R500413A. Christmas-Eve and Easter-Day.
The Literary Gazette, 13 April 1850, pp. 260–261.
As reprinted in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 16, 367–369.
It is provoking, as we did last week, to find writers, with poetry in them, playing at loggers with their reputations. As was the case with Bailey, so is it with Browning. But the mistake is not altogether with them: it is the fault of a School and a Clique of pseudo Critics, (heaven save the mark!) who preach, with congenial qualifications, that all the unintelligibly expressed is “significant;” all the cloudy “æsthetic,” all the inane “philosophies,” and all the nonsensical verbiage magnificent “utterances.” No wonder that poor dreaming Poets are misled by such commentators—your true no-meaning puzzles more than sense; and when senseless eulogists exalt it to the sky, what can we expect but that, the blind leading the blind, both should fall in the ditch!
We cannot see why Poetry should be praised in the proportion that it is divested of plain meaning; why we should be called on to delight in a dark cloud-journey, with only a slight glimpse of light here and there to guide us on our way; why every thought and mode of expression should [p. 261→] be so involved in mystery that it must require the most acute penetration to discern the nature of the one, and long and anxious deliberation to be enabled to guess at the purport of the other. Homer is intelligible enough at a glance; so is Virgil, so is Chaucer, so is Shakspere, so is Dryden, so is Butler, so is Pope, so is Boileau, so are all the great Masters of Song. Their voices are clear. The dealers in the obscure are the obscure. Darkness cannot be transmitted to posterity. We do most sincerely wish that our mystical bards would make a point of understanding themselves and their subjects; and then, we think, there would be the better and absolutely needful chance of their readers understanding them.
We do not deny that we can make out portions of Christmas-Eve and Easter-Day; but we must also confess to the Bœotian stolidity which limits our comprehension, both as to the main design and the conduct of the argument to a modicum of the whole. The versification, too, is vicious, fantastic, and unallowable; the simplicities, prosaic triteness; Pope’s “Essay on Criticism” set at nought; and German mannerism and rationalism pervading elements of the most objectionable order. Let us exhibit a few of these traits: the first six lines will serve as an instance of the Baby-simple style:—
Out of the little chapel I burst
Into the fresh night air again.
I had waited a good five minutes first
In the doorway, to escape the rain
That drove in gusts down the common’s centre,
At the edge of which the chapel stands.
A variety of people enter this chapel—
Groping for the latch
Of the inner door that hung on catch,
More obstinate the more they fumbled,—
And the beauty of their descriptions may be surmised from the sketch of one of them:—
The fat weary woman,
Panting and bewildered, down-clapping
Her umbrella with a mighty report,
Grounded it by me, wry and flapping,
A wreck of whalebones.
The chapel is a Dissenting Zion Meeting-house, and our poet did not like it at all, for he says:—
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.
. . . . .
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.
He bolts accordingly, and revels in the common air, so refreshing from
That pastor vociferant,
—How this outside was pure and different!
There is, however, a smartish simile, affecting the preacher and the preaching:—
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.
Then commences a strange metaphorico-Poetic flight, to which the introduction will be enough, as an example of Mr. Browning’s powers when he is attempting the really beautiful, and also of the versification to which we have alluded:—
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 coalesced,
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.
Was there ever such celestial phenomena; such a lunar rainbow, alias spectral creature, in such a sky; and such process of formation, and such effects, such succession fainter and flushier? such rapture, such foolishness!
The supernatural flight lands him in some strange place, and its recognition is quite of a piece with the rest:—
Alone! I am left alone once more—
(Save for the Garment’s* extreme fold
Abandoned still to bless my hold)
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 Gottingen, that I have to thank for’t?
It may be Gottingen,—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-freight,
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 colour 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 surplice-question)
—The Professor’s grave voice, sweet though hoarse,
Broke into his Christmas-Eve’s discourse.
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*We ought to observe that he has been hanging on to the tail of a Garment all the while he has been whisked about Heaven and Earth,—Ed. L.G.
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We presume our readers have no desire to have it, either wholesale or retail; and we spare them—closing a volume which has annoyed us exceedingly, for we had higher hopes of the author, and lament to see his talent wasted.
The Romish religion is ridiculed like that of the dissenting chapel. The enthusiasm displayed in the whole performance is painful to contemplate. We cannot shut out the dread of that condition of mind on which it evidently so closely borders.
Reviewed:
Christmas-Eve & Easter-Day (RB), London: Chapman & Hall, 1850.
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