An Epistle Containing the Strange Medical Experience of Karshish, the Arab Physician
Karshish, the Arab physician, has been journeying in quest of knowledge pertaining to his art, and writes to his all-sagacious master, Abib, ostensibly about the specimens he has gathered of medicinal plants and minerals, and the observations he has made; but his real interest, which he endeavors to conceal by passing to matters of greater import to him, as he would have his sage at home believe, is in what he pronounces “a case of mania, subinduced by epilepsy”. His last letter brought his journeyings to Jericho. He is now on his way to Jerusalem, and has reached Bethany, where he passes the night.
The case of mania which so interests him,—far more than he is willing to admit,—is that of Lazarus, whose firm conviction rests that he was dead (in fact they buried him) and then restored to life by a Nazarene physician of his tribe, who afterwards perished in a tumult. The man Lazarus is witless, he writes, of the relative value of all things. Vast armaments assembled to besiege his city, and the passing of a mule with gourds, are all one to him; while at some trifling fact, he’ll gaze, rapt with stupor, as if it had for him prodigious import. Should his child sicken unto death, why look for scarce abatement of his cheerfulness, or suspension of his daily craft; while a word, gesture, or glance from that same child at play or laid asleep, will start him to an agony of fear, exasperation, just as like! The law of the life, it seems, to which he was temporarily admitted, has become to him the law of this earthly life; his heart and brain move there, his feet stay here. He appears to be perfectly submissive to the heavenly will, and awaits patiently for death to restore his being to equilibrium. He is by no means apathetic, but loves both old and young, affects the very brutes and birds and flowers of the field. This man, so restored to life, regards his restorer as, who but God himself, Creator and Sustainer of the world, that came and dwelt in flesh on it awhile, taught, healed the sick, broke bread at his own house, then died! Here Karshish breaks off and asks pardon for writing of such trivial matters, when there are so important ones to treat of, and states that he noticed on the margin of a pool blue-flowering borage abounding, the Aleppo sort, very nitrous. But he returns again to the subject, and tries to explain the peculiar interest, and awe, indeed, the man has inspired him with. Perhaps the journey’s end, and his weariness, he thinks, may have had something to do with it. He then relates the weird circumstances under which he met him, and concludes by saying that the repose he will have at Jerusalem shall make amends for the time his letter wastes, his master’s and his own. Till when, once more thy pardon and farewell!
But in spite of himself, his suppressed interest in the strange case MUST have full expression, and he gives way to all reserve and ejaculates in a postscript:—
See before, p. 41 {about one-fifth into Part II of the Introduction}, some remarks on the psychological phase of the monologue.
“The monologue is a signal example of ‘emotional ratiocination’. There is a flash of ecstasy through the strangely cautious description of Karshish; every syllable is weighed and thoughtful, everywhere the lines swell into perfect feeling.”—Robert Buchanan.
“As an example of our poet’s dramatic power in getting right at the heart of a man, reading what is there written, and then looking through his eyes and revealing it all in the man’s own speech, nothing can be more complete in its inner soundings and outer-keeping, than the epistle containing the ‘Strange Medical Experience of Karshish, the Arab Physician’, who has been picking up the crumbs of learning on his travels in the Holy Land, and writes to Abib, the all-sagacious, at home. It is so solemnly real and so sagely fine.”—N. Brit. Rev., May, 1861.
A Martyr’s Epitaph.
A wonderfully effective expression, effective through its pathetic simplicity, of the peaceful spirit of a Christian, who has triumphed over persecution and death, and passed to his reward.
Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister.
The speaker in this monologue is a Spanish monk, whose jealousy toward a simple and unoffending brother has, in the seclusion of the cloister, developed into a festering malignity. If hate, he says, could kill a man, his hate would certainly kill Brother Laurence. He is watching this brother, from a window of the cloister, at work in the garden. He looks with contempt upon his honest toil; repeats mockingly to himself, his simple talk when at meals, about the weather and the crops; sneers at his neatness, and orderliness, and cleanliness; imputes to him his own libidinousness. He takes credit to himself in laying crosswise, in Jesu’s praise, his knife and fork, after refection, and in illustrating the Trinity, and frustrating the Arian, by drinking his watered orange-pulp in three sips, while Laurence drains his at one gulp. Now he notices Laurence’s tender care of the melons, of which it appears the good man has promised all the brethren a feast; “so nice!” He calls to him, from the window, “How go on your flowers? None double? Not one fruit-sort can you spy?” Laurence, it must be understood, kindly answers him in the negative, and then he chuckles to himself, “Strange!—and I, too, at such trouble, keep ’em close-nipped on the sly!” He thinks of devising means of causing him to trip on a great text in Galatians, entailing “twenty-nine distinct damnations, one sure, if another fails”; or of slyly putting his “scrofulous French novel” in his way, which will make him “grovel hand and foot in Belial’s gripe”. In his malignity, he is ready to pledge his soul to Satan (leaving a flaw in the indenture), to see blasted that rose-acacia Laurence is so proud of. Here the vesper-bell interrupts his filthy and blasphemous eructations, and he turns up his eyes and folds his hands on his breast, mumbling “Plena gratia ave Virgo!” and right upon the prayer, his disgust breaks out, “Gr-r-r—you swine!”
