R500900A. Christmas-Eve and Easter-Day.
The English Review, September 1850, pp. 65–70 and 84–90.
As reprinted in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 16, 398–402.
Amidst the existing trials and troubles of Christ’s Church, the progress of poetry, however important in itself to the welfare of a people, may appear at least of minor consequence; among the stirring war-notes of the trump of controversy, the voice of the nightingale may well-nigh be hushed. However, two of the works before us, at least, possess such eminent merit in their respective spheres, that they have won our attention, even at this present crisis. Indeed, we cannot allow such passing troubles, however grievous, to engross our critical attention, or our individual minds: we are convinced that our Anglican branch of the Church Catholic is firmly built upon the One Rock, and that no tempest can uprear her from her strong foundations; and this conviction we are anxious to show forth, by devoting at least our usual amount of space to the literary and other questions of the day. We are not only convinced that “all things work together for good to God’s elect,” but also, that our English Church, despite her sins and short-comings, is in possession of the especial presence of her God, and is destined to be the great champion of Christianity in the approaching warfare with the spirit of Antichrist throughout the civilized world: and, in this persuasion, whatever foes assail or friends desert us, we may grieve indeed for the perversity of man, but our cheeks shall not blanch, neither shall our hearts be troubled. We mourn over existing divisions, but we are intimately convinced that they subserve some high purpose in God’s providence; we work indeed towards the goal of unity; but, until this goal is attained, we are content to abide in patience and in hope: “Heaviness may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning!”
And now, enough of this. Turn we from such solemn themes to the more pleasant task before us,—the critical acknowledgment of merits of the highest order. And here let us pause to say that though the name of Taylor stands with those of Tennyson [p. 66→] and Browning at the head of this article, we are very far from ranking the first of these three authors (as our readers may already know from earlier numbers of our “Review”) with the two latter bards, whom we have recognized, and do recognize, as “facile principes,” the undoubted chiefs of their poetic era. We have already dwelt with love on the exquisite grace and pathos of a Tennyson, on the passion and power of a Browning; and we have further acknowledged that they, with Mrs. Browning, (late Miss Barrett) may fitly be regarded as the founders of a new school, which, though it combines some of the elements of Wordsworth’s and of Shelley’s poetry, the former’s simplicity and the latter’s brilliancy, have yet produced effects which are altogether distinct from those of the bards just named; more substantial than Shelley, more concentrated and powerful than Wordsworth. A special mannerism, no doubt, does characterize these living exponents of the beautiful; they are addicted to the use of a certain half-German phraseology, which is not highly to be commended; they are more or less mystical in their utterances, and they very frequently barely suggest where other writers would express; they have sometimes the air of being laboured and artificial just where they have most striven to be plain and natural; they all require to be read more than once before they can be appreciated; their philosophy and religion are somewhat dubious. Their feelings indeed are eminently reverential, and their love for Christianity appears sincere; but their opinions would seem by no means formed, and they are more or less wanting in that moral courage, which boldly proclaims its own perception of the truth, without the remotest fear of man’s censure or the age’s ridicule.
We mean not to accuse these authors of a vulgar dread of the critic; we doubt not that they hold the anonymous assumption of infallibility, which is now in vogue, in just as much contempt as we do ourselves, and that they would just as little allow themselves to be guided by it. They would scorn themselves, no doubt, if they were consciously influenced by one anticipation of what the “small scribes” might say, who indite critical judgments for “Athenæum” or “Examiner.” Indeed, it is more than questionable, whether any author has yet availed himself of a single hint given by an anonymous critic, unless that critic was not anonymous to him! And this, for various reasons. In the first place, there is something so monstrous in that individual assumption of infallibility and omniscience, which seems to be the invariable accompaniment of anonymous criticism, that the true poet is necessarily disgusted at starting, and irritated at every second word, yes, even by praise. Who is this anybody [p. 67→] or nobody, who, perhaps without a single qualification for his task, sits down to deliver a judgment which professes to be final and without appeal, on my merits,—or on the merits or demerits of a new work of “Tennyson’s?” We repeat, that this assumption of superiority, and further of infallibility, on the part of the critic, is such an insult to the understanding, such an affront to common sense, that no poet, no author of genius, would be likely to profit by the delivery, even of the wisest sentence, from such a bodiless and viewless “voice.” The fact is, that anonymous criticism, literary criticism that is, is altogether a mistake, and cannot be abandoned too soon: its only effect is to forward and realize that millennium of dulness and mediocrity, so long ago hailed by Pope and Dryden from afar: the true poet is slighted, the false is exalted, and “the public is led by the nose, as asses are.”
