R551201E. Men and Women.
The Leader, 1 December 1855, pp. 1157–58; 8 December 1855, pp. 1182–83.
As reprinted in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 22, 320–323.
Robert Browning seems to us unmistakeably the most original poet of the day. We do not say the highest in reach, the most perfect in art, but the most distinctively original. Tennyson and Mr. Browning have both, we believe, more of that indescribable quality which is indicated by the phrase, poetic genius; but in both the parentage is obvious. Although we cannot call them imitators, we recognise their affinity to the poets who preceded them. In Robert Browning we detect no such parentage. He stands alone. He writes as if Wordsworth, Shelley, Coleridge, Keats had never been. For Shelley and Keats he has an avowed love, but no trace of their influence is visible. If any affinities between his poetry and that of predecessors are to be found, they must be sought in our old dramatists rather than in any modern writer.
This quality, which is surely very precious and rare, will necessarily act as a barrier to his popularity. It “puts the reader out.” He hears unfamiliar accents, and must learn to accommodate his ear to them. This, however, is the more difficult, because Browning’s manner is not only unusual, but abrupt, puzzling, needlessly obscure. He cramps his thoughts in hemistichs, instead of giving them space and air. He obscures what might otherwise be intelligible by some whimsical turn or title, which carry the mind away from the obvious meaning. We need not dwell on this much and justly noticed obscurity in a poet, who, like Browning, may be supposed to have settled down in his manner, from which no criticism now can move him. It is enough to indicate the point in passing, and to warn the reader, in reading him, not to give way impatiently—not to be provoked by what may seem mere whim and perversity, but to give some time and thought, assured that the pages which distress him are not without their value, if he “observingly distil it out.”
In Men and Women, all Browning’s merits and all his old defects may be found. The same power of terse, suggestive writing; the same abundance of imagery, forming, as it were, the flesh and substance of the verse, not often forced into external ornament—the tissue of the garment is of gold, not of common stuff, with golden spangles glittering here and there—the same dramatic power of going out of himself, and speaking through his characters; the same reach of knowledge and richness of observation; and, to close this enumeration before we make a catalogue of his qualities, the same marvellous power of story-telling in verse, render these volumes as acceptable as they are original. Such defects as we may espy in the poems are not the defects likely to mislead young poets; and as Browning is not a youngster to profit by newspaper criticism, he may as well not be teased by it. Our space will be better filled with extracts. Here, for instance, is a little poem, which, except for the obscurity of the fourth stanza, is a complete history:—
a woman’s last word.
Let’s contend no more, Love,
Strive nor weep—
All be as before, Love,
—Only sleep!
What so wild as words are?
—I and thou
In debate, as birds are,
Hawk on bough!
See the creature stalking
While we speak—
Hush and hide the talking,
Cheek on cheek!
What so false as truth is,
False to thee?
Where the serpent’s tooth is,
Shun the tree—
Where the apple reddens
Never pry—
Lest we lose our Edens,
Eve and I!
Be a god and hold me
With a charm—
Be a man and fold me
With thine arm!
Teach me, only teach, Love!—
As I ought
I will speak thy speech, Love
Think thy thought—
Meet, if thou require it,
Both demands,
Laying flesh and spirit
In thy hands!
That shall be to-morrow
Not to-night:
I must bury sorrow
Out of sight.
—Must a little weep, Love,
—Foolish me!
And so fall asleep, Love,
Loved by thee.
We should like to quote “The Statue and the Bust;” but it is too long, and we dare not spoil it by piecemeal citation. Take this story of—
a light woman.
So far as our story approaches the end,
Which do you pity the most of us three?—
My friend, or the mistress of my friend
With her wanton eyes, or me?
My friend was already too good to lose,
And seemed in the way of improvement yet,
When she crossed his path with her hunting noose
And over him drew her net.
When I saw him tangled in her toils,
A shame, said I, if she adds just him
To her nine-and-ninety other spoils,
The hundredth, for a whim!
And before my friend be wholly hers,
How easy to prove to him, I said,
An eagle’s the game her pride prefers,
Though she snaps at the wren instead!
So I gave her eyes my own eyes to take,
My hand sought hers as in earnest need,
And round she turned for my noble sake,
And gave me herself indeed.
The eagle am I, with my fame in the world,
The wren is he, with his maiden face.
—You look away and your lip is curled?
Patience, a moment’s space!
For see—my friend goes shaking and white;
He eyes me as the basilisk:
I have turned, it appears, his day to night,
Eclipsing his sun’s disc.
And I did it, he thinks, as a very thief:
“Though I love her—that he comprehends—
One should master one’s passions, (love, in chief)
And be loyal to one’s friends!”
