Robert Browning - Delphi Poets Series
Page 171
Perhaps — but Place Vendôme is waking worth:
Oh, they lost little! — only, man and man
Hardly conclude transactions of the kind
As cousin should with cousin, — cousins think.
For the rest, all was honourably done,
So, ere buds break to blossom, let us breathe!
Never suppose there was one particle
Of recrudescence — wound, half healed before,
Set freshly running — sin, repressed as such,
New loosened as necessity of life!
In all this revocation and resolve,
Far be sin’s self-indulgence from your thought!
The man had simply made discovery,
By process I respect if not admire,
That what was, was: — that turf, his feet had touched,
Felt solid just as much as yonder towers
He saw with eyes, but did not stand upon,
And could not, if he would, reach in a leap.
People had told him flowery turf was false
To footstep, tired the traveller soon, beside:
That was untrue. They told him “One fair stride
Plants on safe platform and secures man rest.”
That was untrue. Some varied the advice:
“Neither was solid, towers no more than turf.”
Double assertion, therefore twice as false.
“I like these amateurs” — our friend had laughed,
Could he turn what he felt to what he thought,
And, that again, to what he put in words:
“I like their pretty trial, proof of paste
Or precious stone, by delicate approach
Of eye askance, fine feel of finger-tip,
Or touch of tongue inquisitive for cold.
I tried my jewels in a crucible:
Fierce fire has felt them, licked them, left them sound.
Don’t tell me that my earthly love is sham,
My heavenly fear a clever counterfeit!
Each may oppose each, yet be true alike!”
To build up, independent of the towers,
A durable pavilion o’er the turf,
Had issued in disaster. “What remained
Except, by tunnel, or else gallery,
To keep communication ‘twixt the two,
Unite the opposites, both near and far,
And never try complete abandonment
Of one or other?” so he thought, not said.
And to such engineering feat, I say,
Monsieur Léonce Miranda saw the means
Precisely in this revocation prompt
Of just those benefits of worldly wealth
Conferred upon his Cousinry — all but!
This Clairvaux — you would know, were you at top
Of yonder crowning grace, its Belvedere —
Is situate in one angle-niche of three
At equidistance from Saint-Rambert — there
Behind you, and The Ravissante, beside —
There: steeple, steeple, and this Clairvaux-top,
(A sort of steeple) constitute a trine,
With not a tenement to break each side,
Two miles or so in length, if eye can judge.
Now, this is native land of miracle.
O why, why, why, from all recorded time,
Was miracle not wrought once, only once,
To help whoever wanted help indeed?
If on the day when Spring’s green girlishness
Grew nubile and she trembled into May,
And our Miranda climbed to clasp the Spring
A-tiptoe o’er the sea, those wafts of warmth,
Those cloudlets scudding under the bare blue,
And all that new sun, that fresh hope about
His airy place of observation, — friend,
Feel with me that if just then, just for once,
Some angel, — such as the authentic pen
Yonder records a daily visitant
Of ploughman Claude, rheumatic in the joints,
And spinster Jeanne, with megrim troubled sore, —
If such an angel, with nought else to do,
Had taken station on the pinnacle
And simply said “Léonce, look straight before!
Neither to right hand nor to left: for why?
Being a stupid soul, you want a guide
To turn the goodness in you to account
And make stupidity submit itself.
Go to Saint-Rambert! Straightway get such guide!
There stands a man of men. You, jeweller,
Must needs have heard how once the biggest block
Of diamond now in Europe lay exposed
Mid specimens of stone and earth and ore,
On huckster’s stall, — Navona names the Square,
And Rome the city for the incident, —
Labelled ‘quartz-crystal, price one halfpenny.’
Haste and secure that ha’p’worth, on your life!
That man will read you rightly head to foot,
Mark the brown face of you, the bushy beard,
The breadth ‘twixt shoulderblades, and through each black
Castilian orbit, see into your soul.
Talk to him for five minutes — nonsense, sense,
No matter what — describe your horse, your hound, —
Give your opinion of the policy
Of Monsieur Rouher, — will he succour Rome?
Your estimate of what may outcome be
From Oecumenical Assemblage there!
After which samples of intelligence,
Rapidly run through those events you call
Your past life, tell what once you tried to do,
What you intend on doing this next May!
There he stands, reads an English newspaper,
Stock-still, and now, again upon the move,
Paces the beach to taste the Spring, like you,
Since both are human beings in God’s eye.
He will have understood you, I engage.
Endeavour, for your part, to understand
He knows more, and loves better, than the world
That never heard his name, and never may.
