R560100A. Men and Women.
Bentley’s Miscellany, January 1856, pp. 64–70.
As reprinted in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 22, 334–337.
The title of these volumes, “Men and Women,” is not much more definitely indicative of their contents than was that of “Bells and Pomegranates”—that chokepear to literal quidnuncs. The titles of the poems themselves are sometimes correspondingly vague, in relation to their subjects: thus we have “Before,” “After,” “De Gustibus——,” “One Way of Love,” “Another Way of Love,” “In Three Days,” “In a Year,” “Love in a Life,” “Life in a Love,” “Any Wife to Any Husband,” and so on. They all are dedicated to Mrs. Browning in a final “One Word More:”
There they are, my fifty men and women
Naming me the fifty poems finished!
Take them, Love, the book and me together.
Where the heart lies, let the brain lie also.
There is little observable deviation in them from Mr. Browning’s characteristic “points,” whether good points or bad; though one may unwillingly fear that of the two classes, positive good and positive bad, it is rather in the latter than the former that advance from the positive to the comparative degree is perceptible. Perhaps closer study, such as this poet requires as a sine quâ non to appreciation, will discover beauties that lurk unseen during a too cursory perusal; but the most cursory perusal can hardly escape a conviction that the poet’s penchant for elliptical diction, interjectional dark sayings, multum in parvo (and, sometimes, seemingly minimum in multo) “deliverances,” flighty fancies, unkempt similitudes, quaintest conceits, slipshod familiarities, and grotesque exaggerations, is unhealthily on the increase. Greatly they wrong him, nevertheless, who proceed, as some do, to confound these excrescent “accidents” with the “essence” of his poetical genius, and to judge him by these, with a radical perversion of inductive method, as though a piled-up sorites of these by-way blemishes were identical with a logical conclusion that he is no poet at all. How much greater a poet he might be, would he but anticipate the easy every-day work of fault-finders, by striking out what they so readily find, and by taking upon himself before publication the duty they promptly assume after it, of rooting out the tares from his wheat,—it is pardonably provoking to think. Nobly endowed is Robert Browning with gifts superior not only in degree but in kind to more than two or three, among contemporary poets, who are read and applauded to the echo by thousands, where he is read and musingly beloved by tens. The excellence of his gifts—a rare union of subjective reflectiveness with objective life and vigour, so that he can make his personæ speak out his thoughts without prejudice to their own individual being,—a lofty moral earnestness, masked often, and so unrecognised or repudiated ever by the short-sighted—nay, a pervading religious tone, jarred only, not drowned, by mocking-bird discords [p. 65→] and “accidental sharps” (exceptions by which some would triumphantly prove the rule),—subtle intellect, deep searchings of heart, shrewd experience, genial spirits, æsthetic culture, lyrical expression,—what gifts are these, and more besides them, for the making of a not-to-be-made Poet (nascitur non fit). Yet time as it passes, instead of exalting these gifts to the exclusion of faulty mannerisms, and once easily now hardly eradicable blemishes, seems to confirm the singer in a habit of putting on his singing-robes after so strange a fashion, that one’s wonder is the inverse of one’s regret that so few should gather round him, with a mind to hear, and the mind to understand.
To note some of the peculiarities that offend or perplex your jog-trot courteous reader in the volumes before us. Expressions very commonly occur of the kind italicised in the following fragments: “And he lay, would not moan, would not curse, As if lots might be worse.” “It was roses, roses, all the way, With myrtle mixed in my path like mad.” “Still our life’s zigzags and dodges.” “Why you cut a figure at the first,” &c. “Ciphers and stucco-twiddlings everywhere.” “But these my triumphs’ straw-fire flared and funked.”
Aaron’s asleep—shove hip to haunch,
Or somebody deal him a dig in the paunch!
Look at the purse with the tassel and knob,
And the gown with the angel and thingumbob.
What, again, is to be said of, or for, such lines as these,—to show that when the fight begins within himself, a man’s worth something?—
God stoops o’er his head,
Satan looks up between his feet—both tug—
He’s left, himself, in the middle, &c.
