We will now continue our discussion of the work of Robert Browning. I recall that they once asked him the meaning of one of his poems, and he answered: “I wrote it long ago. When I wrote it, only God and I knew what it meant; now, only God knows,” in order to avoid answering.
I spoke about some of his minor poems, and there is a poem I would like to recommend to you, but I cannot explain it, not even vaguely. It is perhaps the strangest of all, and it is called “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came.”1 “Childe” does not mean “child” here. It is an ancient title for the nobility and is written with a final “e.” The line is taken from Shakespeare; it is also the name of a ballad that has been lost.2 And it is perhaps the strangest of all of Browning’s poems. The great American poet Carl Sandburg has written a poem titled “Manitoba Childe Roland.”3 It tells how he read that poem to a boy on a farm in Minnesota, and how the child did not understand anything—perhaps the person reading also did not really understand it—but how both of them were carried away, fascinated by the mystery of the poem that has never been explained.4 It is full of magical details. It apparently takes place in the Middle Ages. Not in an historic Middle Ages, but rather the Middle Ages of books about knights errant, of the books in Don Quixote’s library.
And now, before talking about The Ring and the Book, I would like to mention, a bit randomly, a few other poems by Browning. There is one titled “ Mr. Sludge, the Medium.”5 The protagonist of this poem is a medium, a fake medium who takes a lot of money from an American millionaire who is in despair over the recent death of his wife. Mr. Sludge has put the widower in communication with the spirit of the dead woman. And then he is found out, by the American millionaire himself, and he says he is going to report him to the police as an imposter, but finally he says that he will not on the condition that Mr. Sludge, the fake medium, tell him the true story of his career, a career built on deception. And the other says that he heard about spiritualism and thought that he could take advantage of it, for it is not difficult to deceive people who want to be deceived. That, in fact, those who have been deceived by him—not excluding the angry gentleman who is threatening him—have been his accomplices, have closed their eyes when confronting clumsy lies. He tells about how at first he showed his victims texts he said were written in Homer’s handwriting, and as he did not know the Greek alphabet, the Greek words were represented with circles and dots “antes que encontrara el libro útil que sabe” [“before I found the useful book that knows”]. Then he grows more confident and in some way exalts in himself and then, suddenly, he becomes desolate. Then he tries to recover his victim’s trust. He asks him if he hears at that moment the voice of his beloved wife, of that woman he himself has learned to love through the man’s love of her, and through the dialogue with her spirit. The other then threatens him with physical violence. Mr. Sludge continues confessing the truth and then we reach the end of the poem. It is a long poem, because Browning had studied the subject very well, the subject of fake mediums. And then we come to the end, to a conclusion that is wholly unexpected by the reader and for those who have been following the story of Mr. Sludge’s deceptions and the way he worked them. In the end, the medium, whom the other is on the verge of attacking, of physically assaulting, says that everything he has told him has been the truth, that he has not been deceiving him. That he was carrying the dead woman’s letters hidden in the sleeves of his jacket. “Nevertheless,” he adds, in spite of all his tricks, “I do believe there is something in spiritualism, I do believe in the other world.” That is, the protagonist admits that he has been an imposter, but that does not mean that there is no other world, that there are no spirits. One can see how Browning liked ambiguous situations and souls. For example, in this case, the imposter is also a believer.
There is a short poem titled “Memorabilia,” “things worth remembering” in Latin.6 I think the title is taken from some interspersed scenes in the work of the great Swedish mystic Swedenborg. It is about two gentlemen who are conversing, and it turns out that one of them met the well-known atheist poet Shelley, that poet who had so much influence on young people. And the other says to him, “What, did you talk to Shelley? Did you see him, he talked to you, and you answered him? How strange that all is, and yet it is true!” And he says, once he had to cross a moor, a moor that had a name and undoubtedly had some use, some purpose, some destiny in the world. But he has forgotten everything. Everything else—all the blank miles—have been erased. What he remembers is an eagle feather. There, he saw and picked up and placed in his breast the eagle feather—and he has forgotten everything else. This is what happens in life. He has forgotten, but he does remember his encounter with Shelley.7
This year, I met Alfonso Reyes.8 He spoke to me about the great Mexican poet Othón, and he said to me, “What? You know Othón?”9 And then Reyes immediately remembered Browning’s poem and repeated the first stanza:
Ah, did you once see Shelley plain,
And did he stop and speak to you?
And did you speak to him again?
How strange it seems, and new!
And then, at the end:
A moulted feather, an eagle-feather—
Well, I forget the rest.
