E620419A. Last Poems.
The London Review, 19 April 1862, pp. 375–377.
Listed in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 30, 368.
“Last Poems” will correct the unpleasant impression left by “Poems before Congress,” but will not much add to Mrs. Browning’s reputation. The larger part is a collection of fugitive pieces, to which a character is given by some which are the last expression of an undying devotion to the cause of Italian liberty. The first poem, “Little Mattie,” has appeared before, and is well known. It is one of the best, because it is one of the simplest. The fifth stanza is a good specimen of Mrs. Browning’s power of painting childhood:—
“’Twas a green and easy world
As she took it; room to play
(Though one’s hair might get uncurled,
At the far end of the day).
What she suffered she shook off
In the sunshine; what she sinned
She could pray on high enough
To keep safe above the wind.
If reproved by God or you,
’Twas to better her, she knew;
And if crossed, she gathered still
’Twas to cross out something ill.”
But the effect is marred by the moral of the whole, which is that whereas you had been accustomed to look down with a sweet scorn on your living child, your child now looks down with a grand contempt on you. This is a strange and exaggerated expression of that jealousy of lovers which regards with suspicion any alteration that might tend to estrange from them the object of their love. The same idea occurs in “Died,” p. 69, but is there applied to a less selfish moral. “Lord Walter’s Wife” fails to interest us, because it is a profoundly impossible scene, and the conversation is absurd and sometimes almost coarse. But it is very successful as a specimen of dactylic verse, a metre in various forms of which many of these poems are written, and which, in Mrs. Browning’s hands, has gained both in vigour and melody. “Bianca among the Nightingales” is chiefly remarkable for one of those offensive passages which deface so many parts of this author’s works:—
“She lied and stole,
And spat into my love’s pure pyx,
The rank saliva of her soul.”—P. 21.
“May’s Love” and “Amy’s Cruelty” are of a lighter kind in the book. Both are simply and naturally written. One is a lively protest of a lover against universal philanthropy on the part of a young lady; in the other a young lady excuses herself for not being in a hurry to give her lover the exclusive monopoly of her affections:—
“Unless he gives me all in change,
I forfeit all things by him:
The risk is terrible and strange,—
I tremble, doubt,—deny him.
He’s sweetest friend, or hardest foe,
Best angel, or worst devil;
I either hate, or—love him so,
I can’t be merely civil!”
After the weak and monotonous melancholy of “De Profundis,” it is a great relief to come to the vigorous dactyls and trochees of “A Musical Instrument,” better known under the title of the “Great God Pan.” This is one of the few poems in which Mrs. Browning has succeeded in being pathetic without being sentimental. It is nearly as good in its way as Shelley’s “Hymn to Pan,” but the idea of the god is more coarse, and the versification less tender and musical. The best stanzas are these:—
“He tore out a reed, the great god Pan,
From the deep cool bed of the river:
The limpid water turbidly ran,
And the broken lilies a-dying lay,
And the dragon-fly had fled away,
Ere he brought it out of the river.
He cut it short, did the great god Pan,
(How tall it stood in the river!)
Then drew the pith, like the heart of a man,
Steadily from the outside ring,
And notched the poor dry empty thing
In holes as he sat by the river.
Sweet, sweet, sweet, O Pan!
Piercing sweet by the river!
Blinding sweet, O great god Pan!
The sun on the hill forgot to die,
And the lilies revived, and the dragon-fly
Come back to dream on the river.
Yet half a beast is the great god Pan,
To laugh as he sits by the river,
Making a poet out of a man:
The true gods sigh for the cost and pain,—
For the reed which grows never more again,
As a reed with the reeds in the river.”
The first of the poems about Italy is a lamentation over the peace of Villafranca. For a moment Mrs. Browning’s faith in Louis Napoleon seems to be shaken, but a few pages later she reiterates her peculiar doctrine that where the result is very good, the means cannot have been bad:—
“Suppose
Some hell-brood in Eden’s sweet greenery,
Convoked for creating—arose!
Would it suit the infernal machinery?”—P. 66.
A strange doctrine, and one the converse of which it would be inconvenient to apply to patriots who have failed. “The Sword of Castruccio Castracani” breathes some of the spirit of the old drinking-song which sang of Harmodius and Aristogeiton. Of the remaining poems, “The forced Recruit” and “Mother and Poet” are the best. The first of these and the incident on which it is founded are well known. The second is perhaps the best in the book. The two sons of Laura Savio, a poetess and patriot, were killed at Ancona and Gaeta:—
“Dead! One of them shot by the sea in the east,
And one of them shot in the west by the sea.
