R471100A. Bells and Pomegranates.
The British Quarterly Review, 1 November 1847, pp. 490–509.
As reprinted in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 14, 397–404.
Robert Browning has conquered for himself a high rank amongst contemporary poets, and there are few persons, we presume, who pretend to an acquaintance with the literature of the day, to whom his name has an unfamiliar sound. If they have not read his poems, they have heard them praised; the chances are, that among their acquaintance, two or three are warm admirers; and in no scanty number of families may one hear energetic protests against the “affectation” of the title which it has pleased him to adopt as a collective name for the effusions of the last five years. “Bells and Pomegranates!” exclaims the testy objurgator, “what stuff! What is the sense of such an affected title?” Whereupon some admirer replies: “Bells and Pomegranates, sir, is a Rabbinical symbol, used by Mr. Browning to indicate an alternation of music with discoursing, sound with sense, poetry with thought.” The testy old gentleman refuses to accept such an explanation, and closes the discussion by observing—“Rabbinical, indeed! we want English, not Hebrew, sir!”
Such an objection, such a discussion proves at least that Robert Browning has a place apart from and above the herd of implacable verse-writers, ambitious of demonstrating that poetry is a drug—ambitious of proving the truth of Göthe’s sarcasm—
Wer treibt die Dichtkunst aus der Welt?
Die Poeten!
The objection proves that he has his place in our literature; otherwise, no one would trouble himself with a mere title. Accordingly, we think our duty as critics is calmly to consider his claims to renown; for whatever may be the opinion formed of his poetical powers, the very fact that such powers have in our day raised a man into reputation in a department where, since the giants who lately trod the stage have passed into silence, so few names have been heard above the crowd—this fact, we say, has a significance in it, which the future historian of literature will have to ponder on.
There is one distinction we would wish clearly to establish before proceeding further. Horace declares that a poet is born, not made. In some sense, this is not true. A poet must be made as well as born: he must live in a certain condition of circumstances; either his epoch must be favourable to the musical expression of great convictions, or his own education must be favourable to the acquisition and practice of his art. All this looks very much like a truism, we are aware; but it is not our fault if obvious considerations have been so long overlooked that we are forced to recur [p. 491→] to them. What we mean to educe is this: unquestionably a poet must be born with certain faculties which no education can supply, without which all education is incapable of producing lasting poetry. In a tribe of savages there will be found one or two men in whom some uncontrollable impulse urges them to pour forth their feelings into a rude but rhythmic melody. There is a song in the mind of every true poet; and it is only as a singer that he is a poet. No education creates this impulse in the breast of the savage. Nature created him a Bard, and as such his tribe salutes him.
That which is indispensable in a tribe of savages is also indispensable in a civilized nation; but with some apparent qualifications. Poetry, in as far as it is a Song, cannot be learned; but in as far as it is an Art, it can be learned. In the productions of what are called real poets—great poets, whether they wrote epics, or mere lyrics—there is a vitality which is so charming that it makes us overlook a thousand faults; but, on the contrary, in the productions of those whom we may call poets made—mere imitators, clever arrangers—there is amidst all the splendour of ornament a want of life, of freshness, of conviction; so that we are never roused to rapture, we are never haunted by their strains till they become “familiar as household words;” and in them we are intolerant of the faults which in the works of real poets are passed over unheeded. The reason is plain: a rose is not the less a rose because it has many specks of dirt upon it; but one of those specks would ruin a piece of china. And by an instinctive justice in mankind it is always the poets made upon whom much criticism is exercised at the time of their appearance. The Singer is listened to; the Artist is criticised.
Among the poets to whom we should deny the name of Singers there are many of very remarkable pretensions; and their works show to what a height a man may raise himself who was made, not born, a poet. In fact, the born poets are extremely rare. The test to apply is to ask yourself—“Would Mr. —— have been a poet, if other poets had not written before him? Is the irresistible οἱστρος within him which would, in all conditions of life, have goaded him to that fine frenzy in which Song is speech?” If you have any sagacity, you cannot be long in determining this question.
