R500406B. Christmas-Eve and Easter-Day.
The Examiner, 6 April 1850, pp. 211–213.
As reprinted in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 16, 360–366.
At the close of the first portion of this poem the reader is warned against hasty judgments drawn from what may appear to be its occasional levity of tone. We do not think that any really earnest or thoughtful man will require that warning. Whatever other comment it may suggest, the book before us can hardly be received but as an expression of the writer’s spiritual experiences in their utmost force and intensity. But we cannot be certain that other peculiarities in it will not be quite as likely to disconcert the thoughtful and earnest as the frivolous and vain.
These are odd and grave words to begin the notice of a poem with. But to the not scant or insufficient audience now accustomed to expect from Mr Browning a combination of the analytic and imaginative powers such as poets have rarely manifested, it will not be a surprise to hear that the most solemn of all conceivable themes is the subject he has here selected, and less as an exercise of the fancy than as a discipline of the soul. From the lessons taught by Vane’s enthusiastic visions, or Bunyan’s dungeon wrestlings, Mr Browning’s levity only separates him in seeming. Letters of fire could not have burnt more deeply than much that only they who are themselves very light will here suppose to have been thrown off lightly. “Lord, I believe! Help thou my unbelief!” exclaims the inspired writer; and the purpose of the poem before us is to express belief in Christianity, not without doubts, but against doubts. Between him who discards faith altogether and him who yields it up into others’ keeping, between the infallible and the infidel, Mr Browning takes his stand; to declare with all humility his acceptance of the truth, that only from uncertainty can genuine faith be born, that only from modesty and self-distrust can spring true resolution and self-reliance, and that the materials for a temple to God’s service are to be wrought out in human life, amid all its pains and its weakness, its
darkness, hunger, toil, distress.
This we may call the joint teaching of both portions of the poem, but in point of art we observe it as a grave defect that we cannot clearly trace their connection. The second, “Easter-Day,” is a comment by way of dialogue, or (more correctly perhaps) an exhibition of spiritual conflict, on the thesis of belief propounded in “Christmas-Eve,” the first; but the second should rather, we imagine, take precedence of the first in point of time. Of their relative value, or probable effect, we do not entertain much doubt. The reader who cannot appreciate the art or fancy of the first, will not be on that account the less likely to have undergone the suffering of the second, which therefore more broadly addresses the great mass of serious thinkers. On the other hand the treatment of the second is by no means so clearly or sharply defined as that of the first, though not less vivid in feeling, or intense and ardent in emotion. “We know but in part, and we prophesy but in part;” and when the poet leaves the external evidences for the internal conflicts of faith, his voice becomes naturally less assured, and his walk less strong and buoyant. “Let him who thinketh he standeth take heed lest he fall.”
The reader of Mr Browning’s poem of Paracelsus will not forget that something of the same general teaching, though with a marked difference in the special applications of teaching, was in that poem also. It expressed the failure of a man of sovereign intellect and high aspirings, who would have grasped too eagerly and confidently at the secrets of life and the world; and whose later experience sorrowfully revealed to him, that he had forfeited success by seeking vainly to transcend, instead of working patiently within, the necessities and limitations of our imperfect humanity. Vainly had he tried mere knowledge, and mere benevolence, nor less vainly even the combination of both, as long as he kept himself aloof from those he would have aided. Men are not to be served from the eminences above them, but from the common ways around them. He who mixes on their own level with them, “passioned as they,” will avail them most; and only out of a full consideration for the present, with all its weakness and mistakes, have we any chance of shaping out a better and more hopeful future.
