R640830A. Dramatis Personæ.
The Standard, 30 August 1864, p. 3.
Listed in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 31, 343.
It is long since a book was published which required or deserved more careful criticism than this last work of Mr. Browning’s. Its author’s position in literature is very peculiar. Among the half-dozen writers whom, with some effort of charity, we call “our living poets,” his name, by common consent, holds the second place. Some, indeed, of his mos hardy admirers declare his superiority to Tennyson. But these zealous Browingites, whom, by the bye, we have generally found to have very little acquaintance with Tennyson’s writings, base their assertion of their favourite’s superiority upon those elements of his poetry which are least poetical. Attack any part of his work, and their answer is always the same; point out some careless rhythm, some strained comparison, some bald and commonplace stanza, the reply is ever ready, “Look at the thought; these are but trivial defects: work at your study, read over and over again these difficult sentences, and when you have extracted their meaning you will prize it all the more for the trouble you have had in the task.” This is the general defence. We hold it to be invalid. Obscure sentences, harsh rhythms, careless rhymes, are, to our thinking, incompatible with good poetry. A great poem, like a great piece of music, must be simple and harmonious. It it wants either of these qualities it is not great. The common cant of criticism is too tolerant of defects of form. “Jones,” it say, “ may be a clever rhymester, but Smith is the poet. His verse may be rugged, and his fancy poor, but look at his thoughts.” What nonsense is all this—how debasing to art! A great thought no more makes a great poem than a fine piece of marble makes a great statue, or a heap of unordered columns a beautiful temple.
We sometimes meet travellers who have gone out of the beaten track and crossed some very rugged and difficult country. To their retrospective eyes the difficulties make the scenery sublime, and they are always descanting on beauties which they cannot specify and which others cannot find. Just so is it with those who with hardest study toiled through the rugged obscurity of Sordello. Henceforth they sit on an intellectual height, and console themselves for its being cloudy by the thought that it was very hard to get up. Before, however, we go on to speak of the volume now before us we should, in justice to Mr. Browning, note those acknowledged excellences of his poetry which are to be set in the balance against the defect of which we have spoken. And in the first place we must note that the error which we have attributed to Mr. Browning’s admirers, in their carelessness as to beauty of form, seems to exist in the mind of the poet himself. It is not from want of power that Mr. Browning leaves his verses rugged. For although he has never approached the exquisite music of Tennyson’s rhythms the “Saul,” as a specimen of one class of poems, the “Garden Fancies,” as representing another, are very beautiful specimens of melodious verse. In one great excellence he stands alone—the laureate himself does not share it. We mean his marvellous power of reproducing old forms of art. Mr. Ruskin has given most emphatic testimony to the artistic truth of the poem, in which the bishop orders his tomb at St. Praxed’s Church, and revels in the thought of the nine columns, two and two—
Peach blossom marble all, the rare, the ripe,
As fresh poured red wine of a mighty pulse;
the antique black basalt for the slab, the lump of lapis lazuli
Big as a Jew’s head cut off at the nape,
Blue as a vein o’er the Madonna’s breast.
The poem is horrible in its mixture of death-bed thoughts with vanity and avarice, and a religion compared with which Paganism were pure, but from an artistic point of view it is unmatched. There is a little poem in the volume now before us which illustrates this power, and which shall be our first quotation. How Mr. Browning can have been led to spoil it by the offensive conceit of the last couplet we cannot guess. It is called “A Face.”
If one could have that little head of hers
Painted upon a background of pale gold,
Such as the Tuscan’s early art prefers!
No shade encroaching on the matchless mould
Of those two lips, which should be opening soft
In the pure profile; not as when she laughs
For that spoils all: but rather as if aloft
Yon hyacinth, she loves so, leaned its staff’s
Burthen of honey-coloured buds to kiss,
And capture ’twixt the lips apart for this.
Then her lithe neck, three fingers might surround,
How it should waver on the pale gold ground
Up to the fruit-shaped, perfect chin it lifts!
I know Correggio loves to mass, in rifts
Of heaven, his angel faces, orb on orb
Breaking its outline burning shades absorb;
But these are only massed there, I should think,
Waiting to see some wonder momently
Grow out, stand full, fade slow against the sky
(That’s the pale ground you’d see this sweet face by),
All heaven, meanwhile, condensed into one eye,
Which fears to lose the wonder should it wink.