This monologue affords a signal illustration of the poet’s skill in making a speaker, while directly revealing his own character, reflect very distinctly the character of another. This has been seen in ‘My Last Duchess’, given as an example of the constitution of this art-form, in the section of the Introduction on ‘Browning’s Obscurity’.
“The ‘Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister’, is a picture (ghastly in its evident truth) of superstition which has survived religion; of a heart which has abandoned the love of kindred and friends, only to lose itself in a wilderness of petty spite, terminating in an abyss of diabolical hatred. The ordinary providential helps to goodness have been rejected; the ill-provided adventurer has sought to scale the high snow-peaks of saintliness,—he has missed his footing,— and the black chasm which yawns beneath, has ingulfed him.” —E. J. H{asell}, in St. Paul’s Magazine, December, 1870.
An able writer in ‘The Contemporary Review’, Vol. IV., p. 140, justly remarks:—
“No living writer—and we do not know any one in the past who can be named, in this respect, in the same breath with him {Browning} —approaches his power of analyzing and reproducing the morbid forms, the corrupt semblances, the hypocrisies, formalisms, and fanaticisms of man’s religious life. The wildness of an Antinomian predestinarianism has never been so grandly painted as in ‘Johannes Agricola in Meditation’; the white heat of the persecutor glares on us, like a nightmare spectre, in ‘The Heretic’s Tragedy’. More subtle forms are drawn with greater elaboration. If ‘Bishop Blougram’s Apology’, in many of its circumstances and touches, suggests the thought of actual portraiture, recalling a form and face once familiar to us, …it is also a picture of a class of minds which we meet with everywhere. Conservative scepticism that persuades itself that it believes, cynical acuteness in discerning the weak points either of mere secularism or dreaming mysticism, or passionate eagerness to reform, avoiding dangerous extremes, and taking things as they are because they are comfortable, and lead to wealth, enjoyment, reputation,—this, whether a true account or not of the theologian to whom we have referred…is yet to be found under many eloquent defences of the faith, many fervent and scornful denunciations of criticism and free thought… In ‘Caliban upon Setebos’, if it is more than the product of Mr. Browning’s fondness for all abnormal forms of spiritual life, speculating among other things on the religious thoughts of a half brute-like savage, we must see a protest against the thought that man can rise by himself to true thoughts of God, and develop a pure theology out of his moral consciousness. So far it is a witness for the necessity of a revelation, either through the immediate action of the Light that lighteth every man, or that which has been given to mankind in spoken or written words, by The WORD that was in the beginning. In the ‘Death in the Desert’, in like manner, we have another school of thought analyzed with a corresponding subtlety… The ‘Death in the Desert’ is worth studying in its bearing upon the mythical school of interpretation, and as a protest, we would fain hope, from Mr. Browning’s own mind against the thought that because the love of God has been revealed in Christ, and has taught us the greatness of all true human love, therefore,
“In one remarkable passage at the close of ‘The Legend of Pornic’, Mr. Browning, speaking apparently in his own person, proclaims his belief in one great Christian doctrine, which all pantheistic and atheistic systems formally repudiate, and which many semi-Christian thinkers implicitly reject:—
— 1 A volume which appeared in 1860, made up of essays and reviews, the several authors having “written in entire independence of each other, and without concert or comparison”. These essays and reviews offset the extreme high church doctrine of the Tracts for the Times.
On which the Jews were forced to attend an annual Christian sermon in Rome.
The argument is sufficiently shown by what is prefixed to this poem. The ‘Diary by the Bishop’s Secretary, 1600’, is presumably imaginary.
Saul.