The Singer is born according to the will of Nature; the Artist is made according to the accidents of the times, and of his own condition. The one is born in all ages, in all conditions; the other is only producible under certain conditions. It is impossible to predict the appearance of the one; but of the other we may confidently say, “such a time is favourable—such a time is un- [p. 492→] favourable.” And we have hammered away at this distinction in order that we might conclude with saying: The present moment is by no means favourable to poetry; a conclusion which the reader will long ago have drawn for himself, but which is here recorded, 1st, that we may explain why the present is unfavourable to poetry; and 2nd, that we may the better understand how Robert Browning has been able to reach the place he occupies.
The present moment is unfavourable to poetry, because there reigns an intellectual anarchy, and an exhaustive spirit of application, which prevent sympathy in any great convictions, and which pin us down to the present, by barricading us from the future. It is an age of application, rather than of invention. There is prodigious intellectual activity, but it is not employed in opening up new tracks of thought. Great ideas are in the process of incarnation; great changes are taking place within the womb of society; but it is a period of gestation, and we are not yet on the eve of a new birth. All the great epochs in the history of literature have been stirring, troubled epochs, when society was in travail, and the poet’s song was either a song of jubilee for the coming era, or the last cry of despair over the departing. In such periods there is an excitement in the public mind favourable to literature—which is the expression of society—and particularly to poetry. A man gifted with a musical feeling, and strongly influenced by the tendencies of the age, will then rise up, and by uttering in articulate and beautiful tones the thoughts and aspirations which are agitating the dumb millions, be saluted as their Poet; but the very same man, thrown upon other times, would distinguish himself in some other way, so that men should never suspect that he had in him the material for a poet. In our day, we may observe how few men of remarkable powers have given any labour to poetry; and this is the more striking, because almost all our writers have “the accomplishment of verse;” so that if they do not throw their thoughts into poems, it is from an instinctive or reflective sense of the futility of such an employment of their energies. Let us take Macaulay as an example. No one will pronounce him a born poet; yet who will deny that he has greater talents than many men who in their day have been regarded as great poets? and if he had given up his days and nights to the practice of his art, he would assuredly have attained to mastery; but he would not have produced poems such as would rouse the enthusiasm of the public, and deserve the attention of posterity; simply because he would have no exalted aspirations, no great convictions, afforded him by his epoch as the inspiration of his song. Unable to reflect the Present, he would be forced to give some pale copy of the Past; to the Future no [p. 493→] one turns his eyes. It is this sense of the age not being poetical—of its affording the Singer no song of triumph, no elegy of regret, which keeps men of the highest powers from the cultivation of the Muse. It is not that people, now-a-days, are indifferent to poetry. Those who declaim against the age as being too practical or too earnest for the indulgence of poetry, make the egregious mistake of confounding the public indifference to their poems with an indifference to poetry itself. The old poets were never more widely diffused, more thoroughly enjoyed, than at present. The men who had something to sing, and sung it, are still listened to; but the feeble variations of those airs, which our modern singers thrust upon the public, find no listeners, because they have no charm.
This, then, is the great obstacle to a poet’s success in the present day: there is nothing for him to sing! Those who believe they are writing poems, do little more than vary the themes of those who have gone before them. Instead of a man being stung with a resistless impulse to utter something he has thought, or felt, or seen in this world, and to utter it in impassioned music, he stands up in the market-place, and with more or less skill declaims to you what he has gathered of the utterances of Byron, of Wordsworth, of Shelley, of Keats, or of Scott. You, having heard the original strain, decline listening to his murderous reminiscence; while he, draping himself in his neglect, tells you that you are “dead to the influence of poetry.”
So inevitable is imitation, that not only are all the herd of verse-writers to be classed under various “schools,”—one belonging to the “school” of Byron—another to the “school” of Wordsworth, as if Poets were Pedagogues, instructing ingenious youth in the emotions they are to feel, in the opinions they are to hold, and in the things they are to observe!—but even such a distinguished Poet as Tennyson, perhaps the only one of our day who deserves the name of poet—even he submits to the necessity, and imitates Wordsworth. Having apparently put “all his sufferings into song,” he took to copying Wordsworth, and then was wisely silent.
