R410500B. Pippa Passes.
The Monthly Review, May 1841, pp. 95–99.
As reprinted in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 5, 392–393.
[The review deals with three other titles; we give here only those comments relating to Pippa Passes.]
“Bells and Pomegranates” marks an epoch, as the French say, in the history of literary publication in England. In no previous instance, we believe, has a poet put forth his first edition in that cheap form, in which so many interesting reprints have been given to the public by Messrs. Moxon, Smith, Whittaker and others. The author tells us that the number before us is meant for the first of a series of Dramatical Pieces, to come out at intervals, and “I amuse myself,” he says, “in fancying that the cheap mode in which they appear will for once help me to a sort of pet-audience again.” We heartily wish success to his experiment, for surely he has large claims on our sympathies, who, with high poetic endowments, and a fervent desire to influence through his art the thoughts, feelings and characters of his fellow men, yet finds his lot cast on these gloomy days for poetry, in which so few are they who will pause to listen to the voice of the charmer. The plan of the poem is singular. The opening scene introduces us at daybreak to the sorry chamber of Peppa [sic], one of those pale maids of Asolo in the Trevesan, whose
Twelvemonth toil,
Is wearisome silkwinding, coil on coil,
at the moment when she is debating with herself how she shall spend the opening New Year’s Day, her one sole annual holiday. She will wander wherever the changing hours may lead, through [p. 96→] meadow and wood, and by the habitations of men, indulge her human sympathies as she watches, but judge not their doings, and for once delight her fancy by imagining herself each one of all those beings of her little world who think so little of the poor girl from the silk-mills, nor dream that her slighted existence can have any bearing on their own destiny. The proud voluptuous Ottima and her paramour, the enthusiastic artist and his fair Greek bride, the fond mother and her son, high in soul but weak and visionary in intellect, and the pious bishop who comes that night to bless the house, and pray for the soul’s repose of his dead brother; all these she will look on, and be in fancy each of them in turn. Then follow four scenes, morning, noon, evening, and night, in which these individuals are set before us, scenes which would be altogether detached from each other were they not connected by the agency of the silk-girl, whose snatches of song, heard from without, fall like oracles upon the ears of the already passion-wrought listeners, give to their wavering feelings a decisive bias, and produce the climax of each scene. Thus Peppa’s passings, apparently of such trivial moment, are really seen to be the moving causes of effects incalculable, and the moral of her New Year’s hymn is wrought out:—
All service ranks the same with God:
If now, as formerly he trod
Paradise, God’s presence fills
Our earth, and each but as God wills
Can work—God’s puppets, best and worst,
Are we; there is no last nor first.
Say not a small event! Why small?
Costs it more pain this thing ye call
A great event should come to pass
Than that! Untwine me, from the mass
Of deeds that make up life, one deed
Power shall fall short in or exceed!”
The poem, as will readily be surmised from this analysis of it, is fragmentary, and perhaps the consciousness of this has insensibly acted on the author’s mind, and caused that obscurity that offends us in some parts of the poem, particularly in the scene between the artist and his young bride. The very language seems in places fragmentary and enigmatical, not merely from the abstruseness of the thoughts it embodies, but from its own mechanical imperfection. In the lyric parts the ear is often pained by the involved and difficult construction of the words, the awkward breaks, and misplaced pauses. Something of this will have been noticed in the first of the stanzas quoted above. That this defect, however, is but the result of want of care, witness the strange music of this mythic [p. 97→] strain. It is sung by Peppa, and over-heard by Luigi, the enthusiast, and his mother, at the moment when the anxious parent has almost won upon her misguided son to forego his desperate design upon the life of the Austrian despot.
Peppa (without). A king lived long ago,
In the morning of the world,
When earth was nigher heaven than now:
And the king’s locks curled
Disparting o’er a forehead full
As the milk white space ’twixt horn and horn
Of some sacrificial bull—
Only calm as a babe new born:
For he was got to a sleepy mood,
So safe from all decrepitude,
Age with its bane so sure gone by,
(The Gods so loved him while he dreamed)
That, having lived thus long, there seemed
No need the king should ever die.
Luigi. No need that sort of king should ever die!
(Without). Among the rocks his city was:
Before his palace, in the sun,
He sate to see his people pass,
And judge them every one
From its threshold of smooth stone.
They hailed him many a valley thief
Caught in the sheep-pens—robber chief,
Swarthy and shameless—beggar-cheat—
Spy-prowler—or some pirate found
On the sea sand left aground;
Sometimes there clung about his feet
With bleeding lip and burning cheek,
A woman, bitterest wrong to speak
Of one with sullen, thick-set brows:
Sometimes from out the prison house
The angry priests a pale wretch brought,
Who through some chink had pushed and pressed,
Knees and elbows, belly and breast,
Worm like into the temple,—caught
He was by the very God,
Who ever in the darkness strode
Backward and forward, keeping watch
O’er his brazen bowls, such rogues to catch:
These, all and every one
The king judged, sitting in the sun.
Luigi. That king should still judge sitting in the sun.
(Without). His councillors on left and right
Looked anxious up, but no surprize
Disturbed the king’s old smiling eyes,
Where the very blue had turned to white. [p. 98→]
A python passed one day
The silent streets—until he came,
With forky tongue and eyes on flame,
When the old king judged alway;
But when he saw the sleepy hair,
Girt with a crown of berries rare,
The God will hardly give to wear,
To the maiden who singeth dancing bare
In the altar smoke by the pine torch lights,
At his wondrous forest rites,—
But which the God’s self granted him
For setting fire each felon limb
Because of earthly murder done,
Faded till other hope was none;—
Seeing this, he did not dare,
Approach that threshold in the sun,
Assault the old smiling king there.
[Peppa passes.
Luigi. Farewell, farewell—how could I stay? Farewell!
The scene between Ottima (an Italian Lady Macbeth, whom lust has steeled, as ambition did the other,) and her German paramour, Sebald, is too long to extract, and must not be garbled. The following vigorous passage will, however, bear to be detached from the context:—
Otti. Then our crowning night—
Seb. The July night?
Otti. The day of it too, Sebald!
When heaven’s pillars seem o’erbowed with heat,
Its black blue canopy seemed to descend
Close on us both, to weigh down each let each,
And smother up all life except our life.
So lay we till the storm came.
Seb. How it came!
Otti. Buried in woods we lay, you recollect;
Swift ran the searching tempest overhead;
And ever and anon some bright white shaft
Burnt through the pine-tree roof—here burnt and there,
As if God’s messenger thro’ the close wood screen
Plunged and replunged his weapon at a venture,
Feeling for guilty thee and me—then broke
The thunder like a whole sea overhead.—
That universal philanthropy and sentimentality, with “tears of compassion trembling on its eyelids,” are often the disguise of a cold hard heart, has frequently been said, but seldom with more point than in the following passage:— [p. 99→]
If patriotism were not
The earnest virtue for a selfish man
To acquire! he loves himself—and then, the world—
If he must love beyond, but nought between:
As a short-sighted man sees nought midway
His body and the sun above.
And now we must bid farewell to Mr. Browning, thanking him for what he has done, and looking forward to his doing still better; and when he next makes his bow to an audience, assuredly we shall be in the pit.
Reviewed:
Bells & Pomegranates. No. I. Pippa Passes (RB), London: Edward Moxon, 1841.
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