R510312A. Poems (1849).
The Guardian, 12 March 1851, p. 184.
As reprinted in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 17, 368–371.
No living writer has yet given promise of being able to fill the throne which Wordsworth has left vacant. Many of our poets are clever and powerful, and some are great artists; but still they as little reach his complete mastery of the art as they can equal the colossal proportions of his mind. Read a page of the best of them by the side of a great poem of Wordsworth, and we feel at once that his was a power which differed in kind, and not merely in degree, from any which is now left amongst us. Yet, while we honour departed genius, we should not allow ourselves to be unfair to living abilities; nor deny their just share of admiration to the poets who are left us because they are not so great as those who have passed away. Mr. Ruskin, in his Modern Painters, has expressed this lesson in a well known and splendid passage, and it is one which we shall do well never to forget.
It is more than commonly necessary to remember when a clever man neglects, to some extent, the ordinary means for gaining popularity, and leaves his powers to make their way, without that assistance which his own care and labour ought to render them. This is the case, for instance, with the remarkable man whose poems we are now noticing. Mr. Browning and Mr. Tennyson, with many things in common, stand, in this respect, nearly at the opposite extremes of the world of poetry. Every poem of Mr. Tennyson’s bears marks of the most careful finish and elaborate construction. The cadence of the verse, the position of the words, the collocation of the clauses of his sentences, are all evidently well considered. The wider a man’s own reading is, and the more unaccustomed the channels it pursues, the more he will be likely to appreciate Mr. Tennyson’s great learning and cultivation, to understand how wide a field he has travelled over, and how various are the sources, not of his inspiration indeed, but of that vast mass of beautiful and picturesque materials which his inspiration has fused and blended into one characteristic and individual whole. On the contrary, Mr. Browning is so engaged upon the thoughts he has to deliver, that he scarcely ever thinks of the garb in which they are to be presented. Practising, as he does, the most difficult of all the arts, he seems to disregard artistic skill. Fond, like Mr. Tennyson, of ancient themes, and, like him, intensely modern in his tone of thought, he is not like Mr. Tennyson attentive to the proprieties of costume and treatment which grace, while they do not disguise the modernism of “Œnone,” or “Ulysses,” or “Locksley Hall.” Full sometimes to overflowing with fine ideas, he will not take the pains to render them generally intelligible, without an amount of trouble, on the part of the reader, which few will go through, and which the very greatest poets have seldom found it necessary to give. Powerful as his greater works undoubtedly are, it is rather as wholes, than in detached portions, that they produce their effect. No one can deny the cleverness, spirit, and graceful conception of many of his smaller pieces, but they are too often marred by some harshness or inelegance of execution. Often as we might be disposed to quote from him for the sake of the weight of the thought, it would be very seldom on account of verbal felicity.
A great mistake in a man who can avoid it. Pursuit of style, indeed, for itself, is certain to degenerate into mannerism; and a man who is always thinking of the clothing of his thoughts may come in time to be unable to produce any thoughts worth clothing. Yet the power of rendering a conception clearly intelligible, as it is one of the first requisites of any literary man, so is it especially of the poet; and no time or labour is misspent in attaining this object. No power of thought will maintain a writer against obscurity of expression or harshness of language; and, in the case of a poet, no poetical capacity, even of the highest kind, will avail to keep his works popular unless they have also the clearness and beauty of refined poetical expression. George Herbert, and Donne, and Henry Vaughan, and Cowley, to mention no others, held great places in their day, and were men, beyond all question, of great poetical powers; but their harshness and quaint conceits have been fatal to their continued popularity; and there are distinguished writers of our own day, who, we fear, with these men, will pass into comparative oblivion, because they have not taken pains to cultivate their art, nor to write so as to be universally understood; and thus when the feelings of the time have passed away, and the prevailing tone of opinion is no longer familiar, they also will cease to be intelligible.
