E510125B. Poems (1850).
The Spectator, 25 January 1851, pp. 85–86.
As reprinted in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 16, 340-342.
Mrs. Browning’s Poems.
It is no easy task to read through Mrs. Browning’s collected poems; and the accomplishment of it is not likely to result in a heightened sense of her poetical abilities. Such reputation as she has gained under her maiden name of Elizabeth Barrett must have been founded on particular lines and stanzas, which, in the midst of general crudity of thought and marked faults of style, seemed to show glimpses of undeveloped power, and to give promise of better things to come, when experience should have matured her mind and practice corrected her uncertainty of execution. This promise has never been fulfilled. The defects which crowd her opening pages are equally numerous and glaring up to the close of her second volume. Representing, as these volumes do, a poetical career of many years, they show far less progress than might have been expected from the mere habit of writing: and it is quite certain that, to say nothing of the natural growth of intellect, had Mrs. Browning really felt that reverence for the calling of the poet which she is constantly talking of and claiming from mankind, she could not have continued to send forth in her maturity first draughts of poems which, if the jingle of rhyme had not deluded her, she must have felt to be disgraceful to a school-girl. But whatever be the cause, whether incapacity or carelessness, she remains to this day a “foiled potentiality”—a sculptor without hands, powerless over the material in which her creations must be embodied—with the ambitions and desires of the artist, but unable to realize them from ignorance of or contempt for the mechanical means. She can neither write the English that befits the lofty mood of serious poetry nor the graceful mood of sportive verse, nor mould the language she does write into pleasing metrical forms; while in what a painter would call composition she is both ineffective and unnatural. Till she has mastered these preliminary difficulties—the notes and scales of the music, so to speak, of her art— however much she may flatter herself, or other folks may flatter her, with the possession of the “deep poetic heart,” to “poetic fame” she must abandon all pretension. The “mute Milton” perforce remains inglorious; and even muteness is ill exchanged for a “torrens eloquium” of solecisms in grammar, prosody, and sense. Were Mrs. Browning to test her poems by closing her ears to such very imperfect rhyme and rhythm as they possess, she would find that they were written for the most part in weak slipshod English, garnished with a plentiful sprinkling of unusual words, and every now and then “flaring up” into a conflagration of bombast and harshness which would set even the pit of a penny theatre laughing.* As good fun might be made of the choral songs in the “Drama of Exile” as Punch ever extracted from the immortal strains of poet Bunn. Did Bunn ever surpass the opening of the chorus in which the angels finally comfort our exiled first parents?
Live, work on, O Earthy!
By the actual’s tension,
Speed the arrow worthy
Of a pure ascension.
Or again, this of the nightingale, that “flung its song over the gate” after Adam and Eve?—
And I build my song of high pure notes,
Note over note, height over height,
Till I strike the arch of the Infinite;
And I bridge abysmal agonies
With strong clear calms of harmonies.
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*All these faults will be apparent in the passages quoted above, especially in the two from “The Vision of Poets.” But what must a reader think of the ear that can find rhymes in linger and singer, in raiment and lament, in play and regalia, in resounding and round him? And the difficulty is not to pick out these and similar atrocities, but to find a page without many of them. As for rhythm, which, unlike rhyme, is an essential of verse, Mrs. Browning has apparently no feeling of it: she makes verse by her eye instead of her ear. Provided each has its due number of feet, (and often even this amount of accuracy is scorned,) she is satisfied—cares nothing for long or short, for ordinary pronunciation or accent, but as frequently as not brings the stress of her rhythm upon an expletive, or upon the comparatively mute syllables of words.
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The most elaborate in design of Mrs. Browning’s non-dramatic poems is “The Vision of Poets.” It represents, by means of a complicated allegory, the mental agony and bodily asceticism, which, in Mrs. Browning’s opinion, are normal conditions of the true poet. According to her theory, all the great poets have been so many John-the-Baptists, wearing nothing but girdles of camel’s hair, feeding on locusts and wild-honey, and treading with bare and bleeding feet the thorns and thistles of the wilderness. Among the interesting victims are some of whose history nothing is known, many of whom what is known would lead to a conclusion very opposite to that of the Vision. But women are seldom realists, and when they are, are none the better for it. The Vision is written in triplets of octosyllabic verse; a metre which, in order to be effective through a long poem, requires peculiarly terse and polished language, a various but uniformly musical rhythm, with the greatest attention to accuracy of rhyme. Faults of either rhyme or rhythm disappoint the ear, and mar the whole effect of the specific form, which in that case becomes simply a drag and an obstruction to the flow of thought and sentiment. This is Mrs. Browning’s notion of the phraseology and metre.
