E620426A. Last Poems.
The Saturday Review, 26 April 1862, pp. 472–474.
Listed in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 30, 368.
Mrs. Browning’s latest poems are not unworthy of her genius and her fame. She was not, and she never would have become, a perfect artist; but no Englishwoman has approached so nearly the highest region of poetry. Her inspiration, though intermittent and often confused and obscure, was thoroughly genuine, and even in her mistakes and failures there was no prosaic element. Many poetesses have given graceful expression to the various moods of affection and passion. Mrs. Browning accomplished a more difficult task by combining earnest and concentrated thought with intense and sometimes overstrained feeling. Her figurative rendering of curious analytical processes occasionally produces an almost painful surprise and admiration. The metaphorical enigma, from apparently inextricable complication leads at last to some unexpected solution which is at once recognised as true; and yet the intellectual feat is evidently the result, not of deliberate calculation, but of unconscious and sustained excitement. Her far-fetched illustrations would be tedious puzzles, if they were not imaginative rather than ingenious. Although her views of the objects which she describes are peculiar and eccentric, she cannot be charged with affectation when she [p. 473→] simply reproduces the impression which she has first experienced herself.
Those women who are capable of appreciating Mrs. Browning’s compositions not inexcusably believe that she rose to the level of great poets, and it is not altogether easy to explain the failure of an experiment which has perhaps never been tried with equal facilities for success. If Destiny and Nature had intended that a great poem should be written by a woman, Aurora Leigh would perhaps have proved the creative equality of the sexes. Few volumes contain so many harmonious verses, and the abundance of language only corresponds to the fulness of matter. Widely read, although not deeply learned—thoughtful, impassioned, eloquent, and after a fashion even logical—Mrs. Browning in her most elaborate work only succeeded in producing a chaotic mass of poetical fancies. The feverish eagerness of her habitual style was the opposite of the calm and cheerful superiority of a great artist. Her total want of even latent and potential humour converted her ignorance of the world into habitual incapacity of understanding practical life. Except where emotion was the spring of action, she had little sense of reality, and her epic and dramatic efforts represent an inconceivable world moving only in a jerking succession of paroxysms. No fairy tale or pantomime is more remote from possible experience than the story of Aurora Leigh. The inspiration of Sibyls and Delphic priestesses is still, as of old, accompanied by contortions. To possess a great subject without being possessed by it seems to be the exclusive privilege of masculine genius. Women often excel in the description of character and manners, and when, for purposes of fiction, they dabble in law, they only exaggerate the blunders of laymen. Their political sermons and prophecies generally display a credulous partisanship, and in attempting large generalizations they are abandoned by the instinctive perception of expediency and right which serves them so well in practice. As Mrs. Browning was in some respects superior in ability to any woman of her time, it is not disrespectful to her memory to illustrate by her example the qualities and uniform limits of the female intellect.
Knowledge of the world and practical sense of probability are little required in short lyrical and reflective poems. Some parts of the present volume are touching, and many passages are characteristically impressive. A simple and ordinary grief is sometimes made fresher and more solemn by associations at the same time remote, appropriate, and sublime. The death of a girl of thirteen gives Mrs. Browning an opportunity of contrasting the dependent simplicity of childhood, with the approximate omniscience which belongs, according to her poetical assumption, to disembodied spirits. The fancied change is but an embellishment of the mysterious reverence for death which succeeds to the parental consciousness of superiority and protection.
Just so young but yesternight,
Now she is as old as death.
Meek, obedient in your sight,
Gentle to a beck or breath
Only on last Monday. Yours,
Answering you like silver bells
Lightly touched! An hour matures:
You can teach her nothing else—
She has seen the mystery hid
Under Egypt’s pyramid.
By these eyelids pale and close
Now she knows what Rhamnes [sic] knows.
