E630900B. Essays on the Greek Christian Poets and the English Poets (New York).
The Knickerbocker Monthly: A National Magazine of Literature, Art, Politics, and Science, September 1863, pp. 212–216.
Listed in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 30, 376.
THE PROSE OF A POETESS.
A new book from Mrs. Browning! and yet not new, not posthumous in any real sense, but simply a reprint from a series of essays published in the London “Athenæum” during the year eighteen hundred and forty-two.
Distant or recent, it is welcome, as fresh and priceless to us as a parting word; and better, for its high intrinsic worth, as granting us a glimpse of her poetic choices, her prejudices and loves in her own guild of workers.
The first paper is on a subject which hardly seems attractive to one of such fine sensitiveness. The scholarship required would, itself, have proved a hindrance to one less bold. But Mrs. Browning united, to a profound and all-attracting imagination, an affluence of literary culture and of polyglot knowledge, such as only Miss Martineau or Mrs. Somerville can parallel. Whether her classical readings took this direction, in obedience to a natural bias, or from a stern sense of duty—as a linguist might conscientiously study Euclid—it would appear that she finally regarded it as a labor of love. Of this every printed line is a testimony. One is, indeed, perpetually reminded of Sydney Smith’s exquisite witticisms on the flies in amber; the question is not so much how these lispers in numbers came to their lisp, as why Mrs. Browning should have deigned so to immortalize them.
Nor can the mystery be well solved, until we call to mind the constant evidence of a large and cheerful sympathy in the poetess for all that is spiritually earnest or quasi-earnest in the present or the past.
We have, then, a rapid resumé of the metrical literature of the later lower Hellenic writers, from the “Greek Ezekiel,” who composed a drama on Moses, wherein we are told that the great lawgiver and leader—Bishop Colenso’s Martyr—slew the Egyptian because nobody was looking—to Maximus Marganius, the plagiaristic poet of Crete. Some two dozen poets and poetasters are included in the survey. She bestows the laurel wreath of superiority on Synerius, Bishop of Crete, pupil to Hypatia, the ever-memorable Hypatia of Kingsley. With Gregory Nazianzen—the golden-mouthed—“gifted, peradventure, with a keener dagger of sarcasm than should hang in a saint’s girdle,” she is less satisfied. It would be impossible, as it is impracticable, to follow her closely through the rich felicity of her commentary. Word-piercing phrases, quaint twists of expression, are scattered along the pages thicker than leaves in Vallambrosa. Vida is thus gently pilloried: “The Italian poet, smooth as the Italian Canova, working like him out of stone, smooth and cold, disdaining to ruffle his dactyls with the beating of his pulses.” Here is a quiet dreamy pun: “At which the gravest may smile gravely, (as at a doublet worn awry at the Council of Nice.)”
The translations are some of them exquisite, Mrs. Browning infusing no little of her own fire into the chaff. We are tempted to give an extract or two, but refrain, contenting ourselves with the richer fruitage of her prose. “They had not the divine spirit that breathes through the ‘Iliad’ and ‘Prometheus Vinctus,’ she remarks; “nor could it have been theirs—the Greek language having itself been degraded, even as the writers were themselves deficient in vigor of imagination. Yet,” she continues, “we shall reckon names for remembrance,” and speak of things not ignoble; of meek, heroic Christians, and heavenward faces washed serene by tears; strong knees bending humbly for [p. 213→] the very strength’s sake; bright intellects burning often to the winds in fantastic shapes, but oftener still with an honest, inward heat, vehement on heart and brain; most eloquent fallible lips, that convince us less than they persuade—a divine loquacity of human falsities; poetical souls, that are not soul of poets!..... It is, too, as religious poets, that we are called upon to estimate these neglected Greeks; as religious poets of whom the Universal Church, and the world’s literature, would gladly embrace more names than can be counted to either. For it is strange that, although Wilhelm Meister’s up-looking and down-looking aspects, the reverence to things above and things below, the religious all-clasping spirit be, and must be, in degree and measure, the grand necessity of every true poet’s soul; of religious poets strictly so-called, the earth is very bare.... We want the touch of Christ’s blood upon the souls of our poets, that it may cry through them in answer to the ceaseless wail of the sphinx of our humanity, expounding agony into renovation. Something of this has been perceived in Art, when its glory was at the fullest. Something of a yearning after this may be seen among the Greek Christian poets, something which would have been much with a stronger faculty.”
But it is not till the close, when we glance with her over the whole battle-march of the past, and follow the heroic line through glory and through shame—a “vision of the poets”—from Eselytus to Philo, that we discover the subtle undermeaning of this essay. It is the bridge between the old and the new, between the muses of the Ægean and the manly voices of the Elizabethan epoch.
