Fourth Meeting, Friday, February 24, 1882. PETER BAYNE, LL.D., in the Chair. After the reading of Mr. Nettleship's paper on Fifine at the Fair, the Chairman proposed a vote of thanks to Mr. Nettleship, expressing his recognition of the accuracy of analysis and the comprehensiveness of survey which he had shown. The Chairman then, remarking that it was his pleasant duty not to speak, but to induce others to do so, invited the discussion of the paper, and of the questions raised by it. The subject, he said, was of special interest to the ladies present, this poem appealing, as it does, to woman. The author is a man, and all that the woman of the piece, Elvire, says is put into her mouth by a man. Possibly a woman might have more to say. Possibly, also, some men might think that in this poem woman was too much exalted; that there was an over-rating of her absolute unselfishness, her power of being absorbed in another, her tendency to lose herself in man, her power of hero-worshipping. Perhaps, too, some might think that man was not quite done justice to in that comparison of the jelly-fish. Sometimes a woman does not lose herself in a man as a brook loses itself in the ocean, and certainly there are women in relation to whom few men are great enough to play the ocean's part. Mr. F. J. FURNIVALL said that the Society's thanks were specially due to Mr. Nettleship, as he had given up to his Paper, time that ought to have gone to finishing his pictures for the Academy and the Grosvenor Gallery,—a grand Lion roaring over his wounded and dying Lioness, a snow Leopard trying to rescue its cub from a Vulture who had carried it off, and a Navvy's sweetheart stopping him from seeking a bloody revenge. Mr. Nettleship's Analysis of the poem would help every reader, but Mr. F. would like the Sections to be groupt in Subdivisions, and the poem thus broken up into its (say) 9 Parts, by way of a Table of Contents to it, to show readers the main subjects they would find in it. He would submit such a scheme to Mr. Nettleship. He would also like the 'S.' for Sophism extended to-among other paragraphs-Don Juan's excuse on p. 199, § 24, "See how glad she is that we pity her necessity to show herself, pose, and dance, for hire." The truth is given under § 18, "She uses her charms to wheedle men's them," and enjoys it. money from As to the meaning of the poem, Mr. F. said, "When I first read Fifine in 1872, and, after all the fine thoughts and visions in it, came on the last § 132, in which Don Juan goes away to Fifine, I felt offended with the book, and thought that Browning was poking fun at his readers. So I left it alone for many years; and then, having read The Ring and the Book, I saw that just as Browning blew up all Guido Franceschini's 5000 lines of lies and sophisms by his one dynamite verse at the end, "Pompilia! will you let them murder me?" so he had, in § 132 of Fifine, blown up all the Don-Juan husband's fine talk and philosophy piled high in the previous 131 stanzas, or as many of them as are given to his arguments. Still, though the quasi-philosopher's flesh was weak, his spirit was willing to tell us some truths that may help us along. Browning has himself stated that his fancy in the poem was to show merely how a Don Juan might justify himself; partly by truth, somewhat by sophism. The truths are Browning's, the sophisms his Don Juan's. The characterization is, happily for us, imperfect; the author has put his own earnestness and insight into a nature poorer and shallower than his own, and there is therefore much to be learnt from the poem. Who that reads passages like the following, can put them down to a Don Juan? Out of their falseness rise, and reach thou, and remain." Where operates a Power, which every throb and swell ... to altitudes, which gained, Evil proves good, wrong right, obscurity explained, p. 108. The false, and love the true." p. 156-7. "list aloft! harmonics sound, that mean: 'Truth [the Soul] inside; and outside, [God] truth also; and between The individual soul works through the shows of sense, And, through the fleeting, lives to die into the fixed, And reach at length God, man, or both together mixed,' By hints which make the soul discernible by soul'..." In distinguishing the truths from the sophisms in Fifine, I think Mr. Nettleship has given us all great help. As to the answer that the poem gives to Mr. N.'s I and III, "What should be the relation of a married man to other women than his own wife" (p. 225), I say it is, "Don't run after Fifines; and if you do, don't say it's all your wife's fault, and she'd see it to be so, 'did Nature grant but this, That women comprehend mental analysis.' For that is about what Don Juan's sophistries come to. - Fifine, p. 38. Elvire should have had Sigh no more, ladies, sigh no more, Men were deceivers ever; One foot in sea, and one on sho To one thing constant never. But let them go, And be you blithe and bonny, Converting all your sounds of woe Into 'Hey nonny, nonny.'"