R500406A. Christmas-Eve and Easter-Day.
The Athenæum, 6 April 1850, pp. 370–371.
As reprinted in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 16, 357–360.
The book before us is the work of a poet; though if this fact should gain but a limited recognition, the writer will have only himself to blame. If the Muses will masquerade and don the trappings of gipsies, they must feel no offence if they should forfeit by the grotesqueness of their seeming the respect that is due to their nature. True, the Nine may have their seasons of frolic and pastime,—nor is their sporting to be censured when occasion befits; but the Temple of Apollo and the hour of sacrifice are not the place nor the period suitable to such recreations. In a word, our complaint against Mr. Browning is—that while dealing with the highest themes of imagination and indicating his competency to treat them, he has recklessly impaired the dignity of his purpose by the vehicle chosen for its developement. The form of doggrel—carried to excess by strange and offensive oddities of versification—is not that in which the mysteries of faith, doubt, and eternity can be consistently treated.
Examples of such versification are painfully abundant. Seeking here only to illustrate the rhyming eccentricities of the writer, we quote one or two without reference to their sense or context.—
But the most turned in yet more abruptly
From a certain squalid knot of alleys,
Where the town’s bad blood once slept corruptly,
Which now the little chapel rallies,
And leads into day again,—its priestliness
Lending itself to hide their beastliness
So cleverly (thanks in part to the mason),
And putting so cheery a whitewashed face on
Those neophytes too much in lack of it,
That, where you cross the common as I did,
And meet the party thus presided,
“Mount Zion,” with Love-lane at the back of it,—&c.
Another extract will sufficiently test at once our position and the patience of the reader.—
He handled it so, in fine irreverence,
As to hug the Book of books to pieces:
And, a patchwork of chapters and texts in severance,
Not improved by the private dog’s-ears and creases,
Having clothed his own soul with, he’d see to equipt yours,—
So tossed you again your Holy Scriptures.
* * * *
’Tis odds but I had borne in quiet
A qualm or two at my spiritual diet;
Or, who can tell? had even mustered
Somewhat to urge in behalf of the sermon:
But the flock sate on, divinely flustered,
Sniffing, methought, its dew of Hermon
With such content in every snuffle,
As the devil inside us loves to ruffle.
It is pleasant to leave such exhibitions of bad taste, and follow Mr. Browning when he chooses to be in earnest:—nor can higher praise be awarded to his serious vein than that of saying that it enables us to forget his comic one. We are as glad as he professes to have been to escape from the association of old women with broken umbrellas, boys with soapless faces, and elder devotees with greasy cuffs, (the goodly company at the little chapel in which the poem opens), to the free face of Nature and to a night-picture like the following.—
There was a lull in the rain, a lull
In the wind too; the moon was risen,
And would have shone out pure and full,
But for the ramparted cloud-prison,
Block on block built up in the west,
For what purpose the wind knows best,
Who changes his mind continually.
And the empty other half of the sky
Seemed in its silence as if it knew
What, any moment, might look through
A chance-gap in that fortress massy:—
Through its fissures you got hints
Of the flying moon, by the shifting tints,
Now, a dull lion-colour, now, brassy
Burning to yellow, and whitest yellow,
Like furnace-smoke just ere the flames bellow,
All a-simmer with intense strain
To let her through,—then blank again,
At the hope of her appearance failing
* * * *
For lo, what think you? suddenly
The rain and the wind ceased, and the sky
Received at once the full fruition
Of the moon’s consummate apparition.
The black cloud-barricade was riven,
Ruined beneath her feet, and driven
Deep in the west; while, bare and breathless,
North and south and east lay ready
For a glorious Thing, that, dauntless, deathless,
Sprang across them, and stood steady.
’Twas a moon-rainbow, vast and perfect,
From heaven to heaven extending, perfect
As the mother-moon’s self, full in face.
It rose, distinctly at the base
With its seven proper colours chorded,
Which still, in the rising, were compressed,
Until at last they cöalesced,
And supreme the spectral creature lorded
In a triumph of whitest white,—
Above which intervened the night.
But above night too, like the next,
The second of a wondrous sequence,
Reaching in rare and rarer frequence,
Till the heaven of heavens be circumflext,
Another rainbow rose, a mightier,
Fainter, flushier, and flightier,—
Rapture dying along its verge!
Oh, whose foot shall I see emerge,
Whose, from the straining topmost dark,
On to the keystone of that arc?
