R500518A. Christmas-Eve and Easter-Day.
The Atlas, 18 May 1850, pp. 314–315.
As reprinted in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 16, 382–383.
If we had been as eager to notice this book as we were to read it, it would not have lain so long upon our table. We had been long looking for something new from the author of Paracelsus and Bells and Pomegranates; and had quite prepared ourselves to find in the something new something excellent. But we had rather not have read this poem. We have great faith in Robert Browning. But it was not equal to the appreciation of Sordello. And it is hardly strong enough to elevate us into any very towering admiration of the present performance.
That there is power in it cannot be denied. But it is power of a very peculiar and not very attractive kind. It is like Mr. Millar’s [sic, for Millais’s] picture in the Academy. The sublime and the ultra-homely are so blended together—there is such a mixture of coarseness and solemnity, that we know not whether to be revolted or awed—or perhaps, we may best liken the poem to Mr. Browning’s own German Professor, of whom he gives the following account:—
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 the auditory
With a wan pure look, well nigh celestial—
Those blue eyes had survived so much!
While under the book they could not smutch,
Lay all the fleshly and the bestial.
We are not quite sure, however, that the calculation of “three parts sublime to one grotesque,” is not an over-liberal estimate of the former.
The poem is a sort of exposition of the different phases of Christianity, as evidenced in the doctrines of different sects—as familiarised, for example, by the English Methodist, and refined away by the German theologian. The narrator, one Christmas Eve, enters a Methodist chapel, and there falling asleep has a wonderful dream, which brings him face to face with the Redeemer, and introduces him to various new modes of faith as taught in churches, chapels, and lecture-rooms. He believes himself to have gone out into the gloom and cold of a gusty Christmas Eve, on a bleak bare common, where, after seeing strange portents in the sky, including a lunar rainbow, the apparition of Him, on whose faith he is pondering, stands before him:—
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,
Then rushed the blood back, cold and clear
With a fresh enhancing shiver of fear,
And I hastened, cried out, while I pressed
To the salvation of the vest.
But not so, Lord! It cannot be
That thou, indeed, art leaving me—
Me that have despised Thy friends,
Did my heart make no amends?
* * * * *
Less or more,
I suppose that I spoke thus,
When,—have mercy, Lord, on us!
The whole face turned upon me full,
And I spread myself beneath it,
As when the bleacher spreads to seethe it
In the cleansing sun, his wools—
Steeps in the flood of noon-tide whiteness
Some defiled, discoloured web—
So lay I, saturate with brightness.
And when the flood appeared to ebb,
Lo, I was walking, light and swift,
With my senses settling fast and steadying,
But my body caught up in the whirl and drift
Of the Vesture’s amplitude, still eddying
On, just before me, still to be followed,
As it carried me after with its motion:
What shall I say, as a path were hollowed
And a man went weltering through the ocean,
Sucked along in the flying wake
Of the luminous water-snake.
Darkness and cold were cloven, as through
I passed, upborne, yet walking too.
He is carried off to St. Peter’s at Rome. Thence to a lecture-room in Gottingen, and thence “into the little chapel again,” which he comes to the conclusion is best of all; and finishes the poem of Christmas Eve with this declaration:—
Mean-time, 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!
Shut 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.
Now, we seriously think that this is unworthy of Robert Browning. Why should he throw away a reputation in this wilful manner? True, there is less of this wilfulness—less of this bold experimentalising on the faith and forbearance of his friends—in the Easter-day than in the Christmas Eve; but the whole thing will be a disappointment to those who have looked eagerly for some new outpourings from [p. 315→] his rich poetic mind. Poets are not so many, in these days, that we can willingly let go our faith in one whom we have now for many years believed to be a true poet. But we could wish that this volume had not been written. It will add nothing to Robert Browning’s reputation. Though it may not dislodge him from a niche in the temple of those who have once placed him among their idols, it will assuredly establish his divinity in the minds of none who were before hesitating whether to number themselves among his believers, or to wait for some fresh evidences of his genius.
Reviewed:
Christmas-Eve & Easter-Day (RB), London: Chapman & Hall, 1850.
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