E441000F. A Drama of Exile.
The United States Magazine, and Democratic Review, October 1844, pp. 370–377.
As reprinted in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 9, 340–345.
These volumes open a way for themselves, by a dedication full of womanly tenderness, and a preface modest and just in explanation of the grounds of the Poet’s endeavor, and generous in the sympathy with which it reaches toward America, and draws it to the writer’s heart. “My love and admiration have belonged to the great American people,” these are memorable words on the lips of Elizabeth Barrett, “as long as I have felt proud of being an Englishwoman, and almost as long as I have loved poetry itself.” America is not marble nor stone that she should be insensible to a good will so earnest and true! She will sit down to the reading of these poems, in a mood answering to the poet’s, and she will rise up to bless her for the force, the truth, the love, the spiritual solaces, and exaltations of which they are the inspirer and expounder. She will begin with Miss Barrett, far back, in the dim origin of mankind, and hand in hand with her, will bear her company down from that sad drama of exile—Oh, blest and bitter are its memories!—to a wakeful interest in factory children, and the moaning cry of the heart that beats in the bosom of this forty-fourth vexed year of the nineteenth century—
O brave poets keep back nothing!
This “Drama of Exile,” individual in plan and conception, obedient to a unity, and speaking a language of its own, with the lyrical, descriptive, and dramatic forces all in unison, leaves in the true reader’s mind a complete and harmonious impression.
Adam and Eve, at the gate of Eden, are wrapped in a cloud of desolation, and swept out upon the wilderness: the cloud is about them from first to last, their tabernacle, their shrine, their oracular lodgment and look-out. The tone of the work, a high, perhaps the highest test, is unbroken from end to end: and vindicates the originality of the poet, and protects her from any suspicion of borrowing from predecessors. There is in each event a new world, to each mind that in sincerity and the pure spirit of an unmarred nature, looks upon it: to each child of Adam, that Fall in the Garden, and that mournful going forth has a new, a peculiar significance. To Miss Barrett it pleads from a depth of plaintive melancholy, of lonely gloom, which breaks the great heart of humanity in pieces as a little child’s, and suggests spiritual histories of the intercourse of angels, and Nature, and Christ, and God; with the desolate but never-abandoned soul of man. It puts for her, the whole universe of the Mysterious in motion, and teaches in a profound analogy how Adam and Eve, and they, Gabriel and Lucifer, and spirits of the earth, and spirits of Eden, of organic and inorganic nature, and infant voices and poet voices, and voices of revel, and the morning star and the zodiacal powers, discoursed with one another ere the outstretched hand shattered their harmony, and left them to be silent for many and many an age. She calls up the great Angel of Sin to stand in the foreground
A monumental melancholy gloom
Seen down all ages; whence to mark despair,
And measure out the distances from good!
And around this central pillar spin, so to speak, all the powers of nature in tribulation, and appeal against the wrong which has jarred Adam out of the smooth, golden circuit he was keeping in harmony with them. They tell him what he was, and what he is not, and what he is to be. The awe and the strife, and the perplexity born of his wo[e]ful error, anticipate their day, and come to him in one shape and another, direct from the heart of things, without disguise, and with no stammering utterance. The Morning Star sings to Lucifer, and there is consola- [p. 371→] tion here, such truth and tenderness, that he fades away and utterly vanishes, as he needs must, as it proceeds.
Henceforward human eyes of lovers be
The only sweetest sight that I shall see,
With tears between the looks raised up to me.
Ai, ai!
When, having wept all night, at break of day,
Above the folded hills they shall survey
My light, a little trembling, in the grey.
Ai, ai!
And, gazing on me, such shall comprehend,
Through all my piteous pomp at morn or even,
And melancholy leaning out of Heaven,
That love, their own divine, may change or end,
That love may close in loss!
Ai, ai, Heosphoros!
But further on, these sad exiles passing out from underneath this cheerful effulgence, come upon a wild open country, seen vaguely in the approaching night: the first night outside of Eden, the first night of an interminable line shooting on, onward through the time to come, and binding the ages together as with their gloomy links. An awful night—that first of all!