At the opening of “Christmas-Eve,” the relater of the imaginary incidents which form its subject would appear to be in a position, with respect to all existing religions, as of a man waiting for further light. His intellect is too restless, his genius too speculative, to be satisfied with what his commoner fellow-mortals practise for religion. In such ordinary forms he sees but a hopeless contradiction to the wants and persuasions of the soul; he has substituted for them an idea of the spirit of divine love, in which he believes the working efficacy of religion to consist; he has condensed into a few ethical precepts, the law and the prophets; and he condemns all the ruder manifestations of Christian worship for ignorant presumption or dreary superstition. But he is roused from this state to discern, beyond it, what proves to him a more satisfactory though less ambitious wisdom; and he ends by patiently subjecting his knowledge to his ignorance, by the sense that no infallible persuasions are good for fallible man, and by embracing to his own full contentment the simplest and least inviting form of orthodox belief. In like manner, the moral of “Easter-day” is a warning that the most practical and available value of religion may be missed in too ambitious an effort to obtain intellectual mastery over it; that what is eternal in our nature, works by God’s pleasure through what is meanest and most imperfect in our temporary condition; that the best part of philosophy is to know the limits placed to all philosophy; and that man’s moral training is only likely to be perfect, in proportion to that exercise of humility and modesty through which all his worldly achievements and bodily enjoyments may be made tributary to his faith, and subject at all times to the sense of its miraculous origin. The argument of both in one, Christmas-Eve and Easter-Day, is in favour of the Present with its imperfections and sufferings, but also its eager and strenuous aspirings, as against a Future more free from doubt, more confident in hope, and in intellect more complete and supreme. Religion in its homeliest aspect is found to “wear better” than dreams of the grandest philosophy, hopes of the most elevated fancy, or proofs of the subtlest reason.
Something akin to the spirit of this argument may also be supposed to have dictated the choice of the mechanical adjuncts to the poem—the measure in which it is written, and the machinery employed in it. These are commonly of the most “real” kind; yet passing into the “ideal,” where the occasion suggests it, with magical facility. We do not know that any modern poet has equalled Mr Browning in the art with which he can give to the most natural and unaffected terms of the commonest every-day language, an ideally perfect expression. His wit and his imagination are equal; he can employ at once, and at their highest strain, his fanciful and his reasoning powers; without the use of a superfluous word, he can put into easy verse the elaborate niceties of a metaphysical argument; and all this varied with the quickest turns of feeling, the most homely and literal local truth, and the utmost force of picturesque expression. The measure he has here adopted is chiefly octo-syllabic, but regular in its appearance of irregularity, counting by accents where the syllables exceed or fall short, and adapting itself to the mood of the writer with startling yet melodious transition. The purist in poetry may object to a too close occasional contact of the serious and the light, consequent upon this; and which is as though the wit and rhyming surprises of Butler should be found neighboured by the grandeur and music of Milton. But the writer has a secret intention in it, which will not be hidden from those to whom the purpose of the poem is in any manner apparent. The final test in such matters we take to be the impression of freshness and spontaneity, and here this is unquestionably produced. The writing is not for writing’s sake. It is in no respect “bookish.” It is an effluence of irrepressible thought, in harmony with each varying shade of the sentiment conveyed by it, and flushed and quickened throughout as in a man’s actual utterance of what has agitated or raised him.
“Christmas-Eve” contains four descriptions which will illustrate what we have said with a very literal exactness. Two of them may be called real, and two ideal. In the first class we have the description of an English dissenting chapel of the lowest and commonest kind, and the picture of rationalist lecture-room in Germany. In the second we have a view of St Peter’s during high mass, and the account of a supernatural vision in which the Author of Christianity is seen.
The poem, which professes to relate a personal experience, opens as the author, crossing a common on the Christmas-Eve of 1849, is driven by a sudden storm of rain to take shelter in the door-way of a dissenting chapel which he finds at the common’s edge, and into which the congregation is crowding from all quarters, from the main road as well as the common itself, while he thus blocks up the door-way.
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,
They front you as little disconcerted,
As, bound for the hills, her fate averted
And her wicked people made to mind him,
Lot might have marched with Gomorrah behind him.
