E510201B. Poems (1850).
The Critic (London), 1 February 1851, pp. 60–62.
As reprinted in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 17, 284–288.
It is quite time for those who fill the important office of guiding and informing the public taste by criticism of the books that aspire to represent the intellect of the age, to exercise a little more severity than of late has been the fashion with them. Years ago, when the Edinburgh Review and Blackwood’s Magazine were in the vigour of their youth, an author, whether in poetry or prose, who possessed any substantial pretensions to a place in the world’s regards, was so vigilantly observed by the reviewers, that he dared not trespass against rhyme, metre, or sense, and no amount of genius apparent in his pages was received as an excuse for the violation of the acknowledged artistic rules of composition or flights of no-meaning, resorted to when fancy had soared her highest and failed to find a definite idea. By our critics there has been exchanged for that trenchant criticism, so wholesome in its effects, however bitter the draught at the moment, a sort of homœopathic treatment of aspirants for literary fame. It has become the fashion to praise everybody, more or less: to pass the most glaring faults unnoticed, and laud with extravagant praise whatever of praiseworthy can be found. Worse than this, there is a growing tendency to mistake the unintelligible for the profound, and nonsense for something surpassing the critic’s comprehension. The German school, albeit we are greatly indebted to it for imparting strength and vigour to our composition and expanding the range of thought, has, nevertheless, produced its mischiefs, for it has encouraged a species of mysticism, that is extremely convenient to a large class of minds whose ideas are by nature extremely indefinite and who are thus enabled to indulge them to the top of their bent with the luxury of believing that they are transcendentally sublime, when, in fact, they are merely dreamily vague. It is time, we repeat, for the Journalists and Critics of the Literature and Art of the time to come to the rescue of common sense, and by a resolute and unsparing exposure of such errors and false pretences, wheresoever found, endeavour to restore the trespassers to the limits over which they have strayed, and to deter future aspirants from a practice so tempting, because so easy; so deceitful, because so flattering to the dreamy tendencies of youth; and so fatal, because, when once indulged, so difficult to be avoided.
But this duty of severest criticism of carelessness or affectation is never more incumbent on a reviewer than in a case where there is no excuse for them; where the author is capable of better things, does better things, and sins wilfully. Genius is not privileged to play any pranks it pleases, nor is a poet to be excused for setting at defiance the laws of grammar and of rhyme, and uttering mysterial nonsense, because sometimes he favours us with better things, and can, if he will, fill our ears with divinest melodies.
Mrs. Browning, erst Miss Barrett, is a poet; she has genius; she can discourse most eloquent music, and singing soar, and soaring sing. But there is not a writer of our time more obnoxious than herself to the charges of affectation and carelessness. She has been bitten with the mania for German mysticism, only that she has not the reasoning power requisite to turn it to account, and so in striving to say something new she is ever losing herself in a fog, and seeing objects through a fog she mistakes a farthing rushlight for a star. Even in her happiest moments, when she throws herself upon her own natural impulses and is singing most sweetly, there will come a sudden pause, and then, as with an effort, a miserable affectation of profundity will be thrown in to mar the strain. Nor in this is she alone. She is one, and among the foremost, too, of a numerous class of writers, continually increasing, tempted by the example of her success, and the forbearance with which her faults have been received by the press and the public. The style is contagious in itself, for it is always easier to be vague than sublime, and to use strange words than invent definite ideas. “Your true no-meaning puzzles more than wit.” We receive some six or eight volumes of poetry every week, and four-fifths of them are infected with the same disease, only that in them, wanting the genius to compensate for the affectation, it is so much the more intolerable.
We are sorry to speak thus of a poet of so much ability as Mrs. Browning, but truth demands a plain expression of an opinion which has been long pronounced in society, although it has not yet found a voice in the press. But the mission of The London Literary Journal is to give to the world the utterance of that voice, as it speaks in the most intelligent circles of the metropolis of the world. It is our plan and purpose to break through the conventionalisms of criticism, and speak out plainly upon authors and books, and to endeavour, so far as we may, to restore some of the spirit of independent criticism which has been so long dormant. But we trust that it will be a genial and wholesome spirit; sympathizing with and encouraging whatever is good and true, recognising genius wherever it is found, but, for the sake of that genius itself, unsparing of its faults, that it may put them to mending.
