HISTORICAL POEMS, OR POEMS FOUNDED ON FACT.

Many of Mr. Browning's poems are founded on fact, whether historical, or merely of known occurrence; but few of them can be classed by their historic quality, because it is seldom their most important. In "Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau," for instance, we have a chapter in recent history: but we only read it as an abstract discussion, to which a chapter in history has given rise; and in "Pacchiarotto, and how he worked in Distemper," and "Filippo Baldinucci on the Privilege of Burial" (published in the same volume), we find two incidents, each of them true, and each full of historic significance; but which owe all their vitality to the critical and humorous spirit, in which Mr. Browning has described them. The small list of poems which are historical more than anything else, might be recruited from the Dramatic Idyls; but, for various reasons, this publication must stand alone; and even here, it is often difficult to disengage the actual fact, from the imaginary conditions in which it appears. Our present group is therefore reduced to—

We may also place here, as it is historical in character, "The Heretic's Tragedy; a Middle Age Interlude" ("Dramatic Romances." Published in "Men and Women." 1855.)

The real-life drama which Mr. Browning has reproduced under the title of "Red Cotton Night-cap Country," was enacted partly in Paris, partly in a retired corner of Normandy, where he spent the late summer of 1872; and ended in a trial which had been only a fortnight closed, when he supposes himself to be relating it. His whole story is true, except that in it which reality itself must have left to the imagination. Only the names of persons and places are fictitious.[[78]]

The principal actor in this drama, Léonce Miranda, was son and heir to a wealthy Spanish jeweller in the Place Vendôme. He was southern by temperament as by descent; but a dash of the more mercantile Parisian spirit had come to him from his French mother; and while keenly susceptible to the incitements of both religious and earthly passion, he began life with the deliberate purpose of striking a compromise between them. At an early age he determined to live for this world now, and for the other when he was older; and in the meantime to be moderate in his enjoyments. In conformity with this plan he ran riot on Sunday; but worked diligently during the rest of the week. He bestowed his fancy on five women at once; but represented himself, when in their company, as a poor artist or musician, and wasted no money upon them.

One day, however, he fell in love. The object of his affections, Clara Mulhausen, or, as she first calls herself, "de Millefleurs," was an adventuress; but she did not at first allow him to find this out; and when he did so, her hold upon him had become too strong to be affected by the discovery. A succession of circumstances, which Mr. Browning describes, first cemented the bond, then destroyed its secrecy; and since Clara had a husband, and the position could not be legalized, Léonce Miranda had no choice but to accept the social interdict, and with her retire from Paris. He placed a substitute in the business, which had devolved on him through his father's death; and the pair took up their abode at Clairvaux, an ancient priory, which the father had bought. Here Miranda built and improved; indulged his amateur propensities for painting and music; remained devoted to his love, and was rewarded by her devotion. For five years they were very happy.

The first interruption to their happiness was a summons to Miranda, from his mother in Paris, to come and answer for his excessive expenditure. The immorality of his life she had condoned (a curious proof of this is given), for she hoped it would be its own cure. But "his architectural freaks, above all, a Belvedere which he had constructed in his grounds, were a reckless waste of substance which she could not witness without displeasure." She had immense influence with her son; and he took her rebuke so much to heart, that he only left her to fling himself into the Seine. He was brought out alive; but lay for a month at death's door, and made no progress towards recovery till he had been restored to Clara's care; and Clara was painfully winning him back to health, when the telegraphic wires flashed a second summons upon him. His presence was again demanded in the maternal home. "The business was urgent. Its nature he would learn on arrival."

He hastened to his mother's house, to find her a corpse—laid out with all the ghastly ceremonial which Catholic fancy could devise—and to be told that his misconduct had killed her. The tribe of cousins, who had planned the coup de théâtre, were there to enjoy its result. This did not fail them. Miranda fainted away. As soon as consciousness returned, he made his act of atonement. He foreswore the illegal bond. He willed away his fortune to his kinsfolk; and would retain of it, from that moment, only a pittance for himself, and the means of honourable subsistence for Clara. They were to meet in the same house a week later, to arrange in what manner that sinful woman should be acquainted with the facts.

