Reviews

R500600B.  Poems (Boston, 1850) and Christmas-Eve and Easter-Day.

The Massachusetts Quarterly Review, June 1850, pp. 347–385.

As reprinted in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 16, 383–397.

browning’s poems.

The two volumes first named present an inexhaustible field for the critic. Here are gathered plays, dramas, tragedies, dramatic lyrics, songs; all of them of a great and peculiar excellence. And it is not easy to designate that prevailing characteristic of all these which might attract analysis and exposition. If we have nearly made up our mind that a metaphysical faculty, both keen and profound, is the writer’s gift, we suspend our judgment when he gives us some of the most subtle developments of human character and motive that exist since Shakspeare. Lest we should decide in favor of this great trait of genius, he hurries us into the domain of nature, charms us by description at once delicate and sublime, brings the fleeting graces of earth and sky to match his thoughts, gives animals an individuality, from the quick jerboa, “none such as he for a wonder,” to the lion, thinking of his desert, with “the hope in those eyes wide and steady;” there is not a dead or living thing with which the poet has not the healthiest sympathy. He brings them all out, the shy birds, the dumb flowers, and encourages them to show their best side to us. He understands what is going on abroad, and translates for us the native dialects. We yield our admiration to his pictures of still life, and are on the point of calling him the artist of nature, when he gives his tube another turn. Were it not for the genial relations which all his gifts bear to each other, we should say that another poet was demonstrating before us, with the power of vivid relation, the dramatic rendering of imaginary scenes into life and wonderful movement, with inevitable word-painting, with coloring and grouping that cheapen in our estimation the best pictures we can remember. Then he tosses us a lyric, with the rich, “golden cry” of the trumpet; such as “Marching Along,” “Incident of the French Camp,” “The Lost [sic] Leader.” Then his clear voice rolls out the sly humor of “The Pied Piper of Hamelin,” and one of the “Garden Fancies.” Then he breaks into a fierce scorn with “The Confessional;” recovers, and soothes himself with [p. 348→] the singing of “The Boy and the Angel,” and those two exquisite pieces, at once song and picture, “Meeting at Night” and “Parting at Morning.” Oh, then he sings songs; he is the English Beranger, is he, or the clear, smooth, lyrical part of Goethe, with an infusion of ale and animal spirits? You do not catch him so easily. Suddenly, he grows very serious, as he calls up the scenes of “Luria” to pass before you, and invites you to refresh your moral sense with a look at his Moor, the grave and sustained impersonation of Duty. As you become elevated and strengthened, he bids you look again; film after film passes over the magical mirror, each film a character or a life: the pure pathos of Mildred’s lapse in “The Blot in the ’Scutcheon,” and the fast loyalty of that real woman, her sister Guendolen, at whom you are so enraged that you cannot marry, and call her wife; the naïveté and sweet prayerfulness of Pippa, God’s unconscious singer, making the true fibres vibrate in hearts that were forgetting Him; the disinterestedness, the endurance, the love of Right of Valence, rewarded by a doubling of all these in Colombe, who tells him that she prefers to her duchy, “God’s earth, and thee;” the great lesson of the impulsive, ruined Paracelsus, greedy after knowledge, yet impatient of labor, forced to eke out his idea before the world with tricks of the empiric, arrogant with the desire of that which he will not obtain, his heart broken by its last throb, suggesting too late that Love should precede Power, that love itself was knowledge:—“Another yet—I’ll see no more”—the line will stretch out to the crack of doom, if we look into his weird-glass so long. A goodly stint for the critic! whoever will tell us where to begin and what to choose, will save us the chief trouble we find in writing this article.

Now we recollect, Mr. Browning asks, “What’s become of Waring?” We, for one, cannot inform him. On the contrary, we have always wanted to ask Mr. Browning, hoping that he would reply, as on oath, “Is there such a person as Mr. Waring?” In our own community, one or two disappearances have been chronicled within the month, but we must confess, with due deference for the feelings of anxious friends, no case of a person supposed missing has interested us like this of Mr. Waring—if there be such a person. That is our only difficulty. Such drafts are made upon sympathy nowadays, that we have determined to spend no more upon Mr. Waring, if he be really fictitious, that is, only fictitiously real. In that case, nothing but our admiration at the artistic skill of the cheat will repress [p. 349→] our indignation at having wasted so much interest and feeling upon the vagabond, whom we have expected every day to call with a printed circular, intimating genius in distress, turned out of Russia for conspiring, nearly starved in Vishnu-land, with trying to get up an Avatar on precarious pulse, and now begging his way back, with a sublime nonchalance, whether you give him blessing or banning, to Mr. Browning.

Somebody, who pretends to have seen this Waring, describes the circumstance to the anxious poet, thus:—

We were sailing by Triest,

Where a day or two we harbored:

A sunset was in the west,

When, looking over the vessel’s side,

One of our company espied

A sudden speck to larboard.

And, as a sea-duck flies and swims

At once, so came the light craft up,

With its sole lateen-sail, that trims

And turns, (the water round its rims

Dancing, as round a sinking cup,)

And by us like a fish it curled,

And drew itself up close beside,

Its great sail on the instant furled,

And o’er its planks, a shrill voice cried,

(A neck as bronzed as a Lascar’s,)

“Buy wine of us, you English brig?

Or fruit, tobacco, and cigars?”

——The boy leaned laughing back;

And one, half hidden by his side,

Under the furled sail, soon I spied,

With great grass hat, and kerchief black,

Who looked up with his kingly throat,

Said somewhat,——.

That’s a glimpse of Waring, and of an exquisite sea-piece. The reader will admire precisely what he should, without forcing us to italicize for his dulness. We began this article with a resolution not to quote a line. One might as well leave out the part of Hamlet. Without some specimens, it is impossible to appreciate the life and nature of Mr. Browning’s dramatic romances. The characters are as substantial and probable as the landscapes; they are reproduced with all the vividness of thought and feeling belonging to a history. The illusion is complete. In such pieces as “Waring,” “My Lost Duchess,” “The Flight of the Duchess,” you cannot be persuaded that [p. 350→] real persons, with their fates and qualities, are not depicted. You long to know more about them, for their imagined acts and situations have won you completely, enlisting heart and soul in their behalf. You sit with the book in your hand, striving to extract, here and there, some hint of their subsequent fortunes, or some clue to the discovery of who they really were. And this strong charm of authenticity is not dissipated by a frequent perusal, for, as in a genuine history of note, you do not at once embrace and appreciate all their traits. They are as worthy of study as though they were true. They are not lay-figures, nor are they painted in single attitudes, but they have all the manifoldness that comes with years and varied fortunes. The story related may be simple enough, but it is transfused with the life’s blood of the actors; you do not see merely so much of them as is adequate to the incident, but, as in real life, you are conscious of their reserved power and character. Chance touches reveal to you a world of feeling or passion, and a couple of lines gives you a lustrum of their lives.

This versimilitude appears even in such short and slight productions as “The Lost Leader,” which is so true to the predicament of a great man, who has deserted the cause to which he devoted his youthful eloquence, and so earnestly deprecates having any thing more to do with it, that we revive our memory of English history for the last twenty years, to find the original. But all these figures receive their breath of life from the poet’s genius. It is in the “Flight of the Duchess” that this dramatic vitality is most apparent. The first four lines connect the story with a listener who has evidently been indulging in some of his own surmises wide of the truth. Mr. Browning everywhere shows the greatest art, in suggesting by a line, a phrase, or a parenthesis, all the accessories of the scene. In the dramas, an interlocutor will carry on his own thought, and at the same time indicate by the coloring of his language how his listeners receive it, how they look, what they are probably meditating. Their presence punctuates his whole address. The story of the Duchess is told by the Duke’s favorite retainer, his huntsman. The little lady, “a white crane bigger,” was taken out of the convent one day to be married to the Duke, who had just returned home, after long travel, with his “sick, tall, yellow” mother. She was a mother-cat, and had claws. He was one of your middle-age-manners adapters; the dilettanti, in Paris, had told [p. 351→] him what magnificent things the old baronial customs were, and had put him up to reviving

all usages thoroughly worn out,

The souls of them fumed forth, the hearts of them torn out.

He was a very stiff suit of clothes indeed, and our friend, who had inherited a bluff, honest German heart, with speech and spirit of the true pine savor, was extremely annoyed at all his solemn fopperies. But he was the little lady’s friend as soon as she reached the castle gate: poor child, they received her with all the geniality of a water-cure establishment.

The Duke stepped rather aside than forward,

And welcomed her with his grandest smile;

And, mind you, his mother all the while

Chilled in the rear, like a wind to Nor’ward;

And up, like a weary yawn, with its pullies

Went, in a shriek, the rusty portcullis;

And, like a glad sky the north wind sullies,

The lady’s face stopped its play,

As if her first hair had grown gray.