[The review continues with remarks on criticism and Alfred Tennyson, which are omitted here.]
[p. 69→]
Tennyson and Browning are great poets, and yet neither of these are really “household names,” as Byron, and Scott, and others have been: one reason is, that they are in some respects superior to Byron or Scott as poets; that they do not descend, as they did, to the common level; that their merits are often higher and deeper: (for generally the highest genius cannot be recognised at once; we like Strauss’s Waltzes on the very first time of hearing, but Beethoven’s Symphonies may require more than one audience; Moore’s “Melodies” please a child, but [p. 70→] Southey’s “Roderick” will only be duly appreciated by one who possesses a good heart and a cultivated understanding:) Tennyson and Browning have neither the merits nor the demerits of Scott and Byron,—who, however, should only be classed together, as being both in the highest degree popular; for Scott was as superior in artistic unity and sound sense, as he was inferior in power and passion. Our two modern bards have a language and a philosophy of their own, and display, both of them, an hitherto almost unparalleled combination of grace and pathos,—almost unparalleled we say,—for Shakspeare has shown it us before them, (he who has done all things,) in “Romeo and Juliet,” in the last wonderful scene of “A Winter’s Tale,” in Desdemona’s last conference with Emilia, in Lear and Cordelia, &c. They are, together with Mrs. Browning, pre-eminently aristocratic and refined: theirs is indeed the aristocracy of poetic genius, bordering sometimes on affectation, but rarely reaching it. No poets understand better to draw tears,—“tears,” as Southey himself, a master of pathos, expresses it, “of pleasurable pain.” Their colouring is rich and deep, their language is passionate, and their thoughts and feelings are pre-eminently real, even when exaggerated in expression. Indeed, no bards have carried farther, or so far, the combination of the simplest every-day life with the highest order of ideal poetry.
They possess, therefore, the very loftiest merits; but these are scarcely calculated to render them popular; and criticism, to speak generally, has done its utmost to retard their progress, whether intentionally or no. In the first place, it was right long before it discovered their respective merits at all, especially those of Tennyson and Browning. The “Quarterly,” which was ready at once to laud a mediocre “Philip von Artevelde” to the skies; the “Edinburgh,” which could scarcely find language to express its, if possible, still more glowing admiration for “Edwin the Fair,” by the same author, and which has recently bestowed some fifty or sixty pages of laborious comment on that unfortunate abortion, Bulwer’s “King Arthur,” had only scorn and ridicule, or total silence, for Tennyson for ten or twelve years. No doubt his mannerisms did deserve reprehension, but still this lamentable incapacity to discern true poetic merit was the perfectly natural characteristic of both our presumed chief literary organs: now, at last, that they have learnt to admire, they err just as widely in the opposite direction, praising indiscriminately, and losing themselves in those vague common places, in which mediocrity always takes refuge to conceal its real deficiency of taste and judgment.
[The review continues with further remarks on criticism and comments on In Memoriam by Alfred Tennyson, omitted here.]
[p. 84→]
Turn we now to Robert Browning and his new creation. This is a wildly fantastic composition, powerful, earnest, in part devotional, yet audacious, and Hudibrastically satirical. In “Christmas-Eve and Easter-Day” Mr. Browning is understood to have expressed his religious convictions, and to have yielded on the whole his adherence to dogmatic Christianity as “the truth.” That his manner of expression is strangely grotesque cannot be questioned; that his speculations are bold in the extreme nobody will deny. Nevertheless, he indicates in the first division of this poem his faith in Christianity as a fact, and in the second he expresses his sense of the necessity for loving God in Christ better than this world. The whole poem may be said to consist of two visions and their introductions; in the one of which the poet follows our Lord alternately to St. Peter’s at Rome, and the lecture-room of a German Professor; he accepting literally the promise, “When two or three are gathered together,” &c.; while in the other he witnesses the last judgment, and is condemned himself to enjoy this world, with no hope of any thing beyond it for ever and ever, for having preferred it to his God. This groundwork is certainly most bizarre, and the poem contains some even wilder things than these, which we can scarcely pause to indicate; but how much of deep thought and genuine feeling, what quiet yet earnest scorn for the mythical school of unbelievers, what concentrated power, and originality of execution shall we find here!