Who doubts after this example of the beautiful, that it is only a “wanton mood” that ever leads Mr. Browning to follow after the coarse and grotesque? When he leaves the merely beautiful it should be only for that yet higher region where beauty crowned by mystery is changed into the sublime. How freely the writer can breathe the “difficult air” of this eminence may be learnt from the full unfaltering tones which describe his vision of Dooms-night.—
I found
Suddenly all the midnight round
One fire. The dome of Heaven had stood
As made up of a multitude
Of handbreadth cloudlets, one vast rack
Of ripples infinite and black,
From sky to sky. Sudden there went,
Like horror and astonishment,
A fierce vindictive scribble of red
Quick flame across, as if one said
(The angry scribe of Judgment) “There—
Burn it!” And straight I was aware
That the whole ribwork round, minute
Cloud touching cloud beyond compute,
Was tinted each with its own spot
Of burning at the core, till clot
Jammed against clot, and split its fire
Over all heaven, which ’gan suspire
As fanned to measure equable,—
As when great conflagrations kill
Night overhead, and rise and sink,
Reflected. Now the fire would shrink [p. 371→]
And wither off the blasted face
Of heaven, and I distinct could trace
The sharp black ridgy outlines left
Unburned like network—then, each cleft
The fire had been sucked back into,
Regorged, and out it surging flew
Furiously, and night writhed inflamed,
Till, tolerating to be tamed
No longer, certain rays world-wide
Shot downwardly, on every side,
Caught past escape; the earth was lit;
As if a dragon’s nostril split
And all his famished ire o’erflowed;
Then, as he winced at his Lord’s goad,
Back he inhaled: whereat I found
The clouds into vast pillars bound,
Based on the corners of the earth,
Propping the skies at top: a dearth
Of fire i’ the violet intervals,
Leaving exposed the utmost walls
Of time, about to tumble in
And end the world.
The apparition of a divine Presence is another instance of the same faculty.—
I saw .... Oh, brother, ’mid far sands
The palm-tree-cinctured city stands,—
Bright-white beneath, as Heaven, bright-blue,
Above it, while the years pursue
Their course, unable to abate
Its paradisal laugh at fate:
One morn,—the Arab staggers blind
O’er a new tract of death, calcined
To ashes, silence, nothingness,—
Striving, with dizzy wits, to guess
Whence fell the blow: what if, ’twixt skies
And prostrate earth, he should surprise
The imaged Vapour, head to foot,
Surveying, motionless and mute,
Its work, ere, in a whirlwind rapt,
It vanish up again?—So hapt
My chance. He stood there. Like the smoke
Pillared o’er Sodom, when day broke,—
I saw Him. One magnific pall
Mantled in massive fold and fall
His Dread, and coiled in snaky swathes
About His feet: night’s black, that bathes
All else, broke, grizzled with despair,
Against the soul of blackness there.
These two poems of “Christmas-Eve” and “Easter-Day,” though distinguished by separate titles, are virtually one. The former division points out the essential truth which underlies various beliefs,—insisting, nevertheless, that only one belief can be perfect. It is, in fact, an argument for the divinity of Christ,—conducted, however, in a large catholic spirit towards the writer’s opponents. Into this argument it is not our mission to follow Mr. Browning:—but they who do so will take great offence at the flippant tone in which a theme so weighty is urged. In the concluding section of the poem, the difficulties which obstruct belief are discussed; and are resolved into the scepticism of cold intellect, which in resisting the influence of spiritual love resists also its evidence,—for it is its own demonstration. None doubt the divine as a creed, it is urged, but those who reject it as a nature. Men fail to read the proofs of an immortal future because they are wedded in their hearts to the mortal present. Such is Mr. Browning’s theology:—which, as theology, we detail without comment. We observe only that this part of the poem is highly transcendental; and that although Mr. Browning has here risen above the verbal trickery which disfigures the former division,—yet transcendentalism delivered in doggrel verse has throughout the effect of a discord. There is an unpleasant suggestion of the writer’s discrediting his own spell—until the spiritual power of the spell raises the reader’s mind above the consideration of its form. Subtle, analytic, and often brilliant, Mr. Browning almost exhausts the various phases by which Christian belief is modified,—and his argument is full of suggestiveness and mystical beauty. We cannot help thinking of this work as of a cathedral, where, ever as we become absorbed in the anthem, the doors are thrust open to jar us with the common traffic of the street,—or in which grotesque and mocking shapes scoff inappropriately from the architectural details at the spectator whose mind has caught the high and solemn tone which is the inspiration of the general place. It is curious to see how the instinct of the poet rebels against the shackles which he has imposed on it, and breaks loose from most of them in the latter portion of the volume. The concluding pages—which aim at showing that the very mystery which wraps the future is necessary to spiritual growth and aspiration, and that good if limited by the bounds of sensible demonstration would leave no room for faith or progress—are those in which the poet’s genius is most evident. Unfortunately for our purpose, they form a chain of sequences from which we can detach no link for quotation without breaking the series. The argument is so continuous, that the full understanding of any clause—the grasp of its finer meanings—demands a knowledge of what has gone before, and of the spiritual intention of the whole. Still, we must try to give our readers a notion of this by far the finest part of Mr. Browning’s volume.—
Though sharp despairs
Shot through me, I held up, bore on.
