E651000A. Poems (1862); Aurora Leigh, 4th ed.; and Last Poems.
The British Quarterly Review, 1 October, 1865, pp. 359–384. [Hannah Lawrance].
Listed in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 31, 329.
It is hardly too much to say that from the writings of Mrs. Browning we have acquired new ideas as to the capacities of her sex. It is not that we had never before seen lady philosophers and lady poets; but the poets were usually deficient in the higher qualities of imagination, and the philosophers had obtained their enlarged reasoning powers at the expense of the more truly feminine feelings. No woman has ever united abilities like those of Mrs. Browning. Her far-seeing, masculine intellect fitted her for dealing ably with the great social questions of the day. She was possessed of a varied and extensive scholarship. She had also a vigorous imagination, and eminent artistic power for the delineation of character. Thus, with her ardent and impassioned temperament, her deeply Christian spirit, and overflowing sympathy and love, she was well suited to be the poet of her sex, to paint woman as she is, and to vindicate her rightful position in society. Looking back to other poetry, we are surprised to find how little we have really seen of the female heart. Many, like Byron, care only to set before us a lovely ideal beauty, flashing like a meteor across the eye of youth—the source of a moment’s wild, delirious joy, and fading then unnoticed, or leaving behind the blackness of a fierce and moody despair. Or we are told of woman’s [p. 360→] tenderness or her fickleness. We see her now worshipped as an angel, and now cursed as if almost a fiend. But amid all these changes, and occasional glimpses of a higher truth, she seldom appears as anything better than a mere solace or amusement for man. The higher class of poets, like Tennyson, give beautiful delineations of character, but mainly as seen from without, as it would strike the observation of a lover or a husband. Shakspeare, standing almost in the days of chivalry, has painted our finest portraits of the sex. But Shakspeare was obliged to confine himself to that which could be displayed through the medium of the drama. Besides, he dealt with a younger and more stirring period of the world’s history, when manners were less fettered by conventionalism, and women had to take a more active part in life. Miranda, on the desert island; the gentle Cordelia, perishing in the attempt to rescue her estranged father from the hands of his wolfish daughters; the fierce ambition of Lady Macbeth, and its terrible overthrow; such developments of character were only possible in days that are long since past. But when restraint is placed upon one set of powers, another set is called into greater activity. There is much in woman that is incapable of outward dramatic display—feelings which lie concealed in the inmost depths of the heart, and which none but a woman and a genius can express. Who else can tell what passes in her thought while she nurses the world of the future in her arms? From the mere necessities of his art, it was impossible for Shakspeare to introduce amongst his characters a mother with an infant child. And now that all romance has departed from civilized countries, and nations have sobered down into steady everyday life, there are struggles going on unseen of which men have little idea, which lyric poetry alone can utter; and these it is which Mrs. Browning has shown us. We think much of woman’s love to man when he is grown up, but less of what it is in our earliest years. And fondly as we dwell upon the memory of the mothers who tended our childhood, how little of that boundless affection can really live in our remembrance. What, then, shall be said of the love just awakened, and all record of which must have passed away, except from the mind of God?
Mrs. Browning has also spoken for her sex as the satirist of their wrongs. She gives us her opinion in “Aurora Leigh” as to the way in which girls are educated. Aurora was a genius, and, fortunately, her early life had been such as would favour the growth of her poetic faculties. She has been unjustly accused of a cold, unfeminine nature. But the apparent coldness arose, [p. 361→] in great part, from her peculiar training and surroundings. Her native place was Italy. Her mother died at her birth. Her father, the grave and learned man of books, a mere child in worldly affairs, finding her thus cast upon his hands, had brought her up as he best knew how. With what admirable humour is he depicted, so deeply loving and anxious to do well for his little daughter, and yet so completely ignorant of women’s ways with children—“his large man’s hands afraid to touch her curls, as if the gold would tarnish”; and his idea of education being to teach her anything and everything that he himself might happen to know. But while he made the girl a scholar, he wisely took her to learn of Nature amid the silence of the mountains. Thus her genius was allowed space to develop. She grew large of mind and heart, though ignorant of all worldly forms and practices. With her father’s death there came a change, and she was taken to live with an aunt in her distant English home. The character of Aurora’s aunt is a study. She is conventionalism personified, herself made by Nature that very type to which respectable orthodox people endeavour to conform. No one could be more scrupulously kind and conscientious; but her kindness and conscientiousness both stop short at exactly the proper point. By no possibility could her strict principle lead her to do anything that might be considered strange or unusual, or her kindness grow into any warmth of affection. She did everything by rule and line, and was a pattern of order. Her idea of a young lady’s education was a crushing momently supervision which would restrain all animation and freedom, and compel the unlucky subject of it to the uniform, monotonous action of a machine. She would have girls well informed, and their memories stored with useful facts; but on no account would allow of their presuming to think. Fancy the young Aurora, fresh from her native home, her deepest love lying buried in that Italian grave, her nature, in spite of its apparent reserve, burning with ardent and impassioned feeling, that would at once rush forth towards a congenial object. Think of her glowing imagination and long-accustomed wild-wood liberty, and it will be plain how impossible it was that she should appear any other than cold, when compelled to live with a relative who dealt out affection by measure, and who cramped and thwarted her at every step. The very atmosphere of England was chilly and repulsive to one who had gazed upon those clear Italian skies, and every one around seemed to repel her love, and to unite in a conspiracy against her freedom. She felt a mother want about the world, and was ever seeking a sympathy which she [p. 362→] could not find. Then Aurora tries to be docile and obedient, throws herself down in despair, as, perhaps, most do at some time or other in life, determining just to take what comes, and submitting quietly to anything, because all around is impenetrable gloom, and she can see no apparent prospect of release. If any exertion could free her she would make it, but since she can perceive no chance of freedom, all good in life is gone, and her aunt may do as she will with what remains. But this state of mind is unnatural, and can seldom continue long. The night opens by-and-bye, as it always does in such cases, and she is finally set at liberty by her aunt’s death.
