E630418A. The Greek Christian Poets and the English Poets.
The Press, 18 April 1863, p. 380.
Listed in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 30, 369.
The two essays which make up this volume were printed twenty-one years ago in a literary journal at that time deservedly influential, at the present deservedly the reverse. The first essay is the most interesting. It briefly describes the poetical writers of the early Christian centuries, and supplies a few elegant translations. These translations are far more readable than the author’s criticisms; for she seems to have been determined to make her prose poetical, and her fine writing is intolerably fine. Of the Greek language she says, that “no other has lived so long and died so hard—pang by pang, each with a dolphin colour.” We should have imagined, in our ignorance, that the Hebrew language had lived quite as long. But what in the world are “dolphin-colour pangs?” Every page is full of this terrible magniloquence. “Blind Homer spoke this Greek after blind Demodocus, with a quenchless light about his brows, which he felt through his blindness.” “Quenchless,” by the way, is not English, but American. “Pindar rolled his chariots in it (Greek) prolonging the clamour of the games. Sappho’s heart beat through it, and heaved up the world’s.” What would not a leader-writer in a penny paper give to be able to write like this?
For those, however, who desire to know a little about the Greek Christian poets—poetasters were the truer word—and who can read fine writing without intellectual nausea, Mrs. Browning’s little essay may be interesting. The translations, as has been observed, are good. Here, for example, is a fair specimen of Gregory Naziangen’s pathetic sadness:—
Where are my winged words? Dissolved in air.
Where is my flower of youth? All withered. Where
My glory? Vanished. Where the strength I knew
From comely limbs? Disease hath changed it too,
And bent them. Where the riches and the lands?
God hath them! Yea, and sinners’ snatching hands
Have grudged the rest. Where is my father, mother,
And where my blessed sister, my sweet brother?
Gone to the grave!—There did remain for me
Alone my fatherland, till destiny,
Malignly stirring a black tempest, drove
My foot from that last rest. And now I rove
Estranged and desolate a foreign shore,
And drag my mournful life and age all hoar
Throneless and cityless, and childless save
This father care for children, which I have,
Living from day to day on wandering feet.
Where shall I cast this body? What will greet
My sorrows with an end? What gentle ground
And hospitable grave will wrap me round?
Who last my dying eyelids stoop to close—
Some saint, the Saviour’s friend? or one of those
Who do not know him? The air interpose,
And scatter these words too!
We may also quote John of Euchaita’s verses on the Virgin Mary, which are of singular beauty:—
O lady of the passion, dost thou weep?
What help can we then through our tears survey,
If such as thou a cause for wailing keep?
What help, what hope, for us, sweet lady, say?
“Good man, it doth befit thine heart to lay
More courage next it, having seen me so.
All other hearts find other balm to-day—
The whole world’s consolation is my woe!”
The second essay is made up of two reviews—one of a collection of English poetry, the other of some one of Wordsworth’s works. Its style is equally tawdry; thus it begins:—
The voice of the turtle is heard in the land. The green book of the earth is open, and the four winds are turning the leaves: while Nature, chief secretary to the creative Word, sits busy at her inditing of many a lovely poem.
There is no special critical insight, to compensate this painful absurdity of style—indeed, the first part of the essay is little more than a catalogue of English poets, with a few pretentious but meaningless words about each. It is marvellous that a great poetess—and Mrs. Browning was among the greatest—could find it possible to write such shallow, unconsidered stuff. It is even more marvellous that her literary executor has permitted its re-publication.
Reviewed:
The Greek Christian Poets and the English Poets (EBB), London: Chapman & Hall, 1863.
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