E510200A. Poems (1850).
Fraser’s Magazine, February 1851, pp. 177–182.
As reprinted in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 17, 281–284.
Mr. and Mrs. Browning.
[This article begins with a notice of RB’s Sordello, Poems (1849), and Christmas-Eve and Easter-Day; see pp. 000–000.]
Thus, step by step, we have passed on from dislike to palliation, from palliation to something very like justification, and now remain, as we expect many of our readers will, in doubt what verdict to give, and somewhat glad that our verdict matters so very little that it is not worth while giving, on it; unable to prophesy whether Mr. Browning’s poems will occupy a high and permanent place in our literature, but sure that if they do not, it will be from defects of manner rather than of matter, from the mere outward ruggedness of the utterance, and not from any intrinsic want of richness, nobleness, or health, in the nature.
On this latter point there can be no doubt. A higher verdict than ours has been pronounced on it, by the best poetess, in our humble opinion, whom England has yet produced. Her sponsorship shall be sufficient for us; all that remains now for us is to prove the value of her verdict, and the honour of her approbation—much more, of her love. [p. 178→]
This lady has been for some years well known to the world, by the name of Miss Barrett, as a scholar of no common attainments, and a poetess of high merit. The Drama of Exile and The Seraphim, the two longest of her poems, are not those on which we should stake her reputation,—not because they fail in power or beauty, but simply from the nature of their subjects. Angelic themes, even in a master’s hand, are utterly intractable. No poet will dare to be a complete poet and maker in them; he shrinks, and rightly, from giving his spirits a full human interest by gross and material anthropomorphism of his own invention; and without palpable flesh and blood, they can be nothing but mere voices in the air, not greater than humanity, but less, because only a part of it. Even Milton’s genius was forced to sacrifice metaphysic truth for the sake of giving living personality to the denizens of his spirit-world: but who dare—and in the nineteenth century who ought—to follow in his steps? Goethe dare not, though Mr. Bailey dares, and therefore he confined himself in his Faust to the received middle-age superstitions, to the cloven hoof and the witch’s caldron, as the best symbolic vehicle of spiritual truth which he could find. We cannot but think, not only from the doleful, not to say irreverent, failure of Mr. Bailey’s Angel-world (as if Festus had not been monstrous enough), but also from Mrs. Browning’s far superior Seraphim, that poets must leave the angelic hosts alone for a few generations,—at least, till a more scientific Christian pneumatology has thrown fresh light on their nature; and that in the meantime, the truly spiritual is best manifested—where alone the Bible bids us look for it—in the truly human. We question whether the unrivalled translation of Prometheus Vinctus, which follows The Seraphim in Mrs. Browning’s last edition, is not, from its very pagan anthropomorphism, more true to metaphysic than The Seraphim and The Drama of Exile; except just where the facts of the Incarnation give these latter a more thoroughly palpable, human, and historic element of interest.
We are certain that this is the case with the exquisite personal epilogue to The Seraphim, in which the poetess seems to complain of the very impossibility at which we hint. We are certain, too, that it is the case with Confessions, perhaps the highest flight of her Muse, in which the thoroughly human plot is just what enables her to go down into the depths and rise to the heights of the truly Divine.
Confessions.
Face to face in my chamber, my silent chamber, I saw her!
God and she and I only … there, I sat down to draw her
Soul, through the clefts of confession … Speak, I am holding thee fast,
As the angels of resurrection shall do it at the last.
“My cup is blood-red
With my sin,” she said,
“And I pour it out to the bitter lees,
As if the angels of judgment stood over me strong at the last,
Or as thou wert as these!”
When God smote His hands together, and struck out thy soul as a spark,
Into the organized glory of things, from deeps of the dark,—
Say, didst thou shine, didst thou burn, didst thou honour the power in the form,
As the star does at night, or the fire-fly, or even the little ground-worm?
“I have sinned,” she said,
“For my seed-light shed
Has smouldered away from his first decrees!
The cypress praiseth the fire-fly, the ground-leaf praiseth the worm:
I am viler than these!”
When God on that sin had pity and did not trample thee straight,
With His wild rains beating and drenching thy light found inadequate;
When He only sent thee the north winds, a little searching and chill,
To quicken thy flame .. didst thou kindle and flash to the heights of His will?
“I have sinned,” she said,
“Unquickened, unspread,
My fire dropt down; and I wept on my knees!
I only said of His winds of the north, as I shrank from their chill ..
What delight is in these?” [p. 179→]
When God on that sin had pity, and did not meet it as such,
But tempered the wind to thy uses, and softened the world to thy touch;
At least thou wast moved in thy soul, though unable to prove it afar,
Thou couldst carry thy light like a jewel, not giving it like a star?
