PROEM TO DRAMATIC IDYLLS (SECOND SERIES).

The second series of Dramatic Idylls was published in 1880. Compare these lines with Hamlet, iii. 2. 339 fol. : "Why, look you now, how unworthy a thing you make of me! You would play upon me; you would seem to know my stops; you would pluck out the heart of my mystery; you would sound me from my lowest note to the top of my compass and there is much music, excellent voice in this little organ; yet cannot you make it speak. 'Sblood, do you think I am easier to be played on than a pipe?"

6. The lights. The organs of breathing. The word is properly applied only to the lungs of brute animals. Of course its use here is a part of the mockery of the passage.

PIPPA PASSES.

"The most simple and varied of Browning's plays-that which shows every side of his genius, has most lightness and strength, and, all in all, may be termed a representative poem-is the beautiful drama with the quaint title of Pippa Passes. It is a cluster of four scenes, with prologue, epilogue, and interludes; half prose, half poetry, varying with the refinement of the dialogue. Pippa is a delicately pure, good, blithesome peasant maid. "T is but a little black-eyed, pretty singing Felippa, gay silk-winding girl,'-though with token, ere the end, that she is child of a nobleman, put out of the way by a villain, Maffeo, at instigation of the next heir. Pippa knows nothing of this, but is piously content with her life of toil. It is New-Year's day at Asolo. She springs from bed, in her garret chamber, at sunrise, resolved to enjoy to the full her sole holiday. She will not 'squander a wavelet' of it, not a 'mite of her twelve hours' treasure.' Others can be happy throughout the year: haughty Ottima and Sebald, the lovers on the hill; Jules and Phene, the artist and his bride; Luigi and his mother; Monsignor, the Bishop; but Pippa has only this one day to enjoy. She envies these great ones a little, but reflects that God's love is best after all. And yet, how little can she do! How can she possibly affect the world? Thus she muses, and goes out, singing, to her holiday and the sunshine. Now, it so happens that she passes, this day, each of the groups of persons we have named, at an important crisis in their lives, and they hear her various carols as she trills them forth in the innocent gladness of her heart. Sebald and Ottima have murdered the latter's aged husband, and are unremorseful in their guilty love. Jules is the victim of a fraud practised by his rival artists, who have put in his way a young girl, a paid model, whom he believes to be a pure and cultured maiden. He has married her, and just discov ered the imposture. Luigi is hesitating whether to join a patriotic con

spiracy. Monsignor is tempted by Maffeo to overlook his late brother's murder, for the sake of the estates, and to utterly ruin Pippa. .

"All these persons are vitally affected-have their lives changed-merely by Pippa's weird and suggestive songs, coming, as if by accident, upon their hearing at the critical moment. With certain reservations this is a strong and delicate conception, admirably worked" (Stedman, Victorian Poets, p. 315 fol.).

It is most important, in order to judge the work of a poet with fairness or even with intelligence, that we should be able to measure him by his own standard. In plain English, we must know what he means to do. This seems so axiomatic as to be superfluous statement; but much recent criticism fails to hit the mark, because it fails to distinguish between the artist's conception and the artist's execution. It is sheer nonsense to scold Emerson because he does not write like Milton, or condemn George Eliot because she has not the method of Fielding.

The first question to be asked about Mr. Browning's dramas, then, is not "How do they compare with the dramas of Shakespeare ?" but rather "What is their conception?" or, if we like, "How do they compare in conception with those of Shakespeare?" Let us concede at the outset that the mere passage of three hundred years will have a tendency to alter some of the forms which were thought fundamental in the Elizabethan drama. For example, it is true that Shakespeare makes all his persons speak in character. So excellent a critic as Mr. Stedman falls into the error of judging Browning's work by the standard of the old demand. He says of Pippa Passes, "The usual fault is present: the characters, whether students, peasants, or soldiers, all talk like sages; Pippa reasons like a Paracelsus in pantalettes, her intellectual songs are strangely put in the mouth of an ignorant, silk-winding girl; Phene is more natural, though mature even for Italy, at fourteen. Browning's children are old as himself; he rarely sees them objectively." Now the simple fact that Pippa does not speak in the least like a mill-girl is evident to the most cursory reader of ten lines of her opening soliloquy. Surely what one who runs may read cannot have escaped Mr. Browning's attention. He knows that there is no verisimilitude in his dramas. He lives in a world of plain men and women and he knows how they talk, as scores of his poems testify. It must be, then, that this departure from actual dialect is deliberate. Whether we like or approve it or not, here it is, to be accounted for. It may seem arrogance to attempt to explain the method of a living poet, but nothing else remains as reply to such a criticism.

