E501130B. Poems (1850).
The Leader, 30 November 1850, pp. 856–857; 7 December, pp. 880–882; 14 December, p. 905.
As reprinted in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 16, 318–324.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning.
We have a grudge against Mrs. Browning’s critics for having, by their praises, kept us so long in ignorance of her beauties. We cannot, at this distance of time, specify where certain critiques appeared, nor what was the peculiar imbecility they expressed; but we are distinctly conscious of the general impression left by them, which was such as to destroy all curiosity to see the poems they so clumsily bepraised: the impression was that Mrs. Browning, then Miss Barrett, belonged to the least-amiable section of the modern school of affectation and verbosity—an impression some sonnets she published in Blackwood seemed fully to bear out.
Mrs. Browning, in our hearts we make you the amende honorable! The loss has been ours; but we have wronged you in our thoughts,—wronged you and scorned you,—when we should have honoured you and loved you, had not your critics deluded us with hyperboles of nonsense. To be saved from one’s friends has been an ancient prayer; when the friends are critics and noodles the prayer receives a triple intensification!
Probably some of our readers are in the same mood that we were, and from the same causes. If so, we conjure them to rush to the first shop, and carry off the two caskets of jewels bearing the name of Elizabeth Barrett Browning—paying for them if finances permit, but stealing them if necessary; for to possess them is imperative on all lovers of “numerous verse.” By fair means or foul, they must be had. “Steal? convey, the wise it call.” Any jury—having read the volumes—would give a verdict of “extenuating circumstances.”
We cannot pretend, in the novelty of our admiration to utter a final verdict on Mrs. Browning’s claims; no real poet is fathomed by the first cast of a sounding line, be the caster never so skilful. What we propose at present is merely to jot down rough notes towards the final elaboration of a judgment.
And, first, we note the quality—which takes precedence of all other excellences, without which no affluence of imagery or experience can avail—the quality of song. Poetry differs from prose as song differs from speech. The orator may be great, powerful, impassioned; but the highest sublimation of his qualities will never raise him into a singer. The singer may be feeble, his song scarce worth the hearing; but, nevertheless, he remains distinguished from all other men by this one gift of song. Mrs. Browning is a born singer—a poet by the irresistible decree of Nature. Herein she is distinguished from her husband, who, with a far greater reach of intellect, is a poet made by culture—a poet because other poets have lived before him, and spurred his ambitious horse till its paces made him fancy it was Pegasus. There is music in her mind, and that music becomes resonant in verse. Except Tennyson, there is no living writer of whom this is so essential a characteristic. Except Tennyson, there is no living writer to whom we should sooner point as an example of a born poet.
Connected with this primary quality of song there is also a singular magnificence of diction, such as recalls the prodigality of Shelley and Keats. She plays tricks with our noble language, occasionally; but this arises from the very indulgence of power unrestrained by taste; and these tricks look ugly in extracts. She is somewhat overlearned, also, in her diction; yet not pedantically so. The severe strength of simplicity is not in the nature of her genius, which is affluent, redundant, and lyrical, rather than collective, suggestive, and proportional: the emotions rule her genius, not the intellect.
This leads us to the primary defect of her writings—want of substantive wealth. Partly, we suspect because of her position, isolated in its womanhood from the great experiences which enrich a man (for it is only your unhappy or extraordinary women, such as George Sand or De Staël, whose lives furnish them with the material open to men), but still more owing to the natural tendency of her nature, she has allowed her phantasy to move amidst the reveries and unrealities of a silent life, instead of seeking to rebaptize in beauty the thoughts and sufferings of our work-day world. There are exceptions to this charge, and we shall notice them anon; but, taking a broad survey of her writings, this one fact continually forces itself upon us. She does not image forth the world. She does not, with the solemn introspection of egotism, make her own life the image wherein we are to recognize ourselves. Her works are works of pure imagination, or say, rather, of pure phantasy; not the utterances of a deliciously over-burdened soul speaking to our souls. Hence her great admirers will be found among feminine minds of both sexes; among the youthful who are still inhabitants of the realms of fancy, not dragged earthward by sorrowing realities or stern necessities; and among critics and poets, who will consider form, and form only. But, as George Sand so finely says:—“La poesie n’est qu’une forme, une expression de la vie en nous, et là ou elle n’exprime ni vœux, ni convictions, elle n’est qu’un ornement frivole, un instrument sonore.”
