R460117A. Dramatic Romances and Lyrics.
The Athenæum, 17 January 1846, pp. 58–59.
As reprinted in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 11, 371–374.
We have here yet another proof of Mr. Browning’s fertility. Though his manner changes less than might be wished—since the mist, if it rises and reveals a clear prospect for half a page, as certainly falls again,—there are few of his contemporaries who embrace so wide a field of subjects; be they of thought, or description, or passion, or character. Sometimes baroque, Mr. Browning is never ignoble: pushing versification to the extremity of all rational allowances, and sometimes beyond it, with a hardihood of rhythm and cadence little short of Hudibrastic,—he is rarely careless. His aims are truth and freedom. His art is sometimes consummate—“Wherefore not always?” is a question, the reply to which might lead to threadbare dissertations on taste, self-renunciation, and the like. Instead of these, we shall be more just to our author if we give him room to exhibit himself in his strength, and in his variety.
Let us begin by illustrating Mr. Browning’s descriptive powers. The first of these “Dramatic Ballads” tells of a night-ride from Ghent to Aix, and is thrown off with an animation which Bürger himself hardly exceeds. There is a picture in every verse. We will merely take the first and the fourth by way of specimen:—
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 lights sank to rest,
And into the midnight we galloped abreast.
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.
Of the two poems called “Italy in England” and “England in Italy,”—the first contains Carbonaro romance:—and the second nothing less than all Sorrento, with its sights and sounds packed tight in the necromancer’s show-box—too tight, indeed: one picture jostling the other till the senses ache with steady gazing and sudden transition, and the effort to retain distinct images:—
But to-day not a boat reached Salerno,
So back to a man
Came our friends, with whose help in the vineyards
Grape-harvest began:
In the vat half-way up in our house-side
Like blood the juice spins
While your brother all bare-legged is dancing
Till breathless he grins
Dead-beaten, in effort on effort
To keep the grapes under,
For still when he seems all but master
In pours the fresh plunder
From girls who keep coming and going
With basket on shoulder,
And eyes shut against the rain’s driving,
Your girls that are older,—
For under the hedges of aloe,
And where, on its bed
Of the orchard’s black mould, the love-apple
Lies pulpy and red,
All the young ones are kneeling and filling
Their laps with the snails
Tempted out by the first rainy weather,—
Your best of regales
As to night will be proved to my sorrow,
When supping in state,
We shall feast our grape-gleaners—two dozen,
Three over one plate,—
Maccaroni so tempting to swallow
In slippery strings,
And gourds fried in great purple slices,
That colour of kings,—
Meantime, see the grape-bunch they’ve brought you,—
The rain-water slips
O’er the heavy blue bloom on each globe
Which the wasp to your lips
Still follows with fretful persistence—
Nay, taste while awake,
This half of a curd-white smooth cheese-ball,
That peels, flake by flake,
Like an onion’s, each smoother and whiter—
Next sip this weak wine
From the thin green glass flask, with its stopper,
A leaf of the vine,—
And end with the prickly-pear’s red flesh
That leaves thro’ its juice
The stony black seeds on your pearl-teeth
. . . Scirocco is loose!
Hark! the quick pelt of the olives
Which, thick in one’s track,
Tempt the stranger to pick up and bite them
Tho’ not yet half black!
And how their old twisted trunks shudder!
The medlars let fall
Their hard fruit—the brittle great fig-trees
Snap off, figs and all,
For here comes the whole of the tempest!
No refuge but creep
Back again to my side and my shoulder,
And listen or sleep.
Thus, too, the panorama from the top of Calvano is set down: and the wonders in preparation for the “Feast of the Rosary.” Yet, with all this gusto for and acquaintanceship with the South, our poet does not forget England:—
Home-thoughts, from Abroad.
Oh, to be in England
Now that April’s there,
And who wakes in England
Sees, 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 blossomed 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!
