R551201D. Men and Women.
The Examiner, 1 December 1855, pp. 756–757.
As reprinted in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 22, 317–320.
In these volumes the dramatic character of Mr. Browning’s genius displays itself in a way familiar to the readers of his former lyrics. Some fifty men or women of the most various character, and placed in positions that present often the strongest contrasts with each other, are supposed to express portions of their individuality in the several poems (about fifty in all) which constitute the book. Now the person who speaks is a Greek poet, speculating upon high things from his especial point of view, in a letter to a munificent Tyrannos whose rich gifts lie piled together on the pavement of the poets’ court. Now it is a wild chant of the orthodox about a burning heretic, and now a modern strain of pure domestic love. Old painters live again—seeming to speak to us out of their inmost hearts; and old musicians play to us their fugues or toccatas—let us confess as much to our occasional discomposure as if the organ or catgut were under our windows at this moment of writing. Then there is the Arab physician Karshish, who, having occasion to write
To Abib, all sagacious in our art
much about gum-tragacanth, and the true snake-stone, adds a good deal more about what he calls a strange case of mania; the case of
one Lazarus a Jew
Sanguine, proportioned, fifty years of age
The body’s habit wholly laudable.
At this poem we will pause for a moment. Subtle, and full of noble and high suggestion, is the Arab Doctor’s picture of the Lazarus, who, having died and seen God, was alive again; and who, with a real knowledge of the other world to bear upon his estimate of this, came back to live among the cares of men.
Heaven opened to a soul while yet on earth,
Earth forced on a soul’s use while seeing Heaven.
The man is witless of the size, the sum,
The value in proportion of all things,
Or whether it be little or be much.
Discourse to him of prodigious armaments
Assembled to besiege his city now,
And of the passing of a mule with gourds—
’Tis one! Then take it on the other side,
Speak of some trifling fact—he will gaze rapt
With stupor at its very littleness—
(Far as I see) as if in that indeed
He caught prodigious import, whole results;
And so will turn to us the bystanders
In ever the same stupor (note this point)
That we too see not with his opened eyes!
Wonder and doubt come wrongly into play,
Preposterously, at cross purposes.
* * *
And oft the man’s soul springs into his face
As if he saw again and heard again
His sage that bade him “Rise” and he did rise.
Something—a word, a tick of the blood within
Admonishes—then back he sinks at once
To ashes, that was very fire before,
In sedulous recurrence to his trade
Whereby he earneth him the daily bread—
And studiously the humbler for that pride,
Professedly the faultier that he knows
God’s secret, while he holds the thread of life.
Indeed the especial marking of the man
Is prone submission to the Heavenly will—
Seeing it, what it is, and why it is.
’Sayeth, he will wait patient to the last
For that same death which will restore his being
To equilibrium, body loosening soul
Divorced even now by premature full growth:
He will live, nay, it pleaseth him to live
So long as God please, and just how God please.
He even seeketh not to please God more
(Which meaneth, otherwise) than as God please.
Hence I perceive not he affects to preach
The doctrine of his sect whate’er it be—
Make proselytes as madmen thirst to do.
How can he give his neighbour the real ground,
His own conviction? ardent as he is—
Call his great truth a lie, why still the old
“Be it as God please” reassureth him.
I probed the sore as thy disciple should—
“How, beast,” said I, “this stolid carelessness
Sufficeth thee, when Rome is on her march
To stamp out like a little spark thy town,
Thy tribe, thy crazy tale and thee at once?”
He merely looked with his large eyes on me.
The man is apathetic, you deduce?
Contrariwise he loves both old and young,
Able and weak—affects the very brutes
And birds—how say I? flowers of the field—
As a wise workman recognises tools
In a master’s workshop, loving what they make.
But, as Karshish, when he has finished his account, remarks—
Why write of trivial matters, things of price
Calling at every moment for remark?
I noticed on the margin of a pool
Blue-flowering borage, the Aleppo sort,
Aboundeth, very nitrous. It is strange!
From one of Mr Browning’s “Men” we pass now to another. It is a husband in soft reverie by his fireside, with his wife sitting in the chimney-corner. He is dreaming back to his sight the Italian woodland scene among the rocks, the stone-bridge and the chapel, the pool and the charcoal-burner’s huts—that he may dwell upon one especial hour of life spent there, and the moment of it by which his future was determined.
Oh moment, one and infinite!
The water slips o’er stock and stone;
The west is tender, hardly bright.
How grey at once is the evening grown—
One star, the chrysolite!
We two stood there with never a third,
But each by each, as each knew well.
The sights we saw and the sounds we heard,
The lights and the shades made up a spell
Till the trouble grew and stirred.
Oh, the little more, and how much it is!
