R551124B. Men and Women.
The Saturday Review, 24 November 1855, pp. 69–70.
As reprinted in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 22, 302–304.
It is really high time that this sort of thing should, if possible, be stopped. Here is another book of madness and mysticism—another melancholy specimen of power wantonly wasted, and talent deliberately perverted—another act of self-prostration before that demon of bad taste who now seems to hold in absolute possession the fashionable masters of our ideal literature. It is a strong case for the correctional justice of criticism, which has too long abdicated its proper functions. The Della Crusea of Sentimentalism perished under the Baviad—is there to be no future Gifford for the Della Crusca of Transcendentalism? The thing has really grown to a lamentable head amongst us. The contagion has affected not only our sciolists and our versifiers, but those whom, in the absence of a mightier race, we must be content to accept as the poets of our age. Here is Robert Browning, for instance—no one can doubt that he is capable of better things—no one, while deploring the obscurities that deface the Paracelsus and the Dramatic Lyrics, can deny the less questionable qualities which characterized those remarkable poems—but can any of his devotees be found to uphold his present elaborate experiment on the patience of the public? Take any of his worshippers you please—let him be “well up” in the transcendental poets of the day—take him fresh from Alexander Smith, or Alfred Tennyson’s Maud, or the Mystic of Bailey—and we will engage to find him at least ten passages in the first ten pages of Men and Women, some of which, even after profound study, he will not be able to construe at all, and not one of which will he be able to read off at sight. Let us take one or two selections at random from the first volume, and try. What, for instance, is the meaning of these four stanzas from the poem, entitled “By the Fireside”?—
My perfect wife, My Leonor,
Oh, heart my own, oh, eyes, mine too,
Whom else could I dare look backward for,
With whom beside should I dare pursue
The path grey heads abhor?
For it leads to a crag’s sheer edge with them;
Youth, flowery all the way, there stops—
Not they; age threatens and they contemn,
Till they reach the gulf wherein youth drops,
One inch from our life’s safe hem!
With me, youth led—I will speak now,
No longer watch you as you sit
Reading by fire-light, that great brow
And the spirit-small hand propping it
Mutely—my heart knows how—
When, if I think but deep enough,
You are wont to answer, prompt as rhyme;
And you, too, find without a rebuff
The response your soul seeks many a time
Piercing its fine flesh-stuff—
We really should think highly of the powers of any interpreter who could “pierce” the obscurity of such “stuff” as this. One extract more, and we have done. A gold medal in the department of Hermeneutical Science to the ingenious individual who, after any length of study, can succeed in unriddling this tremendous passage from “Master Hugues of Saxe-Gotha,” the organist:—
First you deliver your phrase
—Nothing propound, that I see,
Fit in itself for much blame or much praise—
Answered no less, where no answer needs be:
Off start the Two on their ways!
Straight must a Third interpose,
Volunteer needlessly help—
In strikes a Fourth, a Fifth thrusts in his nose,
So the cry’s open, the kennel’s a-yelp,
Argument’s hot to the close.
One disertates, he is candid—
Two must di[s]cept,—has distinguished!
Three helps the couple, if ever yet man did;
Four protests; Five makes a dart at the thing wished—
Back to One, goes the case bandied!
One says his say with a difference—
More of expounding, explaining!
All now is wrangle, abuse, and vociferance—
Now there’s a truce, all’s subdued, self-restraining—
Five, though, stands out all the stiffer hence.
One is incisive, corrosive—
Two retorts, nettled, curt, crepitant—
Three makes rejoinder, expansive, explosive—
Four overbears them all, strident and strepitant—
Five … O Danaides, O Sieve!
Now, they ply axes and crowbars—
Now, they prick pins at a tissue
Fine as a skein of the casuist Escobar’s
Worked on the bone of a lie. To what issue?
Where is our gain at the Two-bars?
Est fuga, volvitur rota!
On we drift. Where looms the dim port
One, Two, Three, Four, Five, contribute their quota—
Something is gained, if one caught but the import—
Show it us, Hugues of Saxe-Gotha!