The very choice of subjects implies—to our apprehension—the want of real poetic material. “A man can only coin guineas,” said Johnson, “in proportion to his gold;” but the poet, whether he has gold or not, will persist in coining, and invents or borrows his material to satisfy the craving of his desire to create, just as the hen, though widowed, will lay eggs, to fulfil her function in the universe, even if housewives scorn her eggs as worthless: they look as good as other eggs, and gratify her maternal pride, but you cannot hatch them into chickens!
Open these volumes, and you find, first, “The Drama of Exile”—the old fable of Paradise Lost, treated not as Milton treated it, with human nature for his constant theme, and theological argument itself made human; but as Shelley would have treated it, had he been orthodox—with fanciful choruses of earth spirits, flower spirits, angels, and all the supernatural company vexing the reader with the sense of its being “all imagination.” We do not deny the beauty of many passages—the paradisiacal glow that lights up the whole; but we say the poem is a caprice: it is not hewn out of experience; it does not appeal to human sympathies. It is a work produced by mere delight in production. Then comes a still more remote and fanciful drama—“The Seraphim”—in the reading of which we fairly broke down. Years ago we should have gloried in it, and, doubtless, have straightway proceeded to spoil foolscap with an imitation of it! but “years which bring the philosophic mind” have brought the natural distaste for unrealities. And by unrealities we do not mean the things which have no actual existence in the outward world; we mean the things which do not really exist anywhere—which have no vitality. The Arabian Nights are intensely real and true; so are Fairy Tales when good. Puck, Titania, Caliban, and Ariel are as real as Hamlet or Falstaff. But Mrs. Browning’s Seraphim—Ador and Zerah—are unreal in every acceptation of the term.
Following the “Seraphim” come translations of the Prometheus Bound (of which more in detail hereafter) and the Lament for Adonis of Bion: subjects which, as exercises in translation, might be chosen by any poet, but which confirm the view we take of her natural tendency, to avoid mingling with the moving currents of life, and to choose the realm of phantasy. That noble Greek drama lay open to her; why did not the human interests of the Antigone, the Œdipus, the Philoctetes, the Ajax, or the Iphigenia attract her, and why were they foregone for the mythologic grandeur of the Prometheus? To our minds the answer is simple. The remoteness of a subject from human interest (and there is very little human interest in the Prome- [p. 857→] theus—it ends with the first scenes) was to her a fascination.
After these there come “A Vision of Poets”—“The Poet’s Vow”—two ballads, and some sonnets. In the second volume the ballads occupy a foremost place, and miscellaneous poems fill the remainder. We will not pause here to criticize these ballads and romaunts; our present purpose is to indicate the subjects chosen, and to suggest how they are those which a poet would select when moved by reading and reverie rather than by the œstrus of experience. And what the mere choice indicates the treatment confirms. The poems want substance. The form of the vase is beautiful, and its arabesque tracery flatters the eye; but the material is fragile or indifferent. The true regal stamp of the guinea is visible; but unfortunately the coin is not gold.
Enough on this point. Next week we will narrow our criticism to particulars, and tie up a nosegay of lovely flowers culled from her garden; for the present we will lighten the prosing we have just remorselessly flung upon your patience by the quotation of two sonnets, which will show how she can write when her own experience is the fuel of her flame:—
tears.
Thank God, bless God, all ye who suffer not
More grief than ye can weep for. That is well—
That is light grieving! Lighter none befel
Since Adam forfeited the primal lot.