-Much Ado, II. iii. Mr. F. D. MATTHEW said: I am sure Mr. Nettleship will excuse my frankness when I say that his analysis, careful and useful as it is, does not seem to me to help people over what is the real difficulty of the poem. And the point of failure seems to me to be this-that he has devoted himself mainly to analyzing the arguments which the poet has put into the mouth of his Don Juan. Now these arguments really lead to nothing. Don Juan has set himself the task of finding a justification for his inconstancy; of showing that if his attention is momentarily diverted to Fifine, such diversion gives no real ground of offence to Elvire, while it is a source of real gain to himself. The cause seems a hopeless one, but is supported by the brilliancy and intellectual vivacity which specially distinguish Mr. Browning's genius, and we read on, delighted and entranced, almost expecting to learn how, from a vulgar amour-or let us more mildly say, flirtation-the soul is to gather strength or enrichment. Our hopes are vain; and after following all this fascinating mixture of truth and sophism, we end face to face with the almost brutal cynicism of the conclusion. What can be more unsatisfactory? Again and again we go thro' the book with the same result, until at last, dazed and weary, we ask what object the poet can have had in thus putting out all the resources of his genius for the mere purpose of confusing right and wrong. Then all at once it flashes upon us, that we have to deal with a poet, and not with a rhetorical moralist, and we remember that this poet's favourite form is that of dramatic monologue; that he is used to take a character (individual but yet typical) and set him to show us what kind of man he is, and how some instant of circumstance or passion works upon him. If, then, the speaker is sophistical or inconclusive, it is because the conditions under which he speaks makes him so; because these intellectual gyrations and sophisms best express him. The question then to ask is, what kind of man have we here, or under what special relations of life is he displayed? As to this, there is no doubt. Mr. Browning has writ it large in the motto to the poem. It is a Don Juan we have to deal with; not, however, a Don Juan of the old type-lustful, remorseless, godless, an exception among men. This Don Juan is you, or I, or anybody; he is man, who by his mere masculine nature is incapable of absolute faithfulness and devotion. Here he shows himself contrasted with Elvire, the woman, capable of pure and flawless love. This contrast between the temperament of the man and woman is not insisted on here for the first time. It is expounded here (summarized in 74), but it is expressed elsewhere, and especially in Any Wife to Any Husband. What the wife there predicts of the husband to whom she is bidding farewell, the husband here confirms for himself. This comparison suggests another point which may be worth consideration. Is Elvire really present in the flesh with her husband while thus he calmly deliberates on and excuses his infidelity? If so, his behaviour is far worse than that which could be foretold of "any husband": I have but to be with thee, and thy hand Can it be that the Juan who, with all his male weakness, evidently is used to breathing a pure atmosphere, can be so rude and base as thus to announce to the wife whom he declares he loves, that he leaves her at the threshold to go after Fifine? I think not. This web of argument, genuine and sophistical, is not addressed to the living Elvire, "No, not to thee, but to thyself in me." It is the phantom of the lost wife, recalled by his vivid imagination, to whom he pours out the confession of his weakness, the assertion of his real truth and love. Were Elvire still beside him, no Fifine could have tempted him from her side. But if she is too white for real flesh and blood,— “Suppose you are a ghost! A memory, a hope" (§ 130) — then the restraint is gone, and in the absence of his sun he will chase the fireflies. We might call the poem, The Widower's Apology.' The prologue and epilogue seem to bear out this view. In the prologue the idea presented to us is of the disembodied soul watching over one who still remains here, who "both lives and likes life's way." In the epilogue, Death comes to take the man out of the world where he has been bothered by "All the neighbour-talk with man and maid-such men!" (the maids were not so bad), and to him the angel of death is welcome, for it is his wronged, loved wife. (It might be objected that with Elvire away, all his sophistical ingenuity was wasted, but I think Browning would shew us that a man is never more inclined to sophistry than in addressing his own conscience.) MISS DREWRY said: Fifine is surely to be regarded-so indeed, with few exceptions, all Mr. Browning's poems are-as chiefly dramatic in character. That it contains much philosophy of life is not to be doubted; few of Browning's poems, long or short, are fuller of grand utterances on some of the most vexed questions of life; but I do not think we must take it as a laying down or putting forth, in full, of his own philosophy of the question specially of the relations of man and woman. It is a study of character-of two characters, very faithful to nature, and, because faithful to nature, though typical yet individual, not universal-used, as all Browning's studies of character are, to establish and illustrate the truths of human life. That the husband, whose sophistry seems to me in part self-deception, should, in the end, justify Elvire's jealousy, is a point of the fidelity of the picture to nature; man tending to err in this direction more frequently than woman, partly because society gives him more freedom, partly, too, because he is less capable, as a rule, of absorption and self-devotion. We see the same idea drawn out even more fully in the shorter