In his Essay on Shelley, Browning speaks of one class of poets as striving towards "Not what man sees, but what God sees.' This seems the key to the whole matter. Browning does not try to represent the facts of life as they appear to the man who is not a poet. That can be done in prose. If photography be the ultimate art, then we may as well be done at once with painting and sculpture. But, like the other fine arts, poetry is born to express that most difficult of expression-the inexpressible, as we say. So when Browning's great, full, rich soliloquy springs from the lips of the silk-winding girl, it aims to be simply the truest ex

pression of all the wild, free joys and quivering fears which press upon her heart unuttered. She is a dumb creature. In point of fact, she could not voice one of those million emotions. But poetry has come that the human heart may have speech. Like the gospel, it preaches liberty to the captive. The poet sees as God sees, and says as God might say.

Once granting the poet's right to such a method, we shall be broader critics. It is by such a standard that Browning's claims judgment.

Of course dramas constructed on this theory will not succeed on the stage. Mr. Browning's have not succeeded. The moment actual men and women begin to speak the words which the poet puts into their mouths, the discrepancy appears between their speech and their power of speech. There is a fatal confusion of two artistic methods. But let the lines tell their own story, in the closet, and Pippa and Ottima and Colombe and Gerald and Chiappino will become more real than any mere external verisimilitude could make them. For these creatures are learned, and recognized not by their clothes, but by their souls.

The author's dedication of the drama is as follows:

I DEDICATE

MY BEST INTENTIONS, IN THIS POEM, MOST ADMIRINGLY TO THE AUTHOR OF “ION,”—

MOST AFFECTIONATELY TO

MR. SERGEANT TALFOURD.

R. B.

Asolo, the scene of the drama, is nineteen miles northwest of Treviso, and somewhat more than thirty miles from Venice. It is finely situated on a hill, and is encircled by a wall flanked with towers. It has an old cathedral, and the ruins of a Roman aqueduct. Silk-growing and spinning are the chief industries of the region. In the country between Trent and Verona, 120,000 pounds of silk are annually produced.

PROLOGUE. 1. Day. The lengthening and hastening lines are descriptive of the rapid dawn.

20. Asolo. The accent properly falls on the second syllable, but Browning puts it on the first. Cf. 42 and 64 below.

40. Feel. Used in Middle English in the sense of feeling, and colloquially so now.

45. Her Sebald's homage. For the argument of the play, and summary of each episode, see the extract from Stedman's Victorian Poets above. 62. Monsignor. A bishop, as well as lord of his brother's estates. 88. Martagon. A species of lily (Lilium martagon).

89. St. Agnes. She was a virgin martyr of the 4th century. She was remarkable for her beauty, and excited the admiration of all the noble youth of Rome; but she resolved to live as the spouse of Christ, and at last died rather than give herself in marriage. She is kept in the memory of the world of letters, if in no other way, by Keats's poem, The Eve of St. Agnes. Pippa has in mind some picture in the cathedral.

94. Dusk green universe. The depths of ocean. ii. 51 below.

Cf. "Swart green,"

100. Weevil and chafer. Small, destructive insects of the beetle family. The latter is more commonly called the cockchafer.

102. Gibe. Flout. Cf. Shakespeare, A. and C. ii. 2. 74:

"and with taunts

Did gibe my missive out of audience."

120. Luca. The decrepit and hated husband of Ottima.

131. Possagno church. Possagno was the birthplace of Canova, and the church was designed by him. It is in the form of a circular temple. It contains his tomb, and an altar-piece by him. As Possagno is but four miles from Asolo, and as the memory of Canova is worshipped in all the region, nothing could be more natural than that a wedding—especially that of an artist-should take place in that church.

166. Our turret. Probably one of the ruined towers of the old walls. 169. Each to each. The mother and Luigi, not the lizards.