A plain case of incompatibility. Nobody but our friend the huntsman, with his unadulterated Indian instinct for nature, ever found out what heart and fire she had. How he watched her: in a day or two he saw, by her looks, that she had concluded

“This is all a jest against God, who meant

I should ever be, as I am, content,

And glad in his sight; therefore, glad I will be!”

So, smiling, as at first, went she.

We take the placid little lady’s part, and begin to surmise, not without indignation, that the cat and the monkey mean to worry her to death between them for amusement. Found in a convent—doubtless an orphan, then; no friends to smuggle her through a postern gate, or catch her from a short rope tied to her chamber window, and gallop her out of the duchy. As for trying to escape alone, if she ever thought of that, leaning sorrowfully out of the casement, she gave it up with a shudder, at sight of the “great, wild country,” nothing but sheep-range and cattle-tract, and “one vast, red, drear, burnt-up plain,” full of forges and wild furnace-men,

Till, at the last, for a bounding belt,

Comes the salt sand hoar of the great sea-shore. [p. 352→]

An interesting prospect of personal adventure for a lady no bigger than a white crane! Why does not our friend, who has the run of the stakes, help her off, and perhaps go with her? “You shall hear.” One fine autumn day, the Duke determined to get up a grand middle-age hunt, judging, upon reference to the calendar, that it would be just then extremely feudal. All the old books were ransacked, antique jerking and trunkhose laboriously indued, and “woodcraft’s authentic traditions” rehearsed. But the Duke could not be happy till he had found out the lady’s function also. Somebody, upon consulting the authorities, discovered that it was ordained, in eminent deference to the female character, that she should “preside at the disembowelling.” Certainly, our little lady must have become rather soured, for she declined the pleasure.

The Duke, dumb-stricken with amazement,

Stood for a while in a sultry smother,

And then, with a smile that partook of the awful,

Turned her over to his yellow mother,

To learn what was decorous and lawful;

And the mother smelt blood with a cat-like instinct,

As her cheek quick whitened thro’ all its quince-tinct.

She receives such a screed as only an old yellow mother-in-law with creepy whiskers can give; and the Duke meditates revenge. Well, on the very morning of the hunt, a troop of gypsies come up to the castle with their annual gifts. Their guardian angel seems to be “the oldest gypsy then above ground,” and ugly in proportion; altogether a weird and uncomfortable presence. A thought strikes the Duke as soon as he claps eyes upon her; he will give his anti-exenterative wife a good fright by way of punishment. So he bends over his horse’s neck, and whispers the whole history of her ingratitude into the crone’s eager ears, who instantly appreciates it, contrary to his intent, while she promises to do his bidding. And forth the Duke fares to his dandiacal boar-hunt.

This old witch was a personage. No sooner has he turned his back than she drops the crone and becomes the queen-gypsy; the dress alters its arrangement, the head sits imposingly erect, the eyes light up with meaning. Our friend rather dubiously shows her the way to his little pining lady, and takes measures to watch her. Shortly, from a balcony, he witnesses the strange scene of the lady, passive and radiant at the feet of the gypsy, drinking in grateful influence from those mystic eyes and slow-fanning hands; and the woman sings. From [p. 353→] this matchless chant, in which the beneficent crone wins over the harassed lady to escape with her to gypsy-land, and feel there “how love is the only good in the world,” we must quote the following; nor will we promise that it shall be the last from a poem each line of which throbs with vitality; either a laugh, a grace, or a tear:—

We are beside thee, in all thy ways,

With our blame, with our praise;

Our shame to feel, our pride to show,

Glad, sorry—but indifferent, no—

Whether it is thy lot to go,

For the good of us all, where the haters meet

In the crowded city’s horrible street;

Or thou step alone through the morass

Where never sound yet was,

Save the dry quick clap of the stork’s bill,

For the air is still, and the water still,

When the blue breast of the dipping coot

Dives under, and all again is mute.

So at the last shall come old age,

Decrepit, as befits that stage;

How else wouldst thou retire apart

With the hoarded memories of thy heart,

And gather all to the very least

Of the fragments of life’s earlier feast,

Let fall through eagerness to find

The crowning dainties yet behind?

Ponder on the entire past

Laid together thus at last,

When the twilight helps to fuse

The first fresh, with the faded hues,

And the outline of the whole,

As round eve’s shades their framework roll,

Grandly fronts for once thy soul;

And then as, ’mid the dark, a gleam

Of yet another morning breaks,

And, like the hand which ends a dream,

Death, with the might of his sunbeam,

Touches the flesh and the soul awakes,

Then——

Then, indeed; but, no matter about then, with such poetry as this now,—such an embodiment of summer silence, such a picture of the pure tranquillity of age, such trumpet-words, prophesying the birth in death. Match those lines in English if you can, reader; we challenge you, presuming that you [p. 354→] have not skipped them, but read them till you have become transfused into their spirit.

Our friend the huntsman is occasionally coarse, as he ought to be, “born in the kennel;” he airs his vocabulary just enough to be characteristic, without diminishing our respect for his tenderness and loyalty to the Duchess. Nobody objects to Dogberry’s dulness or to Falstaff’s license; the latter perils virtue as little as the former does intelligence. The huntsman is an admirable specimen of a noble nature, far above his condition, the soul of true delicacy and honor, cherishing the little plait of hair that the Duchess gave him, and that last look, which “placed a crown” on him, yet with his speech savoring now and then of the buff-coat and woodcraft, and a phrase or two caught up in the purlieus of the ducal stables. We like him all the better for his plainness. We know that it is not a supernumerary in livery, “for this night only.” He hates that mother-in-law too cordially not to have known her. How refreshing it is to hear the whole-souled disgust with which he describes the cosmetical appliances of the ferocious old mammal:—

Until she grew, from scalp to udder,

Just the object to make you shudder.

Alter a word, and you annihilate the forester. After all, he was cautious how he trenched “more than needs on the nauseous;” otherwise, we can easily imagine how he might have favored us with “sundry touches.” And when he has told his story, and made a clean breast of it, why,

——my heart’s blood, that went trickle,

Trickle, but anon, in such muddy dribblets,

Is pumped up brisk now, thro’ the main ventricle,

And genially floats me about the giblets!

Here are all the marks of genuineness that a theologian could desire; he had evidently quartered the boar and stag in his day. But here is the true heart of the man, with which we conclude. Notice the delicate freedom of his touched remembrances, (Jacynth was his wife,) as he parts from the Duchess:—

Then, do you know, her face looked down on me,

With a look that placed a crown on me,

And she felt in her bosom,—mark, her bosom,—

And, as a flower-tree drops its blossom,

Dropped me—ah, had it been a purse

Of silver, my friend, or gold, that’s worse, [p. 355→]

Why, you see, as soon as I found myself

So understood,—that a true heart so may gain

Such a reward,—I should have gone home again,

Kissed Jacynth, and soberly drowned myself!

It was a little plait of hair,

Such as friends in a convent make

To wear, each for the other’s sake,—

This, see, which at my breast I wear,

Ever did (rather to Jacynth’s grudgment),

And ever shall, till the day of judgment.

We do not find the condensed energy and meaning of Mr. Browning an objectionable trait. Hamlet has to be studied a little, and we remember that Beethoven’s symphonies do not possess us till we have heard each half a dozen times. Mr. Browning seems to take his poems, after writing them, and crush them together at both ends, till he gets the well-knit symmetry and consistency of a Bedouin; he succeeds in making a sort of intellectual and spiritual pemmican. Sometimes, indeed, the desire to produce something dense and nervous gets only obscurity for its result, instead of an effective vivacity. When Mr. Browning began to write, we say, with deference, that this was his besetting sin. One of his former productions, “Sordello,” not included in the present volumes, is full of passages in which the sense is sacrificed to an insane hatred of more words than will suffice to parse them baldly; and even then the reader must have a very suggestive imagination to give the skeleton its motor muscles. Sordello, in fact, is not a poem, though it contains poetical passages. We laboriously surmise that the idea of Sordello’s life and fortunes, as it rested in the brain of the writer, was a poem; of this we get hints enough to justify the impulse of his pen, but he does not strike out the form clear and smooth. The colossal block is left, with lines of beauty lost in parts that remain rough-hewn, or running off into intricate network, as if the innermost nervous structure alternated with the rounded skin. It is as if Kant set himself to restore the torso of an Apollo. “Sordello” is a metaphysical treatise, occasionally interspersed, but hardly relieved, with some exquisite pictures of life and art. We contemplate, for instance, that passage in which Sordello finds the marvel of a marble font supported by shrinking caryatides, in the dim room just kept alive by golden haze of the sunset, as Sordello contemplated the sculpture itself. It is a most perfect rendering of a work of art; endued, moreover, with such individuality [p. 356→] and passion, that we return to it as if we knew that some nemesis had petrified the frail group of sisters in mid-life, in the first blush of their too fond compliance. We return to the sad study of so much beauty riveted in a penance, whose grace makes us pray for a deliverance:—

——Surely, our maiden shrinks,

And a smile stirs her, as if one faint grain

Her load were lightened, one shade less the stain

Obscured her forehead——

Twice-sculptured forms—by the chisel of art and the pen of a passionate fancy! Then, too, Sordello contains some of Mr. Browning’s happiest lines and phrases. He gives us this for a sunset piece:—

A last remains of sunset dimly burned

O’er the far forests, like a torch-flame turned

By the wind back upon its bearer’s hand,

In one long flare of crimson; as a brand

The woods beneath lay black.

