E630700A. Essays on the Greek Christian Poets and the English Poets (New York).
The Christian Examiner (Boston), July 1863, pp. 24–43.
As reprinted in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 30, 369–376.
There lie before us, side by side, as peaceably as though the two authors were not as far removed in aim and conviction as the two poles of the earth, Mrs. Browning’s poems, crowned with her “Essays on the Poets,” and an English book on “Woman,” published twenty-three years ago.
It is well that women should bear in mind what has been, what still is said of them; and we present a few fossil remains of “Woman,” interesting because they are fossil.
“Much, however, have we heard of learned, great, and illustrious women,—of women’s capabilities to reason, philosophize, and legislate. Their learning may be sufficiently illustrated by an anecdote from one of our periodicals. ‘Of course,’ say they, ‘no one can have a higher opinion of the fair sex than ourselves; and nobody can be more unwilling than we to doubt the genuineness of those numerous and various excellences which they exhibit; but we confess, it has often occasioned us to open the eyes of surprise, and lift up the hands of astonishment, to see the familiarity evinced by them with the dead languages, (we say nothing of their aptness at the unknown tongues,) and the facility with which they will turn an ode of Horace or a scene of Menander into English (rather blank) verse.[’] A certain reverend canon, lately deceased, has ‘let the cat out of the bag.’ In a letter lately published in the Gentleman’s Magazine, he thus writes: ‘Yours is a just portrait of Miss Seward of Litchfield,—her exact character. I was conducted the other day to her blue region, as André calls it. She was busy translating, or rather transposing, an Ode of Horace, without understanding a word of the original. She had three different translations before her,—Francis’s, Smart’s, and Bromick’s,—out of which she compounds her own.’”
It matters little whether this statement of a “reverend canon” be true or false. Miss Seward is nothing to English literature, or to female literature, saving as a somewhat respectable milestone from which to measure progress. Of that barren era Mrs. Browning, in her essay on Modern Poets, says:— [p. 25→]
“How sick to faintness grew the poetry of England! Anna Seward ‘by’r lady,’ was the ‘muse’ of those days, and Mr. Hayley ‘the bard,’ and Hannah More wrote our dramas, and Helen Williams our odes, and Rosa Matilda our elegiacs,—and Blacklock, blind from his birth, our descriptive poems, and Mr. Whalley our ‘domestic epics,’ and Darwin our poetical philosophy, and Lady Millar encouraged literature at Bath, with red taffeta and ‘the vase.’ But the immortal are threatened vainly. It was the sickness of renewal rather than of death.”
Those transition days appear crude enough, seen through nineteenth-century spectacles, and the best that can be said of the women is, that they were not much worse than the men. From among many learned women who are cutting out a pathway, surely but silently, we select the one woman-poet,—Elizabeth Barrett Browning. We do not reverence her for scholarship; we reverence her for a true poet. But since the taunt of “no-learning” among women still proceeds from many mouths, it is proper to refute the falsehood with so noble a proof of the contrary. Surely no “reverend canon” will rise up to declare that Mrs. Browning “transposed” translations. Yet we remember almost as false a charge of superficiality, made by the London, “Saturday Review.” After reading that monstrous libel we passed into Casa Guidi, into the room made void forever, and saw the old Greek books that she had earnestly mastered, standing mournful and together; we were told by him who had sounded the depths of her learning, how little people knew of the woman who had gone from among men, and were shown the Hebrew Bible that had been in constant use, heavy, priceless with its marginal notes in Greek (not “lady’s Greek without the accents”),—all the work of Mrs. Browning.
“Difficulties,” says Cabanis, “repel women: their impatience bounds over them.” We take up the “Essays on the Poets” to compare theory with fact. If there is one merit that transcends every other in this small book of large ideas, it is patience. Nothing but love could have inspired Mrs. Browning to roll off the cerements from those old Greek Christians and breathe a little of her own life into them.
Though her criticisms are concentrated in two comparatively short essays, yet she wears the ivy none the less rightly. [p. 26→] Giotto’s perfect circle proved the master, and the fingers of a Michel Angelo take but little time to squeeze the ideal out of a bit of shapeless, senseless clay. Mrs. Browning has but sketched her subject, yet we know that, had she not been a great poet, she would have been a great prose-writer and critic, for she has drawn her circle. How much better, how much stronger, these Essays would be, had they received the intended revision of their author, we can almost assert, from knowing how much greater Mrs. Browning was than Miss Barrett.
Love, my child, love, love!
said the dying father of “Aurora Leigh,” and it was this wondrous flood-tide that bore the poet so far beyond her former self. Time will expand and strengthen all noble souls, but love is the noonday sun that steeps them in God’s essence. And besides,
Italy
Is one thing, England one.
