R491200A. Poems (1850).
Graham’s American Monthly Magazine of Literature and Art, December 1849, pp. 378–379.
As reprinted in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 16, 345–346.
This edition of Browning is almost a fac-simile of the beautiful London edition, published by Chapman & Hall, the only real difference between the two being that the American reprint costs less than half as much as the London original.
Browning, for the last four or five years, has been steadily advancing to fame; and having overcome by the pure strength of his genius all outward and some inward obstacles, is now widely recognized as a new force in English letters. Next to Tennyson, we know of hardly another English poet of the day who can be compared with him. He possesses striking excellences both of thought and diction, but he is so indisputably an originality, that he is compelled to create the taste which appreciates him. Like almost all the poets of the new school, he is “high contemplative,” scorns rather than courts the means of popularity, and is more pleased by conquering one reader than by enticing many. In his distaste for the stereotyped diction and ideas of English poetry, he is apt to go to the opposite extreme of obscurity. There is a beautiful willfulness, a delicious bit of the devil, in him; accordingly many of his verses seem thrown off in an imaginary boxing match with professors of square-toed rhetoric and critics of the old school. This independence and pugnacity are sometimes carried to that extreme of recklessness, which indicates self-conceit and supercilious arrogance, rather than a wrestling with the difficulties of expression. “Sordello,” a poem which the author has now suppressed, was a tangled mass of half-formed thoughts and half-clutched sentiments, tottering dizzily on the vanishing points of meaning; and the publication of such a piece of elaborate worthlessness was an insult to public intelligence which would have consigned to deserved damnation, any poet who did not possess sufficient genius to retrieve his reputation.
In his best works, Browning appears as a poet gifted with a large reason and a wide-wandering imagination; but his reason and imagination do not seem to work genially together—are sometimes in each other’s way—and in their operation they sometimes strangle each other. He thinks broadly and deeply, and he shapes finely; but the thought does not commonly seem born in music, but rather born with music; and he often gives the idea and the illustrative image, instead of the idea in the illustrative image. Sometimes, in reading him, we wish he would abandon poetry for metaphysics, so sure and clear is his analysis and statement of mental phenomena; and then again some magnificent comparison, metaphor or image, or some exquisite touch of characterization, makes us wish that he would abjure metaphysics, and cling to poetry. Compared with Tennyson, his nature would be called hard, and be said to lack mellowness and melody. That sensuous element in poetry, which proceeds from fusing thought, sensation, and imagination—the spiritual and physical—into one sweet product, “felt in the blood,” and felt along the brain, he does not appear to have reached; but then the burning words, struck off like sparks from the conflict of flint and steel, which come from him in his periods of real excitement, seem to the reader sufficient compensations for his comparative absence of softness and harmony. He may not delight so much as Tennyson, but he gives the mind a wider field to range in, inspires a manlier feeling, and indicates a greater capacity. The very fact that all his works are cast in a dramatic form, even though the dramatic element is often more formal than real, shows that his mind has a healthy affection for objects, and steadily resists its own subjective tendencies.
The first poem in the collection is “Paracelsus.” This is an attempt to exhibit the influence on character of knowledge disjoined from love, by a delineation of an aspiring and noble nature, smitten by a restless thirst to know, and ruined by “the lust of his brain.” The poem is not poetically conceived; its central idea is not organic, not the germinating principle of the whole, but rather an abstract proposition logically developed; and, accordingly, the mechanical understanding not the vital imagination is predominant throughout. Besides, though it exercises the brain not unpleasantly, it hardly gives poetic pleasure; and so far from comfortable is the general impression it leaves, that the reader recurs to it only for deep or delicate thoughts and imaginations which are separately beautiful. As a whole, it is not philosophical enough for a treatise, nor beautiful enough for a poem.
“King Victor and King Charles” is a drama containing four characters moderately well conceived and discriminated, but evincing dramatic genius not much above Bulwer’s, though profounder in sentiment, and richer in imagination. The most dramatic passage is where Polyxena seizes her husband’s hand, when he is on the point of yielding to a weak amiability of nature, and conjures him to sacrifice her happiness and his to duty. It is the passage commencing—
King Charles! pause here upon this strip of time,
Allotted you out of eternity!
