R500427A. Christmas-Eve and Easter-Day.
The Leader, 27 April 1850, p. 111.
As reprinted in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 16, 370–372.
browning’s new poem.
Robert Browning has one inestimable quality—originality. Whatever other qualities he may want, this one cannot be denied him. He is not simply an original poet, but perhaps the only original poet of the day; for Tennyson, though far more richly endowed in faculties, is obviously a product of Keats, Shelley, and Wordsworth. Browning sees for himself, thinks for himself, speaks for himself. You may quarrel with his manner, but you cannot say it belongs to another; it is his, every line of it. If you accept it you will probably delight in it, and place the poet on an exalted pedestal. Accordingly Browning’s admirers are “fit” and not “few”; they swear by their master with an enthusiasm pleasant to witness, and not insignificant as a tribute to his power.
But with full recognition of what is excellent in Browning’s poetry we are prevented from sharing all that enthusiasm by the serious deficiencies we note in it. Our space admits of no detailed estimate of his genius; we cannot pause to enumerate the various grounds on which we take our stand; they may all be summed up in one sentence: he is not a Singer. That which distinguishes Poetry from Verse—that music, not of language only but of thought, which constitutes the grand peculiarity and enduring delight of poetry, forms but an insignificant element in his writings. With a command over language, and powers of easy movement in the fetters of rhyme greater than in almost any writer of the day, his poems want the one redeeming grace, the one perfection of art which no teaching can give: his verse is not “full-sailed,” borne onwards by the current of imperious sound, formed out of strange velocities of thought intermingling with emotion, and raising in the hearer a like mysterious agitation. We might turn the objection into another shape, and say that in Browning’s poems we miss the element of Beauty.
It will be seen that we make a serious objection. Let us add that we are testing him severely, and according to a high standard. That is right, for his aims are high. Measure him by the standard of his contemporaries, or that of many whose names in days gone by have had resounding echoes, and he will seem a man of gigantic thews and sinews. Every thing he writes is worthy of attention—he has written nothing more worthy of it than Christmas Eve. It is a great theme powerfully conceived, picturesquely, sometimes grotesquely handled. In distinctness of purpose, pregnancy of meaning, and power of illustration it shows the masterhand.
The poet is standing in the door-way of a Methodist Chapel, while the rain is drenching the desolate common; and as he stands there the strange congregation glare at him before entering:—
Well, from the road, the lanes, or the common,
In came the flock: 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.
You must not be disconcerted with the rough realism of this poem, and complain of the tone being unsuitable to the gravity of the subject; with a keen eye for the truth Browning never idealizes: this is at once the source of his strength and of his weakness.
The fat weary woman is thus followed:—
Prompt in the wake of her, up-pattered
On broken clogs, the many-tattered
Little old-faced, peaking sister-turned-mother
Of the sickly babe she tried to smother
Somehow up, with its spotted face,
From the cold, on her breast, the one warm place;
She too must stop, wring the poor suds dry
Of a draggled shawl, and add thereby
Her tribute to the door-mat, sopping
Already from my own clothes’ dropping,
Which yet she seemed to grudge I should stand on;
Then stooping down to take off her pattens,
She bore them defiantly, in each hand one,
Planted together before her breast
And its babe, as good as a lance in rest.
Close on her heels, the dingy satins
Of a female something, past me flitted,
With lips as much too white, as a streak
Lay far too red on each hollow cheek:
And it seemed the very door-hinge pitied
All that was left of a woman once,
Holding at least its tongue for the nonce.
* * * * * * *
And, when the door’s cry drowned their wonder,
The draught, it always sent in shutting,
Made the flame of the single tallow candle
In the cracked square lanthorn I stood under,
Shoot its blue lip at me, rebutting
As it were the luckless cause of scandal:
I verily thought the zealous light
(In the chapel’s secret, too!) for spite,
Would shudder itself clean off the wick,
With the airs of a St. John’s Candlestick.
Shamed by the reproachful looks of the faithful, and by the “zealous light,” he resolves to enter the chapel:—
Accordingly, as a shoemaker’s lad
With wizened face in want of soap,
And wet apron wound round his waist like a rope,
After stopping outside, for his cough was bad,
To get the fit over, poor gentle creature,
And so avoid disturbing the preacher,
Passed in, I sent my elbow spikewise
At the shutting door, and entered likewise,—
Received the hinge’s accustomed greeting,
Crossed the threshold’s magic pentacle,
And found myself in full conventicle.