He sketches a crowd of hearty haters, in Verona’s market-place:—

Letting the silent luxury trickle slow

About the hollows where a heart should be:

lines appropriately malignant, and better than the paradox which he sports in Paracelsus,

To know that hate is but a mask of love.

Could any thing be better than some of Sordello’s disenchantments?—like,

——the poppies’ red effrontery

Till Autumn spoils their fleering quite with rain,

And, turbanless, a coarse brown rattling crane

Protrudes.

We have marked many other passages in “Sordello,” even more worthy than these, but too long to quote. Yet it is not a poem: the analysis of Sordello’s different moods, and the computations of his growth, are purely metaphysical. They are very obscure, also, from excess of denseness; nor do they always repay a deliberate precipitation into Saxon sense. To attempt doing any justice to the work, a separate criticism should be awarded to it. In the mean time, we feel that Mr. [p. 357→] Browning’s defects largely predominate in it, and it must ever remain “a bitter-sweetling of a book.”

These defects recur with diminished strength in the volumes before us. We say that sometimes his desire to condense begets obscurity. And he also attempts sometimes to cram too many related ideas into the breath allowed for a period. He thus gives a confused impression. The fancies throng to the pen’s point, throwing dashes and commas behind them, till they get out of sight of their arch instigator in the first lines. Upon page 291, of Volume II., is an instance of this. We love to linger over such passages, grudging no time till we tie the two ends together: then we can enjoy the picture so munificently grouped. It is no condemnation of such pages to say that few people will consent to bestow so much time and labor upon them. The lovers of a smooth poetry which can be caught at a glance, or of an easy flow of didactic thought which does not harass the average intellect, cannot sit in judgment upon Mr. Browning’s involutions and lengthy crescendos, for they are not the persons who wait to see whether the picture, at first so confused and apparently destitute of a leading group or idea, is worth the contemplation which may finally reproduce the poet’s point of view, and thus call a beautiful order out of the prodigal chaos. Yet, whenever Mr. Browning’s pen riots in this way, it seems to us a fault in art; he would do more justice to his own point of view, and satisfy equally well his affluent impulses, by breathing his pen more frequently. This would humanize, not popularize, some of his pages, and they would carry captive many more lovable hearts.

We may mention, also, a propensity for excessive self-introversion, which sometimes sends off his characters maundering to themselves, when they should be forwarding the business of the piece. They have the trick of Hamlet, without the apology of Hamlet’s express design to impersonate precisely this trick. A collateral analogy will sometimes throw the man back upon himself, and he drops the main thread to elaborate it, in half a dozen subordinate lines. These asides not infrequently occur when the action of the piece is urgent. Here is an instance of an ethnological speculation grotesquely flawing a crisis; it is in the “Return of the Druses.” Djabal is the son of a Druse mother, of Lebanon, and a French father. His European culture enables him to pass among his tribe, and mainly for their benefit, as the expected Hakeem, or reincarnation of [p. 358→] the first Druse prophet of that name; his friends wait for the critical moment when he will manifest his divine attributes and deliver the nation. But the Druse maiden, whom he loves, betrays him at the very time when success or death is his alternative. His policy lies shattered at his feet; a single word may terminate the whole business of the piece tragically, when he thus soliloquizes in the midst of his passionate astonishment:—

I, with my Arab instinct, thwarted ever

By my Frank policy,—and, within turn,

My Frank brain, thwarted by my Arab heart—

While these remained in equipoise, I lived

—Nothing; had either been predominant,

As a Frank schemer or an Arab mystic,

I had been something; now, each has destroyed

The other—and behold, from out their crash,

A third and better nature rises up—

My mere Man’s nature!

Such a mental estimate may occur among the intense conceptions excited by a single mortal moment, but it cannot attract the man’s attention; it is instantly swallowed up in the ruling dread or hope. Therefore the artist cannot select it as an element of the situation which he endeavors to present. It is alien to the time and place, and reminds us of the nonchalant faces of themselves, which medieval painters sometimes introduced in a transfiguration or crucifixion. We now and then find Luria speculating with the same disregard of his situation. So does Paracelsus refine upon himself and criticize his agonies. The thoughts are often very just and subtle, but the piece ceases to be a drama, and grows psychological. We are glad to possess in print so much fine analysis of human motives and mental varieties, but we cannot help thinking of the discriminating Scotchman, who preferred the hairs upon a separate dish. Mr. Browning keeps us too often distracted between the longing for artistic harmony and the wish to avoid sacrificing so much material of intrinsic merit.

This does not trouble us so much in Paracelsus, because there is no attempt to place the characters in the dramatic action of real life. There is nothing to prevent us from dispassionately studying Paracelsus as dissected by himself. On his death-bed, he gives us nearly eleven pages of a discussion upon the nature of man, and the need of establishing knowledge upon love. The thoughts are so grand, the fancy [p. 359→] is so rich and illustrative, the whole mood is so sublime, that we forget the dying man upon his pallet, and the listening friend, completely rapt and charmed away from all ideas of unity into regions of still meditation. Thought urged with eloquence holds us enthralled; noble and finished figures surprise and stimulate us; the poet nods in not a single period. We remember the ascetic loftiness of Milton’s metaphysics, only to feel them at last depreciated, for they are the mere discursus of a theologian compared with the domestic thoughts and the tender, human religion in Paracelsus. At last, we have a body of divinity clad in the glowing colors of the epic, speaking with the clear, bright voices of the lyric. Reader, let us enjoy some of these lines together. Is the following unworthy of the Paradise Lost? God creates:—

The centre-fire heaves underneath the earth,

And the earth changes like a human face;

The molten ore bursts up among the rocks,

Winds into the stone’s heart, outbranches bright

In hidden mines, spots barren river-beds,

Crumbles into fine sand where sunbeams bask,—

God joys therein! The wroth sea’s waves are edged

With foam, white as the bitter lip of Hate,

When, in the solitary waste, strange groups

Of young volcanoes come up, cyclops-like,

Staring together with their eyes on flame;—

God tastes a pleasure in their uncouth pride!

Then all is still: earth is a wintry clod;

But spring-wind, like a dancing psaltress, passes

Over its breast to waken it; rare verdure

Buds tenderly upon rough banks, between

The withered tree-roots and the cracks of frost,

Like a smile striving with a wrinkled face;

The grass grows bright, the boughs are swoln with blooms,

Like chrysalids impatient for the air;

The shining dorrs are busy; beetles run

Along the furrows; ants make their ado;

Above, birds fly in merry flocks,—the lark

Soars up and up, shivering for very joy;

Afar, the ocean sleeps; white fishing-gulls

Flit where the strand is purple with its tribe

Of nested limpets; savage creatures seek

Their loves in wood and plain; and God renews

His ancient rapture! Thus He dwells in all,

From life’s minute beginnings, up at last

To man,—the consummation of this scheme [p. 360→]

Of being,—the completion of this sphere

Of life: whose attributes had here and there

Been scattered o’er the visible world before,

Asking to be combined—dim fragments, meant

To be united in some wondrous whole,—

Imperfect qualities, throughout creation,

Suggesting some one creature yet to make;

Some point where all those scattered rays should meet,

Convergent in the faculties of man.

If you have read all that, you are willing to enjoy just a few lines more. Such as these:—

Man, once descried, imprints forever

His presence on all lifeless things; the winds

Are henceforth voices, in a wail or shout,

A querulous mutter, or a quick, gay laugh,—

Never a senseless gust, now man is born!

True of thee, my poet, at least.

The herded pines commune, and have deep thoughts,

A secret they assemble to discuss,

When the sun drops behind their trunks, which glare

Like grates of hell.

The morn has enterprise,—deep quiet droops

With evening; triumph takes the sunset hour,

Voluptuous transport ripens with the corn

Beneath a warm moon like a happy face:

—And this to fill us with regard for man.

The dying Paracelsus ignores dramatic proprieties, to talk with us concerning God; to lend to dumb, wistful nature, waiting for man’s recognition, the hues of his great human spirit, brightening towards the close to fill us with faith and brotherly love. This is the loftiest effort of Mr. Browning’s genius; he resigns part of its manifoldness, the fresh, earthy humor, the subtle irony, for a great recompense in solemn conceptions of the nature of God. Solemn, yet cheerful, mingling with his vital fancy, like thoughts of death long past, with the sunshine lying aslant the placid hearth. No man can read without acknowledging that here poetry fulfils her highest object. She takes of the things of God and shows them unto men.

