E620601A. Last Poems.
Church and State Review, 1 June 1862, pp. 44–45.
Listed in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 30, 368.
We have in Mrs. Browning an example of the highest point ever yet reached by a female writer of poetry. But however highly endowed a woman may be, she cannot possess that calm wisdom, that steady strength of wing, which belong to the greater poets. If conscious of unusual power, yet vexed by the necessary limitations of that power, she will probably strive to surpass her rivals by departing from the true region of poetry, or by breaking the laws of the art. Mrs. Browning did so in several ways. Though capable of rigorous melodious verse, she often wilfully chose to spoil her finest efforts by discordant rhythm and impossible rhyme. She wrote political poetry, and so absurd was the result that all the world would have laughed had an unknown author produced it. But men grieved that Mrs. Browning should prostitute her fine faculty in such a way. Worse than this, she was tempted—in Aurora Leigh especially—to the very verge of the profane and the indecorous. All these faults were necessary results of her fretful beating against the bars of her cage. She was great; but not great enough for her own restless ambition. If we compare her with a poetess like Miss Landon, or Mrs. Hemans, we see at once the injury which she has done herself. Could Mrs. Browning have been content with doing that which lay within her power, her vast superiority would have been far more apparent. But, not satisfied with the capacity to excel all women, she desired to contest the palm with all men. Hence, like the De Staël, like Georges Sand, Currer Bell, George Eliot, she was betrayed by the very greatness of her powers and of her desires. There is something very sad in this rebellion against the laws of their own nature which characterizes all epicene women.
Mrs. Browning’s chronic ill-health probably suffices to account for much of the morbid tone to be found in her poems, and especially for her theory that suffering is the poetic heritage. In the fine wild lyric entitled A Musical Instrument, she repeats this theory:—
“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 nevermore again
As a reed with the reeds in the river.”
Nothing can be farther from the truth than this. The morbid poets, spoilt as to their manhood, have invariably some physical defect,—a distorted foot perhaps, or a bad digestion. Their tempers would have been just as bad if they had not been poets at all: but their wives and children would have been the only sufferers. The healthy poet does not look upon his faculty as a chronic disease. There was no moaning, no querulous egoism, about Homer, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Goëthe. But the sad stress of physical pain and languor and hopeless unrest suffices to excuse this occasional morbidness in Mrs. Browning. We know nothing more melancholy than the intense sadness of My Heart and I:—
“You see we’re tired, my heart and I,
We dealt with books, we trusted men,
And in our own blood drench’d the pen,
As if such colours could not fly.
We walk’d too straight for fortune’s end,
We loved too true to keep a friend;
At last we’re tired, my heart and I.”
Nor do we know anything more exquisitely expressive of the pining for rest which is felt by those who suffer perpetual pain than the poem which commences:—
“Of all the thoughts of God that are
Borne inward unto souls afar,
Along the Psalmist’s music deep,
Now tell me if that any is,
For gift or grace, surpassing this—
‘He giveth his beloved sleep.’”
These Last Poems vary greatly, some of them being quite equal to Mrs. Browning’s best previous efforts. Little Mattie, a poem on the death of a child of thirteen, is deprived of pathos by the strain after effect:—
“She has seen the mystery hid
Under Egypt’s pyramid:
By those eyelids pale and close
Now she knows what Rhamses knows.”
These are not the natural thoughts of a mother whose child lies dead; nor indeed would they occur to the most philosophic and indifferent bystander. “What Rhamses knows” we can hardly venture to conjecture, seeing that he died about thirty centuries ago, if we are to believe in Bunsen’s Chronology; but the notion that the child by immediate insight has obtained all conceivable knowledge is simply grotesque. We do not, indeed, consider Mrs. Browning generally happy in treating of the love of children. She was rather amative than philoprogenitive. The humorous simplicity of the next poem, A False Step, is perfectly charming:—
“Sweet, thou hast trod on a heart,
Pause, there’s a world full of men;
And women as fair as thou art
Must do such things now and then.”