Another example of this imitative tendency, which is forced upon writers by the absence of any materials in the age itself, is afforded in the tragedy of the “Patrician’s Daughter,” by Mr. Marston. The author was convinced that dramatists are on the wrong scent in endeavouring on the stage to represent the Past. He felt that a dramatic poet should hold up to his age the very “body of the time.” He knew that passions were as violent—tragedies as terrible—characters as strongly marked now as of old; and he determined to select a subject from the present age. Now, [p. 494→] one would think that in a drama written, as it were, upon theory—written to prove the truth of such a proposition—the author would be careful to avoid all imitation, and still more careful to paint the age with accuracy. But it turned out that the author imitated both Bulwer and Knowles; and as to accuracy, if he had been so wide of the mark in an historical tragedy, the critics would have torn him to pieces. The actors were men in frock coats and white kid gloves—their language was full of Elizabethan idioms and phrases—and the manners were of no age. In fact, he had imposed upon himself a task greater than he was aware of: he had endeavoured to enfranchise himself from imitation—to see with his own eyes.
To be able to see for yourself, and to picture to others what you have seen, are the first great characteristics of genius. To ordinary eyes a flock of sheep present few indications of variety; one sheep is indistinguishable from another sheep. To the shepherd’s eye each differs from each, and has its separate name: to him, a thousand minute appearances distinguish one from the other, because his practised eye sees at a glance that which the unpractised eye could with difficulty discern even when pointed out. In the same way the man of genius is endowed with vision so keen, that where ordinary men observe only the broad distinctions of character, he detects all the myriad shades of difference; he is enabled to individualize. In consequence of this faculty, he is enabled to see things in their truth, because he sees for himself. The greater part of mankind neither see for themselves nor think for themselves. And rare as it is for a man to have that clear intellectual vision, it is perhaps as rare for him to have such powers of expression that he shall be able to write out what he really means. Any one who has handled the pen must be sensible of the astonishing difficulty there is in resisting the temptation to set down the phrases which memory so readily brings forward as expressive of what is in the mind, rather than allow what is in the mind to shape its own expression. Hence the absence of spontaneity in style. Men neither write as they think, nor as they speak, but as they remember others to have written. Instead of regarding style as the incarnation of their own thoughts, and consequently striving to make it as personal and distinct as they can, they regard it as an ornamental dress in which they ought to clothe their thoughts, and are careful to clothe them according to the fashion. No wonder that there are few good writers! No wonder that it is rare to meet with a piece of writing, in prose or verse, which conveys any clear, distinct, truthful picture of the thing described.
It will be readily admitted, therefore, that imitation is the rock [p. 495→] upon which almost all writers must split; because, except in the case of a man of genius, writers are unable to think for themselves, and to write out distinctly what is in their minds. Imitation is not here limited to the obvious parodying of one particular master—as in the case of a writer belonging to the “school” of Byron, or to the “school” of Wordsworth; this is the lowest, vulgarest form of imitation, and arises from a narrow view of the nature of poetry—arises, indeed, from a confusion of success with the conditions of success. But there is a less direct, less obvious imitation, which men fall into, and which consists in adopting the opinions and the language of certain writers who have been their study, and whom they are forced to repeat, because they cannot see for themselves, think for themselves, nor write for themselves. Among the sand-numerous productions which crowd upon the age, how few pages are there of which the writers can say “that is mine—emphatically mine; neither appropriated from another, nor dressed according to the fashion; but born within my own experience, and clothed by me after my manner.”
If we descend from these preliminary considerations to the application of them to the subject before us, we shall easily point out how and why Robert Browning has attained his present position. He is assuredly not a great poet; he is not even a distinguished poet, whose works will be gathered into future collections; but he is nevertheless a man who stands out in relief from his contemporaries—he is a writer of whom one must speak with the respect due to originality. In an age more favourable to the production of poetry, he might have been conspicuous; for he is endowed with some portion of the great faculty which we may metaphorically call the “eye to see.” Deficient in some of the great requisites of his art, he has that one primary requisite: the power of seeing for himself and writing in his own language. Robert Browning is Robert Browning—call him sublime or call him feeble, take any view you will of his poems, you must still admit that he is one standing up to speak to mankind in his speech, not theirs—what he thinks, not what they think. We do not say that there are no traces of other poets in his works: he is of his age, and no man can pretend to escape its influence; he has studied poetry, and no man can at all times separate in his mind the acquired from the generated; but we do say emphatically that he is, in our strict and narrow sense of the term, no imitator, but an original thinker and an original writer.
