Edward Berdoe - The Browning Cyclopædia - A Guide to the Study of the Works of Robert Browning

Charles I.( Strafford. ) The character of this king, who basely sacrifices his best friend Strafford, is founded in fact, but his weakness and meanness are doubtless exaggerated by the poet – to show his meaning, as the artists say.

Cherries.( Ferishtah’s Fancies , 9.) “On Praise and Thanksgiving.” All things are great and small in their degree. A disciple objects to Ferishtah that man is too weak to praise worthily the All-mighty One; he is too mean to offer fit praise to Heaven, – let the stars do that! The dervish tells a little story of a subject of the Shah who came from a distant part of the realm, and wandered about the palace wonderingly, till all at once he was surprised to find a nest-like little chamber with his own name on the entry, and everything arranged exactly to his own peculiar taste. Yet to him it was as nothing: he had not faith enough to enter into the good things provided for him. He tells another story. Two beggars owed a great sum to the Shah. This one brought a few berries from his currant-bush, some heads of garlic, and five pippins from a seedling tree. This was his whole wealth; he offered that in payment of his debt. It was graciously received; teaching us that if we offer God all the love and thanks we can, it will gratify the Giver of all good none the less because our offering is small, and lessened by admixture with lower human motives. For the grateful flavour of the cherry let us lift up our thankful hearts to Him who made that, the stars, and us. We know why He made the cherry, – why He made Jupiter we do not know. The Lyric compares verse-making with love-making. Verse-making is praising God by the stars, too great a task for man’s short life; but love-making has no depths to explore, no heights to ascend; love now will be love evermore: let us give thanks for love, if we cannot offer praise the poet’s own great way.

Chiappino.( A Soul’s Tragedy. ) The bragging friend of Luitolfo, who was compelled to be noble against his inclination, and who became “the twenty-fourth leader of a revolt” ridiculed by the legate.

“Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came.”( Men and Women , 1855; Romances , 1863; Dramatic Romances , 1868.) The story of a knight who has undertaken a pilgrimage to a certain dark tower, the way to which was full of difficulties and dangers, and the right road quite unknown to the seeker. Those who had preceded him on the path had all failed, and he himself is no sooner fairly engaged in the quest than he is filled with despair, but is impelled to go on. At the stage of his journey which is described in the poem he meets a hoary cripple, who gives him directions which he consents to follow, though with misgivings. The day was drawing to a close, the road by which he entered on the path to the tower was gone; when he looked back, nothing remained but to proceed. Nature all around was starved and ignoble: flowers there were none; some weeds that seemed to thrive in the wilderness only added to its desolation; dock leaves with holes and rents, grass as hair in leprosy; and wandering on the gloomy plain, one stiff, blind horse, all starved and stupefied, looking as if he were thrust out of the devil’s stud. The pilgrim tried to think of earlier, happier sights: of his friend Cuthbert – alas! one night’s disgrace left him without that friend; of Giles, the soul of honour, who became a traitor, spit upon and curst. The present horror was better than these reflections on the past. And now he approached a petty, yet spiteful river, over which black scrubby alders hung, with willows that seemed suicidal. He forded the stream, fearing to set his foot on some dead man’s cheek; the cry of the water-rat sounded as the shriek of a baby. And as he toiled on he saw that ugly heights (mountains seemed too good a name to give such hideous heaps) had given place to the plain, and two hills in particular, couched like two bulls in fight, seemed to indicate the place of the tower. Yes! in their midst was the round, squat turret, without a counterpart in the whole world. The sight was as that of the rock which the sailor sees too late to avoid the crash that wrecks his ship. The very hills seemed watching him; he seemed to hear them cry, “Stab and end the creature!” A noise was everywhere, tolling like a bell; he could hear the names of the lost adventurers who had preceded him. There they stood to see the last of him. He saw and knew them all, yet dauntless set the horn to his lips and blew, “ Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came .”

Notes. – At the head of the poem is a note: “See Edgar’s song in Lear .” In Act III., scene iv., Edgar, disguised as a madman, says, while the storm rages: “Who gives anything to poor Tom? whom the foul fiend hath led through fire and through flame, through ford and whirlpool, over bog and quagmire; that hath laid knives under his pillow and halters in his pew; set ratsbane by his porridge; made him proud of heart to ride on a bay trotting-horse over four-inched bridges, to course his own shadow for a traitor. – Bless thy five wits! Tom’s a-cold. – O do de, do de, do, de. – Bless thee from whirlwinds, star-blasting, and taking! Do poor Tom some charity, whom the foul fiend vexes.” At the end of the scene Edgar sings: —

“Childe Roland was the youngest brother of Helen. Under the guidance of Merlin he undertook to bring back his sister from elf-land, whither the fairies had carried her, and he succeeded in his perilous exploit.” – Dr. Brewer. (See the ancient Ballade of Burd Helen .) Childe was a term specially applied to the scions of knightly families before their admission to the degree of knighthood, as “Chyld Waweyn, Loty’s Sone” ( Robert of Gloucester ).