But the poet predicts some retributive regret in the future:—
“Thou’lt sigh, very like, on thy part,
Of all I have known or can know,
I wish I had only the heart
I trod upon years ago.” [p. 45→]
In Lord Walter’s Wife, Mrs. Browning touches a topic that were better left alone. The lady strives to detain a friend of her husband’s who is going because he finds her “far too fair.” She carries this so far that he angrily declares she is fair no longer, but “ugly and hateful.” Thereupon she lectures him for having dared to love her, and analyses, with rather too much detail, the way in which some men are apt to treat their friends’ wives. What can be more mournful than to find a lady writing such a couplet as this?—
“You did me the honour, perhaps to be moved at my side now and then
In the senses—a vice, I have heard, which is common to beasts and some men.”
Bianca among the Nightingales was probably suggested by Mr. Tennyson’s Mariana. It is the soliloquy of an Italian lady deserted in England by her English lover, and greatly fretted by the song of the nightingales. Those whom a great grief has brought low are apt to exaggerate the minor annoyances of life; and, as Mariana’s weariness was aggravated when “the blue fly sung i’ the pane,” so Bianca’s misery is made more miserable by the ceaseless chant of the nightingales. The lyric is full of power and passion, though evidently unoriginal.
Amy’s Cruelty is a second excellent specimen of Mrs. Browning’s delicate humour.
De Profundis is a noble poem:—
“The face which, duly as the sun,
Rose up for me with life begun,
To mark all bright hours of the day
With hourly love is dimm’d away—
And yet my days go on, go on.”
The sad cadence of this poem is exquisite. But the sadness finds relief:—
“A voice reproves me thereupon . . . .
God’s voice, not Nature’s.”
And the result is consolation in the great misery—hope awakened amid despair:—
“I praise Thee while my days go on;
I love Thee while my days go on:
Through dark and dearth, through fire and frost,
With emptied arms and treasure lost,
I thank Thee while my days go on.”
Had Mrs. Browning always written like this she might have won the crown of a Christian poetess.
To the poem of Pan among the reeds, and the “blinding sweet” music which he made on the banks of Ladon, we have already referred. It is curious that the poetess has falsified the myth, and caused the Arcadian god to make a poet “out of a man,” whereas it is known that he found his material in the reed to which the fugitive nymph Syrinx was turned.
Political poems and translations close the volume. The former are quite as illogical and abrupt as the Poems before Congress. Mrs. Browning’s Napoleon-worship is strong as ever. Some of the rhymes are atrocious; ex. gr.—
“Azeglio, Farini, Mamiani,
Ricasoli—doubt by the dozen!—here’s
Pepoli, too, and Cipriani,
Imperial cousins and cozeners.”
Again:—
“Yes, write down the two as compeers,
Confessing (you would not permit a lie)
He bore up his Piedmont ten years,
Till she suddenly smiled and was Italy.”
A View across the Roman Compagna is better, though too nearly approaching profanity. There is a certain sublimity in the conception:—
“Over the dumb Campagna-Sea,
Out in the offing through mist and rain,
Saint Peter’s Church heaves silently
Like a mighty ship in pain,
Facing the tempest with struggle and strain.”
But the latter part of the poem treats sacred persons with too much of the irreverent familiarity which has made The Biglow Papers notorious. Mrs. Browning did not know where to stop.
The character and career of our poetess should be closely studied by any young writers of the female sex who desire to become famous. Let them learn how her restless ambition injured her renown, by inducing her to choose unpoetic subjects, and to treat them unpoetically. Let them compare their own power with hers, and, seeing how far short she fell of high success, let them consider whether it were not more wise to seek in calmer and less exciting occupations the true happiness which to women is more needful than fame.
Reviewed:
Last Poems (EBB), London: Chapman & Hall, 1862.
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