E551217A. Poems (1853).
The Sun, 17 December 1855, p. 3.
As reprinted in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 22, 282–284.
It positively distresses us to find these exquisite “poems” by Elizabeth Browning only in a third edition, while Pollock’s dreary, long-winded howl about the “Course of Time” is running glibly through a twentieth or thirtieth, earning for itself at last the right to be substantially stereotyped. A fact like this says but little indeed for the taste of our generation. It betrays on the part of our book-purchasers an extraordinary obliquity of judgment. It reveals the utter folly of our ever regarding what is called popularity, in the vulgar sense of the word, as a genuine criterion of merit. It demonstrates the absurdity of ever looking to the public at large for the evidences of literary discrimination. Elizabeth Barrett Browning we take to be about the first of our lettered Englishwomen. Yet the Poems of this Sappho of the Anglo-Saxons are only now printing in a third, while “The Course of Time” is already in a twenty-second, and “The Omnipresence of the Deity” actually in a twenty-eighth edition! “So the world wags.” However, even the timbre of a “third edition” upon the title-page of volumes as replete with intrinsic excellence of the very highest order as are indisputably the two volumes here happily submitted to us for re-examination, comes to us as a very welcome, though, to our thinking, under the circumstances, as a wholly inadequate or rather an odiously disproportionate token that the poems of Mrs. Browning are in some manner at least appreciated. Considerably worthier of admiration, as expressions of a highly political and imaginative intellect, than the “Poems” of either Letitia Landon or Felicia Hemans, these remarkable effusions of the genius of Elizabeth Barrett Browning—effusions sometimes charming by their dulcifluous beauty—at others inspiriting by their nervous and forceful eloquence, assume for themselves, we cannot but think, the very loftiest rank among the more treasured of those minor, or miscellaneous, or as they are called for want of some better term, simply “fugitive pieces,” constituting the vast aggregate of our national wealth in versification. Precisely as we should declare of Eliza Cook and Charles Mackay, that they are beyond all question incomparably the greatest of the living song writers of England—so we should unquestionably assert of Elizabeth Browning and Alfred Tennyson, that each is facile princeps among the few other poets of the present generation. Elizabeth Barrett Browning, indeed, is to our mind more than this, taking the most elevated post among the more gifted of her sex, not merely in the present, but in all past generations. Her fame, however, does not in any way rest, to our thinking, upon her more elaborated compositions—upon the “Poet’s Vision,” or the “Poet’s Vow”—upon “The Seraphim,” or “The Drama of Exile”—upon her noble versions of either “The Lament for Adonis,” of Bion, or the “Prometheus Bound” of Æschylus. Neither for that matter can she be considered to rely in any considerable degree for future remembrance upon her numerous, and some of them very admirable sonnets—Petrarch having secured to himself in some wholly mysterious and altogether bewildering manner the rather enigmatical and indeed scarcely comprehensible privilege of possessing immortal fame by right of his reputation simply and exclusively as a sonneteer! What Mrs. Browning will be remembered for hereafter may be discerned, we conjecture, even elsewhere than in her “Romance of the Swan’s Nest,” or her “Romance of the Ganges”—elsewhere even than in her “Rhyme of the Duchess May,” or her “Lay of the Brown Rosary”—in her more brief and less pretentious poems, the “poems of our choice” in her tender ditty of “Bertha in the Lane,” in her lovely ballad of the “Lady Geraldine’s Courtship,” in her passionate “Cry of the Human,” and her most touching “Cry of the Children,” in her loyal “Crowned and Wedded” befitting the courtly muse of a laureate, and her pathetic “Crowned and Buried” noblest among the many noble tributes offered to the shade of the Great Emperor and King, Napoleon. Wonderful guarantees, too, of the permanence of the renown won by the witching music of this exquisite songstress, are discoverable, few will fail to acknowledge, in her dainty dream of “The Lost Bower,” in her marvellous fiction of “The Deserted Garden,” in her memorable conceit of “Hector in the Garden,” in her delicious apostrophy to “A Dead Rose,” in that loveliest