The day came. The cousins arrived. Miranda did not appear. He had broken down at the funeral in a fresh outburst of frenzied grief; but from this he had had time to recover. Someone peeped into his room. There he stood, by a blazing fire, a small empty coffer by his side, engaged in reading some letters which he had taken from it. Whose they were, and what the reading had told him, was quickly shown. He replaced them in the box, plunged this in the fire; and reiterating the words, "Burn, burn and purify my past!" held it there till both his hands had been consumed; no sign of pain escaping him. He was dragged away by main force, protesting against this hindrance to his salvation. "He was not yet purified. SHE was not yet burned out of him." In his bed he raved and struggled against the image which again rose before his eyes, which again grew and formed itself in his flesh.

The delirium was followed by three months of exhaustion. The moment the sick man could "totter" out of his room, he found his way to her whom he had abjured, and who was in Paris calmly awaiting his return to her. She came back with him. He introduced her to his kinsmen. "It was all right," he said; "Clara would henceforth be—his brother; he would still fulfil his bond." From this, however, he departed, in so far as not to content himself with a pittance. He sold his business to the "cousinry," and, as they considered, on hard terms. He and Clara then returned to Clairvaux.

And now, as Mr. Browning interprets the situation, his experience had entered on a new phase. He had tested the equal strength of the earthly and the heavenly powers, and he knew that he could elude neither, and that neither could be postponed to the other. He no longer strove to compromise between these opposing realities, but threw his whole being into the struggle to unite them. He adhered to his unlawful love. His acts of piety and charity became grotesque in their excessiveness. (Of these again particulars are given.) Two years went by; and then, one April morning, Miranda climbed his Belvedere, and was found, soon after, dead, on the turf below. There seemed no question of accident. The third attempt at suicide had succeeded.

On this fact, however, Mr. Browning puts a construction of his own. He asserts the poet's privilege of seeing into the man's mind; and makes him think before us in a long and impassioned soliloquy, which sets forth the hidden motive of his deed. As Mr. Browning conceives him, he did not mean to kill himself. He did so in a final, irresistible impulse to manifest his faith, and to test the foundations of it. It has had for its object, not the spiritual truths of Christianity, but its miraculous powers; and these powers have of late been symbolized to his mind by the Virgin of the Ravissante.[[79]] The conflict of despotisms has thus been waged between the natural woman and the supernatural: each a monarch in her way. As he looks from his tower towards the Church of the Ravissante, he apostrophizes her who is enthroned there.

He imagines her to have reproached him for his divided allegiance; and asserts, in answer, that he has been subject to her all his life. "He could not part with his soul's treasure. But he has, for her sake, lavished his earthly goods, burned away his flesh. If his sacrifice has been incomplete, it was because another power, mysterious and unnamed, but yet as absolute as she, had cast its spells about him. He would have resisted the Enchantress, if she, the Despot, had made a sign. But what token has he ever received, of her acceptance, her approbation? She exacts from her servants the surrender of both body and soul; the least deficiency in the offering neutralizes its sum. And what does she give in exchange for body and soul? Promises? Is a man to starve while the life-apple is withheld from him, if even husks are within his reach? Miracles? Will she make a finger grow on his maimed hand? Would he not be called a madman if he expected it?"

And yet he believes. He summons her to justify his belief. He claims of her a genuine miracle—a miracle of power, which will silence scepticism, and re-establish the royalty of the Church—a miracle of mercy, which will wipe away the past; reconcile duty and love; give Clara into his hands as his pure and lawful wife. "She is to carry him through the air to the space before her church as she was herself conveyed there...." Then come the leap and the catastrophe.

