R501200A. Poems (Boston, 1850).
The Monthly Religious Magazine, December 1850, pp. 568–575.
As reprinted in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 16, 402–405.
There is delight in singing, though none hear
Beside the singer, and there is delight
In praising, though the praiser sit alone
And see the praised far off him, far above.
Landor to Browning.
How mighty soever the stream of inspiration that flowed through the verse of Wordsworth, the channel was cut with extremest care, and every joint was fitted with slow and patient labor; he, standing like the great Master Builder at Cologne, entirely at ease amid the centuries, looking to a future hidden in Eternity, caring little to hurry while he felt that he had forever to work in. The minute and studied survey befitting the works of the dead laureate is little suited to England’s greatest living poet.
Robert Browning has a two fold interest for us. Of himself, that since “Chaucer was alive and hale,” no man has used the English language with such hearty force and genuine purity. Of his wife, she of whom we know little, but that she is wise and good,—that she was for years the invalid inmate of a darkened chamber, when she plumed herself for a flight, that for a time at least, drew England’s eyes from Browning to herself. Wise were they in good truth to unite their forces, who had else divided not only their whole realm but our republic. Elizabeth Barrett is the friend of the American slave, for that we thank her; that she is the friend of all who are oppressed and suffering the world over, needs no witness of ours. She is at Florence, now, with her husband, and rumor tells us that they have a child. The child of Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning! To what an inheritance is it born! The inheritance of so wide a knowledge, so full and generous a heart, so rich and active a sympathy as that of these two made one, involves a responsibility to God and man, from which, could it but look forward, it well might shrink. The most remarkable traits in Browning seem to us, the wide scope of his thought, the almost unconscious purity of his purpose, and the dramatic force of his words. “Paracelsus,” the long- [p. 569→] est and least interesting poem that he has published, does not invite our criticism. We would win readers for his shorter and less mystical pieces, and leave Bombast to his fate.
Sweet and fair as a dewy spring morning opens upon us the lovely conception of “Pippa Passes.” The women of the drama are apt to be the merest sketches. Lifelike enough if you look at them from one side, in a particular light, but far from proving creatures of real flesh and blood, like Miss Brontë’s “Jane Eyre.” This criticism applies in part to Browning, but hardly to the “Pippa Passes.” The women introduced into it are so terribly real, pictured with so true a knowledge, that of some you shudder to think the poet passed them near enough to catch their foul breath; of Pippa, you pray that so pure a spirit may often cross and bless his path. The office of genius, it seems to us, is to reproduce what is pleasant and healthy and uplifting. It is this thought that makes some persons shrink from such sketches as Ottima Sebald and the four courtesans in Pippa. Such portraits remind us of the great “Dissection” by Rembrandt, of which the highest praise is the severest condemnation. But for the Poet there is an argument on the other side. We are uplifted by whatever reveals to us the loathsomeness of vice, and in the present instance the depth of Browning’s shadow is needed, to show the world how utter night may be irradiated by purity like Pippa’s.
The girls at the silk mill have but one holiday yearly. Pippa is one of them, and as she springs blithesome from her bed, she meditates the worth of that one day. She fancies herself in turn the four happiest of Asolo’s simple inhabitants, and seems to pity them, that they have no one day to make much of. As for their other joys, she will share them in fancy the day through; who shall hinder? She will be in turn the mistress, bride, mother, devotee, and she is wise enough to know that the safest love of all, is the love of God. In the midst of her happy review, she pauses to catch a sunbeam, and finally cripples it with a splash from her ewer. The verses which describe this are unmatched for grace and delicacy. Singing her New Year’s Hymn, she wanders forth to watch for happiness,—to others also an angel watch and ward. [p. 570→]
The scene changes, and introduces us to such a home as is the lot of the proud Ottima, the mistress of the German Sebald, upon whom Pippa’s pure thought had rested for a moment. The old husband to whom this young beauty had been sacrificed, has been murdered in the night. Sebald has been intoxicated with passion, but morning breaks and his delirium with it. The power of gross passion, and the greater power of innocence coming by awful surprise on guilt, is nowhere so forcibly depicted. To Sebald, day is now but
—night with the sun added.
By a strong effort, but with true feminine disinterestedness, the woman forgets her own panic, and strives to lure him back to his old love. Ottima had nearly succeeded. Sense had once more nearly conquered soul, and Sebald had lost not only earth but the heaven of the repentant, when the pure voice of Pippa broke on the air,
God’s in his Heaven,
All’s right with the world.
