E620403A. Last Poems.
The Morning Post, 3 April 1862, p. 6.
Listed in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 30, 368.
Even if the poems contained in this volume were far less touching and beautiful than they really are, they would be perused with no ordinary interest, as the last echoes from a lyre far surpassing in depth and variety of tone the productions of most modern poets, and, it is scarcely too much to say, of nearly all the poetesses who have flourished at any period during the whole history of the world. For in the rare command of that wondrous erudition with which Mrs. Browning illustrated, and adorned, and emblazoned whatever theme she treated, it would be difficult to name a single poet, except Dante, who at all comes near to her; nor will the juxtaposition of even his name with hers sound strange to the discerning critic who passes from the study of the “Casa Guidi Windows” to that of the “Portuguese Sonnets,” after being long familiar with the relation borne by the “Vita Nuova” to the “Divina Commedia” of the Tuscan bard. Indeed, it almost suggests itself to the reader when on opening the present volume his eye at once lights on the dedications, “To grateful Florence, to the municipality, her representative, and to Tommaseo, its spokesman, gratefully.” The city of Dante, in which Mrs. Browning lived so long, and beneath the shadow of whose walls she now reposes, and the greatest living commentator on Dante, may accept with a just pride the offering of verse which the mighty Ghibelline himself would have been proud to own.
The feelings with which Mrs. Browning’s poetry is regarded in different classes of readers are not a little peculiar. It either appears to call forth an invincible repugnance, or it creates a fervour of admiration so indiscriminating as to be almost as unfavourable to an impartial estimate of her powers. It is either decried as exaggerated, pedantic, unformed, and unintelligible, or it is lauded in terms which do not even admit the possibility of deduction or abatement from the praises of its admirers. It would be hard to say which of the two moods of mind is the more unfavourable to a clear perception of her unquestioned greatness.
There has probably never existed on this earth a human being with deeper, warmer, and wider sympathies than Elizabeth Barrett Browning, one who suffered more acutely from the sufferings of those she loved, one who rejoiced more thoroughly with their joys, one whose heart bounded more completely in unison with their hopes and aspirations. Thus feeling and thus loving, the trials of a common acquaintance became to her much more than the sufferings of an intimate friend are to the vast majority of mankind. But, then, the trials of the friend and of the relative were felt by her with a proportionate and far more intense acuteness. Hers was not the cosmopolitan sympathy of Canning’s knifegrinder or Moore’s Rousseau, refusing a sixpence to the poor man whose lot is passionately deplored, or, with a profusion of exquisite feelings, sending one’s own offspring to the foundling. Of all the deities in her classical Pantheon, none received from her so fervent an adoration as her own Penates. Father, brothers, sisters, husband, child, were the objects of as intense filial, sisterly, conjugal, and maternal love as the heart of a devoted woman is capable of pouring forth. But her sense of right and justice enabled her clearly to discriminate between just claims and unjust pretensions when advanced even by those whom she was most bound to reverence; so that, whilst by the power of her imagination the sufferings and wrongs of classes in society with which she had never mingled, and of far distant nations which she had never seen, were brought most vividly before her, wrong, injustice, though perpetrated by those in whom she fondly loved and trusted, taught her to speak in the language of a confessor, and would have led her to imitate the heroism of a martyr. There has always appeared to us a deep suggestiveness and significance in the fact of Mrs. Browning having twice—once in early life, and again in the full maturity of her powers—translated the “Prometheus” of Æschylus. Assuredly it was not merely the poetical merit of that grand drama which had rendered it to her an object of untiring study, but rather the moral of courage unsubdued, and haughty defiance of injustice, and proud self-consciousness of enlarged philanthropy, which breathes through the legend of the revolted Titan, and which forms the true key to so much that is sublime in Mrs. Browning’s poetry, and to so much also that was painful in her individual life.
In any attempt at a classification of her poetry there are, now, three great divisions under which her verses naturally fall. One embraces the poetry written in early life—indeed up to the period of her marriage—and may be regarded as crowned and completed by the magnificent series of the “Portuguese Sonnets.” All this poetry bears an individual and personal stamp. By this we mean that the views of the poetess on the great problems of life, though expressed with sufficient clearness and with wondrous power, do not point steadily in any one direction. Aurora Leigh is the central piece of the second division—that avowedly devoted to a passionate advocacy of woman’s character—and to combating the social injustice by which, in Mrs. Browning’s opinion, female character is lowered and female genius dwarfed. The third division is political; its greatest monument is the “Casa Guidi Windows,” which, like the “Poems Before Congress,” and many of the finest pieces in the present volume, treat entirely and exclusively of Italy.
