf. 2 Corinthians 5.1, where Saint Paul speaks 1167), was an eminent biblical scholar of Spain, of "a building of God, a house not made with but Browning makes little attempt to present him hands, eternal in the heavens." as a distinct individual or to relate him to the age 2. A discord that requires resolution. in which he lived. Unlike the more characteristic 3. A key without sharps or flats, representing the monologues, "Rabbi Ben Ezra" presents a meditaplane of ordinary life. tion on a theme, not an individual in the grip of a 1. The speaker, Abraham Ibn Ezra (ca. 1092� dramatic situation.

.

130 6 / ROBERT BROWNING

The last of life, for which the first was made: Our times are in His hand 5 Who saith, "A whole I planned, Youth shows but half; trust God: see all nor be afraid!"

2

Not that, amassing flowers, Youth sighed, "Which rose make ours, Which lily leave and then as best recall?" io Not that, admiring stars, It yearned, "Nor Jove, nor Mars; Mine be some figured flame which blends, transcends them all!"

3 Not for such hopes and fears Annulling youth's brief years, 15 Do I remonstrate: folly wide the mark!

Rather I prize the doubt

Low kinds exist without, Finished and finite clods, untroubled by a spark.

4 Poor vaunt of life indeed, 20 Were man but formed to feed On joy, to solely seek and find and feast: Such feasting ended, then

As sure an end to men; Irks care the crop-full bird? Frets doubt the maw-crammed beast?2

5

25 Rejoice we are allied To That which doth provide And not partake, effect and not receive! A spark disturbs our clod; Nearer we hold of God 30 Who gives, than of His tribes that take, I must believe. 6 35Then, welcome each rebuff That turns earth's smoothness rough, Each sting that bids nor sit nor stand but go! Be our joys three parts pain! Strive, and hold cheap the strain; Learn, nor account the pang; dare, never grudge the throe!0 anguish 7 For thence�a paradox Which comforts while it mocks - Shall life succeed in that it seems to fail: 40 What I aspired to be, And was not, comforts me: A brute I might have been, but would not sink i' the scale.

2. I.e., does care disturb a bird whose gullet ("crop") is full of food? Does doubt trouble an animal whose stomach ("maw") is full?

.

RABBI BEN EZRA / 1 309

What is he but a brute

Whose flesh has soul to suit,

45 Whose spirit works lest arms and legs want play?

To man, propose this test�

Thy body at its best,

How far can that project thy soul on its lone way?

9

Yet gifts should prove their use:

50 I own the Past profuse

Of power each side, perfection every turn:

Eyes, ears took in their dole,

Brain treasured up the whole;

Should not the heart beat once, "How good to live and learn"?

10

55 Not once beat, "Praise be Thine!

I see the whole design,

I, who saw power, see now love perfect too:

Perfect I call Thy plan:

Thanks that 1 was a man!

60 Maker, remake, complete�I trust what Thou shalt do!" For pleasant is this flesh;

Our soul, in its rose-mesh'

Pulled ever to the earth, still yearns for rest;

Would we some prize might hold

65 To match those manifold Possessions of the brute�gain most, as we did best!

Let us not always say,

"Spite of this flesh today

I strove, made head, gained ground upon the whole!"

70 As the bird wings and sings,

Let us cry, "All good things

Are ours, nor soul helps flesh more, now, than flesh helps soul!"

'3

Therefore I summon age

To grant youth's heritage,

75 Life's struggle having so far reached its term:

Thence shall I pass, approved

A man, for aye removed

From the developed brute; a god though in the germ.

14

And I shall thereupon

Take rest, ere I be gone

Once more on my adventure brave and new;4

3. The hody, which holds the soul in its net. 4. In the next lile.

.

1308 / ROBERT BROWNING

Fearless and unperplexed, When I wage battle next, What weapons to select, what armor to indue.0 put on

15 85 Youth ended, I shall try My gain or loss thereby;

Leave the fire ashes,5 what survives is gold:

And I shall weigh the same,

Give life its praise or blame: 90 Young, all lay in dispute; I shall know, being old.

16

For note, when evening shuts, A certain moment cuts The deed off, calls the glory from the gray: A whisper from the west 95 Shoots�"Add this to the rest, Take it and try its worth: here dies another day."

17

So, still within this life, Though lifted o'er its strife, Let me discern, compare, pronounce at last, 100 "This rage was right i' the main, That acquiescence vain: The Future I may face now I have proved the Past."

18

For more is not reserved

To man, with soul just nerved 105 To act tomorrow what he learns today:

Here, work enough to watch

The Master work, and catch

Hints of the proper craft, tricks of the tool's true play.

19 As it was better, youth 110 Should strive, through acts uncouth,

Toward making, than repose on aught found made:

So, better, age, exempt

From strife, should know, than tempt0 attempt

Further. Thou waitedst age: wait death nor� be afraid! and do not

20

115 Enough now, if the Right

And Good and Infinite

Be named here, as thou callest thy hand thine own,

With knowledge absolute,

Subject to no dispute 120 From fools that crowded youth, nor let thee feel alone.

5. If the fire leaves ashes.

.

RABB I BE N EZRA / 1 30 9 Re there, for once and all, Severed great minds from small, Announced to each his station in the Past! 125Was I, the world arraigned,6 Were they, my soul disdained, Right? Let age speak the truth and give us peace at last!7 22 isoNow, who shall arbitrate? Ten men love what I hate, Shun what I follow, slight what I receive; Ten, who in ears and eyes Match me: we all surmise, They this thing, and I that: whom shall my soul believe? 1352 3 Not on the vulgar0 massCalled "work," must sentence pass, Things done, that took the eye and had the price; O'er which, from level stand, The low world laid its hand, Found straightway to its mind, could value in a trice: common i4oM Rut all, the world's coarse thumb And finger failed to plumb,8 So passed in making up the main account; All instincts immature, All purposes unsure, That weighed not as his work, yet swelled the man's amount: Thoughts hardly to be packed Into a narrow act, Fancies that broke through language and escaped; All I could never be, All, men ignored in me, This, I was worth to God, whose wheel the pitcher shaped.9 26 155Aye, note that Potter's wheel, That metaphor! and feel Why time spins fast, why passive lies our clay� Thou, to whom fools propound,1 When the wine makes its round, "Since life fleets, all is change; the Past gone, seize today!"

6. I.e., was I, whom the world arraigned. 7. Stanzas 20 and 21 affirm that in age we can more readily think independently than in youth. Maturity enables us to ignore the pressure of having to conform to the thinking of the crowd of small-minded people. 8. Allusion to a merchant or buyer feeling fabric to determine its price or value. 9. The speaker's highest qualities of soul were shaped on a potting wheel into an enduring "pitcher" or vessel by God. Cf. Isaiah 64.8. 1. Perhaps addressed to Omar Khayyam, whose poem. The Rubaiydt, urged men to eat, drink, and be merry. See FitzGerald's 1859 translation (p. 1213).

.

