E560700A. Poems (1853) and Casa Guidi Windows.
The New Monthly Magazine, July 1856, pp. 369–378.
As reprinted in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 23, 269–273.
“Nous avons bien de la peine à permettre aux femmes un habit de muse,” said Ginguené: “comment pourrions-nous leur souffrir un bonnet de docteur?” Insufferable as the thing may be, experience shows the possibility of the junction of these two anomalies in one “soul feminine,” thus o’er-informing its tenement of clay. Mrs. Browning wears not only the singing-robes of the poetess, un habit de muse, with a grace and glory of the rarest, but dons withal un bonnet de docteur, dealing, to the delectation of Oxford doctors, and the dazed bewilderment of London ladies, in stores of much Latin and more Greek—wincing not at the caution that a little learning is a dangerous thing, herself a deep-drinker and no mere taster of the Pierian spring.
The Lady Scholar is an old grievance, both in prose and poetry. Juvenal is severe against the lettered wife, who discusses Virgil at mealtimes, compares him with Homer, and awes into silence not only unlettered wives, widows, and maidens, but grammarians of the utmost gravity, rhetoricians of the first magnitude, glib-tongued lawyers (causidici) and leather-lunged criers (præcones):
Illa tamen gravior, quæ, cum discumbere cœpit,
Laudat Virgilium, perituræ ignoscit Elisæ:
Committit vates, et comparat inde Maronem,
Atque aliâ parte in trutinâ suspendit Homerum.
Cedunt Grammatici, vincuntur Rhetores, omnis
Turba tacet, nec causidicus, nec præco loquatur,
Altera nec mulier: verborum tanta cadit vis.*
A strong-minded woman, strong in Latin and Greek, in voice and self-assurance, is, in any company, de trop. But a poetess so steeped in Attic lore that she can worthily translate Æschylus, so versed in ecclesiastical Greek that she can worthily translate Gregory and Basil,—and at the same time so tender of soul, so sensitively alive to “the cry of the human,” so kindly an expositor of the heart’s dearest, fondest hopes,—can too much be made of a gift of the gods like this? Had Mrs. Browning only given us the “Prometheus Bound,” and the Hellenistic hymnology, we might admire, many of us with a foolish face of praise: but she has had her own “Vision of Poets,” has sung her own “Romaunt of Margret,” has taken us to “Cowper’s Grave,” has shown us “Bertha in the Lane,” has curdled our blood with the “Lay of the Brown Rosary,” has stirred it by her “Rhyme of the Duchess May,”—and with our admiration is now mingled a softening, subduing, and gently refining influence, which profoundly intensifies while it gives another direction to, that original feeling.
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*Juvenalis Satira. VI.
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The more ambitious, in form and scope, of her early poems, remarkable as they are for occasional glimpses of the “sublime and beautiful,” have a tendency, it must be owned, to confirm by their character and fate the argument of Archdeacon Hare, that of the three main branches of poetry (epic, dramatic, lyric), the only feminine one is the lyrical,— [p. 370→] meaning thereby, not objective lyrical poetry, like that of Pindar and Simonides, and the choric odes of the Greek tragedians,—but that which is the expression of individual, personal feelings, like Sappho’s. The “Drama of Exile” is owned, on all sides, to be a failure, its design considered; but the readiest to give it up cannot help asking, what true lover of poetry would wish this drama unwritten? On the one hand, there are those who maintain that the “Drama of Exile,” as a poetic utterance, and disregarding its technical defects of form, stands well between the Paradise Lost and the Paradise Regained; that Mrs. Browning has filled up the interval worthily and movingly: that if there be a difference in the notes of her Drama and those of the great Epic (as of course there is), it is such a difference only as should subsist between Milton and his Daughter, and that if her Poem has not the strong majesty of the Lost, or the serene beauty of the Regained, it has the appropriate character of an exile’s lament, who hangs his harp upon the willow, and weeps when he remembers Zion. On the other hand, there are those who object, that in the special subject of this Drama, namely, the conception of Eve’s grief as distinguished from Adam’s, and as coloured by the circumstances of