"HOW THEY BROUGHT THE GOOD NEWS FROM GHENT TO AIX"

Pp. 550 f. Browning said: "There is no sort of historical foundation about Good News from Ghent. I wrote it under the bulwark of a vessel off the African coast, after I had been at sea long enough to appreciate even the fancy of a gallop on the back of a certain good horse 'York,' then in my stable at home." But the imaginary object of this imaginary ride was apparently, in Browning's intention, the conveyance of the news of the "Pacification de Gant," a treaty of union of Holland, Zealand, and the southern Netherlands against Spain. As this was concluded in 1576, the date 16 at the head of the poem is perhaps

due to a failure of memory, just as some of the towns mentioned as lying on the route between Ghent and Aix are really not on the shortest and best route. The ride can easily be traced on the map; the distance is somewhat more than ninety miles.

SAUL

Pp. 552 ff. These two consecutive cantos from Saul give David's discussion of the power and love of God, ending in the prophetic vision of the GodMan, Christ. He has examined the works of God carefully and discovers in them evidences of law, wisdom, love, the will and the power to redeem mankind.

MY LAST DUCHESS

Pp. 554 f. This dramatic monologue is one of Browning's most successful efforts in this form of poetry.

The Duke of Ferrara is supposed to be talking with an ambassador who has been sent by an unnamed Count to discuss with him a proposition of marriage with the Count's daughter. When the poem opens, they are returning from the place of discussion to the company awaiting them (cf. 11. 47-48), and the Duke, as if by mere chance, calls attention to a picture, and explains, as coolly as if he had no personal concern in the matter, that this is the picture of his last Duchess, whose "smiles" he had ordered "stopped," because she had a heart "too soon made glad" and had wounded his pride by setting no higher value upon what he gave her than upon the trifling gifts of others. He puts her offence purely as one against taste and family pride. The object of the conversation is, of course, to let the ambassador understand what his next Duchess may expect if she fails to rate highly enough the honor of being his wife.

Fra Pandolf and Claus of Innsbruck are names invented by the poet.

A GRAMMARIAN'S FUNERAL

Pp. 555 f. At the revival of classical learning in Europe the revelation of the rich and highly developed life and literatures of ancient Greece and Rome affected many men like the discovery of a new world. Some, like Erasmus (see Green's Short History of the English People) and the Grammarian of Browning's poem (see J. A. Symonds, The Revival of Learning, or J. Burkhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance, Pt. III), were ready to make all sorts of sacrifices, even to going without

sufficient food, in order to devote their lives to these fascinating studies. The Grammarian is at heart an idealist and a poet, bewildered by this wonderful new world, and so entangled in the preliminaries to acquiring and applying the new ideals of life that he dies before he has completed his preparations for living. His enthusiasm and idealism he has communicated to his pupils, and a company of them bear his body on their shoulders to its last resting place. One of them is the speaker in the poem. He discusses the ideals and aims of his master and asserts that his life was not a failure, but a triumph. This is a favorite theme with Browning (cf. Abt Vogler (p. 567), Apparent Failure, and many other passages).

The poem is not difficult if the reader remembers that here, as in many other poems, Browning's speaker uses the rapid changes of tone and syntactical structure of conversation. This makes it necessary to watch the punctuation closely, as it is intended to hint at the tone and voice inflection. Note especially the parentheses and quotations.

1. 95. Hydroplic means "afflicted with such a

thirst that the more one drinks the more he thirsts."

"CHILDE ROLAND TO THE DARK TOWER CAME"

Pp. 556 ff. Many have insisted upon regarding this poem as an allegory and have tried to find the allegorical meaning of each detail. Browning declared it was not so intended, but was a dramatic poem suggested by the words of the title. He admitted, however, that it might be regarded as having a symbolic significance suggesting faithfulness to any high moral quest in spite of the failure or desertion or treachery of companions, the interference of obstacles and dangers of all sorts, and the uncertainty of the final outcome. It seems also safe to recognize in ll. 175 ff. a suggestion of the sort of moral crisis that is not known as such until one is brought suddenly and unescapably into it, and when courage even if only the courage with which a brave soul fronts the inevitable is the only safe counselor. The right way to read the poem is to attend consciously only to its plain dramatic meaning; it will inevitably suggest to the emotions all the symbolic significance it has.

P. 557. l. 12. Notice that there is only a comma at the end of this line; the sentence goes on. Notice also II. 30, 132. Notice further that the "No" of 1. 61 is very closely connected with ul. 58-60.

P. 558. 1. So. Colloped usually means lying

in folds of fat, but here it is used of the folds or ridges of the horse's gaunt, withered neck.