Amongst these men, though by no means the worst offender, must be classed Mr. Browning; and we have the more insisted on this defect, because with him it is a growing fault. His earlier poems, at least his earliest and finest, Paracelsus, is almost entirely free from the harshness and obscurity which interfere so much with our enjoyment of his later works. We trust he will return to the clearness and beauty of his first compositions, written at a time when he could be powerful without being grotesque, and at once original and profound, with scarcely a trace either of roughness or obscurity. The author of Paracelsus might by this time have made his position amongst great poets a matter beyond all contradiction or dispute.
In the present edition there is no new matter; indeed, it does not contain the whole of the poems which Mr. Browning has given to the world. Sordello, a powerful but not very pleasing story, written in the heroic couplet (a measure not managed at all successfully by him), has been excluded from it. The two volumes are made up of the poem of Paracelsus and of several plays and shorter poems, called Dramatic Lyrics, the whole of which appeared some years since under the title of Bells and Pomegranates. With most of them probably, under that designation, our readers are familiar. “The Flight of the Duchess,” “Saul,” “The Cavalier Songs,” “The Gallop from Ghent,” “The Pied Piper of Hamelin,” “The Lost Leader,” and a few others, are in their way first rate; rough, vigorous, lyrical sketches, dashed off with apparent haste and ease, and very little finished; but instinct throughout with life and power. The regular dramas are, of course, more elaborate, and in all of them there are scenes and passages of remarkable freshness and force. One of them, The Blot on the Scutcheon, was acted some years ago, but without much success. The story is too painful to be generally popular, and its construction too simple, and characters too few, for the arena of the great London theatres. It is, however, a beautiful play for the closet, full of the deepest pathos, and giving promise of great dramatic power. Indeed, although, from infelicity in the choice of his subjects, and want of care in the construction of them, none of his dramas would probably command the attention of a mixed audience, yet his genius is essentially dramatic, and is displayed not only in the occasional felicitous touches which are to be found in all his works, but in the conception and delineation of his characters generally. Few poems are more striking in this way than a sketch, or rather set of sketches, which he calls by the curious name of Pippa Passes, in which he shows the effect produced by the unconscious presence and songs of an innocent young girl (Pippa), as she passes by during a holiday upon various groups of characters, some good, some fearfully criminal, who are in succession presented to us. Even his great poem Paracelsus is conducted entirely by means of dialogue, and though it can hardly be properly called a drama, it remains still, perhaps, the most splendid proof of his dramatical no less than of his poetical powers. His conception of the character of Paracelsus is that he was a man of great genius, at first thoroughly in earnest, far beyond his age, and defying its prejudices; then condescending to play upon its credulity, and gradually becoming an object of hatred and persecution as a detected charlatan, as unfairly depreciated at last as he had been at first extravagantly overrated. The varying phases of this character are admirably developed, and whatever may be its historical accuracy, it is impossible to dispute the remarkable power displayed by Mr. Browning in its delineation. As a specimen of the dignity of his blank verse and the beauty of his lyrics, we conclude our notice with the following striking passage from one of the latter sections of Paracelsus:—
Fest.—And you have never mused and said,
“I had a noble purpose, and full strength
To compass it; but I have stopped half-way,
And wrongly give the first fruits of my toil
To objects little worthy of the gift:
Why linger round them still? why clench my fault?
Why seek for consolation in defeat—
In vain endeavours to derive a beauty
From ugliness? why seek to make the most
Of what no power can change, nor strive instead
With mighty effort to redeem the past,
And, gathering up the treasures thus cast down,
To hold a steadfast course till I arrive
At their fit destination, and my own?”
You have never pondered thus?
Par. Have I, you ask?
Often at midnight, when most fancies come,
Would some such airy project visit me:
But ever at the end .. or will you hear
The same thing in a tale, a parable?
It cannot prove more tedious; listen then!
You and I, wandering over the world wide,
Chance to set foot upon a desert coast:
Just as we cry “No human voice before
Broke the inveterate silence of these rocks!”
