R640402A. Sordello, Strafford, Christmas Eve and Easter Day.
The Round Table, 2 April 1864, pp. 246–248.
Listed in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 31, 337.
Mr. Robert Browning has as much genius as any writer of the time, but few writers have turned their genius to so small account as far as the great mass of readers is concerned. This is owing, it seems to us, to two causes: the natural bent of his genius in an unusual direction, and its determined and often disagreeable willfulness. There is a kind of average comprehension in the world—a limited range of sympathies, and a stereotyped intellectual capacity—which no writer who would reach the world can entirely disregard. The fame of all great writers, and the reputation of many small ones, is owing to their knowledge of this fact, and their willingness to conform to it. The willingness to do this in order to accomplish their end—whether the end be the amusement and instruction of their readers, or their own glory and profit—is a proof of wisdom, and, in a certain sense, of greatness. Men must be taken as they are, not as they might be, and perhaps should be, and so taken they can be moulded almost at will. Homer took the men of his time as he found them, and sang or wrote his epics in a way that they could comprehend, and became as famous then as he is immortal now. Shakespeare took the men of his time as he found them, and, as they demanded plays, wrote plays for them in a way that they could comprehend, winning their applause, and the admiration of the world since. He was as worldly wise, for a dramatist, as Mr. Browning is worldly foolish.
The defect of Mr. Browning’s mind—or its peculiarity, if his admirers prefer to have the sentence turned that way—is its extreme singularity, its unlikeness to the mind of the time. He has, or appears to have, no sympathy with the poetic demands of the general reader, and no compassion for his limited capacities, but an indifference, not to say scorn, of both. He is the most willful, as he is frequently the most obscure of poets.
His genius is essentially dramatic. That is to say, its tendency is to speculate upon man in his relation to himself and others—to trace the workings of his heart and brain, the sweep of his passions, and the drift of his thoughts, under certain conditions and influences, favorable or otherwise, to the laws which govern his being. It is a difficult study to which his genius forces him, and one in which very few have succeeded; none, indeed, not even Shakespeare, in the course which Mr. Browning has marked out for himself, and which he persists in following, no matter whither it lead him. The fault is partly in himself, and partly in his method. He errs at the start in the selection of his themes, which are fre- [p. 247→] quently such as have no dramatic interest, or, what is the same thing to us, seem to have none, owing to our ignorance of them—an ignorance which he takes no pains to enlighten, but the greatest pains to increase. His sympathy with his characters is in excess of his knowledge of them; they affect him for the time being too strongly, possessing him when he should possess them. He occasionally gives us wonderful glimpses of their individuality, but seldom or never presents them as a whole. A few dark hints are all that he vouchsafes to us. It is not so with Shakespeare, who, abounding as he does in similar hints, casts them aside in the prodigality of his nature as things of no moment, and goes on his way rejoicing; not lost like Mr. Browning in the dark abysses of the heart, the mazy windings of the brain, “thorough bush, thorough brier,” but in the broad beaten highway of the world’s actions and thoughts,
As free and general as the casing air.
He selected themes which the meanest of his auditors could understand, mostly those with which they were already acquainted through the medium of old ballads—the chronicle-histories of the time, as Stowe and Hollinshed, and the romances of the Italian story-tellers, who were as familiar to them as the novelists of the day are to us; and he handled these themes intelligibly—so intelligibly, indeed, with such simple truth and naturalness, that it may be doubted whether even the wisest playgoers of the Globe guessed the greatness of the representation which was passing before their eyes. It was too much like nature to seem art; yet it was art, the most marvelous that the world has ever seen. Mr. Browning, however, is not satisfied with it, if we may judge of his opinion from his practice. At any rate the art at which he aims in his dramatic studies is the reverse of this—seeking the subtle instead of the obvious, dealing with processes instead of results, and presenting outlines, or rather silhouettes, instead of finished portraits. It is possible to achieve triumphs in this school of art, as Mr. Browning has shown, but the knowledge and enjoymnet of these triumphs must always be confined to the few who sympathize with the unusual, the difficult, the unattainable. To the many they are
A book shut up, a fountain sealed.
The art of Mr. Tennyson is as narrow, perhaps, as that of Mr. Browning, when compared with Shakespeare’s, but it is of a higher order, it seems to us; at any rate, it is more enjoyable than his great contemporary’s, in that it deals with the Beautiful instead of the Characteristic.