The pathetic definiteness of the reference to “last Monday” would only have occurred to a true poet or poetess. It matters little whether Mrs. Browning really entertained a dreamy belief that intellectual growth and maturity followed instantaneously on death. The doctrine is properly used, not for purposes of dogmatic teaching, but as a vehicle for the imaginative contemplation of a special loss. The little girl of “last Monday” may or may not be initiated in forgotten mysteries, but she is as far off as any semi-fabulous Pharaoh from human knowledge and from loving intercourse.
The lament of Bianca among the Nightingales—a devoted Italian Ariadne mourning for an English Theseus in his own country—is a more passionate utterance of sorrow and indignation. Nothing can be more natural than a burst of anger against the Northern climate and landscape: and perhaps Mrs. Browning was glad of the opportunity of venting, with dramatic propriety, the morbid antipathy which she seems to have entertained against her native country:—
I marvel how the birds can sing.
There’s little difference, in their view,
Betwixt our Tuscan trees that spring
As vital flames into the blue,
And dull round blots of foliage meant,
Like saturated sponges here,
To suck the fogs up. As content
To be too in this land, ’tis clear—
And still they sing, the nightingales.
The contrast between English fogs and Florence in festive illumination with its buildings reflected from the Arno is brilliantly drawn:—
My native Florence! dear, forgone!
I see across the Alpine ridge
How the last feast-day of St. John
Shot rockets from Carraia Bridge.
The luminous city, tall with fire,
Trod deep down in that river of ours,
While many a boat with lamp and choir
Skimmed bird-like over glittering towers—
I will not hear those nightingales.
The conclusion of the poem is singularly beautiful, and it is true to that nature of passion and tempestuous emotion which Mrs. Browning understood far better than the commonplace dealings of everyday life:—
Let her pass.
I think of her by night and day;
Must I, too, join her—out, alas!—
With Giulio in each word I say?
And evermore the nightingales.
Giulio, my Giulio! sing they so,
And you be silent? Do I speak
And you not hear? An arm you throw
Round some one, and I feel so weak!
Oh! owl-like birds! They sing for spite,
They sing for hate, they sing for doom!
They’ll sing through death who sing through night,
They’ll sing and stun me in the tomb—
The nightingales, the nightingales.
A subtle perception of the sequence of thought under the impulse of jealous despair would not of itself necessarily have suggested a poetical form of representation. Native aptitude, improved by livelong cultivation, had given Mrs. Browning an easy command of rhythm and of musical language. In her happier passages she displays a mastery of the mechanism of her art, which her frequent negligence proves her to have undervalued. A polemic zeal in controversy, and an unrestrained impatience to utter all her mind, often tempted her into the use of awkward and ungainly phrases, and in her unlucky political poems she trifled with absurd rhymes and cant expressions, as if from a vain desire to indulge a playfulness which was wholly foreign to her nature. An imaginary Bianca, tormented by the ceaseless song of alien nightingales, was to her incomparably more intelligible and real than the business or pleasure which she watched from her windows, or misunderstood in the newspapers. It is not surprising that she wrote better poetry when she confined herself to subjects within the range of her own sympathy and comprehension. Her declamations in verse about English oppression and Italian liberty are sometimes eloquent, often intemperate and feeble, and uniformly unsatisfactory to sound taste and to critical intelligence. Imaginative thought and querulous emptiness were not likely to produce similar results. The words
An arm you throw
Round some one, and I feel so weak,
are worth volumes of blank verse socialism, and liberalism in rhyme. There may, perhaps, be no necessary antagonism between poetry and politics; but Dante, Milton, and Dryden were men of the world and partizans before they gave a poetic immortality to their favourite theories and factions. Mrs. Browning, like Shelley, regarded public affairs with a querulous anger, as the scene of an unintelligible conflict between abstract right and embodied wrong. It might be natural for a lady of enthusiastic disposition and secluded habits to believe that absolute government was diabolical at Milan and divine at Paris, but a fantastic and impossible chimæra is not susceptible of artistic treatment. Within the sphere of personal experience and reflection her very illusions were more imaginative and more consistent.