her situation—by the consciousness that she had been the first to fall, and the proximate cause of Adam’s transgression—there is certainly no sufficient foundation to sustain the weight of a dramatic poem; that the whole is an attempt to make bricks not only without straw, but almost without clay; that although the poetess, with sincere modesty, disclaims all intention of entering into competition with Milton, the comparison must, of course, force itself upon the reader—who, while he had no right to expect her to rise as soaringly as Milton does above the level of her theme, at any rate might presume that her dramatis personæ should not stand in absolute contrast to his. Yet the Satan of Milton, and the Lucifer of Mrs. Browning are, says a distinguished Professor,* the very antipodes of each other. “Milton’s Satan is a thoroughly practical character, and, if he had been human, he would have made a first-rate man of business in any department of life;”—while the lady’s Lucifer, on the contrary, is “the poorest prater that ever made a point of saying nothing to the purpose, and we feel assured that he could have put his hand to nothing in heaven, on earth, or in hell. He has nothing to do, he does nothing, and he could do nothing.” The Adamus exul of the “Drama,” too, has been described by another critic, as not the large-fronted man in whose full clear nature all manlike qualities meet unconsciously; but “a German metaphysician;” and Eve, as “an amiable and gifted blue-stocking,” not the mere meek motherly woman, with what Aird beautifully calls the “broad, ripe, serene, and gracious composure of love about her;” while the spirits employed in the poem are said to be neither cherubim nor seraphim, neither of those that know nor of those that burn; but fairies; not indeed of the Puck or Ariel species, but of a new metaphysical breed; for “they do not ride on, but split, hairs; they do not dance, but reason; or if they dance, it is on the point of a needle, in cycles and epicycles of mystic and mazy motion.”
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*Aut Aytoun, aut——Lucifer ipse.
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So again of the “Seraphim”—an attempt to write of the Great Tragedy of Golgotha, as Æschylus would have done, had he lived after [p. 371→] that decease that was accomplished at Jerusalem, of which the agonies and vicarious sufferings of Prometheus, some affirm, were type and shadow—of this aspiring effort the most will think, after perusal, with Professor Wilson,* that there is poetry and piety—genius and devotion; but that the awful Idea of the Poem, the Crucifixion, is not sustained; and this, if not the “Drama of Exile,” they too will almost wish unwritten.
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*Christopher in his Cave. 1838.
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It has been said that Mrs. Browning‘s affinities connect her with Milton, Goethe, and John Keats, more closely than with any other of her poet-predecessors:—the religious element in her character bringing her into alliance with the first, while her intimacy with the spirit-world is eminently Goethean, and the Greek classic model on which much of her imagery of life is formed recals the manner of Keats.* Her relationship to Tennyson is still more obvious. “Even Miss Barrett, whom we take,” says Mr. Leigh Hunt, “to be the most imaginative poetess that has appeared in England, perhaps in Europe, and who will attain to great eminence if the fineness of her vein can but outgrow a certain morbidity, reminds her readers of the peculiarities of contemporary genius. She is like an ultra-sensitive sister of Alfred Tennyson.”** In which likeness, moreover, Leontius celebrates her in verse as well as prose; for he thus introduces her at the Feast of the Violets:
A young lady then, whom to miss were a caret
In any verse-history, named, I think, Barrett,
(I took her at first for a sister of Tennyson)
Knelt and received the god’s kindliest benison.
—“Truly,” said he, “dost thou share the blest power
Poetic, the fragrance as well as the flower;
The gift of conveying impressions unseen,
And making the vaguest thoughts know what they mean.”***
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*“We have called it Keats-like, because it throws the common material of modern life into that Grecian marble-halled type, which we see in Keats, and almost in him only.”—Prospective Review, 1845.