Unfortunately, this high praise demands some qualification, and we are forced to add, that he is neither a deep thinker nor a musical writer. So that, although his originality has created for him an eminent position amongst a race of imitators, he has [p. 496→] never yet been able to charm the public—he has never produced anything like “Mariana at the Moated Grange,” “Locksley Hall,” “Ulysses,” “Œnone,” “Godiva,” or the “Miller’s Daughter,” (we mention those least resembling each other,) with which Tennyson has built himself a name. Nor do we anticipate that he will ever do so. He has now been some years before the public, and in various characters. His first poem, which (unlucky circumstance!) is still regarded as his best, was Paracelsus. We well remember its appearance, and the attention it drew on the new poet, who, being young, was held destined to achieve great things. As a first work, it was assuredly remarkable. It had good thoughts, clear imagery, genuine original speech, touches of simple pathos, caprices of fancy, and a power of composition which made one hope that more experience and practice would ripen him into a distinguished poet. There were two objections, which occurred to us at the time. We did not lay much stress upon them, as the author was evidently young. Age and practice, we thought, would certainly remove them. They were the sort of faults most likely to be found in youthful works—viz., a great mistake in the choice of subject, and an abruptness, harshness, and inelegance of versification. It was pardonable in a young man to make a quack his hero; it looked a paradox, tempting to wilful and skilful ingenuity. On the other hand, it also betokened, or seemed to betoken, a want of proper earnestness and rectitude of mind—a love rather of the extraordinary than of the true. Paracelsus was not the hero a young man should have chosen; and yet one felt that he was just the hero a young man would choose. It seems to us that what this betokened has come to pass, and that in his subsequent works we have, if not the same fault, yet a fault which springs, we take it, from the same source. His conceptions are either false or feeble. In the work which succeeded “Paracelsus,” we noted a repetition of the very error itself—viz., in the attempt to idealize into a hero that great but desperate Strafford, the “wicked earl,” as he was called, and as his actions prove him. Meanwhile the other fault—that, namely, of harshness and abruptness—was carried almost to a ridiculous extent; the language was spasmodic, and tortured almost into the style of Alfred Jingle, Esq., in Pickwick, as the Edinburgh Reviewer remarked at the time. Next, after an interval of two or three years, if our memory serves us, came Sordello. What the merit or demerit of conception in that poem may be, no one can presume to say; for except the author himself and the printer’s reader (in the course of duty), no earthly being ever toiled through that work. Walking on a new-ploughed field of damp clayey soil, would be skating compared to it. [p. 497→] Even his staunchest admirers could say nothing to Sordello. Great as is the relish for the obscure and the involved in some minds, there was no one found to listen to these Sybilline incoherences. Other dealers in the obscure have at least charmed the ear with a drowsy music, but Sordello’s music was too grating and cacophonous to admit of the least repose. Whether Browning is to this day convinced of his mistake we know not, but to our ever-renewed surprise we often see Sordello advertised. That he has not burnt every copy he could by any means lay hands on, is to be explained only upon the principle which makes a mother cherish more fondly the reprobate or the cripple of her family.
This much, at any rate, is significant; he has ventured on no such experiment on the public patience since Sordello. The subsequent poems here collected, as Bells and Pomegranates, are always readable, if not often musical, and are not insults to our ears. But, as we hinted, the old objections still remain. He has not yet learned to take due pains with his subject, nor to write clearly and musically. It appears as if he sat down to write poetry without the least preparation; that the first subject which presented itself was accepted, as if any canvass was good enough to be embroidered upon. And respecting his versification, is appears as if he consulted his own ease more than the reader’s; and if by any arbitrary distribution of accents he could make the verse satisfy his own ear, it must necessarily satisfy the ear of another. At the same time, he occasionally pours forth a strain of real melody, and always exhibits great powers of rhyming. One of the most evenly written of his pieces happens to be a great favourite of ours, and we quote it here for the sake of its manful, sorrowful reproaches.
the lost leader.
i.
Just for a handful of silver he left us,
Just for a riband to stick in his coat—
Got the one gift of which fortune bereft us,
Lost all the others she lets us devote;
They, with the gold to give, doled him out silver,
So much was theirs who so little allowed:
How all our copper had gone for his service!
Rags—were they purple, his heart had been proud!