The description of the sort of people that arrive and their intolerant glances at the intruder, of his remonstrance and final entry along with them, is in the highest feeling of Crabbe and Wordsworth. There is an old woman with an umbrella, a poor little wretch with a baby, a girl of the town, a shoemaker’s lad with a bad cough who stops a little before entering
To get the fit over, poor gentle creature,
And so avoid disturbing the preacher,
and some others, inimitably sketched. But the sermon proves intolerable to the too fastidious stranger, and he thus proffers an excuse for his leaving the place as abruptly as he had entered it.
I very soon had enough of it.
The hot smell and the human noises,
And my neighbour’s coat, the greasy cuff of it,
Were a pebble-stone that a child’s hand poises,
Compared with the pig-of-lead like pressure
Of the preaching man’s immense stupidity,
As he poured his doctrine forth, full measure,
To meet his audience’s avidity.
You needed not the wit of the Sybil
To guess the cause of it all, in a twinkling—
No sooner had our friend an inkling
Of treasure hid in the Holy Bible,
(Whenever it was the thought first struck him
How Death, at unawares, might duck him
Deeper than the grave, and quench
The gin-shop’s light in Hell’s grim drench)
Than he handled it so, in fine irreverence, [p. 212→]
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 fain see equipt yours,—
So tossed you again your Holy Scriptures.
And you picked them up, in a sense, no doubt:
Nay, had but a single face of my neighbours
Appeared to suspect that the preacher’s labours
Were help which the world could be saved without,
’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.
My old fat woman purred with pleasure,
And thumb round thumb went twirling faster,
While she, to his periods keeping measure,
Maternally devoured the pastor.
The man with the handkerchief, untied it,
Showed us a horrible wen inside it,
Gave his eyelids yet another screwing,
And rocked himself as the woman was doing.
The shoemaker’s lad, discreetly choking,
Kept down his cough. ’Twas too provoking!
My gorge rose at the nonsense and stuff of it,
And saying, like Eve when she plucked the apple,
“I wanted a taste, and now there’s enough of it,”
I flung out of the little chapel.
Most beautiful is the description that follows. And the reader will mark the easy transition in the music of the verse, and the exquisite reasoning towards the close on the weft of “good and ill” of which the preacher’s speech was woven.
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.
Just by the chapel, a break in the railing
Shows a narrow path directly across;
’Tis ever dry walking there, on the moss—
Besides, you go gently all the way uphill:
I stooped under and soon felt better:
My head grew light, my limbs more supple,
As I walked on, glad to have slipt the fetter;
My mind was full of the scene I had left,
That placid flock, that pastor vociferant,
—How this outside was pure and different!
The sermon, now—what a mingled weft
Of good and ill! were either less,
Its fellow had coloured the whole distinctly;
But alas for the excellent earnestness,
And the truths, quite true if stated succinctly,
But as surely false, in their quaint presentment,
However to pastor and flock’s contentment!
Say rather, such truths looked false to your eyes,
With his provings and parallels twisted and twined,
Till how could you know them, grown double their size,
In the natural fog of the good man’s mind?
Like yonder spots of our roadside lamps,
Haloed about with the common’s damps.
Truth remains true, the fault’s in the prover;
The zeal was good, and the aspiration;
And yet, and yet, yet, fifty times over,
Pharaoh received no demonstration
By his Baker’s dream of Baskets Three,
Of the doctrine of the Trinity,—
Although, as our preacher thus embellished it,
Apparently his hearers relished it
With so unfeigned a gust—who knows if
They did not prefer our friend to Joseph?
His own spiritual condition at the time is glanced at in some masterly verses, containing many of the most beautiful and refined thoughts in the poem; and the sequel of his reasoning is to assure him of God’s exhaustless love, inexpressible by dogma or doctrine; superior to all kinds and forms of faith; and not to be honoured or worshipped in “a narrow shrine.” Yet there, with the heavens looking hope upon him, and the air free and healthful around, he receives the higher lesson. We cannot abridge what follows, and do not need to recommend it to the perceptions of any reader of poetry. The double lunar rainbow is a noble description, and the rest is worthy of the theme. The music in the pauses, the closely knitted harmony of the lines, how admirable. And what a fine contrast between the eager emotion before the apparition is visible, and the calmly settled depth of awe expressed in the later lines.