This wonderful poem, one of the grandest pieces of word-painting in our language, has exercised the ingenuity of Browning students more than any other of the poet’s works. Sordello is difficult to understand, but it was intended by the poet to convey a definite meaning and important lessons, but Childe Roland , we have been warned again and again, was written without any moral purpose whatever. “We may see in it,” says Mrs. Orr, “a poetic vision of life… The thing we may not do is to imagine that we are meant to recognise it.” A paper was read at the Browning Society on this poem by Mr. Kirkman ( Browning Society Papers , Part iii., p. 21) suggesting an interpretation of the allegory. In the discussion which followed, Dr. Furnivall said “he had asked Browning if it was an allegory, and in answer had, on three separate occasions, received an emphatic ‘no’; that it was simply a dramatic creation called forth by a line of Shakespeare’s. Browning had written it one day in Paris, as a vivid picture suggested by Edgar’s line; the horse was suggested by the figure of a red horse in a piece of tapestry in Browning’s house… Still, Dr. Furnivall thought, it was quite justifiable that any one should use the poem to signify whatever image it called up in his own mind. But he must not confuse the poet’s mind with his. The poem was not an allegory, and was never meant to be one.” The Hon. Roden Noel, who was in the chair on this occasion, said “he himself had never regarded Childe Roland as having any hidden meaning; nor had cared so to regard it. But words are mystic symbols: they mean more, very often, than the utterer of them, poet or puppet, intended.” When some one asked Mendelssohn what he meant by his Lieder ohne Worte , the musician replied that “they meant what they said.” A poem so consistent as a whole, with a narrative in which every detail follows in a perfectly regular and natural sequence, must inevitably convey to the thinking mind some great and powerful idea, suiting itself to his view of life considered as a journey or pilgrimage. The wanderings of the children of Israel from Egypt to the Promised Land may be considered simply as a historical event, like the migrations of the Tartars or the Northmen; or they may be viewed as an allegory of the Christian life, like Bunyan’s immortal dream. The historian of the Exodus could never have had in his mind all the interpretations put upon the incidents which he recorded; yet we have the warrant of St. Paul for allegorising the story. Any narrative of a journey through a desert to a definite end held in view throughout the way, is certain to be pounced upon as an allegory; and it is impossible but that Mr. Browning must have had some notion of a “central purpose” in his poem. Indeed, when the Rev. John W. Chadwick visited the poet, and 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.” Mr. Kirkman, in the paper already referred to, says, “There are overwhelming reasons for concluding that this poem describes, after the manner of an allegory, the sensations of a sick man very near to death — Rabbi Ben Ezra and Prospice – are the two angels that lead on to Childe Roland .” Mr. Nettleship, in his well-known essay on the poem, says the central idea is this: “Take some great end which men have proposed to themselves in life, which seemed to have truth in it, and power to spread freedom and happiness on others; but as it comes in sight, it falls strangely short of preconceived ideas, and stands up in hideous prosaicness.” Mrs. James L. Bagg, in the Interpretation of Childe Roland , read to the Syracuse (U.S.) Browning Club, gives the following on the lesson of the poem: – “The secrets of the universe are not to be discovered by exercise of reason, nor are they to be reached by flights of fancy, nor are duties loyally done to be recompensed by revealment. A life of becoming , being , and doing , is not loss, nor failure, nor discomfiture, though the dark tower for ever tantalise and for ever withhold.” Some have seen in the poem an allegory of Love , others of the Search after Truth . Others, again, understand the Dark Tower to represent Unfaith, and the obscure land that of Doubt – Doubting Castle and the By-Path Meadow of John Bunyan, in short. For my own part, I see in the allegory – for I can consider it no other – a picture of the Age of Materialistic Science, a “science falsely so called,” which aims at the destruction of all our noblest ideals of religion and faith in the unseen. The pilgrim is a truth-seeker, misdirected by the lying spirit – the hoary cripple, unable to be or do anything good or noble himself; in him I see the cynical, destructive critic, who sits at our universities and colleges, our medical schools and our firesides, to point our youth to the desolate path of Atheistic Science, a science which strews the ghastly landscape with wreck and ruthless ruin, with the blanching bones of animals tortured to death by its “engines and wheels, with rusty teeth of steel” – a science which has invaded the healing art, and is sending students of medicine daily down the road where surgeons become cancer-grafters (as the Paris and Berlin medical scandals have revealed), and where physicians gloat over their animal victims —