Aurora had, however, already obtained some sort of alleviation—it was indispensable. For look at the picture of her education, an account which every one should read for himself. The main principle was to repress all animal spirits and freedom of thought. In her studies she was compelled to load her memory with a farrago of dry unmeaning facts, shorn of all circumstance or deduction which could give them interest and life. She ranged far and wide through genealogies of Spanish kings, the laws of the Birman empire, and the heights of mountains. She studied popular expositions of Scripture, or rather of “inhuman doctrines never taught by John,” and thence passed on to learn the duties and capacities of her sex, their power of teaching to think, though unable to think themselves (perhaps half the fools in the world are made so through the inability of their mothers for rightly educating them), their tact and rapid insight, and finally their mission as household slaves and stocking-menders, bound in all intellectual questions to yield to the opinion of their husbands. Many a girl’s mind and spirit would have been crushed, but Aurora escaped, after sufferings which she compares to the Drop Torture of the Inquisition. For she had luckily contrived to find some books of her father’s which she read in secret, and then in the early morning, before the rest of the family were awake, she would step softly out of the house, and enjoy an hour or two’s liberty amidst the dewy freshness of the fields. The evil results of such a training in drawing into undue prominence the lower powers of the mind, and crippling the higher, are evident enough. Yet the education of our grandfathers partook largely of this character, and where the boys suffered under whips, the girls were smitten with scorpions. Those who had no appetite for dry, indigestible facts, were made to look upon all study with disgust. Numbers had received such an impression of sensible books from those so named at school, that their only after reading was confined to the specious immorality and high-flown sentiment of the old novels, most of them now long [p. 363→] since dead. But a strong memory can take pleasure in the mere acquisition of knowledge, irrespective of utility or interest. Those who were so constituted could accomplish their tasks with ease. After leaving school they would go on accumulating, pursuing their studies, as it was called, and thus if men they would become scholars, and blue-stockings if women. The evil is now fast disappearing from our educational system, but enough even yet remains to render such satire as Mrs. Browning’s highly valuable.
We cannot help thinking that we may here find some explanation of the lamentable want of women poets in the last century, and of the low order of power which in the present century they have till just lately manifested. A hundred years ago, poetical excellence was held to consist in a slavish compliance with certain artificial rules, and girls were brought up under the repressive system, and taught to consider an intellectual career as a thing meant only for men. But how difficult it must have been to write genuine poetry while hampered by these restrictions. The noblest quality of genius is its obedience to internal impulses, which are stronger than ordinary, and its defiance when actuated by these impulses of any external law which would seek to control it. At first sight how unlikely it would seem that a being gifted with sensibility above others should be able to lay bare his heart with its inmost thoughts and passions, and to stand thus naked before the gaze of his fellow-men. Yet this every poet must do, for the feelings which he ascribes to his heroes are only the reflexion of his own. But genius, from its consciousness of the dignity of nature, and borne upon the wings of its own irresistible impulses, rises above all such difficulties. And if it seem hard for a man, what must it have been for girls brought up with artificial and insipid verse as their only model, and taught that it was unwomanly and indelicate to speak out their healthy natural sentiments? Every refined nature would shrink with horror from the danger of being exposed to such a charge. If a girl had a thoughtful and original intellect, a schoolmistress of the type of Aurora’s aunt would consider her a monster. And such a young lady would be hated by her playmates. Their starved minds and sickly sentimentalism could have nothing in common with her. They would think her masculine and unwomanly, and she in return would look upon them with contempt. Thus she would be driven to cast off more and more the restraints of ordinary society, and would acquire eccentricities of manner, and an apparent hardness and coldness, which in time might become real. Those geniuses, on the other hand, who were cast in a [p. 364→] gentler mould, would do as their companions did—give up thought, and write, like Mrs. Hemans, sweet and graceful poems, which might live in the hearts of mankind, though exerting no powerful influence on their actions. It must not be supposed that native genius would burst through these restrictions, and live on in spite of them, and that therefore no injury would be done. A course of injudicious training can undoubtedly convert a race of men into mere lapdogs and puppies, and every cause which acts upon the mind of a nation will modify the quality of the intellect originally bestowed upon its children. Thus, till within the last few years, our lady poets have been triflers rather than workers. They are now beginning to take a part in showing forth all social wrongs and oppressions, a duty for which, by their deeper sensibilities, they are so much better fitted than men. We have ample proof of what they can accomplish in “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” and Mrs. Browning’s “Cry of the Children.”
How common is that affectation which would have women seem ignorant of the world of sin and shameful crime which lies but half concealed in our streets. Mrs. Browning flings away this fastidiousness, and dares to look upon things plainly as they are—to use coarse words when necessary, sooner than leave unsaid what she wishes: and why should she not? The best of men have done it in their writings, and none will dare to insinuate that their purity has suffered a stain. The only instance we can remember of her falling into real indelicacy is in “Lord Walter’s Wife.” We believe that amidst the enlightenment of the nineteenth century, ladies are becoming far different from what they were, and we may hope ere long to see others as great or even greater than her whose works we are now considering. The old educational system had taught that the sexes have distinct and different spheres of action, and that neither may intrude into the place assigned to the other. Our authoress, on the contrary, insists upon the independence of woman, and on her ability to become, without loss of proper delicacy, an efficient worker in the world of mind.
A general tone of sadness pervades Mrs. Browning’s poetry. As we read there is a constant feeling that the writer is one weary of the world. This is not apparently from disappointment or pressure of any great grief, still less from cynicism or unbelieving despair. Every page evinces a deep-felt love for man, as well as a heart at rest with God. The sadness is of that far nobler cast, peculiar to higher and unworldly natures, and which in part constitutes the melancholy so often attributed to poets. It arises from the constant presence of an ideal, which, though originally gained amidst the contemplation of earthly things, makes all the glory of earth look pale. It teaches its possessor that nothing is good but perfection, and makes him unwilling to [p. 365→] seek his happiness where all is imperfect and consequently linked with pain. It teaches him to look with indifference on that he already is or has accomplished, and to rejoice rather in what he may be, in the future instead of in the past. And still more if he has learnt his highest lesson, it leads him to find his great delight in the contemplation of perfect goodness, and in seeking fully to perform the will of God. Others may need to be warned of the transiency of earthly pleasures, but not so he. He knows, from their starving his higher faculties, that they can yield no abiding satisfaction. Hence his hopes are fixed upon a better world, he regards this as one of disappointment and trial, and is apt to look down upon it with weariness and contempt, longing only to fly away to his eternal home. But this feeling, like all others in excess, is wrong. Our Kingsleys and Carlyles are teaching us a lesson of cheerfulness and content, that a healthy satisfaction should be felt in doing our duty, apart from the hope of future reward. Besides, if we have souls for the next world, we have also bodies which belong to the present. Every creature below us in the scale takes pleasure in existence, in spite of pain, and so ought we to do, as the highest of the animal race. It is true that our position may render this duty difficult, but a duty notwithstanding it must remain. The monks of the middle ages threw away the good things of life as snares and objects of scorn, but the voice of our reformed Christianity tells us that herein they did not well. Our pattern is the Son of Man, who, bearing the sins and woes of a whole race, could eat and drink with the others, and lend his presence to cheer the wedding feast. But how strenuously does Mrs. Browning insist upon the constant sadness of Christ—
And those who loved him said he wept,
None ever said he smiled.