And there is another poem about a man who is dying, and a minister comes, a Protestant minister, who tells him that the world is a vale of tears.10 And the man says to him: “Do I see the world as a valley of tears? No, reverend Sir, not I,” “¿Veo yo acaso el mundo como un valle de lágrimas? No, reverendo señor, no yo.” And then he, who is disfigured and dying, tells the minister that what he remembers of the world has nothing to do with a vale of tears. That what he remembers is a house, a country house where there lived a woman, probably a servant with whom he had a love affair. And to describe the topography of the house, he makes use of the medicine bottles on his bedside table. And he says, “That curtain there is green or blue for a healthy person, but it reminds me of the blinds of the house, how they were, and the lane along the side, because I, scurrying along it, could reach a door, and there she would be, waiting for me.” “I know,” he says, “that all this is improper,” “that it is all indecent, but I am dying.”11 And then he says that he remembers these illicit loves with the servant. That is the only thing he remembers, the only thing life has left him at those final moments, and what he remembers at the end, without any remorse.
There’s another poem whose protagonist is Caliban.12 Browning had read a book about the sources Shakespeare used, about the Patagonian gods—a god named Setebos. And Browning uses this information about the religion of the Patagonian Indians as the basis for his poem titled “Caliban upon Setebos.”
There’s another poem, “Love Among the Ruins,” and this takes place in the countryside of Rome.13 There is a man—we can assume a shepherd—who speaks about the ruins and describes the splendor of a city that once existed there. He speaks of the kings, of the thousands of horsemen, the palaces, the banquets, a subject similar to the Anglo-Saxon elegy called “The Ruin.” And then he says that he often met a girl there, and that this girl would wait for him, and that he would see the love in her eye before he approached and embraced her. He ends by saying that of everything in the world, love is best, love is enough for him, what does he care about kings and empires that have disappeared? Because Browning has—and I have not spoken enough about this—many poems about love, physical love as well. And it is this theme of love that is the subject of the book we will discuss today, before we speak about Dante Gabriel Rossetti—who founded the group the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, and that comes after Browning’s time. But Browning’s major work, a book written with a very strange technique, is The Ring and the Book.
I don’t know if any of you have seen the admirable Japanese film that came out many years ago called Rashomon.14 Akutagawa, who wrote the story on which the film was based, was Browning’s first Japanese translator.15 The technique used in the story (and in the film) is taken from Browning’s The Ring and the Book.The Ring and the Book is much more complex than the film. Which is understandable, because a book can be much more complex than a film. In the film, we have the story of a samurai who goes through the jungle with his wife. They are attacked by a bandit. The bandit kills the woman, and then we have three different versions of the same event. One is told by the samurai, the other by the bandit, and the other by the spirit of the woman through the mouth of a witch. And the three stories are different. They do, however, all refer to the same event. Now, Browning attempted something similar, but much more difficult, because Browning was interested in seeking the truth. Let’s begin with the title of the book: The Ring and the Book. This can be explained in the following way: Browning begins by saying that to make a ring—and the ring becomes a metaphor for the book that he is about to write, that he has already begun to write—it is necessary to use a metal alloy. The ring cannot be made of pure gold, one must mix the gold with other, baser, metals. And for him to make this book, The Ring and the Book, he has had to add to the gold—this humility is also typical of Browning—baser metals, the metals of his own imagination. As for the pure metal, he has found it. He found it, but he has had to extract it from a book that he found at a stand in Florence, and that book is the story of a criminal trial that took place one century earlier in Rome.
That book was translated into English, published by Everyman’s Library, and you would know it under the title The Old Yellow Book.16 This book contains the entire story of a criminal trial, which is sordid, and a rather horrible story. It is about a count who married a peasant woman believing she was wealthy. Then he repudiates her and locks her up in a convent. She manages to escape from the convent to go live at the home of her parents. Then the count appears, because he suspects her of being an adulteress, of having had a love affair with a priest. The count is accompanied by several murderers; they enter the house and kill her. Then he is arrested, and the book records the declarations of the murderer and some letters. Browning read and reread the book, and learned all the details of this sordid story. Finally, the count is sentenced to death for the murder of his wife. And then Browning decided to discover the truth and wrote The Ring and the Book.