**Men, Women, and Books, vol. ii.
***Blue-Stocking Revels, canto ii.
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If she is chargeable with being too often diffuse—with not always journeying on without pause or retrogression, so that occasionally her garments are seen floating or dragging, and she has sometimes “given out the idea, before she has given up her verse,”—it is a charge made most hesitatingly by her admirers, for, say they, what a loss it were, if in getting rid of what we may fancy to be her defects, she were to lose any of what we know to be her beauties. “And perhaps what we think we see amiss in her is only that dross which forms part of every ore in which lies the true metal, and she may in this respect only resemble, after all, Milton, and Shakspeare, and—Nature.” Even her mannerisms are precious to some of her disciples—partly from their being so easily caught, copied, and exaggerated by sentimental mimics. The failures of these personages, as a writer on Shelley has remarked, furnish in the end tests of criticism which are perhaps among the truest that can be applied; for they are certain to caricature and over-do peculiarities, until the very style of their model palls on the public appetite, and, out of all patience with the affectation, mannerism, and false taste of these sectaries, the world [p. 372→] associates the merits of the original with the faults to which they have given birth: whereupon ensues the critical moment for the eventual fame of that original—who, if endowed with sound and genuine qualities, will shake off these importunate encumbrances and float again—if not, will by them be dragged to the bottom. Meanwhile, for a good deal of bad grammar and bad poetry, perpetrated by imitators who take her word (or words) for law, Mrs. Browning is virtually responsible, by such lyrics and lines of hers as tell how Bertha “fell flooded with a Dark,” or of “the heavenly Infinite falling off from our Created,” or how “the full sense of our mortal rushed upon you loud and deep,” or of “chanting down the Golden,” of “the whole bush in a tremble green,” &c. Her rhymes are very often defective or culpable—negatively or positively bad. “Eden” is not a suitable match for “treading.” “Aceldama” does not rhyme kindly with “tamer”—to say nothing of the cockney character of such an untrue yokefellow. “Calmly” might deny itself, and wax wroth exceedingly, at being braced with “palm-tree.” It makes one uneasy to hear of
Self-styled George Sand—whose soul among the lions
Of her tumultuous senses moans defiance.
Or of “elemental” and “prevent all” with “ungentle,” and similar deeds of partnership which it were better to cancel, the partnership being sufficiently dissolute to warrant dissolution.
But a truce to the sorry occupation of fault-finding, or finding out faults. What, after all, “are they among so many” beauties that make up the staple of Mrs. Browning’s delicate white handiwork?
Exquisite in feeling and expression—allowing in the latter case, as usual, for frequent mannerism—is many a contribution of hers to the Poetry of the Affections. The picture, for example, in “Isabel’s [sic] Child,” of the young mother sitting motionless, a wistful lonely watcher, by the side of her dying baby—“pale as baby carved in stone, and seen by glimpses of the moon in a dark cathedral aisle.” She has watched the hours depart, hour after hour for eight long agonising days, days of suspense and the sickness of hope deferred—hours whose coming and going have seen her on bended knees, “with pale-wrung hands and prayings low and broken”—hours shadowed with awful forebodings of the fated, fast-speeding last hours of the baby-sufferer—an advent against which so young a mother, so tender and true, strives beseechingly and piteously in prayers that may not be heard, with groanings that cannot be uttered:
Oh, take not, Lord, my babe away:
Oh, take not to thy songful heaven,
The pretty baby Thou hast given:
Or ere that I have seen him play
Around his father’s knees, and known
That he knew how my love hath gone
From all the world to him!
And how that I shall shiver, dim
In the sunshine, thinking e’er
The grave-grass keeps it from his fair
Still cheeks! and feel at every tread
His little body which is dead
And hidden in the turfy fold
Doth make the whole warm earth a’cold! [p. 373→]
O God! I am so young, so young—
I am not used to tears at nights
Instead of slumber—nor to prayer
With shaken lips and hands out-wrung!