Tears! what are tears? The babe weeps in its cot,
The mother singing; at her marriage-bell
The Bride weeps; and before the oracle
Of high-faned hills the poet hath forgot
That moisture on his cheeks. Thank God for grace
Whoever weep, albeit as some have done,
Ye grope tear-blinded in a desert place,
And touch but tombs—look up! Those tears will run
Soon in long rivers down the lifted face,
And leave the vision clear for stars and sun.
Noble writing that; true, musical, and potent. Hear her again on
grief.
I tell you hopeless grief is passionless—
That only men incredulous of despair,
Half taught in anguish, through the midnight air
Beat upward to God’s throne in loud access
Of shrieking and reproach. Full desertness
In souls, as countries, lieth silent—bare
Under the blenching, vertical eye-glare
Of the absolute heavens. Deep-hearted man, express
Grief for thy Dead in silence like to death;
Most like a monumental statue set
In everlasting watch and moveless woe
Till itself crumble to the dust beneath.
Touch it: the marble eyelids are not wet,
If it could weep it could arise and go.
[Continued in the issue of 7 December 1850.]
Mrs. Browning’s Poems.
(Second Notice.)
“O that I were young and handsome!” exclaimed Hector Berlioz, in one of his spirituel feuilletons; “I would make Alboni desperately in love with me, ill treat her, and in six months she would be the greatest singer in the world.”
Something of that artistic ferocity we feel towards Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Alboni has not a more peerless gift from Nature, nor a greater need for the glorious baptism of suffering. The godlike power of song has been bestowed upon her; but she has little to sing. For solemn psalms and silver litanies, for playful wanderings of fancy and the delicate delights of reverie, she has a finely-toned organ, and can play such themes with “ravishing division”; fill her soul with the gathered stores of experience, and she will pour them forth in eloquent music; but, meanwhile, her playing is like that of a great artist, who preludes the composition of some noble work by running his fingers over the keys to try the capabilities of the instrument.
For power of expression—the genuine musical utterance of emotion—she has scarcely a rival living. But on closing the second volume, and taking a survey of the contents, we cannot help regarding the present collection as poetic exercises rather than as lasting poems. Compared with her contemporaries [p. 881→] she stands eminent above almost all of them; compared with her peers—the real poets—in the great kingdom of fame—her position is insecure from the meagreness of her material. We insist on this point to explain the fervour of our admiration of her genius, and the coldness of our criticism when her substantive value is to be estimated; and the high standard by which we try her should be kept in view.
Before quoting some samples of her power, one objection must be made. Certain mannerisms of style have been touched upon by others; and indeed are too obvious to escape remark. There is one, however, which amounts to a vulgarism, and must not be overlooked—we mean the laxity of pronunciation implied in such rhymes as “smiling and while in,”—“enfolding and told him,” “coming and human .” We are no great sticklers for rigour in rhyme, but smilin’, enfoldin’, and comin’, are vulgarisms of pronunciation. In a subsequent edition these should be removed.
“The Drama of Exile,” which opens the collection, contains abundant examples of that power of poetic expression we just claimed for her; but it is meagre in plan, and quite characterless. Space forbids analysis; we hasten to quote beauties. The least poetic reader will feel the force of this scene—especially the image by which Lucifer paints his own condition:—
Luc. (after a pause). Dost thou remember, Adam, when the curse
Took us in Eden? On a mountain-peak,
Half-sheathed in primal woods and glittering
In spasms of awful sunshine, at that hour
A lion couched,—part raised upon his paws,
With his calm, massive face turned full on thine,
And his mane listening. When the ended curse
Left silence in the world, right suddenly
He sprang up rampant, and stood straight and stiff,
As if the new reality of death
Were dashed against his eyes, and roared so fierce—
(Such thick carnivorous passion in his throat
Tearing a passage through the wrath and fear)—
And roared so wild, and smote from all the hills
Such fast, keen echoes crumbling down the vales
Precipitately, that the forest beasts,
One after one, did mutter a response
In savage and in sorrowful complaint
Which trailed along the gorges. Then, at once,
He fell back, and rolled crashing from the height,
Hid by the dark-orbed pines.
Adam. It might have been.
I heard the curse alone.
