BOOKS.

RED COTTON NICTHT-CAP COUNTRY.*

Ma. BROWNING is the most abrupt and inquisitive of imaginative writers. His works often remind us more of the manner half amused, half grotesque, and wholly indifferent to human judg- ments, with which a sagacious raven inspects the domestic arrangements of our imperfect world, anxious to get a fresh and original view of them, not a view which weuld win its way to any of our hearts, than of the rich and sympathetic, if prejudiced picture which one is accustomed to look for from a poet. He seems to hold his head on one side and find a sort of hoarse, unearthly amusement even at the very heart of the tragedy to which he pierces, so that while no one can say he is too hard upon sin or too tender to folly, it is yet often quite impossible to get rid of the feeling that he is scrutinising both rather "for information's sake,"—as a hospital physician enters into all the symptoms of a very rare disease which he has not the slightest hope of curing or alleviating, but not the leas feels it a privilege to witness,—than for any spell which they have laid upon his imagination. In that finest, perhaps, of all his efforts, the picture of Pompilia in The Ring and the Book, he rose almost entirely out of this region of inquisitive analysis, but even in that great poem he compensated himself for the depth of feeling in his pictures of Pompilia and Caponsaechi, by vivisecting Count Guido with a terribly cold scientific curiosity, and making such a study even of the fine old Pope, as laid the springs of his conduct a little too bare and dry. But in this grotesquely-named and gro- tesquely-conceived poem, the tragedy is all lost in the oddity of treat- ment and the profusion of side-glances the poet keeps taking at his subject. As artists hold their heads on one side to renew the fresh- ness of the impression which a landscape makes upon them, so in this poem from beginning to end Mr. Browning seems always trying to renew his impression of the whole strange and not very agree- able substance of his story, by a succession of half-dry, half- quizzical glances at it, glances too amused and critical to be in keeping with the character of the story. And the effect is, as we have said, to give a painful sense of moral vivisection, of an analysis entered into from mere moral curiosity rather than imaginative sympathy.

The poem is dedicated to Miss Thackeray, and Mr. Browning tells, in his own peculiar, abrupt style, how he met Miss Thackeray in a very sleepy little village on the Norman coast, which Mae Thackeray, with her playful humour, called " White-Cotton -Night- Cap Country," partly from the sleeping costume of its women, and partly ffbm the profound effect of drowsiness produced on those who had lived in the great world. This induces the poet to muse on night-caps, to imagine himself inagreat museum of night-caps, —the night-caps of celebrated people of all sorts down to the cap the hangman draws over the eyes of the condemned, till it occurs to him that France is rather more celebrated for its red night-cap, called the Phrygian cap of liberty, than even for its white :— " Well, it is French, and here we are in France :

It is historic, and we live to learn.

And try to learn by reading story-books.

It is an incident of 'Ninety-two, And, twelve months since, the Commune had the sway. Therefore resolve that, after all the Whites Presented you, a solitary Red Shall pain us both, a minute and no more !

Do not you see poor Louis pushed to front Of palace-window, in persuasion's name, A spectacle above the howling mob Who tasted, as it were, with tiger-smack, The outstart, the first spirt of blood on brow, The Phrygian symbol, the new crown of thorns, The Cap of Freedom? See the feeble mirth At odds with that half-purpose to be strong And merely patient under misery!

And note the ejaculation, ground so hard Between his teeth, that only God could hear,

As the lean, pale, proud insignificance,

With the sharp-featured, liver-worried stare Out of the two grey points that did him stead And passed their eagle-owner to the front Better than his mob-elbowed under-size,— The Corsican lieutenant commented, 'Had I but one good regiment of my own, How soon should volleys to the duo amount Lay stiff upon the street-flags this canaille ;

As for the droll there, he that plays the king

And screws out smile with a Red night-cap on, He's done for ! Somebody must take his place.'

White Cotton Night-cap Country : excellent !

Why not Red Cotton Night-cap Country too ?"

