E560200A. General Review Essay.
Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, February 1856, pp. 131–132 and 136–137.
As reprinted in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 22, 291.
[The article in which this review appears begins with remarks on Alfred Tennyson; these we omit.]
Strange enough, however, this phase of youthfulness does not seem to have struck any woman-poet. We have heroines pensive and heroines sublime, heroines serious and heroines merry, but very few specimens of that high fantastical which embraces all these, and into which most men, and doubtless most women, on their way to soberer life, have the luck to fall. Mrs Browning is too sad, too serious, too conscious of the special pangs and calamities which press heaviest on her sisterhood, to take note of any happier peculiarity. Nor is this special eye to feminine troubles confined to Mrs Browning: a weeping and a melancholy band are the poetesses of all generations. “Woman is the lesser man,” says the Laureate; but only woman is the sadder man—the victim set apart on a platform of injury—the wronged and slighted being whose lot it is to waste her sweetness on hearts unkind and ungrateful, say all the ladies. “Her lot is on you.” The mature woman has no better thought, when she looks over the bright girl-heads, bent in their morning prayer; and wherever we have a female singer, there stands woman, deject and pensive, betrayed, forsaken, unbeloved, weeping immeasurable tears. Is a woman, then, the only creature in God’s universe whom He leaves without compensa- [p. 132→] tion? Out upon the thought! but there ought to be some Ida bold enough to proclaim the woman’s special happinesses—the exuberant girl-delights—the maiden meditation, fancy free—the glory of motherhood—the blessings as entirely her own as are the griefs. Bertha in the Lane is a most moving story, sweetly told; but ye are not always weeping, O gentlest sisterhood! and where are your songs of joy?
[The review continues with remarks on Tennyson, Sydney Dobell, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow; these we omit.]
[p. 136→] It is odd to remark the entire family aspect and resemblance which our English poets bear to one another. Mr Tennyson is the eldest of the group, and they all take after him; but they are true brothers, and have quite a family standard of merit by which to judge themselves. Mr Dobell is the sulky boy—Mr Browning the boisterous one—Mr Smith the younger brother, desperately bent on being even with the firstborn, and owning no claim of birthright. There is but one sister in the melodious household, and she is quite what the one sister generally is in such a family—not untouched by even the schoolboy pranks of the surrounding brothers—falling into their ways of speaking—moved by their commo- [p. 137→] tions—very feminine, yet more acquainted with masculine fancies than with the common ways of women. Another sister or two to share her womanly moderatorship in this noisy household might have made a considerable difference in Mrs Browning: but her position has a charm of its own;—she never lags behind the fraternal band, nay, sometimes stimulated by a sudden impulse, glides on first, and calls “the boys” to follow her: nor does she quite refuse now and then to join a wild expedition to the woods or the sea-shore. If she has sometimes a feminine perception that the language of the brothers is somewhat too rugged or too obscure for common comprehension, she partly adopts the same, with a graceful feminine artifice, to show how, blended with her sweeter words, this careless diction can be musical after all; and you feel quite confident that she will stand up stoutly for all the brotherhood, even when she does not quite approve of their vagaries. She has songs of her own, sweet and characteristic, such as “Little Ellie,” and leaps into the heart of a great subject once in that Lay of the Children, which everybody knows and quotes, and which has just poetic exaggeration sufficient to express the vehement indignation with which the song compelled the singer’s utterance. Altogether, Mrs Browning’s poems, rank them how you will in intellectual power, have more of the native mettle of poetry than most modern verses. She is less artificial than her brotherhood—and there is something of the spring and freedom of things born in her two earlier volumes; she is not so assiduously busy over the things which have to be made.
[This article continues with comments on RB’s Men and Women; see pp. 000–000.]
[Margaret Oliphant]
Reviewed:
General Review Essay (EBB).
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