Dead! both my boys! When you sit at the feast,
And are wanting a great song for Italy free,
Let none look at me!
Then was triumph at Turin: ‘Ancona was free!’
And some one came out of the cheers in the street,
With a face pale as stone, to say something to me,
My Guido was dead! I fell down at his feet,
While they cheered in the street.
I bore it; friends soothed me; my grief looked sublime
As the ransom of Italy. One boy remained
To be leant on and walked with, recalling the time
When the first grew immortal, while both of us strained
To the height he had gained.
My Nanni would add, he was safe, and aware
Of a presence that turned off the balls,—was imprest
It was Guido himself, who knew what I could bear,
And how ’twas impossible, quite dispossessed,
To live on for the rest.
On which, without pause, up the telegraph-line
Swept smoothly the next news from Gaeta:—‘Shot,
Tell his mother.’ Ah, ah, ‘his,’ ‘their’ mother,—not ‘mine,’
No voice says ‘My mother’ again to me. What!
You think Guido forgot?
Both boys dead? But that’s out of nature. We all
Have been patriots, yet each house must always keep one.
’Twere imbecile, hewing out roads to a wall;
And, when Italy’s made, for what end is it done
If we have not a son?”
The contrast of patriotic triumph and private grief was never more pathetically painted; the self-sacrifice of the Spartan mother without the previous discipline which had taught her to subordinate personal love to state ends. [p. 376→]
The last part of the book consists of “Paraphrases,” with one exception, much earlier in date than the other poems. These pieces are called paraphrases, apparently to disarm criticism about their want of closeness to the originals. They are, however, really translations, and as such they are good, though wanting in simplicity, while as paraphrases they are failures. The use of a paraphrase is either merely to clear up obscurities, or to produce a work of art which shall give pleasure like that given by the original, in default of the possibility of giving pleasure by an exact reproduction. In return for its exemption from the difficulties of accurate translation, it undertakes to transmute into a new whole and one perfect in language and melody. In this Mrs. Browning has failed. Her verses are often unrhythmical and awkwardly broken up. This will appear by a comparison of her version of the parting of Hector from Andromache, with the familiar lines of Pope:—
“The babe clung crying to his nurse’s breast,
Scared at the dazzling helm, and nodding crest.
With secret pleasure each fond parent smiled,
And Hector hastened to relieve his child,
The glittering terrors from his brow unbound,
And placed the beaming helmet on the ground.”
Mrs. Browning has,—
“The boy clung back, and shunned his father’s face,
And feared the glittering brass and waving hair
Of the high helmet, nodding horror down.
The father smiled, the mother could not choose
But smile too. Then he lifted from his brow
The helm, and set it on the ground to shine.”—P. 131.
Pope’s lines are more modern in tone, but they are greatly superior in ease and elegance.
It is not by these poems that Mrs. Browning’s reputation will stand or fall. Nor would it be fair, in an estimate of her rank as a poet, to dwell much on those earliest efforts in which she ought to have been learning the limits of her powers. The childhood of men of genius is seldom particularly wise, but they are generally soon disciplined by contact with the world. Mrs. Browning, unfortunately for herself and us, never learnt prudence. Untaught by the experience of the “Essay on Mind,” and the “Seraphim,” she again trod with angels in the “Drama of Exile.” This is a poem of the spasmodic order, in which Lucifer and Gabriel, angels and Eden spirits, hold colloquies with Adam and Eve outside the gate of Paradise. The result is, besides a great deal of profanity and questionable divinity, often such as might be expected to occur now and then from the frequently random shuffling of the types of a number of high-sounding words. This is the more to be regretted because in the intervals of pages which transcend the bounds not only of space and time but of sense and reason, there are passages of exquisite beauty and melody, and the same volumes contain many short poems, such as the “Rhapsody of Life’s Progress” and the “Rhyme of the Duchess May,” unequal, indeed, in execution, and sometimes marred by affectation, but instinct with natural grace. Here is a fine description of childhood from the “Rhapsody:”—
“Then all things look strange in the pure golden æther;
We walk through the gardens with hands linked together,
And the lilies look large as the trees;
And as loud as the birds, sing the bloom-loving bees,—
And the birds sing like angels, so mystical fine;
And the cedars are brushing the archangel’s feet;
And time is eternity,—love is divine,
And the world is complete!”
“Casa Guidi Windows” appeared in 1851. It is a kind of political lovesong, written at two periods, one of hope, the other of despondence after the abortive revolution at Florence in 1849. In the first, even the Pope and the Grand Duke are toned down for a time almost to the likeness of ordinary men; but in the second, the adverse event has changed them into renegades and monsters for whom no names are too hard. We can hardly understand the fury of Mrs. Browning’s Italianized feelings; probably they are pitched too high for the comprehension even of Italians themselves. But there are many passages of eloquent political passion, and the description of the expulsion and return of the Grand Duke are as fine as anything in her poems.