He had by a second will bequeathed all his possessions to the Church, reserving in them a life-interest for his virtual wife; and when the cousinry swooped down on what they thought their prey, Madame Mulhausen could receive them and their condolences with the indignant scorn which their greed and cruelty deserved. They disputed the will on the alleged plea of the testator's insanity. The trial was interrupted by the events of 1870, but finally settled in the lady's favour; the verdict being uncompromising as to her moral, as well as legal claim to the inheritance.

Mr. Browning had lately stood outside the grounds of Clairvaux, and seen its lady pass. She was insignificant in face and expression; and he was reduced to accounting for the power she had exercised, by that very fact. She seemed a blank surface, on which a man could inscribe, or fancy he was inscribing, himself; and it is a matter of fact that, whether from strength of will, or from the absence of it, she presented such a surface to her lover's hand. She humoured his every inclination, complied with his every wish. And because she did no more than this, and also no less, Mr. Browning pronounces her far from the best of women, but by no means one of the worst. The two had, after all, up to a certain point, redeemed each other.

The title of the book arose as follows. The narrative is addressed (as the volume is dedicated) to Miss Annie Thackeray; and its supposed occasion is that of a meeting which took place at St. Rambert—actually St. Aubin—between her and Mr. Browning, in the summer of 1872. She had laughingly called the district "White Cotton Night-Cap Country," from its sleepy appearance, and the universal white cap of even its male inhabitants. Mr. Browning, being acquainted with the tragedy of Clairvaux, thought "Red Cotton Night-Cap Country" would be a more appropriate name; and adopted it for his story, as Miss Thackeray had adopted hers for one which she promised to write. But he represents himself as playing at first with the idea; and as leading the listener's mind, from the suggestions of white night-caps to those of the red one: and null the outward calmness of the neighbouring country, to the tragic possibilities which that calmness conceals.

The supplementary heading, "Turf and Towers," must have been inspired by the literal facts of the case; but it supplies an analogy for the contrasted influences which fought for Miranda's soul. The "tower" represents the militant or religious life. The "turf," the self-indulgent; and the figure appears and reappears at every stage of the man's career. The attempt at compromise is symbolized by a pavilion: a structure aping solidity, but only planted on the turf. The final attempt at union is spoken of as an underground passage connecting the two, and by which the fortress may be entered instead of scaled. The difficulty of making one's way through life amidst the ruins of old beliefs and the fanciful overgrowth in which time has clothed them; the equal danger of destroying too much and clearing away too little; also find their place in the allegory.

The possible friend and adviser, to whom Miranda is referred at vol. xii. p. 122, was M. Joseph Milsand, who always at that time passed the bathing season at St. Aubin.[[80]]

"THE INN ALBUM" is a tragedy in eight parts or scenes: the dialogue interspersed with description; and carried on by four persons not named. It is chiefly enacted in the parlour of a country inn; and the Inn "Album," in spite of its grotesque or prosaic character, becomes an important instrument in it.

Four years before the tragedy occurred—so we learn from the dialogue—a gentlemanly adventurer of uncertain age had won and abused the affections of a motherless girl, whom he thought too simple to resent the treachery. He was mistaken in this; for her nature was as proud as it was confiding; and her indignation when she learned that he had not intended marriage was such as to surprise him into offering it. She rejected the offer with contempt. He went his way, mortified and embittered. A month later she had buried herself in a secluded and squalid village, as wife of the old, poor, overworked, and hopelessly narrow-minded clergyman, whose cure it was. She abstained, however, for his own sake, from making any painful disclosures to her husband; and the daily and hourly expiation brought no peace with it; for she remained in her deceiver's power.

