Part 20 (1/2)
Then he answers the king's letter. ”It is true, O king, I am poet, sculptor, painter, architect, philosopher, musician; all arts are mine.
Have I done as well as the great men of old? No, but I have combined their excellences into one man, into myself.
”I have not chanted verse like Homer, no-- Nor swept string like Terpander--no--nor carved And painted men like Phidias and his friend: I am not great as they are, point by point.
But I have entered into sympathy With these four, running these into one soul, Who, separate, ignored each other's art.
Say, is it nothing that I know them all?
”This, since the best in each art has already been done, was the only progress possible, and I have made it. It is not unworthy, king!
”Well, now thou askest, if having done this, 'I have not attained the very crown of life; if I cannot now comfortably and fearlessly meet death?' 'I, Cleon, leave,' thou sayest, 'my life behind me in my poems, my pictures; I am immortal in my work. What more can life desire?'”
It is the question so many are asking now, and it is the answer now given. What better immortality than in one's work left behind to move in men? What more than this can life desire? But Cleon does not agree with that. ”If thou, O king, with the light now in thee, hadst looked at creation before man appeared, thou wouldst have said, 'All is perfect so far.' But questioned if anything more perfect in joy might be, thou wouldst have said, 'Yes; a being may be made, unlike these who do not know the joy they have, who shall be conscious of himself, and know that he is happy. Then his life will be satisfied with daily joy.'” O king, thou wouldst have answered foolishly. The higher the soul climbs in joy the more it sees of joy, and when it sees the most, it perishes. Vast capabilities of joy open round it; it craves for all it presages; desire for more deepening with every attainment. And then the body intervenes.
Age, sickness, decay, forbid attainment. Life is inadequate to joy. What have the G.o.ds done? It cannot be their malice, no, nor carelessness; but--to let us see oceans of joy, and only give us power to hold a cupful--is that to live? It is misery, and the more of joy my artist nature makes me capable of feeling, the deeper my misery.
”But then, O king, thou sayest 'that I leave behind me works that will live; works, too, which paint the joy of life.' Yes, but to show what the joy of life is, is not to have it. If I carve the young Phoebus, am I therefore young? I can write odes of the delight of love, but grown too grey to be beloved, can I have its delight? That fair slave of yours, and the rower with the muscles all a ripple on his back who lowers the sail in the bay, can write no love odes nor can they paint the joy of love; but they can have it--not I.”
The knowledge, he thinks, of what joy is, of all that life can give, which increases in the artist as his feebleness increases, makes his fate the deadlier. What is it to him that his works live? He does not live. The hand of death grapples the throat of life at the moment when he sees most clearly its infinite possibilities. Decay paralyses his hand when he knows best how to use his tools. It is accomplished wretchedness.
I quote his outburst. It is in the soul of thousands who have no hope of a life to come.
”But,” sayest thou--(and I marvel, I repeat, To find thee trip on such a mere word) ”what Thou writest, paintest, stays; that does not die: Sappho survives, because we sing her songs, And aeschylus, because we read his plays!”
Why, if they live still, let them come and take Thy slave in my despite, drink from thy cup, Speak in my place! ”Thou diest while I survive?”-- Say rather that my fate is deadlier still, In this, that every day my sense of joy Grows more acute, my soul (intensified By power and insight) more enlarged, more keen; While every day my hairs fall more and more, My hand shakes, and the heavy years increase-- The horror quickening still from year to year, The consummation coming past escape When I shall know most, and yet least enjoy-- When all my works wherein I prove my worth, Being present still to mock me in men's mouths, Alive still, in the praise of such as thou, I, I the feeling, thinking, acting man, The man who loved his life so overmuch, Sleep in my urn. It is so horrible I dare at times imagine to my need Some future state revealed to us by Zeus, Unlimited in capability For joy, as this is in desire of joy, --To seek which the joy-hunger forces us: That, stung by straitness of our life, made strait On purpose to make prized the life at large-- Freed by the throbbing impulse we call death, We burst there as the worm into the fly.