Earth Spirits. I wail, I wail!
Luc. That lion is the type of what I am!
And as he fixed thee with his full-faced hate,
And roared, O Adam!—comprehending doom,—
So, gazing on the face of the Unseen,
I cry out here, between the heavens and earth,
My conscience of this sin, this woe, this wrath,
Which damn me to this depth!
Earth Spirits. I wail, I wail!
Eve. I wail—O God!
Luc. I scorn you that ye wail,
Who use your petty griefs for pedestals
To stand on, beckoning pity from without,
And deal in pathos of antithesis
Of what ye were forsooth, and what ye are;—
I scorn you like an angel! Yet, one cry,
I, too, would drive up, like a column erect,
Marble to marble, from my heart to Heaven,
A monument of anguish, to transpierce
And overtop your vapoury complaints
Expressed from feeble woes!
Earth Spirits. I wail, I wail!
Luc. For, O ye heavens, ye are my witnesses,
That I, struck out from nature in a blot,
The outcast, and the mildew of things good,
The leper of angels, the excepted dust
Under the common rain of daily gifts,—
I, the snake; I, the tempter; I, the cursed,—
To whom the highest and the lowest alike
Say, “Go from us—we have no need of thee,”—
Was made by God like others. Good and fair,
He did create me!—ask Him, if not fair;
Ask, if I caught not fair and silverly
His blessing for chief angels, on my head,
Until it grew there, a crown crystallized!
Ask, if He never called me by my name.
Lucifer—kindly said as “Gabriel”—
Lucifer—soft as “Michael”! while, serene,
I, standing in the glory of the lamps,
Answered, “My Father,” innocent of shame
And of the sense of thunder. Ha! ye think,
White angels in your niches, I repent,
And would tread down my own offences, back
To service at the footstool? That’s read wrong:
I cry as the beast did, that I may cry—
Expansive, not appealing! Fallen so deep
Against the sides of this prodigious pit,
I cry—cry—dashing out the hands of wail,
On each side, to meet anguish everywhere,
And to attest it in the ecstasy
And exaltation of a woe sustained
Because provoked and chosen.
Pass along
Your wilderness, vain mortals! Puny griefs,
In transitory shapes, be henceforth dwarfed
To your own conscience, by the dread extremes
Of what I am and have been. If ye have fallen,
It is a step’s fall,—the whole ground beneath
Strewn woolly soft with promise; if ye have sinned,
Your prayers tread high as angels! if ye have grieved,
Ye are too mortal to be pitiable;
The power to die disproves the right to grieve.
Go to! ye call this ruin? I half-scorn
The ill I did you! Were ye wronged by me,—
Hated and tempted, and undone of me,—
Still, what’s your hurt to mine,—of doing hurt,
Of hating, tempting, and so ruining?
This sword’s hilt is the sharpest, and cuts through
The hand that wields it.
Go—I curse you all.
Hate one another—feebly—as ye can;
I would not certes cut you short in hate—
Far be it from me! Hate on as ye can!
I breathe into your faces, spirits of earth,
As wintry blast may breathe on wintry leaves,
And, lifting up their brownness, show beneath
The branches very bare.—Beseech you, give
To Eve, who beggarly entreats your love
For her and Adam when they shall be dead,
An answer rather fitting to the sin
Than to the sorrow—as the heavens, I trow,
For justice’ sake, gave theirs.
I curse you both,
Adam and Eve! Say grace, as after meat,
After my curses. May your tears fall hot
On all the hissing scorns of the creatures here.—
And yet rejoice. Increase and multiply,
Ye and your generations, in all plagues,
Corruptions, melancholies, poverties,
And hideous forms of life and fears of death;
The thought of death being alway eminent,
Immoveable, and dreadful in your life,
And deafly and dumbly insignicant
Of any hope beyond,—as death itself,—
Whichever of you lieth dead the first
Shall seem to the survivor—yet rejoice?
My curse catch at you strongly, body and soul,
And He find no redemption—nor the wing
Of seraph move your way—and yet rejoice!