In Mr. Browning’s poems there is no lack of passion, but it usually comes out in its lowest, the physical form. We will not quote instances of this; those who are familiar with the poems must often have noted them, and we will not set others on the track of such defects. Nor can we here discuss the question whether the present reserve of literature is not a little prudish, and likely to do harm by trying to suppress some parts of our nature. But Mr. Browning’s error, if error it be, comes, we think, from a low view of the worth and dignity of love. It would be amusing, and not unuseful, to work out his theory by a careful comparison of the amatory poems. Here we can only name in illustration of our remark, “Any Wife to Any Husband,” “The Last Ride Together,” and “A Pretty Woman.” Mr. Browning could never have written with Keats’s purity “The Eve of St. Agnes;” he could never have imagined the noble concluding passages of “The Princess.” At the same time, we must admit that “In a Gondola” is one of the most beautiful love poems in the language. But to our thinking, Mr. Browning’s dramas are by far the finest of his works. “Pippa Passes” stands alone in our literature; we have nothing at all like it. And there never was a poem written in which the dramatic effect was stronger. The Rembrandtlike contrasts of light and shade are magnificent. Its one defect is in the unnatural subtlety of thought and word in the songs which Pippa sings, especially in the New Year’s hymn. It is a grave violation of artistic truth, and one too characteristic of Mr. Browning, to make a poor peasant girl,
Pippa, who winds silk,
The whole year round, to get just bread and milk,
and who has but one holiday in the year, sing such stanzas as these for her New Year’s hymn:–
All service ranks the same with God;
If now, as formerly he trod
Paradise, his presence fills
Our earth, each only as God wills
Can work—God’s puppets best and worst,
Are we; there is no last nor first.
Say not “a small event!” Why “small?”
Costs it more pain that this, ye call
A “great event,” should come to pass,
Than that? Untwine me from the mass
Of deeds which make up life, one deed
Power shall fall short in or exceed!
Fine as these verses are in some respects we always feel that they take away some of the simplicity which is meant to be one of the beauties of the character of Pippa. Inferior to “Pippa Passes” in strength of dramatic effect, but a noble and beautiful poem, and far above the rest of its fellows, is “Columbe’s Birthday.” And when we have gone through the volume of “Tragedies and other Plays” we have by no means exhausted the proofs of Mr. Browning’s dramatic genius. Such poems as “The Flight of the Duchess.” the [“]Statue and the Bust,” and “Andrea del Sarto,” are essentially dramatic, in the last named especially the poet speaks in the painter’s character with marvellous subtlety and beauty of expression. We were glad to find that Mr. Browning himself felt in what style of writing lay his special excellence, and very fitly entitled this book “Dramatis Personæ.” We are glad that he should write, as he does in almost all the poems in this volume, under the person of another whom his imagination calls up to live and speak before us. But we must comment on two modes in which he is fond of this dramatic guise. He has given us several poems supposed to be uttered by women. Apparently he conceives himself able to do this kind of personation particularly well. Our readers will probably recall some former poems of this kind—”A Woman’s Last Word,” “Any Wife to Any Husband,” “In a Year”—and in this volume there are three. Now, in all these poems the same tone is adopted, and it is a tone unfair to women, unworthy of the poet. Mr. Browning represents women as for the most part pretty creatures, for whom, for some reasons which he at least does not indicate, men are apt to feel a strange infatuation.
God be thanked! the meanest of his creatures,
Boasts two soul-sides, one to face the world with,
One to show a woman, when he loves her.
The man chooses a woman, and to her
He turns this better soul-side
Thus he sings of his passion—
“While I am I and you are you,
So long as the world contains us both,
Me the loving, and you the loth,
While the one eludes, must the other pursue,”
He is wholly hers, with his arm, and heart,
And brain, all hers for a word, a want,
Put into a look.
He has no lack of faith in his success; if his mistress dies, still he looks on in fancy across the purifying trials of future worlds, and sings that—
God above
Is great to grant, as mighty to make,
And creates the love to reward the love,
I claim you still for my own love’s sake.
Compared with the rapture of her society all other joys grow pale. Ambition seems a childish dream. The line of history that tells a statesman’s life; the soldier’s name scratched on the abbey stones; the famous poem; the sculptured Venus; the successful opera; all power in science, in art, in the ruling of the affairs of men, he holds as follies, compared with the pleasure of riding side by side with the lady of his love. He gains his suit, and thus he sings his triumph:—
I am named and known by that hour’s feat,
There look my station and degree:
So grew my own small life complete
As nature obtained her best of me—
One born to love you, sweet!
