Garden Fancies. (Published in Hoods Magazine, July 1844.) I. The Flower’s Name. The poem describes a garden wherein to a lover’s fancy every shrub and flower is hallowed by the looks and touch of the woman he loves. One flower in particular she named by its “soft meandering Spanish name.” He bids the buds she touched to stay as they are, never to open, but to be loved for ever. Even the roses are not so fair after all, compared with the “shut pink mouth” her fingers have touched. In II., Sibrandus Schafnaburgensis, we have a garden without romance. A student takes amongst the flowers a pedantic old volume, a treatise as dry and crabbed as its title. He read it; then, for his revenge, threw the book into the crevice of a plum tree, amongst the fungi, the moss, and creeping things. Solacing himself with bread and cheese and wine, he read the jolly Rabelais to rid his brain of cobwebs. In process of time the student came to think he had been too severe with the old author, so be fished him up with a rake and put him in an appropriate place on the library shelves, there to dry-rot at ease.
Galuppi, Baldassarre. A musical composer (1706-85). See [Toccata of Galuppi’s, A].
George Bubb Dodington, Parleyings with. (Parleyings with Certain People of Importance in their Day, 1887.) [The Man.] “George Bubb Dodington (born 1691, died 1726) was the son of a gentleman of good fortune named Bubb. He was educated at Oxford, elected member of Parliament for Winchelsea in 1715, and soon after sent as envoy to Madrid. In 1720 he inherited the estate of Eastbury, in Dorsetshire, and took the name of Dodington. On his entrance into public life he connected himself with Sir Robert Walpole, to whom he addressed a poetic epistle, which later on he made, by changing the name, to serve for Lord Bute. His career was full of political vicissitudes of the most discreditable kind, by which he managed to obtain a considerable share of the prizes of politics. He held various offices, chiefly in connection with the navy, to which he was more than once treasurer. It was from Lord Bute, with whom he was a great favourite, that he received the title of Lord Melcombe. He loved to surround himself with the distinguished men of the day, whom he entertained at his country seat; and his interesting diary is a storehouse of information about the political intrigues and cabals of the time. Pope and Churchill both wrote in abuse of him, and Hogarth immortalised his wig in his Orders of Periwigs.” (Pall Mall Gazette, Jan. 18th, 1887.)
[The Poem.] Mr. Symons describes this as “a piece of sardonic irony long drawn out,” and as a “Superior Rogues’ Guide or Instructions for Knaves.” Browning satirically tells Dodington that he went the wrong way to work in his attempts to impose upon the world. Admitting the right of the statesman to “feather his own nest” while pretending to care only for the public weal, because even the birds build the kind of nests that suit their own convenience, without regard to other species, he yet declares there is a right and a wrong way even in deceiving people. “You say, my Lord, that the rabble will not believe and follow you unless you lie boldly, and pretend to be animated only by the desire to serve them; but the rabble tell lies for their own purposes daily, and understand the art as well as you do, and as no man obeys his equal, you must produce something which outdoes in this respect anything with which they are familiar.” Browning offers him a hint: wit has replaced force, now intelligence in its turn must go. “You must have a touch of the supernatural, you must awe men—not by miracles, they will not be accepted—but still, you must pretend to some secret and mysterious power, pretend that, though you know you have fools to deal with, there are some wise men amongst them who are not to be deceived, and each man will flatter himself that he is one of these.... Persuade the people that your real character was merely an assumed one. Pretend to despise, not them, but yourself. That will make men think you obey some law, ‘quite above man’s—nay, God’s!’ Missing this secret, your name is greeted with scorn.”
Note.—The Bower-bird: the name given to certain birds of the genera Ptilorhynchus and Chlamydera, which are ranked under the starling family. They are found in Australia. They are called bower-birds because they build bowers as well as nests.
Gerard. (A Blot in the ’Scutcheon.) Lord Tresham’s faithful and trusted man-servant.
Gerard de Lairesse, Parleyings with. (Parleyings with Certain People of Importance in their Day: 1877, No. VI.) [The Man.] “Gerard de Lairesse, a Flemish painter, was born at Liége in 1640. He early began his career, and produced portraits and historical pictures at the age of fifteen. He was of dissipated life, extravagant, and fond of dress, notwithstanding that he was of deformed figure. The Dutch admired him very much, and modestly called him their ‘second Raphael,’ Heemskirk being the first. He painted for many years at Amsterdam, and towards the close of his life was much troubled by his eyesight, which several times left him. He died in 1711. Very fond of teaching, he was always ready to communicate his method to students, and his name is associated with a Treatise on the Art of Painting, which it is not, however, thought that he wrote. His execution was very rapid, and there is a story told that he made a wager that he would paint, in one day, a large picture of Apollo and the Muses, and that he not only gained the wager, but painted into the picture a capital portrait of a curious bystander. His method of work was eccentric: he would prepare his canvas, and, sitting down before it, take up his violin and play for some time; then, putting down the instrument, he would rapidly sketch in the picture, and again resuming the fiddle, would derive fresh inspiration from the music.” (Pall Mall Gazette, Jan. 18th, 1887.)
[The Poem.] Browning rejoices that, though Gerard had lost his sight, his mouth was unsealed and “talked all brain’s yearning into birth.” He prizes his saying that the artist should discern abundant worth in commonplace, and not despise the vulgar things of town and country as unworthy of his art. Beyond the actual, he taught there was ever “Imagination’s limitless domain”: even dull Holland to him became Dreamland. And so in that great “Walk” of his, written after his blindness, he could evolve greater things than we with all our sight. Perhaps his sealed sight-sense left his mind free from obstruction to indulge fancies “worth all facts denied by fate.” But though we cannot see what the poets of old saw in nature when they invested trees with human attributes, and yet lost no gain of the tree, “we see deeper.” “You,” says Browning, “saw the body,—’tis the soul we see.” We can fancy, too, though fact unseen has taken the place of fancy somehow. Poets never go back at all: if the past become more precious than the present, then blame the Creator! But it can never be so. He invites Gerard to ‘walk with him and see what a poet of the present time discerns in the face of Nature, in her varying moods from daybreak till the shades of night.’ Then follows a series of magnificent descriptions of a thunderstorm in the mountains, the defiant pine tree daring all the outrage of the lightning. Then the laugh of morning, the baffled tempest, the trees shaking off the night stupor from their strangled branches. Diana, with her bow and unerring shaft; for gentle creatures, even on a morn so blithe, must writhe in pain—so pitiless is Nature still! And then the conquering noon: the mist ascends to heaven, and the filmy haze soothes the sun’s sharp glare till tyrannous noon reigns supreme. And when at last the long day dies, clouds like hosts confronting each other for battle come trooping silent. Two shapes from out the mass show prominent, as if the Macedonian flung his purple mantle on the dead Darius. And now the darkness gathers, the human heroes tread the world of cloud no longer. ’Tis a ghost appears on earth: