R460100B. Dramatic Romances and Lyrics.
The New Quarterly Review, January 1846, pp. 152–157.
As reprinted in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 11, 369–371.
[Also reviewed in this article were works by Thomas Cooper, C. Lofft, Thomas Powell, J.A. Heraud, Charles Mackay, and Edward George Bulwer-Lytton. We include only those comments pertaining to RB.]
It is always refreshing to meet with the poetry of Robert Browning: we may be quite sure that we shall meet with no soundings, commonplaces, or simple drivellings; all is firm, vigorous, original, and daring. Alas! that we do not meet with the “sensuous.” The poetry of the “Bells and Pomegranates” wants “flesh and blood;” wants that coming home to men’s bosoms which makes the poet for the million. No! Browning is the poet of the mind; the brain is the organ to which he appeals, and certainly with great success. He is possibly the most intellectual poet of the day; and certainly the most singular (may we say original?) in the treatment of his subject. All [p. 153→] about him is chaste, strong, and intellectual. Sometimes he appears to speak in riddles; but his priests understand him, and they expound his subtle and refined imaginings to the outer circle. His readers, like the Druses, are divided into the Initiated and the Uninitiated.
The Italians have lately created a professorship to expound Dante; a like doubtful compliment might well be paid, from his obscurity, to the illustrious author of “Sordello.” One remarkable peculiarity about Browning is the finish of his style. In the mechanical he was perfect from the first: his “Paracelsus” is an astonishing performance for a poet of eighteen; and a little work called “Pauline,” written and published still earlier, is full of the most truly wonderful writing. He seems to have been born, like his patron, Minerva, of full stature, and ready garbed. He has had no childhood; no adolescence. This, perhaps, may account for the hardness and “cast-ironness” of his style; it is sometimes quite “adamantine.”
Very different to our last author is Charles Mackay. His verses are light, elegant, graceful, and intelligible; you have no rough, Herculean thoughts, developed in a style as startling and Titanian as are those which jostle you in every page of the “Bells and Pomegranates:” no burning madnesses tearing the brain, which you, by a fatal fascination, read over and over again; sometimes to reduce to an intelligible shape, at another time to feel its full galvanic shock thrill through your poetic frame:—here, on the other hand, all is elegant repose; frequent freshness, with occasional bursts of harmony and force, which convince you that a true poet speaks, although not so loudly and strongly as he might do; and he has also the additional merit of showing strong sympathy for his fellow-creatures. We well know how much there is of this spurious poetical sympathy which is not genuine, and therefore to be heartily despised; and when we see it everlastingly obtruding itself, as in some poets we could name, we feel it amount to an ad nauseam, altogether unbearable. Nevertheless, the total absence of all sympathy with the efforts, wishes, and struggles of his fellow-man, is a great defect in the poetry of Robert Browning.
If his works were to be suddenly dug up, and no clue given, it would be almost impossible to predicate the time in which the writer flourished. The petrifactions of the mind are somewhat more difficult to resolve into intelligible genera than those of the antediluvian bones. No poetical Mantell or Buckland would solve this more than Sordelloish obscurity. Now we take this to be against the chances of contemporary popularity, but to add vastly to those in a thousand years to come! Popularity is no [p. 154→] test of original genius; and we therefore repeat, that the abstracted style of this writer, his felicitous and startling combinations, his vast and singular reading, are a type of an age of small fancy, but marvellous cultivation. A friend of his once concluded a long critique on his merits by declaring his poetry to be the mathematics of the Muses, and his poems consequently problems.
In his recent volume he has shown his usual love for strange subjects; his own self-will magnificently displayed; nevertheless we must enter our protest against the reader choosing a subject for the poet!—still there are themes which, like olives or caviare, are, generally speaking, distasteful, and these are the subjects on which this bard will sing. No common-place poet, certainly: all his own, matter and manner, equally so! They are of his own begetting, of his own clothing, his own education! His drama is neither ancient nor modern; national or universal; but entirely and essentially “Browningian.”
Our first selection from the present number of the “Bells and Pomegranates” is called, “How they brought the good news from Ghent to Aix.”—Apparently no very exciting or promising subject to interest his readers with; but let any man, woman, or child, sit down and read it with attention, and they will find themselves carried along in the arduous and breathless flight, and have as fierce and vivid a recollection as though they were the sole survivor of that fearful gallop!—as a piece of dramatic and lyrical action it is perfect.
How wonderfully the perilous journey is brought before us in these lines!
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 through 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.
And his low head and crest, just one sharp ear bent back
For my voice, and the other pricked out on his track;
And one eye’s black intelligence,—ever that glance
O’er its white edge at me, his own master, askance!
And the thick heavy spume-flakes which aye and anon
His fierce lips shook upwards in galloping on. [p. 155→]
By Hasselt, Dirck groaned; and cried Joris, “Stay spur!
Your Roos galloped bravely, the fault’s not in her,
We’ll remember at Aix”—for one heard the quick wheeze
Of her chest, saw the stretched neck and staggering knees,
And sunk tail, and horrible heave of the flank,
As down on her haunches she shuddered and sank.
So left were we galloping, Joris and I,
Past Looz and past Tongres, no cloud in the sky;
The broad sun above laughed a pitiless laugh,
’Neath our feet broke the brittle bright stubble like chaff;
Till over by Dalhem a dome-spire sprang white,
And “Gallop,” gasped Joris, “for Aix is in sight!”