The same might be affirmed of any other Scripture character. And in that most beautiful poem, “The Virgin Mary and the Child Jesus,” we are told of the sorrowful aspect of the babe, as if his face could express a foretaste of the suffering which after years should bring. It is true that there are periods in the world’s history, as well as in that of the individual, when sadness must be the pervading tone of mind. But in general it should not be so. The too habitual melancholy and rapt indifference to earthly concerns of some of the best Christians, has led many to consider religion a gloomy thing, which cannot be accepted without leaving and despising the real good of the present. Thus mischief is done on the one hand by conforming to the world, and on the other by those far nobler who look down upon [p. 366→] it with too much sadness. And this is the case with Mrs. Browning. The drama of the “Exiles,” her earliest poem, perhaps gave promise of a higher excellence than she ever actually attained. It exhibits our first parents after the Fall, when their path lies on into the dreary wilderness of earth, and the flaming sword which guards their lost Paradise waves behind them. Satan, not like him whom Milton painted—that majestic and God-defiant angel, who could sympathize with the innocence retaining, indeed, some faded remnant of departed nobleness and beauty, and now and then visibly pierced with the agonizing sadness of his fate. Milton’s Eve exhibits woman rather in her character of dependence, her feeling towards Adam being that of weakness towards protecting strength. In the Eve of the “Exiles,” we are more impressed by the depths of that tenderness and love which overwhelms her with grief at the thought of the ruin she has brought upon her beloved husband.
The grandest passage is that in which Christ appears leading up the death steed into Jehovah’s presence, where it is stricken by the eye-glance of Deity and expires. But the poem is everywhere marred by the fanciful and discordant imagery so common in Mrs. Browning’s writings, and by the introduction of uncouth scientific words. Most ludicrous expressions are employed in the most solemn passages, and apparently with a complete unconsciousness of their effect. These are the words with which Christ leads the death steed into the awful presence of his Father:—
Look out! O Jehovah, to this I bring before thee,
I with hand nail-pierced, I who am thy Son.
Possibly the sublimest poetry might admit of being regarded in a ludicrous point of view, but if good poetry excites ludicrous ideals, the fault lies with the reader. In a case like this, however, no one can refrain from laughing to find at the climax of a most magnificent passage an expression which would only befit a cabman shouting to a passenger in danger of being run over.
“The Seraphim,” though inferior as a whole, contains, undoubtedly, some fine painting. What a picture of those three black crosses surrounded by the dark and rolling crowd, from which surges up the yell of scornful voices, and at intervals the agonized utterances of the expiring and God-forsaken Christ, viewed at a distance by the hovering angels, as two stars might look through a rent in the clouds upon the billows of an angry sea! But the needless lingering of the two angels when ordered to descend to earth, their somewhat tedious conversation, and [p. 367→] their impossible state of mind at sight of the Crucifixion, horrified and sympathizing, yet painless because incapable of pain: these are serious faults. And though we are sensible of the majestic pathos of the scene which shows the sun pale in mid-heaven, and the darkness spread over the dumb and horror-stricken earth, yet that convulsion when the Saviour had expired, which tore her trembling frame, and startled the dead from their tombs, is but feebly described.
The “Vision of Poets” is a piece more nearly perfect. Mrs. Browning often annoys us by a restless striving to say something grand, which generally either perplexes us from its obscurity, or else is out of place. She also too frequently wants the calmness of the artist, and his superiority to the emotion he depicts. Few of her works have less of these faults than the present. There is occasionally a simile which would be better away, but as a whole the language and unity are exquisite. The aim is to tender our authoress’s conception of a true, heaven-gifted bard, and of the spirit in which he will do his work among men. He cannot rest upon his bed, and walks out into the woods in the still beauty of the moonlight. It is an hour when all living things are wrapped in slumber, and the world is given up to the poet, to people it as he will with the creations of his brain. At such an hour the imagination awakens into unusual activity, and all things assume an unreal, dreamlike character, which makes any romantic event seem probable, and gives us at once the key-note of the strain. As he walks on there accosts him a lady of wondrous beauty, mounted on a snow-white steed, who tells him she has come to crown all poets according to their worth. Mournfully he complains of their low esteem among men, but she reminds him that her crown will reward true worth, and that only. There is no lamentation over the griefs. She has come to impart new truths to him as to his calling. When once he has seen its dignity, all its attendant sadness and trials will sink into insignificance. What a description is that of the journey through the forest, and the emergence on the open moorland, where “beneath the large Heaven-heart, bare with night,” lie the four emblematic pools! The silence and beauty of the moonlight seem everywhere to charm the poem and to harmonize its language. But how very noticeable this is here. The words seem to express those faint sounds heard occasionally amidst the most perfect stillness, as well as those sound which the mind instinctively connects with certain appearances. The starlight falling tremulously on water indicates the rhyming syllables in the couplet:—
Upon the pool where javelin like
The star-rays quiver while they strike. [p. 368→]
Whenever, too, we look upon the unclouded face of the starry heavens, we cannot but feel how exquisitely its silent voice is expressed by the words:—
Until they came from dark to light,
And from the forest to the sight
Of the large Heaven-heart, bare with night,
A fiery throb in every star, &c.
This is what the ancients meant by the music of the spheres. The introduction of the first pool prevents too great suddenness of transition from the real to the allegorical. As he drinks he is bid to “be holy and cold.” And as he tastes of the last pool, or “World’s Cruelty,” he falls into a swoon, in which he sees the vision. He stands in the aisle of a grand old church; and the altar is before him, and from it the incense steams are rising, and filling the place with a misty light. Beside the altar is an organ playing; and behind it is a mighty angel. And as he looked there rose before him the faces of a pale yet life-like company, whose brows were bound with laurel; and he saw that they were departed poets. There they stood in the silence, all, and yet not many beyond count who had sacrificed their lives as prophets of truth and beauty. We may not linger over the magnificent portraiture—Homer, Sophocles, or Æschylus—but one moment let us glance at Lucretius, who is perhaps the most grandly delineated of any:—
Lucretius, nobler than his mood,
Who dropped his plummet down the broad,
Deep universe, and said, “No God.”
Finding no bottom, he denied
Divinely the Divine, and died
Chief poet on the Tiber side.
By grace of God; his face is stern
As one compelled in spite of scorn
To teach a truth he would not learn.
