E610300A. A Drama of Exile.
The Boston Review, March 1861, pp. 154–164.
As reprinted in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 29, 323–327.
Mrs. Browning and Christian Poetry.
There is no field so rich in poetic thought and inspiration as Christianity. It is true that hitherto the great majority of the world’s poets have gathered their fragrant flowers in the shady nooks and picturesque walks of Nature, and have sung their thrilling lays around the salient angles of epic narrative, or [p. 155→] along the hot, beaten road of natural and unsanctified passion. With a few noble exceptions, to whom the Church is deeply indebted, and whose rich, harmonious notes will grow sweeter and more precious as time glides on, poets have drunk their inspiration at the shallower streams of sentimental morality and naturalism, if not even at the muddy pools of the sensuous and the sensual. Surely it is not always to be so.
So certainly and rapidly as the promised dawn of millennial day approaches, the time will come when the grand themes and events in Christianity will stir the Muse to her highest and proudest achievements. The end of poetry, it has been said, is to produce intellectual pleasure by exciting emotions either of the elevated or pathetic order. Where, aside from religion, can be found themes so elevated and pathetic? Aristotle defines poetry to be “imitation,” in the sense that it finds its models in Nature; or, as another philosopher has said, “poetry doth raise and erect the mind by submitting the shows of things to the desire of the mind.”
Religion fathoms the lowest depths and the sublimest heights of Nature; it is the reality of “things,” “the shows” of which the rectified soul longs to have exhibited to it. The themes of religion connect us with the infinite God and his eternal plans; with sin and woe, and their glorious remedy. What other contemplations are calculated so to stir the mind with pathetic and elevated emotions?
These themes are yet to take an absorbing and controlling hold of the public heart and mind; to move men as they move the angelic hosts. There will be a day when the exciting intelligence that shall come along the wires, and over the seas, shall not be of stocks and markets, but of the triumphs of the Redeemer’s kingdom. There will be seen to be, in Redemption and its kindred truths, such a fitness to man’s need, that, when it comes to be grasped, will cause it to stir the souls of the millions as no other themes ever did or ever could. Then will there be a new age of poetry, and poetry of such melting pathos, and of such ennobling, glorifying power, as shall cause men to loath the maudlin verse, and tinsel mimicry of all the Nature-worshipping, or the sensuous and sensual poets.
Mrs. Elizabeth Barrett Browning is a great, Christian poetess. [p. 156→] Her style and range of thought are so scholastic, requiring so much deliberation, thought, and culture in the reading, that, unfortunately, she can never write for the millions. But as to genius she certainly stands in the front rank of female poets; and perhaps her wide and strong grasp, her towering imagination, her deep pathos, her power of exact, condensed language, place her at the head of the list. Mr. Bayne deliberately assigns her “the same place among women as Shakspeare occupies among men.” His testimony as to the deeply and pervasively Christian character of her poetry is so much to my purpose that I shall invite him to take the stand, claiming only the privilege of italicizing some of his words.
“Mrs. Browning is in the highest sense, and always, a Christian poetess. She has drunk more deeply into the spirituality of the Gospel, and, it may even be, looked with greater earnestness and amazement upon certain of its most sublime facts, than Milton .... not ethically, not sentimentally, not alone in spirit, far less for artistic purposes, but in the strictness and literalness of actual belief .... all those central truths of Christianity which have been accepted by the mightiest minds of the era, Paul, Augustine, Luther, Calvin, Edwards, Neander; and once more it has been demonstrated that the bare facts of Christianity transcend in sublimity any counterfeit, and more powerfully stimulate a really great imagination than any other theme whatever. ..... Over all the domain of her poetry, over its central ranges, its quiet gardened valleys, its tinkling rills, falls a radiance of Gospel light. Ever, as her music rises to its noblest cadence, it seems taken up by an angel harp; the highest tone is as the voice of spirits. It would, I cannot doubt, be to their own sincere enjoyment and real profit, if the Christian public pressed boldly into the temple of Mrs. Browning’s song. She is a Christian poetess, not in the sense of appreciating, like Carlyle, the loftiness of the Christian type of character,—not in the sense of adopting, like Goethe, a Christian machinery for artistic self-worship,—not even in the sense of preaching, like Wordsworth, an august but abstract morality,—but in the sense of finding, like Cowper, the whole hope of humanity bound up in Christ, and taking all the children of her mind to him, that he may lay his hand on them and bless them.”
Her appreciative, and evidently experimental, valuation of the Atonement is delectable. Christ is “the chiefest among ten thousand” to her. In her dedication to her father, she [p. 157→] speaks of his holding, with her, “over all sense of loss and transiency, one hope by one Name.”