This is Mr. Browning’s portrait of the lover. There is passion enough, in truth, but we note two defects. In the first place, this love is fed solely by the contemplation of physical charms. It is a sensual love, and it is notable how Mr. Browning takes every opportunity of bringing out this side of the passion. Thus in the poem called “The Last Ride together,” the rejected lover obtains one farewell kiss. Mr. Browning puts it—
Thus lay she a moment on my breast.
The other defect is that the love appears to lead to nothing except the attainment by the lover of certain personal privileges. What is the woman’s part? She is wooed thus warmly, her caprices are studied, her lightest wish obeyed, and finally, she capitulates and passes into the possession of a husband. She is his, a prize, a treasure, an enjoyment, but higher than this the ideal does not go. Of the partnership of heart the poet speaks; on the partnership of will and intellect, the thousand ways in which the wife is the help-mate to her husband, anticipating his desires, sharing grief and joy, purifying him by the example of her purity—strengthening him by the beauty of her simple faith—on these he is silent. Truly this is a low ideal. If it were the prevailing one, we might wisely accept the counsel of the sarcastic Ellesmere, in “Friends in Council,” who warns men not to indulge in loves or hatreds, because they occupy time, discompose the judgement, and hinder self-advancement; but adds the advice that if they must indulge in those unprofitable passions they had better choose the hatreds.
Mr. Browning is also fond of using the dramatic form of soliloquies to put forward his own views on subjects of public interest or philosophic debate. We shall have occasion to comment presently upon one portion of this book in which we think he has abused his power; we only wish now to note that, in these poems more than any others, he allows the intellectual faculties to overthrow the poetic. We should refuse the title of poetry to such a production as “Caliban upon Setebos” in this last volume. It needs as closely-reasoning study as any one of the Bridgewater Treatises, and appears to have been purposely made as difficult as possible by the employment of an awkward and inharmonious contraction. We think these two characteristics of Mr. Browning’s poetry—the low view he takes of the character and office of woman, and the intellectual labour required to understand many of his productions—go far to account for his unpopularity with women. Tennyson is in many respects his own idea; “the double-natured poet,” Browning, has the hard man’s way of looking on all questions, even when he talks in pretty phrases and pretends to be a woman. One other reason for their dislike of him may be added, his fondness for closing a poem of affection with some bitter jest. His mood is often a good deal like Thackeray’s in this respect. Thus, in the new poem called “Dis aliter visum; or, Le Byron de nos jours,” a woman is reproaching a famous writer, many years her senior. for not having asked her to marry him ten years before. And this is the way she ends:—
You know not? That I well believe;
Or you had saved two souls: nay, four.
For Stephanie sprained last night her wrist,
Ancle, or something. “Pooh,” cry you.
At any rate, she danced, all say,
Vilely, her vogue has had its day.
Here comes my husband from his whist.
The suggestion of the last line, taken in connection with what was written fives lines before, has a bitter and unwholesome taste. This unpopularity with women, of course, narrows Mr. Browning’s fame, and will materially weaken his hold on the minds of the next generation. But among the characteristics which we have named as its causes, there is one which almost makes compensation to the poet by giving him a special and very considerable power in the present. The students of whom we have already spoken, who read his poetry almost for the sake of its difficulties, include many men who have no care nor sympathy for what they call “mere poetry.” Pastoral and romance poetry is to them no more than a “jingling medley of purloined conceits;” nay, they turn away from “In Memoriam,” with all its subtle beauties and depths of thought, as being too sentimental. Mr. Browning’s philosophic poems exactly suit them. The thought is good enough to be worth finding; the diction is obscure enough to give interest to the search; and there is no beaut of form to offend their prejudices. And it is the fact that so many will turn to these new poems not so much for enjoyment as for hard intellectual profit that makes the publication important, and requires that the critic should be strict. And now, turning to these new poems, after a long but we hope not a tedious preface, we would first note some peculiarities of rhyme. In many places Mr. Browning is very careless about it; the rhyme is sometimes quietly dropped altogether, as in the little poem called “Prospice.” This is the gem of the shorter pieces, and to our thinking contains some of the finest lines Mr. Browning has ever written. But the one defective rhyme near the end baulks the reader sadly.
