R551200B. Men and Women (Boston, 1856).
The Southern Literary Messenger, December 1855, p. 763.
As reprinted in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 22, 309.
[This review begins with general comments on other Ticknor and Fields publications, which we omit.]
Another volume of Poems, not designed for the million, but certainly far more comprehensible and nervous with a deeper thought, is that of “Men and Women,” by Robert Browning. We are not among those who passionately admire the style of this writer. That he has immense constructive power, the “Blot on the ’Scutcheon” would of itself sufficiently establish if he had written nothing else, but there is a painful obscurity about his meaning which renders him, to our taste at least, not an entertaining fireside companion. Were Browning content to make his dramatis personæ talk, he would assuredly take a very high rank as a[n] artist in that great class of which Shakspeare was the first, but he brings them forward to think—almost all their utterances, alone or in company, are soliloquies—they are forever introspective and fond of alluding to matters doubtless clear enough to themselves, but dark, impenetrably so, to a third person. Thus he has failed to enlist the sympathies of a wide circle of readers, and only those who are fond of mental analysis, can take any pleasure in following up the riddles of his dialogue. Browning has rare command over the language, but he employs it only to show off, just as good riders sometimes use a fine animal only to exhibit feats of equitation. In this way, under his hands it prances and dances, and snorts and cavorts, and cuts all manner of absurd antics, but never goes off in the high octo-syllabic trot, nor moves in the graceful anapæstic amble, nor yet dashes away in the free, splendid gallop of the old ballads. One poem that we recollect (since we have drawn upon horseback exercise for our illustrations,) we must mention as an exception to this dictum—we refer to that fine, bounding lyric of “How they brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix,” which fairly sparkles in every line with the fire from the hoofs striking against the stones of the road.
We need only say that all these publications are gotten up in the very best style of Messrs. Ticknor & Fields to assure the reader that they are choice specimens of the art of bookmaking.
Reviewed:
Men and Women (RB), Boston: Ticknor & Fields, 1856.
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