170. As brooding bird to bird. Browning is especially happy in his observation of birds. Cf. Home Thoughts from Abroad:

"That's the wise thrush; he sings each song twice over,
Lest you should think he never could recapture

The first, fine, careless rapture."

66

Stedman says of that passage: Having in mind Shakespeare and Shelley, I nevertheless think [these] lines the finest ever written touching the song of a bird."

181. The Palace by the Dome. its adjoining Bishop's Palace are 197. More pain that this, etc. misprint of "than" for that.

The cathedral (Duomo or Dome) and in the centre of the town.

The American ed. copies the English

213. Cicala. Italian for cicada, a genus of insects remarkable for the loud shrill sounds they make.

SCENE I.-"To my thinking, there is no grander passage in literature than that tremendous scene between Ottima and her paramour in Pippa Passes; no one accuses the author of that, and of The Ring and the Book, of neglecting love or overlooking the body; and yet I do daily homage to the genius of Robert Browning" (Robert Buchanan *).

4. Your Rhineland nights. There is an especial dramatic purpose in making Sebald a German. The Italian temperament would not be capable of so strong a reaction as he suffers.

28. St. Mark's. The cathedral at Venice, about thirty miles away. The belfry is the lofty campanile of the church, the highest tower in the city. It is a fact that Venice, Vicenza, and Padua can be seen from the hill of Asolo in clear weather. Vicenza is about twenty-five miles to the southwest, and Padua about the same distance directly south.

45. His blood. Cf. Macbeth (ii. 2. 31) for another illustration of the effect of crime in forcing the mind to dwell upon so trivial a matter as mere words.

The Fleshly School of Poetry and Other Phenomena of the Day, by Robert Buchanan (London, 1872).

54. Wittol. Properly, a willing cuckold. Cf. Shakespeare, M. W. ii. 2.313: "Cuckold! wittol-cuckold! the devil himself hath not such a

name.'

56. Black? The mere sight of the dark wine repels him with its suggestion of blood.

58. Duomo. The cathedral. See on prol. 181 above.

59. Capuchin. A monk of the order of St. Francis.

76. Proof-mark. The sign which shows a print to have been an early product of the press before the plate is worn by repeated impressions. 80. Coil. Ado, “fuss." Cf. Shakespeare, T. G. of V. i. 2. 99 : “Here is a coil with protestation !"

116. He is turned. There is a superstition that the face of a murdered man always looks skyward for vengeance.

119. Four gray hairs. Ottima's age is probably greater than Sebald's. See 228 below.

167. Campanula's chalice. A large genus of bell-shaped flowers (Lat. campanula, little bell).

185. Swift ran the searching tempest overhead. Cf. Browning's other description of a thunderstorm in The Ring and The Book (The Pope, 2118):

"I stood at Naples once, a night so dark

I could have scarce conjectured there was earth

Anywhere, sky or sea or world at all:

But the night's black was burst through by a blaze-
Thunder struck blow on blow, earth groaned and bore,

Through her whole length of mountain visible:

There lay the city thick and plain with spires,
And, like a ghost disshrouded, white the sea.'

The later passage is usually regarded as the finer, and it has a tremendous ethical force in its connection. But nothing can be more wonderful as a leap of the imagination than

"Plunged and replunged his weapon at a venture."

INTERLUDE I.—In each scene, or true episode, of the drama, Pippa appears. Not only does she speak or sing in each, but her presence is subtly felt and her appearance expected throughout. But the interludes

Three

are partly by way of explanation and partly for contrast and relief. of them are in prose, and they are all in a much lower key than the body of the drama.

9. Giovacchino. A poet whom these fellows rail at is sure to have some fine qualities. The situation so sneeringly depicted is simply that of honorable flight from a passion either unworthy or impossible. At the head of the gulf of the same name-the northwestern extremity of the Adriatic.

13. Trieste.

14. Bluphocks. The only unredeemed villain whom Browning has created. See interlude ii. I below.

18. Esculapius, an Epic, etc. All these gibes are directed against an honor too fine to enjoy any passion without regard to consequences. Giovacchino has undertaken to cure himself of love by the judicious course of running away. Forthwith he is ridiculed by these fellows for treating love as if it were a disease, instead of enjoying it boldly, be it