Fear death?—to feel the fog in my throat,
The mist in my face,
When the snows begin, and the blasts denote
I am nearing the place,
The power of the night, the press of the storm,
The post of the foe;
Where he stands, the Arch Fear in a visible form,
Yet the strong man must go;
For the journey is done and the summit attained,
And the barriers fall,
Though a battle’s to fight ere the guerdon be gained,
The reward of it all.
I was ever a fighter, so—one fight more,
The best and the last!
I would hate that death bandaged my eyes, and forbore,
And bade me creep past.
No! let me taste the whole of it, fare like my peers
The heroes of old,
Bear the brunt, in a minute pay glad life’s arrears
Of pain, darkness, and cold.
For sudden the worst turns the best to the brave,
The black minute’s at end,
And the elements’ rage, the fiend voices that rave
Shall dwindle, shall blend,
Shall change, shall become first a peace, then a joy,
Then a light, then thy breast,
O thou soul of my soul! I shall clasp thee again,
And with God be the rest!
But if Mr. Browning is careless in his neglect of rhyme, he is sometimes capricious in its use. In one poem from which we have already, in illustration of another comment, quoted one stanza, he takes the trouble of finding a double rhyme for the end of every second line. The result is singularly unpleasing to the ear, and to obtain this undesirable jingle Mr. Browning is compelled to drag in words which being unnecessary, only serve to weaken the sense. We quote three more stanzas which will suffice to justify our censure. “Le Byron de mos jours” is debating with himself whether he shall ask a young girl to marry him.
A match ’twixt me, bent, wigged, and lamed
Famous, however, for verse and worse,
Sure of the Fortieth spare arm-chair
When gout and glory seat me there,
So, one whose love-freaks pass unblamed.
And this young beauty, round and sound
As a mountain apple, youth and truth
With loves and doves, at all events
With money in the Three per Cents;
Whose choice of me would seem profound.
She might take me as I take her,
Perfect the hour would pass, alas!
Climb high, love high, what matter? Still,
Feet, feelings, must descend the hill:
An hour’s perfection can’t recur.
There is one still worse instance of eccentricity of rhyme in this book. It occurs in “Caliban upon Setebos.” The savage has been “speaking his mind” about Setebos, and the thought strikes him, what if the god should hear him?
If He caught me here,
O’erheard this speech, and asks “What chucklest at?”
’Would, to appease Him, cut a finger off,
Or of my three kid yearlings burn the best,
Or let the toothsome apples rot on tree,
Or push my tame beast for the orc to taste:
While myself lit a fire, and made a song,
And sung it, “What I hate, be consecrate,
To celebrate thee and thy state, no mate
For thee what see for envy in poor me?”
This is simply childish; sense and grammar are sacrificed for the sake of a jingle, which is not even melodious. In our remaining space we must confine ourselves to speaking of three poems, of which one has excited a good deal of public attention, and the other two are the most likely to contribute to their author’s future fame.
The first we will notice is “Mr. Sludge, the Medium.” It is by far the longest piece in the book, occupying nearly seventy pages, and professes to be the confession of a “medium,” who has been found out in an attempt at imposture. It has no claims to be called poetry; but directly the volume appeared it was hailed with rapture by some hasty critics as being a triumphant demolition of spiritualism. A great thinker at last had spoken out, and behold, at the touch of his satire, spiritualism had assumed its proper form and stood revealed as an imposture. We will just outline the production before we comment upon it. “Mr. Sludge, the ‘Medium’” has been detected trying to cheat by the patron in whose house he has been living. Threatened with exposure, he kneels and swears that it is the first time he has ever cheated, and that then he should not have tried had he not taken too much champagne:—
Get up?
You still inflict on me that terrible face?
You show no mercy? Not for Her dear sake,
The sainted spirit’s, whose soft breath even now
Blows on my cheek—(Don’t you feel something, sir?)
You’ll tell?
Go tell, then! Who the devil cares
What such a rowdy chooses to . . .
Aie-aie-aie!
Please, sir! your thumbs are through my windpipe, sir!
Ch—ch!
Well, sir, I hope you’ve done it now!