In common with many of her predecessors, Mrs. Browning fancied that poets are subjected to special disabilities as an equivalent for their peculiar gifts. Morally crippled from their birth, as monks and nuns by their dedication, the favoured and blighted race are supposed to move among mankind oppressed by mysterious sorrows, and yet borne up by unearthly impulses, objects of a mixed compassion and reverence, which it is their principal business to cultivate and enforce. Shelley’s picture of himself, as one of the attendants at the obsequies of Adonais, might almost reconcile even a healthy imagination to a false and morbid ideal.—
His head was bound with pansies overblown,
And faded violets, white, and pied, and blue,
And a light spear tipped with a cypress cone,
Around whose base dark ivy tresses grew,
All dripping with the forest’s noon-tide dew,
Vibrated, as the ever-beating heart,
Shook the weak hand that grasped it. Of that crew
He came the last, neglected and apart,
A herd-abandoned deer, struck by the hunter’s dart.
As it appears from many passages in Mrs. Browning’s writings that she suffered much from pain and ill health, she may well be excused for confusing weakness and depression with the poetical faculty, which may perhaps have been their best corrective. The theory that the poet is a self-immolated being is gracefully allegorized in The Musical Instrument, or the pipe first formed by Pan from the reed which in another version became a nymph:—
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.
“This is the way,” laughed the great god Pan,
(Laughed while he sat by the river,)
“The only way since gods began
To make sweet music, they could succeed!”
Then, dropping his mouth to a hole in the reed,
He blew in power 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
Came back to dream on the river. [p. 474→]
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.
There is singular skill and felicity in the imitative lines which represent the shrill music of the pipe:—
Sweet, sweet, sweet, O Pan!
Piercing sweet by the river,
and in poetry the treatment is so far more important than the subject-matter, that the dispute between the satyr-god and the more squeamish denizens of Olympus may well be left unadjusted. It is only for the benefit of young ladies and gentlemen of poetical temperament, who are neither Shelleys nor Mrs. Brownings, that it is expedient to protest against the apotheosis of irritable nerves and weak digestion. It is impossible to conceive Homer or Sophocles, Virgil, Chaucer, or Shakspeare, twaddling about their own incapacity to take their part in the ordinary proceedings of the world. If a less illustrious and contemporary example is more impressive, young poets will do well to study the bright and sunny pastorals of Mr. Barnes, who never disfigures his exquisite groups and landscapes by a dismal sketch of himself in a sable suit in the background. Melancholy and discontent, running almost naturally into a dismal jingle, offer the same facilities to versifiers which a hook-nosed profile presents to an apprentice in drawing. It is a misfortune when a temptation is perverted into a rule. Strong intellects emancipate themselves from any early prejudice which they may have contracted in favour of helplessness and despair. Even the sulky Muse of Childe Harold took to joking and laughing in Don Juan.
Mrs. Browning’s poems will never be really popular. The irregularities, the recondite conceits, the hysterical vehemence which is substituted for force, repel unambitious tastes, as they fail to satisfy the demands of criticism. Literary immortality depends on style as its indispensable condition, if not as its originating cause. Simplicity and repose reproduce themselves only in the language of writers who have the strength and confidence to take their inspiration coolly. It is natural that a poetess should be carried away by her generous hopes and sympathies; but a poet must be as self-possessed as an advocate or a statesman in the midst of his most impassioned appeal. Although, however, Mrs. Browning’s poems are not destined for permanent currency, they are at present cordially admired by that intelligent and enthusiastic section of the community which appreciates the eloquent utterance of what it supposes to be its own aspirations and feelings. Aurora Leigh has passed through four or five editions, and the Last Poems will justify the interest which would in any case attach to departed genius. When contemporary modes of thought have ceased to furnish a key to the peculiarities of Mrs. Browning’s manner, her fame, surviving her popularity, will from time to time induce curious inquirers to disinter portions of her works for the benefit of future generations. In the mean time, it is satisfactory to know that she enjoyed in her lifetime the hearty admiration of all but ordinary readers, and of all but fastidious critics.
Reviewed:
Last Poems (EBB), London: Chapman & Hall, 1862.
___________________
