R560100D. Men and Women.
Fraser’s Magazine, January 1856, pp. 105–116.
As reprinted in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 22, 337–344.
Robert Browning is a name which will serve the future historian of the English literature of the nineteenth century to point the moral of genius unfaithful to its trust. Endowed by nature with those gifts which, duly cultivated, enable a man to become a fine poet, he has chosen to let them run wild; and what might have been a beautiful garden is but a wilderness overgrown with a rank and riotous vegetation. Writer of plays, of philosophical poems, of dramatic lyrics, he has in each class given evidence of strong natural powers weakened by self-indulgence, by caprice, by hankering after originality, by all the mental vices which are but so many names of vanity and self-seeking. Instead of looking on his gifts of imagination and of intellect as entrusted to him for the benefit of others, and as imposing on him the duty of training their rude forces into a perfect faculty of song, he has just got out of them the utmost personal pleasure that they would yield with the least possible trouble. The new thoughts, the passionate emotions, which make life so rich to men of the poetic nature, he has enjoyed keenly, and they have been to him impulses to express himself in various forms of rhythmical art. But art, except as this mere vehicle and vent for his own intellectual energy, he has neglected; its mechanism is troublesome, its processes imply self-restraint, laborious discipline, and patient exercise of judgment; its principal object is to communicate to others what the artist feels and knows. And Mr. Browning not seeming to care for the enjoyment, or the instruction he could afford his fellow-creatures, but only to ease his own conceiving mind and fervent heart, naturally enough refuses to submit to toil which, after all, would probably lessen the actual pleasure of composition, and by refining his taste, lower his estimate of his own productions. Well, if man was not sent here to help his fellow-man, if men of genius especially were not, by the mere possession of that genius, emphatically singled out to be the helpers of their kind, this wantonness would be quite intelligible.
It may fairly be questioned whether the pains by which such a poet as Mr. Tennyson, for instance, makes his poems as good and perfect as he can, before offering them to the public, ever meets with general appreciation, inasmuch as such painstaking in a writer demands a corresponding painstaking in the reader. And still more may it be questioned whether the fervid fluency of a writer who pours his full stream of words, careless how much mud is held in deposit by the flood, is not accompanied by a larger amount of gross self-satisfaction than the rigid self-restraint of the writer who checks the rapidity of his current, and lets the mud fall to the bottom before he presents the cup—which should be the cup of healing—to the nations. On the Epicurean theory, there is small doubt that Mr. Browning is right; it is far pleasanter, for a time at least, to do one’s work in the way that gives one least trouble. And as for fame, or its counterfeit, popularity, there are silly people enough in English society, who look on this carelessness as the fitting and only garb of genius; who, if a poet will but be slovenly, will applaud his graceful audacity, and if obscure, will worship his profundity. And thus laziness and vanity—the two most fatal forms of selfishness—do their worst, and the cliques are in admiration at one of the saddest sights under God’s sky, when the light that came from heaven burns murkier and murkier in a poet’s soul; and instead of making God’s world more intelligible by unfolding the beauty and meaning of its objects and events with loving care and grateful painstaking, he scrawls down the first rough hints that suggest themselves to him, and will not even take the trouble to make them legible. We blame the man who wastes bodily strength and beauty in laziness or aimless feats, while we [p. 106→] are far too lenient to men of high mental power who allow their faculties to decay through want of proper training, or to become distorted through false and inferior aims. We condemn the man who hides his one talent in the earth, and refuses to put it to its uses; what shall we say to him who, possessed of ten talents, wants the self-respect which would dictate their perfect development, and the genuine regard for his fellow-creatures, which would enjoin their strenuous employment.