of all her lovely outpourings of melody and grief, and alluring passion, and irresistible tenderness—her matchless poem entitled “Catarina to Camoens.” These are among the nobler sureties of the future fame of Elizabeth Barrett Browning—as they are among the readiest passports to present admiration. It is especially remarkable, however, that even these masterly effusions of the genius of Mrs. Browning are still, in the “third edition,” blurred by the old blemishes, by which their grace and symmetry were originally disfigured. This, too, in spite of the writer’s avowal, at page viii. of Vol. I., that “the author has done her best to remedy the oversights and defects of the former revision!” It is scarcely comprehensible, after this, how it comes to pass that we still find “Catarina to Camoens” jarring upon our ears with such abominable rhymes as for example—(st. 2.) “bowers” and “yours,” as (st. 14.) “flowings” and “poems,” as (st. 15.) “praying” and “away in,” as (st. 19.) “future” and “suitor.” While in “The Cry of the Children” our senses are still horrified with rhymes like (st. 4.) “stilled in” and “children,” as (st. 11.) “heaven” and “unbelieving,” or again as (st. 12.) “before you” and “glory,” and “unretrievingly” and “heavenly.” Villainously bad rhymes, however, are the arch-fault of Mrs. Browning, a crime against taste, in her instance, altogether incomprehensible. Abominable, too, in its way is the dreary iteration indulged in by her at times as in the case of the wearisome “Toll slowly”—“Toll slowly”—“Toll slowly” repeated again, and again, and yet again, in the interminable “Rhyme of the Duchess May.” Mrs. Browning, we may likewise observe, evinces a curious delight in—what shall we say? how possibly can we express it?—dimly idealising wholly inaudible sounds! Can it be forgotten? for example how the very first of her “Poems,” not, of course, in regard to their merit, but in reference simply to their arrangement, the first poem in the first volume, i.e., the “Drama of Exile,” closes with that wonderful intimation—“There is a sound through the silence as of the falling tears of an angel!” Again, have we not in “Bertha in the Lane” that amazing avowal, at the 22d stanza:—
And I answered coldly, too,
When you met me at the door;
And I only heard the dew
Dripping from me to the floor!
Better than this, though of a similar kind, that exquisite sentence occurring a little earlier in the same poem:—
And the Silence, as it stood
In the Glory’s golden flood,
Audibly did bud—did bud.
If we desired, however, to shadow forth by a single quotation the many rare and noble characteristics of the poetry of Elizabeth Barrett Browning we should adduce some such passage as the following—a passage to us of solemn harmony and exquisite and pathetic beauty. “Crowned and Buried”—it is an apostrophe to the Modern Sesostris:
Napoleon!—years ago, and that great word
Compact of human breath in hate and dread
And exultation, skied us overhead—
An atmosphere whose lightning was the sword
Scathing the cedars of the world—drawn down
In burnings, by the metal of a crown.
Napoleon! Nations, while they cursed that name,
Shook at their own curse; and while others bore
Its sound, as of a trumpet, on before,
Brass-fronted legions justified its fame—
And dying men, on trampled battle-sods,
Near their last silence, uttered it for God’s.
Napoleon! Sages, with high forehead drooped,
Did use it for a problem: children small
Leapt up to greet it, as at manhood’s call:
Priests blessed it from their altars overstooped
By meek-eyed Christs,—and widows with a moan
Spake it, when questioned why they sate alone.
That name consumed the silence of the snows
In Alpine keeping, holy and cloud-hid,—
The mimic eagles dared what Nature’s did,
And over-rushed her mountainous repose
In search of eyeries; and the Egyptian river
Mingled the same word with its grand ‘For ever.’
That name was shouted near the pyramidal
Nilotic tombs, whose mummied habitants,
Packed to humanity’s significance,
Motioned it back with stillness. Shouts as idle
As hireling artists’ work of myrrh and spice
Which swathed last glories round the Ptolemies.
The world’s face changed to hear it. Kingly men
Came down, in chidden babes’ bewilderment.
From autocrat places—each content
With sprinkled ashes for anointing;—then
The people laughed or wondered for the nonce
To see one throne a composite of thrones.
Napoleon! even the torrid vastitude
Of India felt in throbbings of the air
That name which scattered by disastrous blare
All Europe’s bound-lines,—drawn afresh in blood.