Light broke on the guilty man, and Ottima is “emptied of her power.” “Her breath is worse than wine.” He drives her from him. Ottima could sin and never blench, but she cannot love alone. Brief anger is succeeded by bitterest despair. He speaks of her, not to her. She dreads not perdition, but his change. She gives him poison or other means of death. As his agony comes on, she offers her support, and there is a touching power in the humility born of the instant, which adds,
Don’t love me
The more because you lean on me, my own,
and her womanhood returns to her at the last, where, wholly forgetting her own approaching death, she prays
Not to me, God, to him be merciful.
There are such women, and this scene shows the link between them and their sex, offers a lever to philanthropy. It is through their love, that women like Ottima must be moved. It must be turned from man to Truth and God. [p. 571→]
The third part of “Pippa” opens with merry talk between some wild and dissipated students who have been plotting a practical jest on a purer companion. A new comer remonstrates. They have carried on a forged correspondence and inveigled Jules into a marriage with a young Greek. The new student thinks the disappointment will wipe off the early dew of Jules’ youth. Another moralizes, as well as a man can who carries a pipe in his mouth, to the contrary of this. They assemble to watch the return of the bride and groom from church, and to see that in his first disappointment Jules does not harm the budding girl. Poor Phené, carried into a higher heaven by the magic of her lover’s voice, almost forgets the part which she does not understand, taught her by those wicked wits. Jules wonders that she does not speak. “If I do not try,” she says,
It is to keep myself
Where your voice lifted me.
At last she falters out the truth. At first Jules offers her money, and refuses to meet his bride again, but “Pippa passes,” singing a love-song of one who was so high above her lover that her presence only rebuked his love. A new light breaks on Jules’ mind. He gazes on the Greek child;
fresh upon her lips
Alit the visionary butterfly.
He sees the spirit opening to his “Sesame.” His meditation is very beautiful. There is true agony in the cry put up by every one of us at least once in our lives,
Oh, to hear
God’s voice plain, as I heard it first, before
They broke in with that laughter!
His great heart conquers, he carries his girl-bride away where they may enter life together. There is the true sublimity of genius in the last words he speaks of him who played this trick upon him:
Shall I meet Lutwych,
And save him from my statue meeting him?
The next scene opens with a talk between an English vagabond and the Austrian police on the watch for Luigi, a young [p. 572→] Italian patriot, suspected at head-quarters. Luigi has been a tender, loving son, has a sensuous nature, open to all the richness of the natural world. He hates to leave sunshine and moonlight for the dungeon or the scaffold. His mother tempts him to forget his duty by the sweet picture of his young love,
with her blue eyes upturned
As if life were one long and sweet surprise,
In June she comes.
She would have overcome his patriotism in this way, but “Pippa passes,” singing of that “grace kings had when the world began,” and Luigi, braced to his duty, is saved by immediate departure for the scene of it, from the intended arrest of the police.
Last comes an interview between the beloved of God and his Intendant, one whom we do not libel if we call him the beloved of the Devil. Monseignor suspects his rascality, pins him as one might a dead beetle, finds out that Pippa is his brother’s child, long supposed to be dead, that the rascally Intendant means to beguile her to her death of soul and body. Just at the moment “Pippa passes,” and from without is heard the music of her sweet greenwood song, filling with indignant virtue the soul of her uncle. He arrests the family myrmidon in spite of family pride, and we conjecture that henceforth sweet Pippa has a right to more than one holiday in the year. To close the picture we go once more to her airy chamber, as she undresses for the night. Sweet and pure as summer breezes are the lines in which she meditates the events of the day. Little she thinks of all those pert girls said to her. The sense of it entered not the narrow chamber of her pure experience.
It had done me,
However, surely no such mighty hurt
To learn his name, who passed that jest upon me,
she said, and so dismissed the matter.
Her meditations on the pampered double heart’s-ease she pluckt in the morning from Ottima’s bed, are as fresh, original and to the point as could well be written. One can see the [p. 573→] Amateur rejoicing over the red nose of the Zanze, and proclaiming,
’Twas but white when wild she grew.
It hits the fancy of one who loves wild flowers. Reverent meditation on service and love closes the day, for the tired, pure-hearted silk-weaver and song-singer, whom God bless for the pleasure she has brought us.
The Dramatic Lyrics, in the second volume, open with the Cavalier Tunes, so widely popular. One’s heart dances to their well-remembered rhythm, long after one has forgotten the words. There is nothing of the sort more beautiful than the Poem of “Count Gismond.” The happy wife and mother tells to a friend the story of her marriage. As she recalls the old insult which her husband resented,
——the old mist again
Blinds her as then it did,
and to the inquiry of her friend she replies,
I? What I answered? As I live
I never fancied such a thing
As answer possible to give.