And she,—she lies in my hand as tame
As a pear hung basking over a wall;
Just a touch to try and off it came;
’Tis mine,—can I let it fall?
With no mind to eat it, that’s the worst!
Were it thrown in the road, would the case assist?
’Twas quenching a dozen blue-flies’ thirst
When I gave its stalk a twist.
And I,—what I seem to my friend, you see—
What I soon shall seem to his love, you guess.
What I seem to myself, do you ask of me?
No hero, I confess.
’Tis an awkward thing to play with souls,
And matter enough to save one’s own.
Yet think of my friend, and the burning coals
He played with for bits of stone!
One likes to show the truth for the truth;
That the woman was light is very true:
But suppose she says,—never mind that youth—
What wrong have I done to you?
Well, any how, here the story stays,
So far at least as I understand;
And, Robert Browning, you writer of plays,
Here’s a subject made to your hand!
In quite another way, and somewhat injured by a want of a line or two of explicit explanation, is this:—
how it strikes a contemporary.
I only knew one poet in my life:
And this, or something like it, was his way.
You saw go up and down Valladolid,
A man of mark, to know next time you saw.
His very serviceable suit of black
Was courtly once and conscientious still,
And many might have worn it, though none did:
The cloak that somewhat shone and shewed the threads
Had purpose, and the ruff, significance.
He walked and tapped the pavement with his cane,
Scenting the world, looking it full in face,
An old dog, bald and blindish, at his heels.
They turned up, now, the alley by the church,
That leads no whither; now, they breathed themselves
On the main promenade just at the wrong time.
You’d come upon his scrutinising hat,
Making a peaked shade blacker than itself
Against the single window spared some house
Intact yet with its mouldered Moorish work,—
Or else surprise the ferrel of his stick
Trying the mortar’s temper ’tween the chinks
Of some new shop a-building, French and fine. [p. 1158→]
He stood and watched the cobbler at his trade,
The man who slices lemons into drink,
The coffee-roaster’s brazier, and the boys
That volunteer to help him turn its winch.
He glanced o’er books on stalls with half an eye,
And fly-leaf ballads on the vendor’s string,
And broad-edge bold-print posters by the wall.
He took such cognisance of men and things,
If any beat a horse, you felt he saw;
If any cursed a woman, he took note;
Yet stared at nobody, they stared at him,
And found, less to their pleasure than surprise,
He seemed to know them and expect as much.
So, next time that a neighbour’s tongue was loosed,
It marked the shameful and notorious fact,
We had among us, not so much a spy,
As a recording chief-inquisitor,
The town’s true master if the town but knew!
We merely kept a Governor for form,
While this man walked about and took account
Of all thought, said, and acted, then went home,
And wrote it fully to our Lord the King
Who has an itch to know things, He knows why,
And reads them in His bed-room of a night.
Oh, you might smile! there wanted not a touch,
A tang of … well, it was not wholly ease
As back into your mind the man’s look came—
Stricken in years a little,—such a brow
His eyes had to live under!—clear as flint
On either side the formidable nose
Curved, cut, and coloured, like an eagle’s claw.
Had he to do with A.’s surprising fate?
When altogether old B. disappeared
And young C. got his mistress,—was’t our friend,
His letter to the King, that did it all?
What paid the bloodless man for so much pains?
Our Lord the King has favourites manifold,
And shifts his ministry some once a month;
Our city gets new governors at whiles,—
But never word or sign, that I could hear,
Notified to this man about the streets
The King’s approval of those letters conned
The last thing duly at the dead of night.
Did the man love his office? frowned our Lord,
Exhorting when none heard—“Beseech me not!
Too far above my people,—beneath Me!
I set the watch,—how should the people know?
Forget them, keep Me all the more in mind!”
Was some such understanding ’twixt the Two?
I found no truth in one report at least—
That if you tracked him to his home, down lanes
Beyond the Jewry, and as clean to pace,
You found he ate his supper in a room
Blazing with lights, four Titians on the wall,
And twenty naked girls to change his plate!
Poor man, he lived another kind of life
In that new, stuccoed, third house by the bridge,
Fresh-painted, rather smart than otherwise!
The whole street might o’erlook him as he sat,
Leg crossing leg, one foot on the dog’s back,
Playing a decent cribbage with his maid
(Jacynth, you’re sure her name was) o’er the cheese
And fruit, three red halves of starved winter-pears,
Or treat of radishes in April! nine—
Ten, struck the church clock, straight to bed went he.
My father, like the man of sense he was,
Would point him out to me a dozen times;
“St—St,” he’d whisper, “the Corregidor!”
