R560100C. Men and Women (Boston, 1856).
The Christian Examiner, January 1856, pp. 139–140.
As reprinted in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 22, 337.
[The article in which this review appears begins with notices of works by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Bayard Taylor, Alfred Tennyson, Philip James Bailey, and EBB; these we omit here. For the full text of the comments on EBB, see pp. 000–000.]
Mr. Robert Browning has shown us that poetry may be written a great deal worse, in some respects, than anything which has yet passed under our review;—profounder shadow, more conceited pretension, more offensive perversity. One has to hunt for his meaning with as baffled an eye and as frequent a disappointment as in the writings of Mr. Bailey. But the affectation that here juggles with our sight is of another kind, and far the more intolerable of the two. We are almost sorry for what we have said about Mr. Bailey’s offuscations, now that they are found to be so transcended. For he writes at least like a man in earnest, who really fancies he has important thoughts, and wishes to deal honestly with his readers. Provided we are acquainted sufficiently with learned languages, we can really make him out, for the most part, tolerably well, after all. But what shall be said of Mr. Browning? Instead of puzzling us with long pedantic phrases, he usually—though with many detestable exceptions—chooses words that are easily understood; but he so shuffles them about under his sleeves and conjuring-boxes, that we are lost in perpetual bewilderment. Instead of being misty through the remoteness of abstract meditations, he undertakes to be astonishingly familiar; and is so, almost to vulgarity. The most rampant drolleries dance along his lines. He seems to delight in a jaunty and unwholesome foreign manner; and this even while the Holiest Names—which are altogether too freely tossed about—are on his lips. We are sorry to say it, but he exhibits a kind of jesting which an apostle calls “not convenient,” and a tone of levity upon sacred subjects, and a rakish taint of sensuality.
Singers are said to have a head-voice or a chest-voice. Mr. Browning sings from the head, and not from the neighborhood of the heart; and his falsetto is as little like a natural voice as can well be imagined. What is poetry written for, if not to express some thought or feeling which could not so effectually find utterance in any other way? What is its high and true province, but to exalt the fancy, to refine the taste, to awaken the sensibility, to move the heart and soul? Not, certainly, to play off ingenuities, and to try in how many cunning ways one can distort language and disguise thought. Now we have been through the greater part of this volume,—and who could insist upon more?—meeting with no elevated sentiments or profound affections; not a single appeal, whether animating or melting, to what is best in the nature of man; scarcely a single point beyond the range of a smart wit and the lower emotions; not, even by accident, one touch of natural pathos, or glow of holy aspiration. It gambols; it spins webs; it raves; but it shows no purpose, or tendency, or effect, in any high, moral direction. [p. 140→] We plainly charge it with this fatal absence of what alone can give life. We complain of it for offending against reverence and decency, as well as against the sober sense of “Men and Women.” We have toiled along its hard pages, often left in blank wonder as to what the author could possibly have in his mind. “Memorabilia,” page 183, beginning,
Ah, did you once see Shelley plain,
may have some indirect and recondite sense, though entirely beyond our divining. We will quote but one line more:—
Dumb to Homer, dumb to Keats—him, even!
There is no room for questioning who are the poetic Gamaliels at whose feet Mr. Browning has been proud to sit.
[This article concludes with comments on Thomas Hood’s poetry, which we omit.]
Reviewed:
Men and Women (RB), Boston: Ticknor & Fields, 1856.
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