He will have recognized, ere breath be spent
And speech at end, how much that’s good in man,
And generous, and self-devoting, makes
Monsieur Léonce Miranda worth his help;
While sounding to the bottom ignorance
Historical and philosophical
And moral and religious, all one couch
Of crassitude, a portent of its kind.
Then, just as he would pityingly teach
Your body to repair maltreatment, give
Advice that you should make those stumps to stir
With artificial hands of caoutchouc,
So would he soon supply your crippled soul
With crutches, from his own intelligence,
Able to help you onward in the path
Of rectitude whereto your face is set,
And counsel justice — to yourself, the first,
To your associate, very like a wife
Or something better, — to the world at large,
Friends, strangers, horses, hounds and Cousinry —
All which amount of justice will include
Justice to God. Go and consult his voice!”
Since angel would not say this simple truth,
What hinders that my heart relieve itself,
Milsand, who makest warm my wintry world,
And wise my heaven, if there we consort too?
Monsieur Léonce Miranda turned, alas,
Or was turned, by no angel, t’ other way,
And got him guidance of The Ravissante.
Now, into the originals of faith,
Yours, mine, Miranda’s, no inquiry here!
Of faith, as apprehended by mankind,
The causes, were they
caught and catalogued,
Would too distract, too desperately foil
Inquirer. How may analyst reduce
Quantities to exact their opposites,
Value to zero, then bring zero back
To value of supreme preponderance
How substitute thing meant for thing expressed?
Detect the wire-thread through that fluffy silk
Men call their rope, their real compulsive power?
Suppose effected such anatomy,
And demonstration made of what belief
Has moved believer — were the consequence
Reward at all? would each man straight deduce,
From proved reality of cause, effect
Conformable — believe and unbelieve
According to your True thus disengaged
From all his heap of False called reason first?
No: hand once used to hold a soft thick twist,
Cannot now grope its way by wire alone
Childhood may catch the knack, scarce Youth, not Age!
That’s the reply rewards you. Just as well
Remonstrate to yon peasant in the blouse
That, had he justified the true intent
Of Nature who composed him thus and thus,
Weakly or strongly, here he would not stand
Struggling with uncongenial earth and sky,
But elsewhere tread the surface of the globe,
Since one meridian suits the faulty lungs,
Another bids the sluggish liver work.
“Here I was born, for better or for worse:
I did not choose a climate for myself;
Admit, my life were healthy, led elsewhere,”
(He answers) “how am I to migrate, pray?”
Therefore the course to take is — spare your pains,
And trouble uselessly with discontent
Nor soul nor body, by parading proof
That neither haply had known ailment, placed
Precisely where the circumstance forbade
Their lot should fall to either of the pair.
But try and, what you find wrong, remedy,
Accepting the conditions: never ask
“How came you to be born here with those lungs,
That liver?” But bid asthma smoke a pipe,
Stramonium, just as if no Tropics were,
And ply with calomel the sluggish duct,
Nor taunt “The born Norwegian breeds no bile!”
And as with body, so proceed with soul:
Nor less discerningly, where faith you found,
However foolish and fantastic, grudge
To play the doctor and amend mistake,
Because a wisdom were conceivable
Whence faith had sprung robust above disease.
Far beyond human help, that source of things!
Since, in the first stage, so to speak, — first stare
Of apprehension at the invisible, —
Begins divergency of mind from mind,
Superior from inferior: leave this first!
Little you change there! What comes afterward —
From apprehended thing, each inference
With practicality concerning life,
This you may test and try, confirm the right
Or contravene the wrong which reasons there.
The offspring of the sickly faith must prove
Sickly act also: stop a monster-birth!
When water’s in the cup and not the cloud,
Then is the proper time for chemic test:
Belief permits your skill to operate
When, drop by drop condensed from misty heaven,
‘T is wrung out, lies a bowlful in the fleece.
How dew by spoonfuls came, let Gideon say:
What purpose water serves, your word or two
May teach him, should he fancy it lights fire.
Concerning, then, our vaporous Ravissante —
How fable first precipitated faith —
Silence you get upon such point from me.
But when I see come posting to the pair
At Clairvaux, for the cure of soul-disease,
This Father of the Mission, Parish-priest,
This Mother of the Convent, Nun I know —
They practise in that second stage of things;
They boast no fresh distillery of faith;
‘T is dogma in the bottle, bright and old,
They bring; and I pretend to pharmacy.
They undertake the cure with all my heart!
He trusts them, and they surely trust themselves.
