R451115A. Dramatic Romances and Lyrics.
The Examiner, 15 November 1845, pp. 723–724.
As reprinted in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 11, 361–363.
There is little to encourage the songs of poets in these railway days; but the true poet cannot help singing; and it is his best chance for a little honest sympathy, to be dramatic in his song. There is a busy life, a stir of human interest, in all these romances and lyrics. They move to genuine music, and it is not a sleepy tune.
We are disposed to admire this little book of Mr Browning’s very much. Our readers know how high we have ranked his muse; and how we have grieved when she lost her way in transcendental or other fogs, and, like poor Origen’s fallen star, “rayed out” only darkness. Here she has found the path again.
Mr Browning’s metaphysics have been too abundant for his poetry. That is the substance of the objection to be urged against him. And it is not a slight one. Poetry is a jealous mistress, and will have undivided homage. The analytic and the imaginative powers never yet worked well together. But it is the fault (not an inglorious one) of youth: the fault of which Shelley became conscious before he died, and from which Mr Browning is fast freeing himself. Nothing but this retarded his advance.
His writing has always the stamp and freshness of originality. It is in no respect imitative or commonplace. Whatever the verse may be, the man is in it: the music of it echoing to his mood. When he succeeds, there have been few so successful in the melodious transitions of his rhythm. In all its most poetical and most musical varieties, he is a master; and to us it expresses, in a rare and exquisite degree, the delicacy and truth of his genius. Procter says very happily in the Life of Ben Jonson, that the motion of verse corresponds with the power of the poet, as the swell and tumult of the sea answer to the winds that call them up; and this is the safe test of a master in the art.
There are some twenty pieces in the collection; each marked out from its fellow by an idea of its own, to which it moves with corresponding music; from the breathless gallop of “How they brought the good news from Ghent to Aix” to the calm simplicity of the “Boy and the Angel.” The latter is so beautiful that we will take it as it stands. The poet turns the old monkish fiction of Theocrite to a noble and universal truth, and in this little poem has produced a masterpiece.
the boy and the angel.
Morning, evening, noon, and night,
“Praise God,” sang Theocrite.
Then to his poor trade he turned
By which the daily meal was earned.
Hard he laboured, long and well;
O’er the work his boy’s curls fell;
But ever, at each period,
He stopped and sang, “Praise God:”
Then back again his curls he threw,
And cheerful turned to work anew.
Said Blaise, the listening monk, “well done;
I doubt not thou art heard, my son:
As well as if thy voice to-day
Were praising God the Pope’s great way.
This Easter Day, the Pope at Rome
Praises God from Peter’s dome.”
Said Theocrite, “would God that I
Might praise Him, that great way, and die!”
Night passed, day shone,
And Theocrite was gone.
With God a day endures alway,
A thousand years are but a day.
God said in Heaven, “Nor day nor night
Now brings the voice of my delight.”
Then Gabriel, like a rainbow’s birth,
Spread his wings and sank to earth;
Entered in flesh, the empty cell,
Lived there and played the craftsman well:
And morning, evening, noon, and night,
Praised God in place of Theocrite.
And from a boy, to youth he grew:
The Man put off the Stripling’s hue:
The Man matured and fell away
Into the season of decay:
And ever o’er the trade he bent
And ever lived on earth content.
God said, “A praise is in mine ear;
There is no doubt in it, no fear:
So sing old worlds, and so
New worlds that from my footstool go.
Clearer loves sound other ways:
I miss my little human praise.”
Then forth sprang Gabriel’s wings, off fell
The flesh disguise, remained the cell.
’Twas Easter Day: he flew to Rome,
And paused above Saint Peter’s dome.
In the tiring-room close by
The great outer gallery,
With his holy vestments dight,
Stood the new Pope, Theocrite:
And all his past career
Came back upon him clear.
Since when, a boy, he plied his trade
Till on his life the sickness weighed:
And in his cell when death drew near
An angel in a dream brought cheer:
And rising from the sickness drear
He grew a priest, and now stood here.
To the East with praise he turned
And on his sight the angel burned.
“I bore thee from thy craftsman’s cell,
And set thee here; I did not well.