This may be thought a somewhat harsh and rude tone to adopt towards a man for writing poems disfigured by obscurity, and wanting in the graces of a finished art. If poetical genius were showered upon men and women with unsparing hand—if a man with the capacity for becoming a true poet were of everyday occurrence, one more or less would be very little matter, and the due cultivation of his gifts would chiefly concern himself. It is because such poetical faculties as Mr. Browning had given him by nature are not the ordinary endowment of men—because such faculties rightly employed we believe to be a most precious boon to the nation among which they are exercised, that we are inclined to treat him, not as a whimsical person who chooses to be eccentric in a matter indifferent to the world, and defrauds himself alone by his caprice, but as one who, choosing to make himself a law and idol to himself, defrauds the world at large of what they would be the happier and the wiser for possessing. He commits the crime of a man who, entrusted with the germ of a great scientific discovery, and endowed with faculties to work it out to a clear result, refuses to undergo the labour necessary for this purpose. We believe that Mr. Browning might, had he chosen, have become the interpreter of our modern life to us in dramas that would have recalled the force and clearness of the Elizabethan day. We believe that he could have sung the passions and the thoughts of our time with a lyric intensity which would have purified the rough ore of our life of its prosaic dross, and have reacted on that life to make it deeper, truer, and more human. He possesses exactly that combination of curious and extended observation of mankind, with a subtile power of analysing motives and a vivid imagination, which is necessary for the great dramatist. He shrinks from no facts, does not pick his path with delicate step along the world’s highway, fearful of dirtying his feet, is startled at nothing, peers with scrutinising glance into byeways, alleys, and noisome dens, and what he sees he can record, not with the cold, natural-history voice of a speculator, but the living tones of a man who enters into the human and passionate element in all the varied world of suffering and enjoyment, of virtue and of crime, of good and evil. To fill his mind with the elements of dramas, to enter by sympathy into the lives, characters and conduct of others, has plainly been the business of his life. What we complain of him for is, that he has been satisfied with this; that the stir, and business, and passion of the scene has been all he cared for; that what it all meant has seldom seemed to occur to him as worth asking; that even for its mere dramatic interest he has not cared, except as a passing spectacle, keeping his appetite for excitement on the stretch. That what he saw clearly for a moment he was bound to render as clear to others as language could make it, he seems never to have dreamt; the scrawl that served to jot down his memoranda, the few rough notes that his momentary feeling completed for him, seem generally to have exhausted his interest in the revelations made to him. Not only does he not attempt to solve the moral problems which a wide experience of men presents to him; he will not even take the trouble to write the problems out legibly for others to study. His longest poem, Sordello, is so unintelligible from beginning to end, that we once heard an ardent admirer of his, and an accomplished man, acknowledge that only at the third careful reading could one begin to see what the poem at all meant; and that to the last only faint glimmerings of light flitted amid the chasms of black darkness. Paracelsus is a grand conception, [p. 107→] utterly abortive, through hasty execution and slipshod verbiage. Pippa Passes is a chaos of fine material, through which a grand purpose begins the creative organising movement, but leaves off with the merest hint of what the work might have become had the natural powers of the writer been effectually disciplined. Even of the short dramatic lyrics, scarce one approaches even completeness of conception, and certainly, with one or two exceptions, they are miserably short of attainable perfection in execution. They are too often mere hints, rough sketches, requiring clearer statement of facts, more careful elaboration of both phrase and rhythm. Everywhere alike one finds evidence of power not half put forth, of first thoughts printed instead of best thoughts, a facility of execution aimed at, the right to and faculty of which have not been earned by previous labour. A genius everywhere profuse, striking, vigorous, but which mixes indiscriminately weeds and flowers, utters itself always at random, and as often misses as hits its mark. Such is, in our opinion, the character of the poems which Mr. Browning has hitherto published. If his aim has been simply to prove himself a clever man, he has succeeded; if he has aimed at making his fellow-creatures wiser and happier through the talents bestowed upon him, his success has fallen miserably short of what might have been attained by the simple resolution to speak as intelligibly as he could what he had to say. His new volumes have precisely the same faults in about the same proportion. We could select scarcely one poem from these two volumes—with the exception of a particular class of poems to be specially mentioned—which was not more or less spoiled by the most obvious and easily removable faults, either of conception or execution, or both. Many of them are, as they stand, utterly unintelligible; the incidents to which they refer being neither stated nor deducible from the comment. Mr. Browning may possibly hold the key to these enigmas; or here and there one of Mr. Browning’s intimates may guess at the circumstances to which the poems refer. But this is pure impertinence, to publish poems the interpretation of which is a private occurrence, or a conversation to which the public is not admitted, and of which it hears only so much as has no meaning by itself,—just illustrating the selfish temper and carelessness for the gratification of others which lie at the root of all Mr. Browning’s faults. Of course Mr. Browning has a fine reason to give for what we attribute to carelessness and slovenly haste. He tells us that:
Grand, rough old Martin Luther
Bloomed fables, flowers on furze,
The better the uncouther:
Do roses stick like burrs?
