I asked Mr. Browning if the beast of the tapestry was the beast of the poem; and he said yes, and descanted somewhat on his lean monstrosity. But only a Browning could have evolved the stanzas of the poem from the woven image. I further asked him if he had said that he only wrote Childe Roland for its realistic imagery, without any moral purpose,—a notion to which Mrs. Sutherland Orr has given currency; and he protested that he never had. When I asked him if constancy to an ideal—'He that endureth to the end shall be saved'—was not a sufficient understanding of the central purpose of the poem, he said, 'Yes, just about that.'"
Page 337. Artemis Prologizes.
Mrs. Orr prints in her Handbook a note from Browning with reference to the attacks upon him for the form he adopted in the printing of Greek names. It is in reply to an article in the Nineteenth Century, for January, 1886, written by Mr. Frederick Harrison. "I have just noticed," wrote Browning, "in this month's Nineteenth Century that it is inquired by a humorous objector to the practice of spelling (under exceptional conditions) Greek proper names as they are spelled in Greek literature, why the same principle should not be adopted by Ægyptologists, Hebraists, Sanscrittists, Aceadians, Moabites, Hittites, and Cuneiformists? Adopt it by all means whenever the particular language enjoyed by any fortunate possessor of these shall, like Greek, have been for about three hundred years insisted upon in England, as an acquisition of paramount importance at school and college, for every aspirant to distinction in learning, even at the cost of six or seven years' study—a sacrifice considered well worth making for even an imperfect acquaintance with the most perfect language in the world. Further, it will be adopted whenever the letters substituted for those in ordinary English use shall do no more than represent to the unscholarly what the scholar accepts without scruple, when, for the hundredth time, he reads the word which, for once, he has occasion to write in English, and which he concludes must be as euphonic as the rest of a language renowned for euphony. And finally, the practice will be adopted whenever the substituted letters effect no sort of organic change, so as to jostle the word from its pride of place in English verse or prose. 'Themistokles' fits in quietly everywhere, with or without the 'k;' but in a certain poetical translation I remember by a young friend, of the Anabasis, beginning thus felicitously, 'Cyrus the Great and Artaxerxes (Whose temper bloodier than a Turk's is) Were children both of the mild, pious, And happy monarch King Darius; who fails to see that, although a correct 'Kuraush' may pass, yet 'Darayavash' disturbs the metre as well as the rhyme? It seems, however, that 'Themistokles' may be winked at; not so the 'harsh and subversive "Kirke."' But let the objector ask somebody with no knowledge to subvert, how he supposes 'Circe' is spelled in Greek, and the answer will be, 'With a soft c.' Inform him that no such letter exists, and he guesses, 'Then with s, if there be anything like it.' Tell him that to eye and ear equally, his own k answers the purpose, and you have at all events taught him that much, if little enough—and why does he live unless to learn a little!" This note is signed "R. B." Its date is January 4, 1886.
Page 341. Johannes Agricola in Meditation.
"'Antinomians, so denominated for rejecting the Law as a thing of no use under the Gospel dispensation: they say, that good works do not further, nor evil works hinder salvation; that the child of God cannot sin, that God never chastiseth him, that murder, drunkenness, etc., are sins in the wicked but not in him, that the child of grace being once assured of salvation, afterwards never doubteth, ... that God doth not love any man for his holiness, that sanctification is no evidence of justification, etc. Pontanus, in his Catalogue of Heresies, says John Agricola was the author of this sect, A. D. 1535.' Dictionary of all Religions, 1704."
"Browning," says Mr. Cooke, "does not correctly represent the teachings of Agricola, though his poem is correct so far as many Antinomians are concerned. Agricola held that the Law and the Gospel are incompatible, that the Law is only for the Jew, and that the spirit of Christ abolishes it for the Christian. The moral obligations, however, he held were for the Christian as much as for any other person. In the New Testament he found all the principles and motives necessary to give true impulse and guidance to the Christian. It was the use made of his teachings by fanatics which cast an odium on the name of Antinomians; and it is this fanatical and sentimental religion which Browning has interpreted correctly in his poem. Many of the Antinomians taught what is attributed to them in the Dictionary of all Religions, from which Browning quoted when his poem was first published."
Page 348. The Bishop Orders His Tomb.
"I know no other piece of modern English, prose or poetry, in which there is so much told, as in these lines, of the Renaissance spirit,—its worldliness, inconsistency, pride, hypocrisy, ignorance of itself, love of art, of luxury, and of good Latin. It is nearly all that I said of the central Renaissance in thirty pages of the Stones of Venice, put into as many lines, Browning's being also the antecedent work. The worst of it is that this kind of concentrated writing needs so much solution before the reader can fairly get the good of it, that people's patience fails them, and they give the thing up as insoluble; though, truly, it ought to be to the current of common thought like Saladin's talisman, dipped in clear water, not soluble altogether, but making the element medicinal." [John Ruskin.]
Page 387. Is not his love at issue still with sin.
In the first edition there followed this line: Closed with and cast and conquered, crucified.