The Essays are of England. The voice of humanity breathing out of that unrivalled prose preface to the “Poems before Congress” is of Italy. Critical power increases in the exact ratio that insight into humanity is deepened. Italy does much for Northern souls. They need a warm, blue sky and a dreamy atmosphere to develop germs that a cold, frosty air keeps latent. The influence of Italy upon English poets has been great, and to Mrs. Browning it seemed almost a necessity, for there was an intensity in her nature not often the product of English soil and customs. Perhaps it is not mere speculation to trace her great heart-passion back to a tropical sun; for though English, her ancestors claimed the West Indies as a home, and so the South may have left its mark upon Anglo-Saxon characteristics. A fortunate union of Northern head with Southern heart often creates genius.
Turning in Mrs. Browning’s Poems to the “Wine of Cyprus,” the aroma of which is as delightful as that of the grapes glistening with rich ripeness on the Coté d’Or, we find a sketch in words suggestive of a much larger picture. We see that one room in the country-house in Devonshire, with its pale, suffering poet,—a poet not “through pain,” as Byron was, [p. 27→] but in spite of pain. The solitude begotten of suffering may have made Mrs. Browning more learned than she otherwise would have been, but it did not create the poet. The lives of men and women were necessary to her genius. Still-life and the daisy were not to her what they were to Wordsworth. Therefore we say that pain improved the scholar, but clipped the wings of the poet. It washed away the alloy inseparable almost from human health, and sanctified her by an unequalled mercy and charity; but it robbed her of worldly wisdom. Intuition is much, but experience is more. And this we say, well remembering what Mrs. Browning has written of Shakespeare in the Book of the Poets.
“He was wise in the world, having studied it in his heart; what is called ‘the knowledge of the world’ being just the knowledge of one heart and certain exterior symbols. What else? What otherwise could he, the young transgressor of Sir Thomas Lucy’s fences, new from Stratford and the Avon, close in theatric London, have seen or touched or handled of the Hamlets and Lears and Othellos, that he should draw them? ‘How can I take portraits,’ said Marmontel, in a similar experience, ‘before I have beheld faces?’ Voltaire embraced him in reply. Well applauded Voltaire! It was a mot for Marmontel’s utterance, and Voltaire’s praise,—for Marmontel, not for Shakespeare. Every being is his own centre to the universe, and in himself must one foot of the compasses be fixed to attain to any measurement: nay, every being is his own mirror to the universe.”
Knowledge of one heart is the key to all others; but sitting down with that key in our hands is not likely to unlock other hearts. Those hearts must be sought, and their locks found. Therefore we cannot believe that Shakespeare, marvellous genius as he was, could have conceived at Stratford what he conceived as an actor and a manager of a theatre. “All the world’s a stage,” soliloquizes the melancholy Jacques. It is as true that the stage is all the world,—the epitome of every passion, every sentiment, every feeling of which humanity is capable. The theatre is a concentration of the world’s good and evil. In no other profession can the social chromatic scale be played without the missing of a note. There is more of tragic, of dramatic, of comic, in a theatre by daylight, than was ever dreamed of by audiences that nightly congregate to [p. 28→] witness fictitious joys and sorrows. No genius can have Shakespeare’s versatility that has not had his versatile experience. We believe that Miss Barrett could not have written “Aurora Leigh.” We believe the composition of this noble poem required all the worldly knowledge of Mrs. Browning. Its fullest, truest character is the heroine; there Mrs. Browning could not fail: she had only to look into her own heart to find the finest possible specimen of womanhood. Romney follows next in naturalness, for Mrs. Browning could draw upon fact for such nobility. But had Mrs. Browning’s personal knowledge of the different spheres on the earth been greater, Marian Earle would have been less wise, though not more womanly and generous; and Lady Waldemar would not have talked “garlic.” These are spots on the sun, and we make mention of them solely to testify in favor of our theory: we cannot but think that experience meant more to Mrs. Browning in 1860 than in 1842.
We gladly return to drink of the Wine of Cyprus, that we may catch a glimpse of the country-house,
When we two sat in the chamber,
And the poets poured us wine;
those two, the wise blind teacher, Hugh Stuart Boyd, and the double-sighted pupil,—for she saw both earth and heaven,—Elizabeth Barrett. From the window of that study we see “the mountain spreading,” hear the tinkling of the sheep-bells as they slowly “pass the pane”; we turn from
hill and lea,
And the summer sun’s green revel,
to listen to that “girlish voice” reading “somewhat slow” the “rhythmic Greek.” We approach those golden hours with feelings akin to such as may have been inspired by thought of the sacred mysteries, for those two who sat together and looked into the hearts of “those cup-bearers undying of the wine that’s meant for souls,” until
The white vests of the chorus
Seemed to wave up a live air!