Rejoice, because ye have not set in you
This hate which shall pursue you—this fire-hate
Which glares without, because it burns within—
Which kills from ashes—this potential hate,
Wherein I, angel, in antagonism
To God and His reflex beatitudes,
Moan ever in the central universe,
With the great woe of striving against Love—
And gasp for space amid the Infinite—
And toss for rest amid the Desertness—
Self-orphaned by my will, and self-elect
To kingship of resistant agony
Toward the Good round me—hating good and love,
And willing to hate good and to hate love,
And willing to will on so evermore,
Scorning the Past, and damning the To come—
Go and rejoice! I curse you! (Lucifer vanishes.
Still finer this scene between Adam and Eve after the “fall”:—
Christ. Speak, Adam. Bless the woman, man—
It is thine office.
Adam. Mother of the world,
Take heed before this Presence. Lo! my voice,
Which, naming erst the creatures, did express—
God breathing through my breath—the attributes
And instincts of each creature in its name;
Floats to the same afflatus,—floats and heaves
Like a water-weed that opens to a wave,—
A full-leaved prophecy affecting thee,
Out fairly and wide. Henceforward, rise, aspire
Unto the calms and magnanimities,
The lofty uses and the noble ends,
The sanctified devotion and full work,
To which thou art elect for evermore,
First woman, wife, and mother.
Eve. And first in sin.
Adam. And also the sole bearer of the Seed
Whereby sin dieth! Raise the majesties
Of thy disconsolate brows, O well-beloved,
And front with level eyelids the To come,
And all the dark o’ the world. Rise, woman, rise
To thy peculiar and best altitudes
Of doing good and of enduring ill,—
Of comforting for ill, and teaching good,
And reconciling all that ill and good
Unto the patience of a constant hope,—
Rise with thy daughters! If sin came by thee,
And by sin, death,—the ransom-righteousness,
The heavenly life and compensative rest
Shall come by means of thee. If woe by thee
Had issue to the world, thou shalt go forth
An angel of the woe thou didst achieve;
Found acceptable to the world instead
Of others of that name, of whose bright steps
Thy deed stripped bare the hills. Be satisfied;
Something thou hast to bear through womanhood—
Peculiar suffering answering to the sin;
Some pang paid down for each new human life;
Some weariness in guarding such a life—
Some coldness from the guarded; some mistrust
From those thou hast too well served; from those beloved
Too loyally, some treason: feebleness
Within thy heart,—and cruelty without;
And pressures of an alien tyranny,
With its dynastic reasons of larger bones
And stronger sinews. But, go to! thy love
Shall chant itself its own beatitudes,
After its own life-working. A child’s kiss,
Set on thy sighing lips, shall make thee glad;
A poor man, served by thee, shall make thee rich;
A sick man, helped by thee, shall make thee strong;
Thou shalt be served thyself by every sense
Of service which thou renderest. Such a crown
I set upon thy head,—Christ witnessing
With looks of prompting love,—to keep thee clear
Of all reproach against the sin foregone,
From all the generations which succeed.
Thy hand which plucked the apple, I clasp close;
Thy lips which spake wrong counsel, I kiss close,—
I bless thee in the name of Paradise,
And by the memory of Edenic joys
Forfeit and lost;—by that last cypress-tree,
Green at the gate, which thrilled as we came out;
And by the blessed nightingale, which threw
Its melancholy music after us;—
And by the flowers, whose spirits full of smells
Did follow softly, plucking us behind
Back to the gradual banks and vernal bowers
And fourfold river-courses:—by all these,
I bless thee to the contraries of these;
I bless thee to the desert and the thorns,
To the elemental change and turbulence,
And to the roar of the estranged beasts,
And to the solemn dignities of grief,
To each one of these ends,—and to this end
Of Death and the hereafter!