Or the description of a church’s “crypt, one fingers along with a torch,—its face, set full for the sun to shave”? Or this congratulation of departed worthies—“For oh, this world and the wrong it does! They are safe in heaven with their backs to it”? The name of “Holy-Cross Day” may tempt lovers of the “Baptistery” and the “Christian Year” to seek acquaintance with a poem whose name sounds so well; but we should like to watch the pale lenten faces of such inquirers as they read the first verse of “Holy-Cross Day;” to wit (we had almost written tu-whit, with its invariable sequent tu-whoo, infected by the strain):
Fee, faw, fum! bubble and squeak!
Blessedest Thursday’s the fat of the week.
Rumble and tumble, sleek and rough,
Stinking and savoury, smug and gruff.
Take the church-road, for the bell’s due chime
Gives us the summons—’tis sermon-time.
The third verse is stuffed full as it can hold of imagery and bustling life-like excitement:
Higgledy piggledy, packed we lie,
Rats in a hamper, swine in a stye,
Wasps in a bottle, frogs in a sieve,
Worms in a carcase, fleas in a sleeve.
Hist! square shoulders, settle your thumbs
And buzz for the bishop—here he comes. [p. 66→]
In verse-making of this reckless, rollicking sort, Mr. Browning often shows remarkable verve and gusto. But he is apt to be slovenly in tagging his verses, which at times are rather too tag-raggish. When a rhymester is master of his rhymes, in their freaks and conjunctions of the kind called Hudibrastic, it is pleasant enough to note their “wanton heed and giddy cunning”—for one is satisfied the while, that the “heed” will keep in check the wantonness, and that the wildest whirl of “giddiness” will not turn the head of that sage supervisor, “cunning.” But when the rhymester is not master of, but mastered by, his rhymes, all zest in the spectacle is gone. Unhappily this is frequently the case with Mr. Browning’s rhymes. He does not mould them at will, and shape them, as plastic things, to suit his meaning. On the contrary, they mould, or rather distort, his thoughts—sometimes wresting his sense into non-sense. Here is a stanza from “Master Hugues of Saxe-Gotha,” of which the rhymes and the meaning are alike fitted to “puzzle the will” to make the best of them:
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?
Well may the two last lines have a note of interrogation each. One thinks of Billy Black in the farce, with his eternal “D’ye give it up?”—an ever-recurring query, impertinent enough in the farce, but highly pertinent at the end of too many of these rhymes without reason, or most unreasonable rhymes. In the verses hyper-tersely entitled “Before,” we read:
’Tis but decent to profess oneself beneath her.
Still, one must not be too much in earnest either.
In “Old Pictures in Florence,” godhead rhymes (de facto rhymes, never mind about de jure) with embodied; Theseus with knees’ use; San Spirito with weary too; Sofi’s eye with prophesy; Florence with Loraine’s; Witanagemot with bag ’em hot, &c. Again:
Thyself shall afford the example, Giotto!—
… Done at a stroke (was it not?) “O!”
… From these to Ghiberti and Ghirlandajo
… So now to my special grievance—heigh ho!
——
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 seraph 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?
It is by somewhat compulsory measures that “cock-crow” has for its rhyming complement such a phrase as “rock-row;” so “earth’s failure” is the occasional cause of “life’s pale lure,” and “His hundred’s soon [p. 67→] hit” that of “Misses an unit,” and “Lightnings are loosened” of “Peace let the dew send.” Instances like these tempt us to attach a special significance to what sounds like a confession, in the second stanza of “Two in the Campagna:”
For me, I touched a thought, I know,
Has tantalised me many times,
(Like turns of thread the spiders throw
Mocking across our path) for rhymes
To catch at and let go.