The cothurns trod majestic
Down the deep iambic lines;
And the rolling anapæstic
Curled like vapor over shrines! [p. 29→]
Devoutly do we approach the “Hades of a heart” filled with the memories of those who were best and greatest before Christ, and we see how the worship of those demigods opened the way to the “noble Christian bishops,”
Who mouthed grandly the last Greek,
loved dearly, and especially by that blind teacher,
Though the sponges on their hyssops
Were distent with wine—too weak,
and who gradually found a place in the affections of the pupil.
Your Chrysostom, you praised him,
With his glorious mouth of gold;
And your Basil, you upraised him
To the height of speakers old;
And we both praised Heliodorus
For his secret of pure lies;
Who forged first his linked stories
In the heat of lady’s eyes.
And we both praised your Synesius,
For the fire shot up his odes;
Though the Church was scarce propitious,
As he whistled dogs and gods.
And we both praised Nazianzen,
For the fervid heart and speech;
Only I eschewed his glancing
At the lyre hung out of reach.
Do you mind that deed of Até,
Which you bound me to so fast,
Reading “De Virginitate,”
From the first line to the last?
How I said at ending, solemn,
As I turned and looked at you,
That St. Simeon on the column
Had had somewhat less to do.
Thus, from drinking this Cyprus wine, the power is given us to see how the light of the Greek Christians was absorbed by the girl-poet and grew brighter by absorption, and how, in gratitude for those golden hours of golden harvests, the just heart of Elizabeth Barrett resolved that these her teachers should not be “left to perish by the time-gauges as old men, innocent and decrepit, and worthy of no use or honor,” if Eng- [p. 30→] lish wreaths of immortelles, timely laid upon their dusty folios, could lead the thoughtful to their neglected shrines.
“And the reader will perceive at once that the writer’s heart is not laid beneath the wheels of a cumbrous ecclesiastical antiquity, that its intent is to love what is lovable, to honor what is honorable, and to kiss both through the dust of centuries, but by no means to recognize a hierarchy, whether in the Church or in literature.”
Mrs. Browning has made us think more kindly and speak more respectfully of these Greek Christian “poetical souls, that are not souls of poets! Surely not ignoble things!” And first we stop, before the sketch of Apollinarius,—“epoist, dramatist, lyrist, philosopher, and rhetorician,”—so good a sketch that it must be a faithful likeness, and fancy we can see the moving of those firm, self-relying lips that could reply so bravely to the Cæsar, even if with the bravery of intense egotism. We like the heresy that could make hymns human enough for women to sing “softly to the turning of their distaffs.” Those thin lips could say gentle things, even though the man Apollinarius saw nothing better in Eve than “the wretched, misled mother of our race,” whose desire for knowledge is considered by the “poetical soul” to be simply a matter of appetite, as with a poet’s license he accuses her of being “soul-struck by love of—apples”! Having so little faith in woman, we do not wonder that the corners of his mouth grew down, and the thin lips denied the immortality of individuals.
Gregory Nazianzen comes much nearer to our hearts, for though he wrote “thirty thousand verses,” yet, “with the instinct of greater poets, he bares his heart in his poetry, and his heart is worth baring.” He was persecuted, and loved men. We acknowledge the purity of character displayed in Gregory’s poem, “Soul and Body,” yet there is the odor of asceticism about it that makes it too little human for us. Where monkery begins, sympathy must end. “Live and let live,” is the very Christian doctrine of our hearts; therefore, if monks and bishops choose to take upon themselves the weight of celibacy, and, for the glory of the Church, dignify it as cæli beatitudo, we can only wish them joy, asking for like toleration. We think it somewhat intolerant and pre- [p. 31→] sumptuous in Gregory, the sad-hearted celibate, to pronounce that “sweet sickness,” matrimony, a “joy unsound”! and to make a point of declaring that “the best children are none.” We make this reply to his question of “What answer?” And he, earnest soul, knew not how unlovely he was making his faith when he branded the delights of pictured and sculptured art,
And splendor
Of bas-relief, with tracery tender,
And varied and contrasted lines,
Gauds for which the wise will flout thee!
But Gregory believed this, living as he did in the age of extremes, when “tracery tender” went hand in hand with heathen voluptuousness. It is easy to forgive Gregory this flouting. He upheld the Church Militant, and asked of others no more than he required of himself.