It is curious to trace the growth and changes of Mr. Browning’s mind as exhibited in his different works. He began his poetical career with “Paracelsus,” which was a wonderful work for a young man of twenty-four, and is interesting to us now as indicating the early bent of his genius. Its interest centers around its hero, Paracelsus, who bears abut the same relation to his original, Bombast von Hohenheim—a singular compound of science and quackery, to whom we owe the introduction of laudanum into the pharmacopœia—that Shakespeare’s “melancholy Dane” did to the real Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. The Hamlet problem, indeed, seems to have been before the mind of the young poet when he sat down to write the soul-history of Paracelsus, and he wrought accordingly. The poem cannot be considered successful, though it contains some excellent dramatic touches, but it was worth writing, because it gave Mr. Browning the clue to his genius. His next work was the tragedy of “Strafford,” which was more successful, containing, as it did, two or three subtle studies of character. It was not successful on the stage, however, as might have been foreseen, which probably led the young dramatist to think he had mistaken his vocation; at any rate, it changed the course of his mind for awhile, and occasioned the writing of “Sordello.” We know little of “Sordello’s” reception by the public (if Mr. Browning can be said to have had a public then), but it must have been very unfavorable. At all events, it was a lesson to Mr. Browning, who soon abandoned the field of narrative poetry, and returned to his proper walk of dramatic poetry. For the next six years he was the busiest writer in England, pouring forth in rapid succession a series of dramas which, with all their faults, are the most remarkable that have appeared since Shakespeare’s. He began with “Pippa Passes,” waking at once from his nightmare into the fullest, richest, most passionate life. “Pippa Passes” contains some of the most magnificent lines that poet ever wrote; and for the scene between Sebald and Ottima—it is beyond praise.
Buried in woods we lay, you recollect;
Swift ran the searching tempest overhead;
And ever and anon some bright, white shaft
Burnt thro’ 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.
“King Victor and King Charles” has left no distinct impression upon our minds, albeit we have a sort of shadowy recollection that some of the characters are drawn with skill, though with too much subtlety. Better than this, however, better even than “Pippa Passes,” as a whole, were the “Dramatic Lyrics” which he had written while engaged upon these plays, and which were published, one series at least, in the same year as the last. He had finally found what he could do best—what he could do better than any living poet, and much better than any dead one had done. These “Lyrics” introduced a new element into English poetry, and whatever we may think of their method, which is frequently open to grave objections, they have enriched it permanently. What a range of subjects they handle, what diverse lands they traverse, and what a world of character and experience they hint at, beginning with “Kentish Sir Byng,” a remnant probably of Mr. Browning’s Strafford studies, and ending, for the time, with “The Pied Piper of Hamelin.” For a study of Italian character, what can compare with “The Last Duchess,” which, in addition to its rare excellence as a piece of representative painting, has the rarer excellence of showing the character of the speaker, the duke, to be the reverse of what his words would have us believe, betraying him in spite of himself. And “The Cloister”—can anything be more admirable as a picture of what monkery must have been to many of its victims, chained as they were for life to tedious old bores of the same religious order?
If hate killed men, Brother Lawrence,
God’s blood, would not mine kill you!
Solemn and stately is the old classic fragment “Artemis Prologuizes,” in which we think we can detect the influence of Walter Savage Landor, the greatest unrecognized author, poet, dramatist, dialogist of the present century. “The Pied Piper of Hamelin” is excellent for what it is—a child’s story—and noticeable in an art-point of view as marking the appearance of a new spirit in Mr. Browning’s poetry—the spirit of the grotesque and the humorous, clothed in the oddest and most whimsical of forms as regards measure and rhyme.
The dramatic lyrics were followed by three dramas, “The Return of the Druses,” “The Blot on the ’Scutcheon,” and “Colombe’s Birthday.” Of the former, we retain no distinct remembrance. “The Blot on the ’Scutcheon” is one of the most touching tragedies ever written—the tragedy of youth and love and sin, of sorrow and shame and death. It is the most human of all Mr. Browning’s works. “Colombe’s Birthday,” though somewhat obscurely handled, is a beautiful picture of the unshaken truth and constancy of woman, the heroine, Colombe of Ravenstein, Duchess of Juliers and Cleves, belonging to the divine sisterhood of Shakespeare’s women.