—Their querulous echo startles us; we turn:
What ravaged structure still looks o’er the sea?
Some characters remain, too! While we read
The sharp, salt wind, impatient for the last
Of even this record, wistfully comes and goes,
Or sings what we recover, mocking it
This is the record; and my voice, the wind’s.
(He sings.)
Over the sea our galleys went,
With cleaving prows in order brave,
To a speeding wind and a bounding wave—
A gallant armament:
Each bark built out of a forest tree,
Left leafy and rough as first it grew,
And nailed all over the gaping sides,
Within and without, with black-bull hides.
Seethed in fat and suppled in flame,
To bear the playful billows’ game;
So each good ship was rude to see,
Rude and bare to the outward view,
But each upbore a stately tent;
Where cedar-pales in scented row
Kept out the flakes of the dancing brine:
And an awning drooped the mast below,
In fold on fold of the purple fine,
That neither noon-tide, nor star-shine,
Nor moonlight cold which maketh mad,
Might pierce the regal tenement.
When the sun dawned, oh, gay and glad
We set the sail and plied the oar;
But when the night wind blew like breath,
For joy of one day’s voyage more,
We sang together on the wide sea,
Like men at peace on a peaceful shore;
Each sail was loosed to the wind so free,
Each helm made sure by the twilight star,
And in a sleep as calm as death,
We, the strangers from afar,
Lay stretched along, each weary crew
In a circle round its wondrous tent,
Whence gleamed soft light and curled rich scent.
And with light and perfume, music too:
So the stars wheeled round, and the darkness past,
And at morn we started beside the mast,
And still each ship was sailing fast!
One morn, the land appeared!—a speck
Dim trembling betwixt sea and sky—
Avoid it, cried our pilot, check
The shout, restrain the longing eye!
But the heaving sea was black behind
For many a night and many a day,
And land, though but a rock, drew nigh;
So we broke the cedar pales away,
Let the purple awning flap in the wind,
And a statue bright was on every deck!
We shouted, every man of us,
And steered right into the harbour thus,
With pomp and pæan glorious.
An hundred shapes of lucid stone!
All day we built a shrine for each—
A shrine of rock for every one—
Nor paused we till in the westering sun
We sate together on the beach
To sing, because our task was done;
When lo! what shouts and merry songs!
What laughter all the distance stirs!
What raft comes loaded with its throngs
Of gentle islanders?
“The isles are just at hand,” they cried;
“Like cloudlets faint at even sleeping,
Our temple-gates are opened wide,
Our olive-groves thick shade are keeping
For the lucid shapes you bring”—they cried.
Oh, then we awoke with sudden start
From our deep dream; we knew, too late,
How bare the rock, how desolate,
To which we had flung our precious freight:
Yet we called out—“Depart!
Our gifts, once given, must here abide:
Our work is done; we have no heart
To mar our work, tho’ vain”—we cried.
Fest. In truth?
Par. Nay, wait: all this in tracings faint
May still be read on that deserted rock,
On rugged stones, strewn here and there, but piled
In order once; then follows—mark what follows—
“The sad rhyme of the men who proudly clung
To their first fault, and withered in their pride!”
Fest. Come back, then, Aureole; as you fear God, come!
This is foul sin; come back: renounce the past,
Forswear the future; look for joy no more,
But wait death’s summons amid holy sights,
And trust me for the event—peace, if not joy!
Return with me to Einsiedeln, dear Aureole.
Par. No way, no way: it would not turn to good.
A spotless child sleeps on the flowering moss—
’Tis well for him; but when a sinful man,
Envying such slumber, may desire to put
His guilt away, shall he return at once
To rest by lying there? Our sires knew well
(Spite of the grave discoveries of their sons)
The fitting course for such; dark cells, dim lamps,
A stone floor one may writhe on like a worm;
No mossy pillow, blue with violets!
Reviewed:
Poems (RB), London: Chapman & Hall, 1849.
___________________