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?
This sight was shown me, there and then,—
Me, one out of a world of men,
Singled forth, as the chance might hap
To another, if in a thunderclap
Where I heard noise, and you saw flame,
Some one man knew God called his name.
For me, I think I said, “Appear!
Good were it to be ever here.
If Thou wilt, let me build to Thee
Service-tabernacles Three,
Where, for ever in Thy presence,
In extatic acquiescence,
Far alike from thriftless learning
And ignorance’s undiscerning,
I may worship and remain!”
Thus, at the show above me, gazing
With upturned eyes, I felt my brain
Glutted with the glory, blazing
Throughout its whole mass, over and under,
Until at length it burst asunder,
And out of it bodily there streamed
The too-much glory, as it seemed,
Passing from out me to the ground,
Then palely serpentining round
Into the dark with mazy error.
All at once I looked up with terror.
He was there.
He Himself with His human air,
On the narrow pathway, just before:
I saw the back of Him, no more—
He had left the chapel, then, as I.
I forgot all about the sky.
No face: only the sight
Of a sweepy Garment, vast and white,
With a hem that I could recognise.
I felt terror, no surprise:
My mind filled with the cataract,
At one bound, of the mighty fact.
I remembered, He did say
Doubtless, that to this world’s end,
Where two or three should meet and pray,
He would be in the midst, their Friend:
Certainly He was there with them.
And my pulses leaped for joy
Of the golden thought without alloy,
That I saw His very Vesture’s hem.
Afterwards comes the terror that he had scorned the humble friends and worshippers in whose presence the Saviour had been, until a Divine reassurance is given to clear it away. Then, clinging to the hem of the garment which sweeps on before him, he crosses the world, and finds himself outside a building majestically described, of which at first he is ignorant, but which at last he knows to be St Peter’s—still on that very Christmas-Eve.
For see, for see,
The dark is rent, mine eye is free
To pierce the crust of the outer wall,
And I view inside, and all there, all,
As the swarming hollow of a hive,
The whole basilica alive!
Men in the chancel, body, and nave.
Men on the pillars’ architrave,
Men on the statues, men on the tombs
With popes and kings in their porphyry wombs,
All famishing in expectation
Of the main-altar’s consummation.
For see, for see, the rapturous moment
Approaches, and earth’s best endowment
Blends with heaven’s: the taper-fires
Pant up, the winding brazen spires
Heave loftier yet the baldachin;
The incense-gaspings, long kept in,
Suspire in clouds; the organ blatant
Holds his breath and grovels latent,
As if God’s hushing finger grazed him,
(Like Behemoth when He praised him)
At the silver bell’s shrill tinkling,
Quick cold drops of terror sprinkling
On the sudden pavement strewed
With faces of the multitude.
Earth breaks up, time drops away,
In flows heaven, with its new day
Of endless life, when He who trod,
Very Man and very God,
This earth in weakness, shame and pain,
Dying the death whose signs remain
Up yonder on the accursed tree,—
Shall come again, no more to be
Of captivity the thrall,
But the one God, all in all,
King of kings, and Lord of lords,
As His servant John received the words,
“I died, and live for evermore!”