Adam. How doth the wide and melancholy earth
Gather her hills around us, grey and ghast,
And stare with blank significance of loss
Right in our faces! Is the wind up?
Eve. Nay.
Adam. And yet the cedars and the junipers
Rock slowly through the mist, without a noise;
And shapes, which have no certainty of shape,
Drift duskly in and out between the pines,
And loom along the edges of the hills,
And lie flat, curdling in the open ground—
Shadows without a body, which contract
And lengthen as we gaze on them.
Eve. O Life
Which is not man’s nor angel’s! What is this?
Adam. No cause for fear. The circle of God’s life
Contains all life beside.
Eve. I think the earth
Is crazed with curse, and wanders from the sense
Of those first laws affixed to form and space
Or ever she knew sin!
Adam. We will not fear:
We were brave sinning.
Eve. Yea, I plucked the fruit
With eyes upturned to Heaven, and seeing there
Our god-thrones, as the tempter said— not God.
My heart, which beat then, sinks. The sun hath sunk
Out of sight with our Eden.
Adam. Night is near.
Eve. And God’s curse, nearest. Let us travel back,
And stand within the sword-glare till we die;
Believing it is better to meet death
Than suffer desolation.
Adam. Nay, beloved!
We must not pluck death from the Maker’s hand,
As erst we plucked the apple: we must wait
Until He gives death, as He gave us life;
Nor murmur faintly o’er the primal gift,
Because we spoilt its sweetness with our sin.
Eve. Ah, ah! Dost thou discern what I behold?
Adam. I see all. How the spirits in thine eyes,
From their dilated orbits, bound before
To meet the spectral Dread!
Eve. I am afraid—
Ah, ah! The twilight bristles wild with shapes
Of intermittent motion, aspect vague
And mystic bearings, which o’ercreep the earth,
Keeping slow time with horrors in the blood.
How near they reach … and far! how grey they move—
Treading upon the darkness without feet,—
And fluttering on the darkness without wings!
Some run like dogs, with noses to the ground;
Some keep one path, like sheep; some rock like trees;
Some glide like a fallen leaf; and some flow on,
Copious as rivers.
Adam. Some spring up like fire—
And some coil …
Eve. Ah, ah! Dost thou pause to say
Like what?—coil like the serpent when he fell
From all the emerald splendor of his height,
And writhed,—and could not climb against the curse, [p. 372→]
Not a ring’s length. I am afraid—afraid—
I think it is God’s will to make me afraid;
Permitting these to haunt us in the place
Of His beloved angels—gone from us,
Because we are not pure.
And so we might wander on, it seems, for ever, through a boundless variety of hill and dale, in these early spiritual experiences and fortunes of that grey father of mankind, and that poor mournful mother. With what quickness and truth these sad convictions of loss and realizings of sorrow, come and go in the soul of Adam and Eve—how they rise and fall, with the motions acquired from a first wrong done first in the pure world by them, who knows not that has followed them so lately through these pages, where we have quoted it all, that no one might want proof or test to judge us by as we passed along, speaking as we have of this noble Drama of Exile? The poet, we may only add, has not failed to show the true catholicity in which she has considered the fortunes of the race, and that our own new, free land, was in her heart even at Eden gate, as partaking of the promises and chances of the Fall. Is there not something of this true, wide, great land, in words like these—when the spirits of the earth tell Adam how the world shall take its soul from him?
Alp and torrent shall inherit
Your significance of will:
With the grandeur of your spirit,
Shall our broad Savannahs fill—
In our winds your exultations shall be springing.
Even your parlance which inveigles,
By our rudeness, shall be won:
Hearts poetic in our eagles shall beat up against the sun,
And pour downward in articulate clear singing.
Your bold speeches, our Behemoth,
With his thunderous jaw, shall wield!
Your high fancies shall our Mammoth
Breathe sublimely up the shield
Of St. Michael, at God’s throne, who waits to speed him
Till the Heaven’s smooth-grooved thunder
Spinning back shall leave them clear;
And the angels, smiling wonder,
With dropt looks from sphere to sphere,
Shall cry, “Ho! ye heirs of Adam! ye exceed him!”