And the little less, and what worlds away!
How a sound shall quicken content to bliss,
Or a breath suspend the blood’s best play,
And life be a proof of this!
With the tranquil happiness of that whole poem, contrast the masterly expression of the fee-fa-fum in poetry which is conveyed by the strain taken from the text of Edgar’s song in Lear, “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came.” One glimpse of Childe Roland upon his journey will suffice to point the extreme change in character.
As for the grass, it grew as scant as hair
In leprosy—thin dry blades pricked the mud
Which underneath looked kneaded up with blood.
One stiff blind horse, his every bone a-stare,
Stood stupified, however he came there—
Thrust out past service from the devil’s stud!
Alive? he might be dead for all I know,
With that red gaunt and colloped neck a-strain,
And shut eyes underneath the rusty mane.
Seldom went such grotesqueness with such woe:
I never saw a brute I hated so—
He must be wicked to deserve such pain.
* * * *
A sudden little river crossed my path
As unexpected as a serpent comes,
No sluggish tide congenial to the glooms—
This, as it frothed by, might have been a bath
For the fiend’s glowing hoof—to see the wrath
Of its black eddy bespate with flakes and spumes.
So petty yet so spiteful! all along,
Low scrubby alders kneeled down over it;
Drenched willows flung them headlong in a fit
Of mute despair, a suicidal throng:
The river which had done them all the wrong,
Whate’er that was, rolled by, deterred no whit.
Which, while I forded,—good saints, how I feared
To set my foot upon a dead man’s cheek,
Each step, or feel the spear I thrust to seek
For hollows, tangled in his hair or beard!
—It may have been a water-rat I speared,
But, ugh! it sounded like a baby’s shriek.
And so the poem proceeds through a succession of objects perfectly natural in themselves, but to which the condition of mind in the traveller is made to impart a quasi-supernatural terror. As a mere study in the poet’s art this piece is very striking.
Very different is the sort of man who speaks in the modern Italian who compares the relative advantages of life “Up at a Villa and Down in the City.”
What of a villa? Though winter be over in March by rights,
’Tis May perhaps ere the snow shall have withered well off the heights:
You’ve the brown ploughed land before, where the oxen steam and wheeze,
And the hills over-smoked behind by the faint grey olive trees.
* * * * *
Ere opening your eyes in the city, the blessed church bells begin:
No sooner the bells leave off, than the diligence rattles in:
You get the pick of the news, and it costs you never a pin.
By and by there’s the travelling doctor gives pills, lets blood, draws teeth;
Or the Pulcinello-trumpet breaks up the market beneath.
At the post-office such a scene-picture—the new play, piping hot!
And a notice how, only this morning, three liberal thieves were shot.
Above it, behold the archbishop’s most fatherly of rebukes,
And beneath, with his crown and his lion, some little new law of the Duke’s!
Or a sonnet with flowery marge, to the Reverend Don So-and-so
Who is Dante, Boccaccio, Petrarca, Saint Jerome, and Cicero,
“And moreover,” (the sonnet goes rhyming,) “the skirts of St Paul has reached,
Having preached us those six Lent-lectures more unctuous than ever he preached.”
Noon strikes,—here sweeps the procession! our Lady borne smiling and smart
With a pink gauze gown all spangles, and seven swords stuck in her heart!
Bang, whang, whang, goes the drum, tootle-te-tootle the fife;
No keeping one’s haunches still: it’s the greatest pleasure in life.
Wide surely is the range of the dramatic genius that can give expression to character like this, and has also power to fill our hearts with such a strain caught from the very spirit of the Hebrew poets as afterwards represents to us David harping songs (and prefiguring the Saviour) to spirit-troubled Saul.
But the two poems that appear most to stand out from the rest, in importance and a strikingly dramatic power, are those entitled, “In a Balcony” and “Bishop Blougram’s Apology;” of which the former is the only piece in the volumes where the action is developed by more speakers than one. It is a dramatic sketch in the most ordinary sense of the phrase, sustained by three characters, and consisting of three scenes: the action passing throughout, by moonlight, in a balcony attached to the picture-gallery and ball-room of a Queen. The characters are those of this Queen, a woman elderly in years; of her young cousin, a lady of the Court; and of a statesman, who, for the sake of the cousin whom he loves, had entered the Queen’s service, and has achieved in it advantages of momentous importance to the throne. In reward for these, the statesman-lover is about to ask from the Queen her cousin’s hand; but the young lady, too fearful of a withholding of the royal consent, over-persuades him (in the first scene) not to make his demand abruptly, but first to approach the Queen with flatteries that women love. He is to ask for the cousin as
the next thing to the queen—
Since none loves her directly, none dares that!