Vainly I left my angel’s sphere,
Vain was thy dream of many a year.
Thy voice’s praise seemed weak; it dropped—
Creation’s chorus stopped!
Go back and praise again
The early way—while I remain.
With that weak voice of our disdain,
Take up Creation’s pausing strain.
Back to the cell and poor employ:
Become the craftsman and the boy!”
Theocrite grew old at home;
A new Pope dwelt in Peter’s Dome.
One vanished as the other died:
They sought God side by side.
Very differently do the two pieces called “France and Spain” tell their story, and their moral; but not less admirably. A “laboratory” shows us the wicked revels of the ancien régime; a “confessional” the gloomy cruelty of priestcraft; and between the poison that slays the body, and that which kills the soul, we see small difference. The priests use the confessional to betray the lover of the penitent; the court madam visits the laboratory for a drug to dispatch her rival quietly.
Not that I bid you spare her the pain!
Let death be felt, and the proof remain;
Brand, burn up, bite into its grace—
He is sure to remember her dying face!
Two other very striking pieces in the collection are “Italy in England” and “England in Italy.” The one, the proud sad memory of an Italian exile, who remembers, in his English refuge, the brave Lombard girl by whose help he had escaped; the other, the cheerful outburst of an English traveller, who sings a rhapsody of picturesque delight for the wonders he has seen in Italy.
“Such trifles” you say?
Fortù, in my England at home,
Men meet gravely to-day
And debate, if abolishing Corn Laws
Be righteous and wise
—If ’tis proper Seirocco [sic] should vanish
In black from the skies!
As a minute picture of Italian life and scenery, done in the sunniest spirit, and with the most marvellous local truth, this latter poem is very extraordinary. It is the Literal and the Ideal closely knit; with “magic in the web on’t.”
The pleasant dance of the rhythm in “Garden Fancies” takes us to the longest poem in the collection, the “Flight of the Duchess.” If we could have our regretted Thomas Ingoldsby back, with imagination equal to his wit, and enough musical variety in his verse to be worthy of his rhyming surprises, he might write us such a poem as this. The art with which an ideally perfect expression, an expression of the highest poetry, is here given to the most natural and unaffected terms of ordinary every-day language,—seems to us to possess an infinite charm. The story is of a German Duke, by one of whose retainers it is told; and opens thus.
Ours is a great wild country:
If you climb to our castle’s top,
I don’t see where your eye can stop;
For when you’ve pass’d the corn-field country,
Where vineyards leave off, flocks are pack’d,
And sheep-range leads to cattle-tract,
And cattle-tract to open-chase,
And open-chase to the very base
Of the mountain where, at a funeral pace,
Round about, solemn and slow,
One by one, row after row,
Up and up the pine-trees go,
So, like black priests up, and so
Down the other side again
To another greater, wilder country,
That’s one vast red drear burnt-up plain,
Branch’d thro’ and thro’ with many a vein
Whence iron’s dug, and copper’s dealt;
Look right, look left, look straight before,
Beneath they mine, above they smelt,
Copper-ore and iron-ore,
And forge and furnace, mould and melt,
And so on, more and ever more,
Till, at the last, for a bounding belt,
Comes the salt sand hoar of the great sea shore,
—And the whole is our Duke’s country!
But “Our Duke” has dwindled from his rough, hearty, real old ancestors, into a wretched, unreal, pretending formalist: in plain words, a humbug.
What all the old Dukes had been, without knowing it,
This Duke would fain know he was, without being it;
’Twas not for the joy’s self, but the joy of his showing it,
Not for the pride’s self, but the pride of our seeing it.
He resolves to marry, and sets about it as such a creature might; but makes an unlucky choice, and marries a most natural little damsel.
Well, such as he was, he must marry, we heard:
And out of a convent, at the word,
Came the Lady, in time of spring.
—Oh, old thoughts they cling, they cling!
That day, I know, with a dozen oaths
I clad myself in thick hunting-clothes
Fit for the chase of urox or buffle
In winter-time when you need to muffle; [p. 724→]
But the Duke had a mind we should cut a figure,
And so we saw the Lady arrive:
My friend, I have seen a white crane bigger!
