The Browning Cyclopædia: A Guide to the Study of the Works of Robert Browning. Edward Berdoe
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 —
“Toads in a poisoned tank,
Or wild cats in a red-hot iron cage,”
in their passion to reach the dark tower of Knowledge, which to them has neither door nor window. The lost adventurers are the men who, having followed this false path, have failed, and who look eagerly for the next fool who comes to join the band of the lost ones. “In the Paris School of Medicine,” says Mr. Lilly in his Right and Wrong, “it has lately been prophesied that, ‘when the rest of the world has risen to the intellectual level of France, the present crude and vulgar notions regarding morality, religion, Divine providence, and so forth, will be swept entirely away, and the dicta of science will remain the sole guide of sane and educated men.’” Had Mr. Browning intended to write for us an allegory in aid of our crusade, a sort of medical Pilgrim’s Progress, he could scarcely have given the world a more faithful picture of the spiritual ruin and desolation which await the student of medicine who sets forth on the fatal course of an experimental torturer. I have good authority for saying that, had Mr. Browning seen this interpretation of his poem, he would have cordially accepted it as at least one legitimate explanation. Most of the commentators agree that when Childe Roland “dauntless set the slug horn to his lips and blew ‘Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came,’” he did so as a warning to others that he had failed in his quest, and that the way of the Dark Tower was the way of destruction and death.
Christmas Eve. (Christmas Eve and Easter Day: London, 1850.) Two poems on the same subject from different points of view. The scene is a country chapel, a barnlike structure, from which ornament has been rigorously excluded, not so much on account of want of funds as horror of anything which should detract from “Gospel simplicity.” The night is stormy, and Christmas Day must have fallen on a Monday that year, or surely no worshippers in that building would have troubled themselves about keeping the vigil of such a “Popish feast” as Christmas. It must have been Sunday night as well as Christmas Eve, that year of ’49. The congregation eyed the stranger “much as some wild beast,” for “not many wise” were called to worship in their particular way, and the stranger was evidently not of their faith or class. In came the flock: the fat woman with a wreck of an umbrella; the little old-faced, battered woman with the baby, wringing the ends of her poor shawl soaking with the rain; then a “female something” in dingy satins; next a tall, yellow man, like the Penitent Thief; and from him, as from all, the interloper got the same surprised glance. “What, you, Gallio, here!” it expressed. And so, after a shoemaker’s lad, with a wet apron round his body and a bad cough inside it, had passed in, the interloper followed and took his place, waiting for his portion of New Testament meat, like the rest of them. What with the hot smell of greasy coats and frowsy gowns, combined with the preacher’s stupidity, the visitor soon had enough of it, and he “flung out of the little chapel” in disgust. As he passed out he found there was a lull in the rain and wind. The moon was up, and he walked on, glad to be in the open air, his mind full of the scene he had left. After all, why should he be hard on this case? In many modes the same thing was going on everywhere – the endeavour to make you believe – and with much about the same effect. He had his own church; Nature had early led him to its door; he had found God visibly present in the immensities, and with the power had recognised his love too as the nobler dower. Quite true was it that God stood apart from man – apart, that he might have room to act and use his gifts of brain and heart. Man was not perfect, not a machine, not unaware of his fitness to pray and praise. He looked up to God, recognised how infinitely He surpassed man in power and wisdom, and was convinced He would never in His love bestow less than man requires. In this great way he would seek to press towards God; let men seek Him in a narrow shrine if they would. And as he mused thus, suddenly the rain ceased and the moon shone out, the black clouds falling beneath her feet; a moon rainbow, vast and perfect, rose in its chorded colours. Then from out the world of men the worshipper of God in Nature was called, and at once and with terror he saw Him with His human air, the back of Him – no more. He had been present in the poor chapel – He, with His sweeping garment, vast and white, whose hem could just be recognised by the awed beholder, He who had promised to be where two or three should meet to pray – and He had been present as the friend of these poor folk! He was leaving him who had despised the friends of the Human-Divine. Then he clung to the salvation of His vesture, and told Him how he had thought it best He should be worshipped in spirit and becoming beauty; the uncouth worship he had just left was scarcely fitted for Him. Then the Lord turned His whole face upon him, and he was caught up in the whirl of the vestment, and was up-borne through the darkness and the cold, and held awful converse with his God; and then he came to know who registers the cup of cold water given for His sake,