And we are disposed to say the same thing of many other landing-places in Paracelsus. Some may consider it, as a poem, with interlocutors, too long for one that is so devoid of action to break up the current of meditation. It does not [p. 361→] become an object of personal interest with the first reading; people have doubtless skipped a dozen of its speeches. But let each speech, or perhaps each part of the poem, be taken on its own merits, and let Paracelsus talk as long as he pleases, without a hankering that he should be interrupted by his friends. In other words, accept it as a meditative poem, too grave to entertain a reminiscence of the theatre, and too earnestly developing a great idea to unbend in many solaces of the romance or lyric, and its vitality will enrich hours of quiet leisure. It is filled with a rare knowledge of human motives and the operations of the mind. Sometimes other thought and illustration are remote, and the reader cannot immediately possess a conception of the page. Whoever wearily turns the leaves, then, in suspicion that some thing obscure from ultra refinement or collateral analogies seeks to detain him, will miss many passages capable of a generous yield to small labor. It is dangerous to turn the leaves too hurriedly. Sometimes the coupling of a natural grace with a very subtle thought has all the surprise of wit. Again, a gem with a new flash and color will be dug out of lines that look most unpromisingly didactic. Unlike Sordello, this poem contains no passages out of which the process of condensation has squeezed the little conjunctive particles which keep the sense alive till the lines are little more than strings of verbs and nouns. We released once twenty-five lines of Sordello from Mr. Browning’s hydraulic pressure, and it did not recover its normal state short of half a sheet of English. It is plain that ether cannot be inhaled in cakes. In Paracelsus, the natural elasticity of thought is never so cruelly compressed.

This poem contains Mr. Browning’s noblest lyric. Paracelsus sings it, and it embodies the story of his life’s failure. It is—

The sad rhyme of the men who proudly clung

To their first fault, and withered in their pride.

The unbalanced activity of his intellect sallied forth impetuously after knowledge; unbalanced by wants of the heart, and untrained by a renouncing, scientific study. Without the one, he became the solitary, joyless misanthrope, using his knowledge for contemptuous comparison, and blunting his nerves in sudden fits of riot; wanting the other, he was compelled to resort to the shifts of the empiric, to justify the great pretence which his youthful ambition set up among his fellows. Between [p. 362→] Paracelsus and Cagliostro was the difference of motive. The hero of the diamond necklace was nothing but an adroit and hungry swindler. But the mystical chemist, carrying his newly-discovered laudanum in the hilt of his sword, and permitting people to believe it a spirit, was the victim of a position honestly, but prematurely assumed by his inordinate desires. He sings—

We knew, too late,

How bare the rock, how desolate,

To which we had flung our precious freight.

Whether we consider the perfection of its versification, or the sustained and delicate illustration, it would be difficult to match this lyric. After becoming familiar with the poem, the frame warms as you approach it, and you anticipate its movement as you do the choice passage in a symphony. The poem prepares for it, and lets you into the change of key with grace and a sweet surprise: and it is impossible to imagine a single letter or comma of it, whose alteration would not mar the melody. His buoyant ambition puts out to sea, with the glow and rhythm of youth itself:—

Over the sea our galleys went,

With cleaving prows in order brave,

To a speeding wind and a bounding wave,—

A gallant armament——.

There is joy, triumph, a stunning disappointment, and pure pathos for its close.

But Paracelsus has become a confirmed alien from human love. His undiminished ambition has grown gross from his occasional excesses and enforced deceits; whenever the friend of his youth seeks to open before him a nobler aspiration, asking to let God “kindly pioneer a path” for him into His love and service, the jaded spirit slinks back to its clay, oppressed by a friendliness that only reminds him of his weakness.

No, no; learn better and look deeper, Festus!

If you knew how a devil sneers within me,

While you are talking now of this, now that,

As though we differed scarcely save in trifles!

All this obstinate and petulant resistance is truthfully delineated. Just as truthful is the occasional flaming forth of the old thoughts, mixed with the hope of a new youth estab- [p. 363→] lished in God’s love, which the shattered brain will refuse to realize:—

How very full

Of wormwood ’tis, that just at altar service,

The rapt hymn rising with the rolling smoke,

When glory dawns, and all is at the best—

The sacred fire may flicker, and grow faint,

And die, for want of a wood-piler’s help!

Thus jades the flagging body, and the soul

Is pulled down in the overthrow.

Not so,—or, if at all, yet soon to recover its best ideas, and vindicate in some condition, and in the ranks of some service, the pains-taking hand of the Creator. Paracelsus already gathers the embers together, to make out by the tremulous light the long missing fugitive, who comes back at last, asking to be recognized, “the instinct of that happy time” when he vowed his help to man. They know each other, the outcast ideal and the repentant parent-spirit; reconciled, at last, they depart for meeker latitudes, leaving beggary and ruin:—

——I press God’s lamp

Close to my breast—its splendor, soon or late,

Will pierce the gloom: I shall emerge one day.

What the poet Aprile told him about excluding Love from his earthly service is all true; love and knowledge, “halves of one dissevered world.” He pledged his faith to Aprile, but the demoniac intellect soon struck again at the soaring quarry, and sent it into denser air. The touching song of Aprile, that won him so long ago, comes back to the failing sense, with its pathos deepened by his ill-fortune, its lines of truth chiselled out clear by his remorse. The words of warning remain to be his epitaph:—

Lost, lost! yet come,

With our wan troop make thy home:

—we trusted thou shouldst speak

God’s message, which our lips, too weak,

Refused to utter.—

How shall we better arm the spirit?

Who next shall thy post of life inherit?—

How guard him from thy ruin?

Paracelsus is a noble poem. To the service of this great, [p. 364→] neglected thought which it contains, Mr. Browning has brought all the manifoldness of his genius. The careful analysis of moral states and tendencies is scarcely less rich in diction than the passages of feeling and description; the illustration is always inevitable and completely finished. From beginning to end, it is full of mental life; the discourse has the serious probable air, shared by all of Mr. Browning’s characters. They talk with right good-will, under the stress of the moment; all their moods are reported as earnestly as if they were the actors in some popular subject of yesterday, instead of being so far removed by the abstraction both of time and thought. Moreover, we believe that Mr. Browning has described the precise variety to which Paracelsus belonged. If we consult history, we shall find that he is put down as half-mystic, half-quack, with a dash of enthusiasm. Now and then, some one will acknowledge that his chemical works are full of suggestion, and that, like Swedenborg, he has vaguely anticipated several results of modern investigation. But we nowhere find stated the exact amount of manliness and genuine purpose which he possessed; for he had them. No man will write, work, persevere as he did, for the sake of sustaining a life-long deception. Your veritable quack lives from hand to mouth, shuffling cards, dabbling in stocks, and paying dividends to stockholders out of the principal, blowing forth Mississippi and South Sea bubbles—turning up, like friend Waring, in Russia, to sell the czar his latest invention; in Spain, to manage the commissariat of grumbling peninsular armies; in New York, with the plan of a great Western city, not yet emerged from the primeval element. Your literary quack, none the less veritable for his pen, is half chiffonier, half thief, picking in the dust-heaps around clubs and athenæums, dining out, and embezzling all the private scandal, soon to appear in a biography of authors; making very plausible volumes with an editorial scissors, and selling himself to whatsoever interest is momentarily deluded by his cheapness. But, so far as motive is concerned, we would as soon call Jacob Behmen a systematic charlatan, as Aureolus Paracelsus. The chemist never would have worked so, if he merely wished to get a living. And the story of his indignant demolition of the canon, who refused to pay him for the successful employment of the miraculous laudanum, and his quarrel with the authorities, who took the canon’s part, is a mark of honesty. The genuine quack goes constantly lubricated, and, like the snail, is always careful to carry his retreat with [p. 365→] him. He avoids a quarrel with the true currish skulk. He takes care not to spoil his business by any special demonstrations of manhood. If the object of Paracelsus was to enjoy a premature fame, in the notoriety which his treatises and lectures procured, he would have discontinued his investigations when he fell into disgrace; would have taken to preaching, perhaps, and made his living out of the Reformation; or become court physician, under a new name, in Constantinople or London. We believe that Mr. Browning’s poem resuscitates, by the spell of analogy and analysis, the veritable Paracelsus—we mean, his motives and conflicts. He has put into his mouth some noble theology, which Paracelsus may or may not have dimly divined, some acute criticism and exquisite poetry, all of which we will credit to the writer. But we have the moral and nervous structure of the man, the cause of his failure, the key to this variety of humanity wherever found. We have no doubt that Paracelsus, in the second state, upon application, would endorse every line that purports to represent his prevailing tendencies and characteristic defect. Plenty of popes and kings there would serve as diagrams, while he lectured to the effect, that he was like a man who mistakes a taste for the drama for dramatic talent, whose youthful enthusiasm pledges him for life to a position in which clap-trap is a species of self-defence, and the need of self-defence excludes all nobler second-thoughts. To tell this painful and salutary story, Mr. Browning has well selected Paracelsus, expanding the meagre notices of his life into the finished history of a soul. The poem reminds us of the feats of Professor Agassiz, who reproduces those extinct hybrids from the hint of a scale or a vertebra. It will last till men have ceased to love life, thought, and nature.

