R451227A. Dramatic Romances and Lyrics.
The Critic, 27 December 1845, pp. 701–702.
As reprinted in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 11, 366–367.
Robert Browning is a true poet; in every page is the presence of genius; the spirit of song glows within him. Moreover he is an earnest, sincere man; he speaks because he has something to say, and not from any vanity to collect a crowd about him, and make himself the idol of the hour; he has a mind of his own; writes what he thinks in such manner as accords with his mood, and cares very little for the formulas of critics, or the freaks of fashion. He throws himself heart and soul into his subject, and seldom fails to bring out something new. He is one of those whom the more you read, the better you love.
And yet, with these undeniable merits, Robert Browning is not popular; nay, he is known to and appreciated by but a very narrow circle even of those who call themselves lovers of poetry. For this there must be a sufficient cause, and it may not be labour lost to inquire into it.
Nor need we go far to find it. Robert Browning has faults—great and obvious faults, which obscure his many beauties to all eyes, not resolutely bent upon piercing the veil which he has himself thrown over his genius. He is a singularly careless writer; he seems to think that manner is of no consequence, and that, provided as man have ideas, it little matters how he expresses them. Again, he is deficient in the musical ear for metre and rhyme which by so many is mistaken for the essence instead of the mere form of poetry. His lines are often loose; he is careless of cadences; he is not choice in the selection of words, but takes the first that offers itself, regardless of its commonplace or vulgarity. Then he affects a needless plainness of speech; he aims too obviously at originality, which he seems to suppose to lie in differing from all the rest of the world. He has fallen into the besetting sin of our generation of poets, and strains after the simple, which is only pleasing when it is the natural expression of a natural emotion, but becomes almost ludicrous and always offensive when it is the result of art, and produced with effort.
But there are faults which ought not to have militated against his great and many merits to the extent they have done in practice. His works are not read so largely as they should be; his powers are not properly appreciated; his genius is recognised only by a very narrow circle. Even to the literary world he is but partially known. It is the duty of all who have the means to do what in them lies to redress this injustice, to spread his reputation on all fair opportunities, and to give to his productions the welcome to which their intrinsic worth entitles them.
With this conviction we proceed to make better known a very small work he has lately published at a very trifling price, but which contains much genuine poetry. Bells and Pomegranates is a sort of poetical pamphlet appearing at uncertain intervals, sold at a very trifling price, and containing a collection of poems various in their subjects, their styles, their verses, their length. The six previous numbers we have never seen, but this seventh part has been sent, and we were really surprised to find how much of real poetry is scattered about its closely-printed pages. Because it consists but of a few leaves, we presume it has escaped the notice of our contemporaries; but as the plan of The Critic is to estimate books by their worth and not by their size, we have deemed it right to bestow more attention upon this than upon many a splendid quarto that has been submitted to our examination.
It contains some twenty poems, chiefly ballads, which have been so much the fashion of late; but it is not a style in which Mr. Browning excels. He wants the necessary simplicity of thought and utterance, and his attempts to assume it are so evident as to mar the reader’s pleasure in the composition. Compare, for instance, the following, which is among the best, with the lays of Macauley, and the inferiority will be apparent:—
I sprang to the stirrup, and Joris, and He;
I galloped, Dirck galloped, we galloped all Three;
“Good speed!” cried the watch, as the gate-bolts undrew;
“Speed!” echoed the wall to us galloping through;
Behind shut the postern, the light sank to rest,
And into the midnight we galloped abreast.
Not a word to each other; we kept the great pace
Neck by neck, stride for stride, never changing our place;
I turned in my saddle and made its girths tight,
Then shortened each stirrup, and set the pique right,
Rebuckled the cheek-strap, chained slacker the bit,
Nor galloped less steadily Roland a whit.
’Twas moonset at starting; but while we drew near
Lokeren, the cocks crew and twilight dawned clear;
At Boom, a great yellow star came out to see;
At Düffeld, ’twas morning as plain as could be;
And from Mecheln church-steeple we heard the half-chime,
So Joris broke silence with, “Yet there is time!”
At Aerschot, up leaped of a sudden the sun,
And against him the cattle stood black every one,
To stare thro’ the mist at us galloping past,
And I saw my stout galloper Roland at last,
With resolute shoulders, each butting away
The haze as some bluff river headland its spray.
There is spirit and power, though mingled with a certain questionable quaintness, in this:—
the lost leader.
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 theirs 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!
Shakespeare 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! [p. 702→]
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!
The longest of the poems is entitled “The Flight of the Duchess;” and it is the best. It contains more passages of true poetry, with fewer affectations, than are to be found in any equal number of successive lines from Mr. Browning’s pen. We take two of these.
our country.
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’ds the corn-field country,
Where vineyards leave off, flocks are packed,
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 through and through 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!
gipsies.
Now in this land, Gipsies reach you only
After reaching all lands beside;
North they go, south they go, trooping or lonely,
And still, as they travel far and wide,
Catch they and keep now a trace here, a trace there,
That puts you in mind of a place here, a place there:
But with us I believe they rise out of the ground,
And nowhere else, I take it, are found
With the earth-tint yet so freshly embrowned;
Born, no doubt, like insects which breed on
The very fruit they are meant to feed on:
For the earth—not a use to which they don’t turn it,
The ore that grows in the mountains’ womb,
Or the sand in the pits like a honeycomb,
They sift and soften it, bake it and burn it—
Whether they weld, you, for instance, a snaffle
With side-bars never a brute can baffle;
Or a lock that’s a puzzle of wards within wards;
Or, if your colt’s fore-foot inclines to curve inwards,
Horseshoes they’ll hammer which turn on a swivel
And won’t allow the hoof to shrivel;
Then they cast bells like the shell of the winkle,
That keep a stout heart in the ram with their tinkle:
But the sand—they pinch and pound it like otters;
Commend me to Gipsy glass-makers and potters!
Glasses they’ll blow you, crystal-clear,
Where just a faint cloud of rose shall appear,
As if in water one dropped and let die
A bruised black-blooded mulberry;
And that other sort, their crowning pride,
With long white threads distinct inside,
Like the lake-flower’s fibrous roots which dangle
Loose such a length and never tangle,
Where the bold sword-lily cuts the clear waters,
And the cup-lily couches with all the white daughters:
Such are the works they put their hand to,
And the uses they turn and twist iron and sand to.
And there is nature in these
home-thoughts, from abroad.
Oh, to be in England
Now that April’s there,
And who wakes in England
See, some morning, unaware,
That the lowest boughs and the brush-wood sheaf
Round the elm-tree bole are in tiny leaf,
While the chaffinch sings on the orchard bough
In England—now!
And after April, when May follows,
And the whitethroat builds, and all the swallows—
Hark! where my blossom’d pear-tree in the hedge
Leans to the field and scatters on the clover
Blossoms and dewdrops—at the bent spray’s edge—
That’s the wise thrush; he sings each song twice over
Lest you should think he never could recapture
The first fine careless rapture!
And though the fields are rough with hoary dew,
All will be gay when noontide wakes anew
The buttercups, the little children’s dower,
—Far brighter than this gaudy melon-flower!
Reviewed:
Bells & Pomegranates. No. VII. Dramatic Romances & Lyrics (RB), London: Edward Moxon, 1845.
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