We that had loved him so, followed him, honoured him,
Lived in his mild and magnificent eye;
Learned his great language, caught his clear accents,
Made him our pattern to live and to die! [p. 498→]
Shakspeare was of us, Milton was for us,
Burns, Shelley, were with us—they watch from their graves!
He alone breaks from the van and the freemen,
He alone sinks to the rear and the slaves!
ii.
We shall march prospering—not thro’ his presence;
Songs may excite us—not from his lyre;
Deeds will be done—while he boasts his quiescence,
Still bidding crouch whom the rest bade aspire:
Blot out his name, then, record one lost soul more,
One task unaccepted, one footpath untrod;
One more devil’s triumph, and sorrow to angels,
One wrong more to man, one more insult to God!
Life’s night begins: let him never come back to us!
There would be doubt, hesitation, and pain;
Forced praise on our part—the glimmer of twilight,
Never glad confident morning again!
Best fight on well, for we taught him,—come gallantly,
Strike our face hard, ere we shatter his own;
Then let him get the new knowledge and wait us,
Pardoned in Heaven—the first by the throne!
There are some expressions here to which one might object, but the whole poem exhibits a strength, solidity, and sobriety uncommon in contemporary writing. There is no affectation of thought in it; there is none of the pretension which usually mars such poems. The feeling is true, and is manly in its sorrow; and if poets ever listened to the advice so liberally offered them by critics, we would counsel Robert Browning to spare us his caprices, and give us more such writing. He is still young, but he is old enough to have outlived the tendency which urges inexperienced poets into a fantastic and unreal region, simply because they have not sufficiently penetrated into the world of reality. For as Jean Paul, in his Vorschule der Œsthetik, admirably says, “the novelty of their feelings makes them suppose that the objects which excite them are also novel; and they believe that through the former they produce the latter. Hence they plunge either into the unknown and unnamed, in foreign lands and times; or, still more willingly, occupy themselves with the lyrical: for, in the Lyric, there is no other nature to be represented than that which the Lyrist brings with him.”* [p. 499→] This period Browning has outlived; and from him now, if ever, we ought to expect works that are the transcript of real experience.
________
*Die Neuheit ihrer Empfindungen muss ihnen als eine Neuheit der Gegenstände vorkommen; und durch die ersten glauben sie die letzten zu geben. Daher wirken sie sich Entweder ins Unbekannte und Unbenannte in fremde Lände und Zeiten ohne individualität; oder vorzüglick, auf das Lyrische; denn in diesem ist Keiner Natur nachzuahmen als die mitgebrachte.
________
But will he pardon us if we say, that we would more gladly meet him on the next occasion as a writer of prose? It may seem a strange compliment to pay a man who comes before us as a poet; yet a compliment it is. We could say the same to few of his rivals: mediocre as is their poetry, their prose we suspect would be detestable. By dint of assiduous study, “a reasonable good ear in music,” and a fluent rhyming faculty, they produce verses which, if they do not touch the heart, nor stir the soul, do nevertheless, in some measure, gratify the ear. But if we pause for a moment to consider the material of their works, we shall find it so weak, vapid, common-place, or false, that to think of it in prose is alarming. They do not seem to have thought enough and seen enough to be able to be reasonable in prose. This is not the case with Browning. His works have many defects, but they have not that; they show a clear, open mind, prone to reflection; they show that he thinks for himself, and such a man is worth hearing. But he would be better worth hearing in prose than in verse, because, as Göthe said of the rhymers of his day, it is a pity to hear men attempt to sing what they can only speak.
Ihr Guten—grosser und Kleiner—
Ihr singt euch müde und matt;
Und singt doch keiner
Als was er zu sagen hat!
Browning is certainly not a born singer, and what is more, he has not caught the echo of another’s music—he wants the melody and grace of which verse should be made. The sense of Beauty is not keen in him; and thoughts, however noble, conceptions, however grand, will not supply the place of beauty.
Pinxisti Venerem, colis, Artemidore, Minervam,
Et miraris opus displicuisse tuum?
asks Martial, and we may put the same question to Browning.