We notice that, now and then, Mr. Browning affects an unnecessary intensity; his pen is caught by the paper with a scratch and a spatter. One of the best meditations of Paracelsus is slightly marred in this way. The following is only a conceit, put with great vigor:—

—— Make no more giants, God!

But elevate the race at once! We ask

To put forth just our strength, our human strength,

All starting fairly, all equipped alike,

Gifted alike, all eagle-eyed, true-hearted—

See if we cannot beat thy angels yet! [p. 366→]

It is possible, however, that Paracelsus, surnamed Bombastes, and giving a name to the style which he originated, might have indulged in similar remarks; on which ground he may have the whole credit of the following strenuous whimper:—

We get so near—so very, very near!

’Tis an old tale; Jove strikes the Titans down,

Not when they set about their mountain-piling,

But when another rock would crown their work.

But here is an outbreak, which caricatures rather than represents human pride:—

But if my spirit fail,

My once proud spirit forsake me at the last,

Hast Thou done well by me? So do not Thou!

Crush not my mind, dear God, though I be crushed!

Hold me before the frequence of thy seraphs,

And say—“I crushed him, lest he should disturb

My law.”

That distinction between his mind and himself would fetch a liberal price in Germany before the next semester, and might be useful in proving the Trinity. Certainly, Mr. Browning need not exaggerate his own vitality, to rivet our attention to the current of his thought; we are already pledged to him, heart and soul, and do not like to stop to pick up his conceits. We feel as if he were imposing upon our friendship. All this gnarled undergrowth should be cleared away, to let us have a clear vista among the noble trees. A prompt and willing vivacity is his Ariel, always within call; there is not a man living who need so seldom urge his pen. Pity the slit did not catch these imps of conceits as they are sliding triumphantly into fame.

But we wish to avoid giving the impression that they are frequent. And we cannot leave “Paracelsus,” without sharing with the reader a few more of the shorter passages, full of felicitous lines, for we would tempt him to love the poet. The life and motion of the poem begin almost immediately. Each meditation has its climax, the beauty and tenderness scattered everywhere prepare us for the majesty of the close. Parts of the latter we have already quoted. Here is something on the first page. Michal will say—

——“This autumn was a pleasant time,”

For some few sunny days; and overlook

Its bleak wind, hankering after pining leaves. [p. 367→]

We are principled against italics. Here is Constantinople, in the sunset:—

Over the waters, in the vaporous west,

The sun goes down, as in a sphere of gold,

Behind the outstretched city, which, between,

With all that length of domes and minarets,

Athwart the splendor, black and crooked runs,

Like a Turk verse along a scymetar.

Here is a specimen of grave satire, subsiding in the pathos of nature:—

I helped a man to die, some few weeks since,

Warped even from his go-cart to one end—

The living on princes’ smiles, reflected from

A mighty herd of favorites. No mean trick

He left untried; and, truly, well-nigh wormed

All traces of God’s finger out of him,

Then died, grown old; and just an hour before—

Having lain long with blank and soulless eyes—

He sate up suddenly, and, with natural voice,

Said that, in spite of thick air and closed doors,

God told him it was June; and he knew well,

Without such telling, hare-bells grew in June;

And all that kings could ever give or take,

Would not be precious as those blooms to him.

Thus death reveals at last a long-mortified affection. Here is a way to have the morning dawn:—

——The heavy darkness seems

Diluted; grey and clear without the stars;

The shrubs bestir and rouse themselves, as if

Some snake, that weighed them down all night, let go

His hold.

Festus sings to the dying Paracelsus, and brings thoughts of remembered scenery to soothe him:—

——The river pushes

Its gentle way through strangling rushes,

Where the glossy king-fisher

Flutters when noon-heats are near,

Glad the sheltering banks to shun,

Red and steaming in the sun;

Where the shrew-mouse, with pale throat,

Burrows, and the speckled stoat;

Where the quick sand-pipers flit

In and out the marl and grit,

That seems to breed them, brown as they. [p. 368→]

But all these things which we can quote are much finer in their connection; they are parts of the poems of nature. Bring your sea-weed with its delicate flush from the still pool, where you found it floating, the whole truth of water and sky conspiring with its grace, to spread it isolated on the sheet, and it looks less worth spreading than before.

The fast-diminishing space admonishes us that we have yet the greater part of this new archipelago to sail through, and taste the different fruits, while we have hardly indicated the beauties that remain behind. Visit the Jardin des Plantes to appreciate the hopeless bewilderment of the critic fairly turned into Mr. Browning’s menagerie, aviary, flower-garden, and halls of relics, with the door slammed behind him. None of the Plays have yet been noticed,—nothing said yet about the innocent Pippa, with her holiday ministry, a pure voice of nature, Heaven’s opportunity to redeem many sinful hearts, and each of these hearts, too, worth our sympathy; no love yet expressed for Guendolen, who is God’s grace and woman’s fidelity to the erring Mildred, and one of Mr. Browning’s most natural characters, beckoned apart from the living throng of the street, before she has learned the tricks of self-consciousness; no hint of the subtle developments in the “Soul’s Tragedy,” with its racy prose, pitting sly papal reaction against a patriotism none of the purest,—and not yet a line of Valence’s integrity, enamoured of Colombe, another real woman, unspoiled by a year’s splendor, resigned to the legal claimant—Valence, the true Duke’s generous rival in love, but at last the husband of simple Colombe—Valence, the man, left alone with her undisturbed content when the courtiers rushed like motes to the new magnet. It is with the hope of gleaning in this rich field again, that we content ourselves now with “Luria.”

To our perception, this play is not so artless and human as the “Blot in the ’Scutcheon;” its fortunes do not touch our feelings so deeply. Guendolen and Mildred uncover the heart’s well; they draw for us the pathos of home, and the same draught mingles sadness for the catastrophes of sin with gratitude for home’s loyalty and mercy. Yes, we thank Guendolen with our eyes and hearts, for she succeeds in assuring us that God will yet find the sullied Mildred lovable. But “Luria” is grave and somewhat remote; it simply represents Duty triumphing in the midst of intrigue, and with no motive beyond the duty’s self. We do not deny the grandness of the conception, and we acknowledge the impressive result; it ap- [p. 369→] peals to the inner man, touches conscience and honor, and helps us to understand the reserved power of character. But it is a lesson; the “Blot in the ’Scutcheon” is an experience; the one is a drama; the other is a heart’s or home’s interior! Luria is stately and inspiring; but Mildred and Guendolen are of us—women kiss them; all sit and weep with them. “Luria” has, we believe, certain faults in execution, which we wish to notice.

The scene is laid at Luria’s camp, between Florence and Pisa, during the complicated Italian feuds of the fifteenth century. Luria is a Moor, who offered his services to Florence at the nick of time, when Pisa pressed her hardly, and Puccio, the old Florentine commander, had been overthrown. Puccio is patriotic, but out of humor; he serves under Luria, and accords him a malicious, exceptional praise. The brave and childlike Moor is the object of several distinct conspiracies. First, Puccio, detailing trivial faults of Luria, poisons the ear of Braccio, the Florentine commissary, who understands his discontent, and makes use of it; for he has a plan of his own, to spring the sentence of a secret trial, all this time in progress, upon Luria, just when he completes his victory, in order to save the Republic from the Moor’s ambition. Braccio has the Italian subtlety and suspicion; but he has overreached himself, by imputing to Luria his own duplicity. He cannot believe it possible that Luria would not abuse his success for a selfish purpose. Braccio’s secretary understands him better, but is the implicit tool of his master. Then Domizia, a Florentine lady, has a twofold object in coming to the camp: she watches Braccio with deadly hatred, for Florence jealously sacrificed her family, grown dangerous by successful service; therefore she is trying all the while to instigate Luria to direct the army, flushed with victory and devoted to their general, against the Republic. Luria is not without love for her. Husain is a Moor, the friend of Luria, suspecting all these actors and their hidden motives, and urging Luria to secure his own safety by attacking Florence. The piece opens with a successful military operation of Luria, by which he cuts off the Pisans from effecting a junction with certain auxiliary Lucchese. Notwithstanding the politic delays of Braccio, who fears the result of Luria’s success, a battle is fought, and the Pisans are routed. Puccio reports again certain incomplete manœuvres; and at last Braccio sends a mission to Florence, bidding the senate pass sentence upon Luria, and nip [p. 370→] his possible ambition. But this despatch, as well as some previous ones, was intercepted by Tiburzio, the commander of the Pisans. So, then, here is a chance to turn Florence’s victory against Florence. Can the Moor hesitate to taste revenge after seeing this despatch? There is a noble scene, when Tiburzio develops the treason to Luria, and tempts him to renounce his allegiance. So have all the rest tempted, with various motives. What a coil is this for the generous Moor, so devoid of guile as unable to suspect it; so frankly worshipping Florence with the faith of a child and the unwavering duty of a man! What a Christian Moor is this, with his foot planted on his torrid passions, and simply opposing his word of honor to the whispers of revenge! He does not even read the letter, so torn is he between the sincere, soldierly mien of Tiburzio and his faith in Florence. He will first test these Florentines. See, says he to Braccio,—

Chance has put into my hand the means

Of knowing what I earn, before I work!