It is to Synesius of Cyrene that we give all our hearts that can be given to a Greek “poetical soul.” But he was more; he was a man after Nature’s own true making, and therefore we know why he was “the chief, for true and natural gifts, of all our Greek Christian poets,” and why “it was his choice to pray lyrically between the dews and the cloud, rather than preach dogmatically between the doxies.” We love this Synesius, who resolutely resisted the beckonings of the Bishop’s mitre, preferring, like a man, to “think out his own thoughts” until the Church, to the glory of honesty and truth, put the mitre into his hands “on his own terms” of wife and boys, and his brave doubtings on the resurrection of the body. We have ever been fond of the “Squire bishops,” of him who, having “married, loved, and lost,” having tasted all there is of joy and sorrow, could give to the world the full measure of large-hearted sympathy. And we love Synesius, because he loved his teacher Hypatia, “the perfect, the wise,” the heathen, great in her courage as in her beauty, the glorious setting sun of the philosophers, far more divine in her Platonism than those wolves of monks who left the stain of murder upon the Church, and with it blotted Christianity out of Egypt. Cyril the murderer of Hypatia, Synesius her friend and pupil, is the verdict of the ages; and who is there now who will be- [p. 32→] lieve in a Christianity of Cyril’s making? It was Synesius, not Cyril, who was the poet, and wrote this pure ode:—
O my deathless, O my blessed,
Maid-born, glorious Son confessed,
O my Christ of Solyma!
I who earliest learnt to play
This measure for thee, fain would bring
Its new sweet tune to cithern-string,—
Be propitious, O my King!
Take this music which is mine
Anthemed from the songs divine! [p. 33→]
We will sing the deathless One,
God himself and God’s great Son,
Of sire of endless generations,
Son of manifold creations!
Nature mutually endured,
Wisdom in infinitude!
God, before the angels burning,—
Corpse, among the mortals mourning!
What time Thou wast pourèd mild
From an earthy vase defiled,
Magi with fair arts besprent,
At thy new star’s orient,
Trembled inly, wondered wild,
Questioned with their thoughts abroad,—
“What, then, is the new-born child?
Who the hidden God?
God, or corpse, or king?
Bring your gifts, O hither bring
Myrrh for rite,—for tribute, gold,—
Frankincense for sacrifice.
God! thine incense take and hold!
King! I bring thee gold of price!
Myrrh with tomb will harmonize!”
For Thou, entombed, hast purified
Earthly ground and rolling tide,
And the path of demon nations,
And the free air’s fluctuations,
And the depth below the deep!
Thou, God, helper of the dead,
Low as Hades didst thou tread!
Thou, King, gracious aspect keep,
Take this music which is mine,
Anthemed from the songs divine.
In Paul Silentiarius, and his descriptive poem on the Byzantine Church of St. Sophia, in which the poet “dwelt less on the divine dedication and the spiritual uses of the place, than on the glory of the dedicator and the beauty of the structure,” we see too much of the world’s cloven foot to give him the smallest place in our thoughts, though Mrs. Browning is ever generous, and says, “It is right for us to admit the miracle of a poem made out of stones.” But it is John Damascenus that draws us to him through the pathos of his religious sentiment.
From my lips in their defilement,
From my heart in its beguilement,
From my tongue which speaks not fair,
From my soul stained everywhere,
O my Jesus, take my prayer.
Spurn me not for all it says,
Not for words and not for ways,
Not for shamelessness endued
Make me brave to speak my mood,
O my Jesus, as I would!
Or teach me, which I rather seek,
What to do and what to speak.
I have sinnèd more than she,
Who, learning where to meet with thee,
And bringing myrrh, the highest-priced,
Anointed bravely, from her knee,
Thy blessed feet accordingly,
My God, my Lord, my Christ!
As thou saidest not, “Depart,”
Scorn me not, O word, that art
The gentlest one of all words said!
But give thy feet to me instead,
That tenderly I may them kiss,
And clasp them close, and never miss,
With over-dropping tears as free
And precious as that myrrh could be,
T’ anoint them bravely from my knee!
Wash me with my tears: draw nigh me,
That their salt may purify me.
Thou remit my sins who knowest
All the sinning to the lowest,—
Knowest all my wounds, and seest
All the stripes thyself decreest;
Yea, but knowest all my faith,
Seest all my force to death, [p. 34→]
Hearest all my wailings low,
That mine evil should be so!
Nothing hidden but appears
In thy knowledge, O Divine,
O Creator, Saviour mine!
Not a drop of falling tears,
Not a breath of inward moan,
Not a heart-beat,—which is gone!
