Leave him—still loftier than the world suspects,
Living or dying."
The union of humour with intense seriousness, of the grotesque with the stately, is one that only Browning could have compassed, and the effect is singularly appropriate. As the disciples of the old humanist bear their dead master up to his grave on the mountain-top, chanting their dirge and eulogy, the lines of the poem seem actually to move to the steady climbing rhythm of their feet.
The Heretic's Tragedy: a Middle-Age Interlude, is described by the author as "a glimpse from the burning of Jacques du Bourg-Molay [last Grand-Master of the Templars], A.D. 1314, as distorted by the refraction from Flemish brain to brain during the course of a couple of centuries." Of all Browning's mediæval poems this is perhaps the greatest, as it is certainly the most original, the most astonishing. Its special "note" is indescribable, for there is nothing with which we can compare it. If I say that it is perhaps the finest example in English poetry of the pure grotesque, I shall fail to interpret it aright to those who think of the grotesque as a synonym for the ugly and debased. If I call it fantastic, I shall do it less than justice in suggesting a certain lightness and flimsiness which are quite alien to its profound seriousness, a seriousness which touches on sublimity. Browning's power of sculpturing single situations is seldom shown in finer relief than in those poems in which he has seized upon some "occult eccentricity of history" or of legend, like this of The Heretic's Tragedy, or that in Holy-Cross Day, fashioning it into some quaint, curt, tragi-comic form. Holy-Cross Day expresses the feelings of the Jews, who were forced on this day (the 14th September) to attend an annual Christian sermon in Rome. A deliciously naïve extract from an imaginary Diary by the Bishop's Secretary, 1600, first sets forth the orthodox view of the case; then the poem tells us "what the Jews really said." Nothing more audaciously or more sardonically mirthful was ever written than the first part of this poem, with its
"Fee, faw, fum! bubble and squeak!
Blessedest Thursday's the fat of the week;"
while the sudden transition to the sublime and steadfast Song of Death of Rabbi ben Ezra is an effect worthy of Heine: more than worthy. Heine would inevitably have put his tongue in his cheek again at the end.
With the three great mediæval poems should be named the slighter sketch of Protus. The first and last lines, describing two imaginary busts, are a fine instance of Browning's power of translating sense into sound. Compare the smooth and sweet melody of the opening lines—
"Among these latter busts we count by scores
Half-emperors and quarter-emperors,