Should I fight better, should I fight the worse,

With your crown palpably before me? See!

Here lies my whole reward! Best know it now,

Or keep it for the end’s entire delight?

The unruffled Braccio tells him that if his honor is that of the condottiére, he can “break seal and read,”—in which case the act will justify the writing. Domizia is there, and she exclaims: “Thank God, and take revenge.” Just at that moment Tiburzio’s trumpet sounds; if Luria gives up Florence, his trumpet will not reply; then he is Pisa’s. Thus ends the scene:—

My simple Moorish instinct bids me sink

The obligation you relieve me from

Still deeper! Sound our answer, I should say!

And thus: (tearing the paper) the battle! That solves every doubt!

Another battle consummates the salvation of Florence; then Braccio himself informs him of the secret trial, maintaining the right of Florence to institute such a procedure in self-defence. And Domizia does not believe the Moor would bear the mistrust which destroyed her own family; she was certain

He would not bear, but live and fight against,—

Seeing he was of other stuff than they.

Who then will speak for the loyalty of the tempted Luria? Tiburzio appears, speaks, urges Luria to join Pisa:— [p. 371→]

Go you to Pisa—Florence is my place—

Leave me to tell her of the rectitude,

I, from the first, told Pisa, knowing it.

A new temptation! Braccio, imagining that Luria would consult his safety, instantly transfers the command to Puccio, who has too much soldier’s honor left to take it:—

——I want men,

Their hearts as well as hands—and where’s a heart

That’s not with Luria——?

What will Luria do? Braccio has gone to Florence, and Husain and the lady are left to ply him with their eager recommendations of a course that is at once revenge and safety. At last, the Moor emerges from this web of intrigue; he sees the guile, but he finds in it no argument for his own dishonor. The Christian Moor:—

I ruin Florence,—teach her friends mistrust,—

Confirm her enemies in harsh belief,—

And when she finds one day, as she must find,

The strange mistake, and how my heart was hers,

Shall it console me, that my Florentines

Walk with a sadder step, a graver face,

Who took me with such frankness, praised me so,

At the glad outset?

Read this soliloquy of Luria, when the heart needs thoughts of placid forgiveness, and some man’s nobleness to illustrate the idea of duty. But he takes the poison, more deadly than the virulent souls of his intriguers, who return at last to lay the love and devotion of Florence at his feet, and to hang their heads in shameful recollections. Is Braccio remorseful, or does he adroitly accommodate himself to the one generous moment of the Republic, as he says—

Speak, Luria! Here begins your true career,—

Look up to it! All now is possible,—

The glory and the grandeur of each dream,—

And every prophecy shall be fulfilled,

Save one … (nay, now, your word must come at last,)

—That you would punish Florence!

Hus. (pointing to Luria’s dead body.) That is done!

Such is the bald outline of a plot, clothed in thought and poetry, and alive with generous sentiments. The verse often has an elevated repose, in harmony with the impressive thought; and the style is not so involved as in some of the other plays. [p. 372→] The eye and sense gratefully acknowledge its breathing-places. It is transparent, finished, and has all the ease and rhythm of a self-collected woman. In a literary point of view, it is one of Mr. Browning’s most finely-balanced productions; and it gives us, as all symmetrical things do, the impression of a reserve of power.

But in the expression of Luria’s character there appears to us a defect: it is a diminished form of the self-consciousness already alluded to. Here is the radical difference between the men and women of Mr. Browning and of Shakspeare,—with the exception of Guendolen, Mildred, perhaps Pippa and Colombe, Valence, and Tresham. The introvertive faculty is not duly fused and tempered with the keen perception of nature and the spontaneous fancy. It is a defect in Luria, that he does not always forget himself; he speculates upon his own artlessness. He is not content with being the contrast to European intricacy and duplicity, but must tell us that he is so. We sometimes hear it said, that the present century is distinguished for its self-consciousness: this is true of the literary and speculative circles. People are continually “pulling up their beans, to see how they grow.” But art must continue to represent the single-mindedness of nature. People in trouble still act in a very unsophisticated manner. A bankrupt, or the victim of a conspiracy, must have a highly finished education, to take pleasure in watching the throbbing of his own exasperated nerves. Luria talks so well about his Arab instincts that we doubt the purity of his breed; sometimes, we must confess, he has appeared to us like Mr. Browning in a tableau. Take the following as a specimen; bearing in mind, too, that the poison works in him while he speaks; Djabal might have said it:—

And inasmuch as Feeling, the East’s gift,

Is quick and transient,—comes, and, lo, is gone,—

While Northern Thought is slow and durable,

Oh, what a mission was reserved for me,

Who, born with a perception of the power

And use of the North’s thought for us of the East,

Should have stayed there and turned it to account,

Giving Thought’s character and permanence

To the too transitory Feelings there,—

Writing God’s messages in mortal words!

Now Mr. Browning is able to throw into dramatic conditions a Moor with precisely such a mission, but such a Moor would [p. 373→] never say a word about it. Mr. Browning has a rare and delicate appreciation of mental varieties, and this lends great power to his descriptive pen; but this knowledge may subserve the delineation of character only when it does not remind us of its function.

At first, it would seem that Luria could not do any thing more natural than to take poison. Yet this is our greatest objection to the character. In some Moors it would be timely and appropriate, but in Luria it is an imitation: and, moreover, it vitiates, in our estimation, the impression which Mr. Browning endeavored to create, by showing us just such a Moor in just such circumstances. It is a common thing to consult the requisitions of the stage, and kill off the heroes, that the curtain may descend over a clean piece of work, and the spectators be left to pity, but at their convenience to forget. The hero is often by nature a candidate for suicide, in which case we cannot quarrel with his consistency; but whenever we get hold of a man capable of greater things, we demand that he shall not be sacrificed to stage effect. Mr. Browning has made Luria too great for his own catastrophe. His suicide, then, is a lamentable deference to the traditional requisitions of the fifth act, which mars the nobility in all the other four. Luria commits suicide. It is a bêtise worthy of “the nephew of my uncle,” when his forthcoming coup d’état shall fail. Inheriting this cross of the Gallic cock, Luria should have left a note upon his dressing-table, saying much, among other things, of “unappreciated merit,” “unjust suspicions, that make life loathsome,” “tired of being misunderstood,” with a request to seek out his aged mother, somewhere in the Orient, and make over his effects to her. For, seriously, a man upon whose lips so many noble sayings are at home, whose life is a sacrifice to Duty, that fills the soul and masters every sense, like the sight of some great pageant, who towers above the coldness and selfishness of those mean-natured Florentines, like the eternal pyramids of his own favorite imagery, should have supported his character to the end of the drama, as only such a soul could have done, undroopingly. Was he, after all, such a vulgar hero?—so small a man, to drown in a phial of Eastern tincture, where the play leaves him; in his life so Christian, in his death a cockney crossed in love? He should have borne his last great disappointment, as he had borne his previous successes, simply trusting in his sense of right,—thus gaining one more victory, harder than any over Pisan or [p. 374→] Lucchese, over mortified pride and sharp ingratitude. Then he would have been, from first to last, the glorious Moor, the symbol of a Duty that is quite Christian, united with an endurance of life such as only a pagan so Christian can maintain. A cockney Moor might have killed himself, and welcome; but not this son of the morning, who despises revenge, the “brute-like punishment of bad by worse.” When a Moor speaks thus, we have a right to ask him, Is suicide nobler than revenge? If a refusal to punish ingratitude were followed by a consent to live and bear it, would there not be true pathos in the sight or imagination of the subsequent fortunes of such a spirit? What should Luria have done after uttering such words as these?

There, my own orb! He sinks from out the sky!

Why, there! a whole day has he blessed the land,

My land, our Florence,—all about, the hills,

The fields and gardens, vineyards, olive-grounds,

All have been blest,—and yet we Florentines,

With minds intent upon our battle here,

Found that he rose too soon, or else too late,—

Gave us no vantage, or gave Pisa more,—

And so we wronged him! Does he turn in ire

To burn the earth, that cannot understand?

Or drop out quietly, and leave the sky,

His task once ended? Night wipes blame away.