“I have sinned,” she said,
“And not merited
The gift He gives, by the grace He sees!
The mine-cave praiseth the jewel, the hill-side praiseth the star:—
I am viler than these.”
Then I cried aloud in my passion .. Unthankful and impotent creature,
To throw up thy scorn unto God, through the rents in thy nature!
If He, the all-giving and loving, is served so, what then
Hast thou done to the weak and changing .. thy fellows of men?
“I have loved,” she said,
(Words bowing her head
As the wind bows the wet acacia-trees!)
“I saw God sitting above me,—but I .. I sat among men,
And I have loved these.”
Again with a lifted voice .. like a trumpet that takes
The low note of a viol that trembles, and triumphing breaks
On the air with it, solemn and clear .. “I have sinned not in this!
When I loved, I have loved much and well,—I have loved not amiss.
Let the living,” she said,
“Inquire of the dead,
In the house of the pale-fronted images,—
And my own true dead will answer for me, that I have not loved amiss,
In my love for these.
The least touch of their hands in the morning, I keep day and night:
Their least step on the stair still throbs through me, if ever so light:
Their least gift which they left to my childhood, in long ago years,
Is now turned from a toy to a relic, and gazed at through tears.
Dig the snow,” she said,
“For my churchyard bed;
Yet I, as I sleep, shall not fear to freeze,
If but one of these love me with heart-warm tears,
As I have loved these.
If I angered any among them, my own life was sore:
If I fell from their presence, I clung to their memory more:
Their tender I often felt holy, their bitter I sometimes called sweet;
And whenever their heart has refused me, I fell down straight at their feet.
I have loved,” she said,—
“Man is weak, God is dread;
Yet the weakest man dies with his spirit at ease,
Having poured such love-oil on the Saviour’s feet,
As I lavished for these.”
Go, I cried, thou hast chosen the Human, and left the Divine!
Then, at least, have the Human shared with thee their wild berry wine?
Have they loved back thy love, and when strangers approached thee with blame,
Have they covered thy fault with their kisses, and loved thee the same?
But she wept and said,
“God, over my head,
Will sweep in the wrath of His judgment seas
If he deal with me sinning, but only the same
And not gentler than these!”
There are defects of metre and of rhyme here, as in others of these poems, which remind us curiously of Mr. Browning; and they seem, without exception, to have been struck off at once, and never polished afterwards. We regret it, and pray, with all humility, to see them amended, as they have been in the translation of Prometheus: but we prefer quoting to commenting, and so give a poem which should speak for itself. Want of space forces us to omit, much against our will, three stanzas just as beautiful as the rest. Let readers study them for themselves in the original:— [p. 180→]
The Cry of the Children.
Do ye hear the children weeping, O my brothers,
Ere the sorrow comes with years?
They are leaning their young heads against their mothers,—
And that cannot stop their tears.
The young lambs are bleating in the meadows;
The young birds are chirping in the nest;
The young fawns are playing with the shadows;
The young flowers are blowing toward the west—
But the young, young children, O my brothers,
They are weeping bitterly!—
They are weeping in the playtime of the others,
In the country of the free.
Do you question the young children in the sorrow,
Why their tears are falling so?—
The old man may weep for his to-morrow
Which is lost in long ago;
The old tree is leafless in the forest—
The old year is ending in the frost—
The old wound, if stricken, is the sorest—
The old hope is hardest to be lost:
But the young, young children, O my brothers,
Do you ask them why they stand
Weeping sore before the bosoms of their mothers,
In our happy Fatherland?
* * * * * *
“For, oh,” say the children, “we are weary,
And we cannot run or leap;
If we cared for any meadows, it were merely
To drop down in them and sleep.
Our knees tremble sorely in the stooping—
We fall upon our faces, trying to go;
And underneath our heavy eyelids drooping,
The reddest flower would look as pale as snow.
For, all day, we drag our burden tiring,
Through the coal-dark underground;
Or, all day, we drive the wheels of iron
In the factories round and round.
“For, all day, the wheels are droning, turning—
Their wind comes in our faces,—
Till our hearts turn—our head, with pulses burning,
And the walls turn in their places—
Turns the sky in the high window blank and reeling—
Turns the long light that droppeth down the wall—
Turn the black flies that crawl along the ceiling—
All are turning, all the day, and we with all.—
And all day the iron wheels are droning;
And sometimes we could pray,
“O ye wheels” (breaking out in a mad moaning),
“Stop! be silent for to-day!”
Ay, be silent! Let them hear each other breathing
For a moment, mouth to mouth—
Let them touch each other’s hands, in a fresh wreathing
Of their tender human youth!