Once more our hearts prompt us to pause at these “striking verses upon the Blessed among Women, weeping,” by John of Euchaita,—a “voice with a soul in it, clear and sweet and living.”
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!”
And now, gladly grateful that it is to Mrs. Browning we owe a deeper insight into, and interest in, the Greek Christian poets, we bid them farewell, for they have led us to the sixteenth century, and
“Shakespeare is in the world! And the Genius of English poetry, she who only of all the earth is worthy, (Goethe’s spirit may hear us say so and smile,) stooping, with a royal gesture, to kiss the dead lips of the Genius of Greece, stands up her successor in the universe, by virtue of that chrism, and in right of her own crown.”
It is often said, and it has not been unfrequently written, that Mrs. Browning’s erudition is too apparent in her poetry, and for this Mrs. Browning has been severely criticised, on the amiable and Christian assumption that, in thus giving proof of her learning, she has been actuated by a desire for display. A more cruel as well as false supposition cannot be conceived. No one could possess more simplicity and unaffectedness of character than did Mrs. Browning, and be human. It is the crowning glory of her genius that she received her poet-passion with the humility of one who believed it to be a sacred gift intrusted to her keeping by a Higher Power, for the ad-[p. 35→] vancement of the True, the Beautiful, and the Good. As she has grandly written
How true it is,
That if we say a true word, instantly
We feel ’t is God’s, not ours, and pass it on
As bread at sacrament; we taste and pass,
Nor handle for a moment, as indeed
We dared to set up any claim to such!
If Mrs. Browning has put more erudition into certain of her poems than suits the comprehension of the general reader, it is because learning was not learning to her. It had been her daily food for years, and if it became so much a part of herself as to find its way into the poems of her head, what wonder? Had her life been more active, the thoughts begotten of old folios would have been more frequently tempered by those drawn from the common scenery of to-day. But notwithstanding this hypercriticism, there is no contemporary poet who is more deeply imbued with the spirit of this century and has more truly bared its soul to the world. Mrs. Browning had no love of erudition per se. Having known her personally, we can say that we never heard a quotation pass her lips; that the questions of others alone made her scholarship apparent; from herself, of herself, we should never have known that she was master of any language but her own.
We gladly turn to the Book of the Poets, truly named, though the essay merely claims to be a “glancing series of notes upon the English Poets,” for, indeed, we know of no one single essay of a similar nature, however ambitious in its pretensions, that is so full of thought and suggestion, so comprehensive, so just and magnanimous, so earnest in the desire to raise every neglected poet to the niche that bears his name in the great Art Pantheon. The only regret of every student must be that these notes were not brought down to a later date. We know that Mrs. Browning had nobler duties. We know that she was called to watch by the fires of Liberty. Yet we know also that she loved Shelley and Keats, and could she in these last years have turned for a moment to tell us of her Shelley and her Keats, we should be thankful.
Upon opening that now unknown compilation of extracts, Mrs. Browning marks at once the absence of poets, missing sundry by the way. [p. 36→]
“Of Lydgate there is scarcely a page; of Occleve, Hawes, and Skelton,—the two last especially interesting in poetical history,—of Sackville, and the whole generation of dramatists, not a word. ‘The table is not full,’ and the ringing on it of Phillips’s ‘Splendid Shilling’ will not bribe us to endurance.”
Of Skelton Mrs. Browning has written strongly, so strongly that we copy her word-painting as an example of terse power.
“The man is very strong; he triumphs, foams, is rabid, in the sense of strength,—it is as easy to despise a wild beast in the forest as John Skelton, poet-laureate. He is as like a wild beast as a poet-laureate can be. In his wonderful dominion over language, he tears it as with teeth and paws, ravenously, savagely: devasting rather than creating, dominant rather for liberty than for dignity. It is the very sans culottism of eloquence; the oratory of a Silenus drunk with anger only. Mark him as the satyr of poets! fear him as the Juvenal of satyrs! and watch him with his rugged, rapid, picturesque savageness, his ‘breathless rhymes,’ to use the fit phrase of the satirist Hall,—or
His rhymes all ragged,
Tattered and jagged,
to use his own,—climbing the high trees in Delphi, and pelting from thence his victim underneath, whether priest or cardinal, with rough-rinded apples! And then ask, could he write otherwise than so? The answer is this opening to his poem of the ‘Bouge of Court,’ and the impression inevitable of the serious sense of beauty and harmony to which it gives evidence:—
In autumn when the sun in Virgine
By radiant heat enripened hath our corne,
When Luna, full of mutabilities,
As emperess, the diadem hath worne
Of our pole Arctic, smiling as in scorn
At our folie and our unsteadfastnesse.