She was the smallest Lady alive,
Made, in a piece of Nature’s madness,
Too small, almost, for the life and gladness
That over-filled her, as some hive
Out of the bears’ reach on the high trees
Is crowded with its safe merry bees—
In truth she was not hard to please!
Up she look’d, down she look’d, round at the mead,
Straight at the Castle, that’s best indeed
To look at from outside the walls:
As for us, styled the “serfs and thralls,”
She as much thanked me as if she had said it,
(With her eye, do you understand?)
Because I patted her horse while I led it;
And Max, who rode on her other hand,
Said, no bird flew past but she inquired
What its true name was, nor ever seemed tired—
If that was an eagle she saw hover,
And the green and gray bird on the field was the plover?
When suddenly appeared the Duke,
And as down she sprung, the small foot pointed
On to my hand,—as with a rebuke,
And as if his backbone were not jointed,
The Duke stepped rather aside than forward,
And welcomed her with his grandest smile;
And, mind you, his mother all the while
Chilled in the rear, like a wind to Nor’ward;
And up, like a weary yawn, with its pullies
Went, in a shriek, the rusty portcullis,
And, like a glad sky the north-wind sullies,
The Lady’s face stopped its play,
As if her first hair had grown gray—
For such things must begin some one day!
If the reader would discover how the Duchess tires of the Duke, and how she runs off from his formal restraints to the romantic freedom of a merry gypsey band, he must read this charming poem. As the lovers in the delightful tale of Keats fled away “into the storm,” she flies into the greenwood and we hear no more. But her memory is a cheerful one for ever.
Our last extract is of a brief piece called the “Lost Leader.” Manly determination, and resolute yet generous scorn, find here a noble ideal; and let the fine free swing in the verse be duly admired. The second stanza is extremely beautiful.
Just for a handful of silver he left us,
Just for a riband to stick in his coat—
Got the one gift of which fortune bereft us,
Lost all the others she lets us devote;
They, with the gold to give, doled him out silver,
So much was their’s who so little allowed:
How all our copper had gone for his service!
Rags—were they purple his heart had been proud!
We that had loved him so, followed him, honoured him,
Lived in his mild and magnificent eye,
Learned his great language, caught his clear accents,
Made him our pattern to live and to die!
Shakspeare was of us, Milton was for us,
Burns, Shelley, were with us,—they watch from their graves!
He alone breaks from the van and the freemen,
He alone sinks to the rear and the slaves!
We shall march prospering,—not thro’ his presence;
Songs may excite us,—not from his lyre;
Deeds will be done,—while he boasts his quiescence,
Still bidding crouch whom the rest bade aspire:
Blot out his name, then,—record one lost soul more,
One task unaccepted, one footpath untrod,
One more devils’-triumph and sorrow to angels,
One wrong more to man, one more insult to God!
Life’s night begins: let him never come back to us!
There would be doubt, hesitation, and pain,
Forced praise on our part—the glimmer of twilight,
Never glad confident morning again!
Best fight on well, for we taught him,—come gallantly,
Strike our face hard ere we shatter his own;
Then let him get the new knowledge and wait us,
Pardoned in Heaven, the first by the throne!
We leave several fine pieces unnamed as well as unquoted. Among them the “Tomb at St Praxed’s,” a death-bed speech of an old Popish Prelate, which, with a grim and awful kind of humour, mixes up concerns of life and death “in monumental mockery;”—and “The Glove,” a French romance, given as from the recitation of Peter Ronsard, wherein the incident of the court dame flinging her glove into the den of a lion, is ingeniously and not unpleasantly turned to the lady’s advantage.
These Romances and Lyrics form the seventh part of a collection of pieces chiefly dramatic, which Mr Browning has been publishing some years, for odd shillings and sixpences, with the title of Bells and Pomegranates. On the whole they are a remarkable collection, and proof of a very affluent as well as original genius. Wonderful is the saving of paper and press-work and price, in their small print and double columns. They look as though already packed up and on their way to posterity; nor are we without a confident expectation that some of them will arrive at that journey’s end.
[John Forster]
Reviewed:
Bells & Pomegranates. No. VII. Dramatic Romances & Lyrics (RB), London: Edward Moxon, 1845.
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