We think this description one of the finest in this remarkable poem. The last thirteen lines, with their grand completed cadences, come in, after the agony of aspiration expressed in the lines preceding, as though the immortal answer were already vouchsafed, and the glorious consummation come. We regret to have to pass a subsequent subtle discrimination of what is good from what is evil in the Roman Catholic church, expressed with singular depth of spiritual experience, and command of allusion and analogy; but we must hasten to the next celebration of Christmas-Eve to which the hero of the poem is swept along by the sacred vesture to which he is still allowed to cling. There are few who will not be struck by the wit and force of what we are now about to quote—the lecture room and lecture of the German rationalist professor. It is quite a master-piece—everything seen in such minute accuracy of detail, yet also in the light of such a subtle imagination. The visible and invisible are made obvious to us, with marvellous facility and truth. We are not allowed to dislike or despise the professor, whatever we may think of his doctrine.
Alone, beside the entrance-door
Of a sort of temple,—perhaps a college,
—Like nothing I ever saw before
At home in England, to my knowledge.
The tall, old, quaint, irregular town!
It may be .. though which I can’t affirm .. any
Of the famous middle-age towns of Germany;
And this flight of stairs where I sit down,
Is it Halle, Weimar, Cassel, or Frankfort,
Or Göttingen, that I have to thank for’t?
It may be Göttingen,—most likely
Through the open door I catch obliquely
Glimpses of a lecture-hall;
And not a bad assembly neither—
Ranged decent and symmetrical
On benches, waiting what’s to see there;
Which, holding still by the Vesture’s hem,
I also resolve to see with them,
Cautious this time how I suffer to slip
The chance of joining in fellowship
With any that call themselves His friends,
As these folks do, I have a notion.
But hist—a buzzing and emotion!
All settle themselves, the while ascends
By the creaking rail to the lecture-desk,
Step by step, deliberate
Because of his cranium’s over-weight,
Three parts sublime to one grotesque,
If I have proved an accurate guesser,
The hawk-nosed, high-cheek-boned Professor.
I felt at once, as if there ran
A shoot of love from my heart to the man—
That sallow, virgin-minded, studious
Martyr to mild enthusiasm,
As he uttered a kind of cough-preludious
That woke my sympathetic spasm,
(Beside some spitting that made me sorry)
And stood, surveying his auditory
With a wan pure look, well nigh celestial,—
—Those blue eyes had survived so much!
While, under the foot they could not smutch,
Lay all the fleshly and the bestial.
Over he bowed, and arranged his notes,
Till the auditory’s clearing of throats
Was done with, died into a silence;
And, when each glance was upward sent,
Each bearded mouth composed intent,
And a pin might be heard drop half a mile hence,—
He pushed back higher his spectacles,
Let the eyes stream out like lamps from cells,
And giving his head of hair—a hake
Of undressed tow, for color and quantity—
One rapid and impatient shake,
As our own young England adjusts a jaunty tie
(When about to impart, on mature digestion,
Some thrilling view of the surplus [sic] question)
—The Professor’s grave voice, sweet though hoarse,
Broke into his Christmas-Eve’s discourse.
And he began it by observing
How reason dictated that men
Should rectify the natural swerving,
By a reversion, now and then,
To the well-heads of knowledge, few
And far away, whence rolling grew
The life-stream wide whereat we drink,
Commingled, as we needs must think,
With waters alien to the source:
To do which, aimed this Eve’s discourse.
Since, where could be a fitter time
For tracing backward to its prime,
This Christianity, this lake,
This reservoir, whereat we slake,
From one or other bank, our thirst?
So he proposed inquiring first
Into the various sources whence
This Myth of Christ is derivable;
Demanding from the evidence,
(Since plainly no such life was liveable)
How these phenomena should class?
Whether ’twere best opine Christ was,
Or never was at all, or whether
He was and was not, both together—
It matters little for the name,
So the Idea be left the same:
Only, for practical purpose’ sake,
’Twas obviously as well to take
The popular story,—understanding
How the ineptitude of the time,
And the penman’s prejudice, expanding
Fact into fable fit for the clime,
Had, by slow and sure degrees, translated it
Into this myth, this Individuum,—
Which, when reason had strained and abated it
Of foreign matter, gave, for residuum,
A Man!—a right true man, however,
Whose work was worthy a man’s endeavour!