The exigences of prose would be beneficial to him, by curbing his capricious flights, and making him pay more attention to the ground plan than he now does. He will understand our meaning if we refer to Pippa Passes—one of the most admired of his “Bells and Pomegranates,” and one that really contains some charming writing. What his purpose was, we know not; what the piece means, we have in vain asked ourselves and others. It opens with Pippa springing out of bed on New Year’s Day, and [p. 500→] in an irregular lyrical monologue informing us that she means to enjoy her holiday.
For am I not this day
Whate’er I please? Whom shall I seem to-day?
Morn, Noon, Eve, Night—how must I spend my day?
She then intimates her intention, though very vaguely, of personating several characters—
The brother,
The bride, the lover, and the mother—
Only to pass whom will remove—
Whom a mere look at half will cure
The Past, and help me to endure
The Coming . . . . I am just as great, no doubt,
As they! . . .
At the conclusion of this very unintelligible monologue she enters the street, and the scene changes. We are then introduced to an adulteress and her paramour, who having just murdered the husband, are feverishly endeavouring in the assurances of their mutual love to drown their remorseful horror. This is a powerful scene: instinct with the true passion of the drama, and written with the vigour and somewhat of the licence of our Elizabethan dramatists. It also contains some fine lines of mere poetry. In the midst of their guilty triumph, as Ottima has bidden her lover to crown her as his queen,
Your spirit’s arbitress
Magnificent in sin,
Pippa is heard singing without
The year’s at Spring,
The day’s at morn:
Morning’s at seven,
The hillside’s dew-pearled;
The lark’s on the wing,
The snail’s on the thorn,
God’s in his heaven,
All’s right in the world.
[Pippa passes.
The sound of this innocent voice at once arrests Sebald’s guilty conscience, and in a paroxysm of remorse he slays his mistress and himself.
The scene then changes, and we have a new set of actors—young artists—and a new dramatic anecdote—which is closed in the same way, by a song from without, and the stage direction, [p. 501→] Pippa passes. In this way throughout the piece Pippa is made, as it were, the conscience of the personages. The whole piece is but a collection of anecdotes or scenes, with that slender thread. At length we are conducted through this maze of writing to the final scene, which is Pippa’s chamber. Her day is ended, and she returns home to favour us with some more unintelligible monologue. In the course of this she runs over the names of the personages introduced into the various scenes at which she passed, and she tells us that she has been these persons. Hear her:—
Ah, but—ah, but, all the same,
No mere mortal has a right
To carry that exalted air;
Best people are not angels quite—
While—not worst people’s doings scare
The devils; so there’s that regard to spare!
Mere counsel to myself, mind! for
I have just been Monsignor,
And I was you, too, mother,
And you, too, Luigi! How that Luigi started
Out of the turret—doubtlessly departed
On some love-errand or another—
And I was Jules the sculptor’s bride.
And I was Ottima beside,
And now what am I? tired of fooling!
This is tolerably explicit, and further on she says:—
Now one thing I should like to really know:
How near I ever might approach all these
I only fancied being this long day.
From these indications we are led to suppose that all we have had passed before our eyes in the preceding scenes was but the pageant of a dream—a reflection of what was passing in the busy fancy of Pippa. If such was the poet’s intention—and we can guess none other—he has very faintly in the piece indicated that which should have been clear as day; and he has, moreover, employed what appears to us a very clumsy and unsatisfactory machinery. Nor can we understand his purpose in giving us such a dream, or fancy-picture. Was it to show that even in the pure innocent soul of a young girl, there were contained the elements out of which (if thoughts were incarnated into acts) could be created the adulterer, the murderer, the egotistical artist, &c.? If so, he has not made out his case:—it is a paradox he has not made plausible. [p. 502→]
But it is needless for us to multiply objections—none of his admirers have been able to tell us what was his intention in writing it; and, for ourselves, when we compare the passage wherein Pippa says, that the mere act of passing this bride, lover, and mother,
will remove
Whom a mere look at will half cure.
The past, and help me to endure
The coming . . . .
with her subsequent declaration that she has been these very persons, we are utterly bewildered. He may have had a purpose, and know what that purpose is, but he has failed to impart it to his readers.
To express in one sentence our disapproval of Browning’s obscurity, we should say that it is not the obscurity which is suggestive, but the obscurity which is tiresome: it is not owing to the subtlety or profundity of the thoughts, but to the want of steadiness and clearness in the handling.