Her translation of the “Prometheus Bound” is a magnificent sample of feminine scholarship, and must be accepted as the finest version we have yet had of that difficult work. Microscopic criticism will discover flaws, but the whole commands our homage. As a sample of the flaws we cannot help noticing her rendering of two famous lines—the one which, in the review of Professor Blackie’s Æschylus (vide No. 17), we ventured to translate thus—
I gave blind hopes a dwelling in their breasts
(literally, “I made blind hopes house in them”), Mrs. Browning renders
I set blind hopes to inhabit in their houses.
κατῳκισα seems to have misled her into a weaker image than the original. The second is the constantly quoted ᾽ανηριθμον γελασμα, thus rendered:—
Riverwells and laughter infinite
Of yon sea waves!
The passage is, we are aware, a puzzle to translators, but “infinite” is clearly the wrong word, and destroys the image; Blackie’s “multitudinous laughter” is the best yet given, for ᾽ανηριθμον brings before the eye the image of the sea wrinkled all over with laughter. But, away with the microscope! Take up the volume, and be proud of English maidens, when one of them can thus wrestle with the Titan!
“The Vision of Poets” will recall Tennyson’s “Palace of Art.” Instead of speaking of its plan we will cull a nosegay from it:—
These were poets true
Who died for Beauty, as martyrs do
For Truth—the ends being scarcely two.
God’s prophets of the Beautiful
These poets were—of iron rule,
The rugged cilix, serge of wool.
Here, Homer, with the broad suspense
Of thunderous brows, and lips intense
Of garrulous god-innocence.
There, Shakespeare! on whose forehead climb
The crowns o’ the world. Oh, eyes sublime—
With tears and laughters for all time!
Here, Æschylus,—the women swooned
To see so awful, when he frowned
As the gods did,—he standeth crowned.
Euripides, with close and mild
Scholastic lips,—that could be wild,
And laugh or sob out like a child,
Right in the classes. Sophocles,
With that king’s look which, down the trees,
Followed the dark effigies
Of the lost Theban. Hesiod old,
Who, somewhat blind and deaf and cold,
Cared most for gods and bulls. And bold
Electric Pindar, quick as fear,
With race-dust on his cheeks, and clear,
Slant startled eyes that seem to hear
The chariot rounding the last goal,
To hurtle past it in his soul.
And Sappho, crowned with aureole
Of ebon curls on calmed brows—
A poet-woman! none forgoes
The leap, attaining the repose!
Theocritus, with glittering locks
Dropt sideway, as betwixt the rocks
He watched the visionary flocks.
And Aristophanes, who took
The world with mirth, and laughter-struck
The hollow caves of Thought and woke
The infinite echoes hid in each.
And Virgil: shade of Mantuan beech
Did help the shade of bay to reach
And knit around his forehead high;—
For his gods wore less majesty
Than his brown bees hummed deathlessly. [p. 882→]
Lucretius—nobler than his mood:
Who dropped his plummet down the broad
Deep universe, and said, “No God,”
Finding no bottom: he denied
Divinely the divine, and died
Chief poet on the Tiber-side,
By grace of God! his face is stern,
As one compelled, in spite of scorn,
To teach a truth he could not learn.
And Ossian, dimly seen or guessed:
Once counted greater than the rest,
When mountain-winds blew out his vest.
And Spenser drooped his dreaming head
(With languid sleep-smile, you had said,
From his own verse engendered)
On Ariosto’s, till they ran
Their locks in one.—The Italian
Shot nimbler heat of bolder man
From his fine lids. And Dante, stern
And sweet, whose spirit was an urn
For wine and milk poured out in turn.
Hard-souled Alfieri; and fancy-willed
Boiardo, who with laughters filled
The pauses of the jostled shield.
“’Tis an excellent piece of work, madam, lady; comes there more of it?” Ay, much more; but something every now and then we do not understand. Goethe, for example, would have tried the limner’s skill, but what sort of sketch is this?—
And Goethe—with that reaching eye
His soul reached out from, far and high,
And fell from inner entity.
Our Latin and our psychology are equally at fault here. Similar defects mar with obscurity several of her pages.
