E620800A. Last Poems.
The Dublin University Magazine, August 1862, pp. 157–162.
Listed in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 30, 368.
One whom many will doubtless rank as the greatest poetess the world has ever known is dead. Of Sappho few fragments are left: those which remain give us no reason to believe that she could have rivalled the author of “Aurora Leigh.” Myro, Anyte, Nossis—charming creatures who wrote verse in the old Greek times—have no claim to such rivalry. In no language, save Greek and English, have poetesses achieved special fame; and we must put Mrs. Browning high above even Joanna Baillie, Letitia Landon, Felicia Hemans. Mrs. Browning was far more fortunate than the latter two sweet singers. True, she was always the victim of physical suffering, but this was all: morally and intellectually, her life was complete. She always found the right friend, the right instructor. She also found—how different from her predecessors—the right husband. She married a poet, a poet who will for posterity dispute with Mr. Tennyson the laurelled crown; yet is he one who could appreciate her exquisite genius, even though he might know it inferior to his own. Such marriage has no parallel. On both sides, unhappily, teste Sir Cresswell Cresswell, marriage [p. 158→] is the result of strange motives. The man marries because the woman is pretty, or has money; the woman for reasons not dissimilar. But here we have one of our greatest living poets wooing and wedding the greatest of all poetesses. What kind of result was to be expected? Commonplace people might have prophesied all manner of domestic difficulties. A poet, they might say, ought to marry a woman with common sense, who would curb his eccentricities. Vile view of the sublime consummation of human life! The poet who possesses such a wife may love her very well; but imagine the glorious intellectual communion that must have existed between Mr. Robert Browning and his wife, the divine interchange of wondrous schemes, of noble ideas, of fresh conceptions! Without any desire to underestimate the native power of the poetess whom we have lost, we may express a decided opinion, that she would never have reached so high a point if she had not married a great poet.
As a poet, without question of sex—Mr. Tennyson, Mr. Browning, and Mr. Matthew Arnold excepted—who is to be named beside her of our contemporary writers? She was passionate, and thereby puissant; manifold were her faults and failings, but they were the shadows of her greatness. She was often singularly careless, whence arose strange discords amid her melody,—horrible rhyme and rhythm, which made the ear ache with amazement. She invariably wrote nonsense—and it was sometimes dull nonsense—when she wrote political poetry. Her famous Napoleonic refrain
Emperor,
Evermore,
is simply laughable; but some of her political lyrics are terribly dreary. Further, she was too apt to run close to the verge of delicate questions—to deal with Haymarket morality and other ticklish matters. These faults are just as manifest in her “Last Poems” as in any which preceded them. A strange destiny seems to belong to women of genius; they are ever impelled to treat topcis which men avoid; they must give us “Jane Eyres,” “Consuelos,” “Aurora Leighs.” Perhaps, after all, though we have some poetesses whom we should be loth to spare, the production of poetry is not precisely woman’s mission. Perhaps, after all, the best poem she can offer us is a crowing child, with beautiful bright hair, pillowed upon her loving breast.
“Aurora Leigh” is certainly Mrs. Browning’s most original and characteristic poem. A novel in verse. Well, that was new. And then it is clear that she adumbrated herself in her heroine. Aurora is Elizabeth. There is the same morbid dislike to England in poetess and heroine.
Was this my father’s England? . . .
. . . Did Shakspeare and his mates
Absorb the light here? Not a hill or stone
With heart to strike a radiant colour up,
Or active outline on the indifferent air.
Rather different this from Mr. Kingsley’s intense enjoyment of the east wind. Yet had Mrs. Browning wiser moments, when she forgot this prejudice; her very last poem, written just a year ago, is sufficient proof hereof. We quote two stanzas:—
“Now give us lands where the olives grow,”
Cried the North to the South,
“Where the sun with a golden mouth can blow
Blue bubbles of grapes down a vineyard-row!“
Cried the North to the South.
“Now give us men from the sunless plain,”
Cried the South to the North;
“By need of work in the snow and rain
Made strong, and brave by familiar pain!”
Cried the South to the North.
Here have we proof that the poetess did not fail to see wherein lay the strength of the unconquerable and ever-conquering North, namely, in the eternal war which the races who dwell there must wage against the powers of nature. Having fought against the gods, why should they fear men?
We have said that Mrs. Browning was far too apt to trespass beyond certain limits, which are at least æsthetic, if not moral. We have no admiration even for the irreverence of such lines as
Here’s God down on us! what are you about?
We could wish that she had avoided certain erotic speculations, of which [p. 159→] she is very fond. Thus her Lady Waldemar says—
Am I coarse?
Well, love’s coarse, nature’s coarse—ah, there’s the rub!
We fair fine ladies, who park out our lives
From common sheep-paths, cannot help the crows
From flying over—we’re as natural still
As Blowsalinda. Drape us perfectly
In Lyons velvet. We are not, for that,
Lay-figures, look you. We have hearts within,
Warm, live, improvident, indecent hearts,
As ready for outrageous ends and acts
As any distressed sempstress.
