E630815A. Essays on the Greek Christian Poets and the English Poets (New York).
The Methodist (New York), 15 August 1863, p. 250.
Listed in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 30, 376.
If we shall not indulge in unqualified eulogy concerning Mrs. Browning, we by no means violate the spirit of the precept—“de mortuis nil nisi bonum.” We deal with her as though she still lived, as indeed she does. We honor her by tacitly recognizing her claim to a literary eminence which might easily blind inexperienced judgments to grave faults, and which imposes upon faithful criticism the duty of censure as well as of commendation.
Still, no remarks of ours upon this her latest production can affect materially her claims to greatness; nor do we wish that they may. She walks, as one who has a right, among the few great poets, meekly enough, yet with conscious power. But when to “meekly” we would add “womanly,” we must pause. Mrs. Browning’s intellect falls, perhaps, short of sheer masculinity, yet is scarce womanly. She revelled in a range of thought and study from which most so-called intellectual women would have shrunk; and whether from this, or from some other cause, we are seldom, in reading her more elaborate productions, free from a sense of effort; as though she were striving to measure her step with the bold stride of the man. She does not “forgo the leap,” but she does not “attain the repose.” She has written much that is tender, graceful, natural, “pure womanly;” but ofttimes again, her voice
“With all its breaths and breaks
Goes sheathed in brass;”
and walks not always gracefully. She is partial to involved forms of expression, and revels in the most ponderous Latin and Greek compounds, with now and then a dash of Hebrew. Nor can she be charged with affecting pomp of diction as a veil for crude or confused thought. Mrs. Browning has no occasion to affect the thinker. The form in symmetrical enough, but the clothes too often hang ungracefully, and impart to the sylph the gait of the satyr. She is confessedly a careless, sometimes a clumsy versifier; and her prose style is far, very far from being the perfection of English. We cannot justly avoid noting these defects among much that is truly valuable, profoundly true, and exquisitely beautiful in the present essay. John of Euchaita’s truth to nature is described by her in two sentences, one of which would have charmed Samuel Johnson, and the other have horrified Hugh Blair: “the gentle humanities which preponderate in the solitary voice;” “the familiar smiles and sighs which go up and down in it to our ear.” Cannot the decline of the Greek language be described without such a “hyper-Brobdignagian” latinism as “a change involving a caducity?“ And what kind of music is that which “turns heavily upon its own axle as inadequate to living evolution?”
We have once seen it noticed, and this little book confirms the observation, that Mrs. Browning is lacking in one essential element of genius—true humor. Wit she may possess. It is a gift common to most clear intellects; but wit is more nearly allied to talent than to genius. Humor is the twin brother of genius—bone of its bone and flesh of its flesh. The subject of the present essay abounds in points on which a genuine and delicate humor would have seized with happy effect. Mrs. Browning is aware of this, and tries to avail herself of it; but her playfulness is rather the play of the lightning. Her humor runs into satire.
But the essay has merits and beauties enough to outweigh all this. The plodding industry it displays is by no means its least prominent feature; and the hearty enthusiasm with which the authoress has traversed and explored this most unpromising field is enough to make us try and love the Greek Christian poets for her sake. In this armor of loving enthusiasm she cases her subject against the arrows of criticism. We should like to quote at large from the first twenty pages, but must content ourselves with a few choice morsels. Is not the following a ”defensio patrum” in a nutshell: “To these ‘fathers,’ as we call them filially, with heads turned away, we owe more reverence for the grayness of their beards than theologic gratitude for the outstretching of their hands. Devoted and disinterested as many among them were, they themselves were, at most times, evidently and consciously surer of their love in a theologic sense, than of their knowledge in any. What then should be done with our ‘fathers?’ Leave them to perish by the time-worn Ganges, as old men innocent and decrepit, and worthy of no use or honor? Surely not. We may learn of them, if God will let us, love, and love is much; we may learn devotedness of them, and warm our hearts by theirs; and this, although we rather distrust them as commentators, and utterly refuse them the reverence of our souls in the capacity of theological oracles.”
