R520221B. Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley. With an Introductory Essay, by Robert Browning.
The Literary Gazette, 21 February 1852, pp. 173–175.
As reprinted in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 18, 392–393.
Here are five-and-twenty charming and valuable letters of a great poet, which Mr. Moxon has done well to make public, and from the perusal of which Mr. Browning has done his best to affright the reader. The letters themselves occupy some hundred pages of the volume, and Mr. Browning’s “Introductory Essay” monopolizes about fifty. When we bear in mind that no worthy memoir of the much maligned and exquisitely endowed Shelley has hitherto been given to the world, and how easily in these days justice might be rendered to the character of the deceased poet in fifty pages of letterpress by a capable and sympathising pen, we have reason to feel annoyed that Mr. Browning should have taken such unprofitable pains to display his own singular powers of writing, instead of confining himself simply, exclusively, and heartily to the necessary work he had heroically undertaken.
We are bound to state that the conceit of much of Mr. Browning’s introductory discourse is equalled only by its very indifferent English and most questionable grammar; and that the conceit, the bad English, and the careless grammar, are all surpassed by the pervading obscurity of style and thought, which to the ordinary reader cannot but prove distressingly tantalizing. Surely it is not so difficult a matter to explain in simple terms the pretensions of Shelley to the title claimed for him by his worshippers, that Mr. Browning should be driven to the very abstruse method he has unfortunately adopted. If it be necessary now to vindicate the poet’s genius, it is doubly necessary that the vindication should be made in language that appeals at once to the understanding and heart of the multitude, and that does not require all the mysticism that broods on Mr. Browning’s own mind to be transplanted to the reader’s before its meaning can be so much as guessed at. The character of Shelley that has descended to us from the last generation is wholly at variance with the records he has left of his own pure nature in his imperishable verse. The anomaly has to be cleared up. Either society has committed a glaring fault and a grievous injustice, or Shelley has lied in the utterances of his passionate soul as never man lied before. Had Mr. Browning condescended in intelligible and humble prose to reconcile the discrepancy, he would have justified the confidence reposed in him by his publisher, fulfilled a sacred obligation to the poet, and rendered a practical and positive service to the public. As it is, obtruding himself at the threshold of this volume, and intercepting the reader on his way to the “Letters,” he simply performs the very unnecessary office of standing in the way of the sunshine.
A specimen or two of Mr. Browning’s style will sufficiently indicate the nature of his labours. His very first paragraph exhibits a grammatical error:—
“Doubtless,” he writes, “we accept gladly the biography of an objective poet, as the phrase now goes; one whose endeavour has been to reproduce things external (whether the phenomena of the scenic universe or the manifested action of the human heart and brain) with an immediate reference in every case to the common eye and apprehension of his fellow men, assumed capable of receiving and profiting by this reproduction. It has been obtained through the poet’s double faculty of seeing external objects more clearly, widely, and deeply than is possible to the average mind, at the same time that he is so acquainted and in sympathy with its narrower comprehension as to be careful to supply it with no other materials than it can combine into an intelligible whole.”
When a man deals with scientific, abstract, or metaphysical topics, the severest precision of language is an essential condition of the comfort and security of his reader. The “It” which we have printed in italics, is widely disconnected from its antecedent, and cannot fail to send Mr. Browning’s reader on a voyage of discovery after his first perusal of the passage. We have heard the Anti-Corn-Law League styled “a great fact,” and a great fact Mr. Browning designates the solemn tragedy of Othello:—
“We are ignorant,” he says, “what the inventor of Othello conceived of that fact as he beheld it in completeness, how he accounted for it, under what known law he registered its nature, or to what unknown law he traced its coincidence. We learn only what he intended we should learn by that particular exercise of his power—the fact itself,—which with its infinite significances each of us receives for the first time as a creation, and is hereafter left to deal with as, in proportion to his own intelligence, he best may. We are ignorant, and would fain be otherwise.”
For that matter, ignorance will not be peculiar to Mr. Browning. Many a one who has wept at the undeserved sorrows of Desdemona, and mourned over the high-souled weakness of the Moor, and perfectly comprehended the profound agony of both, will read the paragraph we have just quoted, and at the close of it repeat in despair the painful truism contained in the last sentence. Certain we are that we pore over page after page of Mr. Browning’s prose, and our lamentation still is, “we are ignorant, and would fain be otherwise.” Writing upon Shakspere, the author of “Pippa Passes” is certainly obscure to a fault. He wishes to know how the great bard was originally impelled to his marvellous labours, and he thus proceeds in his investigation:—
“Did a soul’s delight in its own extended sphere of vision set it, for the gratification of an insuppressible power, on labour, as other men are set on rest? Or did a sense of duty or of love lead it to communicate its own sensations to mankind? Did an irresistible sympathy with men compel it to bring down and suit its own provision of knowledge and beauty to their narrow scope? Did the personality of such an one stand like an open watchtower in the midst of the territory it is erected to gaze on, and were the storms and calms, the stars and meteors, its watchman was wont to report of, the habitual variegation of his every-day life, as they glanced across its open roof or lay reflected on its four-square parapet? Or did some sunken and darkened chamber of imagery witness in the artificial illumination of every storied compartment we are permitted to contemplate, how rare and precious were the outlooks, through here and there an embrasure, upon a world beyond, and how blankly would have pressed on the artificer the boundary of his daily life, except for the amorous diligence with which he had rendered permanent by art whatever came to diversify the gloom?”
What Mr. Browning drives at in this outburst we defy the reader clearly to make out. What is the difference between William Shakspere and the “personality” of the same illustrious man? And what does the excited essayist mean, when in one and the same breath he calls the inspired poet a “watchtower” erected in the midst of a territory on which it is permitted to gaze, and a “watchman” dwelling in that tower for the purpose of reporting the “habitual variegations of his every-day life?” Mystical writing, however fervid, is not true criticism. Mr. Moxon is naturally desirous to supply the latter to his customers, but Mr. Browning can only give the former to his employer. It is to be lamented that so well-intentioned a publisher should fall into the hands of so incoherent a dreamer. For our own part, we should as soon think of asking Mr. Green to take us in his balloon from Paddington to the Bank, as of applying to a generally unintelligible poet for a sober and serious account of such a “fact” as a great man’s history.
[The review continues with a discussion of Shelley’s life and a selection of the letters, which we omit.]
We have quoted enough to prove our point. “How,” asks Mr. Browning, “shall we help believing Shelley to have been, in his ultimate attainment, the splendid spirit of his own best poetry, when we find even his carnal speech to agree faithfully, at faintest as at strongest, with the tone and rhythm of his most oracular utterances?” How, we add, shall we avoid the conclusion that Shelley’s life was a struggle towards goodness, piety, and love, when his secret correspondence reveals an abiding and heartfelt consciousness of the eternal existence of all three?
Reviewed:
Introductory Essay. Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley (RB), London: Edward Moxon, 1852.
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