The present volume contains specimens of all the three divisions just referred to. “My Heart and I” may be taken as a type of the first; “Void in Law,” and “Lord Walter’s Wife,” are examples of the second; “The First News from Villafranca,” and all the subsequent poems, illustrate the third. By that first news from Villafranca Mrs. Browning was killed, as certainly, if not as speedily, as any Italian soldier who fell by shot from a rifled gun on the field of Solferino; and it is a fact which might as well be borne in mind whenever a stump orator of the Left in the Italian Chambers shall again assert that England never shed one drop of blood in the Italian cause. For that cause England has now to mourn over the untimely loss of her greatest daughter—of her whose name will be uttered with mingled reverence and pride as long as the name of England and her language shall endure.
In these “last poems” the reader will, we repeat, find exquisite examples of what we consider the three great divisions of Mrs. Browning’s poetry. He will obtain, too, from the translations appended a clearer idea of the depth and extent of her classical attainments than from the productions of the same class with which the public was already familiar. The variety of her style, how it could pass from the simplest pathos to the most varied illustration and the most crushing sarcasm, cannot be better exemplified than in the two following poems. The first is entitled—
A FALSE STEP.
I.
Sweet, thou hast trod on a heart.
Pass! there’s a world full of men;
And women as fair as thou art
Must do such things now and then.
II.
Thou only hast stepped unaware,—
Malice, not one can impute;
And why should a heart have been there
In the way of a fair woman’s foot?
III.
It was not a stone that could trip,
Nor was it a thorn that could rend:
Put up thy proud underlip!
T’was merely the heart of a friend.
IV.
And yet peradventure one day
Thou, sitting alone at the glass,
Remarking the bloom gone away,
Where the smile in its dimplement was,
V.
And seeking around thee in vain
From hundreds who flattered before,
Such a word as, “Oh, not in the main
Do I hold thee less precious, but more.”
VI.
Thou’lt sigh, very like, on thy part—
“Of all I have known or can know,
I wish I had only that heart
I trod upon ages ago!”
In these exquisite and touching lines we have the echoes of the strains which, in her “Cowper’s Grave,” early placed Mrs. Browning at the head of the poets who produce the greatest effects by the fewest and simplest means. Now, compare, or rather contrast with these lines, “The View Across the Roman Campagna.” It seems to ring forth the death-knell of the temporal power of the Papacy:—
I.
Over the dumb Campagna sea,
Out in the offing through mist and rain,
St. Peter’s Church heaves silently
Like a mighty ship in pain,
Facing the tempest with struggle and strain.
II.
Motionless waifs of ruined towers,
Soundless breakers of desolate land:
The sullen surf of the mist devours
That mountain range upon either hand,
Eaten away from its outline grand.
III.
And over the dumb Campagna sea,
Where the ship of the Church heaves on to wreck,
Alone and silent as God must be,
The Christ walks. Ay, but Peter’s neck
Is stiff to turn on the foundering deck.
IV.
Peter, Peter! if such be thy name,
Now leave the ship for another to steer,
And proving thy faith evermore the same,
Come forth, tread out through the dark and drear,
Since He who walks on the sea is here.
V.
Peter, Peter! he does not speak;
He is not as rash as in old Galilee;
Safer a ship, though it toss and leak,
Than a reeling foot on a rolling sea!
And he’s got to be round in the girth, thinks he.
VI.
Peter, Peter! He does not stir;
His nets are heavy with silver fish;
He reckons his gains, and is keen to infer
“The broil on the shore, if the Lord should wish,
But the sturgeon goes to the Cæsar’s dish.”
VII.
Peter, Peter! thou fisher of men,
Fisher of fish would’st thou live instead?
Haggling for pence with the other ten,
Cheating the market at so much a head,
Griping the bag of the traitor dead?
VIII.
At the triple crow of the Gallic cock
Thou weep’st not, thou, though thine eyes be dazed.
What bird comes next in the tempest-shock?
Vultures! see, as when Romulus gazed,
To inaugurate Rome for a world amazed!”
The woman who could write both these poems may well be regarded as altogether unsurpassed in the variety of her poetical powers. Yet it is the same fine moral sense—precisely the same hatred of injustice which breathes through both. This, too, it is which lends not merely such a literary charm, but such a high moral, value to all her poetry that all who become thoroughly imbued with its spirit must honour and love right and truth, and detest and despise wrong and falsehood far more than they did before, without losing sight of the counsel embodied in the last stanza of her “Died”:—
Be abstinent in praise and blame.
The man’s still mortal who stands first,
And mortal only if last and worst.
Then slowly lift so frail a frame,
Or softly drop so poor a shame.
Reviewed:
Last Poems (EBB), London: Chapman & Hall, 1862.
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