After these plays came a second series of lyrics and romances, which showed a wider range of study and experience, and an increase of power as well as of clearness of expression. How distinct and sharp everything comes out in the famous ride from Ghent to Aix; how picturesque the two Italian pieces, “Italy in England” and “England in Italy,” the last the most perfect picture of an Italian landscape every painted; how fresh and hearty and naive “The Flower Fancies;” and how strangely true to the place and time (Rome, 15—) “The Tomb at St. Praxed’s.” “The Flight of the Duchess,” while the story is unique, pushes to the extreme the principles of versification commenced in “The Pied Piper.”
“Luria,” “A Soul’s Tragedy,” “Christmas Eve and Easter Day,” and “Men and Women,” complete the bibliography of Mr. Browning’s works to the present time. The first two show a decrease of the dramatic faculty, or rather a decrease of power to use it intelligibly, a fact of which Mr. Browning was probably aware, and which was the cause of his venturing into a new walk—that of the poem proper. His poem not being successful, he returned to the dramatic field, and, wiser than when he left it, confined himself to a third series of romances and lyrics—for such, to all intents and purposes, is his “Men and Women.” It is his best work. Nothing that he had written before compared with “Evelyn Hope,” “Up at a Villa,” and “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came.” And for dramatic monologues, where shall we find the equals of “Fra Lippo Lippi,” “An Epistle Concerning the Strange Medical Experiences of Karshish, the Arab Physician,” “How it Strikes a Contemporary,” “Bishop Bloughram’s Apology,” “Andrea del Sarto,” “In a Balcony,” “Protus,” and “Cleon?” “Andrea del Sarto” we take to be the most perfect of all of Mr. Browning’s short dramatic poems—the one which best indicates the character of the speaker, and which gives us the clearest knowledge of his story; the simple-hearted painter does not suspect his light wife and her handsome cousin, but we, the spectators of the scene, do. His belief in their innocence is our certainty of their guilt.
The impression which this chronological glance at Mr. Browning’s poetry leaves upon our minds is that there have been two or three periods in his career marked by uncertainty and failure; periods of dissatisfaction with some previous work of his, or the reception it met with from the public, which led him to doubt whether he was in the right track, and to attempt a different style of composition. This we conceive to be the reason of his writing “Sordello,” though it is possible it was the result of willfulness—a determination to insult a public that would not admire him. Twenty-four years have passed since “Sordello” first saw the light, and we question whether it has had a solitary reader in all that time. How it was received at its publication we know not, but probably with that contemptuous silence which is harder for a poet to bear than shouts of derisive laughter. One thing is certain, however, it was forgiven, if not forgotten, for the sake of the noble dramas and dramatic lyrics which succeeded it. Mr. Browning’s readers were generous to him. He does not appear, though, to have appreciated this virtue on their part, for here he come again with his incomprehensible nonsense, bullying us at the threshold of his book with his arrogant dedication:
to j. milsand, of dijon.
Dear Friend: Let this poem be introduced by your name, and so repay all the trouble it ever cost me. I wrote it twenty-five years ago for only a few, counting even in these on somewhat more care about its subject than they really had. My own faults of expression were many; but with care for a man or a book such would be surmounted, and without it what avails the faultlessness of either? I blame nobody, least of all myself, who did my best then and since; for I lately give time and pains to turn my work into what the many might, instead of what the few must, like; but, after all, I imagined another thing at first, and therefore leave it as I find it. The historical decoration was purposely of no more importance than a background requires; and my stress lay on the incidents in the development of a soul; little else is worth study. I, at least, always thought so; you, with many known and unknown to me, think so; others may one day think so; and whether my attempt remain for them or not, I trust, though away and past it, to continue ever yours, R.B.
London, June 9, 1863.