It is a significant fact, and highly corroborative of the opening sentence of this paper, that Mrs. Browning’s greatest poems are the two which are chiefly Christian. Their one aim seems to be the pure and vivid exhibition of the grand, distinguishing truths of evangelical religion. “The Seraphim” is a conversation between angels as they view the crucifixion of Christ.
We shall have space only to make brief extracts from the “Drama of Exile,” which presents, in stronger coloring than we have anywhere seen, both the terrible nature of the apostasy, and the grandeur of the recovery of man. It opens in the lurid glare of the waving sword-flame, just outside of Eden, where, in the distance, Adam and Eve are seen flying, silent, all day along the wilderness. Lucifer stalks upon the stage, and, in the most fiendishly triumphant shout, calls upon his infernal legions to exult, and to “taunt the white heavens” with the irreparable woe which he has accomplished.
Rejoice in the clefts of Gehenna,
My exiled, my host!
Earth has exiles as hopeless as when a
Heaven’s empire was lost.
* * * * *
Let them look to the rest of their angels!
Who’s safe from a fall?
He saves not. Where’s Adam? Can pardon
Requicken that sod?
Unkinged is the King of the Garden,
The image of God.
Then follows a dialogue between Lucifer and Gabriel, in which the opposite characters of the contending parties is drawn with a startling vividness. The Satanic motives and emotions are truly and deeply devilish.
Gabriel. Do I dream?
Alas, not so! this is the Eden lost
By Lucifer the serpent! this the sword
(This sword alive with justice and with fire)
That smote upon the forehead, Lucifer
The angel. Wherefore, angel, go—depart—
Enough is sinned and suffered. [p. 158→]
Lucifer. By no means.
Here’s a brave earth to sin and suffer on.
It holds fast still—it cracks not under curse;
It holds like mine immortal. Presently
We’ll sow it thick enough with graves as green
Or greener, certes, than its knowledge-tree—
We’ll have the cypress for the tree of life,
More eminent for shadow:—for the rest
We’ll build it dark with towns, and pyramids,
And temples, if it please you:—we’ll have feasts
And funerals also, merrymakes and wars,
Till blood and wine shall mix and run along
Right o’er the edges. And, good Gabriel,
(Ye like that word in Heaven!) I too have strength—
Strength to behold Him and not worship Him.
Strength to fall from Him and not cry on Him,
Strength to be in the universe and yet
Neither God nor His servant. The red sign
Burnt on my forehead, which you taunt me with,
Is God’s sign that it bows not unto God;
The potter’s mark upon his work, to show
It rings well to the striker. I and the earth
Can bear more curse.
Gabriel. O miserable earth,
O ruined angel!
Lucifer. Well, and if it be!
I chose this ruin; I elected it
Of my will, not of service. What I do,
I do volitient, not obedient,
And overtop thy crown with my despair.
My sorrow crowns me. Get thee back to Heaven,
And leave me to the earth, which is mine own
In virtue of her ruin, as I hers
In virtue of my revolt! turn thou from both
That bright, impassive-passive angelhood,
And spare to read us backward any more
Of the spent hallelujahs.
After the dialogue, various soft, wailing choruses from the different spirits of Eden fill the air with plaintive melody. Spirits of the Trees, River-Spirits, Bird-Spirits, and Flower-Spirits, in chorus and in varying response, join the lamentation.
River-Spirits. Hark! the flow of the four rivers—
Hark, the flow!
How the silence round you shivers, [p. 159→]
While our voices through it go,
Cold and clear.
* * * * *
Flower-Spirits. Fare ye well, farewell!
The Eden scents, no longer sensible,
Expire at Eden’s door.
Each footstep of your treading
Treads out some fragrance which ye knew before.
Farewell! the flowers of Eden
Ye shall smell nevermore.
As night comes on, Adam and Eve, having arrived at the outer border of the sword-glare, pause and break the long silence. O what a picture of the dire effects of sin!
Adam. What is this, Eve? thou droppest heavily
In a heap earthward, and thy body heaves
Under the golden floodings of thine hair!
Eve. O Adam, Adam! by that name of Eve—
Thine Eve, thy life—which suits me little now,
Seeing that I now confess myself thy death
And thine undoer, as the snake was mine—
I do adjure thee, put me straight away,
Together with my name. Sweet, punish me!
O Love, be just! and, ere we pass beyond
The light cast outward by the fiery sword,
Into the dark which earth must be to us,
Bruise my head with thy foot,—as the curse said
My seed shall the first tempter’s! strike with curse,
As God struck in the garden!
* * * * *
Strike, my lord!