It was with pride that we noted Mrs. Browning’s first efforts. We believed that here was a spirit destined to a futurity of renown. It was not that so much was done, as that there was so much promised. There was the presence of genius, but disguised, deformed and shackled. We relied upon age and experience to strengthen its limbs, so that it should throw off the bonds and put away the disguises and affectations, and come forth in its own native simplicity. In this hope we have been as yet disappointed. Mrs. Browning has not profited much by experience, and age has converted many of her foibles into habits. In the latest poems in these volumes we find the very same defects which we lamented in the earliest, if anything, exaggerated and more frequent, as if she had learned to look upon them as virtues, and was proud to display them. Still there is the same recknessness of rhyme and metre; the same indulgence in words without meaning, the same mistaking of sound for sense, the same incompleteness of thought, as if her imagination could only embrace a part of an idea. Yet mingled with these are passages and even whole poems of the truest poetry, which double our regret that one who can write so well should condescend to write so ill, and which suffice, like the ten holy men in the doomed cities, to save her volumes from utter condemnation, and to preserve for her a place among the poets of England.
A few specimens, both of her beauties and faults, will illustrate these remarks. We begin with the latter, that the reader may part with the most pleasing impression upon his mind.
The Leader, and some other papers, have quoted, in proof of her powers, passages from “The Vision of Poets,” intended to depict the supposed sufferings of the sons of song—one of those myths maintained by the whole race in their verses and disproved by their lives. It contains a sort of illustrated catalogue of the poets from the earliest times to the present, and professes to depict the characteristic of each. Some portions of it are unexceptionable, but what will our readers say to such stuff as the following.
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; forlonely [sic] 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.
If a school girl had composed such doggrel as this, and sent it to a provincial newspaper, it would have been rejected as unfit even for its “Original Poetry,”—but being by Mrs. Browning some critics have dared to express admiration for it! Here, again, from “the Drama of Exile.”
Live, work on, O Earthy!
By the actual’s tension,
Speed the arrow worthy
Of a pure ascension.
Surely this is pure nonsense. If it is intended to convey any idea at all, why is it not expressed more distinctly? They who have clear thoughts can always utter them clearly. A hazy sentence is always the result of mental confusion. The idea is not distinct upon paper because it is indistinct in the mind. One more
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 not this very midsummer madness?—And this also?
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.
And there are not many pages in which provoking faults such as these are not to be found destroying the tasteful reader’s delight when he is most pleased and most admiring.
Yet are the beauties so many and so great that for their sake we endure even these defects. What power there is in these verses from a poem entitled
the cry of the factory children.
“For oh,” says 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 heads 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.
There is a beautiful pathos in the poem entitled
a dead rose.
O rose! who dares to name thee?
No longer roseate now, nor soft nor sweet;
But pale, and hard, and dry, as stubble-wheat,—
Kept seven years in a drawer—thy titles shame thee.
The breeze that used to blow thee
Between the hedge-row thorns, and take away
An odour up the lane to last all day,—
If breathing now,—unsweetened would forgo thee.
The sun that used to smite thee,
And mix his glory in thy gorgeous urn,
Till beam appeared to bloom, and flower to burn,—
If shining now,—with not a hue would light thee.
The dew that used to wet thee,
And, white first, grow incarnadined, because
It lay upon thee where the crimson was,—
If dropping now,—would darken where it met thee.
The fly that lit upon thee,
To stretch the tendrils of its tiny feet,
Along thy leaf’s pure edges, after heat,—
If lighting now,—would coldly overrun thee.
The bee that once did suck thee,
And build thy perfumed ambers up his hive,
And swoon in thee for joy, till scarce alive,—
If passing now,—would blindly overlook thee.
The heart doth recognise thee,
Alone, alone! The heart doth smell the sweet,
Doth view the fair, doth judge thee most complete—
Though seeing now those changes that disguise thee.
Yes, and the heart doth owe thee
More love, dead rose! than to such roses bold
As Julia wears at dances, smiling cold!——
Lie still upon this heart—which breaks below thee!
We should notice with warm commendation her translation of Prometheus Bound, perhaps the best translation of a classic by a female hand which our literature can boast. She has caught the spirit of the original, and given us that instead of the bare lifeless words. This is a sonnet of great merit.
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?”
Here is a composition fraught with the finest poetry, suggested by an expression in a poem written by the unfortunate L. E. L. during her voyage to the Cape.
do you think of me?
“Do you think of me as I think of you,
My friends, my friends?”—She said it from the sea,
The English minstrel in her minstrelsy;
While, under brighter skies than erst she knew,
Her heart grew dark,—and groped there, as the blind,
To reach across the waves, friends left behind—
“Do you think of me as I think of you?”
It seemed not much to ask—As I of you?—
We all do ask the same. No eyelids cover
Within the meekest eyes, that question over,—
And little, in the world, the Loving do,
But sit (among the rocks?) and listen for
The echo of their own love evermore—
“Do you think of me as I think of you?”
Love-learned, she had sung of love and love,—
And, like a child, that, sleeping with dropt head
Upon the fairy-book he lately read,
Whatever household noises round him move,
Hears in his dream some elfin turbulence,—
Even so, suggestive to her inward sense,
All sounds of life assumed one tune of love.