Who, while a worm still, wants his wings. But no!
Zeus has not yet revealed it; and alas, He must have done so, were it possible!
This is one only of Browning's statements of what he held to be the fierce necessity for another life. Without it, nothing is left for humanity, having arrived at full culture, knowledge, at educated love of beauty, at finished morality and unselfishness--nothing in the end but Cleon's cry--sorrowful, somewhat stern, yet gentle--to Protus,
Live long and happy, and in that thought die, Glad for what was. Farewell.
But for those who are not Cleon and Protus, not kings in comfort or poets in luxury, who have had no gladness, what end--what is to be said of them? I will not stay to speak of _A Death in the Desert_, which is another of these poems, because the most part of it is concerned with questions of modern theology. St. John awakes into clear consciousness just before his death in the cave where he lies tended by a few disciples. He foresees some of the doubts of this century and meets them as he can. The bulk of this poem, very interesting in its way, is Browning's exposition of his own belief, not an imaginative representation of what St. John actually would have said. It does not therefore come into my subject. What does come into it is the extraordinary naturalness and vitality of the description given by John's disciple of the place where they were, and the fate of his companions. This is invented in Browning's most excellent way. It could not be better done.
The next poem is the _Epistle of Kars.h.i.+sh, the Arab Physician_, to his master, concerning his strange medical experience. The time is just before the last siege of Jerusalem, and Kars.h.i.+sh, journeying through Jericho, and up the pa.s.s, stays for a few days at Bethany and meets Lazarus. His case amazes him, and though he thinks his interest in it unworthy of a man of science in comparison with the new herbs and new diseases he has discovered, yet he is carried away by it and gives a full account of it to his master.
I do not think that Browning ever wrote a poem the writing of which he more enjoyed. The creation of Kars.h.i.+sh suited his humour and his quaint play with recondite knowledge. He describes the physician till we see him alive and thinking, in body and soul. The creation of Lazarus is even a higher example of the imaginative power of Browning; and that it is shaped for us through the mind of Kars.h.i.+sh, and in tune with it, makes the imaginative effort the more remarkable. Then the problem--how to express the condition of a man's body and soul, who, having for three days according to the story as Browning conceives it lived consciously in the eternal and perfect world, has come back to dwell in this world--was so difficult and so involved in metaphysical strangenesses, that it delighted him.
Of course, he carefully prepares his scenery to give a true semblance to the whole. Kars.h.i.+sh comes up the flinty pa.s.s from Jericho; he is attacked by thieves twice and beaten, and the wild beasts endanger his path;
A black lynx snarled and p.r.i.c.ked a tufted ear, l.u.s.t of my blood inflamed his yellow b.a.l.l.s; I cried and threw my staff and he was gone,
and then, at the end of the pa.s.s, he met Lazarus. See how vividly the scenery is realised--
I crossed a ridge of short, sharp, broken hills Like an old lion's cheek-teeth. Out there came A moon made like a face with certain spots, Multiform, manifold and menacing: Then a wind rose behind me. So we met In this old sleepy town at unaware The man and I.
And the weird evening, Kars.h.i.+sh thinks, had something to do with the strange impression the man has made on him. Then we are placed in the dreamy village of Bethany. We hear of its elders, its diseases, its flowers, its herbs and gums, of the insects which may help medicine--
There is a spider here Weaves no web, watches on the ledge of tombs, Sprinkled with mottles on an ash-grey back;
and then, how the countryside is all on fire with news of Vespasian marching into Judaea. So we have the place, the village, the hills, the animals, and the time, all clear, and half of the character of Kars.h.i.+sh.
The inner character of the man emerges as clearly when he comes to deal with Lazarus. This is not a case of the body, he thinks, but of the soul. ”The Syrian,” he tells his master, ”has had catalepsy, and a learned leech of his nation, slain soon afterwards, healed him and brought him back to life after three days. He says he was dead, and made alive again, but that is his madness; though the man seems sane enough.
At any rate, his disease has disappeared, he is as well as you and I.