’Tis pity the poet did not “let go” many and many which he did “catch at.” But we too may as well let go this catching at, and carping at, his demerits, and pass on, in a less captious mood, to his deserts. Not that we affect to enumerate, classify, and duly signalise the latter—mille fois non! But neither are they to be taken for granted, to the extent of being ignored altogether. A word or two, then, on a Representative one or two of these Men and Women. “Saul” is a vigorous and highly graphic sketch of a scene between the first king of Israel and the golden-haired son of Jesse, whose harp had power to soothe and sober the moody monarch. It needs more than a single reading, of the railway reading sort, to follow out its purport; but there is, on the whole, a power and beauty in it of a less jagged outline and misty envelopment than belong to the majority of this collection. Many of its lines are fluent and musical, with a flow and music such as this:
Then I tuned my harp,—took off the lilies we twine round its chords
Lest they snap ’neath the stress of the noontide—those sunbeams like swords!
And I first played the tune all our sheep know, as, one after one,
So docile they come to the pen-door, till folding be done.
They are white and untorn by the bushes, for lo, they have fed
Where the long grasses stifle the water within the stream’s bed;
And now one after one seeks its lodging, as star follows star
Into eve and the blue far above us,—so blue and so far!
Numerous passages, too, it contains of that rich picturesque genre which marks some of the poet’s happiest earlier works; for example:
Oh, the wild joys of living! the leaping from rock up to rock—
The strong rending of boughs from the fir-tree,—the cool silver shock
Of the plunge in a pool’s living water,—the hunt of the bear,
And the sultriness showing the lion is couched in his lair.
And the meal—the rich dates—yellowed over with gold dust divine,
And the locust’s-flesh steeped in the pitcher; the full draught of wine,
And the sleep in the dried river-channel where bulrushes tell
That the water was wont to go warbling so softly and well.
Another Scriptural study, and of still greater interest if not excellence, is that entitled “An Epistle,” indited in the poet’s best blank verse (which at its best is very good indeed), and having for its subject Lazarus of Bethany in his resurrection-life, as seen and speculated upon by an Arab physician, “Karshish, the picker up of learning’s crumbs, the not incurious in God’s handiwork.” The epistle is supposed to be written about the time of the Romans’ advance on Jerusalem: [p. 68→]
The man—it is one Lazarus a Jew,
Sanguine, proportioned, fifty years of age,
The body’s habit wholly laudable,
As much, indeed, beyond the common health
As he were made and put aside to show.
Think, could we penetrate by any drug
And bathe the wearied soul and worried flesh,
And bring it clear and fair, by three days’ sleep!
Whence has the man the balm that brightens all?
This grown man eyes the world now like a child.
* * * * * *
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.
Which of us all, in reading the fourth gospel, has not mused in awful dreamy wonder on the looks, and ways, and words of Lazarus redivivus? and longed to overhear from those lips that Death had kissed as his own, the secrets of that prison-house from which he so strangely had been freed, some news of that bourne from which no traveller returns? As surely as we have all thus mused and longed, shall we all be attracted to know what a poet of earnest, thoughtful, religious feeling has made of this conjectural theme. It has a psychological value of an unwonted kind.
There is another long piece in blank verse, of philosophic and religious interest, called “Cleon,” which discusses the problem of life from the stand-point of an inquiring mind, unenlightened by divine revelation—guessing at truth, groping in the darkness after light, daring to imagine a hereafter, “some future state,” “unlimited in capability for joy, as this is in desire for joy.”
——But, no!
Zeus has not yet revealed it; and, alas!
He must have done so—were it possible.
In a sort of post-scriptum to this letter from Cleon the poet to Protos the tyrannos, the perplexed and finally desponding seeker is made, with pregnant effect, to allude in cavalier obiter terms to “one called Paulus,” to whom Protos had despatched a messenger on some errand, to Cleon unknown and uncared for:
——We have heard his [Paulus] fame
Indeed, if Christus be not one with him.—
Thou canst not think a mere barbarian Jew,
As Paulus proves to be, one circumcised,
Hath access to a secret shut from us?