Oh Lord! I little thought, sir, yesterday,
When your departed mother spoke those words
Of peace through me, and moved you, sir, so much,
You gave me—(very kind it was of you)—
These shirt-studs—(better take them back again,
Please, sir!)—Yes, little did I think so soon
A trifle of trick all through a glass too much
Of his own champagne, would change my best of friends
Into an angry gentleman!
Though, ’twas wrong.
I don’t contest the point; your anger’s just:
Whatever put such folly in my head,
I know ’twas wicked of me. There’s a thick,
Dusk, undeveloped spirit (I’ve observed)
Owes me a grudge—a negro’s I should say,
Or else an Irish emigrant’s; yourself
Explained the case so well last Sunday, sir,
When we had summoned Franklin to clear up
A point about those shares in the telegraph!:
Ay, and he swore .. or might it be Tom Paine?
Thumping the table close by where I crouched,
He’d do me soon a mischief: that’s come true!
He then offers to tell the truth about the tricks, “the whole truth and nought else,” and how there’s been some falsehood. But he wants his passage paid to England, and a little money to start him in some new trade. If this is refused he will tell the public that his patron wanted his presents back and picked a quarrel to obtain them. So the poor dupe consents to give what is asked; supplies eggnogg and cigars, and sits down to listen to the impostor’s story, which begins with the splendid line,
Fol-lol-the-rido-liddle-iddle-ol!
When the confession does come it is certainly a full one. Sludge makes excuses for himself as he goes along—the eagerness of people to pet him directly they thought he might be a medium; their constant suggestions of the form which they wished the spirit manifestations to take; their willingness to confess to any amount of blindness on their own part rather than doubt the reality of the communications through Sludge. Besides, he urges, the whole thing was so easy.
Then, it’s so cruel easy! Oh, those tricks
That can’t be tricks, those feats by sleight-of-hand,
Clearly no common conjuror’s!—no indeed!
A conjuror? Choose me any craft in the world
A man puts hand to; and with six months’ pains,
I’ll play you twenty tricks miraculous
To people untaught the trade: have you seen glass blown,
Pipes pierced? Why, just this biscuit that I chip,
Did you ever watch a baker toss one flat
To the oven? Try and do it! Take my word,
Practise but half as much, while limbs are lithe,
To turn, shove, tilt a table, crack your joints,
Manage your feet, dispose your hands aright,
Work wires that twitch the curtains, play the glove
At end of your slipper,—then put out the lights
And … there, there, all you want you’ll get, I hope!
I found it slip easy as an old shoe.
As for telling persons things “he could not know,” he says the phrase is a mistake; with a quick ear and strong memory any one can find out plenty of things which persons concerned think he cannot know. These are excuses, palliations, but the confession is complete.
I cheated when I could,
Rapped with my toe joints, set sham hands at work,
Wrote down names weak in sympathetic ink,
Rubbed odic lights with ends of phosphor-match,
And all the rest.
Here the style of the poem changes. Hitherto it has been Sludge talking through Browning, now it is Browning talking through Sludge. There is no attempt at being consistent with what has gone before, but the impostor is represented as arguing, with great parade of quasi-philosophic reasons, that perhaps, it was not wholly impossible after all. Thirty pages of very lazy reasoning comes to this—that there is a supernatural world, and that we do not know whether its inhabitants cannot communicate with us, or what means they may use.
And this is the magnificent conclusion of the matter:—
I tell you, sir, in one sense, I believe
Nothing at all—that everybody can,
Will, and does cheat; but in another sense,
I’m ready to believe my very self
That every cheat’s inspired, and every lie
Quick with a germ of truth.
Philosophy having had her say, dupe and impostor part. Sludge gets the money, and the promise of secrecy, and thus leaves his patron:—
That’s, I think,
My bed-room candle. Good-night! Bless you, sir!
R-r-r, you brute, beast, and blackguard! Cowardly scamps.
I only wish I dared burn down the house,
And spoil your sniggering!
Finally, he resolves to go and start as a medium somewhere else, and say that his patron turned him out, because the spirits, speaking through Sludge, revealed that he had poisoned his mother.