P. 559. I. 192. This line, though in quotation marks, is not spoken, but represents the supposed attitude of the hills, watching to see the adversary slay Childe Roland.

1. 203. Browning's fancy was sometimes captured by an old or odd word, and he used it without knowing exactly what it meant. Slug-horn is due to a misunderstanding of an old spelling of the word slogan. Browning seems to have got it from Chatterton, who uses it several times; cf. Skeat's ed., II, pp. 42, 64, 125, 129, 132, 199, and especially 162:

"Some caught a slug-horn, and an onset wound." (Battle of Hastings II, xi.)

FRA LIPPO LIPPI

"Poor brother Lippo" (i.e., Filippo) was in reality a great Florentine painter of the Quattrocento (fifteenth century), whose character and career are very accurately given in this poem. He was born in 1406, according to Berenson, and died in 1469. His teacher was Lorenzo Monaco, the Brother Lorenzo of 1. 236, but he owes much more to Masaccio (= Hulking Tom (1. 277), the nickname of Tommaso Guidi), five years his senior, whom Browning mistakenly makes his pupil. He was also somewhat influenced by Fra Angelico (1387-1455), who is mentioned in l. 235. Lippo's comments on Giotto in the poem are, of course, unfair, and were intended by Browning to be so.

The cloister of the Carmine (1. 7) was then outside the city, a little south and west of the Ponte alla Carraia. When the poem opens, Fra Lippo is at work for Cosimo de' Medici in what is now the Palazzo Riccardi. As this palace was built in 1430 and Fra Lippo seems to be engaged in decorating the walls, the imaginary date of the poem is apparently before Fra Lippo left the cloister in 1432, as, indeed, 1. 7 seems to indicate.

The other places mentioned are in or near Florence. The church of San Lorenzo (St. Laurence, 1. 67) is less than a hundred yards from "the house that caps the corner" (1. 18). The convent of the Preaching Friars (l. 140), or Dominicans, better known as that of San Marco, is a few hundred yards north of San Lorenzo; Camaldoli, the seat of the Camaldolese monks (l. 139), lies about twenty miles east, while Prato (1. 324) is twelve miles northwest.

For the facts of Fra Lippo's career Browning relied upon the latest edition of Vasari's Lives of

the Painters (G. Vasari, Delle Vile de' più Eccellenti Piltori, etc.), which misled him in regard to Masaccio. The snatches of song in the poem are said to be modeled on the type of folk song called stornello (pl. stornelli), though they do not conform to the examples I have seen. The picture conceived for Sant' Ambrogio's church (ll. 346 ff.) is the Coronation of the Virgin, now in the Accademia delle Belle Arti. The words Iste perfecit opus (1. 377, "This one painted the picture") are on a scroll pointing towards the figure of the monk.

The information just given may satisfy some natural curiosity about certain details. The poem itself, however, can be understood without this introduction; it, indeed, contains all the elements necessary to its interpretation as a poem. Browning has two objects in the poem: (1) to give a vivid dramatic presentation of the psychology of this type of artist and the conditions of his life in fifteenth century Italy; (2) to use him as a mouthpiece for some interesting and important views about realistic art.

ONE WORD MORE

Pp. 564 ff. This poem was, as ll. 1-2 indicate, the final poem of the volumes entitled Men and Women (2 vols., 1855). It is a tribute to the poet's wife, as clear and simple as it is beautiful. Its general theme is stated in 11. 96-99 and 184-186. Notes on a few details may be interesting : 1. 5. Nothing is known of Rafael's (1483-1520) century of sonnets; according to Browning it disappeared while in the hands of Guido Reni (b. 1575, d. 1642).

1. 10. Who that one? Rafael's lady was Margareta (la Fornarina), whose likeness appears in many of his pictures.

P. 565. 1. 32. Dante's account of his beginning to draw an angel on the completion of Beatrice's first year "in the life eternal" is given in The New Life (La Vita Nuova), section xxxv (see Professor Norton's translation, pp. 74 ff., and his note on p. 163).

1. 46. Browning called one of his own works Parleyings with Certain People of Importance in Their Day (pub. 1887).

1. 57. Bice (pronounced "Bee'chè") is a loveform of Beatrice.

P. 566. 1. 148. Fiesole, cf. notes on Landor's A Fiesolan Idyl.

1. 150. Samminiato, a popular form of San Miniato, a small mountain southwest of Florence, famous for its scenery and its church.

P. 567. l. 163-165. Zoroaster and Galileo are

named as types of those who studied the moon as scientists; Homer and Keais as poets who wrote about it. Galileo's discovery of the mountains in the moon was one of the most famous results of the use of the telescope. Keats's Endymion is the most notable version of the well-known myth of the loves of Endymion and the moon goddess.

