R640709A. Dramatis Personæ.
The Daily News, 9 July 1864, p. 9.
Listed in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 31, 343.
Criticism is almost out of place in dealing with the productions of so mature and established a writer as Mr. Browning. He has gained his laurels; he has fixed his style; he has his following of admirers and imitators, and his corresponding federation of doubters and detractors; he has made up his mind as to the way he should go, and has already travelled a goodly space of the road. It is not to be supposed that he will alter his manner at the suggestion of any gentleman who has the misfortune to disagree with it, or that he will revise works conceived in patient thought, and manifestly beaten out with toil and sweat, to please reviewers who do not happen to be satisfied. Yet in reading this his latest volume of poems we cannot refrain from once more regretting that he should so often commit himself to a mode of utterance which we must needs regard as a mistake in art; and we should not be discharging our task honestly if we did not give expression to that regret, qualified by the respect due to so noble an intellect—an intellect always working for lofty ends, and gifted with the finest perceptions of natural and moral beauty. The allegation of obscurity has been so frequently brought against Mr. Browning that his unquestioning admirers regard it as a mere cry, and it may indeed have been sometimes echoed superficially enough. But “Dramatis Personæ” furnishes additional testimony that the charge expresses a truth, and an unfortunate truth. There can be no doubt that Mr. Browning is wilfully and elaborately obscure; that with him obscurity is a principle of art; that he likes to put his readers to the trouble of finding out his meaning—guessing it, we might say—instead of giving it simple expression, and leaving the result to be apprehended with different degrees of perception, proportioned to the more or less of intellect that the reader brings with him. A poet may be obscure in two ways. He may be obscure, as Shelley was, from endeavouring to express those exquisite shades of feeling—those cloudy suggestions of something “beyond the reaches of our souls”—those subtle ghosts, prenatal embryos rather, of incomplete perception—which in very exalted moments of spiritual or emotional excitement move darkly across the mirror of our consciousness, but which the highest art and the most potent mastery of language can only adumbrate, and can never seize; or he may be obscure, as Mr. Browning is, from deliberately selecting a difficult or fantastic form of expression, telling you only half what he has to say, and leaving you to jump at the rest. Mr. Browning’s mind is evidently one accustomed to profound thought on questions the most solemn in their aspect and the most infinite in their range. But his obscurity is nine cases out of ten is not owing to his thought, but to his manner. He delights in conveying his ideas in a vehicle that puzzles by its eccentricity, and irritates by its nebulous intimations of something which you must grope after in mist and darkness, doubtful in the end whether your idea of what is meant is the real meaning at all. “Given the height of the mainmast, to find the captain’s name:” we are constantly reminded of that prodigious problem, the conception of a genius who must have filled the soul of Euclid with despair. Mr. Browning gives us the height of his mainmast, and if we don’t from that postulate duly work out the name of the captain, he seems to consider that the fault is ours. If he were writing conundrums instead of poems the artifice would be very fair. We listen to a conundrum with the expectation and the desire to be puzzled, as a pleasant exercise for our powers of conjecture. Besides, in the last resort, if we are too dull to penetrate the disguise, or the disguise be so ingeniously fashioned that no one but Œdipus could possibly see through it, the propounder is at hand to reward our fruitless toil with the answer which solves all difficulties in a moment. But Mr. Browning is not ubiquitously present, to say to his bewildered readers, “D’ye give it up?” and to vouchsafe a more precise explanation of his meaning. Besides, we submit that a poem is not, and should not be, a conundrum. Grant, even, that we guess right, still the mere process of guessing destroys all the pleasure and profit that belong to poetry. A mind that is hard at work piecing out a meaning from disjointed intimations, which sometimes won’t dovetail together, or which reveal great gaps to be filled up from the reader’s own invention at haphazard, is not in a fit state for receiving those intuitions of truth and beauty which it is the poet’s divine privilege to awaken in the soul. It is one of Mr. Browning’s favourite artifices to give us a few hints of a story, beginning at the middle, or more frequently at the end, suggesting a