I had been used to think that personage
Was one with lacquered breeches, lustrous belt,
And feathers like a forest in his hat,
Who blew a trumpet and proclaimed the news,
Announced the bull-fights, gave each church its turn,
And memorised the miracle in vogue!
He had a great observance from us boys—
I was in error; that was not the man.
I’d like now, yet had haply been afraid,
To have just looked, when this man came to die,
And seen who lined the clean gay garret’s sides
And stood about the neat low truckle-bed,
With the heavenly manner of relieving guard.
Here had been, mark, the general-in-chief,
Thro’ a whole campaign of the world’s life and death,
Doing the King’s work all the dim day long,
In his old coat, and up to his knees in mud,
Smoked like a herring, dining on a crust,—
And now the day was won, relieved at once!
No further show or need for that old coat,
You are sure, for one thing! Bless us, all the while
How sprucely we are dressed out, you and I!
A second, and the angels alter that.
Well, I could never write a verse,—could you?
Let’s to the Prado and make the most of time.
The passages marked for extract stand out imploringly to us, yet the pitiless exigences of space must also be observed; we will compromise the matter by returning to the volumes next week.
[Continued in the issue of 8 December 1855.] [p. 1182→]
The reader of these volumes will assuredly feel himself in the presence of a powerful and original mind, which is not what he oftens feels when turning over volumes of verse. But, although Browning has thought much, he gives it forth at white heat, and fuses his thought into the mould of verse, he does not commit the great mistake of pouring it cold into the mould—nor does he forget, to use his own language, that—
Song’s our art:
Whereas you please to speak these naked thoughts
Instead of draping them in sights and sounds.
True thoughts, good thoughts, thoughts fit to treasure up!
But why such long prolusion and display,
Such turning and adjustment of the harp,
And taking it upon your breast at length,
Only to speak dry words across its strings?
He can argue in verse, but even in argument he does not forget that he is a poet. See, as an example, how admirably he argues against the asceticism of the Romantic School, in these words, spoken by the painter monk, Fra dippo dippi [sic]:—
First, every sort of monk, the black and white,
I drew them, fat and lean: then, folks at church,
From good old gossips waiting to confess
Their cribs of barrel-droppings, candle-ends,— [p. 1183→]
To the breathless fellow at the altar foot,
Fresh from his murder, safe and sitting there
With the little children round him in a row
Of admiration, half for his beard and half
For that white anger of his victim’s son
Shaking a fist at him with one fierce arm,
Signing himself with the other because of Christ
(Whose sad face on the cross sees only this
After the passion of a thousand years)
Till some poor girl, her apron o’er her head
Which the intense eyes looked through, came at eve
On tip-toe, said a word, dropped in a loaf,
Her pair of ear-rings and a bunch of flowers
The brute took growling, prayed, and then was gone.
I painted all, then cried “’Tis ask and have—
Choose, for more’s ready!”—laid the ladder flat,
And showed my covered bit of cloister-wall.
The monks closed in a circle and praised loud
Till checked (taught what to see and not to see,
Being simple bodies), “that’s the very man!
Look at the boy who stoops to pat the dog!
That woman’s like the Prior’s niece who comes
To care about his asthma: it’s the life!”
But there my triumph’s straw-fire flared and funked—
Their betters took their turn to see and say:
The Prior and the learned pulled a face
And stopped all that in no time. “How? what’s here?
Quite from the mark of painting, bless us all!
Faces, arms, legs and bodies like the true
As much as pea and pea! it’s devil’s-game!
Your business is not to catch men with show,
With homage to the perishable clay,
But lift them over it, ignore it all,
Make them forget there’s such a thing as flesh.
Your business is to paint the souls of men—
Man’s soul, and it’s a fire, smoke .. no it’s not ..
It’s vapour done up like a new-born babe—
(In that shape when you die it leaves your mouth)
It’s .. well, what matters talking, it’s the soul!
Give us no more of body than shows soul.
Here’s Giotto, with his Saint a-praising God!
That sets you praising—why not stop with him?
Why put all thoughts of praise out of our heads
With wonder at lines, colours, and what not?
Paint the soul, never mind the legs and arms!
Rub all out, try at it a second time.
Oh, that white smallish female with the breasts,
She’s just my niece .. Herodias, I would say,—
Who went and danced and got men’s heads cut off—
Have it all out?” Now, is this sense, I ask?
A fine way to paint soul, by painting body
So ill, the eye can’t stop there, must go further
And can’t fare worse! Thus, yellow does for white
When what you put for yellow’s simply black,
And any sort of meaning looks intense
When all beside itself means and looks nought.