We stop the discourse abruptly, as, after a few more philosophical arguments from the professor to prove that the gospel, though highly respectable, meant
Something entirely different
From all that those who only heard it
In their simplicity thought and averred it,
the narrater himself does. Of the two extremes of popery and rationalism, the poet then avows that he prefers the first—the air may be poisoned in the one, but in the other there is no air to poison. As he leaves the lecture room he pursues the argument of Christ’s mere human intellect and morality, opened up by the professor, into all its subtlest windings, and exhibits its fallacy ad absurdum. As an example of Mr Browning’s power of reasoning in verse we must borrow one or two fragmentary passages from this argument, again desiring the reader to mark into what appropriate dignity of cadence he ascends in the concluding lines.
You pledge
Your fealty to such rule? What, all—
From Heavenly John and Attic Paul,
And that brave weather-battered Peter
Whose stout faith only stood completer
For buffets, sinning to be pardoned,
As the more his hands hauled nets, they hardened,
All, down to you, the man of men,
Professing here at Göttingen,
Compose Christ’s flock! So, you and I
Are sheep of a good man! and why?
The goodness,—how did he acquire it?
Was it self-gained, did God inspire it?
Choose which; then tell me, on what ground
Should its possessor dare propound
His claim to rise o’er us an inch?
Were goodness all some man’s invention,
Who arbitrarily made mention
What we should follow, and where flinch,—
What qualities might take the style
Of right and wrong, . . . .
I would decree
Worship for such mere demonstration
And simple work of nomenclature,
Only the day I praised, not Nature,
But Harvey, for the circulation.
I would praise such a Christ, with pride
And joy, that he, as none beside,
Had taught us how to keep the mind
God gave him, as God gave his kind,
Freer than they from fleshly taint!
I would call such a Christ our Saint,
As I declare our Poet, him
Whose insight makes all others dim:
A thousand poets pried at life,
And only one amid the strife
Rose to be Shakespeare! . . .
. . . . .
No, freely I would praise the man,—
Nor one whit more, if he contended
That gift of his, from God descended [p. 213→]
Ah, friend, what gift of man’s does not?
No nearer Something, by a jot,
Rise an infinity of Nothings
Than one: take Euclid for your teacher:
Distinguish kinds; do crownings, clothings,
Make that Creator which was creature?
Multiply gifts upon his head,
And what, when all’s done, shall be said
But … the more gifted he, I ween!
That one’s made Christ, another, Pilate,
And This might be all That has been,—
So what is there to frown or smile at?
What is left for us, save, in growth,
Of soul, to rise up, far past both,
From the gift looking to the Giver,
And from the cistern to the River,
And from the finite to Infinity,
And from man’s dust to God’s divinity?
The sequel is that the utterer of the poem, and the seer of the vision, finally wakes up in the little chapel which he had not really left, having fallen asleep in the middle of the sermon only to be roused by its “tenth and lastly.” The marvel is completed by a sort of recollection, which comes back out of his dream, even of the drowsy sermon itself; and which justifies the moral of his preference and selection of it before either the celebration in St Peter’s or the rationalist lecture at Göttingen.
I, then, in ignorance and weakness,
Taking God’s help, have attained to think
My heart does best to receive in meekness
This mode of worship, as most to His mind,
Where earthly aids being cast behind,
His All in All appears serene,
With the thinnest human veil between,
Letting the mystic Lamps, the Seven,
The many motions of His spirit,
Pass, as they list, to earth from Heaven.
For the preacher’s merit or demerit,
It were to be wished the flaws were fewer
In the earthen vessel, holding treasure,
Which lies as safe in a golden ewer:
But the main thing is, does it hold good measure?
Heaven soon sets right all other matters!—
Ask, else, these ruins of humanity,
This flesh worn out to rags and tatters,
This soul at struggle with insanity,
Who thence take comfort, can I doubt,
Which an empire gained, were a loss without.