A shadow of a thing, a name’s mere echo
Suffices those who miss the name and thing;
You pick up just a ribbon she has worn
To keep in proof how near her breath you came.
Say I’m so near I seem a piece of her—
Ask for me that way.
The second scene reveals to the poor cousin her terrible mistake. The statesman, Norbert, has retired into the ball-room promising to act as she desires, and presently the old Queen comes out to her, with her woman’s heart touched for the first time, and her long pining for human love suddenly satisfied. What she had thought and felt as Norbert presented himself, she relates; and then, what she expected him to say—and what, substituting his love for the cousin as but a complimentary reflex of his love for the Queen, he has blundered into making her believe he intended to say—is thus told.
It did seem to me your face
Met him where’er he looked: and whom but you
Was such a man to love? it seemed to me
You saw he loved you, and approved the love,
And that you both were in intelligence.
You could not loiter in the garden, step
Into this balcony, but I straight was stung
And forced to understand. It seemed so true,
So right, so beautiful, so like you both
That all this work should have been done by him
Not for the vulgar hope of recompense,
But that at last—suppose some night like this—
Borne on to claim his due reward of me
He might say, “Give her hand and pay me so.”
And I (O Constance, you shall love me now)
I thought, surmounting all the bitterness,
—“And he shall have it. I will make her blest,
My flower of youth, my woman’s self that was,
My happiest woman’s self that might have been!
These two shall have their joy and leave me here.”
Yes—yes—
constance.
Thanks!
queen.
And the word was on my lips
When he burst in upon me. I looked to hear
A mere calm statement of his just desire
In payment of his labour. When, O Heaven,
How can I tell you? cloud was on my eyes
And thunder in my ears at that first word
Which told ’twas love of me, of me, did all—
He loved me—from the first step to the last,
Loved me!
The third interview, which is between the two women and the man they both love, the one striving to keep up the other’s delusion even by sacrifice of her lover, and the lover suddenly confessing all—closes in a situation of singular dramatic interest. The whole of this little piece indeed is so full of life and pathos, that, in the hands of actors reasonably competent, it would surely form a most effective sketch upon the stage.
Quite in another tone is Bishop Blougram’s Apology—perhaps the best, certainly the most subtle poem of the series. Bishop Blougram is a highly prosperous Roman Catholic bishop (in partibus)—perhaps, who knows? an English cardinal—and he appears to have been sorely twitted, some time or other, by his friend “Gigadibs the literary man” with his intellectual and moral inferiority as a believer in papistry and superstition, to the said Gigadibs himself and men of that superior mental sort. Whereupon the bishop has for once asked the literary man to dine with him, and after dinner seizes his occasion quietly and leisurely to roll him out his mind. The propriety of a profession of absolute faith in the church—to the very liquefaction of St Januarius’s blood—he coolly discusses in its various bearings upon his own repute for astuteness and worldly common sense, not even caring to deny the scepticism from which men are certain he cannot possibly be free. Nor does he discuss less directly his right to covet and obtain the good things of this world in most luxurious abundance. The object of the poem, in short, is to show you how all these things can be fused together and become coherent in the mind of a church dignitary (not, we suppose, of Rome only); how he can feel, over his claret, that he serves God duly in his station; and that as for his scepticism, if he must be troubled with it, his business is but to exert sufficient strength to keep it down, because his conscience just as much as his common prudence teaches him to reject
A life of doubt diversified by faith
For one of faith diversified by doubt.
For ourselves we must add that we think the bishop makes out his case remarkably well. Against the aspirations of his literary friend after an unattainable perfection, when for its sake attainable advantages of this world are left unsought and unenjoyed, he brings up a battery of first-rate common sense. The bishop for his own part has been content to prepare himself for the voyage of life by seeking furniture of the kind really suited to his cabin.
Of course you are remarking all this time
How narrowly and grossly I view life,
Respect the creature-comforts, care to rule
The masses, and regard complacently
“The cabin,” in our old phrase! Well, I do.
I act for, talk for, live for this world now,
As this world calls for action, life and talk—
No prejudice to what next world may prove,
Whose new laws and requirements my best pledge
To observe then, is that I observe these now,
Doing hereafter what I do meanwhile.
Let us concede (gratuitously though)
Next life relieves the soul of body, yields
Pure spiritual enjoyments: well, my friend,
Why lose this life in the meantime, since its use
May be to make the next life more intense?
Do you know, I have often had a dream
(Work it up in your next month’s article)
Of man’s poor spirit in its progress still
Losing true life for ever and a day
Through ever trying to be and ever being
In the evolution of successive spheres.
Before its actual sphere and place of life,
Half way into the next, which having reached,
It shoots with corresponding foolery
Halfway into the next still, on and off!
