"Framework which waits for a picture to frame, ...
Roses embowering with nought they embower."
Browning, the poet of the divining imagination, is less apparent here than the astute ironical observer who delights in pricking the bubbles of affectation, stripping off the masks of sham, and exhibiting human [nature] in unadorned nakedness. Donald is an exposure, savage and ugly, of savagery and ugliness in Sport; Solomon and Balkis a reduction, dainty and gay, of these fabled paragons of wisdom to the dimensions of ordinary vain and amorous humanity. Lilith and Eve unmask themselves under stress of terror, as Balkis and Solomon at the compulsion of the magic ring, and Adam urbanely replaces the mask. Jochanan Hakka-dosh, the saintly prop of Israel, expounds from his deathbed a gospel of struggle and endurance in which a troubled echo of the great strain of Ben Ezra may no doubt be heard; but his career is, as a whole, a half-sad, half-humorous commentary on the vainness of striving to extend the iron frontiers of mortality. Lover, poet, soldier, statist have each contributed a part of their lives to prolong and enrich the saint's: but their fresh idealisms have withered when grafted upon his sober and sapless brain; while his own garnered wisdom fares no better when committed to the crude enthusiasm of his disciples. But twice, in this volume, a richer and fuller music sounds. In the great poem of Ixion, human illusions are still the preoccupying thought; but they appear as fetters, not as specious masks, and instead of the serio-comic exposure of humanity we see its tragic and heroic deliverance. Ixion is Browning's Prometheus. The song that breaks from his lips as he whirls upon the penal wheel of Zeus is a great liberating cry of defiance to the phantom-god—man's creature and his ape—[who] may plunge the body in torments but can never so baffle the soul but that
"From the tears and sweat and blood of his torment
Out of the wreck he rises past Zeus to the Potency o'er him,
Pallid birth of my pain—where light, where light is, aspiring,
Thither I rise, whilst thou—Zeus take thy godship and sink."
And in Never the Time and the Place, the pang of love's aching void and the rapture of reunion blend in one strain of haunting magical beauty, the song of an old man in whom one memory kindles eternal youth, a song in which, as in hardly another, the wistfulness of autumn blends with the plenitude of spring.
Browning spent the summer months of 1883 at Gressoney St Jean, a lonely spot high up in the Val d'Aosta, living, as usual when abroad, on the plainest of vegetable diet. "Delightful Gressoney!" he wrote,
"Who laughest, 'Take what is, trust what may be!'"
And a mood of serene acquiescence in keeping with the scene breathes from the poem which occupied him during this pleasant summer. To Browning's old age, as to Goethe's, the calm wisdom and graceful symbolism of Persia offered a peculiar attraction. In the Westöstlicher Divan, seventy years earlier, Goethe, with a subtler sympathy, laid his finger upon the common germs of Eastern and Western thought and poetry. [Browning], far less in actual touch with the Oriental mind, turned to the East in quest of picturesque habiliments for his very definitely European convictions—"Persian garments," which had to be "changed" in the mind of the interpreting reader.
The Fancies have the virtues of good fables,—pithy wisdom, ingenious moral instances, homely illustrations, easy colloquial dialogue; and the ethical teaching has a striking superficial likeness to the common-sense morality of prudence and content, which fables, like proverbs, habitually expound. "Cultivate your garden, don't trouble your head about insoluble riddles, accept your ignorance and your limitations, assume your good to be good and your evil to be evil, be a man and nothing more"—such is the recurring burden of Ferishtah's counsel. But such preaching on Browning's lips always carried with it an implicit assumption that the preacher had himself somehow got outside the human limitations he insisted on; that he could measure the plausibility of man's metaphysics and theology, and distinguish between the anthropomorphism which is to be acquiesced in because we know no better, and that which is to be spurned because we know too much. Ferishtah's thought is a game of hide-and-seek, and its movements have all the dexterity of winding and subterfuge proper to success in that game. Against the vindictive God of the creeds he trusts his human assurance that pain is God's instrument to educate us into pity [and] love; but when it is asked how a just God can single out sundry fellow-mortals
"To undergo experience for our sake,
Just that the gift of pain, bestowed on them,
In us might temper to the due degree
Joy's else-excessive largess,"—
instead of admitting a like appeal to the same human assurance, he falls back upon the unfathomable ways of Omnipotence. If the rifts in the argument are in any sense supplied, it is by the brief snatches of song which intervene between the Fancies, as the cicada-note filled the pauses of the broken string. These exquisite lyrics are much more adequate expressions of Browning's faith than the dialogues which professedly embody it. They transfer the discussion from the jangle of the schools and the cavils of the market-place to the passionate persuasions of the heart and the intimate experiences of love, in which all Browning's mysticism had its root. Thus Ferishtah's pragmatic, almost philistine, doctrine of "Plot-culture," by which human life is peremptorily walled in within its narrow round of tasks, "minuteness severed from immensity," is followed by the lyric which tells how Love transcends those limits, making an eternity of time and a universe of solitude. Finally, the burden of these wayward intermittent strains of love-music is caught up, with an added intensity drawn from the poet's personal love and sorrow, in the noble Epilogue. As he listens to the call of Love, the world becomes an enchanted place, resounding with [the] triumph of good and the exultant battle-joy of heroes. But a "chill wind" suddenly disencharms the enchantment, a doubt that buoyant faith might be a mirage conjured up by Love itself:—