R490908A. Poems (1849).
The Examiner, 8 September 1849, p. 565.
As reprinted in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 16, 343–344.
Robert Browning is a true poet, and a deep and just thinker. We have borne ample testimony to the merits of his successive publications as they appeared; but now that the whole are before us, collected into two volumes, the conviction of their great beauty and value is yet more irresistibly conveyed to us.
We are much mistaken if Mr Browning has yet achieved all that his genius is capable of, but he has already done enough to secure a distinguished place in English literature. At the present stage of his career it is mainly as a dramatic poet that he claims attention. Even his romances and lyrics are in spirit essentially dramatic. He has the true tact of the dramatist; and seems, almost unconsciously, to cast all he writes in the mould of dramatic presentation. Whether he gives vent to the musings of a solitary mind, or to reflections struck out by the collision of assembled minds, he expresses them in address or soliloquy. He pictures to himself a scene occupied by a person “to himself talking;” or by persons interchanging thoughts and sentiments. But with a felicitous and delicate instinct, he gives just so much as his persons would really say; conscious and confident that the words will suggest the accompanying actions, the relative positions of the speakers, and the surrounding scenery. He seldom deviates into the descriptive. His works are all capable of scenic presentation; and, even to the solitary reader in his closet, they conjure up, by the magic of inevitable associations, the scenes in which they are uttered.
The dramas, or dramatic poems, in the collection now before us, are eight in number. “Paracelsus,” “Pippa Passes,” and “A Soul’s Tragedy,” may be classed as embodiments of the author’s abstract conceptions of man and society, in creatures more or less of his own imagination. “King Victor and King Charles,” “Colombe’s Birthday,” “A Blot in the ’Scutcheon,” “The Return of the Druses,” and “Luria,” have more the character of ordinary dramas, in which the persons and incidents have originally presented themselves to the poet’s imagination in their distinct personality. But our distinction is in some degree arbitrary. The poems of both classes are so kindred in their character, and so decidedly emanations of the same mind, that the peculiarities of each are constantly presenting themselves in the other. The difference nevertheless exists, and can be discerned sufficiently for our purpose.
In “Paracelsus” one of the author’s aims appears to have been to delineate with fearless truth the aberrations of a great and generous mind during the throng and hurry of life, and its ultimate re-approximation, after all its sad experience, to original truthfulness and goodness. It is, like “Faust,” an imaginative and picturesque exposition of the text that man, while striving, is ever losing his way. It is composed in the same genial and tolerant spirit as the great work with which we associate it, but with characteristic differences. In “Faust” the deviations to which the soul is led or driven by the instincts of sense are prominent: in “Paracelsus” it is the influence of spiritual seductions that is revealed. The most successful passages in “Faust” are those in which the intellectual aspirations are turned aside and drawn down by the seductions of passion, or the allurements of the merely beautiful. In “Paracelsus” it is vanity and ambition that for a time “lead to bewilder, and dazzle to blind.” And the final and wise aim of the writer is to show that unaided love, as little as unaided knowledge, will serve to regenerate the world; unless he who engages in the Work will consent also to take into account the existing prejudices and interests of mankind.
In “Paracelsus” we have an elaborate study of the individual mind of man. In “Pippa Passes,” we have an equally elaborate study of the conscious and unconscious contact, and reciprocal action and counteraction, of men’s minds in society. This drama, or dramatic poem, call it what you will, is a glimpse of the workings and counter-workings of associated minds, wonderful for its fulness and variety. The conception is beautifully simple. A poor silk-winder in an Italian silk-mill springs from her bed at day-break on New Year’s day; and resolves to spend her one yearly holiday in wandering from one to another of the few mansions which seem to her simple mind to contain the greatest and happiest persons of the limited society in her small town, and to fancy herself each in succession. She carries her resolve into execution; and returns fatigued to her chamber, where she falls asleep, unconscious of having been observed by, or of having had the slightest influence upon the fates of, those to whom she has thus sought to bring herself nearer. The poet conducts us into the interior of each mansion by which she passes. In one we have a haughty Italian beauty and her paramour, who have murdered the old husband; in another, a young, fantastic, but highly-gifted French sculptor, upon whom his jealous and hating companions attempt to play off a cruel deception; in a third, a young Italian carbonero and his fond anxious mother, watched by the Austrian police; and in a fourth, an aged prelate, of noble birth and of high reputation for sanctity, involved in all the difficulties entailed upon him by the heritage of reckless and dissolute elder brothers. Out of doors are Austrian police, angry rude artists, and depraved females and adventurers. The police are engaged in the double task of watching the suspected Luigi, and in carrying on an intrigue to subserve the family politics of the prelate. They employ the wretched females and their vicious male associates, with whom the habits of the jealous artists, and the need of instruments for effecting their plot against their rival’s peace of mind, have associated them. The professional inquisitorial glances of the police are also incidentally directed towards the house of the murdered husband, who is the owner of the silk mills; and poor Pippa is not so entirely isolated from the notice and concerns of these various people as in her happy unconsciousness she had imagined. She is a cast-off child, the object of the machinations of the Prelate’s family, and a destined victim of the intrigues of the police. Her simple bird-like carol, as she “passes,” breaks in upon the conversation of each domestic group, and influences the denouement of each of the four dramas. The individuality of every character is brought out by a few master-touches, and their bearings upon each others’ destinies rendered with equal tact and skill. We are let into the secrets of a whole town, as completely as in “The Devil on Sticks,” by a machinery much more felicitous; while the author, the cicerone who accompanies us unseen and unthought of, is a spirit of a higher and nobler order. In the whole range of poetry we do not remember to have met with a more beautiful conception than Pippa. She is Innocence itself, sporting unharmed amid all sorts of obscene and noisome creatures, unconscious of the dangers to which she is exposed, and carried by a guardian Providence pure and ignorant through them all. From her bird-like waking to her sinking into repose, she is full of life, of beauty, and pure simplicity. Her address to the breaking day, her conversations with her one flower, her playful enjoyment of the straggling sunbeam caught by a drop of water in her basin, are among the most delicate beauties of lyric poetry.