A question we might answer by another somewhat more to the purpose,—Are burrs loved and prized like roses? If an irritated feeling of having been balked, disappointed, defrauded, be an essential element in the impression poetry should make, Mr. Browning’s burrs undoubtedly often attain their success. Only that as the public has the option of submitting to the burr—infliction or not, even this success is partial. Then again there is a fable applied to Keats, of a fisherman on the Tyrian coast, who fished up the murex, of which straightway artificers and handicraftsmen made purple dyes, and dyed silk, and got fame and riches, while the poor fisherman to whom the raw material of the dye was owing got neither.
Mere conchs! not fit for warp or woof!
Till art comes,—comes to pound and squeeze
And clarify,—refines to proof
The liquor filtered by degrees,
While the world stands aloof.
And there’s the extract, flasked and fine,
And priced, and saleable at last!
And Hobbs, Nobbs, Stokes and Nokes combine
To paint the future from the past,
Put blue into their line.
Hobbs hints blue,—straight he turtle eats.
Nobbs prints blue,—claret crowns his cup.
Nokes outdares Stokes in azure feats,—
Both gorge. Who fished the murex up?
What porridge had John Keats?
Now, this is both unfair to John Keats, and false in feeling besides. The author of St. Agnes’ Eve was not deficient in art, whatever the [p. 108→] boy who wrote Endymion may have been; and the fame of Keats stands at least as high as his productions justify, and allows a considerable margin over for the promise of only half-developed powers. And the theory itself, that the so-called originator in poetry is defrauded of his fame by the world, which bestows its admiration on those who seize, and elaborate, and refine his imperfect hints, at once unduly exaggerates the powers implied in such originality, and underrates those of the artist whose genius absorbs, digests, and reproduces, organically recombined, what has been less serviceably employed by the discoverer. Indeed, we are so dependent on those who have preceded us, and those who surround us, that originality in any other sense than that of thorough assimilation and reproduction in fresh forms is somewhat absurd. And to return to Mr. Browning’s illustration, we suppose he would not coolly argue that the fisherman who furnished the material of blue paint was really a greater genius than the painter who employed it upon a picture. And with respect to himself we really do not see in what peculiar sense he can justify his own roughness and obscurity by any claim of originality. The passions he describes are familiar,—the characters he draws are not more new than those of any other writer who looks into life for his material. Originality, in our sense of the word, he certainly has; that is, he looks about him with his own eyes, and not through the spectacles of school, or sect, or party; he wanders pretty much at will through God’s and the Devil’s world, and does not keep himself within four walls, however ample and well furnished. That is the only meaning of originality that is worth anything, and this scarcely excludes necessarily the qualities of the artist by which alone the knowledge gained can be communicated in such a manner as to win the permanent attention of mankind. Keats, his favourite, died almost in his nonage, and yet in the few years he lived, his art grew even more than his genius, if we are reluctantly obliged, for the sake of clear distinctions, to separate what are but form and substance. Mr. Browning has been before the public twenty years at least, and his art is as awkward and rude and ineffective now as it was at first. Neither Keats nor Martin Luther will serve his turn for an excuse. He had much better ponder on the fable he has put into Luther’s mouth. Date and dabitur are twins—God has given to him that he might give to others; he has accepted the gift, but refused the labour implied in the condition. It is no question of genius too high and noble for the arts of grammar and rhythm and phrase, but simply of genius allied to a will not resolute enough to earn fairly the renown it seeks, to a vanity seeking by bye-ways a royal road to enduring poetic fame. And now enough of prologuing; let us see proof of what has been asserted.