What says the body when they spring
Some monstrous torture engine’s whole
Strength on it? No more says the soul!
Many a woman’s dumb heart takes courage from these lines as her faith finds sympathy in those that follow:
This glads me most, that I enjoyed
The heart of the joy, with my content
In watching Gismond unalloyed
By any doubt of the event.
God took that on Him. I was bid
Watch Gismond for my part; I did.
She cannot repeat to any one the words of love whose slightest intonation is still fresh in her ear. She goes on to tell, how her two boys preserve in different ways the lineaments of their father’s love and pride, but in the midst of it Gismond returns. What a touch of nature, of sweet womanly evasion, in the concluding lines!
And have you brought my tercel back?
I just was telling Adela
How many birds it struck since May. [p. 574→]
It seems that few persons enter into and enjoy the humor in many of Browning’s Lyrics. In the “Soliloquy in the Spanish Cloister,” it oozes out between the syllables. The humble brother ordered by his abbot to water his flowers, does it with some spirit and a grumbling warfare that betrays some monastic secrets. His indignation at the exclusive appropriation of a new goblet and spoon causes the early death of the friar’s favorite lily, and instead of regretting the accident, the monk goes on to express his conviction that Brother Lawrence has carried the title of Saint somewhat too easily. He notes how often said saint forgets the minor observances of the order, and with what suspicious sympathy his eyes glisten when Gipsy lovers near the convent walls. He rejoices inwardly when the friar complains that there are no fruit blossoms on his plants, that he succeeds in keeping them “close nipped on the sly,” and so disappoints the hopes of his hated superior. Poor unhappy Dominican, we of the world can sympathize in your horror of the vice you have no mind to imitate, while you are incapable of the virtue to which it chooses to pay homage.
The “Songs in a Gondola” follow, full of exquisite poetry and passionate power. Would that we could give to them a holy as we are forced to give a hearty admiration. Great favorites with us are the two lyrics about Waring, shadowing forth in their sweet playful way the history of many a soul gifted perhaps like that of Coleridge, proud, claiming as a birthright what the world will never give till it is earned, quitting it in distaste, and while all the faithful are looking towards the Vishnu land for the Avatar, indolently dreaming away its life under a lateen sail! Heaven send some special prophet to save the multitude of such from their cigars.
“Christina” is a rare love-song, recognizing as such things seldom do, the impossibility of our losing the love we have given. It always returns to bless us, to draw us near to God, and in honoring the loveliness of another to double our own. The two “Scenes in a Madhouse” are full of power. “Splendor proof,” the dim soul
Keeps the brood of stars aloof,
that it may get to God, and when the lover has opened the lids of his strangled Porphyria, lids, “like shut buds that hold a [p. 575→] bee,” he rests the dear head on his shoulder, and listens for that voice which is to rouse his slumbering intellect and show him to himself a broken-hearted rather than a sinful man.
And all night long, we have not stirred,
And yet God has not said a word!
Browning’s peculiar appreciation of the dramatic power of language is aptly shown in the rush and hurry of the Arab ride through the Metidja, and the expressive force of the “Pied Piper.” There is a delicate touch in the “Italian in England” where the patriot says to the peasant woman,
whose faith was shown
To Italy, our mother; she
Uses my hand and blesses thee.
“All the memories pluckt at Sorrento,” “The flowers or the weeds,” are very precious. The whole piece needs to be read in a hurried but distinct tone, that one may hear the gathering and rush of the Scirocco in the woods; and pertinent indeed is the close where after marking with a master’s hand all the minute signs of its presence he adds,
“Such trifles”—you say?
Fortie [sic] in my England at home
Men meet gravely to-day
And debate, if abolishing Corn Laws
Is righteous and wise!
If ’t is proper Sirocco should vanish
In black from the skies!
It would be a strange topic, which Browning as he sings could not turn to a wise and kind purpose. “The Lost Leader” and “The Lost Mistress” all can appreciate.
Robert Browning to our thinking needs one improvement. A mind on fire like his might give dramatic power to sentiment, to intellectual struggles, disappointments and deserts; as it is, almost all his dramatic force is gained from the narrow observation of passion. Hence, as in the Songs in a Gondola, one’s love of poetry and one’s love of God may not burn together on his altar, but through the thin blue sacrificial flame, flares up ever and anon the hot red blaze of the common fire born of earth’s necessity, not of its heaven-aspirings.
C. W. H. D. [Caroline Wells Healey Dall]
Reviewed:
Poems (RB), Boston: Ticknor, Reed, & Fields, 1850.
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