“We have watched them,” she chaunts, “along the cloudy tops of the great centuries, through the ages dark but for them, and now stand looking with eyes of farewell upon the last pale sign on the lost mist-bound hill. But it is the sixteenth century. Beyond the ashes on the hill a red light is gathering; above the falling of the dews a great sun is rising; there is a rushing of light and song upward—let it still be upward! 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.”
The Book of the Poets, the last and crowning division of the volume, has the advantage of being essentially more popular, and at the same time more congenial to the author, whose calm judgment, as we have seen, places England on the vacant throne of Greece. It must not be supposed that she aspires to rival in comprehensiveness and exhaustive criticism such books as that of Campbell. Mrs. Browning would not have attempted such. With a keen insight into the more occult principles of her art, she prefers a few broad strokes, flame-portraits in a sentence, to laborious and unsatisfactory disquisition.
And therefore are we glad that she has followed her bent. Such a splendid epitome, such a Homeric catalogue of great names, was never put forth before.
Crowning Chaucer with the aureola of rosy-dawn, she glances in turn, hastily or searchingly, at each of what she calls “the five eras” of English poetry. We wish there were space to give a tithe of her wholly exquisite judgments on the several writers who come up under her view: of Gower, “nailed to a comparative degree,” .... “waiting for ever in his brother’s ante-chamber, like Napoleon’s tame kings,” “his man-mountainism;” of Skelton, who “triumphs, foams, is rabid in the sense of strength,” the satyr of poets! the Juvenal of satyrs!” of Spenser, and Shakspeare, and Milton—we dare not venture on the list. A few passages, to [p. 214→] satisfy our conscience, the reader must accept. Take this as the genesis of British, and, therefore, of American poetry:
Our poetry has an heroic genealogy. It arose where the sun rises, in the far east. It came out of Arabia, and was tilted on the lance-heads of the Saracens into the heart of Europe—Armorica catching it in rebound from Spain, and England from Armorica. It issued in its first breath from Georgia, wrapt in the gathering cry of Persian Odin; and passing from the orient of the sun, to the antagonistic snows of Iceland, and oversweeping the black pines of Germany, and the jutting shores of Scandinavia, and embodying in itself all wayside sounds, even to the rude shouts of the brazen-throated Cimbri, so modified, multiplied, resonant in a thousand Runic echoes; it rushed abroad like a blast into Britain.
Of her rhythmic creed, her theory of longs and shorts, wherein she has been suspected heterodox, let the following bit of enthusiasm explain—the tribute to the “morning-star” of English poetry, so aptly introduces the discussion, and so entirely coheres with it, that we make no scruples in including it as part of the extract:
Nothing is too high for him (Chaucer) to touch with a thought, nothing too low to dower with an affection.... Child-like, too, his tears and smiles lie at the edge of his eyes, and he is one proof more among the many that the deepest pathos and the quickest gayeties hide together in the same nature. He is too wakeful and curious to lose the stirring of a leaf, yet not too wide awake to see visions of green and white ladies between the branches; and a fair house of fame, and a noble court of love, are built and holden in the winking of his eyelashes. .... 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.... Grant 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..... 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.
At a later page, when she has reached the years succeeding the “Great and glorious Revolution,” we have a second digression, with this for its subject. A completely new phase has occurred in the mode of poetry, and she is asking herself what it is:
In what did the change consist? Practically and partially in the idol-worship of rhyme. 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 chaunt, marking the time with an audible indistinctness, and catching occasionally and reflecting the full light of the emphasis of the sense in mutual elucidation. But the new practice endeavored to identify, in all possible cases, the rhyme, and what may be called the sentimental emphasis; securing the latter to the tenth rhyming syllable, and so dishonoring the emphasis of the sentiment into the base one of the marking of the time. And not only by this unnatural provision did the emphasis minister to the [p. 215→] rhyme, but the pause did it also. “Away with all pauses,” said the reformers, “except the legitimate pause at the tenth rhyming syllable. O rhyme, live for ever! Rhyme alone take the incense from our altars! tinkling cymbals alone be our music!” And so arose, in dread insignificance, the Heart and import men.