131 0 / ROBERT BROWNING

27

Fool! All that is, at all, Lasts ever, past recall; Earth changes, but thy soul and God stand sure: 160 What entered into thee, That was, is, and shall be: Time's wheel runs back or stops: Potter and clay endure.

28

He fixed thee 'mid this dance Of plastic0 circumstance, molded

165 This Present, thou, forsooth, wouldst fain arrest:2 Machinery just meant To give thy soul its bent,

Try thee and turn thee forth, sufficiently impressed.

29

What though the earlier grooves 170 Which ran the laughing loves

Around thy base,3 no longer pause and press? What though, about thy rim, Skull-things in order grim

Grow out, in graver mood, obey the sterner stress?

3� 175 Look not thou down but up! To uses of a cup, The festal board, lamp's flash, and trumpet's peal, The new wine's foaming flow, The Master's lips a-glow! 180 Thou, heaven's consummate cup, what need'st thou with earth's wheel?

31 But I need, now as then, Thee, God, who moldest men;

And since, not even while the whirl was worst, Did I�to the wheel of life 185 With shapes and colors rife, Bound dizzily�mistake my end, to slake Thy thirst:

32 So, take and use Thy work: Amend what flaws may lurk,

What strain o' the stuff, what warpings past the aim! 190 My times be in Thy hand! Perfect the cup as planned! Let age approve of youth, and death complete the same!

ca.1862 1864

2. I.e., you would be glad to stop ("arrest") time at to figures of cherublike boys, often featured in this present point of your life. Renaissance art. 3. Of the clay pitcher. "Laughing loves" may refer

.

1311

EMILY BRONTE 1818-1848

Emily Bronte spent most of her life in a stone parsonage in the small village of Haworth on the wild and bleak Yorkshire moors. She was the fifth of Patrick and Maria Bronte's six children. Her father was a clergyman; her mother died when she was two. At the age of six, she was sent away to a school for the daughters of poor clergy with her three elder sisters; within a year, the two oldest girls had died, in part the result of the school's harsh and unhealthy conditions, which Charlotte Bronte was later to portray in Jane Eyre (1847). Mr. Bronte brought his two remaining daughters home, where, together with their brother and younger sister, he educated them himself. Emily was the most reclusive and private of the children; she shunned the company of those outside her family and suffered acutely from homesickness in her few short stays away from the parsonage.

Despite the isolation of Haworth, the Bronte family shared a rich literary life. Mr. Bronte discussed poetry, history, and politics with his children, and the children themselves created an extraordinary fantasy world together. When Mr. Bronte gave his son a box of wooden soldiers, each child excitedly seized one and named it. The soldiers became for them the centers of an increasingly elaborate set of stories that they first acted out in plays and later recorded in a series of book-length manuscripts, composed for the most part by Charlotte and her brother, Branwell. The two younger children, Emily and Anne, later started a separate series, a chronicle about an imaginary island called Gondal.

In 1850 Charlotte Bronte told the story of how she and her sisters came to write for publication. One day when she accidentally came upon a manuscript volume of verse in Emily's handwriting, she was struck by the conviction "that these were not common effusions, nor at all like the poetry women generally write." With some difficulty, Charlotte persuaded her intensely private sister to publish some of her poems in a selection of poetry by all three Bronte sisters. Averse to personal publicity and afraid that "authoresses are liable to be looked on with prejudice," Charlotte, Emily, and Anne adopted the pseudonyms of Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell. Although the 1846 book sold only two copies, its publication inspired each of the Bronte sisters to begin work on a novel; Emily's was Wuthering Heights (1847). She began work on a second novel, but a year after the publication of Wuthering Heights, she died of tuberculosis.

Many of Emily's poems�"Remembrance" and "The Prisoner," for example�were written for the Gondal saga and express its preoccupation with political intrigue, passionate love, rebellion, war, imprisonment, and exile. Bronte also wrote personal lyrics unconnected with the Gondal stories; but both groups of poems share a drive to break through the constrictions of ordinary life, whether by the transfigurative power of the imagination, by union with another, or by death itself. Like Catherine and Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights, the speakers of Bronte's poems yearn for a fuller, freer world of spirit, transcending the forms and limits of mortal life. Her concern with a visionary world links her to the Romantic poets, particularly to Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley; but her hymnlike stanzas have a haunting quality that distinguishes her individual voice.

I'm happiest when most away

I'm happiest when most away I can bear my soul from its home of clay On a windy night when the moon is bright And the eye can wander through worlds of light�

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131 2 / EMIL Y BRONT E 5 When I am not and none beside� Nor earth nor sea nor cloudless sky� But only spirit wandering wide Through infinite immensity. 1838 1910 The Night-Wind In summer's mellow midnight, A cloudless moon shone through Our open parlour window And rosetrees wet with dew. ? I sat in silent musing, The soft wind waved my hair: It told me Heaven was glorious. And sleeping Earth was fair. ioI needed not its breathing To bring such thoughts to me, But still it whispered lowly, "How dark the woods will be! 15"The thick leaves in my murmur Are rustling like a dream, And all their myriad voices Instinct0 with spirit seem." imbued 20I said, "Go, gentle singer, Thy wooing voice is kind, But do not think its music Has power to reach my mind. "Play with the scented flower, The young tree's supple bough, And leave my human feelings In their own course to flow." 25 The wanderer would not leave me; Its kiss grew warmer still� "O come," it sighed so sweetly, "I'll win thee 'gainst thy will. 30"Have we not been from childhood friends? Have I not loved thee long? As long as thou hast loved the night Whose silence wakes my song. "And when thy heart is laid at rest Beneath the church-yard stone

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REMEMBRANCE / 131 3

35 I shall have time enough to mourn And thou to be alone."

1840 1850

Remembrance1

Cold in the earth, and the deep snow piled above thee! Far, far removed, cold in the dreary grave! Have I forgot, my Only Love, to love thee, Severed at last by Time's all-wearing wave?

5 Now, when alone, do my thoughts no longer hover Over the mountains, on that northern shore; Resting their wings where heath and fern-leaves cover Thy noble heart for ever, ever more?

Cold in the earth, and fifteen wild Decembers

io From those brown hills have melted into spring� Faithful indeed is the spirit that remembers After such years of change and suffering!

Sweet Love of youth, forgive if I forget thee While the World's tide is bearing me along: 15 Other desires and other hopes beset me, Hopes which obscure but cannot do thee wrong.

No later light has lightened up my heaven, No second morn has ever shone for me: All my life's bliss from thy dear life was given�

20 All my life's bliss is in the grave with thee.

But when the days of golden dreams had perished And even Despair was powerless to destroy, Then did I learn how existence could be cherished, Strengthened and fed without the aid of joy;

25 Then did I check the tears of useless passion, Weaned my young soul from yearning after thine; Sternly denied its burning wish to hasten Down to that tomb already more than mine!

And even yet, I dare not let it languish,

30 Dare not indulge in Memory's rapturous pain; Once drinking deep of that divinest anguish, How could I seek the empty world again?