We have charged some of the poems of these volumes with being utterly unintelligible. Will any one venture to solve the riddle of Women and Roses? which we quote entire, lest it should be supposed the meaning lurks in some passage omitted:—
I dream of a red-rose tree.
And which of its roses three
Is the dearest rose to me?
Round and round, like a dance of snow
In a dazzling drift, as its guardians, go
Floating the women faded for ages,
Sculptured in stone, on the poet’s pages.
Then follow the women fresh and gay,
Living and loving and loved to-day.
Last, in the rear, flee the multitude of maidens,
Beauties unborn. And all, to one cadence,
They circle their rose on my rose tree.
Dear rose, thy term is reached,
Thy leaf hangs loose and bleached:
Bees pass it unimpeached.
Stay then, stoop, since I cannot climb,
You, great shapes of the antique time!
How shall I fix you, fire you, freeze you,
Break my heart at your feet to please you?
Oh! to possess, and be possessed!
Hearts that beat ’neath each pallid breast!
But once of love, the poesy, the passion,
Drink once and die!—In vain, the same fashion,
They circle their rose on my rose tree.
Dear rose, thy joy’s undimmed;
Thy cup is ruby-rimmed,
Thy cup’s heart nectar-brimmed. [p. 109→]
Deep as drops from a statue’s plinth
The bee sucked in by the hyacinth,
So will I bury me while burning,
Quench like him at a plunge my yearning,
Eyes in your eyes, lips on your lips!
Fold me fast where the cincture slips,
Prison all my soul in eternities of pleasure!
Girdle me once! But no—in their old measure
They circle their rose on my rose tree.
Dear rose without a thorn,
Thy bud’s the babe unborn:
First streak of a new morn.
Wings, lend wings for the cold, the clear!
What’s far conquers what is near.
Roses will bloom nor want beholders,
Sprung from the dust where our own flesh moulders.
What shall arrive with the cycle’s change?
A novel grace and a beauty strange.
I will make an Eve, be the artist that began her,
Shaped her to his mind!—Alas! in like manner
They circle their rose on my rose tree.
Our next evidence shall be a pair of poems, the first of which is in Browning’s best style; the second in nearly, though not quite, his worst. It is not, of course, because the first is tender, devoted, and full of a gracious sweetness, while the second represents caprice, affection on the wane, the ungracious side of love and marriage, that the former is to be preferred; but because in the former the images are clear, their symbolic meaning apprehended with no more effort than belongs to poetry of this kind, the rhythm musical, and the phrase natural, and in good taste,—while in the latter the language of things employed to express the sentiment is of the obscurest interpretation; the connexion of the thoughts broken and abrupt; two passages—though the poem is so short—disfigured, the one by inanity, the other by an allusion, the irrelevance of which would shock most persons, if its profanity did not; and the conclusion most lame and impotent. We do not say that a wife might not write such a poem in playful menace to her husband, or by way of serious warning, and prefer in the latter case to veil her serious meaning in a cipher of which her husband held the key; but as written for the public it contrasts in all the points we have mentioned most disadvantageously with its pendant. We mark in italics the two passages to which we particularly refer above:—
one way of love.
All June I bound the rose in sheaves.
Now, rose by rose, I strip the leaves,
And strew them where Pauline may pass.
She will not turn aside? Alas!
Let them lie. Suppose they die?
The chance was they might take her eye.
How many a month I strove to suit
These stubborn fingers to the lute!
To-day I venture all I know.