But our last words of Skelton must be, that we do not doubt his influence for good upon our language. He was a writer singularly fitted for beating out the knots of the cordage, and straining the lengths to extension; a rough worker at rough work. Strong, rough Skelton!”
And because of his strength he is denied admission among “severe selections”! Gladiators must yield the ring to the Pomfrets, with their rhymes of “endure,” “furniture.” [p. 37→]
Chaucer and Spenser are the friends of all men; beloved by many in the heart, praised by some with the lips, because their honors have grown gray with the weight of centuries, and envy and jealousy only wrestle with those poets whose hairs age has not turned. It is no new thing to read the praises of these poet pioneers, and yet their memories are made brighter to us by the graceful touches laid on by Mrs. Browning in such fine colors. True enthusiasm on any subject, be it never so homely or familiar, is as invigorating to the soul as pure fresh air to stifled lungs. And we who are not given to the “idol-worship of rhyme,” take infinite pleasure in the flower that we now gather and press.
“Not one of the ‘Queen Anne’s men,’ measuring out tuneful breath upon their fingers, like ribbons for top-knots, did know the art of versification as the old rude Chaucer knew it. Call him rude for the picturesqueness of the epithet; but his verse has at least as much regularity in the sense of true art, and more manifestly in proportion to our increasing acquaintance with his dialect and pronunciation, as can be discovered or dreamed in the French school. Critics, indeed, have set up a system, based upon the crushed atoms of first principles, maintaining that poor Chaucer wrote by accent only! Grant to them that he counted no verses on his fingers; grant that he never disciplined his highest thoughts to walk up and down in a paddock,—ten paces and a turn; grant that his singing is not after the likeness of their sing-song: but there end your admissions. It is our ineffaceable impression, in fact, that the whole theory of accent and quantity held in relation to ancient and modern poetry stands upon a fallacy,—totters rather than stands; and that, when considered in connection with such old moderns as our Chaucer, the fallaciousness is especially apparent. Chaucer wrote by quantity, just as Homer did before him, just as Goethe did after him, just as all poets must. Rules differ, principles are identical. All rhythm presupposes quantity. Organ-pipe or harp, the musician plays by time. Greek or English, Chaucer or Pope, the poet sings by time. What is this accent but a stroke, an emphasis, with a successive pause to make complete the time? And what is the difference between this accent and quantity, but the difference between a harp-note and an organ-note? Otherwise, quantity expressed in different ways? It is as easy for matter to subsist out of space, as music out of time.”
There are those who still swear in the name of “Queen [p. 38→] Anne’s men,” and shake their heads sadly at these present degenerate times. They have Goldsmith for authority; their Augustan Age is his; the period of Alexandrines is the “true standard for future imitation.”
“‘Were I to be permitted to offer an opinion upon this subject,’ says Goldsmith, ‘I should readily give my vote for the reign of Queen Anne, or some years before that period. It was then that taste was united to genius; and, as before our writers charmed with their strength of thinking, so then they pleased with strength and grace united. In that period of British glory, though no writer attracts our attention singly, yet, like stars lost in each other’s brightness, they have cast such a lustre upon the age in which they lived, that their minutest transactions will be attended to by posterity with a greater eagerness than the most important occurrences of even empires, which have been transacted in greater obscurity.’”
The Milky-Way is beautiful, yet we prefer the evening star, and that glorious host of constellations splendidly brilliant in their individuality. Those “Queen Anne’s men” are wonderfully skilful gardeners, whose lawns are soft as velvet and green as the deepest emerald, whose hedges are clipped with marvellous precision, and whose plats are laid out in figures mathematically correct. Garden and lawn are perfect, yet in the dust we see the trailing of the “wounded snake,” and in our best moods we ask for the mountain and forest, and even those wild beasts of Skelton’s. We say this with all due respect for Pope and Dryden, the distinguishable centre of that Milky-Way, but with very little respect for their “vehicle,” the everlasting couplet.
“Among the elder poets, the rhyme was only a felicitous adjunct, a musical accompaniment, the tinkling of a cymbal through the choral harmonies. You heard it across the changes of the pause, as an undertone of the chant, marking the time with an audible indistinctness, and catching occasionally and reflecting the full light of the emphasis of the sense in mutual elucidation.”