Red Cotton Aright-Colt Country; or, Turf and Tower:. By Robert Browning. London: Smith and Elder. That is perhaps the finest passage in the poem. That cap of liberty has indeed proved a crown of thorns' to all who, unpre- pared, have put it on ; yet the metaphor misleads, for the crown of thorns was a true crown only because it was suffering borne for others, but the cap of liberty, where it has carried moat benefit, has been a fool's cap too, because they who wore it were unprepared for it, and became its victims. But to return to the poem. Having thus suggested that France has bitterer moods, even under the seemingly sleepy Conservatism of her people, than the White- night-cap would symbolise, the poet suggests that perhaps even in that sleepy neighbourhood which his fair friend had named White Cotton Night-cap Country, there might be traces of this fiercer disposition, which ought to be symbolised by the red cotton night- cap, and so leads us gradually into a weird story of sin and super- stition which has been unravelled in a recent French trial, and the scene of the most tragic incident in which had been in the immediate neighbourhood of the sleepy Norman village. The hero of the story is the eldest son of a rich Paris jeweller, half of Spanish, half of French blood,—profoundly and fanatically super- stitious, also full of the eager voluptuous French nervousness which rebels in its very nature against the grim yoke of the Spanish form of faith, and also disposes the mind upon which that joke is forced, to bring the faith it accepts to book, and test it practically by its own tests. But we will quote Mr. Browning's own analysis :— " This son and heir then of the jeweller,

Monsieur Ldonce Miranda, at his birth,

Mixed the Castilian passionate blind blood

With answerable gush, his mother's gift, Of spirit, French and critical and cold.

Such mixture makes a battle in the brain, Ending as faith or doubt gets uppermost ; Then will has way a moment, but no more, So nicely-balanced are the adverse strengths, And victory entails reverse next time.

The tactics of the two are different And equalise the odds : for blood comes first, Surrounding life with undisputed faith.

But presently, a new antagonist, By scarce-suspected passage in the dark, Steals spirit, fingers at each crevice found Athwart faith's stronghold, fronts the astonished man:

'Such pains to keep me far, yet here stand I,

Your doubt inside the faith-defence of you!'"

Perhaps the poet's analysis is hardly always consistent with itself. Once Mr. Browning represents his hero as of a merely "leaning nature," and says of him that when his brother died, he,

"Meant to lean By nature, needs must shift his leaning-place To his love's bosom from his brother's neck, Or fall flat, unrelieved of freight sublime."

Yet neither the cold, thrifty profligacy which is attributed to the hero at the outset of his career before he comes to love really at all, nor the reckless passion of his love when he does fall in love, nor the vehemence of his attachment to his mother, nor the fierce remorse which makes him burn off his guilty hands, as he calls them, the hands with which he had written such heaps of love- letters to the object of his passion, nor the fanatical ecstacy (as Mr. Browning interprets it) of the last and fatal act which ends his life, is quite consistent with the merely dependent leaning nature here ascribed to him. He must have been hard and ruth- less till his affection was roused, and then liable to almost any excess of spontaneous passion. The man who could burn off his own hands in his remorse, crying out, "Burn, burn, purify," and again, who could exclaim,—

" Why am I hindered when I would be pure ?

Why leave the sacrifice still incomplete ?

She holds me,—I must have more hands to burn!" _ was not a merely dependent creature. He may have had but little will, as distinguished from passion; still, gusts of impulse so violent, and unrefiected from any other miud, are hardly characteristics of mere dependence or "of much affection and some foolishness," as Mr. Browning also describes it. We do not call the cyclones dependent, even though they are doubtless dependent on some natural law or other outside themselves ; and it seems hardly apt to describe any mind that had passed through the phases of the coldest and most selfish lust, the most profound devotedness of earthly affection, and spasms of self-forgetting asceticism and fanatical rapture, merely as one "of much affection and some foolishness." Though these terms may be really applicable, they are surely inadequate. And this seems to us the chief blot on Mr. Browning's poem, that in spite of all his quizzi- cal side-glances at his hero, and his imaginative analysis of that hero's fervent desire to test and show his faith in the miraculous help he only half believed in, by the fatal leap

from his own tower which caused his death, we do not get a really satisfying picture of the man at all, but only a number of rather inquisitive researches into his moral anatomy. We seem to see in the story something of the figure of the traditional Ignatius Loyola, without his strong will,—a man who had been profligate, and who had yet great capacities for both superstition and faith, but who, unlike Loyola, was never in any degree master of himself, and passed from earthly love to raptures of earthly religion in somewhat sudden and violent bounds. This is hardly the character Mr. Browning delineates, though it is the one his story seems to require ; and on the *hole, we are disappointed with his develop- ment of the battle between the Spanish and the French blood in his hero's veins. II is coldly analytical, without quite justifying itself as true.