How skilful is the management of the verse in this instance. In many of the portraits the three-lined stanzas have proved inconvenient, because not long enough to complete the likeness, which had to break into a second stanza, and then the effect was marred and disturbed. Here, on the contrary, the form of verse is the source of much additional power. Thus we read, “Broad, deep universe.” The force of these words is doubled by the end of the line necessitating a pause between the two adjectives, so that the breadth and depth are each, as it were, weighed separately in the mind. Furthermore, Lucretius having thus mea- [p. 369→] sured the universe, has determined that no God is there. He has forced down the idea of a Deity—crushed it beneath his feet. There is no more God. When “he denied divinely the Divine, and died chief poet of the Tiber side,” we feel that he did so by his own power, and that the work of life had been done in his own strength, unassisted by and in defiance of a God. This effect is produced by the necessary pause at the end of the verse. Then suddenly as we resume our reading we find there was something omitted. “By grace of God.” What a marked change of idea is produced by these words thus placed; like the sunlight of dawn irradiating the darkness of a mountain world, and that dawn the work of an instant. God’s power is asserted where we had least expected it. But some of the portraits are failures. Dante here is not the man pointed at in the street as the man who had been in hell. And can Mrs. Browning really have read Ben Jonson, often one of the filthiest and most immoral writers in our literature, and yet talk of the time when the “world was worthy of such men”? We have in this poem an allegorical representation of the process by which the poet’s heart is purified and changed. We see him at first high-minded and thoughtful, but yet self-seeking, like others. He is, therefore, restless and disturbed in spirit. But he is made to taste of the cruelty and deceitfulness of earth, he communes with his brethren, the illustrious dead, and looks in visionary thought upon the unseen world, and learns high truths of God. And so he at length comes to feel what the angel has told him, that the poet’s work, in large measure, resembles that of the Redeemer; he must sacrifice himself for the benefit of mankind, to lead them through beauty to all moral excellence. In the light of such an idea how contemptible appeared that fantastic company who came at the angel’s bidding, and wished to make poetry the means of attaining earthly renown. The conclusion brings before us a morning of sunshine and dew, when white-clothed children are standing in the wood, plucking the palm-branches. The moment’s frightened laugh just shows how profound the calm. From one who seems the chief we learn that the poet is dead, and palms are required for his tomb. Did he foresee any such honour? The child cannot tell; he had never thought about this while standing beside the dying bard, near whom a friend’s hand had laid the offering of a simple flower. Childlike himself, the poet has been able to communicate his lofty-thoughtedness to a child. What a grandeur there is in the absence of lamentation, as if all instinctively felt that the departed did not belong here! In the last scene we behold him lowly and imperfect, as he would appear in his own eyes, [p. 370→] because of the grand ideal ever before him. Now we look upon him glorified, as he would seem in the eyes of the world, and especially when he was gone. There is no contempt for human love; he passed away in a kiss, and he turned to ask for that kiss after his latest prayer. And now we learn that the child is the poet’s son, who must support his father’s fame amongst men, and teach them to love the poet, without which his works can do little good. The tears which roll down his cheeks seem more of glory than lamentation. Then, at last, we remember the weakness of the little one. “Is he not too young and tender for this orphanage?” Why, that is the very truth which has been set forth all along. Earth is too hard for the childlike and tender of feeling, as it was for the poet himself, and they must suffer; but thus is knowledge gained. He was an orphan, but we cannot here have all we want, for life is only “perfected by death.”
The “Poet’s Vow,” though a work of great merit, is faulty from indistinctness of the leading thought. A poet has determined to quit mankind, and to pass a solitary life. It is not through grief or disappointment he has formed this resolution. His worldly affairs are prosperous, his friends many, and he is betrothed to a beautiful and affectionate girl; but he looks upon the earth as oppressed and injured by the evil ways of man, and hopes by complete isolation to attain a fuller love for nature, to become, so to speak, a second Adam as yet uncursed. The poem opens at evening, when all hearts, we are told, are rushing together for sympathy after the toils and separation of the day. But the poet sits alone in his hall, wrapped in meditation, which at length he interrupts by the utterance of his vow. His feelings do not entirely coincide with his resolution, for there is no hatred of mankind:—
Hear me forswear man’s sympathies, his pleasant yea and no.
But neither his bosom-friend Sir Rowland, nor even the beautiful Rosalind, can awaken a trace of emotion, or call up a deeper shade upon his brow. The life he proposes is of a stern, unloving cast; his heart cannot go forth in full sympathy with all creation, after putting away the head of it, to the birds, the flowers, and the joyous open sunshine, but he returns to “Courland Hall alone.”
The bats along the ceilings cling, the lizards on the floors do run,
And storms and years have worn and reft the stain by human builders left
In working at the stone.
The painting of Rosalind is very beautiful, looking [p. 371→]
Upon him silently with her large, doubting eyes,
Like a child who never knew but love, whom words of wrath surprise.
And then her vain attempt to move him, and indignation when he asked her to take his property, and become the bride of Sir Rowland, for those who would cast aside humanity as evil, and try to place it before their minds as all sordid and mercenary at the root.
I thought, but I am half a child, and very sage art thou,
The teachings of the heaven and earth should keep us soft and low.
She has studied nature to more purpose than he. Then Sir Rowland reminds him how the human is linked with the Divine, so that in rejecting the one we must of necessity reject the other too:—
From earth what blessing can be given,
When the spirits seven do show in heaven a man upon the throne?
The whole speech being an expansion of the words, “He who loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, how can he love God whom he hath not seen?” With all man’s faults, if we cannot, in a sense, see God in him, and love him in God’s image, we have no true love for God himself. And the poet more than another should know that evil is the accident and not the essence of our nature, it being his special gift to recognise the ideal and typical everywhere.
Very still and harmonious is the language as we follow the misguided man to his lonely Courland Hall. The passing Christians with their upturned faces of love as they wend their way to the house of prayer, the loving bridegroom and his bride, the innocent child at play—none of these can teach him that humanity is in the main good and holy; he must learn it by a severer lesson. And next we look upon the dying Rosalind. The nurse would open the window and let in the sweet freshness of earth and air; but she cannot bear to behold them, since it was for these that her betrothed had left her. The flowers are to be plucked in the wood where, in childhood, she had played with him, when both were innocent and loving, and therefore in the right spirit for learning of nature. And when she is dead, her corpse is carried away and laid on a bier before her lover’s door. It is night, and the poet comes forth to gaze upon the stars. He has cast away the best of earth in his pride, and yet would flatter himself that he can fitly converse with Heaven. Suddenly the corpse strikes his eye, and, spirit-broken, he falls with a groan upon it. A scroll placed in her mouth tells him how [p. 372→] her deep love had been smitten to death by his cruel blow; how her last breath had been spent in prayer for him; how she had even hated to see the beauties of earth, not from any feeling of scorn, but humbly asking to be forgiven because she cannot endure to look thereon. And thus, even after death, she comes to beseech him to cast away his sinful pride,—
Lest Heaven’s own palm droop in my hand, and pale among the saints I stand
A saint companionless.