Next, as containing paintings of characters, these “Dramatic Romances” make up a gallery full of human creatures—not abstractions. The dying Ecclesiastic, who bespeaks his “Tomb [p. 59→] at St. Praxed’s”—gloating over the monumental luxuries he orders for himself, (whose wondrous appetite is warranted to go no further—by Princess Buckingham’s death-bed speeches recounted by Walpole) while in every other line he vents his spite and revenge against one Gandolf, who lies near his chosen burial-place in a far meaner tomb—is a study of a human being, full of the wretched ambition and the long-drawn hate of monastic existence. So, too, the French lady in “The Laboratory,” with her profligacy and her passion, her frivolity and her ferocity, gives us a story, a country, and an epoch, in twelve short stanzas of what at first seems merely inconsequent talk:—
He is with her; and they know that I know
Where they are, what they do: they believe my tears flow
While they laugh, laugh at me, at me fled to the drear
Empty church to pray God in for them!—I am here.
Grind away, moisten and mash up thy paste,
Pound at thy powder,—am I in haste!
Better sit thus, and observe thy strange things,
Than go where men wait me and dance at the King’s.
That in the mortar—you call it a gum?
Ah, the brave tree whence such gold oozings come!
And yonder soft phial, the exquisite blue,
Sure to taste sweetly,—is that poison too?
Had I but all of them, thee and thy treasures,
What a wild crowd of invisible pleasures!
To carry pure death in an earring, a casket,
A signet, a fan-mount, a fillagree-basket!
Soon, at the King’s but a lozenge to give
And Pauline should have just thirty minutes to live!
To light a pastille, and Elise, with her head,
And her breast, and her arms, and her hands, should drop dead!
“The Confessional” is a yet more ghastly “tragedy in little” of a Spanish girl, whose lover was betrayed to the Inquisition by her confessor. But the most vivid of all are the four figures in the “Flight of the Duchess”: the Huntsman who tells the tale: the Duke himself: the Sycorax his mother: and the Bride, whom the reader shall see. By way of prelude, let us give the outset of the story:—
You’re my friend:
I was the man the Duke spoke to;
I helped the Duchess to cast off his yoke, too;
So here’s the tale from beginning to end,
My friend!
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 salts and hoar of the great sea shore,
—And the whole is our Duke’s country!
There is good satire in the description of the Duke and his Middle Age heroics and revivals—the touch of “his own mystery,” at the close of the stanza, genially bringing us home to the narrator:—
So, all the old Dukes had been, without knowing it,
This Duke would fain know he was, without being it;
’T was not for the joy’s self, but the joy of his showing it,
Nor for the pride’s self, but the pride of our seeing it.
He revived all usages thoroughly worn out,
The souls of them fumed forth, the hearts of them torn-out:
And chief in the chase his neck he perill’d,
On a lathy horse, all legs and length,
With blood for bone, all speed, no strength;
—They should have set him on red Berold,
With the red eye slow consuming in fire,
And the thin stiff ear like an abbey spire!
Here is the Duke’s wife and puppet elect, fetched out of the convent for His Sublimity:—
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 bear’s 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 enquired
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 grey—
For such things must begin some one day!
Such an union of Life and Death could not, of course, endure. The lady pined and grew recusant. There was a hunting party at which she was appointed to “superintend the disembowelling.” No wonder the Bird chose to shrink back into its cage from such a brutal pastime! Whereupon the Duke—we suppose on Lady Ashton’s principle of breaking the Lily of Lammermoor’s spirit, by placing the wise woman Dame Gourlay near her—for attendant, sent a gipsy crone, to bear his disobedient lady company. The precise intent of the Duke is not clearly made out: but the whole description of the introduction of the Gipsy and her performances is strange and fascinating. The crone had her own game to play;—she found, as found Johnnie Faa in the Earl of Cassilis’ lady, kindred instincts, nay, it would seem, kindred blood, in the poor ceremony-bound Duchess:—and, by a strain of mystic invitation and prophecy, which lulls one like a dream-song, and which beguiled the rough eaves-dropping Huntsman,—so enchanted the Lady, that an unforeseen catastrophe followed:—
But to return from this excursion,—
Just, do you mark, when the song was sweetest,
The peace most deep and the charm completest,
There came, shall I say, a snap—
And the charm vanished!
