Development. (Asolando, 1889.) Mr. Sharp, in his admirable Life of Browning, says that the poet’s father was a man of exceptional powers. He was a poet both in sentiment and expression; and he understood, as well as enjoyed, the excellent in art. He was a scholar, too, in a reputable fashion; not indifferent to what he had learnt in his youth, nor heedless of the high opinion generally entertained for the greatest writers of antiquity, but with a particular care himself for Horace and Anacreon. As his son once told a friend, “The old gentleman’s brain was a storehouse of literary and philosophical antiquities. He was completely versed in mediæval legend, and seemed to have known Paracelsus, Faustus, and even Talmudic personages, personally.” Development, indeed! That the embryonic mediæval lore of the banker’s clerk should have potentially contained the treasures of Paracelsus, Sordello, and Rabbi Ben Hakkadosh, is as wonderful as that the primary cell should contain the force which gathers to itself the man.
Notes.—Philip Karl Buttmann was a distinguished German philologist, born at Frankfort-on-the-Main, 1764, and died at Berlin, 1829. He studied at Göttingen, and in 1796 was appointed secretary of the Royal Library at Berlin. His fame rests on his Griechische Grammatik, the Ausführliche Griechische Sprachlehre, and the Lexilogus oder Beiträge zur Griechischen Worterklärung. These works are ranked highly for their exact criticism. He brought out valuable editions of Plato’s Dialogues and the Meidias of Demosthenes. Friedrich August Wolf, the great critic, was born at Haynrode, near Nordhausen, in 1759; he died in 1824. He studied philology at Göttingen, and published an edition of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, with notes, in 1778. He filled the chair of philology and pedagogial science at Halle for twenty-three years. In 1806 he repaired to Berlin. His fame chiefly rests on his Prolegomena in Homerum, which was devoted to the argument that the Iliad and the Odyssey are not the work of one single and individual Homer, but a much later compilation of hymns sung and handed down by oral tradition. Its effect was overwhelming. Stagirite == Aristotle. “The Ethics” == the Nicomachean Ethics, the great work of Aristotle. “Battle of the Frogs and Mice,” a mock epic attributed to Homer. “The Margites,” a humorous poem, which kept its ground down to the time of Aristotle as the work of Homer; it began with the words, “There came to Colophon an old man, a divine singer, servant of the Muses and Apollo.”
Dîs Aliter Visum; or, Le Byron de Nos Jours. “Dîs aliter visum” is from Virgil, Æn. ii. 428, and means “Heaven thought not so.” (Dramatis Personæ, 1864.) The poem describes a meeting of two friends after a parting of ten years. They should have been more than friends: they were made for each other’s love; but love came in a guise which was not acceptable, and the heart which the man might have won, and the love which would have blessed him and ennobled his life, was for reasons of prudence disregarded, and both lovers went their way, having missed their life’s chance. It is the woman who speaks—the “poor, pretty, thoughtful thing” of other days; a woman who tried to love and understand art and literature—to love all, at any rate, that was great and good and beautiful. She wonders if he—the man who might have completed his partial life with a great love—ever for a moment valued her rightly, and determined that “love found, gained and kept,” was for him beyond art and sense and fame? She was young and inexperienced in the world’s ways; he was old and full of wisdom: too wise, perhaps, to see where his best interests lay. It would never do, he thought—a match “’twixt one bent, wigged and lamed——and this young beauty, round and sound as a mountain apple.” And so they parted. He chose a lower ideal, she married where she could not love; so the devil laughed in his sleeve, for not two only, but four souls were in jeopardy.
The poem is a good example of the poet’s way of drawing from a half-serious, half-bantering and indifferent confession of thoughts and feelings one of his great moral lessons. It has been compared to what is termed vers de société, and as such, up to stanza xxiii., it may be fitly described; then comes Mr. Browning’s sudden uprising to his highest power. It is as though he had lightly touched on the ways of men, and discussed them half-playfully with some light-hearted, not to say frivolous, audience in a drawing-room. The listeners stand smiling, and speculating as to his real meaning, when all at once he rises from his chair and brings in a moment before the thoughtless group of listeners the great and awful import of life, and the real meaning of the things which men call trifles, but which in God’s sight are big with the interests of Eternity. So, in this poem he leads us from pretty talk of “Heine for songs and kisses,” “gout, glory, and love freaks, love’s dues, and consols,” to one of his grandest life-lessons—the necessary incompleteness of all human existence here, because heaven must finish what earth can never complete,—the supreme evolution of the soul of man. Earth completes her star-fishes; Heaven itself could make no more perfect or more beautiful star-fish:
“He, whole in body and soul, outstrips
Man, found with either in default.”
The star-fish is whole. What is whole can increase no more. It has nothing to do but waste and die, and there is an end of it.
“Leave Now for dogs and apes!
Man has Forever.”
On the side of the man in the poem it could be fairly argued that a more unreasonable match could hardly be imagined than one between a “bent, wigged and lame” old gentleman and a “poor, pretty, thoughtful” young beauty, notwithstanding her offer of body and soul.
Notes.—viii., Robert Schumann, musical critic and composer: was born 1810, died 1856. Jean August Dominique Ingres (born 1780, died 1867). “The modern man that paints,” a celebrated historical painter, a pupil of David. He was opposed to the Romantic School, and depended for success on form and line. “His paintings, with all their cleverness, appear to English eyes deficient in originality of conception, coarse, hard and artificial in manner, and untrue in colour” (Imp. Dict. Biog.), xii., “The Fortieth spare Arm-chair.” This refers to the French Academy, founded by Richelieu in 1635. When one of the forty members dies a new one is elected to fill his place.
Djabal. (Return of the Druses.) The son of the Emir, who seeks revenge for the murder of his family, and declares himself to be the Hakim—who is to set the Druse people free. He loves the maiden Anael, and when she dies stabs himself on her dead body.