What depth of love is here! Rosalind has triumphed; his body lies motionless upon hers, and in the morning, when they approached the bier, “the bier was holding twain.” The imperfection of the piece lies in the poet being represented as abandoning society because things of sense were making too much impression on his mind, and dulling his spiritual vision. There ought, therefore, to have been much difficulty in breaking away from his old connections. But of this we see nothing. He gave up his wealth, his friends, and even Rosalind without the least concern. There was no concealed struggle. His brow, as he sat meditating alone, was “too calm for gentleness.” Some part of this difficulty may be removed by consideration of his peculiar circumstances. His love for Rosalind was not a sudden, violent passion. They had known each other and played together from infancy, and their affection had thus grown up insensibly. Then the poet had reached that period of mental development at which doubt and disturbance enter for a season, as preliminary to the attainment of a deeper and abiding peace. The earth, which he had thought so good, now appears tainted; he sees the evil in man, but has not yet fathomed the deeper truth which the childlike Rosalind feels—that the good exceeds the evil. His love appears to him a part of the boyish nature he has cast aside; he looks on it with a sort of contempt, and thinks he needs it no longer. For Rosalind is a woman, and probably no better than the rest. Reasoning with him was, and would necessarily be, in vain. The way to convince him of his error is by moving his heart, which can only be done by a blow so severe that his strength is insufficient to sustain it. He has rendered himself unfit for doing God’s work in the world; and his soul can only be saved at the price of his body’s destruction.
In “Lady Geraldine’s Courtship” we have a striking picture of the treatment to which many a young genius is exposed when his fame has introduced him into a higher circle than that to which he originally belonged. He has fallen in love with a lady of rank, who [p. 373→] had behaved with greater kindness than the rest, but looks down, he believes, with a contemptuous pity upon his affection. This poem is a letter to his friend, written on a sudden awakening from his dream of love, by a hand trembling with the hurried excitement of mingled passion, humiliation, and torturing despair. The portrait of the lady is drawn with the eager admiration of a lover, whose very indignation at supposed ill-usage seems to vanish when an opportunity arises for dilating on her beauty and perfection. The conclusion shows that she had returned his affection from the first, and raises him to the height of happiness. The poem is an admirable satire upon injuries of that cruel class unrecognised by the general laws of society. The hurried metre, so well suited to the more impassioned part, is scarcely adapted for ordinary quiet conversation, such as that of the company when walking in Lady Geraldine’s garden. The management throughout is very artistic, scenery, society, or whatever else is introduced, serving to throw light upon the character of Geraldine. We see her as a lady of imperial beauty, one who is born to command. Her numerous train of lovers are held completely in awe; yet withal is she so gentle, so true-hearted, and ladylike in feeling, that the humbly-born poet at once is quite at home with her. This union of queenly dignity with the most winning gentleness, is one of the most striking beauties of her character, the dignity being kept continually before us, and yet never once descending with a parade of condescension and kindness which causes the acutest suffering to his sensitive nature. How well is the conversation rendered:—
And they praised me in her presence:—“Will your book appear this summer?”
Then returning to each other—“Yes, our plans are for the moors.”
Then with whisper dropped behind me—“There he is, the latest comer.”
“Oh, she only likes his verses, what is over she endures.”
“Quite low-born, self-educated, somewhat gifted, though, by nature,
And we make a point of asking him, of being very kind.”
While the wrath within is making him cold with scorn, the Lady Geraldine speaks:—
“Have you such superfluous honour, sir, that, able to confer it,
You will come down, Mr. Bertram, as my guest, to Wycombe Hall?”
Mrs. Browning is guilty of many sins of affectation, but this is not amongst the number, as the agitation of the lady’s feelings, and [p. 374→] the conscious effort to appear easy and unmoved while burning with indignation, would naturally occasion this mode of speaking. And now the poet is at rest. Though the lady’s halls are thronged with a high-born company, we see that her authority holds them in check like a spell. He has entered the magic circle to enjoy the pleasures of the wealthy, and, above all, the society of her who is now entrancing his whole soul. Enchanted by the present, he refuses to think of the terrible future he is preparing, and cares only to breathe while he may in that rich atmosphere of delight. It is very foolish, no doubt, but how many would have courage to do otherwise? What a light is thrown upon the character of Geraldine by his perfect ease in her company; how entirely she seems to prevent any sense of inequality from entering his mind. He is chief among the guests while they daily walk with the lady; and at length we hear no more of the others, but they two wander about alone, and sit reading in the woods, or her rich voice awakens the echoes with a song. And so days of happiness pass away. till one morning he hears outside the window the voice of a lord, who is asking the Lady Geraldine to become his bride. She refuses, not with scorn, but with that graceful, easy dignity which knows so well how to maintain itself while rendering exactly what is due to every one.
What he said again I know not; it is likely that his trouble
Worked his pride up to the surface, for she answered in slow scorn,
“And your lordship judges rightly. Whom I marry shall be noble,
Ay, and wealthy, I shall never blush to think how he was born.”
The scorn here flashes up in a moment—it is the right place for it—but there is no trace of littleness or contemptuous resentment. The poet’s day-dream was at an end; he rushed through the door, and poured out before her in a torrent of wild words his love, his fury at his imagined wrong, and his scorn of the conventionalism by which he supposed the lady to be enchained. At length he has finished.
Could you guess what word she uttered? She looked up as if in wonder,
With tears beaded on her lashes, and said, “Bertram!” It was all.
His eyes are so obscured by the bewilderment of passion, that neither the tears nor the familiar name, thus mentioned in his own letter, can convince him of her love. And then he faints exhausted. What a grand comparison of his end to that of a wild [p. 375→] horse dashing through the city, and striking itself dead against the cold still wall of a church! So blindly did he rush against her, sitting there in the dignity of her goodness and beauty. The letter is ended, and then comes a conclusion, a mode of treatment which Mrs. Browning more than ever employs to lead us from the tumult of passion to final repose and rest. He finds that the lady has loved him all along, and that the wealth and nobility she had spoken of were the wealth and nobility of virtue.
It has been asserted on good authority that the “Lady Geraldine’s Courtship” was written in the incredibly short space of twelve hours, to complete a volume for the publisher. This unusual facility was the bane of our authoress. When Tennyson was younger his execution was slow, careful, and laborious; we find his pieces short, simple, and repeatedly altered in the successive editions of his works. Mrs. Browning, on the contrary, with the exception of “Aurora Leigh,” wrote her longest poems when very young; one, eighty pages in length, at ten years of age; a translation of the “Prometheus Vinctus” at fifteen; and but a little later the drama of “The Exiles.” This too easy flow of language is a mischief to anyone. When ideas struggle slowly into expression, they act with greater force upon the words, their effective heat is increased like that of pent-up fire. But writers like our authoress and Mr. Ruskin, who have too ready a command of words, are apt to become intoxicated, and carried away by the superabundance of the supply. They are tempted to use high-sounding language for its own sake, and to run on into such unmeaning grandiloquence as we see here and there in the fifth volume of “Modern Painters,” and frequently in Mrs. Browning.