She will not hear my music? So!
Break the string—fold music’s wing.
Suppose Pauline had bade me sing!
My whole life long I learned to love.
This hour my utmost art I prove
And speak my passion.—Heaven or hell?
She will not give me heaven? ’Tis well!
Lose who may—I still can say,
Those who win heaven, blest are they.
another way of love.
June was not over,
Though past the full,
And the best of her roses
Had yet to blow,
When a man I know
(But shall not discover,
Since ears are dull,
And time discloses)
Turned him and said with a man’s true air,
Half sighing a smile in a yawn, as ’twere,—
“If I tire of your June, will she greatly care?”
Well, Dear, in-doors with you!
True, serene deadness
Tries a man’s temper.
What’s in the blossom
June wears on her bosom?
Can it clear scores with you?
Sweetness and redness,
Eadem semper!
Go, let me care for it greatly or slightly!
If June mends her bowers now, your hand left unsightly
By plucking their roses,—my June will do rightly.
And after, for pastime,
If June be refulgent
With flowers in completeness,
All petals, no prickles,
Delicious as trickles
Of wine poured at mass-time,—
And choose One indulgent
To redness and sweetness: [p. 110→]
Or if, with experience of man and of spider,
She use my June-lightning, the strong insect ridder,
To stop the fresh spinning,—why, June will consider.
If Mr. Browning showed symptoms of indifference early in his honeymoon, this Another Way of Love would have been a very pretty and meaning reproof and warning to him—with the exception of the sacramental wine allusion,—just the sort of note in verse a poetical wife might write to her poetical husband; but, coram populo, such lover’s talk of broken sentences, hints significant to the parties talking and no one else, is almost impertinent. We should not of course lay one such poem as a very heavy charge against any man, but it is a specimen of a style which disfigures the majority of Mr. Browning’s shorter poems—a preference for allusive writing which has an air of cleverness and refinement, and ends in being too often simply unmeaning, because it may mean anything or nothing. And that most ineffective conclusion—why, June will consider—is just an example of Mr. Browning’s favourite plan of writing a poem that, so to speak, leads to nothing, has no end, is but a fragment of versified talk, as if the very essence of art was not to present things completely from a particular point of view. We have in these volumes abundant instances of this most provoking of faults in a writer whose fragments are good enough to interest one,—none more striking than a comparatively long and highly-wrought poem, with the title Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came. The poem consists of thirty-four stanzas of six lines each, and is, we suppose, allegorical; but from beginning to end we can discover no hint as to what the allegory means, and find only description preparatory to some adventure which is to disclose the symbol of the “dark tower” and its terrible neighbourhood—but the adventure never comes off in the poem, which thus closes:—
There they stood, ranged along the hillsides—met
To view the last of me, a living frame
For one more picture! in a sheet of flame
I saw them and I knew them all. And yet
Dauntless the slug-horn to my lips I set
And blew. “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came.”
This seems to us very much like making a fool of the public, and all the worse for the striking ability lavished upon the fragment, as if a showman should hang round his caravan-front with the most wonderful pictures of the rarities on view inside, and the public after “walking up, walking up,” should find nothing behind the front, not even four bare walls. We guess what the fate of the showman would be if a pump or a pond were at hand. Such impatience of the labour necessary to work out fine conceptions, such a resting satisfied with the portico to which a temple naturally belongs, is at least as good an instance of “indolence which aspires to strive” as the story of The Statue and the Bust, one of the best poems, undoubtedly, in these volumes, interesting in itself as a history, and well told in a terza rima new, if we mistake not, to the English language, but as usual with Browning, marred by a close, in which a fine moral struggles obscurely through slovenly phraseology, and—its counterpart and cause—thought only half elaborated. The story is of a Grand Duke of Florence, who loved and was loved by the bride of one of his ministers, both resolving to act out their love, and both dallying with this purpose till years flew by, and the lady and her lover grew old and died baffled of their “life’s set prize.” Before this, however, the lady has her bust, in scorn of her feebleness of will, executed by Robbia, and set in the cornice over the window at which she used to watch the Grand Duke pass daily; and the duke has himself, from a similar feeling, cast in bronze, by John of Douay, on horseback, in the square, looking up to the window where his lady-love sat. Mr. Browning fancies the two in their tombs pondering what a gift life was, and sensible they had missed its aim, and thus delivers his moral of their story:—
I hear your reproach—“But delay was best,
For their end was a crime!”—Oh, a crime will do
As well, I reply, to serve for a test, [p. 111→]
As a virtue golden through and through,
Sufficient to vindicate itself
And prove its worth at a moment’s view.