And my sense returned, so strangely banished,
And, starting as from a nap,
I knew the crone was bewitching my lady,
With Jacynth asleep; and but one spring made I
Down from the casement round to the portal,
Another minute and I had entered,
When the door opened, and more than mortal
Stood, with a face where to my mind centred
All beauties I ever saw or shall see,
The Duchess—I stopped as if struck by palsy.
She was so different, happy and beautiful,
I felt at once that all was best,
And that I had nothing to do, for the rest,
But wait her commands, obey and be dutiful:
Not that in fact, there was any commanding,
—I saw the glory of her eye,
And the brow’s height and the breast’s expanding,
And I was hers to live or to die:
As for finding what she wanted,
You know God Almighty granted
Such little signs should serve his wild creatures
To tell one another all their desires,
So that each knows what its friend requires
And does its bidding without teachers.
I preceded her; the crone
Followed silent and alone;
I spoke to her, but she merely jabbered
In the old style; both her eyes had slunk
Back to their pits; her stature shrunk;
In short, the soul in its body sunk
Like a blade sent home to its scabbard;
We descended, I preceding,
Crossed the court with nobody heeding,
All the world was at the chase,
The court-yard like a desert place,
The stable emptied of its small fry;
I saddled myself the very palfrey
I remember patting while it carried her,
The day she arrived and the Duke married her;
And, do you know, though it’s easy deceiving
Oneself in such matters, I can’t help believing
The lady had not forgotten it either,
And knew the poor devil so much beneath her
Would have been only too glad for her service
To dance on hot ploughshares like a Turk dervise,
But unable to pay proper duty where owing it
Was reduced to that pitiful method of showing it:
For tho’ the moment I began setting
His saddle on my own nag of Berold’s begetting,
(Not that I meant to be obtrusive)
She stopped me, while his rug was shifting,
By a single rapid finger’s lifting,
And, with a gesture kind but conclusive,
And a little shake of the head, refused me,—
I say, although she never used me,
Yet when she was mounted, the gypsy behind her,
And I ventured to remind her,
I suppose with a voice of less steadiness
Than usual, for my feeling exceeded me,
—Something to the effect that I was in readiness
Whenever God should please she needed me,—
Then, do you know, her face looked down on me
With a look that placed a crown on me,
And she felt in her bosom,—mark, her bosom—
And, as a flower-tree drops his blossom,
Dropped me—ah, had it been a purse
Of silver, my friend, or gold that’s worse,
Why, you see, as soon as I found myself
So understood,—that a true heart so may gain
Such a reward,—I should have gone home again,
Kissed Jacynth, and soberly drowned myself!
It was a little plait of hair
Such as friends in a convent make
To wear, each for the other’s sake,—
This, see, which at my breast I wear,
Ever did (rather to Jacynth’s grudgment),
And ever shall, till the Day of Judgment.
And then,—and then,—to cut short,—this is idle,
These are feelings it is not good to foster,—
I pushed the gate wide, she shook the bridle,
And the palfrey bounded,—and so we lost her!
We must leave untouched the study of “Saul” leaning against his tent-pole,—the love verses, in which the book is rich, and the new version of the well-known story of “King Francis, the Lady, the Glove, and the Lion,”—in which Mr. Browning most chivalrously defends one who has been be-sung and be-scandalized as the cruellest of her sex.—Enough has been given to prove that these Romances will add to the poet’s reputation.
[Henry Fothergill Chorley]
Reviewed:
Bells & Pomegranates. No. VII. Dramatic Romances & Lyrics (RB), London: Edward Moxon, 1845.
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