Thou wrongest our philosophy, O king,
In stooping to inquire of such an one,
As if his answer could impose at all. [p. 69→]
“Cleon” will repay a reflective and time-taking perusal. So, on a cognate topic, or group of topics, but radically alien in style, will the polemical nondescript yclept “Bishop Blougram’s Apology”—a tissue of violent contrasts and provoking incongruities—fine irony and coarse abuse, subtle reasoning and halting twaddle, the lofty and the low, the refined and the vulgar, earnestness and levity, outpoured pell-mell by the blustering yet “pawky” bishop over his wine. But what is probably the most perfect specimen of even, sustained, and lofty excellence afforded in this collection, is the dramatic fragment, “In a Balcony”—than which there are few better things in the best of its author’s dramas; and that is saying more, by a great deal, than would be supposed by idle play-goers and railway-bookstall-keepers, whose gauge of excellence is the run of so many nights, and the run on so many copies. Let such as doubt Mr. Browning’s possession of a real dramatic talent, listen to his speakers “In a Balcony,” and note the construction and quietly marked-out action of the piece; and they will surely abate their scepticism, or the avowal of it. We had intended to quote several excerpts from these scenes, but space is wanting, and the reader will of course enjoy them fifty times as much in their proper place; for to cull elegant extracts from any drama good for anything, is almost a crime against the dramatist—or rather, ’tis worse than a crime, ’tis a blunder. Nor will we drag in disjecta membra from “Andrea del Sarto,” painting from himself and to himself,—from “A Grammarian’s Funeral,” that piquant elegy on an old scholar who, the ruling passion strong in death, was heard still, “through the rattle,” settling the busing of ῾οτι and the proper basis of ᾽ουν, and (after he was dead up to the waist) the true “doctrine of the enclitic De”—or from that jovial confession of “Fra Lippo Lippi,” escaped from a three weeks’ painting job, to overtake, in the fresh air (past midnight though), the “hurry” he has overheard from his open window, of “feet and little feet, a sweep of lute-strings, laughs, and whifts of song.” But it were unfair to quote no one piece entire; so here is one more than commonly fitted for popularity:
Evelyn Hope.
Beautiful Evelyn Hope is dead
Sit and watch by her side an hour.
This is her bookshelf, this her bed;
She plucked that piece of geranium-flower,
Beginning to die too, in the glass.
Little has yet been changed, I think—
The shutters are shut, no light may pass
Save two long rays thro’ the hinge’s chink.
Sixteen years old when she died!
Perhaps she had scarcely heard my name—
It was not her time to love: beside,
Her life had many a hope and aim,
Duties enough and little cares,
And now was quiet, now astir—
Till God’s hand beckoned unawares,
And the sweet white brow is all of her. [p. 70→]
Is it too late, then, Evelyn Hope?
What, your soul was pure and true,
The good stars met in your horoscope,
Made you of spirit, fire, and dew—
And just because I was thrice as old,
And our paths in the world diverged so wide,
Each was nought to each, must I be told?
We were fellow-mortals, nought beside?
No, indeed! for God above
Is great to grant, as mighty to make,
And creates the love to reward the love,—
I claim you still, for my own love’s sake!
Delayed it may be for more lives yet,
Thro’ worlds I shall traverse, not a few—
Much is to learn and much to forget
Ere the time be come for taking you.
But the time will come,—at last it will,
When, Evelyn Hope, what meant, I shall say,
In the lower earth, in the years long still,
That body and soul so pure and gay?
Why your hair was amber I shall divine,
And your mouth of your own geranium’s red—
And what you would do with me, in fine,
In the new life come in the old one’s stead.
I have lived, I shall say, so much since then,
Given up myself so many times,
Gained me the gains of various men,
Ransacked the ages, spoiled the climes;
Yet one thing, one, in my soul’s full scope,
Either I missed, or itself missed me—
And I want and find you, Evelyn Hope!
What is the issue? let us see!
I loved you, Evelyn, all the while;
My heart seemed full as it could hold—
There was place and to spare for the frank young smile
And the red young mouth and the hair’s young gold.
So, hush,—I will give you this leaf to keep—
See, I shut it inside the sweet cold hand.
There, that is our secret! go to sleep;
You will wake, and remember, and understand.
Reviewed:
Men and Women (RB), London: Chapman & Hall, 1855.
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