It is when returning to the Elizabethan days, that Mrs. Browning writes con amore. “Shakespeare is in the world.” Her genius expands in the magnetic warmth of his presence, and like a true interpreter claims that he was a great artist, despite the verdict of the majority. [p. 39→]
“Nature cannot be reasoned apart into antagonistic principles. Nature is God’s art,—the accomplishment of a spiritual significance hidden in a sensible symbol...... Art lives by Nature, and not the bare mimetic life generally attributed to Art: she does not imitate, she expounds. Interpres naturæ is the poet artist; and the poet wisest in nature is the most artistic poet; and thus our Shakespeare passed to the presidency unquestioned, as the greatest artist in the world.”
And then Milton! how joyful is Mrs. Browning that she is able to link his name with Shakespeare’s, though the thread is scarcely visible to common eyes!
“It is pleasant to think that he was actually born before Shakespeare’s death; that they two looked upwardly to the same daylight and stars; and that he might have stretched his baby arms (animosus infans) to the faint hazel eyes of the poet of poets. Let us think in any wise that he drew in some living, subtle Shakespearian benediction, providing for greatness.”
We touch the grain of censure, that grows more and more sensible as the scales on men’s eyes drop off, and they see a vision of heaven and of hell, not imagined, or at least not written of, by Dante or by Milton.
“If we hazard a remark which is not admiration, it shall be this,—that, with all his heights and breadths, with all his rapt devotions and exaltations towards the highest of all, we do miss something (we, at least, who are writing, miss something) of what may be called, but rather metaphysically than theologically, spirituality. His spiritual personages are vast enough, but not rarefied enough. They are humanities, enlarged, uplifted, transfigured,—but no more. In the most spiritual of his spirits there is a conscious, obvious, even ponderous materialism. And hence comes the celestial gunpowder, and hence the clashing with swords, and hence the more continuous evil which we feel better than we describe, the thick atmosphere clouding the heights of the subject...... If anybody should retort, that, complaining so, we complain of Milton’s humanity, we shake our heads. For Shakespeare also was a man; and our creed is, that the ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream’ displays more of the fairyhood of fairies than the ‘Paradise Lost’ does of the angelhood of angels.”
We but obey our instincts in dwelling upon this Elizabethan age, with its grand Miltonic border, looking back upon its mountain heights, as we have done from the lowlands where [p. 40→] stand the “Queen Anne’s men” in all their “glorified correctness” and their devotion to “cherry-stones.” But there are “five eras of English poetry.” Though Mrs. Browning tarries before the monuments of the great, and wanders in many a chosen by-way, she wavers not on the march; pausing to dig at “fossil remains,” despite the belief that “nobody will thank her”; turning “for refreshment to Goldsmith,—that amiable genius, upon whose diadem we feel our hands laid ever and anon in familiar love”; advancing to the new era that “was alive in Cowper,” upon whose grave her rhythmic tears have fallen; and where “Burns walked in glory on the Scottish mountain’s side.” In Wordsworth she recognizes the “poet-hero of a movement essential to the better being of poetry, the poet-prophet of utterances greater than those who first listened could comprehend, and of influences most vital and expansive.” He found Nature among the Lakes, that the Tennysons and the Brownings might find Nature universal.
“Let a poet never write the words ‘tree,’ ‘hill,’ ‘river,’ and he may still be true to Nature. Most untrue, on the other hand, most narrow, is the poetical sectarianism, and essentially most unpoetical, which stands among the woods and fields announcing with didactic phlegm, ‘Here only is Nature.’ Nature is where God is. Poetry is where God is. Can you go up, or down, or around, and not find Him?”
It is because the Tennysons and the Brownings have written firm in the faith of God’s and Nature’s omnipresence, that they have left Wordsworth far behind.
It is pleasant to read Elizabeth Barrett’s passing eulogy of Robert Browning, little dreaming, as she did at the time, how deep a meaning that name would have to her. This reference recalls to our memory a day at Casa Guidi, when we carried to the Brownings a letter of Edgar Poe’s addressed to a friend, in which Poe had copied for his reading the warm praise that “the world’s greatest poetess, Elizabeth Barrett,” had awarded to him [in letter 2284]. “Did Poe write this of me?” exclaimed Mrs. Browning, looking up with glistening but unbelieving eyes; “he was kind.” The tone of voice said further, “But I cannot believe, however friends may applaud.” And then she bent her head to read her own words in Poe’s nervous, clearly-cut handwriting. [p. 41→]
“This vivid writing! this power which is felt! ‘The Raven’ has produced a sensation—a ‘fit horror’—here in England,..... I hear of persons absolutely haunted by the ‘Nevermore,’ and one acquaintance of mine, who has the misfortune of possessing a ‘bust of Pallas,’ never can bear to look at it in the twilight. Our great poet, Mr. Browning, the author of ‘Paracelsus,’ ‘The Pomegranates,’ etc., is enthusiastic in his admiration of the rhythm.”