A pleasant doctrine for a fine lady to teach. Pope got into trouble for declaring that “every woman was a rake at heart;” but here is a lady who holds the same faith. As we look through the pages of “Aurora Leigh,” we are astounded at the grossness which Mrs. Browning seemed unable to avoid. Take the passage in which Marian Erle’s mother tries to betray the girl to a libertine. It is horrible to think that such a scene was conceived and wrought out by a woman. Take again her words—Romney Leigh’s amazing words to his cousin Aurora, when he is wooing her—about the vice
That slurs our cruel streets from end to end
With eighty thousand women in one smile,
Who only smile at night beneath the gas.
Nor had she conquered this tendency in her “Last Poems.”
We have indicated Mrs. Browning’s greatest failing. So great was her genius that her womanhood seemed to her like imprisonment; she longed and strove to think as men think, to write as men may write. Sad, almost always, is the fate of the woman who enters the arena against men. Incredulous of her inevitable weakness, a woman so highly endowed as Mrs. Browning imagines that she can do what she will; but her fate is the fate of Aphrodite when she encountered Diomed—any ordinary mortal can wound her. We have written strongly on this point; for we feel that Mrs. Browning’s character and achievements involve a weighty lesson for literary ladies.
But, as we again read “Aurora Leigh,” more strongly than ever came on us the conviction of Mrs. Browning’s transcendent poetic powers. What a noble lesson she reads to all poets in these lines—
Why, if there’s room for poets in this world
A little overgrown (I think there is),
Their sole work is to represent the age—
Their age, not Charlemagne’s—this live throbbing age
That brawls, cheats, maddens, calculates, aspires,
And spends more passions, more heroic heat
Betwixt the mirrors of its drawing-rooms,
Than Roland with his knights at Roncesvalles.
To flinch from modern varnish, coat or flounce,
Cry out for togas and the picturesque,
Is fatal—foolish too. King Aurthur’s self
Was commonplace to Lady Guenever;
And Camelot to minstrels seemed as flat
As Fleet-street to our poets.
This is excellent; but it is pleasant to know that “our poets” are not all afraid of Fleet-street, and that the greatest of them has immortalized the “plump head-waiter at the Cock”—that elysium of steak and stout. Turning over the pages, many marginal marks arrest us: here is a warning against marrying a poetess—
A dropped star
Makes bitter waters, says a book I’ve read.
Here again is a most exquisite description of “woman’s spite”—
How she talked
To pain me! woman’s spite. You wear steel mail:
A woman takes a housewife from her breast,
And plucks the delicatest needle out
As ’twere a rose, and pricks you carefully
’Neath nails, ’neath eyelids, in your nostrils. . . . .
How truly Mrs. Browning’s poetic instinct guides her in reference to the Wolffian heresy about Homer—
Wolff’s an atheist;
And if the Iliad fell out, as he says,
By mere fortuitous concourse of old songs,
Conclude as much too for the universe.
Nor was that instinct wrong in regard to the English estimate of Frenchmen— [p. 160→]
The English have a scornful insular way
Of calling the French light . . . .
Is a bullet light
That dashes from the gun-mouth, while the eye
Winks and the heart beats one, to flatten itself
To a wafer or the white speck on a wall
A hundred paces off? Even so direct,
So sternly undivertible of aim
To this French people.
The “undivertible aim” in question has led to Louis Napoleon; but that does not matter. Perhaps the best passage in the poem is that which describes the voyage to Italy past “the old miraculous mountains,” until
Genoa broke with day
The Doria’s long pale palace striking out
From green hills in advance of the white town,
A marble finger dominant to ships,
Seen glimmering through the uncertain gray of dawn.
Unquestionably, “Aurora Leigh” gives us the poetess’s best and her worst. The commixture of very good and very bad is, however, to be found in all her writings—in her “Last Poems” as in the rest. Already have we indicated the fault which utterly spoils such poems as “Lord Walter’s Wife.” “Little Mattie” may be taken as the type of many poems spoilt by a minor fault, straining after effect. In it, while striving to be original, Mrs. Browning is simply unnatural. A girl of thirteen dies. The pathos of such an event is obvious to the least poetic of us. We can all feel what it would be to us if a little daughter of such age were to die. Few words and simple suffice. But Mrs. Browning could not be brief and simple—
She has seen the mystery hid
Under Egypt’s pyramid;
By those eyelids, pale and close,
Now she knows what Rhamses knows.
Rhamses! Who in the world cares about the Egyptian king (date, B.C. 1215, according to Bunsen and Lepsius), or thinks any thing of the poetess’s doubtful dogma, in the presence of death? Far more poetry is there in the couplet written on a similar subject by a famous modern Latinist:—
Vita quid est hominis? Viridis floresculus horti
Sole oriente oriens, sole cadente cadens.