“What is it though my trust is gone
From natural things? Henceforth my part
Be less with Nature than with Art!
For Art supplants, gives mainly worth
To Nature; ’tis Man stamps the earth—
And I will seek his impress, seek
The statuary of the Greek,
Italy’s painting—there my choice
Shall fix!”
“Obtain it,” said the Voice.
“The one form with its single act,
Which sculptors laboured to abstract,
The one face, painters tried to draw,
With its one look, from throngs they saw!
And that perfection in their soul,
These only hinted at? The whole,
They were but parts of? What each laid
His claim to glory on?—afraid
His fellow-men should give him rank
By the poor tentatives he shrank
Smitten at heart from, all the more,
That gazers pressed in to adore!
‘Shall I be judged by only these?’
If such his soul’s capacities,
Even while he trod the earth,—think, now
What pomp in Buonarotti’s brow,
With its new palace-brain where dwells
Superb the soul, unvexed by cells
That crumbled with the transient clay!
What visions will his right hand’s sway
Still turn to form, as still they burst
Upon him? How will he quench thirst,
Titanically infantine,
Laid at the breast of the Divine?
Does it confound thee,—this first page
Emblazoning man’s heritage?—
Can this alone absorb thy sight,
As if they were not infinite,—
Like the omnipotence which tasks
Itself to furnish all that asks
The soul it means to satiate?
What was the world, the starry state
Of the broad skies,—what, all displays
Of power and beauty intermixed,
Which now thy soul is chained betwixt,—
What, else, than needful furniture
For life’s first stage? God’s work, be sure,
No more spreads wasted, than falls scant:
He filled, did not exceed, Man’s want
Of beauty in this life. And pass
Life’s line,—and what has earth to do,
Its utmost beauty’s appanage,
With the requirements of next stage?
Did God pronounce earth ‘very good’?
Needs must it be, while understood
For man’s preparatory state;
Nothing to heighten nor abate:
But transfer the completeness here,
To serve a new state’s use,—and drear
Deficiency gapes every side!”
* * *
Then I—“Behold, my spirit bleeds,
Catches no more at broken reeds,—
But lilies flower those reeds above—
I let the world go, and take love!
Love survives in me, albeit those
I loved are henceforth masks and shows,
Not loving men and women: still
I mind how love repaired all ill,
Cured wrong, soothed grief, made earth amends
With parents, brothers, children, friends!
Some semblance of a woman yet
With eyes to help me to forget.
Shall live with me; and I will match
Departed love with love, attach
Its fragments to my whole, nor scorn
The poorest of the grains of corn
I save from shipwreck on this isle,
Trusting its barrenness may smile
With happy foodful green one day,
More precious for the pains. I pray,
For love, then, only!”
At the word,
The Form, I looked to have been stirred
With pity and approval, rose
O’er me, as when the headsman throws
Axe over shoulder to make end—
I fell prone, letting Him expend
His wrath, while, thus, the inflicting Voice
Smote me. “Is this thy final choice?
Love is the best? ’Tis somewhat late!
And all thou dost enumerate
Of power and beauty in the world,
The mightiness of love was curled
Inextricably round about.
Love lay within it and without,
To clasp thee,—but in vain! Thy soul
Still shrunk from Him who made the whole,
Still set deliberate aside
His love!—Now take love! Well betide
Thy tardy conscience! Haste to take
The show of love for the name’s sake.”
It is well for Mr. Browning’s present venture, that poetry, from its elemental nature, may to some extent charm even where the entire work violates the harmonies of relation. Morals and science lose all their value if there be incompleteness or incongruity in their exposition; but the primary influences of beauty and truth which constitute song are welcome even through partial revelations.
The one blue break of beauty in the clouds,
or the scattered stars that gaze on us through the rift, are prized though the general sky be overcast.—This qualified recognition the poems before us must claim. From their perusal intelligent minds may rise enriched with new images of beauty and new stimulants to thought. But that higher appreciation which belongs to a perfect and consistent whole—to those works in which the form corresponds to the spirit, and in which thought, passion, and even humour are harmoniously fused by the imagination—must be denied to them. If, in spite of many unquestioned excellencies, we turn from what Mr. Browning has done to speculate on what he might have done, it is his own genius that provokes the comparison and enhances the regret.
[John Westland Marston]
Reviewed:
Christmas-Eve & Easter-Day (RB), London: Chapman & Hall, 1850.
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