Three years went by. The elderly adventurer then fell in with a young, wealthy, and inexperienced man, who had loved the same woman, and whose honourable addresses had been declined for his sake; and he acquired over this youth an influence almost as strong as that which he had exercised over the young girl. He found him grieving over his disappointment, and undertook to teach him how to forget it; became his master in the art of dissipation; helped to empty his pockets while he filled his own; and finally induced him to form a mercenary engagement to a cousin whom he did not love. When the story opens, the young man has come to visit his bride-elect in her country home; and his Mephistopheles has followed him, under a transparent pretext, to secure a last chance of winning money from him at cards. The presence of the latter is to be a secret, because he is too ill-famed a personage to be admitted into the lady's house; so they have arrived on the eve of the appointed day, and put up at a village inn on the outskirts of the cousin's estate. There they have spent the night in play. There also the luck has turned; and the usual winner has lost ten thousand pounds. His friend insists on cancelling the debt. He affects to scout the idea. "The money shall, by some means or other, be paid."

The discussion is renewed with the same result, as they loiter near the station, at which the younger will presently make a feint of arriving; and for the first time he asks the elder why, with such abilities as his, he has made no mark in life. The latter replies that he found and lost his opportunity four years ago, in a woman, who, he feels more and more, would have quickened his energies to better ends. He then, with tolerable frankness, relates his story. The younger follows with his own. But, for a reason which explains itself at the time, the connection between the two escapes them.

The woman herself next appears on the scene, and with her, the girl cousin. They are friends of old; and the married one has emerged from her seclusion at the entreaty of the betrothed, to pass judgment on her intended husband. The young girl is not satisfied with her own feeling towards him whom she has promised to marry; though she has no misgiving as to his sentiments towards her. She is to bring him for inspection to the inn. And the friend, entering its parlour alone, is confronted by her former lover, who has temporarily returned there.

A stormy dialogue ensues. She denounces him as the destroyer, ever lying in wait for her soul. He taunts her with the malignant hatred with which for years past from the height of her own prosperity she has been weighing down his. She retorts in a powerful description of the love with which he once inspired her, of the living death in which she has been expiating her mistake. And as he listens, the old feeling in him revives, and he kneels to her, imploring that she will break her bonds, and secure their joint happiness by flying with him. She sees nothing, however, in this, but a second attempt to ensnare her; and is repulsing the entreaty with the scorn which she believes it to deserve, when the younger man bursts merrily into the room. A wave of angry pain passes over him as he recognizes the heroine of his own romance, and hastily infers from the circumstances in which he finds her, that he has been the victim of a double deception. The truth gradually shapes itself in his mind; but meanwhile the older man has grasped the situation, and determined to make capital of it—to avenge his rebuff and to rid himself of his debt at the same time. He begs the lady to leave the room for a few moments, handing her, for her entertainment, the inn "album," over which he and his friend were exchanging jokes a few hours ago; and in which he has, at this moment, inscribed some lines. The purport of these is that this young man loves her; and that unless she responds to his advances, the secret of her past life shall be revealed to her husband.

Alone with the younger man, he exhausts himself in coarse libels against the woman, of whom that morning only he was speaking, as the lost opportunity of his life; bids him ask of her what he desires, and have it; and calls on him to admit, that in preserving him from marrying her, and placing her nevertheless at his disposal, he will have earned his gratitude, and paid the value of the ten thousand pounds.

When the woman returns, the album in her hand, the calm of death is upon her. She has lived prepared for this emergency, provided also with the means of escaping from it. But she will not die without entreating her young admirer to shake off, before it is too late, the evil influence to which both, though in different ways, have succumbed; and her dignity, her kindness, the instinctive reverence, and now chivalrous pity, with which she has inspired him carry all before them. He renews his declaration; implores her to accept him as her husband, if she is free—her friend if she is not; her husband even if the relation she is living in be something less than marriage; to exact any delay, to impose any probation, so that in the end she accepts him.

She replies by putting her hand into his, to remain there, as she says, till death shall part them. The older man, who has just re-entered the room, congratulates them on having arrived at so sensible an understanding. The woman, now very pale, contrives to point to the fatal entry in the album which she still grasps; and asks her friend—after quoting the writer's words—how, but in her own way, the mouth of such a one could have been stopped.

"So," exclaims the youth. And he flies at the man's throat, and strangles him.