Must a game be played for the sake of pelf?
Where a button goes, ’twere an epigram
To offer the stamp of the very Guelph.
The true has no value beyond the sham.
As well the counter as coin, I submit,
When your table’s a hat, and your prize a dram.
Stake your counter as boldly every whit,
Venture as truly, use the same skill,
Do your best, whether winning or losing it,
If you choose to play—is my principle!
Let a man contend to the uttermost
For his life’s set prize, be it what it will!
The counter our lovers staked was lost
As surely as if it were lawful coin:
And the sin I impute to each frustrate ghost
Was, the unlit lamp and the ungirt loin,
Though the end in sight was a crime, I say.
You of the virtue, (we issue join)
How strive you? De te, fabula!
Here is the bold morality of a man who refuses to see life through conventional spectacles; but unless one were tolerably familiar with the train of thought that energy of act and force of purpose are the most important elements in character, and that life is given to test these, we should hardly make out Mr. Browning’s meaning clearly from the slovenly and careless enunciation of it in these stanzas. Nor ought a poet of Mr. Browning’s principles to state thus nakedly what is only a half-truth after all, and which Mr. Browning knows as well as we do to be only a half-truth. But it would have given him some trouble, we suppose, to re-write these concluding stanzas so as to express his meaning less obscurely, and with its proper limitation. So he leaves his word-puzzles to acute people, and his morality to shift for itself: one consequence of which is that he has spoiled the effect of what would otherwise be one of the most complete and striking poems in his collection.
Our main object in this paper is to show how Mr. Browning defrauds himself of sympathy and fame, and his readers of enjoyment, by not doing justice to his own genius,—by wilfulness, caprice, and carelessness. Here is a pair of poems that are short enough to be quoted largely, the first of which is almost perfect—quite perfect but for an occasional awkwardness of phrase, perhaps mainly due to the frequency and doubling of the rhyme. While the second, conceived as tenderly and as truly, is wholly sacrificed to a metre that is but disjointed prose, and an arrangement of rhymes that baffles ordinary ears to catch,—rhymes that are so to the eye merely, like an occasional unintentional jingling of like sounds in careless prose:—
a woman’s last word.
Let’s contend no more, Love,
Strive nor weep—
All be as before, Love,
—Only sleep!
* * * *
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.
in a year.
Never any more
While I live,
Need I hope to see his face
As before.
Once his love grown chill,
Mine may strive—
Bitterly we re-embrace,
Single still.
Was it something said,
Something done,
Vexed him? was it touch of hand,
Turn of head?
Strange? that very way
Love begun.
I as little understand
Love’s decay.
* * * *
Was it wrong to own,
Being truth?
Why should all the giving prove
His alone? [p. 112→]
I had wealth and ease,
Beauty, youth—
Since my lover gave me love,
I gave these.
That was all I meant,
—To be just,
And the passion I had raised
To content.
Since he chose to change
Gold for dust,
If I gave him what he praised
Was it strange?
Would he loved me yet,
On and on,
While I found some way undreamed
—Paid my debt!
Gave more life and more,
Till, all gone,
He should smile “She never seemed
Mine before.
What—she felt the while,
Must I think?
Love’s so different with us men,”
He should smile.
“Dying for my sake—
White and pink!
Can’t we touch these bubbles then
But they break?”
