Melander. The author whose work “Joco-Seria” suggested the title of Mr. Browning’s volume of poems Jocoseria (q.v.).
Melon-Seller, The. (Ferishtah’s Fancies, II.) The second of the lessons learned by Ferishtah on his way to dervishhood. He sees a well-remembered face in a melon-seller near a bridge. He was once the Shah’s Prime Minister: he peculated, and was disgraced. Shocked at the contrast between what the man was and has now become, Ferishtah asks him if he did not curse God for the twelve years’ bliss he enjoyed only to end in misery like that? The beggar contemptuously asked his questioner if he were unwise enough to think him such a fool as to repine at God’s just punishment on sin, and to reproach Him with the happiness he had tasted in the past? Job said: “Shall we receive good at the hand of God, and evil not receive?” This was just what the melon-seller said. “But great wits jump”; and Ferishtah, having learned the great lesson, went his way to dervishhood. The Lyric asks for a little severity from Love: so much undeserved bliss has been imparted, that a little injustice seems requisite to balance things.
Memorabilia. (Men and Women, 1855—when the title was Memorabilia (on Seeing Shelley); Lyrics, 1863; Dramatic Lyrics, 1868.) A man with a soul crosses a vast moor, a blankness of miles, but on one hand-breadth spot he spies an eagle’s feather, which he cherishes. An eagle’s feather meant something to the man with the soul, the miles of blank moor had nothing to say to him; and so once he saw Shelley plain, and even spoke to him. The man had lived long before and had lived long after, but the sight of Shelley and the words he spoke made just that hand-breadth of his life something different from all the colourless remainder. [Some there are who love to say the same of Robert Browning!] Mr. Browning early in his youth (1825) fell under the influence of Shelley. Mr. Sharp, in his Life of Browning, says that, as he was one day passing a bookstall, “he saw, in a box of second-hand volumes, a little book advertised as ‘Mr. Shelley’s Atheistical Poem,—very scarce.’ He had never heard of Shelley, nor did he learn for a long time that the Dæmon of the World and the miscellaneous poems appended thereto constituted a literary piracy.” He discovered that there was such a poet as Shelley; that he had written several volumes, and was dead. He begged his mother to procure him Shelley’s works, which she had some difficulty in doing, as several booksellers to whom she applied knew nothing of them. The books were ultimately purchased at Ollier’s shop, in Vere Street. Shelley, as Mr. Sharp says, “enthralled” Browning. His first work, Pauline, was written under the dominance of the Shelley passion. He refers to Shelley in Sordello. Memorabilia was composed in the Roman Campagna in the winter of 1853-54.
Men and Women. (Published in 1855, in two vols.; now dispersed in vols. iii., iv. and v. of Poetical Works, 1868.) The poems included under this general title were fifty-one in number.
Vol. 1. contained the following:—“Love among the Ruins,” “A Lovers’ Quarrel,” “Evelyn Hope,” “Up at a Villa—Down in the City,” “A Woman’s Last Word,” “Fra Lippo Lippi,” “A Toccata of Galuppi’s,” “By the Fireside,” “Any Wife to any Husband,” “An Epistle of Karshish,” “Mesmerism,” “A Serenade at the Villa,” “My Star,” “Instans Tyrannus,” “A Pretty Woman,” “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came,” “Respectability,” “A Light Woman,” “The Statue and the Bust,” “Love in a Life,” “Life in a Love,” “How it Strikes a Contemporary,” “The Last Ride Together,” “The Patriot,” “Master Hugues of Saxe-Gotha,” “Bishop Blougram’s Apology,” “Memorabilia.”
Vol. II.: “Andrea del Sarto,” “Before,” “After,” “In Three Days,” “In a Year,” “Old Pictures in Florence,” “In a Balcony,” “Saul,” “De Gustibus——,” “Women and Roses,” “Protus,” “Holy-Cross Day,” “The Guardian Angel,” “Cleon,” “The Twins,” “Popularity,” “The Heretic’s Tragedy,” “Two in the Campagna,” “A Grammarian’s Funeral,” “One Way of Love,” “Another Way of Love,” “Transcendentalism,” “Misconceptions,” “One Word More.”
In the six-volume edition of Poetical Works the poems comprised under the title of Men and Women are the following, and it is these which are generally understood now by the Men and Women poems:—“Transcendentalism,” “How it Strikes a Contemporary,” “Artemis Prologuises,” “An Epistle containing the Strange Medical Experience of Karshish the Arab Physician,” “Pictor Ignotus,” “Fra Lippo Lippi,” “Andrea del Sarto,” “The Bishop orders his Tomb at St. Praxed’s Church,” “Bishop Blougram’s Apology,” “Cleon,” “Rudel to the Lady of Tripoli,” “One Word More.”
Unquestionably in these works we have the very flower of Mr. Browning’s genius. There is not one of them which the world will willingly let die. As Mr. Symons says, their distinguishing feature is “the monologue brought to perfection. Such monologues as Andrea del Sarto, or The Epistle of Karshish, never have been, and probably never will be, surpassed, on their own ground, after their own order.”
Mesmerism. (Dramatic Romances: 1855.) A description of an influence of one mind upon another, which would in modern medical parlance be termed hypnotism. When an operator has this power, and has frequently exercised it upon his subject, it is undoubtedly true that what is here described in so lifelike a manner may actually take place. The subject may have been led to expect that she would be required to undertake the journey in question, and the mind in that case would contribute to the success of the operation. Hypnosis and somnambulism are not produced by any fluid which escapes from the mesmeriser’s body, but by the fact that the subject has been induced to form a fixed idea that he is being hypnotised. Braid asserts that the imagination of the subject is an indispensable element in the success of the experiment; he declares that the most expert hypnotiser will exert himself in vain unless the subject is aware of what is passing and surrenders himself body and soul. Binet and Frere, in their valuable work on Animal Magnetism, p. 96, say that “a whole series of purely physical agents exist, which prove that sleep can be induced without the aid of the subject’s imagination, against his will, and without his knowledge.” The incidents of the poem may all be accounted for by the doctrine of expectant attention. The use of hypnotic suggestion for criminal purposes is referred to in stanzas xxvi. and xxvii.—a very real danger from a medico-legal point of view, as some think. At night, when all is quiet but the noises peculiar to the hours of darkness, the mesmeriser of the poem desires that the woman under the influence of his will-power shall forthwith make her way to him through the rain and mud straight to his house. In due time she enters without a word. Recognising the wonderful influence which one mind may exercise upon another, the operator prays that he may never abuse it, and he reflects that one day God will call him to account for its exercise.
Mihrab Shah. (Ferishtah’s Fancies, 6.) The Mystery of Evil and Pain. An inquirer, while culling herbs, has had his thumb nipped by a scorpion. He wishes to know “Why needs a scorpion be? Why, in fact, needs any evil or pain happen to man if God be wholly good and omnipotent?” Ferishtah replies that when he awoke in the morning he was thankful that his head did not tumble off his neck. “But,” says the inquirer, “heads do not fall unchopped.” Says the dervish, “They might do so by natural law; why might not a staff loosed from the hand spring skyward as naturally as it falls to the ground?” What would be the bond ’twixt man and man if pain were abolished? Take away from man thanks to God and love to man, what is he worth? The lyric explains the compensations of existence. The ardent soul is enshrined in feeble flesh, the sluggish soul in a robust frame. What one person lacks is found in another, and this creates a bond of sympathy between our spirits. No one has everything. What we lack we admire when present in another, and so our own defects are pardoned for what in us is excellent.