She has only time to thank her deliverer; to tell him why his devotion is unavailing—to provide for his safety by writing in the album from which he has torn the fatal page, that he has slain a man who would have outraged her: and that her last breath is spent in blessing him.

A merry voice is heard; and the young, light-hearted girl comes all unconscious to the scene of the tragedy. The curtain falls before she has entered upon it.

The betrayal of the lady, the transaction of which she becomes the subject, and her consequent suicide, are taken from an episode in English high life, which occurred in the present century.

"THE TWO POETS OF CROISIC" is an extract from the history of two writers of verse, whose respective works obtained from circumstances a brilliant but short-lived renown. It forms part of a reminiscence, supposed to be conjured up by a wood fire near which the narrator, with his wife, is sitting. The fire, as he describes it, is made of ship-wood: for it burns in all the beautiful colours which denote the presence of metallic substances and salts; and as his fancy reconstructs the ship, it also raises the vision of a distant coast well known to his companion and to himself. He sees Le Croisic—the little town it is—the poor village it was[[81]]—with its storm-tossed sea—its sandy strip of land, good only for the production of salt—its solitary Menhir, which recalls, and in some degree perpetuates, the wild life and the barbarous Druid worship of old Breton times.[[82]] And in the bright-hued flames, which leap up and vanish before his bodily eyes, he sees also the two ephemeral reputations which flashed forth and expired there.

René Gentilhomme, born 1610, was a rhymer, as his father had been before him. He became page to the Prince of Condé, and occupied his spare time by writing complimentary verse. One day, as he was hammering at an ode, a violent storm broke out; and the lightning shattered a ducal crown in marble which stood on a pedestal in the room in which he sat. Condé was regarded as future King of France: for Louis XIII. was childless, and his brother Gaston believed to be so; in consideration of this fact, men called him "Duke." René took the incident as an omen, and turned his ode into a prophecy which he delivered to his master as the utterance of God. "The Prince's hopes were at an end: a Dauphin would be born in the ensuing year." A Dauphin was born; and René, who had at first been terrified at his own boldness, received the title of Royal Poet, and the honours due to a seer. But he wrote little or no more; and he and the tiny volume which composed his works soon disappeared from sight.

The narrator, however, judges that this oblivion may not have been unsought, since one who had believed himself the object of a direct message from God, would have little taste for intercourse with his fellow men; and he suspends his story for a moment to ask himself how such a one would bear the weight of his experience; and how far the knowledge conveyed by it might be true. He decides (as we should expect) that a direct Revelation is forbidden by the laws of life; but that life is full of indirect messages from the unseen world; that all our "simulated thunder-claps," all our "counterfeited truths," all those glimpses of beauty which startle while they elude the soul, are messages of this kind: darts shot from the spirit world, which rebound as they touch, yet sting us to the consciousness of its existence. And so René Gentilhomme had had a true revelation, in what reminded him that there are things higher than rhyming and its rewards.

Paul Desforges Maillard was born nearly a century later, and wrote society verses till the age of thirty, when the desire for wider fame took possession of him. He competed for a prize which the Academy had offered to the poet who should best commemorate the progress made by the art of navigation during the last reign. His poem was returned. It was offered, through the agency of a friend, to a paper called "The Mercury." The editor, La Roque, praised the work in florid terms, but said he dared not offend the Academy; he, too, returned the MS. Paul, mistaking the polite fiction for truth, wrote back an angry tirade against the editor's cowardice; and the latter, retorting in as frank a fashion, told the writer that his poem was execrable, and that it was only consideration for his feelings which had hitherto prevented his hearing so.

At this juncture Paul's sister interposed. He was wrong, she declared, to proceed in such a point-blank manner. In cases like these, it was only wile which conquered. He must resume his incognito, and try, this time, the effect of a feminine disguise. She picked out and copied the feeblest of his songs or sonnets, and sent it to La Roque, as from a girl-novice who humbly sued for his literary protection. She was known by another name than her brother's (Mr. Browning explains why); the travesty was therefore complete. The poem was accepted; then another and another. The lady's fame grew. La Roque made her, by letter, a declaration of love. Voltaire also placed himself at her feet.

Paul now refused to efface himself any longer. The clever sister urged in vain that it was her petticoats which had conquered, and not his verse. He went to Paris to claim his honours, and introduce himself as the admired poetess to La Roque and Voltaire. Voltaire bitterly resented the joke; La Roque affected to enjoy it; but nevertheless advised its perpetrator to get out of Paris as fast as possible. The trick had answered for once. It would not be wise to repeat it. Again Paul disregarded his sister's advice, and reprinted the poems in his own name. "They had been praised and more than praised. The world could not eat its own printed words!"

He discovered, however, that the world could eat its words; or, at least, forget them. The only fame—the speaker adds—which a great man cannot destroy, is that which he has had no hand in making. Paul's light, with his sister's, went out as did that of his predecessor.

Mr. Browning gives, in conclusion, a test by which the relative merit of any two real poets may be gauged. The greater is he who leads the happier life. To be a poet is to see and feel. To see and feel is to suffer. His is the truest poetic existence who enslaves his sufferings, and makes their strength his own. He who yokes them to his chariot shall win the race.[[83]]

"CENCIAJA" signifies matter relating to the "Cenci;"[[84]] and the poem describes an incident extraneous to the "Cenci" tragedy, but which strongly influenced its course. This incident was the murder of the widowed Marchesa dell' Oriolo, by her younger son, Paolo Santa Croce, who thus avenged her refusal to invest him with his elder brother's rights. He escaped the hands of justice, though only to perish in some other disastrous way. But the matricide had been committed on the very day which closed the trial of the Cenci family for the assassination of its Head; and it sealed Beatrice's fate. Her sentence seemed about to be remitted. The Pope now declared that she must die.

... "Paolo Santo Croce

Murdered his mother also yestereve,

And he is fled: she shall not flee at least!"

The elder son of the Marchesa, Onofrio Marchese dell' Oriolo, was arrested on the strength of an ambiguous scrap of writing, which appeared to implicate him in his brother's guilt; and subjected in prison to such a daily and day-long examination on the subject of this letter, that his mind gave way, and the desired avowal was extracted from him. He confessed to having implied, under reserves and conditions which practically neutralized the confession, his assent to his mother's death. He was beheaded accordingly; and the Governor of Rome, Taverna, who had conducted the inquisition, was rewarded by a Cardinal's hat. Other motives were, however, involved in the proceeding than the Pope's quickened zeal for justice. He had entrusted the case to his nephew, Cardinal Aldobrandini; and it was known that the Cardinal and the Marchese had courted the same lady, and the latter unwisely flaunted the possession of a ring which was his pledge of victory.

This story, with other details which I have not space to give, was taken from a contemporary Italian chronicle, of which some lines are literally transcribed.

The heretic of "THE HERETIC'S TRAGEDY" was Jacques du Bourg-Molay, last Grand Master of the Order of Knights Templars, and against whom preposterous accusations had been brought. This "Jacques," whom the speaker erroneously calls "John," and who might stand for any victim of middle-age fanaticism, was burned in Paris in 1314; and the "Interlude," we are told, "would seem to be a reminiscence of this event, as distorted by two centuries of refraction from Flemish brain to brain." The scene is carried on by one singer, in a succession of verses, and by a chorus which takes up the last and most significant words of each verse; the organ accompanying in a plagal cadence,[[85]] which completes its effect. The chant is preceded by an admonition from the abbot, which lays down its text: that God is unchanging, and His justice as infinite as His mercy; and singer and chorus both denounce the impious heresy of "John:" who admitted only the love, and sinned the "Unknown Sin," in his confidence in it. How the logs are fired; how the victim roasts; amidst what hideous and fantastic torments the damned soul "flares forth into the dark" is quaintly and powerfully described.