Next, in these volumes we come upon sonnets, in which resolution is wisely expressed or determined on by the writer for her own sake: or Grief is moralised: or Irreparableness: Comfort: Work: with a good lesson, read once or twice from a scripture text: or a word spoken, as the sonnet allows, to a brother or sister that may be profited.
George Sand (would that there were no unwomanly associations with that man’s name!) is not without the spell of this small, charmed round.
Thou large-brained woman and large-hearted man,
Self-called George Sand! whose soul, amid the lions
Of thy tumultuous senses, moans defiance,
And answers roar for roar, as spirits can:
I would some mild miraculous thunder ran
Above the applauded circus, in appliance
Of thine own nobler nature’s strength and science,—
Drawing two pinions, white as wings of swan,
From thy strong shoulders, to amaze the place
With holier light! That thou to woman’s claim,
And man’s, might join beside the angel’s grace
Of a pure genius sanctified from blame;
Till child and maiden pressed to thine embrace,
To kiss upon thy lips a stainless fame.
Her sonnets are compact, direct, generally clear and just, and worthy to be classed with the best of the best writers. Passing through sonnet-land we arrive at a region more peculiarly Miss Barrett’s as we knew her before the present collection appeared. The “Romaunt of the Page” and the “Lay of the Brown Rosary” are ballads: not in the antique spirit exactly, but ballad subjects raised from the ground of common flesh-and-blood into an atmosphere, refined, slightly mystical, and, according to a general bias of Miss Barrett’s mind, subjective in the handling. Of the three poems of this character the Romaunt of the Page has the advantage of a certain old chivalresque relish: the Lay of the Brown Rosary, Tennysonian somewhat in the treatment: and Lady Geraldine’s Courtship the freshness of contemporary interest: with a reference or two like this to the [p. 373→] author of “Paracelsus,” after allusion to “Wordsworth’s solemn-thoughted Idyl,” “Howitt’s ballad-dew” and “Tennyson’s enchanted reverie,”
“from Browning some Pomegranate which if cut deep down the middle,
Shows a heart within blood-tinctured, of a veined humanity!”
Concluding the volume are also two lesser poems, one of which, “The Mournful Mother,” is a fine lamentation over her dead Blind Boy, with a certain strength and agony, even, of feeling—tempered always with a color of hope and love—which we shall find illustrated in later poems. Proof enough that though oftenest raised to the rapture of spirituality and the unseen, this true poet has a heart that beats as vividly and passionately, when sufficiently prompted, as Homer or Dante.
And we shall see that in her second volume, upon which we now enter, she is found more frequently dealing with realities and the accepted emotions, or rather with certain phases of ordinary emotion (for Miss Barrett will always have her way), than heretofore. A “Vision of the Poets,” for with this it begins—to be seen by us at the prompting of a poet, to have her for guide, and to feel all along that we are in truth breathing an element of genuine magic and wonder! We will not tarry on the threshold of the Vision, but hurry to where the sight we most desire to see is made known to us—only pausing for a moment to take notice that we are in a building where we observe
The arches, like a giant’s bow,
To bend and slacken—and below
The nichéd saints to come and go.
We become instantly conscious of “a strange company around” and lo! we are in the mighty presence!
Deathful their faces were; and yet
The power of life was in them set—
Never forgot, nor to forget.
Sublime significance of mouth,
Dilated nostril full of youth,
And forehead royal with the truth.
These faces were not multiplied
Beyond your count, but side by side
Did front the altar, glorified;
Still as a vision, yet exprest
Full as an action—look and geste
Of buried saint, in risen rest!
The poet knew them. Faint and dim
His spirit seemed to sink in him,
Then, like a dolphin, change and swim
The current—These were poets true
Who died for Beauty, as martyrs do
For Truth—the ends being scarcely two.
God’s prophets of the Beautiful
These poets were—of iron rule,
The rugged cilix, serge of wool.
Here, Homer, with the broad suspense
Of thunderous brows, and lips intense
Of garrulous god-innocence.
There, Shakspeare! on whose forehead climb
The crowns o’ the world! Oh, eyes sublime—
With tears and laughters for all time!
Here, Æschylus,—the women swooned
To see so awful when he frowned
As the gods did,—he standeth crowned.