1845 1846

1. Titled in manuscript "R. Alcona to J. Breznaida," this poem was originally composed as a lament by the heroine of the Gondal saga for the hero's death.

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131 4 / EMILY BRONTE

Stars

Ah! why, because the dazzling sun Restored our earth to joy Have you departed, every one, And left a desert sky?

5 All through the night, your glorious eyes Were gazing down in mine, And with a full heart's thankful sighs I blessed that watch divine!

I was at peace, and drank your beams

10 As they were life to me And revelled in my changeful dreams Like petrel0 on the sea. small dark seabirds

Thought followed thought�star followed star Through boundless regions on, 15 While one sweet influence, near and far, Thrilled through and proved us one.

Why did the morning dawn to break So great, so pure a spell, And scorch with fire the tranquil cheek

20 Where your cool radiance fell?

Rlood-red he rose, and arrow-straight His fierce beams struck my brow: The soul of Nature sprang elate, But mine sank sad and low!

25 My lids closed down�yet through their veil I saw him blazing still; And steep in gold the misty dale And flash upon the hill.

I turned me to the pillow then

30 To call back Night, and see Your worlds of solemn light, again Throb with my heart and me!

It would not do�the pillow glowed And glowed both roof and floor, 35 And birds sang loudly in the wood, And fresh winds shook the door.

The curtains waved, the wakened flies Were murmuring round my room, Imprisoned there, till I should rise

40 And give them leave to roam.

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THE PRISONER. A FRAGMENT / 131 5

O Stars and Dreams and Gentle Night; O Night and Stars return! And hide me from the hostile light That does not warm, but burn�

45 That drains the blood of suffering men; Drinks tears, instead of dew: Let me sleep through his blinding reign, And only wake with you!

1845 1846

The Prisoner. A Fragment1

In the dungeon crypts idly did I stray, Reckless of the lives wasting there away; "Draw the ponderous bars; open, Warder stern!" He dare not say me nay�the hinges harshly turn.

5 "Our guests are darkly lodged," I whispered, gazing through The vault whose grated eye showed heaven more grey than blue. (This was when glad spring laughed in awaking pride.) "Aye, darkly lodged enough!" returned my sullen guide.

Then, God forgive my youth, forgive my careless tongue!

io I scoffed, as the chill chains on the damp flagstones rung; "Confined in triple walls, art thou so much to fear, That we must bind thee down and clench thy fetters here?"

The captive raised her face; it was as soft and mild As sculptured marble saint or slumbering, unweaned child; 15 It was so soft and mild, it was so sweet and fair, Pain could not trace a line nor grief a shadow there!

The captive raised her hand and pressed it to her brow: "I have been struck," she said, "and I am suffering now; Yet these are little worth, your bolts and irons strong;

20 And were they forged in steel they could not hold me long."

Hoarse laughed the jailor grim: "Shall I be won to hear; Dost think, fond� dreaming wretch, that I shall grant thy prayer? foolish Or, better still, wilt melt my master's heart with groans? Ah, sooner might the sun thaw down these granite stones!

25 "My master's voice is low, his aspect bland and kind, But hard as hardest flint the soul that lurks behind;

1. An excerpt from a poem in the Gondal manu- printed as "The Prisoner: A Fragment" in Poems script, "Julian M. and A. G. Rochelle," describing (I 846) by the Bronte sisters. The speaker, a man, an event unplaced in the story, this poem was is visiting a dungeon in his father's castle.

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131 6 / EMILY BRONTE

And I am rough and rude, yet not more rough to see Than is the hidden ghost which has its home in me!"

About her lips there played a smile of almost scorn:

30 "My friend," she gently said, "you have not heard me mourn; When you my kindred's lives�my lost life, can restore Then may I weep and sue�but never, Friend, before!

"Still, let my tyrants know, I am not doomed to wear Year after year in gloom and desolate despair; 35 A messenger of Hope comes every night to me, And offers, for short life, eternal liberty.

"He comes with western winds, with evening's wandering airs, With that clear dusk of heaven that brings the thickest stars; Winds take a pensive tone, and stars a tender fire,

40 And visions rise and change that kill me with desire�

"Desire for nothing known in my maturer years When joy grew mad with awe at counting future tears; When, if my spirit's sky was full of flashes warm, I knew not whence they came, from sun or thunderstorm;

45 "But first a hush of peace, a soundless calm descends; The struggle of distress and fierce impatience ends; Mute music soothes my breast�unuttered harmony That I could never dream till earth was lost to me.

"Then dawns the Invisible, the Unseen its truth reveals;

50 My outward sense is gone, my inward essence feels� Its wings are almost free, its home, its harbour found; Measuring the gulf it stoops and dares the final bound!

"Oh, dreadful is the check�intense the agony When the ear begins to hear and the eye begins to see; 55 When the pulse begins to throb, the brain to think again, The soul to feel the flesh and the flesh to feel the chain!

"Yet I would lose no sting, would wish no torture less; The more that anguish racks the earlier it will bless; And robed in fires of Hell, or bright with heavenly shine,

60 If it but herald Death, the vision is divine."2

She ceased to speak, and we, unanswering turned to go� We had no further power to work the captive woe; Her cheek, her gleaming eye, declared that man had given A sentence unapproved, and overruled by Heaven.

1845 1846

2. Cf. the words of the dying Catherine in Wuth- escape into that glorious world, and to be always ering Heights (1847), chap. 15: "The thing that irks there....! shall be incomparably beyond and me most is this shattered prison [my body]. . . . I'm above you all." tired, tired of being enclosed here. I'm wearying to

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JOHN RUSKIN / 1317

No coward soul is mine1

No coward soul is mine No trembler in the world's storm-troubled sphere I see Heaven's glories shine And Faith shines equal arming me from Fear

5 O God within my breast Almighty ever-present Deity Life, that in me hast rest As I Undying Life, have power in Thee

Vain are the thousand creeds

10 That move men's hearts, unutterably vain, Worthless as withered weeds Or idlest froth amid the boundless main

To waken doubt in one Holding so fast by thy infinity is So surely anchored on The steadfast rock of Immortality

With wide-embracing love Thy spirit animates eternal years Pervades and broods above,

20 Changes, sustains, dissolves, creates and rears

Though Earth and moon were gone And suns and universes ceased to be And thou wert left alone Every Existence would exist in thee

25 There is not room for Death Nor atom that his might could render void Since thou art Being and Breath And what thou art may never be destroyed.