He should have passed serenely from the scene of his unrequited glories, carrying our imaginations captive in the train of his true triumph; graced too, in his return to the East, with all our drooping sorrows and wild surmises. There might we see him sit on the ruins of cities, dashing away the hot tears, and swallowing down the sobs that rise at the bidding of his indignant memories. We should follow him, as he sought, with every fibre of his character more firmly knit by the cruel trial, the early oasis, the only green spot left in the waste of his disappointment, where the dusk forms would crowd around the true hero, bringing him “fresh instinct to translate them into law.” Perhaps, too, “in Vishnu-land, what Avatar?” But wherever he led the captive hearts, as he left the ungracious stage of Florence, they would gaze upon a fate more pathetic and ennobling than a hundred deaths. And so should every such tragedy conclude, if the hero’s previous life can afford the requisite guarantees to the imagination. But what does the great Luria, in the play? He takes a small phial from his [p. 375→] breast-pocket, shakes it well before taking the contents, as all the strength has settled, mutters to himself,

Strange! This is all I brought from my own land

To help me.

Strange, indeed; we had, throughout the play, been under the impression that he had brought his own will with him, his own untainted conscience and mild simplicity, his own noble indifference to every fate less than reproach, to help him. He uncorks, we say, this phial, decants the virulent treacle and water—with what an air the stars of every season extinguish themselves!—lives through the whole of the fifth act, doubtless with much nausea and “sinking of the lower abdomen,” and dies just as Florence repents, and sends to him, bidding him live for his reward. There is a spurious pathos in such a catastrophe. It is indeed bitter to think that the noble Moor did not live to accept the repentance of the selfish city, and to enjoy the complete vindication of his character. But he did not foresee the result; and the effect of the character is marred precisely at the spot where he seeks in oblivion an unmanly refuge for his wounded feelings. So do all the heroes turn the last scene into comedy; they fall upon their swords, or take physic bought at an apothecary’s. When shall we learn that the true pathos of a drama’s close resides in the continuation, by the spectator’s imagination, of the hero’s suffering, of the long regrets, of the slow transformation of the poison into nutriment and life? Luria’s character is spoiled, merely that every body may exclaim, when justification comes too late for him, “What a pity!” That may be very sad, but it is not truly tragic. The consistency of the character is ruined, and its total effect seriously damaged, for the sake of an unhappy accident; and because it is not a custom of the fifth act to leave the heroes alive, suffering with the imagination. If the play was really written to develop the great-heartedness of a man whose idea of life is Duty, and whose whole demeanor has shown that he can afford to be misunderstood not without luxuries of feeling far exceeding his deserved reward, either Florence should not have repented, or Luria should have departed unwitting of the tardy justice. Then Florence would have been indeed punished, for Luria’s contempt would have remained alive. Any thing, rather than another craven suicide!

There remain to be quoted a few lines, showing the fine art and feeling that have been lavished on this play. Luria delays [p. 376→] the battle, dreading to see his occupation gone, and himself thrown aside:—

Peace follows it!

Florence at peace; and the calm, studious heads

Come out again, the penetrating eyes;

As if a spell broke, all’s resumed; each art

You boast, more vivid that it slept awhile!

’Gainst the glad heaven, o’er the white palace-front

The interrupted scaffold climbs anew;

The walls are peopled by the painter’s brush;

The statue to its niche ascends to dwell;

The present’s noise and trouble have retired,

And left the eternal past to rule once more.

You speak its speech and read its records plain,

Greece lives with you, each Roman breathes your friend,

—But Luria—where will then be Luria’s place?

Domizia thinks that he should have been one of them; he answers:—

Oh, no!

Not one of you, and so escape the thrill

Of coming into you, and changing thus,—

Feeling a soul grow on me that restricts

The boundless unrest of the savage heart!

The sea heaves up, hangs loaded o’er the land,

Breaks there, and buries its tumultuous strength;

Horror, and silence, and a pause awhile;

Lo, inland glides the gulf-stream, miles away,

In rapture of assent, subdued and still,

’Neath those strange banks, those unimagined skies!

Luria contrasts his untutored instincts with the calm sagacity of Europe; the lines are fine, though we doubt Luria’s right to them, unless he really has the faith which he describes so well:—

For on their calm sagacity I lean,

Their sense of right, deliberate choice of good.—

Such faith stays when mere wild belief would go!

Yes—when the desert-creature’s heart, at fault

Amid the scattering tempest’s pillared sands,

Betrays its steps into the pathless drift—

The calm, instructed eye of man holds fast

By the sole bearing of the visible star,

Sure that, when slow the whirling wreck subsides,

The boundaries, lost now, shall be found again,—

The palm-trees and the pyramid over all. [p. 377→]

Husain says a fine thing for a pugnacious Moor:—

They called our thirst of war a transient thing;

The battle element must pass away

From life, they said, and leave a tranquil world:

—Master, I took their light, and turned it full

On that dull, turgid vein, they said would burst

And pass away; and, as I looked on life,

Still, everywhere I tracked this, though it hid

And shifted, lay so silent, as it thought,

Changed oft the hue, yet ever was the same;

Why, ’twas all fighting, all their nobler life!

All work was fighting, every harm—defeat,

And every joy obtained—a victory.

The remaining volume which heads our article is Mr. Browning’s latest production. It is divided into two parts, which are headed respectively “Christmas-Eve” and “Easter-Day.” Its commencement reminds us of the “Flight of the Duchess,” with the same rich vein of humor, and the same preternatural rhymes. But these rhymes, as in the former piece, have such a sensible air of necessity, that it seems difficult to imagine how the story could be told without them. We acquire a respect for riot which is so useful and unaffected. Here we have “Manchester” rhyming with the surprising, but extremely sensible combination of “haunches stir.” There is nothing like having a respectable “connection!” “Joseph” couples amicably with “knows if”—“Gallio” leads off a “tally ho!”—“Iketides” has “indebted ease”—“Frankfort” has “thank for’t;” “Scriptures” do not quarrel with “equipt yours,” nor “statue” with “that, you.”

“Christmas-Eve” is rainy, but the poet has taken it into his head to attend the service in “Zion Chapel Meeting.” We find him shivering in a very moist and uncomfortable porch, rather daunted by the scowls and drippings of the saints, who brush past him, astonished at seeing the scoffer waiting at the gate of their tabernacle:—

——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; then, with a snort, [p. 378→]

Like a startled horse, at the interloper,

Who humbly knew himself improper,

But could not shrink up small enough,

Round to the door, and in,—the gruff

Hinge’s invariable scold,

Making your very blood run cold.

Each arrival is hit off in admirable style, with his usual eye for individualities and latent humor:—

Then a tall, yellow man, like the penitent thief,

With his jaw bound up in a handkerchief,

And eyelids screwed together tight,

Led himself in by some inner light.

Finally, with the stimulus of a little indignant excursus upon exclusiveness, he screws up his courage to the point of entering:—

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.

He says that he very soon had enough of it; there was a dreadful smell; he sat next a man with a greasy coat. But all other perceptions were crushed by

——the pig-of-lead-like pressure

Of the preaching-man’s immense stupidity.

He had sufficient presence of mind, however, to notice its effect upon the audience:—

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.

Concluding quite soon that he had “seen the elephant,” he pursued the usual course of extempore naturalists, and left the place. Here the humor deserts the poem, save an occasional [p. 379→] glimmer or two, chiefly in a subsequent visit to a Straussian professor at Göttingen. The thought and verse become serious and lofty, while the metre does not change: for Mr. Browning has a very serious object in writing the poem, nothing less than to develop his views of Christian Faith and of Life. We pursue the current, quoting freely without the least remorse, as the book has not yet become frequent here. The same enterprising firm from whom we have received the two handsome volumes above noticed will soon place this also within our reach; and we hope that readers will liberally endorse the taste of those gentlemen.

There was a lull in the rain as he left the chapel, and, as he walks along, he contrasts the serenity of nature with the mephitic atmosphere around the preacher’s tripod. There is an analysis of the general sermonic style of Zion Chapel meetings: following which we have a metaphysical discussion of Love and Power. With proper labor, it will be found to contain thoughts worth pondering, and we gain a definite impression of the true, healthy religion of Mr. Browning’s nature. His soul rises to God, earnest for the future time when it shall be satiated with His Love. The wind and rain now cease; “the black cloud-barricade was riven,” and we have a glorious description of a lunar rainbow, with a fainter one as its counterfoil above it.

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, forever in Thy presence,

In ecstatic acquiescence,

Far alike from thriftless learning

And ignorance’s undiscerning,

I may worship and remain!”

Omitting a few lines, the poem continues thus:—

All at once I looked up with terror.

He was there.

He Himself with his human air,

On the narrow pathway, just before:—

——Only the sight

Of a sweepy garment, vast and white,

With a hem that I could recognize. [p. 380→]

He presses, hastening, “to the salvation of the Vest,” and pours out his heart in longing that the Presence may continue with him:—

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 wool,—

Steeps in the flood of noontide whiteness

Some defiled, discolored web,—

So lay I, saturate with brightness.