One ill consequence of his negligence in bringing out his purpose clearly, when he has one, is the transitoriness of the impression he leaves upon the mind. The Blot on the ’Scutcheon is a play we have read, and of which we otherwise have some knowledge, yet we have totally forgotten all about it, except that it seemed to us more Spanish than English in its feeling, and thoroughly false in the delineation of motives and passions. The Flight of the Duchess is a favourite with most readers, and contains some admirable writing; but surely never was a story worse told. In this singular poem we see Browning’s merits and faults fully displayed. Its somewhat ostentatious luxuriance of rhyme has scarcely been surpassed by Butler, Pulci, or Byron; and some of the descriptive bits are admirable.
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 passed the corn-field country,
Where vineyards leave off, flocks are pack’d;
And sheep range yields 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 by row,
Up and up the pine trees go,
So, like black priests up, and so [p. 503→]
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 salt and hoar of the great sea shore,
And the whole is our Duke’s country!
The Duke dies, and his “yellow Duchess” takes her infant abroad, where they remain many years, till the child had grown into a man:—
And he came back the pertest ape
That ever affronted human shape;
Full of his travel, struck at himself—
You’d say, he despised our bluff old ways
—Not he! For in Paris they told the elf
That our rough Northland was the Land of Lays,
The one good thing left in evil days;
For the Mid-Age was the Heroic Time,
And only in wild nooks like ours
Could you taste of it yet as in its prime,
True Castles, with proper Towers,
Young-hearted women, old-minded men,
And manners now as manners were then.
So, all the old Dukes had been, without knowing it,
This Duke would fain know he was, without being it;
’Twas 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!
Well, such as he was, he must marry, we heard:
And out of a convent, at the word,
Came the lady, in time of spring,
—Oh, old thoughts they cling, they cling! [p. 504→]
That day, I know, with a dozen oaths
I clad myself in thick hunting clothes
Fit for the chase of the urox or buffle,
In winter-time when you need to muffle;
But the Duke had a mind we should cut a figure,
And so we saw the Lady arrive:
My friend, I have seen a white crane bigger!
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 bears’ 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,
Strait 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 inquired
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 back bone 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!
This Duchess was an active, lively creature, who would have made an excellent chatelaine, but
The Duke’s plan admitted a wife at most
To meet his eye with other trophies,
Now outside the hall, now in it
To sit thus, stand thus, see and be seen
At the proper place in the proper minute,
And die away the life between. [p. 505→]
She sickens and pines away, her health and spirit broken. The Dowager Duchess and the Duke always scolding and snubbing her; and when her husband sees her ailing, he swears it is done “to spite him.”
Well, early in autumn, at first winter warning,
When the stag had to break with his foot, of a morning,
A drinking hole out of the fresh tender ice
That covered the pond till the sun, in a trice,
Loosening it, let out a ripple of gold,
And another and another, and faster and faster,
Till, dimpling to blindness, the wide water rolled:
Then it so chanced that the Duke, our master,
Asked himself, what were the pleasures in season,
And found, since the calendar bade him be hearty,
He should do the Middle Age no treason
In resolving on a hunting party.
Always providing the old books showed the way of it.
With great pomp and preparation is this hunting party set on foot; and as the “old books” assigned a conspicuous place to the lady, it is of course resolved that the duchess is to fill that place with becoming state. To the duke’s surprise, she refuses point blank. Her health would not allow of it. The duke is in a silent rage, and goes forth upon his expedition. A graphic description of gypsies is here introduced, for which we have no space. One of them, an old blear-eyed hag, comes forward to the duke—
“She was come,” she said, “to pay her duty
To the new duchess, the youthful beauty:”
No sooner had she named his lady,
Than a shine lit up the face so shady;
And its smirk returned with a novel meaning—
For it struck him, the babe just wanted weaning;
If one gave her a taste of what life is and sorrow,
She, foolish to-day, would be wiser to-morrow;
And who so fit a teacher of trouble,
As this sordid crone, bent well nigh double?
So, glancing at her wolf-skin vesture,
(If such it was, for they grow so hirsute,
That their own fleece serves for natural fur-suit.)
He contrasted, ’twas plain from his gesture,
The life of the lady, so flower-like and delicate,
With the loathsome squalor of this helicat.