What with affirming, denying,
Holding, risposting, subjoining,
All’s like … it’s like … for an instance I’m trying …
There! See our roof, its gilt moulding and groining
Under those spider-webs lying!
So your fugue broadens and thickens,
Greatens and deepens and lengthens,
Till one exclaims—“But where’s music, the dickens?
Blot ye the gold, while your spider-web strengthens,
Blacked to the stoutest of tickens?”
Do our readers exclaim, “But where’s poetry—the dickens!—in all this rigmarole?” We confess we can find none—we can find nothing but a set purpose to be obscure, and an idiot captivity to the jingle of Hudibrastic rhyme. This idle weakness really appears to be at the bottom of half the daring nonsense in this most daringly nonsensical book. Hudibras Butler told us long ago that “rhyme the rudder is of verses;” and when, as in his case, or in that of Ingoldsby Barham, or Whims-and-Oddities Hood, the rudder guides the good ship into tracks of fun and fancy she might otherwise have missed, we are grateful to the double-endings, not on their own account, but for what they have led us to. But Mr. Browning is the mere thrall of his own rudder, and is constantly being steered by it into whirl-pools of the most raging absurdity. This morbid passion for double rhymes, which is observable more or less throughout the book, reaches its climax in a long copy of verses on the “Old Pictures of Florence,” which, with every disposition to be tolerant of the frailties of genius, we cannot hesitate to pronounce a [p. 70→] masterpiece of absurdity. Let the lovers of the Hudibrastic admire these tours de force:—
Not that I expect the great Bigordi
Nor Sandro to hear me, chivalric, bellicose;
Nor wronged Lippino—and not a word I
Say of a scrap of Fra Angelico’s.
But are you too fine, Taddeo Gaddi,
To grant me a taste of your intonaco—
Some Jerome that seeks the heaven with a sad eye?
No churlish saint, Lorenzo Monaco?
* * * * *
Margheritone of Arezzo,
With the grave-clothes garb and swaddling barret,
(Why purse up mouth and beak in a pet so,
You bald, saturnine, poll-clawed parrot?)
No poor glimmering Crucifixion,
Where in the foreground kneels the donor?
If such remain, as is my conviction,
The hoarding does you but little honour.
The conclusion of this poem rises to a climax:—
How we shall prologuise, how we shall perorate,
Say fit things upon art and history—
Set truth at blood-heat and the false at a zero rate,
Make of the want of the age no mystery!
Contrast the fructuous and sterile eras,
Show, monarchy its uncouth cub licks
Out of the bear’s shape to the chimæra’s—
Pure Art’s birth being still the republic’s!
Then one shall propose (in a speech, curt Tuscan,
Sober, expurgate, spare of an “issimo,”)
Ending our half-told tale of Cambuscan,
Turning the Bell-tower’s altaltissimo.
And fine as the beak of a young beccaccia
The Campanile, the Duomo’s fit ally,
Soars up in gold its full fifty braccia,
Completing Florence, as Florence, Italy.
How really deplorable is all this! On what theory of art can it possibly be defended? In all the fine arts alike—poetry, painting, sculpture, music—the master works have this in common, that they please in the highest degree the most cultivated, and to the widest extent the less cultivated. Lear and the Divine Comedy exhaust the thinking of the profoundest student, yet subdue to hushed and breathless attention the illiterate minds that know not what study means. The “Last Judgment,” the “Transfiguration,” the “Niobe,” and the “Dying Gladiator” excite alike the intelligent rapture of artists, and the unintelligent admiration of those to whom art and its principles are a sealed book. Handel’s Israel in Egypt —the wonder of the scientific musician in his closet—yet sways to and fro, like a mighty wind upon the waters, the hearts of assembled thousands at an Exeter Hall oratorio. To take an instance more striking still, Beethoven, the sublime, the rugged, the austere, is also, as even Mons. Jullien could tell us, fast becoming a popular favourite. Now why is this? Simply because these master minds, under the divine teaching of genius, have known how to clothe their works in a beauty of form incorporate with their very essence—a beauty of form which has an elective affinity with the highest instincts of universal humanity. And it is on this beauty of form, this exquisite perfection of style, that the Baileys and the Brownings would have us believe that they set small account, that they purposely and scornfully trample. We do not believe it. We believe that it is only because they are half-gifted that they are but half-intelligible. Their mysticism is weakness—weakness writhing itself into contortions that it may ape the muscles of strength. Artistic genius, in its higher degrees, necessarily involves the power of beautiful self-expression. It is but a weak and watery sun that allows the fogs to hang heavy between the objects on which it shines and the eyes it would enlighten; the true day-star chases the mists at once, and shows us the world at a glance.