At the commencement the poet finds himself in a dissenting chapel, having been driven thither by a storm of wind and rain on the great Easter-Eve; there he falls asleep, under the infliction of a pulpit Boanerges, and imagines in his dream that he leaves the chapel, sees our Lord issuing from it, and follows Him, first to St. Peter’s, then elsewhere, as has been already indicated. The description of the meeting-house, “Mount Zion Chapel,” is most admirable; the arrival, or dropping in of the congregation, one by one, is touched with a master-hand. How graphic is this—
Well,—from the road, the lanes or the common,
In came the flock:—the fat weary woman,
Panting and bewilder’d, down-clapping
Her umbrella with a mighty report,
Grounded it by me, wry and flapping,
A wreck of whalebones.
This in its way can scarcely be surpassed. Then the arrival of this poor child of sin:— [p. 85→]
A female something past me flitted,
* * * *
And it seem’d the very door-hinge pitied
All that was left of a woman once,
Holding, at least, its tongue for the nonce.
The poet’s own resolve to step in at last—he is all this time waiting outside in the vestibule for the storm—is most characteristically indicated. The flock gives him angry supercilious glances in passing, or he imagines as much:—
There was no standing it much longer,—
“Good folks,” said I, as resolve grew stronger,—
“This way you perform the grand inquisitor
When the weather sends you a chance visitor?—
You are the men, and wisdom shall die with you,
And none of the old seven churches vie with you.”
But he goes in at last, and graphically does he describe the preacher’s style, and the delight of the congregation:—
The flock sat on, divinely fluster’d.
This passage is, we think, inimitable:—
My old fat woman purr’d with pleasure,
And thumb round thumb went twirling faster,
While she, to his periods keeping measure,
Maternally devour’d the pastor.
Well, he imagines he leaves the chapel, emerging on the heath or common some where near London. Much admirable matter follows of a reflective order, though strangely expressed. The power of man to grieve or glorify God,
As a mere machine could never do,
is asserted: his consequent separation from God, and yet the need of God’s love in him to accomplish any thing. Then, after a fanciful account of a gigantic lunar rainbow, which attracts the poet’s attention, our Lord is seen by him as coming from the chapel.
All at once I look’d 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!
* * * *
My mind fill’d with the cataract,
At one bound, of the mighty fact. [p. 86→]
How finely said! The poet describes himself as pressing to “the salvation of His vest,” striving to touch the border of His garment, and being hurried after Him in a rapid mystical flight, across land and ocean, to the gate of St. Peter’s at Rome; all which is strangely but grandly told. Graphically pourtrayed is St. Peter’s, where our Lord enters in this vision, but the poet does not: he fears to be confused by the idolatry within: he tells us, Deity might transcend all minor errors, where faith and love were present; but he, “a mere man,” could not, must fear to quit the clue God had given him. Yet, on consideration, he half doubts whether he ought not to enter; whether for him, too, love should not obscure the presence of error:—
I see the error; but, above
The scope of error, see the love.
Here follows a fine passage commencing,—
Oh, love of those first Christian days!
on the apparent contempt shown by the early Christians for Pagan art and Pagan beauty; over which we know not whether to rejoice or mourn.
Love, with Greece and Rome in ken,
Bade her scribes abhor the trick
Of poetry and rhetoric,
And exult, with hearts set free,
In blessed imbecility
Scrawl’d, perchance, on some torn sheet,
Leaving Livy incomplete.
* * * *
Love was the startling thing, the new;
Love was the all-sufficient too.
At last our Lord re-issues; and now He wends His course, followed by our poet, to some “tall, old, quaint, irregular town,” a university town of Germany;—
It may be Göttingen,—most likely.
And there, to a lecture-hall, where a body of students are assembled on this same Easter-Eve, to listen to a mythical rationalistic lecture on our Lord and Christianity. The professor is described most graphically: his lecture, or what is given of it, is a perfect epitome of the common-places of the now fashionable transcendental infidelity, which Browning deals with unsparingly. The myth of Christ and its origin is dilated on; how His word and tradition,— [p. 87→]
Though it meant
Something entirely different
From all, that those who only heard it
In their simplicity thought and averr’d it,
Had yet a meaning quite as respectable!
Rather a home-thrust this, O transcendentalists! Then the professor comes to the main upshot of this twaddle: “Was he,” that is, Christ,—
Was He not surely the first to insist on
The natural sovereignty of our race?
which detested cant wears out at last our poet’s patience, and drives him from the lecture-hall to ruminate on what he has listened to. The mingled contempt and pity of the ensuing passage make it one of the most telling imaginable against the follies of infidelity. Clearly the poet shows, that if Christ’s divinity be rejected, nothing virtually is left; for as to mere morality, that is admitted and proclaimed on other hands without the addition, that—
He, the sage and humble,
Was also one with the Creator!
Powerfully and unanswerably the poet proceeds:—
You urge Christ’s followers’ simplicity:
But how does shifting blame evade it?