May it be mine! And let us hope
That no worse blessing befal the Pope,
Turn’d sick at last of the day’s buffoonery.
Of his posturings and his petticoatings,
Beside the Bourbon bully’s gloatings
In the bloody orgies of drunk poltroonery!
Nor may the Professor forego its peace
At Göttingen, presently, when, in the dusk
Of his life, if his cough, as I fear, should increase,
Prophesied of by that horrible husk;
And when, thicker and thicker, the darkness fills
The world through his misty spectacles,
And he gropes for something more substantial
Than a fable, myth, or personification,
May Christ do for him, what no mere man shall,
And stand confessed as the God of salvation!
Meantime, in the still recurring fear
Lest myself, at unawares, be found,
While attacking the choice of my neighbours round,
Without my own made—I choose here!
The giving out of the hymn reclaims me;
I have done!—And if any blames me,
Thinking that merely to touch in brevity
The topics I dwell on, were unlawful.—
Or, worse, that I trench, with undue levity,
On the bounds of the Holy and the awful,
I praise the heart, and pity the head of him,
And refer myself to Thee, instead of him;
Who head and heart alike discernest,
Looking below light speech we utter,
When the frothy spume and frequent sputter
Prove that the soul’s depths boil in earnest!
May the truth shine out, stand ever before us!
I put up pencil and join chorus
To Hepzibah Tune, without further apology,
The last five verses of the third section
Of the seventeenth hymn in Whitfield’s Collection,
To conclude with the doxology.
At this point the “Christmas-Eve” portion of the poem closes, and we cannot, for the present at least, take any extract from the second portion. We have described its aim, and with that must be content. It has more of Mr Browning’s old obscurity, or super-subtlety of allusion and connection, as it will be more correct to say; and though some of the completest poetical images are contained in it, and a more sustained dignity and seriousness than in the first, it is not free from the appearance of over-effort, and it pushes to an extreme the most dogmatic views of the claims and exactions of Christianity.
It will not be supposed that in seeking to convey to the reader what we have derived of Mr Browning’s meaning in these latter respects from the volume before us, we would imply our own implicit agreement with them. Far from this. We are much more disposed than Mr Browning would now seem to be, to perceive in a mutual reverence for differences of creed one of the most Christian manifestations of the religious spirit, and to recognise in those very differences but a better means of development for that free mental life which must always co-operate with religion to make the latter truly profitable to man. We are by no means sure that we should hesitate to call not a few passages in the poem we have been noticing but another form of a common bigotry—poetry veiling a somewhat narrow and intolerant superstition. But unsatisfactory and imperfect in these respects as the composition is, we think its general teaching, as we have sought to explain it, quite sound, apart from the particular applications now and then indiscreetly given to it.
As an emanation of thought in verse we think it every way a most remarkable production, and not unlikely to have effects much beyond the mere pleasure or entertainment of a great many readers. Mr Browning has been steadily reclaiming his genius, of late years, from the “vague and formless infinite” into which at one time it seemed to be falling, and in this respect the work before us is full of the richest future promise. He will yet win and wear his laurel, and be admitted for what he truly is, one of the most original poets of his time. He is equally a master of thought and emotion, and joins to a rare power of imaginative creation that which is still more rarely found in union with it—the subtlest power of mental reasoning and analysis. Over the instrument of language he exerts the most facile mastery, and few poets have moved with such free and flowing step through the most complicated word-mazes of music and measure. We would challenge for such a writer the respectful attention of those most opposed to the views he promulgates. The feeling of this poem is true, whatever may be thought of its dogmatism; and its essential teaching is independent of particular forms. It will assuredly waken very many to the “better part” suggested by its theme, and it will stir and quicken thought in all.
[John Forster]
Reviewed:
Christmas-Eve & Easter-Day (RB), London: Chapman & Hall, 1850.
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