R500500C. Christmas-Eve and Easter-Day.
The Prospective Review, May 1850, pp. 267–279.
As reprinted in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 16, 379–382.
art. vi.—new poems by bailey and browning.
Religious Poetry is in danger of falling into two opposite vices, either that of dying away in mere moral or theological dissertation, in which case it becomes “dull and even dreary”—or that of using the mysteries, and infinitude of a divine theme, merely to enhance the interest and heighten the picturesque effects of a vivid and scenic imagination. The latter fault arises commonly from two very distinct causes, either from want of moral reverence in intellects of great power and depth that delight in the excitement of wonder, though they have little of the spirit or humility of worship—a class of minds that have been conspicuous lately in this country as disciples of Mr. Carlyle—or on the other hand, from the mere want of moral sensitiveness and discrimination, which makes them identify physical things with spiritual, and represents the whole of religion to their minds according to the analogies of law and sensuous conceptions. All these faults are common enough in the religious poetry and poetic prose of our own day. The first of them simply makes a religious poem unreadable; the second inexpressibly painful and repulsive to reverential minds; the last makes it low-toned and disagreeable to all of higher perceptions.
[The review continues with remarks on The Angel World and other Poems by Philip James Bailey, which are omitted here.] [p. 271→]
Of Mr. Browning’s poem we have little to say: we only placed it at the head of this article because it affords an instructive comparison with Mr. Bailey’s in arriving at any distinct views as to the peculiar mental characteristics of a poet. These new poems of Mr. Browning exhibit a higher intellectual power, a keener moral sensitiveness, and altogether a far more spiritual nature than Mr. Bailey’s: still, though they are far more religious, they are, as it seems to us, decidedly less poetical, than the “Angel World.” “Christmas Eve” is written apparently with the intention of showing that Christ blesses by his presence all the churches that earnestly and in truth desire to follow and love him, from the Roman Communion down to the intellectual audience of a German rationalist, whatever be their errors, and yet that the eclectic principle in religion is spurious and worthless, since the true faith lies in one view and in one only. In “Easter Day” he enters on the discussion of the relation between faith in Christ and moral acceptance with God, and connects the moral quality involved in faith with the intellectual fact of belief in this manner, that our doubts of the incarnation are mainly moral, arising from the feebleness of our own love, which renders it difficult, sometimes impossible, for men to believe that the divine love could ever have been so infinite as to lead God to put on for our sakes man’s imperfect nature, and submit to the [p. 272→] sufferings and the sorrows of a mortal lot. We have no contest at present with Mr. Browning’s views, and only wish to speak of him in his character of a poet, and especially of a religious poet. The only passages that could be thought to be poetical in these new poems are the descriptions of the moonlight night with the lunar rainbow and the appearance of the vision in the first poem; and in the last, the description of the Aurora Borealis on the night before Easter Day.
. . . . . And as I said
This nonsense, throwing back my head
With light complacent laugh, 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 spilt 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
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; [p. 273→]
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 rest is for the most part either moral argument in doggerel verses of a very unharmonious kind, or descriptions of scenes and persons, often clever, but not by any means beautiful. Mr. Browning’s poetry is indeed altogether of a hard description, and shows, to use a distinction pointed out by Mr. Ruskin, more appreciation of the picturesque, than of the essentially beautiful and sublime: this is shown, we think, even in his ungraceful versification, which is totally devoid of melody and even smoothness, and yet is not ill adapted to bring out sharp distinctions and pointed contrasts. This is a fault which has increased upon him; though his poetry has always been less genuine poetry than illustrated thought, or intellectual description of beautiful scenes. There is one circumstance which the comparison of all the greatest poets of the world forces more and more strongly upon us, that their peculiar power consists mainly in the perfect closeness with which their sentiments are bound up together in their minds, so that while they are expressing one, they pass into another, and never call up a mere phase of human sentiment, but unite all the finest and most complex shades of feeling in the wonderful web of their full and glowing utterance. This we take to be the main characteristic of a poet; he passes directly from sentiment to sentiment, and illustrates one emotion through the medium of another, so as to touch at once all the varied springs of feeling that each object may excite in a human soul; and yet one tone of feeling may, and generally must, remain predominant; only while ordinary minds detect this alone, and strive to express it as if it were single and distinct, the poet passes by none of those minor accompaniments unconsciously present with [p. 274→] us, which “fill up the melody, though scarce interpreting the thought.” In truth, it is the part of the poet to present, in living combination, the groups of sentiments which are roused, and, even more still, that ought to be roused in human minds towards objects of human interest; and if we keep fast hold of this principle, we are convinced that it will explain a great proportion of the deficiencies and merits of poetical writers. No human sentiment, any more than chemical element, is ever found in the actual world uncombined; and to express and arouse the various clusters of sentiments, in their truest and purest living combinations, is the highest task of poetry. The highest poet seems to require not only the highest qualifications of every other human being, but, in addition to these, that peculiar cast of mind which binds up all the sensitive parts of his nature, physical, moral, and spiritual, in the most intimate union. This it is which distinguishes him from the artist, who has usually the finest sensitiveness in some particular power of perception, but in whom this fineness of faculty remains in itself, and does not take constant illustration from the neighbouring sentiments: the poet, in order to be the highest of his order, should have all the sensitive perceptions as fine and keen as artists of every class, and in addition, that intimate tie existing among them all which allows each to seek illustration and expression from the refined analogies of the others.