We have not quoted half the passages we marked for the purpose; and must positively contrive to insert a third notice of these volumes, in spite of the pressure of new publications. To leave off with an objection would be unfair to our own admiration, not to mention the reader, so we close this with a sonnet that shall sing its own praises:—
consolation.
All are not taken! there are left behind
Living Beloveds, tender looks to bring,
And make the daylight still a happy thing,
And tender voices, to make soft the wind.
But if it were not so—if I could find
No love in all the world for comforting,
Nor any path but hollowly did ring,
Where “dust to dust” the love from life disjoined—
And if before those sepulchres unmoving
I stood alone (as some forsaken lamb
Goes bleating up the moors in weary dearth),
Crying, “Where are ye, O my loved and loving?”
I know a Voice would sound, “Daughter, I am ....
Can I suffice for heaven, and not for earth?”
[Continued in the issue of 14 December 1850.]
Mrs. Browning’s Poems.
(Third Notice.)
We have endeavoured, in two articles, to convey our opinion of Mrs. Browning’s qualities, and are still unsatisfied with the result; having a vague feeling that our extracts do not justify our praise, and that the reader may bring against us the very complaint we brought against her previous critics, viz., of injuring our verdict by the samples brought forward to prove it. But, in truth, extracts are altogether inadequate: they are bricks from a building, and give no correct representation of the building itself. The better plan, in most cases, would be to quote entire poems; yet this, also, would be very incomplete.
Looking through these volumes for a single poem which might be accepted as typical of the whole, we are struck with the fact that so very few of them could be quoted as gems without great flaws; not one of them but contains evidence of the poet’s power, yet scarcely one that can be pronounced entirely good. Therefore, take up the volumes for yourself—they are worth reading and rereading—and expect from us only a fragment or two. “The Romaunt of the Page” is a pretty ballad delicately told. In “The Lay of the Brown Rosary” there is a weird tone which will delight all who are not repelled by obscurity. “The Rhyme of the Duchess May” would be a glorious ballad but for the wearisome iteration of the burden, carried beyond effectiveness. “Lady Geraldine’s Courtship” is a ballad of modern life with lovely lines and pictures, but unlifelike in its treatment; and, indeed, this unreality is a frequent drawback to the effect of the poems. Yet how truly she can touch the human chords is shown in many passages—as in this:—
insufficiency.
There is no one beside thee, and no one above thee;
Thou standest alone, as the nightingale sings!
Yet my words that would praise thee are impotent things;
For none can express thee, though all should approve thee!
I love thee so, Dear, that I only can love thee.
Say, what can I do for thee? … weary thee … grieve thee?
Lean on thy shoulder … new burdens to add? …
Weep my tears over thee … making thee sad?
Oh, hold me not—love me not! let me retrieve thee!
I love thee so, Dear, that I only can leave thee.
or in this:—
If the rain fell, there was sorrow;—
Little head, leant on the pane,
Little finger drawing down on it
The long trailing drops upon it,—
And the “Rain, rain, come to-morrow,”
Said for charm against the rain.
or this love poem:—
a valediction.
God be with thee, my beloved,—God be with thee!
Else alone thou goest forth,
Thy face unto the north,—
Moor and pleasance, all around thee and beneath thee,
Looking equal in one snow:
While I, who try to reach thee,
Vainly follow, vainly follow,
With the farewell and the hollo,
And cannot reach thee so.
Alas! I can but teach thee.—
God be with thee, my beloved,—God be with thee!
Can I teach thee, my beloved,—can I teach thee?
If I said, “Go left or right,”
The counsel would be light,—
The wisdom, poor of all that could enrich thee.
My right would show like left;
My raising would depress thee,—
My choice of light would blind thee,—
Of way, would leave behind thee,—
Of end, would leave bereft.
Alas! I can but bless thee.—
May God teach thee, my beloved,—may God teach thee!
Can I bless thee, my beloved,—can I bless thee?
What blessing word can I
From mine own tears keep dry?
What flowers grow in my field wherewith to dress thee?
My good reverts to ill;
My calmness would move thee,—
My softness would prick thee,—
My bindings up would break thee,—
My crownings curse and kill,
Alas! I can but love thee.—
May God bless thee, my beloved,—may God bless thee!
