R560104A. Men and Women (Boston, 1856).
New York Evening Express, 4 January 1856, [p. 4].
As reprinted in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 22, 368.
Browning is the poet of idiosyncracy,—of idiosyncracy and waywardness. His poems impress one with the peevishness of wearied and overwrought aspiration. In the new volume just issued (Men and Women, Boston, Ticknor & Fields), we have even a still more marked development of his peculiarities in this respect than almost any heretofore. The same moodiness, pride, whim and hauteur which characterize “Milord” on his grand tour, or in his continental loiterings, make up the spirit of “Men and Women.” His lyrical pieces, his dramatic pieces, his descriptive pieces, are all of this one temper. Indeed, in the dramatic efforts, where his peculiarities might be supposed to submerge themselves, he only manages the anomaly of multiplying himself and his whim, in each of the characters. His dialogue and action has an uniformity, varied only in the artificial division of it, which seems like so many fragments of a broken mirror, reflecting the incumbent features—the idiosyncracy of Robert Browning.
Such a poet does not get out of his own couch far enough to gain any feeling or fellowship with the real hearts of men and women. In presenting us, therefore, with a representation of his fellows, in a medium which should specially exhibit their common nature as the basis or background for such an effort, we find no such adjunct, but a sort of bas-relief execution, each figure varied without atmosphere, roundness, or completeness—each broken or cut short with abrupt and arbitrary curtness. There is not wanting in his verses either beauty of thought, language, or design, but neither the elegance of his sentiments, nor the picturesqueness of his subjects, compensate for the artificial and overstrained effects of their treatment. He has, too, reached the height of the prevailing faults of the present school of English poets: a remoteness from the fresh, natural, and, perhaps, rude experience of men and things in nature. Abstracted farther into a synthetic contemplation than any previous school of writers, one never receives at their hands the fresh impressions of original perception, but only as strained through a sort of mental distillation. The wine they extract from the fruit of life loses all aroma of its origin, and takes a new, spirity, dry, and feverish character, always exasperating, and never soothing in its effects.
Reviewed:
Men and Women (RB), Boston: Ticknor & Fields, 1856.
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