Now this is the reason why we maintain, that though Mr. Browning’s mind seems intellectually and spiritually of a higher order than Mr. Bailey’s, the latter has far more of the poetic nature than the former. Mr. Bailey’s mind is of that kind, that all its finest sensitive faculties seem fused together so essentially, that one sentiment cannot be expressed without a similar expression of all those bordering and minor feelings which really touch upon it in the human soul. Thus when he says—
. . . . . . In one
A soul of lofty clearness, like a night
Of stars, wherein the memory of the day
Seems trembling through the meditative air,
he combines in so wonderful a manner all the shades of feeling with which we regard that kind of clear sad nature, [p. 275→] and expresses so perfectly the real and close analogy between them and the feelings excited by a quiet star-light night—and that, too, without making any harsh transition from persons to things, so beautifully does he impersonate the “meditative air”—that the whole fulness of the actual sentiment (indeed more than the whole fulness of the sentiment that any but a poet would have felt) comes flowing into the mind. Again, where he describes the jewels of the Queen as—
Now gleaming forth defiant, now reposed
In silent capabilities of light,
the poetry is felt to consist in the spontaneous passage from the feeling excited by the mere visual beauty of light, to that higher sentiment felt towards the light that comes and goes with mental life, and moral agency. Indeed all Mr. Bailey’s sentiments seem linked together in that close alliance, that his poetry summons up and expresses at once not a single phase, but a various complexity of feeling, thus combining in language the numerous elements of emotion, and, by touching the various chords, calls out not single notes, but musical harmonies from the mind. All we complain of is, that the feelings he thus frequently touches are never among the highest; his hand never approaches even the higher notes of moral sentiment and religious love; and in a poem professedly religious, we reach no higher tone of feeling than is afforded by the most ordinary experiences of human life. With Mr. Browning it is quite otherwise; there is true spiritual feeling and moral keenness in his poem; but his mind is more intellectual than Mr. Bailey’s, and he delineates isolated thought and sentiment without difficulty, but they have the coldness and unreality of mere phases of feeling, prominent phases perhaps, yet not the full expression of the whole sensitive nature. His thought does not apparently live inside but outside his affections, and when one of them is touched, the vibration does not pass on to the others with that facility which in truly poetic minds rouses into expression so many shades of sentiment at once; there seems to be (as indeed in all ordinary minds there is) some nonconducting medium which separates his various feelings [p. 276→] and affections, and his imagery is taken, especially in these latter poems, not from the natural analogies of related feelings, but from recollection of similar intellectual ideas. Poetry has been defined to be the “expression of the affections by means of the imagination;” but this is not strictly true; it is the expression of some parts of our sensitive nature, with relation to, and through the analogies of, other sensations or affections. The detection of mere intellectual resemblances is one function of the imagination; yet to express the affections by such analogies is not poetical, but the contrary; this would be illustration and not poetical expression. Lord Bacon had a rich imagination, and yet his language, even when expressing the affections, is seldom or never poetical: because his expressions arise not from the natural connection of associated or adjacent sentiments, but from the intellectual connection of associated ideas. Shakspere is everywhere admitted as the highest poet the world has ever seen; and yet his theme is not often, if ever, the highest possible; there is perhaps scarcely one character conceived in the highest tone of Christian and spiritual thought, in the whole of his dramas. Human beauty and perfection abound everywhere; spiritual perfection was not within the range of even his vast intellect. Yet what marks him as so essentially the poet, far above those with even higher aims, and higher nature, is that all his transitions are the natural movements of his mind amongst kindred sensations and sentiments, while for their power and fineness of perception, those sentiments are at least very near to human perfection. But for this very reason Shakspere never draws a man of absolute will, where the emotional changes are not supreme but subordinate; it has often been noticed that the powerful characters of Shakspere owe their power to their strength of impulse and passion, not to mere commanding volition; the ἐγκρατὴς of Aristotle was a character that even Shakspere did not understand. Perhaps no perfect poet could draw such a character faultlessly; for the dramatic element in poetry is the overflow of the spontaneous part of our nature in its complexity, the transition from feeling to feeling; and perhaps the conception of an absolutely perfect dramatist and poet is an impossible one, involving contradictory elements of character. [p. 277→] It is just on this account that Sir Walter Scott’s poetry is so poor and (in Mr. Ruskin’s sense) so merely picturesque as contrasted with what is essentially beautiful or sublime, namely, that his nature seems to