But it is in “Aurora Leigh” that both her faults and merits reach their highest point. This she styles “the most mature of my works, and the one into which my highest convictions upon Life and Art have entered.” Seldom has any poem met with such various criticisms. One critic has called it the greatest poem of the century, another a splendid failure in an impossible attempt; others have given it harder names. This most original of works beggars description. It is not exactly a novel, for it is written in metre, and has few incidents and hardly any delineation of manners. It is not an epic, for it consists chiefly of views. It is not a drama, for much of it is descriptive. It is a sort of medley of all three. Perhaps it may be classed in a species by itself as an autobiographical novelette with a purpose, written partly in an epic, partly in a dramatic, form. It is a most provoking mixture of faults and beauties. As a novel it is in every way bad. The main incident is offensive, besides being impossible. The heroine is changed in the middle, the whole interest being centred, for four books, in Marian Erle. The two chief characters would seem insufferable prigs in real life, and their conversations are absurdly stilted and unnatural. The whole book is disfigured by the continual presence of one unpleasant “I,” who is glorified throughout and never makes a mistake except in having supposed herself indifferent to Romney Leigh, and who leads all the conversations, so that Romney and others may glorify her. Romney, in the end, is blinded, without any other apparent object than that she may display her magnanimity in marrying him. Finally, the description of their meeting, at the close of the book, is both poor and stilted. But if the characters are such as could not be tolerated in a novel which claimed to represent real life, are they better as poetical creations? They are worse. Mrs. Browning’s labours have been intentionally those of the spider rather than those of the bee. From the beginning her professed object in all her poetry has been to give complete expression to her own being, to deliver the message with which she is charged from the Infinite. One consequence of this is that almost all her characters are projections of her own consciousness. She has not created a single natural or life-like character. Her personages are charged with a mission, which they shriek forth, and then die out of memory. None of them are informed with that “right Promethean fire” which makes poetical creations living beings whom we know and see and should recognize if we met them. The only exception to this is the admirable character of the aunt; but she belongs rather to the novel than to the poem, and is not of a high order. Marian Erle is indeed a beautiful face, smiling through her tears—
“As if one held a light
Across a waste of waters;”
—but she is nothing more.
It remains, then, to consider if the lesson taught, the views conveyed, are such as to make us pardon the imperfection of the vehicle. The great lesson seems to be this, so far as we can gather its drift, that Art is the great instrument by which the life of man is to be ennobled. But really the effect of Art, in any ordinary sense of the word, on the masses, is easily exaggerated. In any case, its effect depends on the individual, so that it cannot be prescribed wholesale. Vast numbers of the people cannot be reached by it at all, and a very large class is more “improved;” that is, stimulated and made uncomfortable, so as to wish to become better, by appeals exaggerated and coarse, and shocking to all artistic feeling. Only a limited class is capable of being much improved by Art, and it is questionable if even there the improvement directly extends to any other faculties than those intellectual ones which are immediately concerned. But the hopelessness of the cause matters little to this chivalrous writer; for, as she tells us,—
“The world’s male chivalry has perished out,
But women are knight-errants to the last.”—P. 283.
A multitude of minor faults disfigure the whole poem. It is full of the most uncouth and affected conceits, and metaphors in the worst possible taste galvanized into extravagant and painfully-protracted vitality. In one place, streams bleat on in innocent repose; in another, shadows are unleashed down the wind. We find ourselves constantly on the borders of profanity and indelicacy, though the profanity often almost vanishes in the grotesqueness of the humour. Here is a specimen:—
“Here’s God down on us! What are you about?”
The versification and diction are always vigorous, and often melodious; but what is to be said for lines which violate accent in this way?—
“Philosopher against philanthropist,
Academician against poet, man
Against woman, against the living, the dead,—
Then home, with a bad headache and worse jest!”
—a very probable result. Or what excuse is there for such expressions as “a multiform” (p. 89); “irrepressive” for irrepressible (p. 120); “innumerous” for innumerable (p. 33)?
Yet, whilst the whole is glaringly bad, and destitute of nature and simplicity, and every page is studded with blemishes, there are many passages of high-souled thought, of graphic description, of tender pathos, and of exquisite melody. We recognize a genius so gifted, as might have produced an immortal poem but for its unhappy misdirection and want of care in the details. The seventh book is as fine in its way as anything in modern literature, especially the description of Marian’s child (for Mrs. Browning, like the Brontës and George Sand, is great in child-painting), and that of the journey to Italy.