“Colombe’s Birth Day” is a sweet and beautiful dramatic poem, abounding in intellectual wealth. The characters of Colombe and Valence are vigorously drawn. The scene between them in the fourth act, where he confesses his love, is grand and exhilarating as an exhibition of character and passion. But the idea of the play, that of representing the triumph of love over wealth and rank in a woman fully susceptible of the charms of the latter, is the animating life of the piece. We hardly know, out of Fletcher and Shakspeare, a play where fidelity to a sentiment is represented with such ethereal grace.
In “Luria” and “The Return of the Druses,” an intimate acquaintance is shown with the best and worst parts of human nature, and the development of the characters indicates that the author’s dramatic skill grows with exercise. Luria is a noble character, original in conception, and finely developed from “within outwards.” “A Soul’s Tragedy” has many marked excellences of thought, and diction, and exhibits one of the most hateful qualities in human nature, with a blended dramatic coolness and individual abhorrence, singularly felicitous.
The “Dramatic Lyrics” are very striking, and are full of matter. “Count Gismond,” “Porphyria’s Lover,” “The Confessional,” “The Lost Leader,” and “The Pied Piper of Hamelin,” we should select as, on the whole, the best. The latter, written for little William Macready, exhibits the peculiar vein of humor in which Browning excels, and of which we have indications all over his works. The commencement we will venture to extract: [p. 379→]
Rats!
They fought the dogs, and killed the cats,
And bit the babies in the cradles,
And ate the cheese out of the vats,
And licked the soup from the cook’s own ladles.
Split open the kegs of the salted sprats,
Made nests inside men’s Sunday hats,
And even spoiled the women’s chats,
By drowning their speaking
And shrieking and squeaking,
In fifty different sharps and flats.
But the grandest pieces in the volume are “Pippa Passes,” and “A Blot in the ’Scutcheon.” The latter, in the opinion of Dickens, is the finest poem of the century. We think there can be detected in it that hardness of touch which characterizes the other dramas, but the depth and pathos of the matter, and the approach to something like impassioned action in the events, make it wonderfully impressive. Once read it must haunt the imagination forever, for its power strikes deep into the very substance and core of the soul. Thorold’s adamantine pride, and Guendolen’s sweet woman’s sympathy, and Mildred’s awful sorrow, can never be forgotten. Mildred’s repetition, in moments of agony or half-consciousness, of the lines—
I was so young—I loved him so—I had
No mother—God forgot me—and I fell—
exceeds in pathetic effect any thing in English dramatic literature since the Elizabethan era.
We hardly know how to express our admiration of “Pippa Passes,” making as it does the “sense of satisfaction ache,” with its abounding beauty. In this piece the author’s nature seems for once to have become fluid, and gushes out in melodious thought and passion. Pippa herself is one of poetry’s most exquisite creations, and, among her many “passes,” those she makes into the hearts and imaginations of a thousand readers, ought not to be overlooked. The design of the play is new, and it would be difficult to state in an intellectual form the source of its charm. Its completeness is in its seeming incompleteness. The grandest scene is that between Ottima and Sebald, the fine audacity of which carries us back to the elder period of the English drama. The greatest instance of imagination in Browning’s works is contained in this scene. We give it below:
Buried in woods we lay, you recollect;
Swift ran the searching tempest overhead,
And ever and anon some bright white shaft
Burnt through the pine-tree roof—here burnt and there,
As if God’s messenger through the close wood screen
Plunged and replunged his weapon at a venture,
Feeling for guilty thee and me.
The dedication of “Pippa Passes” is beautifully ingenius:
i dedicate
my best intentions, in this poem, most admiringly,
to the author of “ion,”—
most affectionately to
mr. serjeant talfourd.
We trust that the elegant edition of Browning, which we have here noticed, will make him widely known in the United States. The volumes are in Ticknor & Co.’s best style, both as regards type and paper.
[Edwin Percy Whipple]
Reviewed:
Poems (RB), Boston: Ticknor, Reed, & Fields, 1850.
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