I ask no better. Never mind the cause,
Fons et origo of the malady:
Apply the drug with courage! Here’s our case.
Monsieur Léonce Miranda asks of God,
— May a man, living in illicit tie,
Continue, by connivance of the Church,
No matter what amends he please to make
Short of forthwith relinquishing the sin?
Physicians, what do you propose for cure?
Father and Mother of the Ravissante,
Read your own records, and you find prescribed
As follows, when a couple out of sorts
Rather than gravely suffering, sought your skill
And thereby got their health again. Perpend!
Two and a half good centuries ago,
Luc de la Maison Rouge, a nobleman
Of Claise, (the river gives this country name)
And, just as noblewoman, Maude his wife,
Having been married many happy years
Spent in God’s honour and man’s service too,
Conceived, while yet in flower of youth and hope,
The project of departing each from each
Forever, and dissolving marriage-bonds
That both might enter a religious life.
Needing, before they came to such resolve,
Divine illumination, — course was clear, —
They visited your church in pilgrimage,
On Christmas morn: communicating straight,
They heard three Masses proper for the day,
“It is incredible with what effect” —
Quoth the Cistercian monk I copy from —
And, next day, came, again communicants,
Again heard Masses manifold, but now
With added thanks to Christ for special grace
And consolation granted: in the night,
Had been divorce from marriage, manifest
By signs and tokens. So, they made great gifts,
Left money for more Masses, and returned
Homeward rejoicing — he, to take the rules,
As Brother Dionysius, Capucin;
She, to become first postulant, then nun
According to the rules of Benedict,
Sister Scolastica: so ended they,
And so do I — not end nor yet commence
One note or comment. What was done was done.
Now, Father of the Mission, here’s your case!
And, Mother of the Convent, here’s its cure!
If separation was permissible,
And that decree of Christ “What God hath joined
Let no man put asunder” nullified
Because a couple, blameless in the world,
Had the conceit that, still more blamelessly,
Out of the world, by breach of marriage-vow,
Their life was like to pass, — you oracles
Of God, — since holy Paul says such you are, —
Hesitate, not one moment, to pronounce
When questioned by the pair now needing help
“Each from the other go, you guilty ones,
Preliminary to your least approach
Nearer the Power that thus could strain a point
In favour of a pair of innocents
Who thought their wedded hands not clean enough
To touch and
leave unsullied their souls’ snow!
Are not your hands found filthy by the world,
Mere human law and custom? Not a step
Nearer till hands be washed and purified!”
What they did say is immaterial, since
Certainly it was nothing of the kind.
There was no washing hands of him (alack,
You take me? — in the figurative sense!),
But, somehow, gloves were drawn o’er dirt and all,
And practice with the Church procured thereby.
Seeing that, — all remonstrance proved in vain,
Persuasives tried and terrors put to use,
I nowise question, — still the guilty pair
Only embraced the closelier, obstinate, —
Father and Mother went from Clairvaux back
Their weary way, with heaviness of heart,
I grant you, but each palm well crossed with coin,
And nothing like a smutch perceptible.
Monsieur Léonce Miranda might compound
For sin? — no, surely! but by gifts — prepare
His soul the better for contrition, say!
Gift followed upon gift, at all events.
Good counsel was rejected, on one part:
Hard money, on the other — may we hope
Was unreflectingly consigned to purse?
Two years did this experiment engage
Monsieur Léonce Miranda: how, by gifts
To God and to God’s poor, a man might stay
In sin and yet stave off sin’s punishment.
No salve could be conceived more nicely mixed
For this man’s nature: generosity, —
Susceptibility to human ills,
Corporeal, mental, — self-devotedness
Made up Miranda — whether strong or weak
Elsewhere, may be inquired another time.
In mercy he was strong, at all events.
Enough! he could not see a beast in pain,
Much less a man, without the will to aid;
And where the will was, oft the means were too,
Since that good bargain with the Cousinry.
The news flew fast about the countryside
That, with the kind man, it was ask and have;
And ask and have they did. To instance you: —
A mob of beggars at The Ravissante
Clung to his skirts one day, and cried “We thirst!”
Forthwith he bade a cask of wine be broached
To satisfy all comers, till, dead-drunk
So satisfied, they strewed the holy place.
For this was grown religious and a rite:
Such slips of judgment, gifts irregular,
Showed but as spillings of the golden grist
On either side the hopper, through blind zeal;
Steadily the main stream went pouring on
From mill to mouth of sack — held wide and close
By Father of the Mission, Parish-priest,