Thou knowest all my prayings were
“I bless Thee, God, for past delights—
Thank God!” I am not used to bear
Hard thoughts of death! The earth doth cover
No face from me of friend or lover!
And must the first who teacheth me
The form of shrouds and funerals, be
Mine own first-born beloved? he
Who taught me first this mother-love?
Dear Lord,* who spreadest out above
Thy loving piercèd hands to meet
All lifted hearts with blessing sweet,—
Pierce not my heart, my tender heart,
Thou madest tender! Thou who art
So happy in Thy heaven alway,
Take not mine only bliss away!
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*This, and cognate forms of expression, we cannot view with the same favour as Mrs. Browning. Especially objectionable is the form “Dear God!”—which, to some minds, has the unhappy effect of coming in once and again to mar an otherwise beautiful passage—as in the most moving “Lay of the Brown Rosary,”
Then breaking into tears—“Dear God,” she cried, “and must we see
All blissful things depart from us, or ere we go to Thee,” &c.
Mr. Kingsley’s fictions and reviews are similarly chargeable with the repetition of the phrase “God’s earth,” &c. Nothing more easily degenerates into jargon than this sort of diction.
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The picture, again, however fainter in hue and lighter in effect, of the happy child in “The Deserted Garden”—as seen, in pensive retrospect, by that child’s sobered, saddened self, altera et eadem, in after-years. And that, in a still lighter vein, of Little Ellie sitting alone among the beeches of the meadow, on the stream-side’s grassy covering—now dipping her feet in the shallow water’s flow, and now holding them “nakedly in her hands, all sleek and dripping, while she rocketh to and fro”—her thoughts shaping out, at the impulse of plastic fancy, the lover who shall woo and win her, a lover noble of form, mounted on red-roan steed,—and to whom, and whom alone, she will discover
That swan’s nest among the reeds.
And that of Bertha’s sister, recalling, on her meek death-bed, the scene she had beheld, the words she had heard, under “boughs of May-bloom” in the lane—striving as she dies of a broken-heart to comfort the bruised heart of others;—altogether, indeed, as it has noway carelessly been called, “the purest picture of a broken heart that ever drew tears from the eyes of woman or of man.” And that of her who being dead yet speaketh in the “Poet’s Vow.” And that of the stately Lady Geraldine, approaching low-born Bertram “slowly, slowly, in a gliding measured pace,
With her two white hands extended, as if praying one offended,
And a look of supplication, gazing earnest in his face”—
while he gazes, rapt in ecstasy as fond as ever thrilled Leontes gazing on [p. 374→] Hermione marbled in living flesh, and is ready to “swoon to death in the too utter life” brought by this apparition of his love—
Ever, evermore the while in a slow silence she kept smiling—
But the tears ran over lightly from her eyes, and tenderly;
“Dost thou, Bertram, truly love me? Is no woman far above me
Found more worthy of thy poet-heart, than such a one as I?”
But perhaps superior to all in pathetic earnestness and depth, is the farewell of Catarina to Camöens.
There are frequent touches in Mrs. Browning’s poems, not so commonly noticed as they deserve, significant of peculiar skill in producing a kind of weird and eerie impression, by certain interjectional details, or thrilling asides, or subdued terrors, pertaining to the ghostly element in the consciousness or the imagination of man. The Lay of the Brown Rosary shows a master-hand in this class of composition. Detached fragments might be instanced from various other lays or legends. As exemplifying, however, in its least direct but not least stirring expression, the art to which we refer, take some lines from “Bertha in the Lane”—where the dying girl’s simple narrative of a too painful past is interrupted now and then by surmises, startings, startled questionings, that wonderfully deepen and determine the interest of the scene:
Had he seen thee, when he swore
He would love but me alone?
Thou wert absent,—sent before
To our kin in Sidmouth town.
When he saw thee who art best
Past compare, and loveliest,
He but judged thee as the rest.
Could we blame him with grave words,
Thou and I, Dear, if we might?
