E630500A. The Greek Christian Poets and the English Poets.
The Victoria Magazine, May 1863, pp. 95–96.
Listed in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 30, 369.
We have here a series of short criticisms, reprinted from the Athenæum of 1842, upon “the good, fervid, faulty, Greeks,” who wrote poetry between the second century and the sixteenth, and, as illustrations of the criticisms, a few excellent translations. We must not do more than call attention to the rendering of the ninth hymn of Synesius, and of another—we believe the seventh—which opens and closes with a music finer than that we hear in its native Greek. The “Soul and [p. 96→] Body,” from Gregory Nazianzen, the “Deserted House,” from John of Euchaita, and a passionate, but very solemn poem of John Damascenus, are, perhaps, the next best, where all are good. Mrs. Browning’s prose is a poet’s prose. It at once excites and enthralls the reader, who owns the “unseen power,” and is “proud to be checked and soothed by that o’ermastering charm.” The thoughts rush out fast,—so fast that they sometimes fall into too frequent parentheses, but they are straight again in a moment—“disentangled, by no breaking of the thread.” Take as examples the clever speech of Apollinarius, who wrote new epics and tragedies as fast as Julian forbade old Homer and the great tragedians to the Christians. He, “besides being an epoist, dramatist, lyrist, philosopher, and rhetorician, was, we are sorry to add, in the eternal bustle of his soul, a heretic,—possibly for the advantage of something additional to do.” Again, “We want the touch of Christ’s hand upon our literature, as it touched other dead things”—and those fine passages, too long for transcription, on the Greek language, and the rise of Shakespeare’s sun. The second half of the volume is an Essay on the English Poets, rising to very noble eloquence when the critic touches Shakespeare, Milton, and last of all, Wordsworth, whom she happily names the Xenophon of the return to nature from the idol-worship of rhyme. “It is well,” she says of him, in words which slightly turned from their first meaning befit her own intense and too short career,—“It is well … to count the cost of this life of a master in poetry, and learn from it what a true poet’s crown is worth; to recal both the long life’s work for its sake—the work of observation, of meditation, of reaching past models into nature, of reaching past nature unto God; and the early life’s loss for its sake.”
Reviewed:
The Greek Christian Poets and the English Poets (EBB), London: Chapman & Hall, 1863.
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