And in The Ring and the Book, the story is repeated I think ten times, the same story. And what is curious, what is original, is that the story—as opposed to what happens in Rashomon—as far as the facts, is the same. The reader of the book learns them perfectly. The difference is in the point of view of each character.17 It is possible that Browning was inspired by the epistolary novels that were in fashion in the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries. I think that Die Wahlverwandtschaften, by Goethe, belongs to this genre.18 And he was also inspired by the novels of Wilkie Collins. Collins, in order to lighten up the long narrative of his detective plots, would pass the story around from character to character. And this worked for satirical purposes. For example, we have a chapter narrated by one of the characters. That character tells how he had just conversed with So-and-so, who had impressed him greatly with the wit and depth of his conversation. And then we go to the next chapter, narrated by his interlocutor, and in that chapter we see that he has just spoken with the narrator of the previous chapter, and that the other bored him to death with his imbecilities. That is, there is a game of contrast and satire.
Now, Browning takes this method of having several people tell the story, but he does not do it in succession. That is, one character does not pass on the story to another. Each character tells the whole story, the same story, from beginning to end. And Browning dedicates the first part to Elizabeth Barrett, who had died. And at the end he says, “Oh, lírico amor, mitad ángel, mitad pájaro, toda una maravilla y un incontenible deseo.” And he says how sometimes he has looked at the sky and he seems to have seen a place where the blue of the sky is more blue, more passionate, and he thought that she might be there. I remember those first lines. “Ah, lyric Love, half angel, half bird, and all a wonder, and a wild desire.” And then we have the first canto of the poem, titled “Half-Rome.” And there we have the facts, the facts told by a random individual who saw Pompilia—Pompilia is the murdered woman—and was impressed by her beauty and is certain of the guilt of the murderer, of the injustice of her murder. Then we have another chapter that is called “Half-Rome” also. There, the same story is told by a gentleman, a gentleman of a certain age, who is telling it to his nephew. And he tells him that the count, by killing his wife, has acted justly. He is on the count’s side, the side of the murderer. Then we have “Tertium Quid,” and this character tells the story with what he believes is impartiality: that the woman is partially right, and the killer also is partially right. He tells the story halfheartedly.
We then have the defense of the priest. Then we have the defense of the count. And then we have what the prosecutor and the defense attorney say. The prosecutor and the defense attorney use legal jargon, and it is as if they were not even talking about the story: they are continually held up by legal issues. That is, they speak, we can say, from outside the story.
Then there is something that could be what the woman would have said. And at the end, we have a kind of monologue by the count, who has been sentenced to death. Here the count abandons all subterfuge, all lies, and he tells the truth. He tells how he has been tortured by jealousy, and how his wife deceived him, how she took part in the first deception of him. When he married her, he believed that he was marrying a woman with money. They deceived him, and she was an accomplice in this deception. And as he is saying these things dawn is breaking. And, horrified, he sees the gray light of morning. They come to get him to take him to the scaffold. And then he concludes with these words: “Pompilia, ¿vas a dejar que me asesinen?” That’s what the man who murdered her says. “Pompilia, will you let them murder me?” And then the pope speaks. The pope here represents wisdom and truth. The pope thinks it is just for the murderer to be executed. And then we have a few reflections of Browning’s.
Now, I have compared Browning to Kafka.19 You might remember that poem “Fears and Scruples,” I looked at at the beginning, that poem about the ambiguity of the relationship between the believer and God. The believer prays but does not know if there is a listener, an interlocutor. He does not know if there is really a dialogue. But in this book—and this is the fundamental difference between Browning and Kafka—Browning knows. He is not just playing with his imagination, Browning believes that there is a truth. Browning believes there is, or is not, a guilty party. He believes, that is, he was always attracted to, the ambiguity, the essential mystery of the human relationship to the universe, but Browning believed in a truth. Browning wrote this book, he imagined, he re-created this criminal episode in order to be able to confer a truth. And he believed he had come to it by using, of course, that metal he called baser, the metal in the gold alloy, the metal of his imagination.
Browning was essentially an optimist. There is a poem by Browning titled “Rabbi Ben Ezra.”20 Rabbi Ben Ezra was a Spanish rabbi.21 Chesterton says that it is typical of Browning that, when he wanted to pronounce his final truth about the world, about mankind, about our hopes, he put this truth in the mouth of an obscure Spanish rabbi from the Middle Ages, a forgotten rabbi, about whom we know only that he lived in Toledo and afterwards in Italy, and who was always complaining about his bad luck. He said that he had such bad luck that if he had taken to selling candles, the sun would have never set, and if he had taken to selling shrouds, men would suddenly have become immortal. And Browning puts in the mouth of this Rabbi Ben Ezra the idea he came to about the world, the idea that everything we do not achieve on earth, we will achieve—or we are achieving—in heaven. And he says that what happens to us, what we see, is like the arc of a circumference. We see merely a fragment or even a very small curve, but the circumference—happiness, plenitude—exists elsewhere, and it will exist for us. Browning comes to the idea that old age is not only a decline, a mutilation, an impoverishment. Old age is also a plenitude, because in old age we understand things.22 He came to believe this. This poem is another of Browning’s great poems, and it concludes with this idea: that old age is the perfection of youth.