have had none of this involution of sentiment as we may call it; he only described what he saw by a single sense or sentiment; and then to enhance the interest, he is obliged to seek out non-essential incidents, strange and grotesque collocations, vivid meeting-lines of different and disconnected feelings, which are called picturesque, rather because they rivet the attention by the novelty and wonder of their coincidence than because they are in themselves imaged forth as beautiful and fine. In this sense the picturesque is a combination that may result from mere intellectual imagination, not from the imagination that is caused by inwardly associated emotions: and accordingly we often see that the most picturesque writers are nearly devoid of poetry. They conceive of new and startling combinations of forms, colours, sentiments, and thoughts, without being led to them by any inward connection of the feelings themselves, and so they produce striking effects, and contrasts, that are artificially artistic, and not a consequence of inward feeling. This is in a very great degree true of Mr. Browning; his poetry and his descriptions are picturesque, not beautiful; there are sharp divisions in his thought, and vivid outlines in his sensations, that give anything but the blended effect of true poetical description, and yet his descriptions are vivid and striking. Mr. Ruskin is, on the other hand, a high example of one who describes natural beauty not with intellectual keenness, but by inward sympathy with the influences of the scene. The description of a scene in the Jura, in his Seven Lamps of Architecture,* is one of the most exquisitely poetical we have ever read; the thoughts fly after each other, not in the order of intellectual observation, but of closely-associated feelings; and instead of the half-startled and novel interest with which we read a description by Scott, we experience as we read, those strange mysterious feelings that the actual presence of majestic natural beauty always excites.
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*Chap. vi. Lamp of Memory, Section 1.
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Keats, whose poetry is almost purely sensuous, still [p. 278→] always writes under the influence of the natural associations of fine senses, never from the analogies of intellectually associated thoughts; and in Shelley, the charm may be always traced to the wonderful play of all the finer emotions in the ever-varied tints of his fascinating lyrics. Wordsworth too, so universally regarded as a poet of meditation, not of emotion, owes all his finest passages to the quiet and subtle transition from sentiment to sentiment secretly connected by some tie that we know not of: so that one is made to illustrate and shine upon another, and the scattered rays of different affections are brought to a focus in the scene or thought of which he sings. Thus what is the exquisite delight with which we turn to such lines as the following from his often wearying goodness of mind and calmness of thought, unless it be that here he weaves together many threads of the finest feeling into one beautiful web, while elsewhere he spins out a single sentiment, or drops the sensitive altogether for the mere intellectual nature:—
The Stars of midnight shall be dear
To her; and she shall lean her ear
In many a secret place,
Where rivulets dance their wayward round,
And beauty born of murmuring sound
Shall pass into her face.
The mere fine expression of a single sentiment or sensation is not yet poetry, it is only beginning to be so; just as music is not yet music when only a single note has been struck; but when many feelings are gathered together by the spontaneous affinities of the mind, or at the very least according to the same laws by which the spontaneous affinities might draw them together, and not by the mere intellectual effort of volition, then poetry may be said to arise.
It appears easily from this view of Poetry what is the reason which makes it the tendency of the poet to impersonate or humanize the objects of nature and the world of thought: if that be the essence of poetry, to express the intimate connection of the sensitive faculties of the soul in their collective and simultaneous activity, yet in that well-ordered harmony which gives prominence to the highest, [p. 279→] and only calls in the lower sensations to add a fringe of brightness to the whole, then it is obvious that this end can fully be attained only when the object delineated is a person. Towards persons only, are the higher sentiments of the mind awakened, so that their various and transfiguring presence must be lost, if the thoughts are fixed only on passive and lifeless things. And above all, a religious poem gains all its beauty and grandeur from realising everywhere the divine personality: from regarding all the quiet brightness, and gentle shadows of life as unfolded from sentiments yet more mysteriously blended than those of man; and from throwing across all, that infinite shadow of power, which mingles even the profoundest trust with the sublimity of wonder, and softens the narrow intensity of earthly purpose, by revealing beyond its poor horizon that vista of diviner things which must unfix, at last, the gaze of the most downcast soul, and show the boundless spiritual world, in which it has been treading, unaware, its dangerous, though not unguarded way.
[?Richard Holt Hutton]
Reviewed:
Christmas-Eve & Easter-Day (RB), London: Chapman & Hall, 1850.
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