Can I love thee, my beloved,—can I love thee?
And is this, like love, to stand
With no help in my hand,
When strong as death I fain would watch above thee?
My love-kiss can deny
No tear that falls beneath it:
Mine oath of love can swear thee
From no ill that comes near thee,—
And thou diest while I breathe it,
And I—I can but die!
May God love thee, my beloved,—may God love thee!
Here, also, is a picture of our London Life:—
The champ of the steeds on the silver bit,
As they whirl the rich man’s chariot by;
The beggar’s whine as he looks at it,—
But it goes too fast for charity:
The trail on the street of the poor man’s broom,
That the lady, who walks to her palace-home,
On her silken skirt may catch no dust;
The tread of the business-men who must
Count their per cents, by the paces they take;
The cry of the babe unheard of its mother,
Though it lie on her breast, while she thinks of the other
Laid yesterday where it will not wake;
The flower-girl’s prayer to buy roses and pinks,
Held out in the smoke like stars by day;
The gin-door’s oath, that hollowly chinks
Guilt upon grief and wrong upon hate;
The cabman’s cry to get out of the way;
The dustman’s call down the area-grate;
The young maid’s jest and the old wife’s scold;
The haggling talk of the boys at a stall;
The fight in the street which is backed for gold;
The plea of the lawyers in Westminster-hall;
The drop on the stones of the blind man’s staff,
As he trades in his own grief’s sacredness;
The brothel’s shriek and the Newgate laugh;
The hum upon ’Change and the organ’s grinding,
The grinder’s face being nevertheless
Dry and vacant of even woe,
While the children’s hearts are leaping so
At the merry music’s winding!
The black-plumed funeral’s creeping train,
Long and slow (and yet they will go
As fast as Life, though it hurry and strain!)
Creeping the populous houses through,
And nodding their plumes, at either side,
At many a house where an infant, new
To the sunshiny world, has just struggled and cried,—
At many a house where sitteth a bride
Trying the morrow’s coronals,
With a scarlet blush to-day.
Slowly creep the funerals,
As none should hear the noise and say,
“The living, the living must go away
To multiply the dead!”
Power of musical expression, power of word-painting, and trembling sensibility of nerves are visible in almost every page of these volumes, showing the poetic nature and poetic culture, but showing also, as we must constantly iterate, an absence of that wealth of material—observation, suffering, and thought—which is indispensable to the creation of enduring poems. Jean Paul, in his Vorschule der Æsthetik, acutely observes of young poets, that the novelty of their feelings is mistaken by them for novelty of objects, and their ignorance makes them work in the Unknown or the Mystical, in foreign countries and in foreign times, without individuality; or else exclusively in the Lyrical, for in this last there is no Nature to be imitated other than that which they bring with them. These remarks apply to Mrs. Browning. Foreign scenes, distant times, the Mystical and the Lyrical, make up her poems. Life, as it pulses in our hearts, is dimly, if at all, portrayed by her. Yet so true is it that Experience alone forms the substance of real poetry, that even Lyrical Poetry, which is more directly egotistic and personal, seems to demand for its perfection that the poet should have seen, felt, and thought much: as witness the great Lyric poets of all ages.
We conclude these imperfect notices with a little picture from “The Romance of the Swan’s Nest,” which is a poem in itself:—
Little Ellie sits alone
’Mid the beeches of a meadow,
By a stream-side, on the grass;
And the trees are showering down
Doubles of their leaves in shadow
On her shining hair and face.
She has thrown her bonnet by,
And her feet she has been dipping
In the shallow water’s flow;
Now she holds them nakedly
In her hands, all sleek and dripping,
While she rocketh to and fro.
Little Ellie sits alone,
And the smile she softly useth
Fills the silence like a speech;
While she thinks what shall be done,
And the sweetest pleasure chooseth
For her future within reach.
[George Henry Lewes]
Reviewed:
Poems (EBB), London: Chapman & Hall, 1850.
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