poem, Any Wife to any Husband. MR. GUSTAFSEN said that he considered the poem a profoundly intuitional one; the very failure of the man seeming to him the crowning part of it. There is a faculty in man entirely beyond what is limited by common sense or intellect, and that is given to woman. THE CHAIRMAN said that the use of such Societies as the present might derive some slight illustration from the fact that, while listening to the discussion, as carried on by Mr. Matthew, Mr. Gustafsen, and Miss Drewry, his ideas had been brought to a stage of crystallization which they had never reached before. He had repeatedly read Fifine and felt its power and splendour, but he had been deeply impressed with its tantalizing character. Argument succeeded argument, but no precise conclusion was arrived at in any. You passed from one to the other as a swimmer passes from wave to wave; the idea of swimming-of moving on in a yielding medium-was associated in his mind with the entire poem. He seemed now, however, to perceive that, amid the changing pageantry of imagery and argument, one thing was fixed,—the supreme nobleness of Elvire. Her personality was intensely realized. We saw her in the closest personal relations with her husband, leaning on his arm, smiling approval on him or looking blame, her cheek coming very near to his. There could be no mistake about her being a woman of flesh and blood. But in character she was ideal. The weaknessesexcept the one enchanting weakness of loving without reserve-were all her husband's. And this at least was to be said for him, that he never sullied with one stain of accusation the pure whiteness of her ideal kindness and perfectness. But he could not poise himself steadily at her elevation. Even she could not make a hero of him, or imprint her own repose upon his Bohemian changefulness. When she left him, he remained, if inconsolable, yet incurable-a worldling to the last. In the Epilogue demons haunt his solitary house. But he has not swerved in heart from his love for her, and at the last she forgives him, and receives him to a love that triumphs over death. The meaning of all this must be that woman is capable of dwelling in a region of moral purity and permanence too ethereal for Such an estimate of woman, even if one could not subscribe to it, had certainly a good deal to commend it, and had been countenanced by Ruskin, Scott, and Shakespeare. man. Fifth Meeting, Friday, March 24, 1882. HON. RODEN NOEL in the Chair. THE CHAIRMAN said he felt convinced the audience had a great treat in store. 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 prophet, intended. To one who believes at all definitely that inspiration is a fact, to one especially who regards the individual spirit as in communion with a whole hierarchy of intelligences, as member of a universal spirit-whole, and that the sensible images or perceptions words convey are themselves symbols of higher truth, this conception of the function of words presents no difficulty. Browning, however, is no mere versemaker: he has been charged with harshness and ruggedness; it is alleged that "his lines are not in love with the progress of their own beauty," as Hunt said those of Keats were; but he cannot be charged with want of deep thought. So that he may probably enough have anticipated us in the meaning we may find in this poem-since even his dramas, though he be the first dramatic poet of our time, are written rather for the sake of the universal and typical significance involved in them, than for the sake of the mere development of plot or character. Every great poet is the interpreter of his own age, and to some extent revelator of the age following. And the present time is analytical, philosophic, scientific; our best poetry will not therefore be purely pictorial and narrative. Let us, however, be careful not to father upon Browning, by way of interpreting him, the bantlings born of our own ignorance and conceit. We know how Shakspere has suffered in this way! But he is in his grave, and we cannot hear him laughing at us—a contingency too possible in the case of Mr. Browning. I am sure, however, said the Chairman, that Mr. Kirkman will give us an interpretation well worth listening to. "CHILDE ROLAND TO THE DARK TOWER CAME." "At the spark of a thought to burst into a flame" is what Browning has done in two of his most brilliant and characteristic poems; at the sparks of two thoughts taken from his great prototype Shakspere: the most uncultured style of human thought during life in Caliban, and the quintessence of cultured thought in death in Childe Roland. This is the last of Browning's romances, as it must needs be, by all the powers of earth and heaven. Plenty of romances grave and gay on this side; but this must let the curtain fall on the total of life romances, or the total romance of life. This supreme work of genius displays the most felicitous construction on the whole, and in every verse, line, and word. It deserves therefore careful, elaborate, and sympathetic study. Many persons have alleged that so enigmatical a poem is merely an intellectual puzzle, a higher kind of charade, a gratuitous tax levied on our wit as well as on our attention. Some one asked Mendelssohn what he meant by his Lieder ohne Worte, to which he replied, "that they meant what they said." So first this is a continuance of the old Ballad Romance of Childe Roland, found in R. Jamieson's Illustrations |