long course of previous events, and leaving us to divine their nature by the termination to which they have led, and by a few allusions which always imply a foregone knowledge such as in the reader’s case does not exist. These poems generally take a species of dramatic form, and are addressed by one of the chief actors in them to the other chief actor. Each character is of course supposed to know all the antecedents; but unfortunately the reader does not, and is placed in much the same position as if he were taken to the theatre to see a tragedy, of which only the fifth act was played. Several of these intentional fragments are to be found in the volume before us. “James Lee,” “The Worst of it,” “Too Late,” and some others, are all fifth acts or broken scenes of tragedies, the full meaning of which we are expected to arrive at by a species of induction, building up the entire structure as anatomists build upon the extinct mammoth and dragon of the early slime, from a bone or two. We do not see what is gained by this method. If it be said that it furnishes us with good intellectual exercise, we answer that that is not the proper end and object of poetic art. The value of poetry consists partly in the pleasure it gives; partly, and much more, in its power to enlarge our sympathies and quicken our sense of the Divine in nature—for it was a petty mistake of the last century to suppose that poetry is simply an elegant, idle recreation, like embroidery or tambour-work. The use of poetry is as positive as that of mathematics or engineering. It expresses certain forms of truth and beauty which could not be as well expressed in any other way. But mere intellectual exercise is no part of its work. For such an end, the study of algebra or of logic would do a great deal better. All the greatest poets are aware of this, and do not confuse the two things. It is unquestionably true that in the finest kind of poetry a vast overplus of latent suggestion lies beneath the primal meaning, and that the more we examine, and the greater the powers of our own mind, the more we shall find germinating from the pregnant roots of the conception. But the primal meaning itself is plain. We never guess as to the intention of “King Lear” or “Paradise Lost.” The sonnets of Shakespeare are the nearest approach to an exception to this rule; but even they are full of distinct propositions. We may speculate as to whether they are autobiographical or simply fanciful; who were the men and women spoken of, and what precise degree of connexion there may be between the various parts of the series. But out of the whole one hundred and fifty-four, there are probably not more than a dozen which are not in themselves perfectly intelligible, expressing in language of transcendent beauty experiences as profound and general as life, and love, and death. That some few are enigmatical is sufficiently accounted for by the recorded fact that Shakespeare meant them for circulation “among his private friends,” who probably knew the circumstances to which they referred, and that he never published them himself. Mr. Browning voluntarily addresses a large audience, and we think cheats himself of some part of the recognition to which his splendid genius is entitled by this fantastic dalliance with an obscurity that is wholly gratuitous and non-essential. And there are other causes, besides the fragmentary mode of relating a story, which go to the production of this obscurity. Fondness for metaphysical discussion, an abrupt and sometimes cramped mode of expression, and metaphors which rather darken than illustrate the meaning, contribute to fence and palisade the writings of Mr. Browning with a very quickset hedge of perplexity.
The volume now given to the world is as full of these characteristics as previous volumes have been. It has all Mr. Browning’s analytical subtlety of thought, all his wonderful command of language, all his smouldering fire of passion, all his fluent grace of lyrical expression (sometimes most provokingly abandoned, as it would seem from mere wilfulness, for very prosaic kinds of verse), and all his obscurity. It again evinces, moreover, that tendency of its author to describe the darker and more oppressive forms of human passion—the wild eccentricities and mournful failures of love. The poems we have already alluded to, and two or three others—such as “Dis Aliter Visum, or le Byron de nos Jours,” “Youth and Art,” and “A Likeness”—hang heavy and dark as thunder clouds, and overcome the mind with a sense of weary gloom that is almost intolerable. There are moods of Mr. Browning’s mind, or moods of other persons’ minds, which he depicts with marvellous force, wherein even reliance on Providence seems like another form of despondency, and we are reminded of those lines in Shelley’s “Masque of Anarchy:”
——One fled past, a maniac maid,
And her name was Hope, she said,
But she look’d more like Despair.