Euripides, with close and mild
Scholastic lips,—that could be wild,
And laugh or sob out like a child
Right in the classes. Sophocles,
With that king’s look which down the trees,
Followed the dark effigies
Of the lost Theban! Hesiod old,
Who somewhat blind, and deaf and cold,
Cared most for gods and bulls! and bold
Electric Pindar, quick as fear,
With race-dust on his cheeks, and clear,
Slant startled eyes that seem to hear
The chariot rounding the last goal,
To hurtle past it in his soul!
And Sappho crowned with aureole
Of ebon curls on calmed brows—
O poet-woman! none forgoes
The leap attaining the repose!
Theocritus, with glittering locks,
Dropt sideway, as betwixt the rocks
He watched the visionary flocks!
And Aristophanes! who took
The world with mirth, and laughter-struck
The hollow caves of Thought and woke
The infinite echoes hid in each.
And Virgil! shade of Mantuan beech
Did help the shade of bay to reach. [p. 374→]
And knit around his forehead high!—
For his gods wore less majesty
Than his brown bees hummed deathlessly,
Lucretius—nobler than his mood!
Who dropped his plummet down the broad
Deep universe, and said “No God,”
Finding no bottom! he denied
Divinely the Divine, and died
Chief poet on the Tiber-side,
By grace of God! his face is stern,
As one compelled, in spite of scorn,
To teach a truth he could not learn.
And Ossian, dimly seen or guessed!
Once counted greater than the rest,
When mountain-winds blew out his vest.
And Spenser drooped his dreaming head
(With languid sleep-smile you had said
From his own verse engendered)
On Ariosto’s, till they ran
Their locks in one!—The Italian
Shot nimbler heat of bolder man
From his fine lids. And Dante stern
And sweet, whose spirit was an urn
For wine and milk poured out in turn.
Hard-souled Alfieri; and fancy-willed
Boiardo,—who with laughters filled
The pauses of the jostled shield.
And Berni, with a hand stretched out
To sleek that storm! And not without
The wreath he died in, and the doubt
He died by, Tasso! bard and lover,
Whose visions were too thin to cover
The face of a false woman over.
And soft Racine,—and grave Corneille—
The orator of rhymes, whose wail
Scarce shook his purple! And Petrarch pale,
Who from his brainlit heart hath thrown
A thousand thoughts beneath the sun,
Each perfumed with the name of One.
And Camoens, with that look he had,
Compelling India’s Genius sad
From the wave through the Lusiad,
With murmurs of a purple ocean
Indrawn in vibrative emotion
Along the verse! And while devotion
In his wild eyes fantastic shone
Between the bright curls blown upon
By airs celestial, .. Calderon!
And bold De Vega,—who breathed quick
Song after song, till death’s old trick
Put pause to life and rhetoric.
And Goethe—with that reaching eye
His soul reached out from, far and high,
And fell from inner entity.
And Schiller, with heroic front
Worthy of Plutarch’s kiss upon ’t—
Too large for wreath of modern wont.
And Chaucer, with his infantine
Familiar clasp of things divine—
That mark upon his lip is wine.
Here Milton’s eyes strike piercing-dim!
The shapes of suns and stars did swim
Like clouds from them, and granted him
God for sole vision! Cowley, there,
Whose active fancy debonaire
Drew straws like amber—foul to fair.
Drayton and Browne,—with smiles they drew
From outward Nature to renew
From their own inward nature true.
And Marlowe, Webster, Fletcher, Ben—
Whose fire-heart sowed our furrows, when
The world was worthy of such men.
And Burns, with pungent passionings
Set in his eyes. Deep lyric springs
Are of the fire-mount’s issuings.
And Shelley, in his white ideal,
All statue-blind; and Keats, the real
Adonis, with the hymeneal
Fresh vernal buds half sunk between
His youthful curls, kissed straight and sheen
In his Rome-grave, by Venus queen.
And poor, proud Byron—sad as grave
And salt as life! forlornly brave,
And quivering with the dart he drave.
And visionary Coleridge, who
Did sweep his thoughts as angels do
Their wings, with cadence up the Blue.