“A Soul’s Tragedy” contrasts the conscious effect of that delusive generosity and patriotism which has its source in selfish vanity, with that sterling unconscious goodness which springs from real benevolence and principle. The part of explanatory chorus is admirably discharged by a caustic but benevolent instrument of a despotic government, who enters on the scene declaring that he has “known three-and-twenty leaders of revolts,” and who leaves it declaring that he “knows four-and-twenty.” The moral of the piece is worthy of being laid to heart by all: “You only do right to believe that you will get better as you get older. All men do so. They are worst in childhood, improve in manhood, and get ready in old age for another world. Youth, with its beauty and grace, would seem bestowed upon us for some such reason as to make us partly endurable till we have time for really becoming so of ourselves without their aid, when they leave us. The sweetest child we all smile on for his pleasant want of the whole world, to break up, or suck in his mouth, seeing no other good in it—would be rudely handled by the world’s inhabitants, if he retained these angelic infantine desires when he has grown six feet high, black and bearded.”
The other five plays of Mr Browning are real plays. The personages in them are indeed not more life-like or real than those we have been speaking of; but they are such as the author has met with in history, public or domestic. In each of the three upon which we have with so much pleasure been expatiating, a general idea appears gradually to have resolved itself into a dramatic story. In the others, a dramatic story has led the author, and through him leads his readers, to general ideas. The persons of these dramas are full of individual character, clearly and powerfully expressed. Djabal, the hero of “The Return of the Druses,” is a Paracelsus of active life. This theme, and the border land in the human character where the juggler and the sincere enthusiast meet, appear to be the favourite sporting-places of Mr Browning’s imagination. The eager, disappointed Victor; the intriguing D’Ormea, led back to truth and virtue by sheer good sense; the intellectually weak Charles, strong in his goodness; the chivalrous, plebeian Valence; the ambitious Berthold, with hauntings of human affection; Tresham, the strong sacrifice to an absorbing idea of honour; the child-sinners, Mildred and Mertoun; and many, many more; are brought vividly before us, instinct with humanity. If the characters in “Luria” have less of human reality about them than those of the other dramas, there is more of contagious passion and impressive incident in the poem. These hurry the reader along with them; and the sentiments, without exaggeration, are pure and lofty.
“The Pied Piper of Hamelin,” “How they brought the News to Aix,” and “Cavalier Tunes,” are masterpieces of bold, vigorous, easy ballad melody. These, with the “Incident of the French Camp,” may be compared with Schiller’s best masterpieces in the same class of compositions.
The most remarkable feature of Mr Browning’s genius is the equi-potency of the imaginative and the reasoning powers in his composition. He is a subtle analyst of the human mind, and is endowed at the same time with a rarely equalled power of imaginative creation. It is an error characteristic of the age, and therefore one which he could hardly be expected to escape, that poets should now be too apt to substitute the elaborations of metaphysical analysis for the visions which imagination bodies forth out of many impressions from without. In earlier ages men read less and acted more. Now-a-days all sit more concentrated within themselves; not so much looking straight forward at the real world, as at its image reflected in the mirror of books and newspapers. Our education, too, renders us familiar with abstractions more early than with individual impressions. Hence our unconscious tendency to present, not what actually appears, but what is known or believed to exist. This has the same fatal effect upon imaginative literature that our great reliance upon anatomical knowledge has on the arts of sculpture and painting. Poetry is perverted into metaphysics. It is the sense of a lingering taint of this kind about Mr Browning’s poetry, and a belief that he has yet the power altogether to work himself clear of it, that induced us to anticipate at the outset of these remarks the possibility of still greater works by him in future. Be this anticipation realised or not, he has already produced what the world will not willingly let die. With a vast deal of obscurity, of false philosophy, of ungainly and jerking expression, there is a principle of undying vitality in all his compositions. There is powerful imagination, playful fancy, enthusiasm tempered, not allayed, by reflection; and, above all, there is that benevolent irony of disposition which, placing him above the loftiest themes he handles, imparts to him the character of a real artist, as distinguished from the accidental utterer of happy conceptions.
In earlier notices of Mr Browning’s separate works we quoted so liberally, and have had such frequent occasion to know that those quotations took deep hold upon the minds of many who had not read the works from which they were taken, that we may fairly dispense with specimen passages at present. No library of English poets can be held complete without these volumes.
[John Forster]
Reviewed:
Poems (RB), London: Chapman & Hall, 1849.
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