And when the glory of her dream withdrew,—
When knightly gestes and courtly pageantries
Were broken in her visionary eyes,
By tears the solemn seas attested true,—
Forgetting that sweet lute beside her hand,
She asked not,—do you praise me, O my land?—
But—“Think ye of me, friends, as I of you?”
Hers was the hand that played for many a year
Love’s silver phrase for England,—smooth and well!
Would God, her heart’s more inward oracle
In that lone moment, might confirm her dear!
For when her questioned friends in agony
Made passionate response,—“We think of thee,”—
Her place was in the dust, too deep to hear.
Could she not wait to catch their answering breath?
Was she content—content—with ocean’s sound,
Which dashed its mocking infinite around
One thirsty for a little love?—beneath
Those stars, content,—where last her song had gone,—
They, mute and cold in radiant life,—as soon
Their singer was to be, in darksome death?
Bring your vain answers—cry, “We think of thee!”
How think ye of her? warm in long ago
Delights?—or crowned with budding bays? Not so.
None smile and none are crowned where lieth she,—
With all her visions unfulfilled, save one—
Her childhood’s—of the palm-trees in the sun—
And lo! their shadow on her sepulchre!
“Do you think of me as I think of you?”—
O friends,—O kindred,—O dear brotherhood
Of all the world! what are we, that we should
For covenants of long affection sue?
Why press so near each other, when the touch
Is barred by graves? Not much, and yet too much,
Is this “Think of me as I think of you.”
But while on mortal lips I shape anew
A sigh to mortal issues,—verily
Above the unshaken stars that see us die,
A vocal pathos rolls! and He who drew
All life from dust, and for all, tasted death,
By death and life and love, appealing, saith,
Do you think of me as I think of you?
There is a playfulness in the following which will recommend its soberer truths to many a memory.
a man’s requirements.
Love me, sweet, with all thou art,
Feeling, thinking, seeing,—
Love me in the lightest part,
Love me in full being.
Love me with thine open youth
In its frank surrender;
With the vowing of thy mouth,
With its silence tender.
Love me with thine azure eyes,
Made for earnest granting!
Taking colour from the skies,
Can Heaven’s truth be wanting?
Love me with their lids, that fall
Snow-like at first meeting:
Love me with thine heart, that all
The neighbours then see beating.
Love me with thine hand stretched out
Freely—open-minded:
Love me with thy loitering foot,—
Hearing one behind it.
Love me with thy voice, that turns
Sudden faint above me;
Love me with thy blush that burns
When I murmur “Love me!”
Love me with thy thinking soul—
Break it to love-sighing;
Love me with thy thoughts that roll
On through living—dying.
Love me in thy gorgeous airs,
When the world has crowned thee!
Love me, kneeling at thy prayers,
With the angels round thee.
Love me pure, as musers do,
Up the woodlands shady:
Love me gaily, fast, and true,
As a winsome lady.
Through all hopes that keep us brave,
Further off or nigher,
Love me for the house and grave,—
And for something higher.
Thus, if thou wilt prove me, dear,
Woman’s love no fable,
I will love thee—half-a-year—
As a man is able.
We must take now a portion of a poem addressed to Mr. Boyd who had presented her with some
cyprus wine.
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 ai’s and oi’s.
* * * * *
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.
So to come back to the drinking
Of this Cyprus:—it is well;
But those memories, to my thinking,
Make a better ænomel [sic]:
And whoever be the speaker,
None can murmur with a sigh,
That, in drinking from that beaker,
I am sipping like a fly.
In conclusion we present two sonnets, of which Wordsworth might have boasted.
I never gave a lock of hair away
To a man, Dearest, except this to thee,
Which now upon my fingers thoughtfully
I ring out to the full brown length and say
“Take it.” My day of youth went yesterday;
My hair no longer bounds to my foot’s glee,
Nor plant I it from rose or myrtle-tree,
As girls do, any more. It only may
Now shade on two pale cheeks, the mark of tears,
Taught drooping from the head that hangs aside
Through sorrow’s trick. I thought the funeral-shears
Would take this first; but love is justified:
Take it thou, . . finding pure from all those years,
The kiss my mother left here when she died.
How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of Being and Ideal Grace.
I love thee to the level of everyday’s
Most quiet need, by sun and candlelight.
I love thee freely, as men strive for right;
I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise;
I love thee with the passion put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood’s faith;
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints,—I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life!—and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.
We cannot part from Mrs. Browning without expressing an earnest hope that such true genius may yet throw off its weaknesses and vindicate its natural greatness.
E.W.C.
[Edward William Cox]
Reviewed:
Poems (EBB), London: Chapman & Hall, 1850.
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