Dear, the pang is brief.
Do thy part,
Have thy pleasure. How perplext
Grows belief!
Well, this cold clay clod
Was man’s heart.
Crumble it—and what comes next?
Is it God?
We say that the man who could write the first of these poems, and did write the second, must be utterly reckless in the employment of his faculties, utterly careless whether his art produce beauty or deformity. More often, however, Mr. Browning’s caprice mixes in the same poem the best and the worst, and that is to our thinking a still greater offence. The two first poems of the collection are instances. Love among the Ruins is really a description of some such place as Old Sarum, vivid with touches of wonderful pictorial power, but which is continually marred by the sacrifice of meaning and appropriate language to a metre quite unadapted for the subject predominant, though not unadapted for the subject indicated in the title. Talk about the old city and its ruins fills eleven and a half of fourteen stanzas, the love occupies a stanza and a half, and the moral the concluding stanza. How beautiful a poem Browning might have written in this metre had he almost reversed these proportions, and taken the pains such a metre demands, may be judged from this specimen, in which the love is included:—
And I know, while thus the quiet coloured eve
Smiles to leave
To their folding, all our many-tinkling fleece
In such peace,
And the slopes and rills in undistinguished grey
Melt away—
That a girl with eager eyes and yellow hair
Waits me there
In the turret, whence the charioteers caught soul
For the goal,
When the king looked, where she looks now, breathless, dumb
Till I come.
But he looked upon the city, every side,
Far and wide,
All the mountains topped with temples, all the glades’ Colonnades,
All the causeys, bridges, aqueducts,—and then,
All the men!
When I do come, she will speak not, she will stand,
Either hand
On my shoulder, give her eyes the first embrace
Of my face,
Ere we rush, ere we extinguish sight and speech
Each on each.
* * * *
Oh, heart! oh, blood that freezes, blood that burns!
Earth’s returns
For whole centuries of folly, noise and sin!
Shut them in,
With their triumphs and their glories and the rest.
Love is best!
The next poem—A Lover’s Quarrel—is one of our especial favourites, because it is at once so intensely passionate, so Maud-like in parts, and so thoroughly modern and domestic. Yet such stanzas as these come in and spoil our pleasure:—
What’s in the “Times?”—a scold
At the emperor deep and cold;
He has taken a bride
To his gruesome side,
That’s as fair as himself is bold:
There they sit ermine-stoled,
And she powders her hair with gold. [p. 113→]
Could but November come,
Were the noisy birds struck dumb
At the warning slash
Of his driver’s-lash—
I would laugh like the valiant Thumb
Facing the castle glum
And the giant’s fee-faw-fum!
Perhaps Mr. Browning would justify such writing on the ground of its representing fairly the tone of mind depicted; but art’s realism is surely not to be confounded with literalness, the artist’s business is not to make people speak and look exactly as they would speak and look, with all the accidents of human weakness about them. It is a large subject to discuss, but surely art is not daguerreotyping, even if the literal truth for which we value the sun-picture were attainable by the artist. Mr. Browning seems to us wholly to forget this distinction, and in forgetting it to abdicate altogether the true function of the poet.