Have wisdom’s words no more felicity?
The stumbling-block, His speech—who laid it?
How comes it, that for one found able
To sift the truth of it from fable,
Millions believe it to the letter?
Ay, how indeed? How were the Evangelists deluded, the Apostles blinded, and the whole world taken in by such a gigantic unreality? There is but one answer. They never were! Browning goes on to tell us, that if Christ our Lord were man only, he should protest against all Socinian worship of Him: honoured He then might be as the Shakspeare of theology, but nothing more.
I would call such a Christ our Saint,
As I declare our poet, him
Whose insight makes all others dim.
But it is not new moral truths of which man needed or needs the communication, so much as—
A motive and injunction,
For practising what we know already; [p. 88→]
And this the poet concludes accordingly was “the real God-function!” Finely he continues,—
And such an injunction and such a motive
As the God in Christ, do you waive, and “heady,
High-minded,” hang your tablet-votive
Outside the fane on a finger-post?
Again:—
What is the point where Himself lays stress?
Does the precept run, “Believe in good,
In justice, truth, now understood
For the first time?”—or, “Believe in Me,
Who lived and died, yet essentially
Am Lord of life?”
This again is, we need not say, unanswerable. But the poet’s scorn rises yet higher at the pretended admiration with which the rationalist or mythical misinterpreter calls on us to take back our faith, when he has made dust and ashes of it, and honour it as much as ever!
“Go home, and venerate the myth
I thus have experimented with—
This Man, continue to adore him,
Rather than all who went before him,
And all who ever followed after?”—
Surely for this I may praise you, my brother!
Will you take the praise in tears or laughter?
And further on:—
But still, when you rub the brow meticulous,
And ponder the profit of turning holy,
If not for God’s, for your own sake solely,—
God forbid, I should find you ridiculous!!
Certainly, the force of scornful pity can no further go. After some very far-reaching reflections on the apparent benefits of toleration and the need for some real creed, the poet follows our Lord again, as he imagines, back to the chapel from which he started, when his waking is well described. Strange to say, Browning has here thought fit to intimate his preference of some or any form of dissent to the teaching of the Church of England, or of any Church: thus we presume that we are to understand him, where he says:—
My heart does best to receive in meekness
This mode of worship, as most to His mind,
Where earthly aids being cast behind, [p. 89→]
His all in all appears serene
With the thinnest human veil between!
And yet we believe, we almost know, that our author has been throughout life a member of our Church Communion. Is this a mere freak of genius, or how are we to understand it? Some of the concluding reflections of the first part are very striking, as, for instance, where the poet says of the poor German Professor, whom he has described as apparently dying of a slow consumption:—
When thicker and thicker, the darkness fills
The world through his misty spectacles,
And he gropes for something more substantial
Than a fable, myth, or personification,—
May Christ do for him what no mere man shall,
And stand confess’d as the God of salvation!
Finally the poet says, vindicating the style and method of this poem,
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!
And now we have allowed Mr. Browning to speak much for himself; and, we think, to some effect. Of the second part, “Easter-Day,” we can only say that it is wilder again than the first, more poetic it may be, and grander; the description of the final conflagration in the vision of the last day is truly magnificent and awful,—and that it deals with a most difficult subject, the degree to which asceticism should enter into the life of the true Christian. Our poet almost seems to imagine that he should give up the use of this world altogether, and to condemn himself because he cannot consent to do this. He states the ascetic argument derived from the death of Christ our Lord, as strongly as it can be stated, in the passage commencing:—
Enough! you know
The all-stupendous tale,—that birth,
That life, that death! [p. 90→]
and appears to imagine the said argument incontrovertible; on which point we differ from him. We think, and know, that the use of this world is permitted to the Christian, yes, even to him who aims at perfection; after which all indeed are bound to strive, and not an isolated class. But, as a whole, this second part is far less satisfactory to us than the first: we think it founded, to a great degree, on a mistake. This is not the place, however, at the fag-end of a long literary article, in which we could enter into such a controversy. Much there is, no doubt, that is very admirable here, too, in this second part of the poems: and powerfully does the poet demonstrate, that earth without the hope of heaven would only be a wilderness.
On the whole, however, this contribution of Browning’s to our poetic literature is a great work, and is gladly hailed by us as such. Essentially different as it is in all respects from “In Memoriam,” they are both destined to an earthly immortality.
[The review concludes with remarks on The Virgin Widow by Henry Taylor, omitted here.]
[?Archer Thompson Gurney]
Reviewed:
Christmas-Eve & Easter-Day (RB), London: Chapman & Hall, 1850.
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