Our first thought on turning from this production is sincere regret that Mr. Browning should have wasted so much time. That it has any poetic merit the author himself would hardly contend. There is not a phrase or sentence in it worth anybody’s while to recollect. Has it, then, any value for its thought? Is it fair, is it at all effective as an attack upon spiritualism! We are no advocates of spiritualism, but we think Mr. Browning himself must see that that widely-spread belief cannot be touched by such attacks as his. He has been answered in the Spiritual Magazine by an article which described a seance of Mr. Home’s at which Mr. Browning and his late wife (a believer in spiritualism) were present. It is asserted that at that sitting a laurel crown was lifted by spirit hands and placed on Mrs. Browning’s head, to her husband’s evident disappointment. The article, however, is intemperately written, and as far as we are now concerned it does not matter whether any personal animosity or pique has induced Mr. Browning to this attack. We only say it is perfectly futile. Spiritualism is now a widely-spread belief, numbers of persons whose assurance on any other subjects would be at once accepted, depose to having witnessed and convinced themselves of the truth of certain supernatural manifestations. To refute them Mr. Browning introduces an ignorant boy, with flexible limbs and a belief in omens, makes him confess that he has only pretended to be a medium, while cheating all the time, and then seems to think he has overthrown spiritualism. The idea is absurd. We have before noted in these columns that the truth or falsehood of spiritualism is now merely a matter of evidence. Certain testimony is produced in its favour. If that can be disproved, or the facts accounted for on any other hypothesis, well and good. We should be glad to hear that it was done. But to get rid of it by a rigmarole like this—Mr. Browning might as well try to joke away a thunderstorm. It is not the first time he has misused this form of writing. “Mr. Sludge” is foolish; “Bishop Blougram” was censurable. In that poem Mr. Browning represented a prelate of the Roman Church as justifying his profession of religion by the lowest reasons, nay, not only professing religion from base motives, but debasing the Christian faith that he might more easily reconcile it with his worldliness. We have always thought that an immoral poem. The author, without any justifying example—without the adoption of a name which might limit the application of his satire, tried to take away all the poetry which attached to the office, and to insinuate a heavy slander on all who filled it.
Of the other two poems we mentioned we are glad to be able to speak in very different terms. Indeed, we think they may both be placed among the very highest productions of Mr. Browning. “A Death in the Desert” tells of the last words of the beloved disciple John. It is in every respect a noble poem. It is the only one of these new poems in which there is any descriptive introduction of the principal speaker, and in that it gains greatly. It is supposed to be reported by Pamphylax the Antiochene, who thus writes:—
I said, “If one should wet his lips with wine,
And slip the broadest plantain leaf we find,
Or else the lappet of a linen robe,
Into the water-vessel, lay it right,
And cool his forehead just above the eyes,
The while a brother, kneeling either side,
Should chafe each hand and try to make it warm—
He is not so far gone but he might speak.”
This did not happen in the outer cave,
Nor in the secret chamber of the rock,
Where, sixty days since the decree was out,
We had him, bedded on a camel-skin,
And waited for his dying all the while;
But in the midmost grotto, since noon’s light
Reached there a little, and we would not lose
The last of what might happen on his face.
I at the head, and Xanthus at the feet,
With Valens and the boy, had lifted him,
And brought him from the chamber in the depths,
And laid him in the light where we might see;
For certain smiles began about his mouth,
And his lids moved, presageful of the end.
Beyond, and half-way up the mouth o’ the cave,
The Bactrian convert, having his desire,
Kept watch, and made pretence to graze a goat
That gave us milk, on rags of various herb,
Plantain and quitch, the rocks’ shade keeps alive;
So that if any thief or soldier passed
(Because the persecution was aware),
Yielding the goat up promptly with his life,
Such man might pass on joyful at a prize,
Nor care to pry into the cool of the cave.
Outside was all noon and the burning blue.
“Here is wine,” answered Xanthus,—dropped a drop;
I stooped and placed the lap of cloth aright,
Then chafed his right hand, and the boy his left:
But Valens had bethought him, and produced
And broke a ball of nard, and made perfume.
Only he did—not so much wake, as—turn
And smile a little, as a sleeper does
If any dear one call him, touch his face—
And smiles and loves, but will not be disturbed.
Then Xanthus said a prayer, but still he slept:
It is the Xanthus that escaped to Rome,
Was burned, and could not write the chronicle.
Then the boy sprang up from his knees, and ran,
Stung by the splendour of a sudden thought,
And fetched the seventh plate of graven lead
Out of the secret chamber, found a place,
Pressing with finger on the deeper dints,
And spoke, as ’twere his mouth, proclaiming first,
“I am the Resurrection and the Life.”