1846 1850

1. According to Charlotte Bronte, these are the last lines her sister wrote. JOHN RUSKIN 1819-1900

John Ruskin was both the leading Victorian critic of art and an important critic of society. These two roles can be traced back to two important influences of his childhood. His father, a wealthy wine merchant, enjoyed travel, and on tours of the Continent he introduced his son to landscapes, architecture, and art. From this exposure Ruskin acquired a zest for beauty that animates even the most theoretical of his

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131 8 / JOHN RUSKIN

discussions of aesthetics. In his tranquil autobiography (titled Praeterita, 1885�89, or, as he said, "Past things"), composed in the penultimate decade of a turbulent life, Ruskin reflected on the profound experience of his first view of the Swiss Alps at sunset. For his fourteen-year-old self, he writes, "the seen walls of lost Eden could not have been more beautiful":

It is not possible to imagine, in any time of the world, a more blessed entrance into life, for a child of such a temperament as mine. True, the temperament belonged to the age: a very few years,�within the hundred,�before that, no child could have been born to care for mountains, or for the men that lived among them, in that way. Till Rousseau's time, there had been no "sentimental" love of nature; and till Scott's, no such apprehensive love of "all sorts and conditions of men," not in the soul merely, but in the flesh .. . I went down that evening from the garden-terrace of Schaffhausen with my destiny fixed in all of it that was to be sacred and useful.

Such a rapturous response to the beauties of nature was later to be duplicated by his response to the beauties of architecture and art. During a tour of "this Holy Land of Italy" (as he called it), he visited Venice and recorded in his diary (May 6, 1841) his response to Saint Mark's cathedral square in that city: "Thank God I am here! It is the Paradise of cities and there is moon enough to make herself the sanities of earth lunatic, striking its pure flashes of light against the grey water before the window; and I am happier than I have been these five years. .. . I feel fresh and young when my foot is on these pavements."

Ruskin's choice of phrase in these accounts of how beauty affected him reflects the second influence in his life, often at odds with the first: his daily Bible readings under the direction of his mother, a devout Evangelical Christian. From this biblical indoctrination Ruskin derived some elements of his lush and highly rhythmical prose style but more especially his sense of prophecy and mission as a critic of modern society.

Ruskin's life was spent in traveling, lecturing, and writing. His prodigious literary output can be roughly divided into three phases. At first he was preoccupied with problems of art. Modern Painters (1843�60), which he began writing at the age of twenty-three after his graduation from Oxford, was a defense of the English landscape painter J. M. W. Turner (1775�1851). This defense (which was to extend to five volumes) involved Ruskin in problems of truth in art (as in his chapter "Pathetic Fallacy") and in the ultimate importance of imagination (as in his discussion of Turner's painting The Slave Ship).

During the 1850s Ruskin's principal interest shifted from art to architecture, especially to the problem of determining what kind of society is capable of producing great buildings. His enthusiasm for Gothic architecture was infectious, and he has sometimes been blamed for the prevalence of Gothic buildings on college campuses in America. A study of The Stones of Venice (185 1�53), however (especially the chapter printed here), will show that merely to revive the Gothic style was not his concern. What he wanted to revive was the kind of society that had produced such architecture, a society in which the individual workers could express themselves and enjoy what Ruskin's disciple William Morris called "work-pleasure." A mechanized production- line society, such as Ruskin's or our own, could produce not Gothic architecture but only imitations of its mannerisms. Ruskin's concern was to change industrial society, not to decorate concrete towers with gargoyles.

This interest in the stultifying effects of industrialism led Ruskin gradually into economics. After 1860 the critic of art became (like the writer he most greatly admired, Thomas Carlyle) an outspoken critic of laissez-faire, or noninterventionist, economics. His conception of the responsibilities of employers toward their workers, as expounded in Unto This Last (1860), was dismissed by his contemporaries as an absurdity. What he was laboring to show was that self-seeking business relationships

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JOHN RUSKIN / 13 19

could be reconfigured on the principle of dedicated service, taking as a model the learned professions and the military. The soldier, however unrefined, is more highly regarded by society than the capitalist, Ruskin said, "for the soldier's trade .. . is not slaying, but being slain." Although his position was essentially conservative in the proper sense of the word (he styled himself "a violent Tory of the old school;�Walter Scott's school"), he was regarded as a radical eccentric. It was many years before his social criticism gained a following among writers as diverse as William Morris, Bernard Shaw, and D. H. Lawrence; and in particular among the founders of the British Labour Party, his influence was to be profound and lasting.

Buskin's realization, after 1860, that despite his fame he was becoming isolated and that the world was continuing to move in directions opposite from those to which he pointed may have contributed to the recurrent mental breakdowns from which he suffered between 1870 and 1900. As he reports in Fors Clavigera (1880): "The doctors said I went mad, this time two years ago, from overwork," but he had not then been working harder than usual. "I went mad because nothing came of my work . . . because after I got [my manuscripts] published, nobody believed a word of them." Also contributing to his breakdowns may have been his unhappiness in his relations with women. His marriage to Effie Gray in 1848 was a disaster. After six years of living together, an annulment was arranged on the grounds that the marriage had not been consummated. Buskin testified that he had not found his wife's person physically attractive, although by others she was considered a great beauty. One of these admirers was the Pre-Baphaelite painter John Millais, who fell in love with her at a time when he was painting her husband's portrait; shortly after the annulment he married her. (Given the spectacular failure of Buskin's marriage and subsequent romantic relationships, it is ironic that he was to produce a highly influential, and frequently reprinted, description of the ideal characters of man and woman, husband and wife, in an 1864 lecture, "Of Queens' Gardens." See "The 'Woman Question'" below,

p. 1581.) In later years Buskin fell in love with a young Irish girl, Bose La Touche, whom he first met when he was nearly forty and she was a child of nine. They were divided not only by the gap of age but by religious differences. She was an intensely pious believer; and for several years after Ruskin proposed marriage to her, when she was eighteen, she tried unsuccessfully to persuade him to return to the Evangelical faith that he had abandoned. In 1875, after herself suffering attacks of mental illness, La Touche died at the age of twenty-five. In his autobiography Ruskin commented: "I wonder mightily what sort of creature I should have turned out, if instead of the distracting and useless pain, I had had the joy of approved love, and the untellable, incalculable motive of its sympathy and praise. It seems to me such things are not allowed in the world. The men capable of the highest imaginative passion are always tossed on fiery waves by it." Despite both the despair that he suffered following La Touche's death and the recurring attacks of mental illness that blighted the last thirty-five years of his life, Ruskin remained active and productive up until his final silent decade of the 1890s. His publications during his active period included six volumes of his lectures on art that he had delivered as Slade Professor of Fine Arts at Oxford and his letters to laborers, Fors Clavigera (1871�84). One topic that becomes especially prominent in these later writings is pollution of air and water�an ideal subject for Ruskin's eloquence. In discussing it he combines his lifelong love for beautiful landscape and landscape painting with his later acquired conviction that modern industrial leadership was woefully irresponsible. A letter of A. E. Housman, who was an undergraduate at Oxford in 1877, provides a vivid record of how effective Ruskin could be:

This afternoon Ruskin gave us a great outburst against modern times. He had got a picture of Turner's, framed and glassed, representing Leicester and the Abbey in the distance at sunset, over a river. He read the account of Wolsey's death out of Henry VIII. Then he pointed to the picture as representing Leicester