Perhaps never has the cause of injured humanity been pleaded with more moving and exquisite pathos than in the “Cry of the Children.” It is one of those utterances which are heard when the loftiest spirits amongst us are stirred to the depths, when their indignation at the wrong is almost quenched in pity and tears for the suffering. And it were well if men would listen and take warning, for if so terrible the cry of the oppressed when uplifted by a feeble human tongue, what will it be when the tyrant is accused in the judgment by the voice of those guardian angels who always stand before the face of the Father in heaven? The plaintive, lamenting tones of young children, low, musical, but crushed down into monotony by the grinding pressure of cruel suffering, are heard in every line of this poem. It is as if they were making an attempt to sing it in a low plaintive murmur, for the words seem to come to us in singing as we read. All other young things in creation are at play—the lambs, the fawns, and the birds; but down the children’s cheeks the bitter tears are flowing, [p. 376→] and their mother can give no solace. You ask them why they are weeping:—
Your old earth, they say, is very dreary,
Our young feet, they say, are very weak,
Few paces have we taken, yet are weary,
Our grave rest is very far to seek.
From the first moment that a young child’s eyes open on the world, nature wishes him to be taught that life is a joyous and a gladsome thing. Every sight, feeling, and sound stimulate his curiosity, and furnish a source of pleasure. It is the time when he should learn to make a free, full use of his energies by finding that his enjoyment is always proportionate to his activity. In this way his inborn attachment to existence is strengthened, and is perhaps never more really powerful than now. For the timid, miserly grasp with which the old man clings to his few remaining days is not for a moment to be compared with that healthy animation and glowing hope which makes the present an unceasing source of delight, and clothes with the rainbow hues of its superabundant glory the prospects of the future. Casual troubles, of course, will come, but their influence is intended to be slight, and the elastic spirit of a child can recover from a heavy blow. The young man who is just beginning to think and to experience greater troubles, may for a time consider this earth as an evil place, and perhaps it is better so, but even here this feeling should be only temporary. Nothing can be more terrible than the cry which Mrs. Browning has placed in the mouths of the children grown old before their time, and spirit-crushed by an ever present weight of woe which cannot be shaken off, who, instead of life and pleasure, are longing only for the grave, and mourn that its rest “is so very far to seek.” They look into the grave of one who has died before her time. What is their first remark? There was no room “for any work in the close clay.” It is dreadful for work to be the one haunting idea in the children’s minds, connecting itself with every object upon which they look, and even overcoming their natural awe of death! They know nothing about spirits happy in heaven, but think of the grave as a place of rest, where they may sleep and be undisturbed.
From the sleep wherein she lieth none will wake her,
Crying, “Get up, little Alice, it is day.” …
And merry go her moments, lulled and stilled in
The shroud by the kirk chime.
A child who should love activity and restlessness, looking upon such fearful rest as this, and calling it “merry”! Then you tell them to play:— [p. 377→]
Go out, children, from the mine and from the city,
Sing out, children, as the little thrushes do,
Pluck your handful of the meadow cowslips pretty,
Laugh aloud to feel your fingers let them through.
But their only idea of these cowslips is formed from the black, wretched weeds which grow beside the mine, and they ask to be let alone in absolute dread of those pleasures so delightful to a healthy child which would be to their wearied frames only another kind of work. Sleep, sleep is their one wish. Those who are compelled to live in the large manufacturing towns, like Birmingham or Leeds, and still more those who have passed through such accursed spots as Tipton and other like places in the coal districts, will know how utterly impossible it is fast becoming for any poet to rise up there amongst the labouring classes, from mere absence of all which could call forth his perception of the beautiful. And when we consider how conducive is a love of nature to morality and religion, we cannot help seeing that here is everything which can render man utterly depraved and degrade him into a mere piece of mechanism. The coal districts are in fact notorious for want of refinement, and brutality. And now we see the children as it were yoked in contest with the fearful machinery, their soft weak limbs compelled to keep pace with the hard unpitying iron, ever rushing and hurrying on. If for one moment they might but know what silence is, or touch each other and feel that there is other life besides that of machinery, life which can sympathize with them! How can you tell them to pray, when all around is teaching them that no one cares for their misery, the human beings passing without noticing their sobs, unheard amid that incessant roar.
Is it likely God, with angels singing round him,
Hears our weeping any more?
They know but two words of prayer—[“]Our Father,” spoken softly as a charm when they go to rest. And they are told that his image is the master who keeps them at work, and from him they must acquire their idea of a Supreme Being. How is it likely that God will pity them! Slaves, martyrs, age-worn before their time, orphans of earthly love and of heavenly (we employ Mrs. Browning’s expressions), what is left for them but to weep?
In “Isabel’s Child,” though a fine poem, the spirit of the infant, which appeared in the vision, talked too much about “finite” and “infinite,” and other such hard matters; the language of the “Cry of the Children,” on the contrary, is for the most part beautifully simple. [p. 378→]
“Bertha in the Lane” is an example of that secret, uncomplaining, almost Divine self-sacrifice which we recognise as especially characteristic of woman. It is not that we never find it in men, for “Enoch Arden” is a noble instance to the contrary, but the feminine nature is more forward to yield, to give way and adapt itself to circumstances, to work for those who, as is the case with children, are unconscious of the love and care bestowed. Man’s kindness is rather shown when some outward recognition of it is possible, and he is framed more to control and to command.
The story of the poem is a very simple one. Robert, at first betrothed to the elder sister, whose calm grave beauty had attracted him, is afterwards carried away by the irresistible charms of the younger and more brilliant Bertha. The sisters’ attachment to each other remains as strong as ever, but the elder is pining away and dying from neglect.
The short story, with all its details, is admirably brought out in the poem. The sick girl goes to her death-bed at noon, having just completed the wedding gown which she intends as a last present to her sister. The work of the day finished, and the weariness she expresses at the early hour, typify the fact that, though it is yet morning, the labour of life is ended. She has not only forgiven Bertha, but endeavours to conceal her own suffering, and to sympathize with her sister’s coming happiness. It is not a sudden death, but that slow drooping which leads so gradually to the end, that there can be no surprise, and sorrow is felt by the survivors in its mildest form. What a subdued sweet tone rests upon the whole picture, the two sisters of such different temperaments, the one so bright and animated, the other so gentle and grave! For the quiet cheerfulness of the invalid kindles almost into joy at the near approach of death, which casts a tearful cloud over the lively animation of Bertha, and the two characters seem more really alike from the medium through which we view them. And still more is this the case towards the close, when the cloud is penetrated with light, and the dying girl is filled with rapture, and Bertha’s tears are dried amidst a holy calm, and all darkness and sorrow disappear in the white still radiance of approaching heaven. The composition throughout is eminently artistic, the sorrow is never unrelieved so as to be painful to contemplate, and the minor details are worked in with admirable skill.
