R551206B. Men and Women.
The Sun, 6 December 1855, p. 3.
As reprinted in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 22, 330–331.
Fifty portraits of men and women, lightly sketched off in profile by the cunning hand of the author of “Paracelsus.” Blooming with youth, wrinkled with age, ugly as sin, beautiful as virtue, gentle and simple, matron and maiden, bearded veteran and smooth-faced stripling—here they severally are, one and all pencilled delicately in pen-and-ink miniatures, kit-cat, full-length, sitting, standing, some of them, indeed, literally speaking likenesses. It is by a happy thought that Mr. Browning has thus strung together as in a motley coronal fugitive pieces, as varied in sparkle, and colour, and value, as would be a circlet formed of gold, and lead, and silver, and tinfoil, and pebbles, and pearls, and bits of coloured glass-beryl, and flint, and topaz, and clay, and malachite. For the several fragments making up the whole of this strange poetic chaplet are no less singularly contrasted with each other than materials thus respectively, as the case may chance to be, most precious or most worthless. It is as if we had had poured into our hands the unsifted produce of some rich digging newly discovered and hastily worked upon the auriferous banks of the grand old Pactolas—an occasional nugget of rare size and purity glittering out among a predominating mass of commonest sand and rubble. Mr. Browning comes anew before his readers with this advantage—that it is now some time since the issue of his last metrical production. He has this no less obvious disadvantage, however—that that last effusion of his was an egregious failure to all intents and purposes. We speak, of course, in allusion to his scarcely comprehensible and decidedly repulsive poem entitled “Christmas Eve and Easter Day”—a poem wholly unadorned by a single beauty, save in the instance of one solitary couplet where the fountains in the Piazza of St. Peter’s, at Rome, were exquisitely described as—
Growing up eternally
Each like a musical water-tree!
Disappointed, however, in the instance of this latest outpouring of our author’s thoughts in versification, we could not but remember with pleasure many another worthier ebullition of his genius. Whether we laid aside with the sadness or chagrin “Christmas Eve and Easter Day,” or, on the other hand, took up “Men and Women” with the eagerness of expectation, we could not but call to mind with a deep sense of intellectual obligation the music and the fragrance resulting from the concord and the beauty of his “Bells and Pomegranates.” We could not but muse with a certain degree of satisfaction over the memories of the dim “Sordello” and of the mysterious “Paracelsus.” We could not but recognise the high dramatic power manifested in “The Blot on the ’Scutcheon.” Above all, we could not but cherish in our most grateful recollection the lyrical splendour of “Pippa Passes”—to our mind Robert Browning’s undoubted masterpiece. Remembering “Pippa Passes” thus gratefully, although we were driven perforce to cast aside with scorn the moon-struck rhapsody of “Christmas Eve and Easter Day,” we have recently taken up with hopeful curiosity the two newly-printed volumes of verse from the same hand, quaintly designated for want of some better title “Men and Women.” The leaves of these volumes we have since then turned over with varying sensations of satisfaction and disappointment. We have been revolted, for example, by the clever flippancy of “Bishop Blougram’s Apology”—an apology in which superstition and irreligion are jumbled detestably together in very frightful antithesis. We have been charmed by the graces scattered profusely over the genial stanzas dedicated to the subject of “Old Pictures in Florence.” We have listened with alternating emotions to our author’s musings comfortably “By the Fireside,” and picturesquely “Among the Ruins.” We have looked, with him, now “Up at the Villa,” now “Down in the City.” We have heard him sing of the corpse of “Evelyn Hope” and of the ghost of “Fra Lippo Lippi”—celebrating here “A Tocatta [sic] of Galuppi’s,” here again a fugue of “Master Hugues of Saxe Gotha.” Startled may be one while [sic] by some such poetry as this:
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?”
Or bewildered by versification as incoherent as the following—
Who thinks Hugues wrote for the deaf?
Proved a mere mountain in labour?
Better submit—try again—what’s the cleft?
“Faith, it’s no trifle for pipe and for tabor—
Four flats—the minor in F.
Friend, your fugue taxes the finger.
Learning it once, who would lose it?
Yet all the while a misgiving will linger—
Truth’s golden o’er us although we refuse it—
Nature, thro’ dust-clouds we fling her!
Hugues! I advise meâ poenâ
(Counterpoint glares like a Gorgon)
Bid One, Two, Three, Four, Five, clear the arena!
Say the word, straight I unstop the Full-Organ,
Blare out the mode Palestrina.
While in the roof, if I’m right there—
. . . Lo you, the wick, in the socket!
Hallo, you sacristan, show us a light there!
Down it dips, gone like a rocket!
What, you want, do you, to come unawares,
Sweeping the church up for first morning-prayers,
And find a poor devil at end of his cares
At the foot of your rotten-planked rat-riddled stairs?
Do I carry the moon in my pocket?
Dropping perchance at another moment upon a crazy little scrap of interrogative quatrains such as the subjoined—
memorabilia.
Ah, did you once see Shelley plain
And did he stop and speak to you?
And did you speak to him again?
How strange it seems, and new!
But your were living before that,
And you are living after,
And the memory I started at—
My starting moves your laughter!
I crossed a moor with a name of its own
And a use in the world no doubt,
Yet a hand’s-breadth of it shines alone
’Mid the blank miles round about—
For there I picked up on the heather
And there I put inside my breast
A moulted feather, an eagle-feather—
Well, I forget the rest.
Decidedly, after all, we very much question whether a single one among these fifty minor poems by Robert Browning can add one leaf of bay to the garland worn by him for some time past as the poet of “Pippa Passes,” of the “Blot on the ’Scutcheon,” of “Sordello,” of “Paracelsus,” and (generally) of “Bells and Pomegranates.” Fragmentary verses “In Three Days,” “In a Year,” “In a Balcony,” about “A Light Woman,” and a “Patriot,” and “Before,” and “After,” and “Popularity,” and “Misconceptions,” pieces relating to “Saul,” and “Protus,” and “Cleon,” and “De Gustibus”—and for that matter, too, De Omnibus—may be sprinkled sparsely here and there with poetic beauties without materially tending in any way to enhance the writer’s literary reputation. Particularly when, as in the present instance, these beauties are plentifully intermingled with eccentricities, and prejudices, and absurdities, and platitudes beyond the grasp of the most forbearing reader’s capacity for either patience or forgiveness. Altogether the ground opened to us by this new work from the hand of Mr. Browning, though it may be starred at intervals with the primrose, and the violet, and the lily, and the carnation, is bristling all over with the nettle, and the thistle, and the burdock, with—
Agari, and fungi, and mildew, and mould—
mental weeds, and brambles, and parasites, as unsightly as unprofitable.
Reviewed:
Men and Women (RB), London: Chapman & Hall, 1855.
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