These poets faced (and other more)
The lighted altar booming o’er
The clouds of incense dim and hoar:
And all their faces in the lull
Of natural things, looked wonderful
With life and death and deathless rule! [p. 375→]
All still as stone, and yet intense;
As if by spirit’s vehemence
That stone were carved, and not by sense.
All still and calm as statue-stone!
The life lay coiled unforgone
Up in the awful eyes alone,
And flung its length out through the air
Into whatever eyes should dare
To front them—Awful shapes and fair!
But where the heart of each should beat,
There seemed a wound instead of it,
From whence the blood dropped to their feet,
Drop after drop—dropped heavily,
As century follows century
Into deep eternity.
We have quoted this at length: have been anxious to lose not a word of it: as one of the finest pieces of criticism in the language; or rather of delicate critical and poetical sympathy—where subtle and comprehensive learning are made to look unpedantic, and poetical description is reinforced by a “learned spirit of dealing.” These, ye poets of this new world, are the shrines to look to—these the men that have the true gift of tongues—and this the spirit in which great things are reverenced and striven for.
In all that roll there is no small name, no petty tinkler’s glory made much of; and enskied under these, how should the spirit grow, and seek to make itself at home among grand and beautiful and enduring conceptions. The philosophy and illustration by which this admirable passage is introduced and succeeded are excellent—full of subtle suggestions and fine analogies, and a consciousness of a right to speak on the part of the author. Then, with another of the ballads, “the Rhyme of the Duchess of May,” striking, and effective and characteristic—we come upon a little piece of an altogether different spirit— the management of which shows how great individuality of power in the poet may overmaster the plainest and commonest material.
THE LADY’S YES.*
“Yes!” I answered you last night;
“No!” this morning, Sir, I say!
Colors, seen by candle-light,
Will not look the same by day.
When the tabors played their best,
Lamps above, and laughs below—
Love me sounded like a jest,
Fit for Yes or fit for No!
Call me false, or call me free—
Vow, whatever light may shine,
No man on thy face shall see
Any grief for change on mine.
Yet the sin is on us both—
Time to dance is not to woo—
Wooer light makes fickle troth—
Scorn of me recoils on you!
Learn to win a lady’s faith
Nobly, as the thing is high;
Bravely, as for life and death—
With a loyal gravity.
Lead her from the festive boards,
Point her to the starry skies,
Guard her, by your truthful words,
Pure from courtship’s flatteries.
By your truth she shall be true—
Ever true, as wives of yore—
And her Yes, once said to you,
Shall be Yes for evermore.
________
*It is to the credit of Mr. Graham’s Magazine at Philadelphia, where this poem originally appeared, that it was the first to publish in this country an original production of Miss Barrett’s; and that from time to time others of her writings have been by that means widely circulated through the United States.
________
Passing by two or three minor poems, each good in its kind, we hear “The Cry of the Children,” a noble and stirring supplication, rising from the very depths of the poet’s soul, to every other true soul in the realm, and in the world. It is known throughout America, and we only dwell upon it, to mark the pathetic truth in the career of the little overworked factory-child, that the morning comes at last, for come it must, when
From the sleep wherein she lieth, none will waken her,
Crying, “Get up, little Alice! it is day,”
and that other passage, terrible and Dantesque to us, where [p. 376→]
All day, the wheels are droning, turning,—
Their wind comes in our faces,—
Till our hearts turn,—our heads, with pulses burning,
And the walls turn in their places—
Turns the sky in the high window blank and reeling—
Turns the long light that droppeth down the wall—
Turn the black flies that crawl along the ceiling—
All are turning, all the day, and we with all!—
And all day the iron wheels are droning;
And sometimes we could pray,
“O ye wheels” (breaking out in a mad moaning),
“Stop! be silent for to-day!”
and sustained as well in what ensues.
“Crowned and Wedded,” and “Crowned and Buried,” are counterparts to each other, the one being a graceful rendering of passages in the life of Victoria I., and the other a powerful commentary on the career of Napoleon; each of which is entitled to the praise of originality in subjects not easily treated with freshness and spirit. There are many lines in these worth quoting; emphatic and picturesque.