This, however, is perhaps rather a characteristic of the present age in general than of Mr. Browning in particular, and certainly no one can give the mood more masterly expression than he.
The poems which strike us as being the best in the volume are “Abt Vogler,” “Rabbi Ben Ezra,” “Caliban upon Setebos, or Natural Theology in the Island,” and “Mr. Sludge, ‘the Medium.’” The commencement of “A Death in the Desert” is also magnificent, but it passes on to a mere theological argument, which is surely quite beyond the province of poetry. The “death” is that of St. John, who, lying concealed in a cavern, addresses his faithful followers with his last breath, and literally argues out the doctrines of Christianity, replying by anticipation to the objections of modern freethinkers. “Abt Vogler” is a gorgeous fancy. The supposed speaker is a musician who by the witchery of his art raises about him a palace of sound.
Higher still and higher (as a runner tips with fire,
When a great illumination surprises a festal night—
Outlining round and round Rome’s dome from space to spire)
Up, the pinnacled glory reached, and the pride of my soul was in sight.
In sigh? Not half! for it seemed, it was certain, to match man’s birth,
Nature in turn conceived, obeying an impulse as I;
And the emulous heaven yearned down, made effort to reach the earth,
As the earth had done her best, in my passion, to scale the sky:
Novel splendours burst forth, grew familiar and dwelt with mine,
Not a point nor peak but found and fixed its wandering star;
Meteor-moons, balls of blaze: and they did not pale nor pine,
For earth had attained to heaven, there was no more near nor far.
Nay more; for there wanted not who walked in the glare and glow,
Presences plain in the place; or, fresh from the Protoplast,
Furnished for ages to come, when a kindlier wind should blow,
Lured now to begin and live, in a house to their liking at last;
Or else the wonderful Dead who have passed through the body and gone,
But were back once more to breathe in an old world worth their new:
What never had been, was now; what was, as it shall be anon;
And what is,—shall I say, matched both? for I was made perfect too.
All through my keys that gave their sounds to a wish of my soul,
All through my soul that praised as its wish flowed visibly forth,
All through music and me!
But the vision fades and is lost, and the musician is led to think that all this beauty, dreamlike and transitory here, must be existent permanently in the world beyond death. For—
There shall never be one lost good! What was, shall live as before;
The evil is null, is nought, is silence implying sound;
What was good, shall be good, with, for evil, so much good more;
On the earth the broken arcs; in the heaven, a perfect round.
All we have willed or hoped or dreamed of good, shall exist;
Not its semblance, but itself; no beauty, nor good, power
Whose voice has gone forth, but each survives for the melodist
When eternity affirms the conception of an hour.
The high that proved too high, the heroic for earth too hard,
The passion that left the ground to lose itself in the sky,
Are music sent up to God by the lover and the bard;
Enough that He heard it once; we shall hear it by-and-by.
And what is our failure here but a triumph’s evidence
For the fulness of the days? Have we withered or agonized?
Why else was the pause prolonged but that singing might issue thence?
Why rushed the discords in, but that harmony should be prized?
Sorrow is hard to bear, and doubt is slow to clear,
Each sufferer says his say, his scheme of the weal and woe;
But God has a few of us whom He whispers in the ear;
The rest may reason and welcome; ’tis we musicians know.
If Mr. Browning had never written anything but this poem it would give him a high place in his art. In “Rabbi Ben Ezra” the same line of thought is followed out in a more sober and intellectual manner. The Rabbi, reflecting on what we may term the divine incompleteness of man, as distinguished from the greater perfection but smaller range of the brutes, concludes that all these broken hopes, these unfulfilled aspirations, this suggestion of greatness even in failure, point to the larger life of the future as the only compensation for the present. “Caliban upon Setebos,” is a soliloquy of the monster on the nature of his “dam’s god Setebos,” wonderful for its picturesqueness, dramatic truth, and implied thought and sarcasm. This is how Caliban mediates on his deity, and as many people meditate on theirs:
Setebos, Setebos, and Setebos!