Napoleon—from the Russias, west to Spain!
And Austria trembled—till ye heard her chain.
And Germany was ’ware—and Italy
Oblivious of old fames—her laurel-looked,
High-ghosted Cæsars passing uninvoked,—
Did crumble her own ruins with her knee,
To serve a newer.—Ay! but Frenchmen cast
A future from them nobler than her past.
Hearken again to the voice of the Pythoness, chanting anew the glory and the woe of the Great Conqueror!
Napoleon! ’twas a high name lifted high!
It met at last God’s thunder sent to clear
Our compassing and covering atmosphere
And open a clear sight beyond the sky
Of supreme empire; this of earth’s was done—
And kings crept out again to feel the sun.
The kings crept out—the peoples sate at home,
And finding the long-invocated peace
A pall embroidered with worn images
Of rights divine, too scant to cover doom
Such as they suffered,—cursed the corn that grew
Rankly, to bitter bread, on Waterloo.
A deep gloom centred in the deep repose—
The nations stood up mute to count their dead—
And he who owned the Name which vibrated
Through silence,—trusting to his noblest foes
When earth was all too grey for chivalry,
Died of their mercies ’mid the desert sea.
Again, upon the same great theme, her voice is lifted up as with the passionate grief of a Cassandra: singing of the Dead—
O wild St. Helen! very still she kept him,
With a green willow for all pyramid,—
Which stirred a little if the low wind did,
A little more, if pilgrims overwept him,
Disparting the lithe boughs to see the clay
Which seemed to cover his for judgment day.
Nay, not so long!—France kept her old affection
As deeply as the sepulchre the corse,
Until dilated by such love’s remorse
To a new angel of the resurrection,
She cried, ‘Behold, thou England! I would have
The dead whereof thou wottest, from that grave.’
And England answered in the courtesy
Which, ancient foes turned lovers, may befit,—
‘Take back thy dead! and when thou buriest it,
Throw in all former strifes ’twixt thee and me.’
Amen, mine England! ’tis a courteous claim—
But ask a little room too … for thy shame!
Because it was not well, it was well,
Nor tuneful with thy lofty-chanted part
Among the Oceanides,—that Heart
To bind and bare and vex with vulture fell,
I would, my noble England! men might seek
All crimson stains upn thy breast—not cheek!
I would that hostile fleets had scarred this bay,
Instead of the lone ship which waited moored
Until thy princely purpose was assured,
Then left a shadow—not to pass away—
Not for to-night’s moon, nor to-morrow’s sun!
Green watching hills, ye witnessed what was done!
Pronouncing thus, in fine, the oracular dictum of poesy upon the fame of this later demigod, the “Crowned and Buried”—
napoleon.
Blood fell like dew beneath his sunrise—sooth!
But glittered dew-like in the covenanted
Meridian light. He was a despot—granted!
But the αυτος of his autocratic mouth
Said ye i’ the people’s French: he magnified
The image of the freedom he denied.
And if they asked for rights, he made reply
“Ye have my glory!”—and so, drawing round them
His ample purple, glorified and bound them
In an embrace that seemed identity.
He ruled them like a tyrant—true! but none
Were ruled like slaves: each felt Napoleon.
I do not praise this man: the man was flawed
For Adam—much more Christ!—his knee, unbent—
His hand, unclean—his aspiration, pent
With a sword-sweep—pshaw!—but since he had
The genius to be loved, why let him have
The justice to be honoured in his grave.
I think this nation’s tears thus poured together,
Worthier than shouts; I think this funeral
Grander than crownings, though a Pope bless all;
I think this grave stronger than thrones. But whether
The crowned Napoleon or the buried clay
Be better, I discern not—Angels may.
So, with that wild strain of a melody most beautiful and most affecting still vibrating upon the chords of our remembrance, let us close these brief and inadequate words of reference to the writings of a true woman, and a poet no less genuine and illustrious. Honour to Elizabeth Barrett Browning, whose name—as that of Mary Somerville, is the boast of her sex in the scientific annals of our generation—is preeminent among the living glories of our English literature!
Reviewed:
Poems (EBB), 3rd ed., London: Chapman & Hall, 1853.
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