E560100A. The Poems of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (New York, 1854).
The Christian Examiner, January 1856, pp. 137–138.
As reprinted in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 22, 285.
[The article in which this review appears begins with notices of works by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Bayard Taylor, Alfred Tennyson, and Philip James Bailey; these we omit.]
The somewhat lavish poetry of Mrs. Browning has found many admirers in England and in this country. We could never be of the number, notwithstanding her many claims to respectful regard. The words often outweigh the thoughts, and the thoughts are often hardly worth expressing; and her pages contain instances of almost every blemish of style, except those [p. 138→] that are of a plebeian order. But our chief complaint is of what we cannot but consider an elaborate affectation overspreading her verses. There seems to be a desire of saying things in a way in which no one else would think of saying them. While we are wishing that she would not pester us so with her Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, we find that her English troubles us a great deal more. Affectation—it cannot be repeated too often—is the bane of a great portion of the poetry now most in vogue. Give us, one is ready to say, the talk of clowns, if they will seriously undertake to talk, rather than the jingle and subtlety of ambitious phrases trying to pass for conceptions! In these Mrs. Browning is affluent. Her manner of writing often shows a remarkable affinity to Mr. Bailey’s; and to the faults chargeable against him she adds others of her own, which show a great want of true perception, and take a plunge occasionally not only into the dark, but into the ridiculous. Take for example:
Let us sit on the thrones
In a purple sublimity,
And grind down men’s bones
To a pale unanimity.
Not long ago we saw quoted as a brilliant specimen the following lines on the creation of angels:—
As yourselves
Were fashioned very good at best (?), so we
Sprang very beauteous from the creant Word
Which thrilled around us; God himself being moved,
When that august work of a perfect shape,
His dignities of soveran angel-hood,
Swept out into the universe; divine,
With thundrous movements, earnest looks of gods,
And silver-solemn clash of cymbal wings.
There is no need of pointing out the particular sins of such inflations as these. They are part of an exceedingly disagreeable piece of Christian mythology, entitled “A Drama of Exile,” which fills a hundred pages in the second of these two volumes, and which closes with a sort of stage direction: “There is a sound through the silence, as of the falling tears of an angel.” (!) The whole “Drama” is a large collection of “taffata phrases,” “three-piled hyperboles,” and “figures pedantical.” To say, after this, that her rhyming is frequently of the very worst that can anywhere be encountered, would seem to be descending to small matters. We would gladly, if there were space, repeat some passages of a different kind, and of undoubted merit, from this lady’s writings. But after all, where there is such an absence of simplicity and poise, the crown is off from the “goddess Poesy,” and there can be little to be heartily admired.
[This article concludes with a notice of RB’s Men and Women; see pp. 000–000.]
Reviewed:
Poems (EBB), 2 vols., New York: C.S. Francis, 1854.
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