Why can’t a painter lift each foot in turn,
Left foot and right foot, go a double step,
Make his flesh liker and his soul more like,
Both in their order! Take the prettiest face,
The prior’s niece .. patron-saint—is it so pretty
You can’t discover if it means, hope, fear,
Sorrow or joy! won’t beauty go with these?
Suppose I’ve made her eyes all right and blue,
Can’t I take breath and try to add life’s flash,
And then add soul and heighten them threefold?
Or say there’s beauty with no soul at all—
(I never saw it—put the case the same—)
If you get simple beauty and nought else,
You get about the best thing God invents—
That’s somewhat.
In the argumentative style, there is that strange, sarcastic, puzzling, because dramatic poem, called “Bishop Blougram’s Apology;” and charming it is to turn from such dramatic goings out of himself, to the direct and beautiful expression of his love for his wife, which smiles with deep and quiet tenderness in many a page. In the following passage, for example, how true and pretty is the allusion to his wife’s poetical fame, and his delight in it. (We must premise, that the phrase, “My moon of poets,” is an allusion to something which has been said in an earlier passage of the poem)—
God be thanked, the meanest of his creatures
Boasts two soul-sides; one to face the world with,
One to show a woman when he loves her.
This I say of me, but think of you, Love!
This to you—yourself, my moon of poets!
Ah, but that’s the world’s side—there’s the wonder—
Thus they see you, praise you, think they know you.
There, in turn I stand with them and praise you,
Out of my own self, I dare to phrase it.
But the best is when I glide from out them,
Cross a step or two of dubious twilight,
Come out on the other side, the novel
Silent silver lights and darks undreamed of,
Where I hush and bless myself with silence.
This does not, of course, read so well in extract as it does in its own place; but that is the inconvenience attending newspaper criticism; one can only give “specimen bricks,” which are not true specimens. The best parts of these volumes are beyond quotation limits. To conclude, we will give another story in two short poems—“Before” and “After”:—
before.
Let them fight it out, friend! things have gone too far.
God must judge the couple! leave them as they are
—Whichever one’s the guiltless, to his glory,
And whichever one the guilt’s with, to my story.
Why, you would not bid men, sunk in such a slough,
Strike no arm out further, stick and stink as now,
Leaving right and wrong to settle the embroilment,
Heaven with snaky Hell, in torture and entoilment!
Which of them’s the culprit, how must he conceive
God’s the queen he caps to, laughing in his sleeve?
’Tis but decent to profess oneself beneath her.
Still one must not be too much in earnest either.
Better sin the whole sin, sure that God observes,
Then go live his life out! life will try his nerves,
When the sky which noticed all, makes no disclosure,
And the earth keeps up her terrible composure.
Let him pace at pleasure, past the walls of rose,
Pluck their fruits when grape-trees graze him as he goes.
For he ’gins to guess the purpose of the garden,
With the sly mute thing beside there for a warden.
What’s the leopard-dog thing, constant to his side,
A leer and lie in every eye on its obsequious hide?
When will come an end of all the mock obeisance,
And the price appear that pays for the misfeasance?
So much for the culprit. Who’s the martyred man?
Let him bear one stroke more, for be sure he can.
He that strove thus evil’s lump with good to leaven,
Let him give his blood at last and get his heaven.
All or nothing, stake it! trusts he God or no?
Thus far and no farther? farther? be it so.
Now, enough of your chicane of prudent pauses,
Sage provisos, sub-intents, and saving-clauses.
Ah, “forgive” you bid him? While God’s champion lives,
Wrong shall be resisted: dead, why he forgives,
But you must not end my friend ere you begin him;
Evil stands not crowned on earth, while breath is in him.
Once more—Will the wronger, at this last of all,
Dare to say “I did wrong,” rising in his fall?
No?—Let go then—both the fighters to their places—
While I count three, step you back as many paces.
after.
Take the cloak from his face, and at first
Let the corpse do its worst.
How he lies in his rights of a man!
Death has done all death can.
And absorbed in the new life he leads
He recks not, he heeds.
Nor his wrong nor my vengeance—both strike
On his senses alike,
And are lost in the solemn and strange
Surprise of the change.
Ha, what avail death to erase
His offence, my disgrace?
I would we were boys as of old
In the field, by the fold—
His outrage, God’s patience, man’s scorn
Were so easily borne.
I stand here now, he lies in his place—
Cover the face.
If these specimens send the reader to the volumes they have fulfilled their purpose.
Reviewed:
Men and Women (RB), London: Chapman & Hall, 1855.
___________________