As a specimen of mingled flattery and insolence, this dedication is without a parallel in English literature. We leave the reader to digest it at his leisure, and pass on to “Sordello,” which we have read and which we do not like. We are aware where this confession places us, by the Browning standard of intellectual capacity, but we cannot help it. We do not like “Sordello,” nor do we believe that any one else does. We do not understand “Sordello,” nor do we believe that any one else does. There is nothing in it to like, nothing in it to understand. It is a stupendous literary imposture, a wanton insult to the public. What else can a poem be, not one page of which is written in intelligible English, not one sentence of which contains a clear thought, reflection, sentiment, or what not?—a story in which nothing is told that mortal can comprehend, either concerning its hero, Sordello (if he be the hero), who he was, what he did, and so forth, or of the times in which he lived, the stormy period of the Guelfs and Ghibbelines? We defy Mr. Browning’s admirers to unravel the mystery of Sordello’s life, even to tell who he was from the poem alone. Failing to obtain the least information in that quarter, and feeling a little curiosity in the matter, we hunted him up in the French biographical dictionaries and found that he was a troubadour before the days of Dante, who put him into the Divina Commedia (in the sixth book, we think, of the Purgatory); that he wrote a number of works, whose name and scope we are uncertain of, though one, we believe, was a treatise on language, or philology, or something of the sort; and finally that he ran away with somebody’s wife—a count’s, or probably a king’s. Such is the extent of our information concerning the historic Sordello, and, small as it is, we do not care to add to it; for, as the French say, the game is not worth the candle. We never intend to open the poem “Sordello” again, for why should we bewilder ourselves in its jagged, spasmodic lines, which foam and rave and fret like the waves of a chopping sea, blown hither and thither by the ever-changing wind; in its mysterious allusions, beside which the darkest of Milton’s—say that of “the great vision of the Guarded Mount”—are daylight itself; in its always-beginning, never-ending labyrinths—of mental experience, it is intended to be, we suppose, the intellectual change and growth, the spiritual doubt and unrest, of Sordello, who out-Hamlets Hamlet, even when the latter is as mad as a March hare? We shall not attempt it again, and we would advise the reader not to attempt it at all. The only point in which “Sordello” is not utterly bad—except, of course, its language, which, generally energetic, like all that Mr. Browning writes, is frequently startling from its boldness—the only redeeming things in it are the gleams which it occasionally gives of Italian landscape, fragments of emblazoned pages torn out of the Book of Nature. Here is one:
That autumn eve was stilled:
A last remains of sunset dimly burned
O’er the far forest, like a torch-flame turned
By the wind back upon its bearer’s hand
In one long flare of crimson; as a brand
The woods lay black beneath.
And here another:
He spied
Mighty descents of forest; multiplied
Tuft on tuft, here, the frolic myrtle-trees,
There gendered the grave maple-stocks at ease.
And, proud of its observer, straight the wood
Tried old surprises on him; black it stood
A sudden barrier (’twas a cloud passed o’er)
So dead and dense, the tiniest brute no more
Must pass; yet presently (the cloud dispatched)
Each clump, behold, was glistering detached
A shrub, oak-boles shrunk into flex-stems.
Here, too, is one of the most unique pictures ever painted, though we have no conception of how it came to be in the poem. It matters not, however, for, luckily, it is “its own excuse for being:”
As, shall I say, some Ethiop, past pursuit
Of all enslavers, dips a shackled foot,
Burnt to the blood, into the drowsy black
Enormous watercourse which guides him back
To his own tribe again where he is king;
And laughs because he guesses, numbering
The yellower poison-wattles on the pouch [p. 248→]
Of the first lizard wrested from its couch
Under the slime (whose skin, the while, he strips
To cure his nostril with, and festered lips,
And eyeballs bloodshot through the desert blast)
That he has reached its boundary, at last
May breathe: thinks o’er enchantments of the South
Sovereign to plague his enemies, their mouth,
Eyes, nails, and hair; but, these enchantments tried
In fancy, puts them soberly aside
For truth, projects a cool return with friends,
The likelihood of winning mere amends
Ere long; thinks that, takes comfort silently,
Then, from the river’s brink, his wrongs and he,
Hugging revenge close to their hearts, are soon
Off-striding for the Mountains of the Moon.
Of “Strafford,” at which, rather than at “Sordello” (“Rest, perturbed spirit, rest!”), we advise Mr. Browning’s readers to open the volume, we have only left ourselves room to say that it contains two characters which are very skillfully drawn—that of Strafford himself, and his “friend turned Joe,” John Pym. As portraits they are neither very obvious nor very striking (Mr. Browning’s dramatic method does not produce such results), but they are profoundly true, we are inclined to think, to the souls of these two men whom the wild whirl of their time arrayed against each other. The interview between them, with which the tragedy ends, is as noble as it is touching. We thank Mr. Browning for including “Strafford” in his collected works; nor, remembering “Sordello,” do we object toe “Christmas Eve and Easter Day,” though it has failed, we confess, to interest us.
Reviewed:
Sordello, Strafford, Christmas-Eve and Easter-Day (RB), Boston: Ticknor & Fields, 1864.
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