As when a traveller, bound from north to south,
Scouts fur in Russia—what’s its use in France?
In France spurns flannel—where’s its need in Spain?
In Spain drops cloth—too cumbrous for Algiers!
Linen goes next, and last the skin itself,
A superfluity at Timbuctoo.
When, through his journey, was the fool at ease?
I’m at ease now, friend—worldly in this world;
I take and like its way of life; I think
My brothers who administer the means
Live better for my comfort—that’s good too;
And God, if he pronounce upon it all,
Approves my service, which is better still.
The whole of this powerful poem, in short, presents a subtle admixture of true wisdom and genuine religious instinct joined and reconciled to a thoroughly comfortable worldliness. And one part of it must have convinced even his literary assailant, for he soon afterwards buys emigrants’ tools and proceeds to begin life in Australia: and as we cannot suppose a Gigadibs to have proved not worthy his salt as a writer of leading articles here, we must accept his departure as a proof that Blougram had thoroughly discontented him with a continuance of such thin mental fare as that of simple aspiration.
To give that up indeed, to abandon the idle hope of seeking the other world simply by shunning this, and above all to do with all one’s might whatsoever the hand finds to do, delaying nothing till to-morrow that may be done to-day, is a lesson taught by more than one of Mr Browning’s “men and women”; and in the very charming poem of the Statue and the Bust, written in the terza rima with incomparable facility and grace, this latter feeling finds its utmost illustration.
Let a man contend to the uttermost
For his life’s set prize, be it what it will!
To which let us add what the Greek poet, Cleon, writes of the habit of discontent with what is, and of desire for what cannot be.
They praise a fountain in my garden here
Wherein a Naiad sends the water-spurt
Thin from her tube; she smiles to see it rise.
What if I told her, it is just a thread
From that great river which the hills shut up,
And mock her with my leave to take the same?
The artificer has given her one small tube
Past power to widen or exchange—what boots
To know she might spout oceans if she could? [p. 757→]
She cannot lift beyond her first straight thread.
And so a man can use but a man’s joy
While he sees God’s.
And so the Grammarians of old, carrying their master to burial on the heights, sing as they go:
That low man seeks a little thing to do,
Sees it and does it:
This high man, with a great thing to pursue,
Dies ere he knows it.
That low man goes on adding one to one,
His hundred’s soon hit:
This high man, aiming at a million,
Misses an unit.
That, has the world here—should he need the next,
Let the world mind him!
This throws himself on God, and unperplext
Seeking shall find Him.
All through these poems, at the same time, are touches in abundance that save the poet from any charge of a materialist temper in such teaching. In “Evelyn Hope;” in the address of the dying wife, “Any Wife to any Husband;” in many another page, and not least in those pages where the poet, speaking in his own person, dedicates his Men and Women to his own wife; there is full expression given to the purest spiritual feeling.
But we must quote no more. Only indeed to establish beyond dispute that these volumes are not exclusively “obscure and mystical” have we been induced to quote so much. No doubt there are too many pieces in the volumes to which the objection of obscurity in the meaning, and of a perverse harshness in the metres, may be justly urged. It is Mr Browning’s old fault. Since his first poem was published twenty years ago, when we were the first to promise him the reputation he has won, this journal has been incessantly objecting to it. But there is some danger at present, we see, of the objection being carried too far. An occasional obscurity of expression which may be the drawback on a full mind, is a very different thing from that constant obscurity of no expression which is the only claim to admiration in an empty one. Much of the former proceeds in the present case from what we fear is inseparable from a cast of thought imparting nevertheless to the whole its pervading excellence and flavour. The robust intellect works actively; and the perceptions of a poet, when applied to thoughts of more than common subtlety, will often necessarily outrun his reader’s. Such obscurity proceeds from fullness, not emptiness; and it is not always that a thought which is hard to follow will be found not worth the exercise of mind required for overtaking it. A distinctive quaintness, a complete absence of diffuseness, and the inborn dramatic feeling which is often apt to suggest breaks of phrase, and striking interruptions to a train of thought, are among the chief causes of what is most complained of in Mr Browning. They are part of the writer’s individuality, and it is by right of his individuality that he will live, if he is to be read by future generations. We do not say this by way of defending unquestionable faults, but to explain why they disfigure the work of a man of true genius. We heartily wish them all away; but they shall not prevent our pronouncing the poems we have quoted or named in this review, and many others which we have not been able either to quote or name (such charming lyrics as “A Woman’s Last Word,” “Love among the Ruins,” the stanzas so wonderfully expressive of “Mesmerism,” the “Last Ride,” the “Patriot,” &c.), to be as genuine poetry as any that has been written in our time.
[John Forster]
Reviewed:
Men and Women (RB), London: Chapman & Hall, 1855.
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