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132 0 / JOHN RUSKIN

when Turner had drawn it. Then he said, "You, if you like, may go to Leicester to see what it is like now. I never shall. But I can make a pretty good guess." Then he caught up a paintbrush. "These stepping-stones of course have been done away with, and are replaced by a be-au-ti-ful iron bridge." Then he dashed in the iron bridge on the glass of the picture. "The color of the stream is supplied on one side by the indigo factory." Forthwith one side of the stream became indigo. "On the other side by the soap factory." Soap dashed in. "They mix in the middle�like curds," he said, working them together with a sort of malicious deliberation. "This field, over which you see the sun setting behind the abbey, is now occupied in a proper manner." Then there went a flame of scarlet across the picture, which developed itself into windows and roofs and red brick, and rushed up into a chimney. "The atmosphere is supplied�thus!" A puff and cloud of smoke all over Turner's sky: and then the brush thrown down, and Ruskin confronting modern civilization amidst a tempest of applause, which he always elicits now, as he has this term become immensely popular, his lectures being crowded, whereas of old he used to prophesy to empty benches.

From Modern Painters

[A DEFINITION OF GREATNESS IN ART]1

Painting, or art generally, as such, with all its technicalities, difficulties, and

particular ends, is nothing but a noble and expressive language, invaluable as

the vehicle of thought, but by itself nothing. He who has learned what is

commonly considered the whole art of painting, that is, the art of representing

any natural object faithfully, has as yet only learned the language by which

his thoughts are to be expressed. He has done just as much towards being that

which we ought to respect as a great painter, as a man who has learnt how to

express himself grammatically and melodiously has towards being a great poet.

The language is, indeed, more difficult of acquirement in the one case than

in the other, and possesses more power of delighting the sense, while it speaks

to the intellect; but it is, nevertheless, nothing more than language, and all

those excellences which are peculiar to the painter as such, are merely what

rhythm, melody, precision, and force are in the words of the orator and the

poet, necessary to their greatness, but not the tests of their greatness. It is not

by the mode of representing and saying, but by what is represented and said,

that the respective greatness either of the painter or the writer is to be finally

determined.

^ * &

'"S o that, if I say that the greatest picture is that which conveys to the

mind of the spectator the greatest number of the greatest ideas, I have a def

inition which will include as subjects of comparison every pleasure which art

is capable of conveying. If I were to say, on the contrary, that the best picture

was that which most closely imitated nature, I should assume that art could

only please by imitating nature; and I should cast out of the pale2 of criticism

those parts of works of art which are not imitative, that is to say, intrinsic

beauties of color and form, and those works of art wholly, which, like the

Arabesques of Raffaelle in the Loggias,3 are not imitative at all. Now, I want

1. From vol. 1, part 1, section 1, chap. 2. 1520), were decorative wall paintings that featured 2. Beyond the notice or attention. a complex pattern of leaves, animals, and human 3. The arabesques in the Loggia of the Vatican, figures. designed by the Italian painter Raphael (1483�

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MODERN PAINTERS / 1321

a definition of art wide enough to include all its varieties of aim. I do not say, therefore, that the art is greatest which gives most pleasure, because perhaps there is some art whose end is to teach, and not to please. I do not say that the art is greatest which teaches us most, because perhaps there is some art whose end is to please, and not to teach. I do not say that the art is greatest which imitates best, because perhaps there is some art whose end is to create and not to imitate. But I say that the art is greatest which conveys to the mind of the spectator, by any means whatsoever, the greatest number of the greatest ideas; and I call an idea great in proportion as it is received by a higher faculty of the mind, and as it more fully occupies, and in occupying, exercises and exalts, the faculty by which it is received.

If this, then, be the definition of great art, that of a great artist naturally follows. He is the greatest artist who has embodied, in the sum of his works, the greatest number of the greatest ideas.

["the slave ship"]4

But I think the noblest sea that Turner has ever painted, and, if so, the noblest certainly ever painted by man, is that of "The Slave Ship," the chief Academy5 picture of the exhibition of 1840. It is a sunset on the Atlantic after prolonged storm; but the storm is partially lulled, and the torn and streaming rain clouds are moving in scarlet lines to lose themselves in the hollow of the night. The whole surface of sea included in the picture is divided into two ridges of enormous swell, not high, nor local, but a low, broad heaving of the whole ocean, like the lifting of its bosom by deep-drawn breath after the torture of the storm. Between these two ridges the fire of the sunset falls along the trough of the sea, dyeing it with an awful but glorious light, the intense and lurid splendor which burns like gold and bathes like blood. Along this fiery path and valley the tossing waves by which the swell of the sea is restlessly divided lift themselves in dark, indefinite, fantastic forms, each casting a faint and ghastly shadow behind it along the illumined foam. They do not rise everywhere, but three or four together in wild groups, fitfully and furiously, as the under-strength of the swell compels or permits them; leaving between them treacherous spaces of level and whirling water, now lighted with green and lamplike fire, now flashing back the gold of the declining sun, now fearfully shed from above with the indistinguishable images of the burning clouds, which fall upon them in flakes of crimson and scarlet and give to the reckless waves the added motion of their own fiery being. Purple and blue, the lurid shadows of the hollow breakers are cast upon the mist of night, which gathers cold and low, advancing like the shadow of death upon the guilty ship as it labors amidst the lightning of the sea, its thin masts written upon the sky in lines of blood, girded with condemnation in that fearful hue which signs the sky with horror, and mixes its flaming flood with the sunlight, and, cast far along the desolate heave of the sepulchral waves, incarnadines the multitudinous sea.6

I believe, if I were reduced to rest Turner's immortality upon any single

4. From vol. 1, part 2, section 5, chap. 3. The Ruskin by his father as a New Year's present in painting is of a ship ill which slaves are being trans-1844 and hung in the Ruskin household for a numported. Victims who have died during the passage ber of years until Ruskin decided to sell it because are being thrown overboard at sunset; as Ruskin he found its subject "too painful to live with." The noted, "the near sea is encumbered with corpses." painting now hangs in the Museum of Fine Arts in 5. The Royal Academy of Arts, founded in London Boston. in 1768. The painting, by the great British land-6. Cf. Shakespeare's Macbeth 2.2.60. "Incarnascapist J. M. W. Turner (1775�1851), was given to dines"; reddens.

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132 2 / JOHN RUSKIN

work, I should choose this. Its daring conception�ideal in the highest sense

of the word�-is based on the purest truth, and wrought out with the concen

trated knowledge of a life; its color is absolutely perfect, not one false or mor

bid hue in any part or line, and so modulated that every square inch of canvas

is a perfect composition; its drawing as accurate as fearless; the ship buoyant,

bending, and full of motion; its tones as true as they are wonderful; and the

whole picture dedicated to the most sublime of subjects and impressions�

completing thus the perfect system of all truth which we have shown to be

formed by Turner's works�the power, majesty, and deathfulness of the open,

deep, illimitable Sea.