Our main object has been to protest against what we feel to be the false teachings of a perverted school of art; and we have used this book of Mr. Browning’s chiefly as a means of showing the extravagant lengths of absurdity to which the tenets of that school can lead a man of admitted powers. We should regret, however, in the pursuit of this object, to inflict injustice on Mr. Browning. This last book of his, like most of its predecessors, contains some undeniable beauties—subtle thoughts, graceful fancies, and occasionally a strain of music, which only makes the chaos of surrounding discords jar more harshly on the ear. The dramatic scenes “In a Balcony” are finely conceived and vigorously written; “Bishop Blougram’s Apology,” and “Cleon,” are well worth reading and thinking over; and there is a certain grace and beauty in several of the minor poems. That which, on the whole, has pleased us most—really, perhaps, because we could read it off-hand—is “The Statue and the Bust,” of which we give the opening stanzas:—
There’s a palace in Florence, the world knows well,
And a statue watches it from the square,
And this story of both do the townsmen tell.
Ages ago, a lady there,
At the farthest window facing the east
Asked, “Who rides by with the royal air?”
The brides-maids’ prattle around her ceased;
She leaned forth, one on either hand;
They saw how the blush of the bride increased—
They felt by its beats her heart expand—
As one at each ear and both in a breath
Whispered, “The Great-Duke Ferdinand.”
That self-same instant, underneath,
The Duke rode past in his idle way,
Empty and fine like a swordless sheath.
Gay he rode, with a friend as gay,
Till he threw his head back—“Who is she?”
—“A Bride the Riccardi brings home to day.”
* * * * *
He looked at her, as a lover can;
She looked at him, as one who awakes,—
The past was a sleep, and her life began.
As love so ordered for both their sakes,
A feast was held that self-same night
In the pile which the mighty shadow makes.
(For Via Larga is three-parts light,
But the Palace overshadows one,
Because of a crime which may God requite!
To Florence and God the wrong was done,
Through the first republic’s murder there
By Cosimo and his cursed son.)
The Duke (with the statue’s face in the square)
Turned in the midst of his multitude
At the bright approach of the bridal pair.
Face to face the lovers stood
A single minute and no more,
While the bridegroom bent as a man subdued—
Bowed till his bonnet brushed the floor—
For the Duke on the lady a kiss conferred,
As the courtly custom was of yore.
In a minute can lovers exchange a word?
If a word did pass, which I do not think,
Only one out of the thousand heard.
That was the bridegroom.
Why should a man who, with so little apparent labour, can write naturally and well, take so much apparent labour to write affectedly and ill? There can be but one of two solutions. Either he goes wrong from want of knowledge, in which case it is clear that he wants the highest intuitions of genius; or he sins against knowledge, in which case he must have been misled by the false promptings of a morbid vanity, eager for that applause of fools which always waits on quackery, and which is never refused to extravagance when tricked out in the guise of originality. It is difficult, from the internal evidence supplied by his works, to know which of these two theories to adopt. Frequently the conclusion is almost irresistible, that Mr. Browning’s mysticism must be of malice propense: on the whole, however, we are inclined to clear his honesty at the expense of his powers, and to conclude that he is obscure, not so much because he has the vanity to be thought original, as because he lacks sufficient genius to make himself clear.
Reviewed:
Men and Women (RB), London: Chapman & Hall, 1855.
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