He is caught up and borne along “in the whirl and drift of the Vesture’s amplitude,” across the world. It is Christmas-Eve at Rome; how beautiful every line is now! The Dome—the multitude clustered round every “coigne of vantage” in the great Basilica, waiting to see blaze forth “the main-altar’s consummation,”—the aspiration of the “taper-fires,”—the organ’s personality, who

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.—

He prefers the clue of his reason to the possible truth that “shines athwart the lies” of Rome,—but he extols the obedient love of the worshippers, keeping them fast to God, through the night of error:—

As a babe can find its mother’s breast,

As well in darkness as in light,

Love shut our eyes, and all seemed right.

With his whole verse, in a fine enthusiasm, he sums up his perception that “too much love there can never be.” Out again, borne along in the Vesture’s eddy, bound for a visit to a Göttingen professor: so the Christmas lecture of a Straussian is the contrast to the uncritical devotion of the Roman spectacle. A few masterly touches give us the room, the audience, and the professor:—

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 [p. 381→]

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.

He finds in reason the foundation for the “Myth of Christ.”

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.

Upon all these points, we heartily sympathize with Mr. Browning’s acute and racy criticism, and consider that he has not misrepresented, while dissecting the mythical theory. We are rather surprised, too, to find him so easy and transparent in this domain. Only a slight difference between us springs up at last, when he seems inclined to exalt the historical Person above the continual and sufficient presence of God. But the glow and conviction of his elevating verse indispose us now for any criticism of particular statements.

He begins to feel very tolerant; talks about the value of religion, and the superfluity of sectarianism; hazards the phrase, “mild indifferentism,” and his heart becomes quite genial in this “lazy glow of benevolence.” But the Vesture is not suited with this, and leaves him alone on the college-steps, as we think, rather intolerantly, considering that long ago the same Vesture’s hem was touched by such as needed healing. But let us follow the rather orthodox poet, who misses his second person of the Trinity, and starts up in terror, exclaiming:—

Needs must there be one way, our chief,

Best way of worship; let me strive

To find it, and, when found, contrive

My fellows also take their share.

If, with his best endeavor, he fails in this, he believes that God, in his own method, will bring “all wanderers to a single track.” On the whole, his reflections are so satisfactory that they bring back the “flying robe” again, and he feels like a man who has answered all the fundamental questions of a “council,” and has gracious ministerial permission to be ordained. Of a sudden:—

——at a passionate bound, I sprang

Out of the wandering world of rain,

Into the little chapel again. [p. 382→]

He rubs his eyes—the saints have edged away from him, looking spiritual daggers. And yet, how could he remember all about the sermon, if he had been asleep? So it was, however; he keeps the orthodoxy of his dream, indulges in a gentle suspiration for the pope’s and professor’s salvation, and the “Christmas-Eve” concludes thus:—

——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.

“Easter-Day” commences in the conversational style; the poet and his imaginary foil discuss the difficulty of being a Christian. Some fine things are said upon the subject of faith. For instance, the difficulty of believing is the touchstone of belief:—

Could He acquit us, or condemn,

For holding what no hand can loose,

Rejecting when we can’t but choose?

As well award the victor’s wreath

To whosoever should take breath

Duly each minute while he lived—

Grant heaven, because a man contrived

To see the sunshine every day

He walked forth on the public way.

You must mix some uncertainty

With faith, if you would have faith be.

For a while this is the spirit of the conversation; one wishing to “grow smoothly, as a tree,” the other declaring that so the world lives now. Some respectable pursuits are shown up [p. 383→] with light touches of irony—then men find what evidences of belief they desire:—

——as is your sort of mind,

So is your sort of search.—

A very true thing, said in jest. But the poet assumes the Divine incarnation in the person of a single history, and then reminds us of “certain words, broad, plain,” which cannot be explained away:—

Announcing this world’s gain for loss,

And bidding us reject the same.

The pursuits of the world are finely contrasted with the spirit of denial:—

——we, the better part

Have chosen, though ’twere only hope,—

Nor envy moles like you, that grope

Amid your veritable muck,

More than the grasshoppers would truck,

For yours, their passionate life away,

That spends itself in leaps all day

To reach the sun. You want the eyes

To see, as they the wings to rise

And match the noble hearts of them.

And so he proves how hard it is to be a Christian, forced always to ward off the stroke of doubt, “caught upon the guard” of the better hope. The other speaker awards him small thanks for this; he already lives in trusting ease, indulging only the “blind hopes to spice the meal of life with.” Whereupon, in refutation of worldliness, we have the relation of another vision. It is a vision of judgment. This is a noble effort of imagination, pledged to the service of religious thought,—the verse soars into sublime description, and the pages redden with the fierce hues of this tremendous vision. The material prodigy of this Easter judgment passes away, and the scene fills with the presence of God, dealing with the human soul. The poet fixes his affections upon the world, and thought, and beauty, and love; in each case, the Spirit declares to him the emptiness of his choice. Love existed in all the other things which he had enumerated; even his choice of love is somewhat late:—

Now take love!— Well betide

Thy tardy conscience! Haste to take

The show of love for the name’s sake. [p. 384→]

The humbled poet at last resigns every clinging thought of the world, hoping to find his peace and the favor of the Spirit in entire renunciation:—

Be all the earth a wilderness!

Only let me go on, go on,

Still hoping ever and anon

To reach, one eve, the better land!

Then did the Form expand, expand—

I knew Him through the dread disguise,

As the whole God within his eyes

Embraced me.

Easter-Day breaks—“no paradise stands barred to entry”—spite of dreary moments hope is elastic, and the poet knows that “mercy every way is infinite.”

So cordial is our agreement with the pure spirit of all this, that we cannot spend a word upon occasional disagreements in theology. Filled with this spirit of religious love, the reader can return to the power and beauty of this world, portrayed with such loving sympathy in all the verse of Mr. Browning, and permit them amid enjoyment to kindle worship of the unseen world, the kingdom of munificent correspondences to these partial shows of time. Thanks to Mr. Browning, we learn from his poem to mingle content with aspiration. We will keep every charm of earth, every beautiful line that he has added to the treasury of poets, every minute marvel with which God tempts us to think of the plenitude of heaven. “All partial beauty” is a pledge of that. The pledge shall not suffice our mood, yet we cannot refuse to love it now with a tranquil hope. Nothing of late has so lifted the veil behind our customary routine and feeling, letting in upon them ripples of glory from the sphere of perfect beauty, as the latter half of “Easter-Eve,” with its presageful lines, its credible anticipations, its cosmic thought. We forbear to mar the sustained and solemn grace of the poem by quotations of that which every man must buy and read. It has the full, vital force of all the other strokes from the same pen. There is no easy sentiment for summer afternoons, and reading it is not an amusement; for that, as the word purports, carries us oftener away from the muses than keeps us in their instructive company. Mr. Browning makes our senses all alert; we cannot listen to him in a reverie, but with self-possessed faculties. Sometimes even his best images require a salutary effort to clutch them; occasional conceits excepted, they are not far-fetched, confused and [p. 385→] dim, but palpable, the handle towards the hand, marshalling the fancy the way it ought to go. This is true of all his works. We think we can perceive in “Christmas-Eve and Easter-Day” that Mr. Browning has also gained clearness, without sacrificing a single quality of his genius. Indeed, its power is materially increased, for his pen serves the thought with a greater regard for human sympathy. Such lofty beauty which the many need, is more conformed to the style of the many, without ever stooping to win by a dilution of its subtle energies. Is it too much to say that, with this pen for his sceptre, Mr. Browning can exact the homage of all hearts? He will permit us to apply to his conceptions of truth and beauty, what he says of the “chief, best way of worship”:—

——let me strive

To find it, and, when found, contrive

My fellows also take their share.

We deem that he possesses all the gifts and the exuberant life needed by the great artist, and he makes us conscious of a religiousness that can command their services for the good of men. Give the world a direction towards the good. Schiller says to the artist: “You have given it this direction, if as a teacher you elevate its thoughts to the necessary and eternal; if, while acting or composing, you transform the necessary and eternal into an object of its impulse. Create the conquering truth in the modest stillness of your soul, array it in a form of beauty, that not only thought may pay it homage, but sense lovingly comprehend its presence.”

Last words of admiration and gratitude linger on our pen. We bespeak for every future line of Mr. Browning a cordial welcome here. And it is pleasant to think that he cannot regard the warm, personal friendships he has unconsciously established here, with indifference. We assure him that he can take his piece entitled “Time’s Revenges,” and for “a friend” in the first line read “friends,” adapting the passage to express our ever-increasing regard for the books he writes.

Contrive, contrive

To rouse us, Waring! Who’s alive?

Our men scarce seem in earnest now;

Distinguished names!—but ’tis somehow

As if they played at being names

Still more distinguished, like the games

Of children. Turn our sport to earnest.

[John Weiss]

Reviewed:

Poems (RB), Boston: Ticknor, Reed, & Fields, 1850.

Christmas-Eve & Easter-Day (RB), London: Chapman & Hall, 1850.

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