ABT VOGLER

Georg Joseph Vogler (b. 1749 at Würzburg, d. 1814 at Darmstadt) was the son of a violin maker and was early devoted to the career of musician. He studied in Germany and Italy and taught and directed in Germany and Sweden. While in Rome he entered the priesthood and was appointed Apostolic Protonotary and Chamberlain. He was court chaplain and master of the chapel at Mannheim and Stockholm, and established schools of music at both places. He composed a great deal of music, but his principal interest for us is in his career as virtuoso. Having made a good many simplifications in the pipe organ, which resulted in a portable organ about nine feet in height, depth, and breadth, named by him an "orchestrion," he visited Denmark, Holland, and England with it and gave organ recitals with much success. This is the instrument upon which he has been improvising when Browning's poem opens (cf. 1. 2).

The central ideas of the poem are expressed in 11. 69-82.

The musician has just built up with his playing a beautiful structure of music, as wonderful both in result and in mode of accomplishment as the legendary palace built by Solomon for the princess he loved. He reflects upon these resemblances (ll. 1-40), expressing first the wish (1. 9) that this palace of music might be permanent, not doomed to perish as the notes of the improvisation die away. Then (ll. 41-56) he contrasts the rational, intelligible processes of other arts - painting, poetry, etc. with the mysterious and divine creative processes of music. Then he returns to the question whether music even improvised music does really perish when the tones cease here on earth, and he finds in his soul's demand for personal immortality (ll. 63-64) the assurance that music, and all that is good and beautiful, must exist eternally in and through the power and love of the Ineffable Name; and finds in the necessity for the completion of the incomplete and the final success of apparent earthly failure triumphant "evidence for the fulness of the days" (11. 65-82), the reality of eternity. And conformably to what is said of the nearness of God to the musician in ll.

49-56, he declares in 11. 81-88 the divine revelation of these truths to musicians.

The rest of the poem is a real, and at the same time symbolic, return from these exalted thoughts and feelings through the emotional effects of music to the plane and the duties of common human life. 1. 3. Legends of Solomon's skill in magic arose very early out of what the Bible says of his wisdom. The Talmudists inferred from the simple Biblical statement that no sound of a hammer was heard in the building of the Temple, that he must have used supernatural means, and they devised a story of a wonderful animal that cut stone and glass and iron, discovered by Solomon by means of his knowledge of the language of birds (see S. Baring-Gould's Myths of the Middle Ages and Legends of the Patriarchs and Prophets). Later legends, hinted at in the Koran, put him in control of armies of angels and demons, able to execute every command.

1. 5. The demons had or assumed all shapes. 1. 7. The belief that the real name of God was unspeakable goes back to ancient Hebrew times or at least to a time earlier than the Septuagint version of the Old Testament; see any good encyclopædia under Jehovah or Jahveh.

P. 568. 1. 18. If crest here means anything more than "head" or "creature," it is used to imply the different natures or groups represented by different crests or cognizances.

1. 22. The lighting of the lamps around St. Peter's dome (1. 23) used, it is said, to be one of the great sights of Rome on festal occasions.

1. 34. Protoplast is usually taken here to mean "model" or "mold." It seems rather to mean "creator," "first maker," as in Browning's other use of it in Fifine, cxxiv.

1. 42. visibly, as if he had really seen the structure of music.

1. 51. this = the art of music.

P. 569. ll. 91-96. The symbolism of this passage is clear. The efforts of commentators to indicate the succession of chords are not entirely satisfactory. In 1. 91 the common chord seems to mean the basal chord of the tonality in which he had been improvising, for he would hardly have begun his descent to the C Major of this life from any other tonality. That this was not itself C Major, as some suppose, is probable; for what reason would there then be for sliding into the minor and the ninth before finding the resting place in C Major? What seems clear is that, beginning on the heights of feeling induced by his improvisation, the musician resumes the tonality in which he was improvising and, modulating by semi-tones,

AE

slips into the minor, which characteristically arouses emotions of unrest, incompleteness, and longing; but he resolutely blunts this with the inharmonic ninth, and then resolves this into C Major- the tonality of common human life.

RABBI BEN EZRA

Rabbi Ben Ezra, or Ibn Ezra, was born in Spain about 1090. He travelled in Africa, the Holy Land, Persia, India, Italy, France, and England, and was a scholar and a poet. Some of the ideas which Browning here puts into his mouth were really expressed by him in his poems and his commentaries on the Bible.

THE EPILOGUE TO ASOLANDO

Pp. 572 f. The volume of which this little poem is the epilogue was published the day of Browning's death, December 12, 1889. It contemplates his own death and the feelings which his friends will have about it, and rejects their imagined pity, declaring that as on earth he was one who never feared or doubted, so after death he will continue his career, asking only that his friends cheer him though unseen and speed him onward. Note the contrast between midnight (1. 1) and noonday (1. 16).

WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY

Pp. 573 ff. A typical John Bull among writers, Thackeray is nowhere more Bull-ish than in dealing with his fellow-humorist. The key to all that he has to say about Sterne is found in the last sentence of the selection; his mid-Victorian sense of what is due the conventions will not permit him to discuss Sterne without saying that he prefers Dickens for his children. This personal bias, on moral, not literary, grounds, pervades his presentation of the character. His study is not unsympatheticfar from it; it is appreciative, even kindly, but it never for a moment abandons the position of a paterfamilias in a frock-coat. He is scandalized - and, one may admit, not without reason; all the more scandalized because Sterne was a clergyman. Compare his study with Stevenson's treatment of Villon, pp. 662 ff.

The essay quoted is a good example of Thackeray's vigorous and genial English, his bluffness suffused with sentiment, his happy faculty of choosing the material that will give to his presentation vitality and charin.

ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH

Pp. 578 ff. Clough perhaps gave fuller and sincerer expression than any other poet to the religious doubt and unrest characteristic of the middle of the nineteenth century. Others-even at their sincerest give us only the conclusions they have reached and such steps in the progress of their thought as they think profitable for us; Clough allows us to be with him in all his falterings, his waverings, his inconsistencies. In Easter Day, we have, to be sure, first the doubts and then the faith, but in The Questioning Spirit and its sequel, Bethesda, the moods are reversed. In this sincerity lies his great value. He was a poetic thinker but only too seldom a poetic artist. This may have been due in part to his sincerity - his recording at the moment the thoughts of the moment. "All immortal verse," says William Sharp, "is a poetic resurrection," and he quotes Schiller as saying that "to live again in the serene beauty of art, it is needful that things should first die in reality."

QUA CURSUM VENTUS

The title is a phrase from Vergil's Eneid, III, 269, and means "whithersoever the wind directs the course." The situation in the Eneid bears no resemblance to that set forth in this poem. There Æneas, in relating his adventures, tells how he left the islands called the Strophades; "The winds," he says, "spread wide our sails; over the foaming waves we flee, whither the wind and the helmsman direct our course:"

Tendunt vela Noti; fugimus spumantibus undis, Qua cursum ventusque gubernatorque vocabat.

Our poem presents, under the figure of two ships that sail away into the night and are unintentionally separated, the common experience of friends who unintentionally and unwittingly drift apart in thought and feeling.

JOHN RUSKIN

THE STONES OF VENICE

Pp. 582 ff. Ruskin was a combination of types rarely combined an artist and a reformer. Fundamentally, he was an artist; but as he was not content to observe and study and love the beautiful things that exist, but wished to see all the world beautiful, he inevitably joined the ranks of those who strive to hasten by human and arti

ficial means the golden age when all hateful and hideous things shall be unknown.

Himself trained as a painter, Ruskin used words as he used pigments, to build up a composition that would convey an impression of objectivity colored by personality, very much as a painting of the same subject would do. For this reason his description of St. Mark's is one of the most wonderful pieces of word-painting ever produced. As he is writing for English readers to whom the word cathedral is rich in associations - and associations altogether foreign to the scene he is about to describe - he prepares the way by summing up the characteristic features of an English cathedral. Having set forth and banished these, he feels still that the reader's mind is not sufficiently ready to receive emotionally the impression of a church so unlike any other, and he prepares the way further by a long description of the incongruous scenes.crowded into the paved alley leading to the piazza. And when expectation can bear no more, 'we forget them all, for between those pillars there opens a great light. . . ."

Observe that the description of the cathedral itself fills only half a page, while almost as much space is devoted to contrasting it with the people who live round about it, and three times as much space is given to preparing for the description. But the word-picture, short as it is, is as vividly colored as any piece of English prose; it gives a clear impression of the general appearance of the church, and of its structure from the ground to the spires, and it bathes the whole scene in an atmosphere of suggestion by means of the words used, much as a painter gets atmospheric effects by combinations of color.

THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE

Pp. 584 ff. The selection from The Crown of Wild Olive, though it contains less wonderful descriptive writing, is quite as beautiful in its way, and fully as characteristic of Ruskin. It shows the strength of his bitter hostility to the economic waste that produced nothing but ugliness for the expenditure of labor. It reveals the artist as an economist, a socialist, a lover of his fellow-men, and a wanderer in lonely paths of thought; and it contains a doctrine that he was eager to impress upon the hearts of his readers. The value of Ruskin's work grows with the growing recognition of political economy as the science, not of wealth, but of social well-being.

The meaning of the title is explained in the last paragraph of the selection.