This is, in every respect, one of Browning’s grandest poems; and in all that is included in the idea of EXPRESSION, is quite perfect.
The portion of Scripture which is the germ of the poem, and it is only the germ, is contained in the First Book of Samuel 16:14–23.
To the present consolation which David administers to Saul, with harp and song, and the Scripture story does not go beyond this, is added the assurance of the transmission of his personality, and of the influence of his deeds; first, through those who have been quickened by them, and who will, in turn, transmit that quickening— “Each deed thou hast done, dies, revives, goes to work in the world: …each ray of thy will, every flash of thy passion and prowess, long over, shall thrill thy whole people, the countless, with ardor, till they too give forth a like cheer to their sons: who, in turn, fill the South and the North with the radiance thy deed was the germ of”; and, then, through records that will give unborn generations their due and their part in his being.
The consolation is, moreover, carried beyond that afforded by earthly fame and influence. David’s yearnings to give Saul “new life altogether, as good, ages hence, as this moment,— had love but the warrant, love’s heart to dispense”, pass into a prophecy, based on his own loving desires, of the God-Man who shall throw open to Saul the gates of that new life.
With this prophecy, David leaves Saul. On his way home, in the night, he represents himself as attended by witnesses, cohorts to left and to right. At the dawn, all nature, the forests, the wind, beasts and birds, even the serpent that slid away silent, appear to him aware of the new law; the little brooks, witnessing, murmured with all but hushed voices, “E’en so, it is so!”
A Death in the Desert.
‘A Death in the Desert’ appears to have been inspired by the controversies in regard to the historical foundations of Christianity, and, more especially, in regard to the character and the authorship of the Fourth Gospel—controversies which received their first great impulse from the ‘Leben Jesu’ of David Friedrich Strauss, first published in 1835. An English translation of the fourth edition, 1840, by Marian Evans (George Eliot), was published in London, in 1846.
The immediate occasion of the composition of ‘A Death in the Desert’ was, perhaps, the publication, in 1863, of Joseph Ernest Renan’s ‘Vie de Jesus’. ‘A Death in the Desert’ was included in the poet’s ‘Dramatis Personae’, published in the following year.
“In style, the poem a little recalls ‘Cleon’; with less of harmonious grace and clear classic outline, it possesses a certain stilled sweetness, a meditative tenderness, all its own, and beautifully appropriate to the utterance of the ‘beloved disciple’.”—Arthur Symons.
During a persecution of the Christians, the aged John of Patmos has been secretly conveyed, by some faithful disciples, to a cave in the desert, where he is dying. Revived temporarily by the tender ministrations of his disciples, he is enabled to tell over his past labors in the service of his beloved Master, to refute the Antichrist already in the world, and to answer the questions which, with his far-reaching spiritual vision, he foresees will be raised in regard to Christ’s nature, life, doctrine, and miracles, as recorded in the Gospel he has written. These services he feels to be due from him, in his dying hour, as the sole survivor of Christ’s apostles and intimate companions.
This is the only composition in which Browning deals directly with historical Christianity; and its main purpose may, in brief, be said to be, to set forth the absoluteness of Christianity, which cannot be affected by any assaults made upon its external, historical character.
The doctrine of the trinal unity of man (the what Does, what Knows, what Is) ascribed to John (vv. 82–104), and upon which his discourse may be said to proceed, leads up the presentation of the final stage of the Christian life on earth—that stage when man has won his way to the kingdom of the “what Is” within himself, and when he no longer needs the outward supports to his faith which he needed before he passed from the “what Knows”. Christianity is a religion which is only secondarily a doctrine addressed to the “what Knows”. It is, first of all, a religion whose fountain-head is a Personality in whom all that is spiritually potential in man, was realized, and in responding to whom the soul of man is quickened and regenerated. And the Church, through the centuries, has been kept alive, not by the letter of the New Testament, for the letter killeth, but by a succession of quickened and regenerated spirits, “the noble Living and the noble Dead”, through whom the Christ has been awakened and developed in other souls.
POEMS.
It was customary, on entering a convent, to change the
baptismal name for some other.
— ↩‘The Mountain Glory’, the subject of the chapter from which
this is taken.
— ↩John W. Colenso, Bishop of Natal, in South Africa; he
published works questioning the inspiration and historical
accuracy of certain parts of the Bible, among which was ‘The
Pentateuch, and the Book of Joshua critically examined’.
—
Holy-Cross Day. ↩