I, in brief, was the man the duke beckoned
From out of the throng; and while I drew near
He told the crone, as I since have reckoned,
By the way he bent and spoke into her ear [p. 506→]
With circumspection and mystery,
The main of the lady’s history,
Her frowardness and ingratitude;
And for all the crone’s submissive attitude
I could see round her mouth the loose plaits tightening,
And her brow with assenting intelligence brightening,
As though she engaged with hearty good will
Whatever he now might enjoin to fulfil,
And promised the lady a thorough frightening.
And so just giving her a glimpse
Of a purse, with the air of a man who imps
The wing of the hawk that shall fetch the hernshaw,
He bade me take the gypsy mother,
And set her telling some story or other,
Of hill or dale, oakwood or fernshaw,
To while away a weary hour
For the lady left alone in her bower,
Whose mind and body craved exertion,
And yet shrank from all better diversion.
The old gipsy has an interview with the duchess, and then, as far as we can make out the drift of some very obscure writing, she either entices the duchess away, inducing her to leave this wretched do-nothing life, and join the free roving gipsies, or else, by some necromantic spell, spirits her away. The upshot clearly is, that the duchess departs and returns no more.
It would have cost the poet very little trouble to have made all clear, which in this work is so obscure; but that little trouble he has not chosen to bestow. What is the consequence? The poem leaves no distinct impression. We have waded through columns of rhyme, sometimes pleased with a fine image, sometimes with a vigorous description, often with a strange sense of the writer’s power; but we close the book with no desire to recur to it, with no picture on which to dwell. In a word, the substance of the poem has been sacrificed to the mere writing. This will appear idle criticism to our modern poets, no doubt; they only think of “passages,” and if they have succeeded in writing here and there some dozen lines that will look well in extract, they believe they have written a poem. It is not so, however. A poem is not made out of “passages;” it is the musical embodiment of some strong emotion or some deep thought; and however necessary beauty may be to the expression, the thing to be expressed requires equal if not greater labour.
In bringing our rambling observations to a close, we should say that Robert Browning deserves his position from his originality; but although his name has a certain celebrity, he has not [p. 507→] yet won for himself a niche in the temple of his nation’s literature. He is rather a thinker than a singer; and yet cannot be accepted as a remarkable thinker. The general conception of his larger works is weak and wavering, but the details exhibit no common powers. Whatever merits he may possess, are, however, damaged by the eccentricity and want of beauty of his style. It is abrupt, harsh, full of familiar turns, and yet not familiar in its general structure; spasmodic in its vehemence, and obscure from mere negligence. We should be loath to charge him with affectation; but it does appear astonishing that any man so well read as Robert Browning, should play such tricks with his style, except for the purpose of aping originality and attracting attention. Originality lies not in being unlike the rest of mankind. That is eccentricity. What is true and beautiful, has always a direct parentage with everything else that is true and beautiful. Originality, therefore, will not be shown in startling the public with a novelty; but in producing that which is at once novel yet familiar: like many other things, and yet distinctly individual, and having such an air of ease and obviousness, that people will wonder it was never done before.
We have been sparing of extracts, as neither the novelty nor the costliness of the works warranted our occupying space with passages to support our opinions. As the effect of this has perhaps been somewhat unfavourable to the poet, we cannot do better than conclude with quoting his much-admired romance:—
how he brought the good news from ghent to aix.
i.
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.
ii.
Not a word to each other, we kept the great pace
Neck by neck, stride by stride, never changing our place;
I turned in my saddle and made its girths tight,
Then shortened each stirrup, and set the pique right,
Rebuckled the check-strap, chained slacker the bit,
Nor galloped less steadily Roland a whit. [p. 508→]
iii.
’Twas moonset at starting; but while we drew near
Lokeren, the cocks crew and twilight dawned clear;
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!”
iv.
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.
v.
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.
vi.
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.
vii.
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 Dalkem a dome spire sprang white,
And “Gallop!” gasped Joris, “for Aix is in sight!”
viii.
“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, [p. 509→]
With his nostrils like pits full of blood to the brim,
And with circles of red for his eye-sockets’ rim.
ix.
Then I cast loose my buff coat, 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.
x.
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 to Ghent.
[George Henry Lewes]
Reviewed:
Bells & Pomegranates (RB), Collected ed., London: Edward Moxon, 1846.
___________________