I, also, after tempting, writhe on the ground,
And I would feed on ashes from thine hand,
As suits me, O my tempted!
Adam. My beloved,
Mine Eve and life—I have no other name
For thee or for the sun than what ye are,
My utter life and light! If we have fallen,
It is that we have sinned,—we: God is just;
And since his curse doth comprehend us both,
It must be that his balance holds the weights
Of first and last sin on a level. What!
Shall I, who had not virtue to stand straight
Among the hills of Eden, here assume
To mend the justice of the perfect God, [p. 160→]
By piling up a curse upon his curse,
Against thee—thee—
Eve. Is it thy voice?
Or some saluting angel’s—calling home
My feet into the garden?
Adam. O my God!
I, standing here between the glory and dark—
The glory of thy wrath projected forth
From Eden’s wall, the dark of our distress
Which settles a step off in that drear world—
Lift up to Thee the hands from whence hath fallen
Only creation’s sceptre,—thanking Thee
That rather Thou hast cast me out with her
Than left me lorn of her in Paradise,
With angel looks and angel songs around
To show the absence of her eyes and voice,
And make society full desertness
Without her use in comfort!
Eve. Where is loss?
Am I in Eden? can another speak
Mine own love’s tongue?
Adam. Because with her, I stand
Upright, as far as can be in this fall,
And look away from heaven which doth accuse,
And look away from earth which doth convict,
Into her face, and crown my discrowned heart
Out of her love, and put the thought of her
Around me, for an Eden full of birds,
And lift her body up—thus—to my heart,
And with my lips upon her lips,—thus, thus,—
Do quicken and sublimate my mortal breath
Which cannot climb against the grave’s steep sides,
But overtops this grief!
Lucifer returns, and in the most provoking and insulting manner mocks our first parents with their change, their sufferings and prospects. Chanting angel-voices strive to comfort and sustain them. But the Earth reviles them for being the cause of her briers and thorns, her storms and volcanoes and all her desolating woes. The Zodiac bursts out in terror upon their vision; the beasts accuse and threaten them; all Nature frowns upon them, until Christ appears rebuking the Earth-Spirits, unfolds the crucifixion-scene, and with glorious promises and kind words of blessing, cheers and gladdens them. [p. 161→]
Christ. I am here!
Adam. This is God!—Curse us not, God, any more.
Eve. But gazing so—so—with omnific eyes,
Lift my soul upward till it touch thy feet!
Or lift it only,—not to seem too proud,—
To the low height of some good angel’s feet,
For such to tread on when he walketh straight
And thy lips praise him.
Christ. Spirits of the earth,
I meet you with rebuke for the reproach
And cruel and unmitigated blame
Ye cast upon your masters. True, they have sinned;
And true, their sin is reckoned into loss
For you the sinless. Yet your innocence,
Which of the praises? since God made your acts
Inherent in your lives, and bound your hands
With instincts and imperious sanctities
From self-defacement? Which of you disdains
These sinners who in falling proved their height
Above you by their liberty to fall?
And which of you complains of loss by them,
For whose delight and use ye have your life
And honor in creation? Ponder it!
This regent and sublime Humanity,
Though fallen, exceeds you! this shall film your sun,
Shall hunt your lightning to its lair of cloud,
Turn back your rivers, footpath all your seas,
Lay flat your forests, master with a look
Your lion at his fasting, and fetch down
Your eagle flying. Nay, without this law
Of mandom, ye would perish,—beast by beast
Devouring.
* * * * *
Eve. Speak on still, Christ. Albeit thou bless me not
In set words, I am blessed in harkening thee;—
Speak, Christ.
Christ. Speak, Adam. Bless the woman, man;—
It is thine office.
Adam. Mother of the world,
Take heart before this Presence.
Soon Christ is gradually transfigured into humanity and suffering.
Eve. O Saviour Christ,
Thou standest mute in glory, like the sun.
Adam. We worship in Thy silence, Saviour Christ. [p. 162→]
Eve. Thy brows grow grander with a forecast woe,—
Diviner with the possible of death!
We worship in thy sorrow, Saviour Christ.
Adam. How do thy clear, still eyes transpierce our souls,
As gazing through them toward the Father-throne
In a pathetical, full Deity,
Serenely as the stars gaze through the air,
Straight on each other.
Eve. O pathetic Christ,
Thou standest mute in glory, like the moon.
Christ. Eternity stands always fronting God;
A stern colossal image, with blind eyes
And grand dim lips that murmur evermore
God, God, God! * * *
Howbeit in the noon of time
Eternity shall wax as dumb as Death,
While a new voice beneath the spheres shall cry,
“God! why hast thou forsaken me, my God?”