We omit one or two marked passages that we may transcribe the following entire. It is a beautifully true lesson, and one which Mrs. Browning has a right to read to poets: “It is, too, as religious poets that we are called upon to estimate these neglected Greeks—as religious poets of whom the universal Church and the world-literature would gladly embrace more names than could be counted to either. For it is strange that, although Wilhelm Meister’s up-looking and down-looking aspects—the reverence to things above and things below—the religious, all-clasping spirit—be, and must be, in degree and measure, the grand necessity of every true poet’s soul—of religious poets, strictly so called, the earth is very bare. Religious parcel-poets we have indeed, more than enough; writers of hymns, translators of Scripture into prose, or of prose generally into rhymes, of whose heart’s devotion a higher faculty were worthy. Also there have been poets, not a few, singing as if earth were still Eden, and poets many, singing as if in the first hour of exile, when the echo of the curse was louder than the whisper of the promise. But the right ‘genius of Christianism’ has done little up to this moment, even for Chateaubriand. We want the touch of Christ’s hand upon our literature, as it touched other dead things—we want the sense of the saturation of Christ‘s blood upon the souls of our poets, that it may cry through them in answer to the ceaseless wail of the Sphynx of our humanity, expounding agony into renovation.”
And yet withal, it is, as we have said, an unpromising field. There is a ton of quartz for a grain of gold. We want all the authoress’s pertinent and lively criticism, and all her eulogies, renewed from time to time, to save us from weariness. It all fails to account for the insatiable curiosity, the restless zeal for knowledge, that could lead a woman’s tender feet over the burning sands of Ezekiel’s “Exodus from Egypt,” that could support her patience amid the fantastic patchwork of Clemens Alexandrinus, the platitudes of Apolinarius, the “bald verbosity” of the twenty-two thousand verses of Normus, and all to reach the widely-scattered beauties of Gregory Nazianzen, John Damascenus, and John of Euchaita.
We wonder not that she marked with a white stone the day on which she finished Gregory’s poem on Celibacy, and “laid up the memory of it among the chief triumphs, to say nothing of the fortunate deliverances of her life.” There may be, there are, traces of real power, real humanity, real fire and inspiration, real pathos and tenderness in these Greek Christian poets, but it lies mingled with such a mass of common-place, of Neo-Platonic mysticism, of odd conceits and affectations, that one must have a deeply-rooted faith in their genius to sift it at all. It cannot add to Mrs Browning’s reputation to say that she knows beauties when she finds them. She sketches well, and seizes readily upon the salient merits and defects. She is conscious that she has a “bad case” and a prejudiced jury; but from first to last she does the best that can be done for her clients. She has made out all that she claims for these old Greek Christian poets—not profundity, not elegance, not splendor of imagination. These she did not hope to find. Both under the absurdity and confusion of thought generated by an age of intellectual decline, an age of new wine in old bottles and of new pieces in old garments; an age of yearning, but only partial faith, and of growing distrust in the deductions of reason—under all she has found, here and there, the warm human heart, uttering itself sincerely, and therefore speaking with power—“that higher distinction, inherent in brain and breast, of vivid thought and quick sensibility.”
The scope of this article forbids our saying aught as to the comparative merits of the poets themselves. The renderings, so far as we can judge without having the originals at hand, are felicitous, though “through a surfeit of would-I-ing,” and “lamping light,” are new to us. They may be Patristic Greek, but are not English. We have no space to remark upon the other essay on the English Poets. The treatment can be more felicitous only because the theme is more congenial. The book is a welcome addition to standard literature, and will tend no less to interest the curious than to keep warm in the hearts of American scholars the name of Elizabeth Barrett Browning.
Reviewed:
Essays on the Greek Christian Poets and the English Poets (EBB), New York: James Miller, 1863.
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