E630516A. The Greek Christian Poets and the English Poets.
John Bull, 16 May 1863, p. 315.
Listed in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 30, 369.
We are half disposed to regret the publication of this posthumous volume. Anything from the pen of Elizabeth Browning must have interest, and there are in these pages many of those glorious sentences which have caught the fire of her verse language. Besides the subject of the earlier part of this volume is closely connected with the story of her life; reminding us of her own descriptions of her early studies among—
——the noble Christian bishops,
Who mouthed grandly the last Greek.
But we should not have expected Elizabeth Browning to make a very keen critic, especially on the English poets; and it must be owned that this is a very crude and careless performance—bright indeed with flashes of its writer’s genius, but indicating a sort of work to which that genius was but ill-fitted. It would seem that these pages were composed for the columns of some literary periodical, and they bear the traces of that perfunctory work which is almost necessarily the result of writing for hurried readers. There is, moreover, about them a painful suggestion of a desire to fall in with the slang of popular notions which belongs to the same class of literary compositions. Obviously, they have been written in a hurry, and they appear to be carelessly edited. Thus we have Apollinarius repeatedly written down Apolinarius. We hear of a Manuel Phile, meaning, we suppose, Manuel of Phile. The Greek Ezekiel is spoken of as “no vatis.” Gregory Nazienzen is said to have been “son of the Bishop of Nazienzen,” but this may be a misprint for Nazianzum. It is still worse to be told of Medæa and the Argo-voyage to Cholchos. But on the whole, this rapid catalogue of a class of authors too little known to the modern public, is full of interest, and we wish that Mrs. Browning had found time to expand her notice to dimensions more worthy of the subject.
She is less successful because of necessity more critical in recounting the English poets. It might have been anticipated that she would hardly discern the greatness of Dryden and Pope. But when she is angry with Pope for his “correctness” it is not a little strange that she should forget that if people after Pope’s time wrote weak poetry and thought it might pass for true poetry because the lines were musically turned after Pope’s model—that this brings no blame to Pope himself, who wrote great poetry in verses of musical exactness. We are not sure, even, that she fully appreciates Wordsworth, although her praise of Wordsworth is sympathetic and eloquent. The following catalogue of the lyrical poets is beautiful and discriminative:—
O Shakespeare, let thy name rest gently among them, perfuming the place. We “swear” that these sonnets and songs do verily breathe, “not of themselves, but thee;” and we recognise and bless them as short signs from thy large poetic heart, burdened with diviner inspiration! O rare Ben Jonson, let us have thy songs, rounded each with a spherical thought, and the lyrics from thy masques alive with learned fantasy, and thine epigrams keen and quaint, and thy noble epitaphs, under which the dead seem stirring! Fletcher, thou shalt be with us—prophet of Comus and Penseroso! giddy with inhalation from the fount of the beautiful, speaking out wildly thought upon thought, measure upon measure, as the bird sings, because his own voice is lovely to him. Sidney, true knight and fantastic poet, whose soul did too curiously inquire the fashion of the beautiful—the fashion rather than the secret,—but left us in one line, the completest “Ars Poetica” extant,—
Foole, sayde my Muse to mee, looke in thine heart, and write,—
thy name be famous in all England and Arcadia! . . . . . Herrick, the Ariel of poets, sucking “where the bee sucks” from the rose-heart of nature, and reproducing the fragrance idealised; and Carew, using all such fragrance as a courtly essence, with less of self-abandonment and more of artificial application; and Herbert, with his face as the face of a spirit, dimly bright; and fantastic Quarles, in rude and graphic gesticulation, expounding verity and glory; and Breton, and Turberville, and Lodge, and Hall (not the satirist), and all the hundred swans, nameless or too numerous to be named, of that Cayster of the rolling time.
The closing portion of the volume appears to be a review of Wordsworth’s posthumous works; and Mrs. Browning, with a true poet’s exultation, dwells on the moral of Wordsworth’s “heroic life of poetic duty” as a noble lesson to all poets, that they should trustfully follow the inspirations of their own genius rather than “the popular cheer, the critical assent, and the money in the purse.”
Reviewed:
The Greek Christian Poets and the English Poets (EBB), London: Chapman & Hall, 1863.
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