R551117B. Men and Women.
The Press, 17 November 1855, pp. 1100–01
As reprinted in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 22, 296–297.
Both Mr. Longfellow and Mr. Browning have their admirers. It is only fit that special poets should have special readers, and we shall not, for that reason, attempt to anticipate the judgment which will be passed on these performances by Longfellowites and Browningites. In neither case are the poems much to our taste. We conceive that their authors have adopted a vicious system; that they have mistaken affectation for originality; and that their works partake of the peculiar faults of that school which conceives itself privileged by virtue of its genius to emancipate itself from the laws of both rhyme and reason. We can, as in Mr. Tennyson’s last poem, see occasional beauties in these volumes, though rarer and of a less striking kind than in “Maud;” but, as coming from poets of some reputation, they seem to us very unsatisfactory proofs of the poetic talent and taste of our age. But our readers shall decide for themselves.
[The article in which this review appears continues with a notice of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha, which we omit.]
To Mr. Browning must be accorded a foremost place in the fragmentary or spasmodic school. He is evidently of opinion that to be poetic it is necessary to be obscure. He expects us to understand passion from a dash, pathos from a note of admiration, and a whole tumult of emotions from an unfinished sentence. He has heard of the ancient artist who indicated the father’s emotion at his daughter’s sacrifice by hiding his face. Mr. Browning is always veiling his meaning that we may understand the more from his absence of expression. He is a master of dark speech, and of fathomless intent. His meaning lies so deep, that no plummet we know of can sound it. After vain attempts to comprehend some of his poems—there are fifty of them in the two volumes, he tells us—we are forced to abandon the effort in despair. His Sphinx is too cunning for us. In the volume of Arago’s works just published, the French philosopher insists that clearness or intelligibility is the politeness an author owes to his readers. How Mr. Browning must scoff at such a rule. By his practice he insists that what is intelligible is worthless. It is the part of genius to produce what is incomprehensible. Like the tuneful Jubb in Little Pedlington, he has written poems which none but he can comprehend. We must give some examples, for in truth the book is of that kind which only specimens can describe. Here is one poem complete:— [p. 1101→]
respectability.
Dear, had the world in its caprice
Deigned to proclaim “I know you both,
Have recognised your plighted troth,
Am sponsor for you—live in peace!”—
How many precious months and years
Of youth had passed, that speed so fast,
Before we found it out at last,
The world, and what it fears?
How much of priceless life were spent
With men that every virtue decks,
And women models of their sex,
Society’s true ornament,—
Ere we dared wander, nights like this,
Thro’ wind and rain, and watch the Seine,
And feel the Boulevart break again
To warmth and light and bliss?
I know the world proscribes not love;
Allows my finger to caress
Your lip’s contour and downiness
Provided it supply a glove.
The world’s good word!—the Institute!
Guizot receives Montalembert!
Eh? down the court three lampions flare—
Put forward your best foot!
Those last lines are suspicious. We will not say that the poem does not contain profound meaning, that Mr. Browning’s admirers may not discern innumerable beauties in it, but we will be bound to say that the annals of Bedlam could supply volumes of matter of very similar kind—proofs of the poetic inspiration of its inmates.
Let us try again. Here is a longer and more ambitious piece:—
women and roses.
I dream of a red-rose tree.
And which of its roses three
Is the dearest rose to me?
Round and round, like a dance of snow
In a dazzling drift, as its guardians, go
Floating the women faded for ages,
Sculptured in stone, on the poet’s pages.
Then follow the women fresh and gay,
Living and loving and loved to-day.
Last, in the rear, flee the multitude of maidens,
Beauties unborn. And all, to one cadence,
They circle their rose on my rose tree.
Dear rose, thy term is reached,
Thy leaf hangs loose and bleached:
Bees pass it unimpeached.
Stay then, stoop, since I cannot climb,
You great shapes of the antique time!
How shall I fix you, fire you, freeze you,
Break my heart at your feet to please you?