“How they’ll greet us”—and all in a moment his roan
Rolled neck and croup over, lay dead as a stone;
And there was my Roland to bear the whole weight
Of the news which alone could save Aix from her fate,
With his nostrils like pits full of blood to the brim,
And with circles of red for his eye sockets’ rim.
Then I cast loose my buffcoat, each holster let fall,
Shook off both my jack-boots, let go belt and all,
Stood up in the stirrup, leaned, patted his ear,
Called my Roland his pet-name, my horse without peer;
Clapped my hands, laughed and sang, any noise bad or good,
Till at length into Aix Roland galloped and stood.
And all I remember is, friends flocking round
As I sate with his head ’twixt my knees on the ground,
And no voice but was praising this Roland of mine,
As I poured down his throat our last measure of wine,
Which (the burgesses voted by common consent)
Was no more than his due who brought good news from Ghent.
(Bells and Pomegranates, p. 3.)
As a contrast to this piece of breathless writing, we refer our readers to a piece of felicitous pleasantry. The poet, it appears, took into his garden a book to read “one golden summer morn,” and read it through. In a fit of innocent malice “he resolved to entomb it in a cleft plum-tree: conscientious qualms afterwards induced him to rescue the unhappy volume some time afterwards from its unhallowed grave. Our readers will not fail to observe the exquisite happiness of some of the rhymes.
From this piece of “learned fun and frolic” we will turn to the dying bed of an old “Tractarian Cardinal,” where we shall see a curious compound of all the small and hideous vices of the human heart fully developed under the sacred Romish hat.
My sons, ye would not be my death? Go dig
The white-graped vineyard where the oil-press stood,
Drop water gently till the surface sinks, [p. 156→]
And if ye find .. Ah, God I know not, I! …
Bedded in store of rotten figleaves soft,
And corded up in a tight olive-frail,
Some lump, ah God, of lapis lazuli,
Big as a Jew’s head cut off at the nape,
Blue as a vein o’er the Madonna’s breast …
Sons, all have I bequeathed you, villas, all,
That brave Frascati villa with its bath,
So let the blue lump poise between my knees,
Like God the Father’s globe on both his hands
Ye worship in the Jesu Church so gay,
For Gandolf shall not choose but see and burst!
Swift as a weaver’s shuttle fleet our years:
Man goeth to the grave, and where is he?
Did I say basalt for my slab, sons? Black—
’Twas ever antique-black I meant! How else
Shall ye contrast my frieze to come beneath?
The bas-relief in bronze ye promised me,
Those Pans and Nymphs ye wot of, and perchance
Some tripod, thyrsus, with a vase or so,
The Saviour at his sermon on the mount,
St. Praxed in a glory, and one Pan
Ready to twitch the Nymph’s last garment off,
And Moses with the tables … but I know
Ye mark me not! What do they whisper thee,
Child of my bowels, Anselm? Ah, ye hope
To revel down my villas while I gasp
Bricked o’er with beggar’s mouldy travertine
Which Gandolf from his tomb-top chuckles at!
Nay, boys, ye love me—all of jasper then!
’Tis jasper ye stand pledged to, lest I grieve
My bath must needs be left behind, alas!
One block, pure green as a pistachio-nut,
There’s plenty jasper somewhere in the world—
And have I not St. Praxed’s ear to pray
Horses for ye, and brown Greek manuscripts,
And mistresses with great smooth marbly limbs?
—That’s if ye carve my epitaph aright,
Choice Latin, picked phrase, Tully’s every word,
No gaudy ware like Gandolf’s second line—
Tully, my masters? Ulpian serves his need!
And then how I shall lie through centuries,
And hear the blessed mutter of the mass,
And see God made and eaten all day long,
And feel the steady candle-flame, and taste
Good strong thick stupifying incense-smoke!
For as I lie here, hours of the dead night,
Dying in state and by such slow degrees [p. 157→]
I fold my arms as if they clasped a crook,
And stretch my feet forth straight as stone can point,
And let the bedclothes for a mortcloth drop
Into great laps and folds of sculptor’s-work:
And as yon tapers dwindle, and strange thoughts
Grow, with a certain humming in my ears,
About the life before this life I lived,
And this life too, Popes, Cardinals, and Priests,
St. Praxed at his sermon on the mount,
Your tall pale mother with her talking eyes,
And new-found agate urns as fresh as day,
And marble’s language, Latin pure, discreet,
—Aha, elucescebat quoth our friend?
No Tully, said I, Ulpian at the best!
Evil and brief hath been my pilgrimage.
All lapis, all, sons! Else I give the Pope
My villas. (Bells and Pomegranates, p. 9.)
While we are on the subject of Papal enormities, we will direct the reader’s attention to another poem, in which Mr. Browning denounces the abuses of the Confessional. It is the story of a poor love-sick girl, who has been persuaded, or rather intimidated by one of those human atrocities, called Romish priests, to betray the confidence of her lover, who is engaged in some popular movement. The priest swearing that he will, of course, only use the knowledge thus acquired to save her lover’s soul and life. She wanders to the market-place, and there beholds her lover’s execution, with the demon priest officiating. If any living man has hitherto doubted the genius of Robert Browning, let him “confess,” when he has read that poem, his conversion. The poem is too long for extraction.
Reviewed:
Bells & Pomegranates. No. VII. Dramatic Romances & Lyrics (RB), London: Edward Moxon, 1845.
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