Then a charming little copy of verses to the Poet’s Dog Flush, the gift of her “dear and admired friend” (whose dear and admired friend, in a wider sense, is she not) “Miss Mitford.” It is a happiness to know that Flush has not yet attained the age of baldness; we know he has not that of gravity, for the poet prompts him with an assurance,
Leap!—thy broad tail waves a light,
Leap! thy slender feet are bright,
Canopied in fringes.
Leap—those tasselled ears of thine
Flicker strangely, fair and fine,
Down their golden inches.
Then we have—hark again! “The Cry of the Human,” to class with “The Cry of the Children;” fearful and earnest, and full of power, and known as widely as that. “Bertha in the Lane,” pastoral, tender, and well wrought out, but perhaps not one of the best. “The Wine of Cyprus,” spirited and energetic; and other minor poems, closing, characteristically, with “The Dead Pan,” in answer to a poem of Schiller’s, in which Miss Barrett, of course, adopts the more thoroughly devotional view of the legend, and plants herself, as is her custom, on the ground of highest spirituality and refinement. These concluding poems are mostly written in the manner of pieces which occur earlier in the volumes; have her usual characteristics, and sustain the collection to the end.
And now that we have arrived at a point where we seem called upon to say something of the sum of Miss Barrett’s powers, and of her rank in the literature in whose language she writes: we find her in possession of a spirit of profound devotion to her art, reverent of its great masters; skilled in the appliances which do not make poetry, but without which no poetry can be made, and wielding these successfully through a varied tract of different styles, topics, and measures. She is individual, distinct, and peculiar in what she does, and separated from every other poet of the day by leading characteristics. In aid of this, which is the spirit of her labors, we find her in command of a rhythm as well as a rhyme peculiar to herself: frequently employed, and almost always with success. Its singularity lying, perhaps, after all, in the extreme subtilty of her power of association, in right of which she is accustomed to take a wide circuit in the opening, and to come in from a great distance to conclude her measure in some altogether unexpected form. To this should be added, that she relies greatly on an understood fund of learning in her reader; and taxes him, close and frequent, for whatever resources of nice analogy and far-off allusion he may be master. Her appeal is oftener to the mind than to the eye; she describes things by their essence, and not by color. Her landscapes are in the mind projected outward: not drawn close to the mind from without. But in the midst of this powerful tendency of her intellect, we think we discover a process of concentration and objectivity going on, by which the external world is acquiring value in her eyes, from its relations to the world of the unseen. Whatever she writes, is supported by a profound religious feeling—taking most frequently the guise of a certain spirituality of the imagination—sometimes obvious, sometimes concealed—but always there. And she is always true and magnanimous in dealing with the great qualities [p. 377→] of human nature, and will not blind her regard, for any reason, to what is excellent and praise-worthy, wherever it lies.
An eminent quality of her character we take to be truth, and the love of truth. It is not this, altogether, that has made her a poet; but it is this that gives her poems force and value. She will not be false to her convictions for the sake of a fine image; nor will she fail to speak her mind, though it bring her upon a bad rhyme. It must not be understood from this that there is anything like hardness, or want of passion in her writings: they are full of passion, but passion of a peculiar kind: the passion of a peculiar nature, subtly moved to show itself, and in a subtle utterance. It is her noblest praise that she belongs in spirit and purpose, to the great school of writers whose praise she has so well spoken. Her affections are true and generous; and should Heaven grant her more of that life which is dealt to her, as we know, so feebly now; lead her forth once more into the green fields, and allow her once more to stand under its blue shelter, out of the disquietude and pain and short-coming that attend on the lonely house—we know not what we might not promise her and ourselves of good and beautiful and true. But why do we seem to repine when Heaven perchance (no doubt it has!) has measured to her and to us its fairest measure, letting fall grain by grain, with a golden cadence, where it might have spread into discord and nothingness. It is enough for us to know that here is a true advance on former endeavors; and that enough has already been done to give our friend and benefactor a high rank, the very highest, among English women who have helped to speed our English tongue throughout the world!
[Cornelius Mathews]
Reviewed:
A Drama of Exile, and Other Poems (EBB), New York: Henry G. Langley, 1845.
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