Her last work of any length is “Poems before Congress.” Common language is too feeble for the enthusiasm with which she deifies the liberator of Italy, and her passion rises to such cloudy heights as this:—
“We stand to meet thee on these Alpine snows,
And while the palpitating peaks break out
Ecstatic from somnambular repose,” &c.
Mrs. Browning is at least a good hater and a good lover; but her selection of an object for her homage is not to be justified by such arguments as that, if we would not regard history as a mere thimble-rig, we must recognise a direct Providence in the events of the last few years. Surely it is open to us to question the honesty of the instrument without having the charge of “a blank atheism” hurled at our heads. The versification of “Poems before Congress” recalls that of the lyrical passages in “Maud;” but it is inferior in melody, and the metrical position of the words is constantly incompatible with their natural accentuation.
The secret of Mrs. Browning’s failure is in this—that she drew too little from observation and knowledge, too much from the depths of her own unique and passionate nature. All highly-wrought and ideal temperaments have a tendency to feed on themselves, to create the world à priori. Women in particular start at a disadvantage in this way. They are, for the most part, jealously shut out from the knowledge of things as they are; and, what is still more fatal, they are debarred from that free interchange of thought which is necessary to cast out their idols of the cave. In Mrs. Browning’s case this defect was much aggravated by a life of sickness and seclusion. An apologist for her imperialism has claimed for her a deeper insight into the real right and wrong of events than is possessed by ordinary men, as the result of a cloister life kept aloof from the passions and interests of the moment, and judging all things by a standard of eternity. But the insight of a recluse is really of a very unpractical kind, and is of value only when confined to his own duties and feelings. Applied to the world without, it is worthless. St. Simeon Stylites, with his filmed and horny eyes, knew as little of what went on in the crowds below as they did of his conflicts with Abaddon and Asmodeus on the top of his pillar. In the preface to the volumes of poems which were published in 1844, Mrs. Browning tells us that so far she had done her work as the completest expression of her own being to which she could attain; and this ideal she seems to have followed throughout her life. But as she tells us in “Aurora Leigh”;—
“Natural things
And spiritual,—who separates those two
In art, in morals, or the social drift,
Tears up the bond of nature and brings death,
Paints futile pictures, writes unreal verse.”—P. 302.
Yet she understands, thinks, and creates entirely from the platform of her own isolated individuality. The result is a kind of strained originality, which has been the cause or occasion of all her defects. It is this which dictated her choice of subjects which interest only a small number of people. It is this which has made her characters mere unreal shades, which seem lost and out of place in the daylight of real life. It is this which has made her belie the promise of her youth. This kind of originality is apt to promise [p. 377→] much in early life, because it involves a certain unity and complete grasp. But it does not improve. The imagination, fed only on itself, becomes morbid. Another result of this over-wrought independence is her habitual violation of that reserve about delicate subjects, which is natural, though it has become conventionalized. Why do women of real power, like Mrs. Browning, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, generally write about things and in a way which shock common minds? They talk as if they had “sounded all the depths and shoals,” and, in the excess of their reaction against prudery, they select for their art things which are present, indeed, in nature, but become obtrusive in their writings. One other result of the same fruitful parent of faults is the unintelligibility of many things in Mrs. Browning’s poems. These à priori poets conceive pictures and scenes which other minds cannot appreciate, and further aggravate their obscurity by the practice of a kind of intellectual hieroglyphics or shorthand, using words according to their own personal associations to signify many things which they do not express. Indeed, it sometimes seems as if these writers, having conceived some unutterable beatific vision, and expressed it temporarily for themselves in their peculiar, abbreviated style, immediately, as it were, lose the key to their own puzzle, but yet print for us what not even they, the high priests of the mystery, can any longer understand. Such are some passages even in “Aurora Leigh,” and many in the earlier poems. What is the meaning of
“Forms, spaces, motions wide,
Of weak insensate things?”
This may be the tongue of angels, but who is to interpret to men? If Homer gives us the name by which Scamander or a hawk is called in the large utterance of the gods, he also vouchsafes a translation into the language of articulating men. But in Mrs. Browning the meaning of many passages, doubtless not nonsense to the author, is lost to us for want of the steps by which others lead their readers up to the thought; and remains an octave too high for our sense to appreciate.
Still, when all is said, there remains enough of genius and passion to place Mrs. Browning perhaps even in the first rank of poets. It is due to that which she has done well and to the poetical capacity which she has shown even in failure to believe that, under less unfavourable circumstances, she might have been inferior to none.
Reviewed:
Last Poems (EBB), London: Chapman & Hall, 1862.
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