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 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 and 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——
Here are the worthies of our own day.
And Burns, with pungent passionings
Set in his eyes. Deep lyric springs
Are of the fire-mount’s issuings.
And Shelley, in his white ideal,
All statue blind; and Keats, the real
Adonis, with the hymeneal
Fresh vernal buds, half sunk between
His youthful curls, kissed straight and sheen
In his Rome-grave, by Venus Queen.
And poor proud Byron,—sad as grave
And salt as life: forlornly brave,
And quivering with the dart he drave.
And visionary Coleridge, who
Did sweep his thoughts as angels do
Their wings, with cadence up the blue.
And so she runs on, through Greek, Latin, English, Italian, and German bards; touching them all off with a verse or two of criticism, which, even if it were done as neatly and sensibly as it is now slovenly and absurd, would tire one long before she had done parading her alarming acquaintance with the names of foreign and native poets. Like all bad artists, she never knows when she has said enough, and does not spend sufficient time upon her poems to make them short. She labours under the mistake that two-hundred-and-forty pence make a pound in the coinage of Parnassus. And so she sends into the world rough sketches, thrown off, it is to be supposed, in one or two sittings, which, if months and weeks were spent upon their concentration, completion, correction, and polish, might possibly be fine poems. We say possibly, because Mrs. Browning has given no single instance of her ability to compose finished works. Diffuseness, obscurity, and exaggeration, mar even the happiest efforts of her genius. She is run away with by a fatal facility of bad versification, and a fatal profusion of crude half-formed thoughts and images. In “Lady Geraldine’s Courtship,” which contains finer passages than any other of her poems, verses which Tennyson might have written in a first sketch are followed by others for which a schoolboy would be deservedly whipped.
Oh, the blessed woods of Sussex! I can hear them still around me,
With their leafy tide of greenery still rippling up the wind!
Oh, the cursed woods of Sussex! where the hunter’s arrow found me,
When a fair face and a tender voice had made me mad and blind.
* * * *
For her eyes alone smile constantly; her lips have serious sweetness,
And her front is calm—the dimple rarely ripples on her cheek:
But her deep blue eyes smile constantly,—as if they had by fitness
Won the secret of a happy dream she does not care to speak.
* * * *
In her utmost lightness there is truth—and often she speaks lightly;
Has a grace in being gay which even mournful souls approve;
For the root of some grave earnest thought is understruck so lightly,
As to justify the foliage and the waving flowers above.
Then will come such a verse as this—
She was patient with my talking; and I loved her—loved her certes
* * * *
As I loved pure inspirations—loved the Graces, loved the Virtues.
Or something in the “Ercles vein” that outdoes ancient Pistol; e.g.
From my brain the soul-wings budded—waved a flame about my body
Whence conventions coiled to ashes. I felt self-drawn out, as man,
From amalgamate false natures; and I saw the skies grow ruddy
With the deepening feet of angels, and I knew what spirits can.
Is it not inconceivable that man or woman should indite such stuff as this, immediately following a verse in which the limits of the rhetoric of passion are reached, and the poetess stands on the brink of the precipice without a symptom of falling over, till she wantonly throws a somerset and goes head-foremost into infinite bathos? She shall convict herself of felo-de-se. Here is the verse—
There, I maddened! her words stung me! life swept through me into fever;
And my soul sprang up astonished; sprang, full stature in an hour.
Know you what it is when anguish, with apocalyptic never,
To a Pythian height dilates you, and despair sublimes to power?