’Thinketh, He dwelleth i’ the cold o’ the moon.
’Thinketh He made it, with the sun to match,
But not the stars; the stars came otherwise;
Only made clouds, winds, meteors, such as that:
Also this isle, what lives and grows thereon,
And snaky sea which rounds and ends the same.
’Thinketh, it came of being ill at ease:
He hated that He cannot change His cold,
Nor cure its ache. ’Hath spied an icy fish
That longed to ’scape the rock-stream where she lived,
And thaw herself within the lukewarm brine
O’ the lazy sea her stream thrusts far amid,
A crystal spike ’twixt two warm walls of wave;
Only she ever sickened, found repulse
At the other kind of water, not her life,
(Green-dense and dim-delicious, bred o’ the sun)
Flounced back from bliss she was not born to breathe,
And in her old bounds buried her despair,
Hating and loving warmth alike: so He.
’Thinketh, He made thereat the sun, this isle,
Trees and the fowls here, beast and creeping thing.
Yon otter, sleek-wet, black, lithe as a leech;
Yon auk, one fire-eye in a ball of foam,
That floats and feeds; a certain badger brown
He hath watched hunt with that slant white-wedge eye
By moonlight; and the pie with the long tongue
That pricks deep into oakwarts for a worm,
And says a plain word when she finds her prize,
But will not eat the ants; the ants themselves
That build a wall of seeds and settled stalks
About their hole—He made all these and more,
Made all we see, and us, in spite: how else?
He could not, Himself, make a second self
To be His mate; as well have made Himself.
He would not make what He mislikes or slights,
An eyesore to Him, or not worth His pains:
But did, in envy, listlessness or sport,
Make what Himself would fain, in a manner, be—
Weaker in most points, stronger in a few,
Worthy, and yet mere playthings all the while,
Things He admires and mocks too,—that is it.
’Thinketh, such shows nor right nor wrong in Him,
Nor kind, nor cruel: He is strong and Lord.
’Am strong myself compared to yonder crabs
That march now from the mountain to the sea;
’Let twenty pass, and stone the twenty-first,
Loving not, hating not, just choosing so.
’Say, the first straggler that boasts purple spots
Shall join the file, one pincer twisted off;
’Say, this bruised fellow shall receive a worm,
And two worms he whose nippers end in red;
As it likes me each time, I do: so He.
But as he indulges in these thoughts, a thunder-storm comes on:
What, what? A curtain o’er the world at once!
Crickets stop hissing; not a bird—or, yes,
There scuds His raven that hath told Him all!
It was fool’s play, this prattling! Ha! The wind
Shoulders the pillared dust, death’s house o’ the move,
And fast invading fires begin! White blaze—
A tree’s head snaps—and there, there, there, there, there
His thunder follows! Fool to gibe at Him!
Lo! ’Lieth flat and loveth Setebos!
’Maketh his teeth meet through his upper lip,
Will let those quails fly, will not eat this month
One little mess of whelks, so he may ’scape!
“Mr. Sludge, ‘the Medium,’” is a scathing exposition of the habits of mind which, on the part of believers in “spiritualism,” invite the tricks and artifices of charlatans. The poem is full of reflection and knowledge, and would be admirable if it were not rather too long. Sixty-six pages are too many for such a subject.
Mr. Browning has in “Dramatis Personæ” added some more stones to the temple of his fame. Whatever we may think of his obscurities, he is undoubtedly one of the most original writers of verse in our English tongue; and, while that tongue lasts, his place is assured and distinct beyond dispute or cavil.
Reviewed:
Dramatis Personæ (RB), London: Chapman & Hall, 1864.
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