E510116A. Poems.
The Theatrical Journal, 16 January 1851, pp. 17–18.
Addendum to The Brownings’ Correspondence, vol. 16.
It is sometimes difficult to say, when claims are nearly evenly balanced, who ought to occupy the first position in certain departments of literature and art: but were we asked, who is the first of living novelists, poets, and dramatic authors, we should have no hesitation in naming Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton, Mrs. Browning, and Westland Marston.
As a novelist, Bulwer ranks high. He has mastered the mechanism of the craft, and his tales are works of art. A poet in the high sense of the word he is not; but he has rhetoric at command, some fancy, and a dash of imagination which sometimes startles us with its brilliancy. Mrs. Browning on the contrary is no artist at all, not as much so even as her husband. She writes from impulse and the heart; she has a strong inspiration, the greatest genius any woman in England ever possessed; but her works are fragments, like Coleridge’s. Marston’s mind is between that of the author of Rienzi and Mrs. Browning. He can write from the head, but he has far too much enthusiasm to be what Bulwer is.
Schiller, Shelley, and Coleridge, are the authors who have exercised the largest amount of influence on these writers.
Insensibly every writer copies in some measure the author he most admires; but no man of genius of course gives a mere literal transcript of the original. Genius in fact is the result of intense sympathy or admiration, either excited by nature or books. For the most part genius is a mournful heritage; and others reap where it has sown; but if it be morbid, it wants the diviner part of its essence; and it dies.
Bulwer commenced his career more than a quarter of a century ago, and his fame has grown year by year in spite of ridicule and detraction. As a novelist we admire him; but when he attempts poetry, dramatic or not, he almost always fails.
Mrs. Browning has at last got to a second edition; an honour which Bailey attained for “Festus” years ago. She is eminently a poetess of faith, and it seems to us that the ceaseless reiteration of the Supreme Being’s name in her works is a mistake.
Bailey and Mrs. Browning both do this until we are nearly nauseated with the repetition of the most sacred of names. Providence does not intend that we should be always in the same attitude of devotion, Life when worthy, to use Zanoni’s words,—“is a perpetual prayer.”
Bulwer, though a copyist of Schiller, and sometimes of Goethe, has original merit. His characters want warmth and nature for the most part; but they are so elaborated and highly finished, that they are scarcely inferior to Scott’s. Although we do not think that either the famous author of Waverley, or the only less celebrated Baronet, who has written so many skilful romances, are men of the loftiest intellect and finest imagination, their talents are great and various: but the poetic and philosophic elements are more conspicuous in a Coleridge, a Wordsworth and a Browning. In art however, Bulwer is not surpassed by any one alive, and hardly by Scott.
The genius of Mrs. Browning is not merely delicate and feminine. She has not only the nerves and fibres, but the magna ossa lacertosque of the poet. She is solemn, sublime, impassioned, intense; full [p. 79→] of love, which is almost idolatry—and yet never betraying weakness. Sappho, George Sand, and this poetess, stand on the same pedestal, towering above a Hemans, a Landon, and even a Joanna Baillie.
Marston is not poetically, quite equal to Mrs. Browning; but his intellect is acute, subtle, and analytical. He can dive deep into the heart, and delineate emotion and passion with great power. His sentiment is exquisite, and his psychology very fine. He is pre-eminently the poet of woman’s love; and one of the most spiritual of our thinkers. Though not the consummate artist Bulwer is, he has far more poetry; and probably he will go on improving in what is the mere externalism of art.
R.W.T.B.
Reviewed:
Poems (EBB), London: Chapman & Hall, 1850.
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