Let them feel that this cold metallic motion
Is not all the life God fashions or reveals—
Let them prove their inward souls against the notion
That they live in you, or under you, O wheels!—
Still, all day, the iron wheels go onward,
Grinding life down from its mark;
And the children’s souls, which God is calling sunward,
Spin on blindly in the dark.
Now tell the poor young children, O my brothers,
To look up to Him and pray—
So the blessed One, who blesseth all the others,
Will bless them another day. [p. 181→]
They answer, “Who is God, that He should hear us,
While the rushing of the iron wheels is stirred?
When we sob aloud the human creatures near us
Pass by, hearing not, or answer not a word!
And we hear not (for the wheels in their resounding)
Strangers speaking at the door.
Is it likely God, with angels singing round Him,
Hears our weeping any more?
Two words, indeed, of praying we remember;
And at midnight’s hour of harm,—
“Our Father,” looking upward in the chamber,
We say softly for a charm.*
We know no other words, except “Our Father.”
And we think that in some pause of angels’ song,
God may pluck them with the silence sweet to gather,
And hold both within His right hand, which is strong.
“Our Father!” If He heard us, He would surely
(For they call Him good and mild)
Answer, smiling down the steep world very purely,
“Come and rest with Me, my child.”
“But, no!” say the children, weeping faster,
“He is speechless as a stone;
And they tell us, of His image is the Master
Who commands us to work on.
“Go to!” say the children,—“Up in Heaven,
Dark, wheel like, turning clouds are all we find.
Do not mock us; grief has made us unbelieving—
We look up for God, but tears have made us blind.”
Do ye hear the children weeping and disproving,
O my brothers, what ye preach?
For God’s possible is taught by His world’s loving—
And the children doubt of each.
And well may the children weep before you;
They are weary ere they run;
They have never seen the sunshine, nor the glory
Which is brighter than the sun:
They know the grief of man, but not the wisdom;
They sink in man’s despair without its calm—
Are slaves, without the liberty in Christdom—
Are martyrs, by the pang without the palm,—
Are worn, as if with age, yet unretrievingly
No dear remembrance keep,—
Are orphans of the earthly love and heavenly:
Let them weep! let them weep!
They look up, with their pale and sunken faces,
And their look is dread to see,
For they mind you of their angels in their places,
With eyes meant for Deity;—
“How long,” they say, “how long, O cruel nation,
Will you stand, to move the world, on a child’s heart,—
Stifle down with a mailed heel its palpitation,
And tread onward to your throne amid the mart?
Our blood splashes upward, O our tyrants,
And your purple shows your path;
But the child’s sob curseth deeper in the silence
Than the strong man in his wrath!”
________
*A fact rendered pathetically historical by Mr. Horne’s Report of his Commission.
________
If this lady is not a great poetess, who is? But we must make an end, and we cannot do so better than by giving specimens of certain delicious “Sonnets from the Portuguese,” with which these volumes conclude. From the Portuguese they may be: but their life and earnestness must prove Mrs. Browning either to be the most perfect of all known translators, or to have quickened with her own spirit the framework of another’s thoughts, and then modestly declined the honour which was really her own:— [p. 182→]
i.
I thought once how Theocritus had sung
Of the sweet years, the dear and wished-for years,
Who each one in a gracious hand appears
To bear a gift for mortals, old or young:
And, as I mused it in his antique tongue,
I saw in gradual vision through my tears,
The sweet, sad years, the melancholy years, ..
Those of my own life, who by turns had flung
A shadow across me. Straightway I was ’ware
So weeping, how a mystic shape did move
Behind me, and drew me backward by the hair;
And a voice said in mastery while I strove, ..
“Guess now who holds thee?” “Death!” I said. But, there,
The silver answer rang, “Not Death, but Love!”
xxvii.
My own beloved, who hast lifted me
From this drear flat of earth where I was thrown,
And in betwixt the languid ringlets, blown
A life-breath, till the forehead hopefully
Shines out again, as all the angels see,
Before thy saving kiss! My own, my own,
Who camest to me when the world was gone,
And I who looked for only God, found thee!
I find thee: I am safe, and strong, and glad,
As one who stands in dewless Asphodel
Looks backward on the tedious time he had
In the upper life .. So I, with bosom-swell,
Make witness here between the good and bad,
That Love, as strong as Death, retrieves as well.
And now our task is finished. If in any word we shall seem to have been too harsh toward this gifted pair, our plea must be, that their very genius at once gives us a right to call on them to do still better, and puts them out of the reach of any injury which a critic can inflict. May they, for their own sakes, year by year, mine deeper among the golden truths, which can never be learnt alone, and mutually teaching, correcting, inspiring each other, add year by year fresh treasures to the Christian poetry of their mother-land!
[Charles Kingsley]
Reviewed:
Poems (EBB), London: Chapman & Hall, 1850.
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