I began with the metaphor of the arc fragment and the full and complete circumference. There is a vast bibliography about Browning. There is an encyclopedia written about Browning, with often absurd explanations of his poems.23 It says, for example, that the poem “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came” is a poem about vivisection.24 There are other absurd explanations. But perhaps the best book about Browning, a delightful book to read, is a book that Chesterton published in the first decade of this century, in the year 1907 or 1909, I think, and it is part of that admirable series, English Men of Letters.25 Reading a biography of Chesterton, written by his secretary, Maisie Ward, I read that all of Chesterton’s quotations of Browning in the book were wrong.26 But they were wrong because Chesterton had read Browning so much that he had learned him by heart. And he had learned it so well that he had not needed to consult Browning’s work a single time. He was wrong precisely because he knew it.27 It is a pity that the editor of the series, English Men of Letters, Virginia Woolf’s father, Leslie Stephen, reinstated the original text. It would have been interesting to compare Browning’s original text to how they appear in Chesterton’s text. Unfortunately, they were corrected, and the printed book contains Browning’s texts. It would have been lovely to know how Chesterton transformed in his memory Browning’s verses—for memory is also made up of forgetting.
I feel some kind of remorse. I think I have been unfair to Browning. But with Browning something happens that happens with all poets, that we must question them directly. I think, in any case, that I have done enough to interest you in Browning’s work. The pity is, as I already said, that Browning wrote his work in verse. If not, he would now be known as one of the great novelists and one of the most original short-story writers in the English language. Though if he had written in prose, we would have lost much admirable music. Because Browning was a consummate master of English verse. He mastered it as well as Tennyson, or Swinburne, or any other. But there is no doubt that for a book like The Ring and the Book—a book made up of the same story repeated several times—it would have been better in prose. The curious thing about The Ring and the Book, to which I will now return, is that although each character recounts the same events, and although there is no difference in what they tell, there is a fundamental difference, which belongs to the realm of human psychology, the fact that each of us believes we are justified. For example, the count admits he is a murderer, but the word “murderer” is too general. We know this from reading other books. If we read Macbeth, for example, or if we read Crime and Punishment by Dostoyevsky—I think the original is called “Guilt and Expiation”—we do not feel that Macbeth or Raskolnikov are murderers. That word is too blunt. We see how events have led them to commit a murder, which is not the same as being a murderer. Is a man defined by what he has done? Cannot a man commit a crime, and cannot his crime be justified? A man is led to the execution of a crime through thousands of circumstances. In the case of Macbeth, for example, we have the first scene with the three witches, who are also the three Fates. These witches prophesize what will take place. And so Macbeth, upon seeing that these prophecies are correct, comes to think that he was predestined to murder Duncan, his king, and then he commits other murders. And the same thing happens in The Ring and the Book: none of the characters lies, but each one of the characters feels justified. Now, Browning believes there is a guilty party, that this guilty party is the count, even though he thinks he is justified, given the circumstances, for murdering his wife.
And Chesterton, in his book about Browning, writes about other great poets; he says that Homer might have thought, for example, “I will tell them the truth about the world, and I will tell them the truth based on the fall of a great city, on the defense of that city,” and he made the Iliad. And then another poet, whose name has been forgotten, says: “I will tell them the truth about the world, and I will tell it based on what a just man suffered, his friends’ reproaches, the voice of God who descends in a swirl,” and he wrote the Book of Job. And another poet could say, “I will tell them the truth about the world, and I will tell it by describing to them an imaginary or visionary journey through hell, purgatory, and paradise,” and that poet is Dante. And Shakespeare could have thought, “I will tell them the truth about the world by telling stories about a son who learned, from a ghost’s revelations, that his mother had been an adulteress and a murderer,” and he wrote Hamlet. But what Browning did was stranger. He said, “I have found this story of a criminal trial, a sordid story of adultery, the story of a murder, the story of lies and deceptions. And based on that story, which all of Italy talked about, and which all of Italy has forgotten, I will reveal to them the truth about the world,” and he wrote The Ring and the Book.
In the next class I will discuss the great English poet of Italian origin, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and I will begin by describing his tragic personal history. And then we will look at two or three of his poems, without excluding several of his sonnets, sonnets that are considered to be perhaps the most excellent in the English language.
PROFESSOR BORGES
A COURSE ON ENGLISH LITERATURE
No comments:
Post a Comment