Mrs. Browning has also exercised the higher faculties of the poet, in giving life to the mere abstractions of history. The Virgin Mary is to many of us little more than a name, or perchance a half-angelic face looking down from some beautiful Italian picture. We seldom think of her even as she is represented in Scripture, as one for virtue and goodness highly favoured among women. From this dim unreal [p. 379→] existence Mrs. Browning has called her into life. In the “Virgin Mary and the Infant Jesus” we see her maiden face as she walks in lonely thought among the midnight hills of Galilee; and watch the workings of her heart as she presses the Holy Child to her bosom with mingled reverence, adoration, and deep maternal love. How little had we before considered the large share of agony that mother bore in sympathy with the pains which wrought the redemption of the world, or that consciousness, stronger than in any other human being, that the Saviour was really of the same flesh with her!
Much good thought and felicity of expression may be found among the Sonnets. But sonnets are seldom easy reading, and these are no exception. In the first place, nothing can be more tedious than the perusal of a number of short pieces of any kind. The want of continuity involves a constant effort on beginning afresh to get a general idea of what the new poem is about, without which it is impossible to appreciate it. Then the rapid change makes it difficult for any strong or distinct impression to remain after laying the book aside. Besides, the necessary brevity is apt to render the construction obscure and involved. Mrs. Browning is not usually distinguished by clearness and intelligibility; indeed, to judge from certain passages in “Aurora Leigh,” she looks upon too readable poetry with a sort of contempt. No wonder, therefore, that her Sonnets are hard to be understood. The three finest, perhaps, and those at least simple enough, are upon the “Two Sayings” of Scripture, the one being “Jesus wept,” the other “When the Christ denied and scorned looked upon Peter.” We really think these among the most beautiful things we ever read. The words, “Jehovah at the Judgment call,” remind us how seldom people think of the meek deserted Christ as identical with the stern-seeming and awful God of the Old Testament, whose glory was too terrible to behold. How much new meaning that look now has for us, and what can be more touching than the Saviour’s words to Peter:—
“For when thy final need is dreariest,
Thou shalt not be denied as I am here;
My voice to God and angels shall attest,
Because I know this man, let him be clear.”
To shed light thus upon the beauty of an undeveloped thought, and to bring out its full significance, is one of the highest excellences of the poet.
We pass on to “Aurora Leigh,” the work on which Mrs. Browning’s fame will chiefly rest. The reader who comes to it after perusal of her other writings will be delighted at the change. Much of the old obscurity is gone; what remains is confined to [p. 380→] similes and reflections, which are apart from the main track of the story, and may be passed over without detriment to the general effect. The style is energetic and condensed, strikingly pictorial, and as highly fanciful as before. We are absolutely astonished at the vast compass and sudden changes, the rapid spirited narration; now flashing up with brilliant and telling sarcasms, and then carrying us away to the sublimest heights of passion and poetry.
Some critics have asserted that “Aurora Leigh” would have been best given in the form of a plain prose novel. We do not think so. The difference between prose and verse is certainly not so marked as many would seem to imagine. All prose is to some extent metrical, as we feel in our dislike to a lame or ill-balanced sentence. It differs from verse chiefly in the lower pitch and greater irregularity of the measure. But as the passion of the writer rises, his language will become more and more metrical, and at length will pass into something much resembling verse, or, as we term it, “prose poetry.” We cannot help perceiving that prose is scarcely adapted for the highest flights of the imagination, when acquired knowledge is vanishing, and appearances alone are realities. Look, for example, at the following lines from “Aurora Leigh”:—
And, with force
As passionate as fear, she tore her hands
Like lilies from the rocks, from hers and his,
And sprang down, bounded headlong down the steep,
Away from both—away, if possible
As far as God—away! They yelled at her,
As famished hounds at a hare. She heard them yell;
She felt her name hiss after her from the hills
Like shot from guns. On, on! And now she had cast
The voices off with the uplands. On! Mad fear
Was running in her feet and killing the ground;
The white roads curled as if she burnt them up,
The green fields melted, wayside trees fell back
To make room for her. Then her head grew vexed,
Trees, fields, turned on her, and ran after her;
She heard the quick pants of the hills behind,
Their keen air pricked her neck. She had lost her feet,
Could run no more, yet, somehow, went as fast;
The horizon, red ’twixt steeples in the east,
So sucked her forward, forward, while her heart
Kept swelling, swelling, till it swelled so big
It seemed to fill her body; then it burst,
And overflowed the world, and swamped the light,
“And now I am dead and safe,” thought Marian Erle—
She had dropped, she had fainted. [p. 381→]
Perhaps it would be difficult to select from modern poetry a more splendid example of the higher work of the imaginative faculty, than is given us here. It is in passages like these that Mrs. Browning’s great genius chiefly manifests itself, and in prose they would be altogether impossible. A writer so fervid and impassioned would be stripped of half her power; and, besides, we should be more keenly alive to the improbabilities and faulty construction of the story.
We now proceed to glance at the general scope of the poem: Little Mattie, happy in heaven, and conscious of her own superiority, would look down with a “grand contempt” upon her mother still burdened with the troubles of the world. And there we are told is the sting of it. Could we know the reality it would “make a woman mad outright.” “Michael with the sword” would be less terrible to mothers than their own dead darlings.
This is a fair specimen of the faults of the last volume. Instead of the fancies of the earlier poetry, disfiguring thoughts which are otherwise true and beautiful, there is great simplicity of style and diction, but the leading ideas have become fantastic, outrageous, or unnatural. Perhaps Mrs. Browning’s lowest depth was the “Casa Guidi Windows.” He must be indeed a hardy explorer or an unscrupulous admirer who has patience to follow the thread of that intolerable poem. As for ourselves, we have once perused it, and the impression we received was such that no inducement, short of escape from some urgent bodily torture, could bring us to renew the attempt. Though not more than some seventy pages in length, the moments spent in reading seem hours; and we venture to assert, that once read it can never be forgotten. We were going to say that it tells us something about Italy and the entrance of the Austrian troops, but it is not worthwhile to proceed. That long desert waste, with it fogs and quicksands, and deep morasses, and absolute unintelligibility, had better remain uninterred, a monument of what lamentable prostration can overtake even a genius like that of our author.