Whereat he opened his eyes wide at once,
And sat up of himself, and looked at us;
And thenceforth nobody pronounced a word:
Only outside, the Bactrian cried his cry
Like the lone desert-bird that wears the ruff,
As signal we were safe, from time to time.
Then the dying disciple speaks. In prophetic vision he sees the confused doubt of later days, and hears the question put in many forms, “Did Christ in truth exist?”
“Was he revealed in any of His lives,
As power, as love, as influencing soul?”
He hears men contending that Christ was but a dream, the creation of the human mind. Power, love, will? Where is proof of power since the world revolves in an accustomed course, without change or interruption. Love? that is “the mere projection from man’s inmost mind.”
And what he loves, thus falls reflected back,
Becomes accounted somewhat out of him,
He throws it up in air, it drops down earth’s,
With shape, name, story added, man’s old way.
Will, too. There is no room for that in the unchanging order of nature.
Law in turn discards power, love, and will.
The reasoning by which the disciple meets such objections is nobly conceived; subtle and strong as an argument, and very fine poetry. There are several passages we should like to quote, but we must forbear. In one only will we indulge.
In “Christmas Eve” Mr. Browning wrote:—
The loving worm within its clod,
Were diviner than a loveless God
Amid his worlds, I will dare to say.
In “A Death in the Desert” he thus puts the same thought. Speaking of power, will, and love, S. John says:—
“If man prove the sole existent thing
Where these combine, whatever their degree,
However weak the might or will or love,
So they be found there, put in evidence—
He is as surely higher in the scale
Than any might with neither love nor will,
As life, apparent in the poorest midge,
When the faint dust speck flits, ye guess its wing
Is marvellous beyond dead Atlas’ self:
I give such to the midge for resting place.”
Of the last poem which we singled out for notice, “Rabbi Ben Ezra,” we can say but little. It is a grand poem. To note its beauties would be to quote the whole, and that we cannot do. The Rabbi reviews his life, the baffled hopes of youth; the shortcomings of manhood; the doubt yet calmness of old age.
There is a beautiful stanza in which he images the epochs of a man’s life, at which he can turn back to judge of a past that seems complete:—
For note, when evening shuts,
A certain moment cuts
The deed off, calls the glory from the grey:
A whisper from the west
Shoots—“Add this to the rest,
Take it, and try its worth: here dies another day.”
But the great beauty of the poem lies in the concluding stanzas, which we take to be the finest Mr. Browning has ever written, almost sublime in the adaptation of the Scripture metaphor, and, with the exception of the involved last stanza but one, far beyond his usual felicity of diction.
Alf, note that potter’s wheel,
That metaphor! and feel
Why time spins fast, why passive lies our clay—
Show to whom fools propound,
When the wine makes its round,
Since life fleets, all is changed; the past gone, seize to-day!
Fool! All that is, at all,
Lasts ever, past recall;
Earth changes, but thy soul and God stand sure:
What entered into thee,
That was, is, and shall be;
Time’s wheel runs back or stops; potter and clay endure.
He fixed thee mid this dance
Of plastic circumstance,
This present, thou, forsooth, wouldst fain arrest,
Machinery just meant
To give thy soul its bent,
Try thee, and turn thee forth, sufficiently impressed.
What though the earlier grooves
Which ran the laughing loves
Around thy base, no longer pause and press?
What though, about thy rim,
Scull-things in order grim
Grow out in graver mood, obey the sterner stress?
Look not thou down but up!
To uses of a cup,
The festal board, lamp’s flash and trumpet’s peal,
The new wine’s foaming flow,
The master’s lips a-glow!
Thou, heaven’s consummate cup, what needst thou with earth’s wheel?
But I need, now as then,
Thee, God, who mouldest men;
And since, not even while the whirl was worst,
Did I—to the wheel of life
With shapes and colours rife,
Bound dizzily—mistake my end, to slake thy thirst:
So take and use thy work!
Amend what flaws may lurk,
What strain o’ the stuff, what warpings past the aim!
My times be in thy hand!
Perfect the cup as planned!
Let age approve of youth, and death complete the same.
O si sic omnia. These two poems are worthy of all praise, and we are sorry that the character of some of their companions will prevent this volume of “Dramatis Personae” from advancing its author’s fame.
Reviewed:
Dramatis Personæ (RB), London: Chapman & Hall, 1864.
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