1843

From Of the Pathetic Fallacy7

3 * 3

Now therefore, putting these tiresome and absurd words8 quite out of our

way, we may go on at our ease to examine the point in question�namely, the

difference between the ordinary, proper, and true appearances of things to us;

and the extraordinary, or false appearances, when we are under the influence

of emotion, or contemplative fancy; false appearances, I say, as being entirely

unconnected with any real power of character in the object, and only imputed

to it by us. For instance�

The spendthrift crocus, bursting through the mold

Naked and shivering, with his cup of gold.9 This is very beautiful, and yet very untrue. The crocus is not a spendthrift,

but a hardy plant; its yellow is not gold, but saffron. How is it that we enjoy

so much the having it put into our heads that it is anything else than a plain

crocus?

It is an important question. For, throughout our past reasonings about art,

we have always found that nothing could be good or useful, or ultimately

pleasurable, which was untrue. But here is something pleasurable in written

poetry, which is nevertheless untrue. And what is more, if we think over our

favorite poetry, we shall find it full of this kind of fallacy, and that we like it

all the more for being so.

It will appear also, on consideration of the matter, that this fallacy is of two

principal kinds. Either, as in this case of the crocus, it is the fallacy of willful

fancy, which involves no real expectation that it will be believed; or else it is

a fallacy caused by an excited state of the feelings, making us, for the time,

more or less irrational. Of the cheating of the fancy we shall have to speak

presently; but, in this chapter, I want to examine the nature of the other error,

that which the mind admits when affected strongly by emotion. Thus, for instance, in Alton Locke�

7. From vol. 3, part 4, chap. 12. In this celebrated being unfairly rigorous in pointing up the fallacy, chapter Ruskin shifts from discussing problems of and Ruskin himself falls into it often. See, e.g., his truth and realism in art to the same problems in reference to "the guilty ship" in his discussion of literature. The term pathetic refers not to some-Turner's The Slave Ship, above. thing feebly ineffective but to the emotion (pathos) 8. The metaphysical terms objective and subjective with which a writer invests descriptions of objects as applied to lands of truth. and to the distortion (fallacy) that may result. 9. From "Astraea" (1850), a poem by Oliver Wen- Poets such as Tennyson protested that Ruskin was dell Holmes.

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MODERN PAINTERS / 132 3

They rowed her in across the rolling foam�

The cruel, crawling foam.1

The foam is not cruel, neither does it crawl. The state of mind which attrib

utes to it these characters of a living creature is one in which the reason is

unhinged by grief. All violent feelings have the same effect. They produce in

us a falseness in all our impressions of external things, which I would generally

characterize as the "pathetic fallacy."

Now we are in the habit of considering this fallacy as eminently a character

of poetical description, and the temper of mind in which we allow it, as one

eminently poetical, because passionate. But, I believe, if we look well into the

matter, that we shall find the greatest poets do not often admit this kind of

falseness�that it is only the second order of poets who much delight in it.

Thus, when Dante describes the spirits falling from the bank of Acheron

"as dead leaves flutter from a bough,"2 he gives the most perfect image possible

of their utter lightness, feebleness, passiveness, and scattering agony of

despair, without, however, for an instant losing his own clear perception that these are souls, and those are leaves: he makes no confusion of one with the other. But when Coleridge speaks of

The one red leaf, the last of its clan,

That dances as often as dance it can,3 he has a morbid, that is to say, a so far false, idea about the leaf: he fancies a

life in it, and will, which there are not; confuses its powerlessness with choice,

its fading death with merriment, and the wind that shakes it with music. Here,

however, there is some beauty, even in the morbid passage; but take an

instance in Homer and Pope. Without the knowledge of Ulysses, Elpenor, his

youngest follower, has fallen from an upper chamber in the Circean palace,

and has been left dead, unmissed by his leader or companions, in the haste of

their departure. They cross the sea to the Cimmerian land; and Ulysses sum

mons the shades from Tartarus.4 The first which appears is that of the lost

Elpenor. Ulysses, amazed, and in exactly the spirit of bitter and terrified light

ness which is seen in Hamlet, addresses the spirit with the simple, startled

words: "Elpenor! How earnest thou under the shadowy darkness? Hast thou

come faster on foot than I in my black ship?'"5 Which Pope renders thus: O, say, what angry power Elpenor led

To glide in shades, and wander with the dead?

How could thy soul, by realms and seas disjoined,

Outfly the nimble sail, and leave the lagging wind? I sincerely hope the reader finds no pleasure here, either in the nimbleness

of the sail, or the laziness of the wind! And yet how is it that these conceits6 are so painful now, when they have been pleasant to us in the other instances? For a very simple reason. They are not a pathetic fallacy at all, for they are put into the mouth of the wrong passion�a passion which never could possibly have spoken them�agonized curiosity. Ulysses wants to know the facts

1. From chap. 26 of Charles Kingsley's novel 4. In classical mythology the lowest region of the Alton Locke (1850). underworld. 2. Inferno (1321), 3.112, by Dante Alighieri 5. Odyssey (8th century B.C.E.), 11.51. The trans( 1265�1321). Acheron: one river of the classical lation by Alexander Pope (1688-1744) was pub- underworld. lished in 1715-20. 3. Christabel (1816), 49-50, by Samuel Taylor 6. Extended poetic devices. Coleridge (1772-1834).

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132 4 / JOHN RUSKIN

of the matter; and the very last thing his mind could do at the moment would

be to pause, or suggest in anywise what was not a fact. The delay in the first

three lines, and conceit in the last, jar upon us instantly, like the most frightful

discord in music. No poet of true imaginative power would possibly have writ

ten the passage. Therefore, we see that the spirit of truth must guide us in some sort, even

in our enjoyment of fallacy. Coleridge's fallacy has no discord in it, but Pope's has set our teeth on edge. 4 * *

1856

From The Stones of Venice

[THE SAVAGENESS OF GOTHIC ARCHITECTURE]1

I am not sure when the word "Gothic" was first generically applied to the

architecture of the North; but I presume that, whatever the date of its original

usage, it was intended to imply reproach, and express the barbaric character

of the nations among whom that architecture arose. It never implied that they

were literally of Gothic lineage, far less that their architecture had been orig

inally invented by the Goths themselves; but it did imply that they and their

buildings together exhibited a degree of sternness and rudeness,2 which, in

contradistinction to the character of Southern and Eastern nations, appeared

like a perpetual reflection of the contrast between the Goth and the Roman

in their first encounter. And when that fallen Roman, in the utmost impotence

of his luxury, and insolence of his guilt, became the model for the imitation

of civilized Europe,3 at the close of the so-called Dark Ages, the word Gothic

became a term of unmitigated contempt, not unmixed with aversion. From

that contempt, by the exertion of the antiquaries and architects of this century,

Gothic architecture has been sufficiently vindicated; and perhaps some among

us, in our admiration of the magnificent science of its structure, and sacred

ness of its expression, might desire that the term of ancient reproach should

be withdrawn, and some other, of more apparent honorableness, adopted in

its place. There is no chance, as there is no need, of such a substitution. As

far as the epithet was used scornfully, it was used falsely; but there is no

reproach in the word, rightly understood; on the contrary, there is a profound

truth, which the instinct of mankind almost unconsciously recognizes. It is

true, greatly and deeply true, that the architecture of the North is rude and

wild; but it is not true that, for this reason, we are to condemn it, or despise.

