E630715A. The Greek Christian Poets and the English Poets.
The Guardian, 15 July 1863, p. 671.
Listed in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 30, 376.
[The article in which this review appears also contains notices of works by RB, R. Owen, Bessie Rayner Parkes, Maresco Pearce, and Matthew Brydie; these we omit.]
Next to theLast Poems of Mrs. Browning, and not far from the collected works of her husband, should be placed upon our shelves her essays on the Greek Christian Poets and the English Poets. Each of them appeared at first in an ephemeral form; and each would probably have been lost in the vast catacombs of ephemeral literature, if it had not been associated with the name of its writer. To those who appreciate Mrs. Browning’s genius, these two hundred pages are a curious study. The prose of our learned English poetess is peculiar; yet it has its force and attractiveness. It would be much easier to criticise than to match the following description of Lord Surrey:-
“Lord Surrey passes as the tuner of our English nearly up to its present pitch of delicacy and smoothness; and we admit that he had a melody in his thoughts which they dared not disobey. That he is, as has been alleged by a chief critic, ‘our first metrical writer,’ lies not in our creed; and, even Turberville’s more measured praise-
Our mother tongue by him hath got such lyght,
That rustic speche thereby is banisht qwyht,-
we have difficulty in accepting. We venture to be of opinion that he did not belong to that order of master-minds with whom transitions originate, although qualified, by the quickness of a yielding grace, to assist effectually a translational movement. There are names which catch the proverbs of praise as a hedge-thorn catches sheep’s wool, by position and approximation rather than adaptitude: and this name is of them. Yet it is a high name. His poetry makes the ear lean to it, it is so sweet and low; the English he made it of, being ready to be sweet, and falling ripe in sweetness into other hands than his.”
We dare not quite use Mrs. Browning’s language of herself, and say that her criticisms fastened on the Greek Christian poets as a hedge-thorn catches sheep’s wool, by position and approximation rather than adaptitude. Her earnest religious mind had real sympathy with them, yet her school of religious thought and her taste in language was so unlike theirs that this sympathy was imperfect. She looked at the Fathers, and reported as the result of her survey that “we owe them more reverence for the greyness of their beards than theological gratitude for the outstretching of their hands.” She appreciated their poetry, and that of their Eastern successors, in part; perhaps she was more indebted to them for the outstretching of their hands to teach and to warn than she was at all aware of.
Reviewed:
The Greek Christian Poets and the English Poets (EBB), London: Chapman & Hall, 1863.
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