There is a certain great period in the history of our mother country of which every body has heard much. Kingsley, Dixon, Froude, have chanted the pæans of its political glory; Hazlitt, Lamb, Coleridge, have exalted its literary merit. Is the reader tired thereof? No? Then we will quote once again, and stop:
O thou days of Elizabeth! … Never since the first nightingale brake voice in Eden, arose such a jubilee-concert; never before or since has such a crowd of true poets uttered true poetic speech in one day. Not in England, evermore! Not in Greece, that we know. Not in Rome, by what we know. Talk of their Augustan era—we will not talk of it, lest we desecrate our own of Elizabeth. The latter was rightly prefigured by our figure of the chorus of moons. It was, besides, the milky-way of poetry; it was the miracle-age of poetical history. We may fancy that the master-souls of Shakspeare and Spenser, breathing, stirring, in divine emotion, shot vibratory life through other souls in electric association; we may hear, in fancy, one wind moving every leaf in a forest, one voice responded to by a thousand rock-echoes. Why, a common man, walking through the earth in those days, grew a poet by position—even as a child’s shadow, cast upon a mountain-slope, is dilated to the aspect of a giant.
The most conspicuous and perhaps the preëminent merit of this volume lies in the healthful and, shall we say, new view in which literature is considered. This, even more than the elasticity and exuberance of her style, has lifted it high up above the level of its class. The poets are adjudged, not on their special claims as singers or mere artists, but for what they have done for the race, as teachers of art, as guides, as helpful friends in the thick life-struggle. Not that any such purpose is openly avowed; not, even, that the authoress had any such special design. But a tacit agreement, a right feeling, that, in no other sense, was the work which themselves have accomplished a good work, or a useful work, stamps all her verdicts, and gives them the impress of law. It is a source of regret that such a belief is not more general among literary critics. Consult any one of the countless books on British or universal literature, and it will be found that the criteria of judgment is present popularity, or the amusement which the writers may yet afford, or that they were concerned in great events not as directly influential by their published words, but relatively by virtue of date. “Chambers’s Cyclopædia” is the embodiment of this way of thinking. The jugglery of juxtaposition is almost as successful as that of intellectual vigor. If somebody knew Johnson, or was an acquaintance of Gray’s, or corresponded with Cowper, or even lived in the Elizabethan epoch, he must be crowded into the columns, and numbered with the “white-robed” throng. As if literature were amenable to the same laws which fetter society!—as direct a tinker at his milk-pan! As if, indeed, it were a profession with no sublimer aims than go to the filling up of pantry and larder! The prevalent notions of literature, which are dinned into the ears of college students, and “young ladies of the graduating-class,” are, as we opine, wholly false, corrupting, dangerous; good enough for the Homes and Blairs, for the Chesterfields and the Georges of the past, but inappropriate, poisonous, in the new facts of to-day. There is an imperative need of a novum organum in criticism, of a Caliph Omar for the libraries and catalogues.
If these books and book-wrights agree not with the law of humanity, sense, practical usefulness, suggestive of duty, [p. 216→] pure ideals, bringing balm to the broken heart or the weary soul, let them be expurgated, given up to the bakers to heat ovens, to the trunk-makers, or the paper-manufactories, any way that they shall do some useful thing in their generation. Carlyle’s letter to Allibone is one of the wisest of the century.
There are men in the pantheon of authors, whose justification rests in that law of the mythical Lycurgus, that the useless and besotted should be exhibited to the Spartan youth, to warn by their examples. If Harlequin, or the maskers who seem to have stolen his robes, could be well caged, or properly be got rid of, the public, the students, thinkers of the present and the future, would not grumble at the punishment.
Concerning the great leaders of English poetry, the opinions of Mrs. Browning are mostly those of the century—differing only in respect to the far-off pioneers, whose faith serves for eyesight; and all of us are willingly governed by our prejudices. It is in the concreteness, the condensation of her sentences, the swift audacities of expression, that she shines with a lustre all her own. Naturally, excess of light may lead to darkness. We had, indeed, treasured up a half-dozen phrases to launch our critical thunderbolt at—the “pong-by-pong-cock, with a dolphin color,” especially arousing our ire. But we forbear. Mrs. Browning saw deeper and farther than most eyes. To her mobile imagination a pong could have color, and a dolphin color too; even as the Scandinavian Scald, in his quick vision and superhuman sense, heard the grass grow in the fields, and the fleece on the backs of the sheep.
And now as we close the volume, and our poor words of welcome, taking a sad farewell of the last page that will come to us from that poetess, we can only urge the reader to buy it! The publisher has not sent us a copy, so we can speak freely and honestly. Buy it, place it in the right-hand niche of your shelf, keep it close to you hand; and when you are wearied with the commentators, when the mole-eyed wisdom of Kames, and the madness of Blair, and the keen but mortal Campbell dull on you—when even the poets themselves pall on your vision, and the words slip through your brain, leaving no shadow, take down this book and read it in the light and fragrance of purple eve-tide, and you shall find it a fit companion to Sidney’s deathless “defence;” rich in right criticism, clear-seeing loving enthusiasm, and breathing ripely of the aroma of Parnassus.
Reviewed:
Essays on the Greek Christian Poets and the English Poets (EBB), New York: James Miller, 1863.
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