Far otherwise: I believe it is in this very character that it deserves our pro

foundest reverence. The charts of the world which have been drawn up by modern science have

thrown into a narrow space the expression of a vast amount of knowledge, but

I have never yet seen any one pictorial enough to enable the spectator to

1. From vol. 2, chap. 6. had been "to show that the Gothic architecture of 2. Lack of refinement, roughness. Goths: a Ger-Venice had risen out of .. . a state of pure national manic people who by the 3rd century C.E. had set-faith and domestic virtue; and that its Renaissance tled north of the Black Sea. architecture had arisen out of.. . a state of con3. Renaissance architecture, based on imitating cealed national infidelity and domestic corrupclassical buildings, was distasteful to Ruskin. He tion." later stated that his aim in The Stones of Venice

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THE STONES OF VENICE / 1325

imagine the kind of contrast in physical character which exists between

Northern and Southern countries. We know the differences in detail, but we

have not that broad glance and grasp which would enable us to feel them in

their fullness. We know that gentians grow on the Alps, and olives on the

Apennines; but we do not enough conceive for ourselves that variegated

mosaic of the world's surface which a bird sees in its migration, that difference

between the district of the gentian and of the olive which the stork and the

swallow see far off, as they lean upon the sirocco wind.4 Let us, for a moment,

try to raise ourselves even above the level of their flight, and imagine the

Mediterranean lying beneath us like an irregular lake, and all its ancient prom

ontories sleeping in the sun: here and there an angry spot of thunder, a gray

stain of storm, moving upon the burning field; and here and there a fixed

wreath of white volcano smoke, surrounded by its circle of ashes; but for the

most part a great peacefulness of light, Syria and Greece, Italy and Spain, laid

like pieces of a golden pavement into the sea-blue, chased, as we stoop nearer

to them, with bossy5 beaten work of mountain chains, and glowing softly with

terraced gardens, and flowers heavy with frankincense, mixed among masses

of laurel, and orange, and plumy palm, that abate with their gray-green shad

ows the burning of the marble rocks, and of the ledges of porphyry sloping

under lucent sand. Then let us pass farther towards the north, until we see

the orient colors change gradually into a vast belt of rainy green, where the

pastures of Switzerland, and poplar valleys of France, and dark forests of the

Danube and Carpathians stretch from the mouths of the Loire to those of

the Volga, seen through clefts in gray swirls of rain cloud and flaky veils of the

mist of the brooks, spreading low along the pasture lands: and then, farther

north still, to see the earth heave into mighty masses of leaden rock and heathy

moor, bordering with a broad waste of gloomy purple that belt of field and

wood, and splintering into irregular and grisly islands amidst the northern seas,

beaten by storm, and chilled by ice drift, and tormented by furious pulses of

contending tide, until the roots of the last forests fail from among the hill

ravines, and the hunger of the north wind bites their peaks into barrenness;

and, at last, the wall of ice, durable like iron, sets, deathlike, its white teeth

against us out of the polar twilight. And, having once traversed in thought this

gradation of the zoned iris of the earth in all its material vastness, let us go

down nearer to it, and watch the parallel change in the belt of animal life: the

multitudes of swift and brilliant creatures that glance in the air and sea, or

tread the sands of the southern zone; striped zebras and spotted leopards,

glistening serpents, and birds arrayed in purple and scarlet. Let us contrast

their delicacy and brilliancy of color, and swiftness of motion, with the frost-

cramped strength, and shaggy covering, and dusky plumage of the northern

tribes; contrast the Arabian horse with the Shetland, the tiger and leopard

with the wolf and bear, the antelope with the elk, the bird of paradise with

the osprey: and then, submissively acknowledging the great laws by which the

earth and all that it bears are ruled throughout their being, let us not condemn,

but rejoice in the expression by man of his own rest in the statutes of the lands

that gave him birth. Let us watch him with reverence as he sets side by side

the burning gems, and smooths with soft sculpture the jasper pillars, that are

to reflect a ceaseless sunshine, and rise into a cloudless sky: but not with less

reverence let us stand by him, when, with rough strength and hurried stroke,

4. Hot wind from the southern Mediterranean. 5. Ornamental, or embossed. "Chased": decorated.

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132 6 / JOHN RUSKIN

he smites an uncouth animation out of the rocks which he has torn from

among the moss of the moorland, and heaves into the darkened air the pile of

iron buttress and rugged wall, instinct with6 work of an imagination as wild

and wayward as the northern sea; creations of ungainly shape and rigid limb,

but full of wolfish life; fierce as the winds that beat, and changeful as the

clouds that shade them. There is, I repeat, no degradation, no reproach in this, but all dignity and

honorableness: and we should err grievously in refusing either to recognize as

an essential character of the existing architecture of the North, or to admit as

a desirable character in that which it yet may be, this wildness of thought, and

roughness of work; this look of mountain brotherhood between the cathedral

and the Alp; this magnificence of sturdy power, put forth only the more ener

getically because the fine finger-touch was chilled away by the frosty wind,

and the eye dimmed by the moor mist, or blinded by the hail; this outspeaking

of the strong spirit of men who may not gather redundant fruitage from the

earth, nor bask in dreamy benignity of sunshine, but must break the rock for

bread, and cleave the forest for fire, and show, even in what they did for their

delight, some of the hard habits of the arm and heart that grew on them as

they swung the ax or pressed the plow. If, however, the savageness of Gothic architecture, merely as an expression

of its origin among Northern nations, may be considered, in some sort, a noble

character, it possesses a higher nobility still, when considered as an index, not

of climate, but of religious principle.

In the 13th and 14th paragraphs of Chapter XXI of the first volume of this

work, it was noticed that the systems of architectural ornament, properly so

called, might be divided into three: (1) Servile ornament, in which the exe

cution or power of the inferior workman is entirely subjected to the intellect

of the higher; (2) Constitutional ornament, in which the executive inferior

power is, to a certain point, emancipated and independent, having a will of its

own, yet confessing its inferiority and rendering obedience to higher powers;

and (3) Revolutionary ornament, in which no executive inferiority is admitted

at all. I must here explain the nature of these divisions at somewhat greater

length. Of Servile ornament, the principal schools are the Greek, Ninevite, and

Egyptian; but their servility is of different kinds. The Greek master-workman

was far advanced in knowledge and power above the Assyrian or Egyptian.