At first sight it will appear strange that Mrs. Browning should write sonnets better than any other form of poem. Her sonnets are by no means perfect; but the difficult nature of the metre, and the necessary limitation to fourteen lines, have had the effect of restraining her diffuseness, and giving somewhat more of precision to her thoughts and of polish to her style. One addressed to George Sand pleases us from the fact that, coming from a strictly religious Englishwoman, who is, we believe, a member of a Dissenting church, it is a remarkable proof both of Mrs. Browning’s largeness of tolerant sympathy, and in some degree of the advances we are making in Christian charity.
Thou large-brained woman and large-hearted man,
Self-styled George Sand; whose soul, amid the lions
Of thy tumultuous senses, moans defiance,
And answers roar for roar, as spirits can;
I would some mild miraculous thunder ran [p. 86→]
Above the applauded circus, in appliance
Of thine own nobler nature’s strength and science;
Drawing two pinions, white as wings of swan,
From thy strong shoulders, to amaze the place
With holier light!—that thou to woman’s claim,
And man’s, might join beside the angel’s grace
Of a pure genius sanctified from blame;
Till child and maiden pressed to thine embrace,
To kiss upon thy lips a stainless fame.
It would not be fair to our authoress, after all our fault-finding, not to quote a stanza or two from her poem of “Cyprus Wine,” addressed to Mr. Boyd, who had presented her with some of that rare beverage. Mr. Boyd had the misfortune to be blind, and Mrs. Browning had been his pupil in Greek, in order to aid him in reading his favourite patristic authors. The stanzas that we shall quote are full of vigour and spirit; and from their epistolary form we overlook the carelessness of rhyme and awkwardness of diction which blemish all her more pretentious compositions. It is pleasant to be enabled to conclude our review with unqualified praise.
If old Bacchus were the speaker,
He would tell you, with a sigh,
Of the Cyprus in this beaker,
I am sipping like a fly—
Like a fly or gnat on Ida
At the hour of goblet pledge,
By Queen Juno brushed aside, a
Full white arm sweep from the edge.
Sooth, the drinking should be ampler,
When the drink is so divine:
And some deep-mouthed Greek exampler
Would become your Cyprian wine.
Cyclop’s mouth might plunge aright in,
While his one eye overleered;
Nor too large were mouth of Titan,
Drinking rivers down his beard.
Pan might dip his head so deep in,
That his ears alone pricked out;
Fawns around him, pressing, leaping,
Each one pointing to his throat;
While the Naiads, like Bacchantes,
Wild, with urns thrown out to waste,
Cry, “O Earth, that thou would grant us
Springs to keep of such a taste!”
* * * *
Very copious are my praises,
Though I sip it like a fly!
Ah! but, sipping, times and places
Change before me suddenly.
As Ulysses’ old libation
Drew the ghosts from every part,
So your Cyprian wine, dear Grecian,
Stirs the Hades of my heart.
And I think of those long mornings
Which my thought goes far to seek,
When betwixt the folio’s turnings,
Solemn flowed the rhythmic Greek.
Past the pane, the mountain spreading,
Swept the sheep-bell’s tinkling noise,
While a girlish voice was reading
Somewhat low for αι’s and οι’s.
Then what golden hours were for us,
While we sat together there!
How the white vests of the chorus
Seemed to wave up a live air!
How the Cothurns trod majestic
Down the deep iambic lines;
And the rolling anapæstic
Curled, like vapour over shrines!
* * * *
Ah, my gossip! you were older,
And more learned, and a man!
Yet that shadow—the enfolder
Of your quiet eyelids—ran
Both our spirits to one level;
And I turned from hill and lea,
And the summer sun’s green revel,
To your eyes that could not see.
Now Christ bless you with the one light
Which goes shining night and day!
May the flowers which grow in sunlight
Shed their fragrance in your way!
Is it not right to remember
All your kindness, friend of mine,
When we two sat in the chamber,
And the poets poured us wine?
So, to come back to the drinking
Of this Cyprus:—it is well;
But those memories, to my thinking,
Make a better ænomel:
And whoever be the speaker,
None can murmur with a sigh,
That, in drinking from that beaker,
I am sipping like a fly.
“O si sic omnia!” We echo Mrs. Browning’s own hope, that the path may be clear before her towards better aims and ends than any which are attained in these two volumes.
Reviewed:
Poems (EBB), London: Chapman & Hall, 1850.
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