Thy brown eyes have looks like birds
Flying straightway to the light:
Mine are older.—Hush!—Look out—
Up the street! Is none without?
How the poplar swings about!
. . . . . .
We are so unlike each other,
Thou and I; that none could guess
We were children of one mother,
But for mutual tenderness.
Thou art rose-lined from the cold,
And meant, verily, to hold
Life’s pure pleasures manifold.
I am pale as crocus grows
Close beside a rose-tree’s root!
Whosoe’er would reach the rose,
Treads the crocus underfoot—
I, like May-bloom on thorn-tree—
Thou, like merry summer-bee!
Fit, that I be pluck’d for thee.
Yet who plucks me?—no one mourns—
I have lived my season out,—
And now die of my own thorns
Which I could not live without. [p. 375→]
Sweet, be merry! How the light
Comes and goes! If it be night,
Keep the candles in my sight.
Are there footsteps at the door?
Look out quickly. Yea, or nay?
Some one might be waiting for
Some last word that I might say.
Nay? So best!—So angels would
Stand off clear from deathly road—
Not to cross the sight of God.
. . . . . .
Of the poetess’s moving lyrics, meant in one form or other to express, echo, and reverberate what she calls the “cry of the human,” it boots not to speak at any length: they are commonly the best known and understood of all her poems. The “Cry of the Children” witnesses to the earnestness of her sympathies, and the power with which she can give them broken voice. Moir calls the truth of these stanzas an “importunate and heavy load,” that weighs on the heart like a nightmare—on the imagination, like a torture-scene by Spagnoletto. It is as real, and goes as straight to the heart, as the “Song of the Shirt.” Her “Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point” is another outburst of passionate remonstrance, vented as it were in gasps and sobs of song. Thorough earnestness, indeed, marks all the verses she writes “with a purpose,” from stanzas few and simple to the longer and more laboured “Casa Guidi Windows”—the “very incoherent and fragmentary form” of which, however, is in itself, by the sentence of Charles Kingsley, a true and natural expression of her natural bewilderment, uncertainty, alternate hope and disappointment, vague yet sure expectation of a darker and a brighter future, “a red sunrise of retribution, from whose glory and whose horror her eyes, as they should have done, turned away, while all things quivered before them, indistinctly amid the mist of tears”—what time she heard a little child go singing
’Neath Casa Guidi windows, by the church,
“O bella libertà, O bella!”—
a little child, too, who “not long had been by mother’s finger steadied on his feet,” though still O bella libertà! he sang. The war-utterances of “Maud” had been anticipated for years by the laureate’s greatest living rival in song, who denounces a hollow peace, where fellowship is not, nor mercy, nor any true fruit of bella libertà,—and who prefers to it the horrors of war, the “raking of the guns across the world,” “the struggle in the slippery fosse, of dying men and horses, and the wave-blood bubbling”—such things she swears “by Christ’s own Cross,” and by the “faint heart of her womanhood,” are better than a despot’s selfish Peace, for that
Is gagged despair, and inarticulate wrong,
Annihilated Poland, stifled Rome,
Dazed Naples, Hungary fainting ’neath the throng,
And Austria wearing a smooth olive-leaf
On her brute forehead, while her hoofs outpress
The life from these Italian souls.
Mary Russell Mitford, lately taken from us in a green old age, has [p. 376→] told the world more than any one else, or than all other gentle gossips put together, of the life-history and painful past of the poetess. Miss Barrett that was (and under another title still is) once cordially addressed in a sonnet Miss Mitford that then was (and now, alas! is not):
Dear friend, in whose dear writings drops the dew
And blow the natural airs; thou, who art next
To nature’s self in cheering the world’s view,
To preach a sermon on so known a text, &c.