Neither he nor those for whom he worked could endure the appearance of

imperfection in anything; and, therefore, what ornament he appointed to be

done by those beneath him was composed of mere geometrical forms�balls,

ridges, and perfectly symmetrical foliage�which could be executed with abso

lute precision by line and rule, and were as perfect in their way, when com

pleted, as his own figure sculpture. The Assyrian and Egyptian, on the

contrary, less cognizant of accurate form in anything, were content to allow

their figure sculpture to be executed by inferior workmen, but lowered the

method of its treatment to a standard which every workman could reach, and

then trained him by discipline so rigid that there was no chance of his falling

beneath the standard appointed. The Greek gave to the lower workman no

subject which he could not perfectly execute. The Assyrian gave him subjects

which he could only execute imperfectly, but fixed a legal standard for his

imperfection. The workman was, in both systems, a slave.

6. Imbued with as an animating force.

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THE STONES OF VENICE / 1327

But in the medieval, or especially Christian, system of ornament, this slavery

is done away with altogether; Christianity having recognized, in small things

as well as great, the individual value of every soul. But it not only recognizes

its value; it confesses its imperfection, in only bestowing dignity upon the

acknowledgment of unworthiness. That admission of lost power and fallen

nature, which the Greek or Ninevite felt to be intensely painful, and, as far as

might be, altogether refused, the Christian makes daily and hourly, contem

plating the fact of it without fear, as tending, in the end, to God's greater glory.

Therefore, to every spirit which Christianity summons to her service, her

exhortation is: Do what you can, and confess frankly what you are unable to

do; neither let your effort be shortened for fear of failure, nor your confession

silenced for fear of shame. And it is, perhaps, the principal admirableness of

the Gothic schools of architecture, that they thus receive the results of the

labor of inferior minds; and out of fragments full of imperfection, and betray

ing that imperfection in every touch, indulgently raise up a stately and unaccusable whole. But the modern English mind has this much in common with that of the Greek, that it intensely desires, in all things, the utmost completion or perfection compatible with their nature. This is a noble character in the abstract, but becomes ignoble when it causes us to forget the relative dignities of that nature itself, and to prefer the perfectness of the lower nature to the imper

fection of the higher; not considering that as, judged by such a rule, all the

brute animals would be preferable to man, because more perfect in their func

tions and kind, and yet are always held inferior to him, so also in the works of

man, those which are more perfect in their kind are always inferior to those

which are, in their nature, liable to more faults and shortcomings. For the

finer the nature, the more flaws it will show through the clearness of it; and

it is a law of this universe that the best things shall be seldomest seen in their

best form. The wild grass grows well and strongly, one year with another; but

the wheat is, according to the greater nobleness of its nature, liable to the

bitterer blight. And therefore, while in all things that we see, or do, we are to

desire perfection, and strive for it, we are nevertheless not to set the meaner7

thing, in its narrow accomplishment, above the nobler thing, in its mighty

progress; not to esteem smooth minuteness above shattered majesty; not to

prefer mean victory to honorable defeat; not to lower the level of our aim, that

we may the more surely enjoy the complacency of success. But above all, in

our dealings with the souls of other men, we are to take care how we check,

by severe requirement or narrow caution, efforts which might otherwise lead

to a noble issue; and, still more, how we withhold our admiration from great

excellencies, because they are mingled with rough faults. Now, in the make

and nature of every man, however rude or simple, whom we employ in manual

labor, there are some powers for better things: some tardy imagination, torpid

capacity of emotion, tottering steps of thought, there are, even at the worst;

and in most cases it is all our own fault that they are tardy or torpid. But they

cannot be strengthened, unless we are content to take them in their feeble

ness, and unless we prize and honor them in their imperfection above the best

and most perfect manual skill. And this is what we have to do with all our

laborers; to look for the thoughtful part of them, and get that out of them,

whatever we lose for it, whatever faults and errors we are obliged to take with

it. For the best that is in them cannot manifest itself, but in company with

7. Lesser.

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132 8 / JOHN RUSKIN

much error. Understand this clearly: You can teach a man to draw a straight

line, and to cut one; to strike a curved line, and to carve it; and to copy and

carve any number of given lines or forms, with admirable speed and perfect

precision; and you find his work perfect of its kind: but if you ask him to think

about any of those forms, to consider if he cannot find any better in his own

head, he stops; his execution becomes hesitating; he thinks, and ten to one

he thinks wrong; ten to one he makes a mistake in the first touch he gives to

his work as a thinking being. But you have made a man of him for all that. He

was only a machine before, an animated tool. And observe, you are put to stern choice in this matter. You must either

make a tool of the creature, or a man of him. You cannot make both. Men

were not intended to work with the accuracy of tools, to be precise and perfect

in all their actions. If you will have that precision out of them, and make their

fingers measure degrees like cogwheels, and their arms strike curves like com

passes, you must unhumanize them. All the energy of their spirits must be

given to make cogs and compasses of themselves. All their attention and

strength must go to the accomplishment of the mean act. The eye of the soul

must be bent upon the finger point, and the soul's force must fill all the invis

ible nerves that guide it, ten hours a day, that it may not err from its steely

precision, and so soul and sight be worn away, and the whole human being

be lost at last�a heap of sawdust, so far as its intellectual work in this world

is concerned; saved only by its Heart, which cannot go into the form of cogs

and compasses, but expands, after the ten hours are over, into fireside human

ity. On the other hand, if you will make a man of the working creature, you

cannot make a tool. Let him but begin to imagine, to think, to try to do any

thing worth doing; and the engine-turned precision is lost at once. Out come

all his roughness, all his dullness, all his incapability; shame upon shame,

failure upon failure, pause after pause: but out comes the whole majesty of

him also; and we know the height of it only, when we see the clouds settling

upon him. And, whether the clouds be bright or dark, there will be transfig

uration behind and within them. And now, reader, look around this English room of yours, about which you

have been proud so often, because the work of it was so good and strong, and

the ornaments of it so finished. Examine again all those accurate moldings,

and perfect polishings, and unerring adjustments of the seasoned wood and

tempered steel. Many a time you have exulted over them, and thought how

great England was, because her slightest work was done so thoroughly. Alas!

if read rightly, these perfectnesses are signs of a slavery in our England a

thousand times more bitter and more degrading than that of the scourged

African, or helot8 Greek. Men may be beaten, chained, tormented, yoked like

cattle, slaughtered like summer flies, and yet remain in one sense, and the

best sense, free. But to smother their souls within them, to blight and hew

into rotting pollards9 the suckling branches of their human intelligence, to

make the flesh and skin which, after the worm's work on it, is to see God,1

into leathern thongs to yoke machinery with�this it is to be slave-masters

indeed; and there might be more freedom in England, though her feudal lords'

lightest words were worth men's lives, and though the blood of the vexed

husbandman dropped in the furrows of her fields, than there is while the

animation of her multitudes is sent like fuel to feed the factory smoke, and

8. A class of serfs in ancient Sparta. 1. "And though, after my skin, worms destroy this 9. Trees with top branches cut back to the trunk. body, yet in my flesh shall 1 see God" (Job 19.26).