Oh! to possess, and be possessed!
Hearts that beat ’neath each pallid breast!
But once of love, the poesy, the passion,
Drink once and die!—In vain, the same fashion,
They circle their rose on my rose tree.
Dear rose, thy joy’s undimmed;
Thy cup is ruby-rimmed,
Thy cup’s heart nectar-brimmed.
Deep as drops from a statue’s plinth
The bee sucked in by the hyacinth,
So will I bury me while burning,
Quench like him at a plunge my yearning,
Eyes in your eyes, lips on your lips!
Fold me fast where the cincture slips,
Prison all my soul in eternities of pleasure!
Girdle me once! But no—in their old measure
They circle their rose on my rose tree.
Dear rose without a thorn,
Thy bud’s the babe unborn:
First streak of a new morn.
Wings, lend wings for the cold, the clear!
What’s far conquers what is near.
Roses will bloom nor want beholders,
Sprung from the dust where our own flesh moulders.
What shall arrive with the cycle’s change?
A novel grace and a beauty strange.
I will make an Eve, be the artist that began her,
Shaped her to his mind!—Alas! in like manner
They circle the rose on my rose tree.
If any of our readers admire this piece, and fancy they can understand it, we recommend them to purchase Mr. Browning’s volumes at once. The right books will then get into the hands of the right readers. The sample is a favorable one of Mr. Browning’s poetic powers; in fact, the verses are about as unintelligible (Mr. Browning’s great claim to distinction) as any in the whole collection.
Those poems in which there is some glimmer of meaning are very little more satisfactory than those of which nothing can be made. Early in the first volume there is a piece headed “Evelyn Hope.” Beautiful Evelyn Hope died at sixteen. She had scarcely heard the name of the gentleman who moralises over her. But he claims her for his own:—
Is it too late, then, Evelyn Hope?
What, your soul was pure and true,
The good stars met in your horoscope,
Made you of spirit, fire, and dew—
And just because I was thrice as old,
And our paths in the world diverged so wide,
Each was nought to each, must I be told?
We were fellow mortals, nought beside?
There seems little natural connection between this girl of sixteen, made of “spirit, fire, and dew,” and the gentleman of forty eight who claims her. He has no doubt, however, of receiving her in the end:—
No, indeed! for God above
Is great to grant as mighty to make,
And creates the love to reward the love—
I claim you still for my own love’s sake!
Delayed it may be for more lives yet,
Through worlds I shall traverse, not a few—
Much is to learn and much to forget
Ere the time be come for taking you.
But the time will come—at last it will,
When, Evelyn Hope, what meant, I shall say,
In the lower earth, in the years long still,
That body and soul so pure and gay?
Why your hair was amber I shall divine,
And your mouth of your own geranium’s red—
And what you would do with me, in fine,
In the new life come in the old one’s stead.
So he gives her a leaf to keep as a pledge of their engagement, and concludes:—
See, I shut it inside the sweet cold hand.
There, that is our secret! go to sleep;
You will wake, and remember, and understand.
It would be useless to analyse further, or quote more. The dramatic fragments in the collection are best. That one headed “In a Balcony,” though it has the faults of the spasmodic school, is not without a certain kind of indicative passion.
As for the extravagance of expression to be found here, it passes all that we have been accustomed to meet with even in the undisciplined raggedness of modern verse. A church in Florence has
Its face set full for the sun to shave.
And one poem ends with the emphatic question,
Do I carry the moon in my pocket?
Affectation is the monster vice of our modern poets. It greatly disfigures the song of Tennyson, but Mr. Browning’s poems are affectation and nothing else. To be sure, the defence which has been set up for “Maud,” may be set up for “Men and Women.” If there be men of hysterical temperament, why should we not have a hysterical poem; and if there be men of affected intellect, why not have affected verse? For no other reason than this, that the aim of poetry should be to elevate or refine the mind, never to dwarf or debase it.
Reviewed:
Men and Women (RB), London: Chapman & Hall, 1855.
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