In the cheeriest of Old Maids’ “Recollections of a Literary Life,” that pleasant kindly gossip about Books, Places, and People, is given, with characteristic unreserve and delicate sympathy combined, a record* of [p. 377→] certain tragic passages that have deeply tinged the life and works of her gifted friend. Acquaintance with it casts a mournful light on some dark places in the poems, where the darkness may be felt. Without knowing an atom of the story of her life, it is yet impossible not to infer from Mrs. Browning’s poetry, that hers is no mere luxury of woe; that she is noway liable to the suspicion of wilful gloom for very wantonness; that she is no fantastic or professional threnodist, making a special wonder and grief of the o’erpassing of a summer-cloud; but one who has learned, as only storm-laden sorrow can teach, the possible anguish that human life can entail and human heart endure. By one overmastering affliction,
God’s shadow on her face is laid
In sanctity for aye.
Jean Paul has beautifully said: “Der Schmerz liegt auf den weiblichen Herzen, die geduldig unter ihm sich drücken lassen, mit grösserer Last als auf den männlichen auf, die sich durch Schlagen und Pochen unter ihm wegarbeiten; wie den unbeweglichen Tannengipfel aller Schnee belastet, indess auf den tiefern Zweigen, die sich immer regen, keiner bleibt.”** But sighs of heart-weariness escape ever and anon from the o’er-fraught heart, that else would break. In no modern poet are these suspiriosœ cogitationes more pregnant with meaning. In none are retrospective reveries shadowed forth in greater depth of solemn sadness. We have never seen the recognition their pathos claims awarded to those self-communings in “Night and the Merry Man,” for instance, where memory evokes from the past souvenirs of fancy’s golden treasures, and of poems delightedly conned in childhood, ere the chilling discovery was made that Life is not a poem too: [p. 378→]
What are these? more, more than these!
Throw in dearer memories!—
Of voices—whereof but to speak,
Maketh mine all sunk and weak;
Of smiles, the thought of which is sweeping
All my soul to floods of weeping;
Of looks, whose absence fain would weigh
My looks to the ground for aye;
Of clasping hands—ah me! I wring
Mine, and in a tremble fling,
Downward, downward, all this paining!
. . . . . .
A yet more moving example, to the same effect, is found in “The Fourfold Aspect”—beginning with a time when “the worst recorded change was of apple dropt from bough, when love’s sorrow seem’d more strange than love’s treason can seem now”—
Then, the Living took you up
Soft upon their elder knees,—
Telling why the statues droop
Underneath the church and trees—
and thence, tracing the shades of the prison-house as they close in upon, and well-nigh darken to despair, well-nigh stifle and slay, the mortal that had yet to learn its mortality:
Ay, but soon ye woke up shrieking,—
As a child that wakes at night
From a dream of sisters speaking
In a garden’s summer light,—
That wakes, starting up and bounding,
In a lonely, lonely bed,
With a wall of darkness round him,
Stifling black about his head!—
And the full sense of your mortal***
Rushed upon you deep and loud,
And ye heard the thunder hurtle
From the silence of the cloud—
Funeral torches at your gateway
Threw a dreadful light within:
All things changed, you rose up straightway,
And saluted Death and Sin.
Since—your outward man has rallied,
And your eye and voice grown bold—
Yet the Sphinx of Life stands pallid,
With her saddest secret told.
These are but scant glimpses of one or two phases of the Fourfold Aspect. Let the reader survey all four aspects, in the original, with the care and feeling they demand, nay command,—and then ask himself if the poem does not merit a higher rank and wider acceptance than is its lot.
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*The reader will be glad to read, if for the first time, and not unwilling, if for a second, Miss Mitford’s narrative: [We omit the reviewer’s extract from Mary Russell Mitford’s biographical sketch of EBB, which included an account of her brother Edward’s death by drowning, in Recollections of a Literary Life (1852, I, 268–272).]
**Die unsichtbare Loge.
***“Mortal,” a Barrettism for mortality. Syncope is a very summary way of turning an adjective into a substantive, pro rê natâ.
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Reviewed:
Poems (EBB), London: Chapman & Hall, 1853.
Casa Guidi Windows (EBB), London: Chapman & Hall, 1851.
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