And not a voice in Heaven shall answer it.
* * * * *
Christ. Then, at last,
I, wrapping round me your humanity,
Which, being sustained, shall neither break nor burn
Beneath the fire of Godhead, will tread earth
And ransom you and it, and set strong peace
Betwixt you and its creatures. With my pangs
I will confront your sins; and since those sins
Have sunken to all Nature’s heart from yours,
The tears of my clean soul shall follow them
And set a holy passion to work clear
Absolute consecration. In my brow
Of kingly whiteness shall be crowned anew
Your discrowned human nature. Look on me!
As I shall be uplifted on a cross
In darkness of eclipse and anguish dread,
So shall I lift up in my pierced hands,
Not into dark, but light—not unto death,
But life—beyond the reach of guilt and grief,
The whole Creation. Henceforth in my name
Take courage, O thou woman—man, take hope!
Your grave shall be as smooth as Eden’s sward,
Beneath the steps of your prospective thoughts,
And, one step past it, a new Eden-gate
Shall open on a hinge of harmony
And let you through to mercy. Ye shall fall
No more, within that Eden, nor pass out
Any more from it. In which hope, move on, [p. 163→]
First sinners and first mourners. Live and love,—
Doing both nobly, because lowlily.
Live and work, strongly, because patiently.
And, for the deed of death, trust it to God
That it be well done, unrepented of,
And not to loss. And thence, with constant prayers
Fasten your souls so high, that constantly
The smile of your heroic cheer may float
Above all floods of earthly agonies,
Purification being the joy of pain.
The victory which the Redeemer achieves over “the wild horse of Death” is set in bolder conceptions and language than were ever before uttered. While the stricken and comforted pair advance, hand in hand, into the wilderness, a chorus of invisible angels responsive sing.
Second Semichorus.
Yet a Tamer shall be found!
One more bright than seraph crowned,
And more strong than cherub bold,
Elder, too, than angel old,
By his gray eternities.
He shall master and surprise
The steed of Death,
For He is strong, and He is fain.
He shall quell him with a breath,
And shall lead him where he will,
With a whisper in the ear,
Full of fear—
And a hand upon the mane,
Grand and still.
First Semichorus.
Through the flats of Hades where the souls assemble
He will guide the Death-steed calm between their ranks
While, like beaten dogs, they a little moan and tremble
To see the darkness curdle from the horse’s glittering flanks.
Through the flats of Hades where the dreary shade is,
Up the steep of Heaven, will the Tamer guide the steed—
Up the spheric circles—circle above circle,
We who count the ages, shall count the tolling tread—
Every hoof-fall striking a blinder, blanker sparkle
From the stony orbs, which shall show as they were dead.
Second Semichorus.
All the way the Death-steed with tolling hoofs shall travel, [p. 164→]
Ashen-gray the planets shall be motionless as stones,
Loosely shall the systems eject their parts coeval—
Stagnant in the spaces, shall float the pallid moons.
Suns that touch their apogees, reeling from their level,
Shall run back on their axles, in wild, low, broken tunes.
Chorus.
Up against the arches of the crystal ceiling,
From the horse’s nostrils shall steam the blurting breath.
Up between the angels pale with silent feeling,
Will the Tamer, calmly, lead the horse of Death.
Semichorus.
Cleaving all that silence, cleaving all that glory,
Will the Tamer lead him straightway to the Throne;
“Look out, O Jehovah, to this I bring before Thee
With a hand nail-pierced—I, who am thy Son.”
Then the eye Divinest, from the deepest, flaming,
On the mystic courser, shall look out in fire.
Blind the beast shall stagger where it overcame him,
Meek as lamb at pasture—bloodless in desire.
Down the beast shall shiver—slain amid the taming,—
And, by Life essential, the phantasm Death expire.
In these extracts two unfortunate expressions occur, which are calculated to misrepresent the authoress.
“Then the eye Divinest” can only be intended to represent the lower place which our Saviour assumed as necessary to his mission as a suffering servant. For in a previous extract the Supreme Divinity of Christ is unequivocally asserted. Adam says of Him, “This is God!” And Eve, “not to seem too proud,” would have her soul lifted up to the height of some good angel’s feet.
So also in the passage,—
So shall I lift up in my pierced hands
The whole Creation.
In consistency with her poetic aim, she would doubtless be understood as meaning what the Saviour himself did in saying, “And I, if I be lifted up will draw all men unto me.” The door shall be opened to the whole creation, and perhaps in the end it shall be seen that the lost are so few in comparison with the saved as to form the exceptions to the general rule.
Reviewed:
A Drama of Exile, and Other Poems (EBB), New York: Henry G. Langley, 1845.
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