Admirable is the description of the interior of Zion Chapel, and the preacher who there “deals damnation round” while “the old fat woman purred with pleasure,” and of the droning sermon which sent the poet to sleep. In that sleep he dreams that he is once more out in the open air, beneath the sky, subject to all the influences of nature, and he also dreams that there he meets the Saviour:—
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 their 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.
Holding by the sacred Garment he is wafted to Rome, and at St. Peter’s witnesses the Catholic celebration of Christmas Eve. The plan of this is striking. No contrast could be finer than that of squalid Methodism and gorgeous Romanism; but Browning, whose observant eye sees the one vividly enough, fails to do adequate justice to the other. The pomp, and splendour, and sensuous grandeur of Catholicism are indicated rather than painted. Having witnessed the two antipodes of worship, he next is carried to the centre of Scepticism. From Roman forms he passes to the inquisitor of all forms—he is at Göttingen listening to a mythical interpretation of Christianity by a “hawknosed 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, wellnigh 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 surplus-question)
—The Professor’s grave voice, sweet though hoarse,
Broke into his Christmas-Eve’s discourse.
We cannot quote the lecture, but it is not a very unfair version of the mythic doctrine. Truly enough does he say:—
Unlearned love was safe from spurning—
Can’t we respect your loveless learning?
Let us at least give learning honour!
What laurels had we showered upon her,
Girding her loins up to perturb
Our theory of the Middle Verb:
Or Turklike brandishing a scimetar
O’er anapæsts in comic-trimeter:
Or curing the halt and maimed Iketides,
While we lounged on at our indebted ease:
Instead of which, a tricksy demon
Sets her at Titus or Philemon!
When Ignorance wags his ears of leather
And hates God’s word, ’tis altogether;
Nor leaves he his congenial thistles
To go and browse on Paul’s Epistles.
But he prefers the errors of Romanism or Methodism to those of Hegelianism:—
Truth’s atmosphere may grow mephitic
When Papist struggles with Dissenter,
Impregnating its pristine clarity,
—One, by his daily fare’s vulgarity
Its gust of broken meat and garlic;
—One, by his soul’s too-much presuming,
To turn the frankincense’s fuming
And vapours of the candle starlike
Into the cloud her wings she buoys on:
And each, that sets the pure air seething,
Poisoning it for healthy breathing—
But the critic leaves no air to poison;
Pumps out by a ruthless ingenuity
Atom by atom and leaves you—vacuity.
Thus much of Christ, does he reject?
And what retain? His intellect?
What is it I must reverence duly?
Poor intellect for worship, truly.
Which tells me simply what was told
(If mere morality, bereft
Of the God in Christ, be all that’s left)
Elsewhere by voices manifold.
He awakes in the little chapel again, taught some lessons by his dream; and the substance of what he has learned is given in the second poem—or division of the poem called Easter-day—wherein, after setting forth the difficulties which beset the mind desirous of becoming truly Christian, he concludes by the orthodox-heterodoxy—or heterodox-orthodoxy, which ever you please—that Christianity is Love.
On the theology of the poem we should have much to say did time and place serve; meanwhile we need only applaud in passing the sincere and earnest spirit which breathes through it. The sincerity of it will to many look like levity. Already we have heard strange objections to the “tone,” as not elevated enough. Do these critics imagine that an “elevated” tone is difficult? Do they suppose that Browning could not have adopted it, had he thought fit? But he did not think fit. Instead of imitating Milton he spoke as Robert Browning; his keen sense of the ludicrous and grotesque fading into the background whenever the presence of more solemn themes overshadowed it. In the bold and artful mingling of the ludicrous with the intensely serious he reminds us of Carlyle. His style is swayed by the subject. It is a garment, not a mould; it takes the varying shapes of varied movement, and does not force its one monotony on all.
As a page out of the history of a life, the poetic confession of a troubled soul, Christmas Eve has a significance and a value peculiarly its own. We have read it three times, and with increasing admiration. What it wants to make it an enduring work of art is that which the author cannot give it, has not to give—the magic and the mystery of Beauty. But of its kind it is really great. The luxury of rhyme—the marvellous facility playing with difficulties as an Indian juggler plays with balls, every one will have noticed. Since Butler no English poet has exhibited the same daring propensity and facility in rhyming. If the verse is sometimes rugged it is but the better exponent of the thought. Realism in Art has Truth as an aim, Ugliness as a pitfall.
[George Henry Lewes]
Reviewed:
Christmas-Eve & Easter-Day (RB), London: Chapman & Hall, 1850.
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