Few questions have excited more attention in the present century than that of the best means for the reformation of the poor. One large class of thinkers have held that our principal endeavours should be directed to the amelioration of their outward circumstances. Let them have proper food and employment, and be taught to live clean and orderly, and the reformation will be well-nigh accomplished. Religion will come in afterwards, and all will be as we could wish. The liberty and equality ideas of the French Revolution period have had their influence upon this class of theorists. Able writers have suggested that rich men should abandon rank and station, and come down to live and labour with the common people. By thus [p. 382→] showing their sympathy and recognition of the brotherhood of all humanity, they would materially assist in effecting the desired change. This is the reformation from without. First set right the body, and the mind will follow. The main purpose of “Aurora Leigh” is to show the fallacy of such principles, and the mischiefs which would result from the attempts of any reformer who should wish his inferiors to submit to his plans, while professing to treat them as equals. It is here that we see in its full grandeur Mrs. Browning’s idea of the dignity of the poet’s mission. She believes, as every Christian should, that all true change must commence within. When men have been taught to look upon the unseen, to know that the things of most importance are beyond sense, when their hearts have been changed by cultivation of their sympathies and affections, and especially by belief in redemption through Christ, then, and not till then, will they rise to better things, and outward improvement may be expected to follow. Now, to lead to Aurora’s early life. While yet under her aunt’s roof, her cousin Romney had made her an offer of marriage. As Aurora typifies the poet, one of God’s chief agents in reforming the world by raising the mind to loftier ideas, so is Romney the representative of those who believe that everything may be done by amendment of the outward condition. He is a wealthy and talented young man, of good family, generous and noble-hearted. There is no conventionalism in him. Whatever he thinks right he will do unflinchingly at all costs. Duty, as dictated by a large and loving spirit, is the law of his life. And here he falls into error, for not satisfied with making it his grand aim to do good, he would even have duty suggest the path which his affections are to follow. He attempts to be independent of his feelings, and to talk and act as though he had none. It was thus that he afterwards wished to marry Marian Erle, not for love, but to obtain a suitable helpmate in his work, and to set a good example by breaking through the distinctions of rank and caste. And here was one cause of his refusal by Aurora Leigh. She admired him, as she admired all else that was great and noble. She sympathized with his passion for reform, and felt that he was a being vastly superior to her aunt. Beyond this she really loved him, though her affection was dormant, and as yet unknown to herself; but where another would have talked of affection, he spoke of duty; she wanted love. He asked her to become a fellow-worker and assistant in his plans, and, as she thought, a mere wheel in the machinery which he had constructed. Her mind was full of the lofty aspirations of the poet; she felt herself gifted to speak to men’s hearts, and considered this the great agency of reform. Romney looked upon her plans and [p. 383→] hopes as an idle dream, wished her to leave this trifling, as he called it, and to lend a helping hand in forwarding his schemes. The result was inevitable; before they could be united each had a lesson to learn. Romney was refused, and they parted. Years had passed away. Aurora, cast upon the world, had risen rapidly to fame; the edifice of Romney’s schemes had crumbled from the inherent rottenness of the material. Those whom he sacrificed everything to relieve had turned against him, hating the restraints which compelled them to abandon vice. His ancestral mansion had been burnt in a mutiny, and his eyesight lost in the catastrophe. Once more the cousins met; both had undergone a change. Romney was convinced of the impracticability of his schemes, and owned that Aurora in the main was right. She, on the other hand, acknowledged that she had trusted too much in what man can do, and too little in the influence of God. Our work has to be done, but results must be left with him. And the cousins can now agree, for Romney has learnt from Aurora’s writings a juster appreciation of the powers of woman, and confesses that passionate love which had before been under wrong ideas of duty.
We cannot help regretting that Mrs. Browning’s genius should have been lavished so much upon fragmentary efforts, instead of being concentrated upon larger and more imperishable works. There is much good poetry in the last two volumes, which posterity will undoubtedly leave, because in a form not compact enough to carry. In the after stages of her career, the powers of our authoress underwent a decline. Her later writings in the main are weak and inferior, though there is still undoubted evidence of genius. How feeble, for instance, are the songs about Italy, besides being crowded with political allusions often but half intelligible. One of the simpler and more beautiful is the “Forced Recruit.” The very subjects of the poems in the last volume are frequently odd and farfetched. We may instance “Lord Walter’s Wife,” which we have already censured on the score of indelicacy. “Little Mattie” is written to a mother whose daughter, thirteen years of age, is just dead. Most people would have dwelt upon the hope of final reunion in heaven, but not so Mrs. Browning. She tells the mother how completely she is now severed from the lost one. Yesterday they were united in affection, now the child lies a mute and pallid corpse. But could those lips again use human language, what comforting words would they speak to that sorrow-stricken heart! Nothing of the kind!—
She would answer like the Son!
What is now ’twixt thee and me?
Dreadful answer, better none. [p. 384→]
The thoughts of poetry, star-like, should be about it. The great poet does not spend life in executing microscopic copies of the small parts of nature. He makes the universe the scaffold for his ideal. He fills the world with thoughts on pilgrimage to build shrines of his own, as well as to visit those which time has consecrated. It is the office of his art, not merely to show to the mind its workings, to hold up to the reader a reflexion of his own feeling, but also to display before him things that by no other means could be revealed—wonders of which otherwise he would never have dreamed. Hence its power to ennoble and instruct. To cut off from poetry this, its high province, is to confound it with metaphysics, and to convert it into the genius which wields the dissecting knife in place of the flaming sword. Metaphysics shows man what he is, poetry what he is and what he should be; the one classifies his powers, the other educates them. The poet not only portrays nature, but strives after an ideal excellence, not contrary to, but combined from and founded on that which is real. While limning the earth fairly, he carries us to imagined regions beyond it, measures mortal capabilities, not only as they are, but as they will be, and shows us religion and virtue somewhat as they appear in their own country, as well as here, in their less worthy place of sojourning.
It has ever been a part of the province of imagination to bridge with its rainbow those spaces which science has failed to fill up with any certain knowledge. But if it be true that the more we know the more we discern the extent of the unknown, there can be no reason to fear that the triumphs of science will really diminish the domain of the poetical. These two sources of influence, like spiritual and providential dispensations of the Divine Being, are formed to work in separateness, but not in hostility. Time, while opening to us many of the doors of mystery, points to yet more beyond them, of which he still holds the key.
[Hannah Lawrance]
Reviewed:
Poems (EBB), 5th ed., London: Chapman & Hall, 1862.
Last Poems (EBB), 2nd ed., London: Chapman & Hall, 1862.
Aurora Leigh (EBB), 4th ed., London: Chapman & Hall, 1859.
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