“I am so glad I wrote that,” said Mrs. Browning, with a beautirul smile; and Mr. Browning, having read, also expressed his gratitude for praise from such a source,—praise undeserved, he said, in words of true chivalric ring. It was a noble sight to us, this mutual homage, and we rejoiced that the curious accident of a letter should have made us witness to it. The bread cast upon the water had returned after the vicissitudes of fourteen years. And now we continue and conclude the quotation from this letter, for the sake of unhappy, gifted Edgar Poe.
“Then there is a tale of his which I do not find in this volume, but which is going the rounds of the newspapers, about Mesmerism (The Valdemar Case), throwing us all into ‘most admired disorder.’ or dreadful doubts as to ‘whether it can be true.’ .... The certain thing in the tale in question is the power of the writer, and the faculty he has of making horrible improbabilities seem near and familiar.”
We can readily imagine the intense pleasure and gratification which prompted Poe, so often maliciously criticised, to share the kind words with his friends.
We have turned the last page of these Essays on the Poets, yet grieve to close the book. With it we feel as though we clasped the very spirit of all beauty since the beginning of the Christian era. From those exquisite translations of the Fathers—the Greek soul embodied into English, word for word and thought for thought, the long, patient work of meditation, ay, and of prayers,—they are prayers—we learn the grand lesson of humility and self-sacrifice born of a religion of the heart. The Book of the Poets is to us an ideal rainbow, a blending in the heavens of the poets according to their true colors, a sign of promise for the future of poetry, no less than a reflection of its glory in the past. [p. 42→]
In summing up in Wordsworth what the poet should be as a man, Mrs. Browning says:—
“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 recall 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,—the loss of the popular cheer, of the critical assent, and of the ‘money in the purse.’”
A real poet is a prophet. Was there ever prophet who did not suffer martyrdom? Many may not remember Mrs. Browning’s beautiful poem, “A Musical Instrument,” in which the “great God Pan” is represented cutting the reeds as he sits by the river,
Making a poet out of a man.
He cut it short did the great god Pan,
(How tall it stood in the river!)
Then drew the pith, like the heart of a man,
Steadily from the outside ring,
And notched the poor dry empty thing
In holes, as he sat by the river.
“This is the way,” laughed the great god Pan,
(Laughed while he sat by the river.)
“The only way, since gods began
To make sweet music, they could succeed.”
Then dropping his mouth to a hole in the reed,
He blew in power by the river.
Sweet, sweet, sweet, O Pan!
Piercing sweet by the river!
Blinding sweet, O great god Pan!
The sun on the hill forgot to die,
And the lilies revived, and the dragon-fly
Came back to dream on the river.
“No,” said one of the cleverest of Englishmen in reply to this poem, “I deny that the man must be sacrificed to make the poet.” He was not a poet. But Mrs. Browning answers:—
“When Milton said that a poet’s life should be a poem, he spoke a high moral truth; if he had added a reversion of the saying,—that a poet’s poetry should be his life,—he would have spoken a critical truth, not low.” [p. 43→]
To do this is no abnegation needed? Does not the poetic faculty bring with it a sensibility which, because of the evil in the world, more frequently leads to exquisite pain than to exquisite pleasure? Patience is genius, and what does this patience mean but the consecration of time to solitary study, while the echo of music and dancing, and the laugh of the multitude, sound seductively to the ear? He who lives for the good of the future must renounce many joys of the present. To be a true poet, the man must stand on a pinnacle far above the level of humanity; and is it no sacrifice to stand alone, when the sympathies are so wide and various?
The moral of every great deed is
The virtue of slandering the doers.
The very absence of “money in the purse” is an unending trial. Yet the martyrdom is for Truth’s sake. It is sweet and glorious. The pipe no longer sighed to be a reed in the river, when its piercing sweet music transfixed the sun on the hill, revived the lilies, and lured back the dragon-fly.
But with woman, is it not better that she should remain a reed in the river?
No perfect artist is developed here
From an imperfect woman.
So Mrs. Browning has written, who was the almost perfect artist, because she was a perfect woman. Aspirations are as vital to women as to men: it is the absolute necessity for their expression, that the world must acknowledge whether the applause be great or not at all.
But what if none? It cannot yet undo
The love I bear unto this holy skill
This is the thing that I was born to do.
This is my scene, this part must I fulfil.
So sang old Daniel in the “Musophilus.” So bravely, beautifully terminates Mrs. Browning’s Book of the Poets.
[Kate Field]
Reviewed:
Essays on the Greek Christian Poets and the English Poets (EBB), New York: James Miller, 1863.
___________________