The picture of the not very pure heroine, "the medium article," who is mistress to two or three men before she knows and becomes really faithful to the hero, is more consistent and subtle. She is one who is capable only of a second-rate love, who cannot so redeem herself by love as to rise to that height where love forgets itself in the desire to minister to another's good. But in the second stage she is complete of her kind,—one who can reflect perfectly the wishes of those whom they love and who can heal the wounds in their self-esteem :—

"Born, bred, with just one instinct,—that of growth :

Her quality was, caterpillar-like, To all-unerringly select a leaf And without intermission feed her fill, Become the Painted Peacock, or belike

'The Brimstone-wing, when time of year should suit;

And 'tis a sign (say entomologists) Of sickness, when the creature stops its meal One minute, either to look up to heaven, Or turn aside for change of aliment.

No doubt there was a certain ugliness

In the beginning, as the grub grew worm :

She could not find the proper plant at once, But crawled and fumbled through a whole parterre.

• • • • • • • • - • Was he for pastime? Who so frolic-fond As Clara? Had he a devotion-fit?

Clara grew serious with like qualm, be sure !

In health and strength he,—healthy too and strong, She danced, rode, drove, took pistol-practice, fished, Nay, 'managed sea-skiff with consummate skill.'

In pain and weakness, he,—she patient watched

And wiled the slow drip-dropping hours away, She bound again the broken self-respect, She picked out the true meaning from mistake, Praised effort in each stumble, laughed 'Well-climbed !'

When others groaned 'None over grovelled so ! '

'Rise, you have gained experience !' was her word; 'Lie satisfied, the ground is just your place!'

They thought appropriate counsel. 'Live, not die, And take my full life to eke out your own.'

• • • • • • • • • • • 'But—loved him ? ' Friend, I do not praise her love ; True love works never for the loved one so, Nor spares skin-surface, smoothening truth away.

Love bids touch truth, endure truth, and embrace Truth, though, embracing truth, love crush itself.

*Worship not me. but God ! 'the angels urge :

That is love's grandeur : still, in pettier love

The nice eye can distinguish grade and grade.

Shall mine degrade the velvet green and puce Of caterpillar, palmer-worm—or what—

Ball in and out of ball, each ball with brush

Of Venus' eye-fringe round the turquoise egg

That nestles soft, —compare such paragon With any scarabaaus of the brood That, born to fly, keeps wing in wing-case, walks Persistently a-trundling dung on earth ?

Egypt may venerate such hierophants,

Not L" That is a fine and subtle analysis, and apparently consistent with the miserable story. But still the heroine is so wholly the second figure in the piece, and the tragic incidents which give it its interest keep, on the whole, so far clear of her, that it is hardly enough that this part of Mr. Browning's picture is really powerful. It is the tragedy that fascinates us, and the tragedy he treats in the same critical- grotesque mood as he does the analysis of the lady, "the medium article." Now that mood may be adequate for the latter subject, but it is not for the first, and so the total effect upon us is that a very grim subject, full of tragic elements, has been rather coldly analysed and almost quizzed, instead of worked up into a tragic poem.

As to style, we must add that there is far less of obscurity, but also far less of fitful eloquence, than usual with Mr. Browning. There is the same faulty, short-hand, article-eliminating hurry of style, as if the poet had to get his story told within a certain number of minutes, and every-superfluous ward, and many words by no means superfluous, must therefore be left to the reader to guess at. But there are very few passages the meaning of which is not quite clear at the second reading, and as our extracts will have shown, there are some of great subtlety and intellectual vivacity. Still Mr. Browning has not succeeded in giving any true poetic excuse for telling a story so full of disagreeable elements. When told, it fails to purify, as tragedy should, "by pity and by fear."