Here there is a sublime simplicity; but to connect the little girl who is lost with Rhamses, or to speculate on the knowledge which she has suddenly acquired, is perfectly ludicrous. That which “hurts the most a thousandfold,” according to Mrs. Browning, is to find
Some dear child we used to scold,
Praise, love both ways, kiss and tease,
Teach and tumble, as our own,
All its curls about our knees,
Rise up suddenly full-grown.
Would not this move us to laughter, but for the inevitable pathos of the subject? The thought of death for some dear child we love is so sad, that the poetess’s variations on the theme almost fill us with disgust.
But if Mrs. Browning was unable to conceive and describe the sadness which falls on the hearts of father and mother when their darling dies, she had few rivals when the love of man and woman was her theme. She treated this topic with equal excellence both in the tragical and the humorous vein. The very next poem in her posthumous volume, “A False Step,” shows her mastery of the latter.
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.
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?
Why, indeed? But we, male mortals, have a foolish habit of throwing our hearts down, for the pretty, careless creatures to tread upon. “Nice soft road,” they think; “what is it to us who supplies the pavement?” And so our very best macadamization gets cut up into ruts. But our poetess prophesies evil to the fair creatures who do the mischief. She predicts the time when
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!”
As a parallel to this charming poem, we may quote “Amy’s Cruelty.”
Fair Amy, of the terraced house,
Assist me to discover
Why you, who would not hurt a mouse,
Can torture so your lover. [p. 161→]
You give your coffee to the cat,
You stroke the dog for coming,
And all your face grows kinder at
The little brown bee’s humming.
But when he haunts your door—the town
Marks coming and marks going—
You seem to have stitched your eye-lids down
To that long piece of sewing.
Amy’s reply is a fair one; its subtlety is exquisite.—The dog, the cat, the bee, ask nothing from her—
But he . . . to him, the least thing given
Means great things at a distance;
He wants my world, my sun, my heaven,
Soul, body, whole existence.
And then she proceeds—
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!
Surely never was the exquisite strife between man and maiden in the golden days of wooing put in words more exquisite. We conceive the two poems whence we have quoted, to be, in their kind, perfect.
Not less power has our poetess when she describes the tragic aspect of love. Here is “Bianca among the Nightingales,”—a new “Mariana,”—loved in Italy, deserted in England. Of this we quote the final stanza:—
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?
O, 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!
Mrs. Browning never surpassed the passion and pathos of this poem; it excels Mr. Tennyson’s “Mariana,” by which it was, probably, suggested. Equally pathetic, but apparently more personal, is the poem entitled “My Heart and I,” whereof the sad refrain is—
We’re tired, we’re tired, my heart and I!
Alas, that utter weariness should in this world be the sole guerdon of the famous poetess in whose songs we delight! Shelley says—
Most wretched men
Are cradled into poetry by wrong:
They learn in suffering what they teach in song.
But what of women?
“De Profundis” is a wonderful poem; sad, but sublimely aspirant. Never have we read any presentment so complete of ineffable anguish, of ineffable consolation:—
The heart which, like a staff, was one
For mine to lean and rest upon:
The strongest on the longest day
With steadfast love, is caught away—
And yet my days go on, go on.
So runs the mournful verse. But suddenly “a voice reproves me.” Suddenly God’s own voice is heard; suddenly comes consolation as only it can come from the infinite abyss of God’s illimitable love.
Why did not Mrs. Browning always write in this pure and lofty strain? Alack, why do we not all of us always write and always live up to our highest? We are human, mortal. There is no more to be said. Even the just have to be “made perfect:” and who among us is just?
We have reached our poetess’s last political verses. Two of these are worth notice. One concerns the “Roman Question.”
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.
The picture is graphic and definite; and the subsequent stanzas—rather unjust by the way to Saint Peter—are original and strong. Excellent also is the poem concerning the Queen of Naples.
On she drew as a queen might do,
To meet a dream of Italy,
Of magical town and musical wave,
Where even a god his amulet blue
Of shining sea, in an ecstasy,
Dropt and forgot in a nereid’s cave. [p. 162→]
What is this? As quick as a kiss
Falls the smile from her girlish mouth!
The lion-people has left its lair,
Roaring along her garden of bliss,
And the fiery underworld of the South
Scorched its way to the upper air.
Well, she is dead, England’s chief poetess—the rose, the consummate crown, the rarer and stronger and more passionate Sappho of our time. Very freely have we here written of her faults, but not from any spiteful or malicious feeling. Her faults were of her womanhood: her great achievements were her own. She—noble and fearless soul that she was—would not desire a word written or spoken in extenuation of her mistakes. Nor need she. None can deny her greatness. But the blemishes which we see in her works, the spots which here and there obscure the solar disc of her fame, may teach us, may teach woman especially, a weighty lesson. The function of woman is—not to write, not to act, not to be famous—but to love.
[Mortimer Collins]
Reviewed:
Last Poems (EBB), London: Chapman & Hall, 1862.
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