The blemishes we have been noticing are blemishes for the most part upon poems of a serious or impassioned cast, and may be classed as faults of conception arising from impatience and feebleness of purpose, producing fragments instead of wholes; and as faults of execution, where a similar dislike of labour and carelessness of perfection produce doggrel. But Mr. Browning is fond of the grotesque for its own sake. Odd phrases, startling rhymes, strange arrangements, sudden transitions of thought, all kinds of eccentricities of style, have a fascination for him, we imagine, apart from the saving of labour accomplished by their means, and he writes whole poems apparently with little other object than to indulge this taste. It may easily be imagined that the writer who cannot keep himself from doggrel in poems intended to convey grave thoughts and tender sentiments, will play antics sufficiently extravagant when his purpose is to set things in the light of a playful or a tragical humour. But Mr. Browning unfortunately wants both wit to furnish the garb of wisdom in her sportive moods, and taste to warn him where the dangerous edge of sense and nonsense runs. He has not feeling enough of congruity to venture safely on a style in which airy grace and ease of movement are the condition of success. He tumbles, like a man who cannot keep his legs, not like a man who has such perfect command of his muscles that he can balance himself in a position of unstable equilibrium. And when he seeks to exhibit, as he sometimes does, the true grotesque, the blending of the tragic and comic, the terrible and the ridiculous, he seems to us, from a want of earnestness of feeling, or habitual carelessness of execution, to fall short at buffoonery. We have specimens of both classes of poems in these volumes. Old Pictures at Florence and Master Hugues of Saxe Gotha belong to the former; The Heretic’s Tragedy and Holy-Cross Day to the latter. In not one of these are evidences of Mr. Browning’s imagination and intellectual capacity wanting—the power to bring realities before his mind, and the power to think about them to some purpose when they are there; but what he sees he scrawls on his canvas with such a rough and ready hand; and what he thinks he expresses in such broken hints and such strange jargon, that the reader has a task to perform in getting through them, quite unnecessary from any profundity natural to the thoughts, or any obscurity to the things themselves, and strikingly illustrating the truth that the labour of a reader is generally in inverse proportion to that of the writer whose works he is studying. Here is a passage in which Mr. Browning is complaining of his ill-luck in finding no buried scrap of any of the early Florentine painters whose praises he is singing, and after a mere tiresome list of names, about as suitable to verse as an auctioneer’s catalogue, he goes on:—
I, that have haunted the dim San Spirito,
(Or was it rather the Ognissanti?)
Stood on the altar-steps, patient and weary too!
Nay, I shall have it yet, detur amanti!
My Koh-i-noor—or (if that’s a platitude)
Jewel of Giamschid, the Persian Sofi’s eye!
So, in anticipative gratitude,
What if I take up my harp and prophesy? [p. 114→]
When the hour is ripe, and a certain dotard
Pitched, no parcel that needs invoicing,
To the worst side of the Mont St. Gothard,
Have, to begin by way of rejoicing,
None of that shooting the sky (blank cartridge),
No civic guards, all plumes and lacquer,
Hunting Radetzky’s soul like a partridge
Over Morello with squib and cracker.
We’ll shoot this time better game and bag ’em hot—
No display at the stone of Dante,
But a kind of Witan-agemot
(“Casa Guidi,” quod videas ante)
To ponder Freedom restored to Florence,
How Art may return that departed with her.
Go, hated house, go trace each of the Loraine’s!
And bring us the days of Orgagna hither.
How we shall prologuise, how we shall perorate,
Say fit things upon art and history—
Set truth at blood-heat and the false at a zero rate,
Make of the want of the age no mystery!
Contrast the fructuous and sterile eras,
Show, monarchy its uncouth cub licks
Out of the bear’s shape to the chimæra’s—
Pure Art’s birth being still the republic’s!
Is this the style of thing that is to be our latest improvement on Whistlecraft, or Beppo? To us it appears to be the motley without the wit and wisdom it covered; the cap and the bells without the teeming brain and bright eye. Better grave dulness than this spasmodic folly; better the sober plodding of the patient ass along the beaten highway of prose than this insane kicking up of heels, meaningless braying, and sportive breaches of asinine manners, in the rich pasture-meadow of poetry.
It was remarked above that one class of poems was to be excepted from the general censure passed upon these volumes. Those who are familiar with Mr. Browning’s previous writings will hardly fail to guess that we allude to compositions in which the exhibition of character is effected by a single discourse—soliloquy, conversation, or epistle. Mr. Browning’s faults appear less in this form than in any other, either because a certain laxity of style is not unbefitting the colloquial character of the subject, and the framework admits readily of considerable discursiveness, and easy passing from topic to topic; or because Mr. Browning’s forte really lies rather in exhibiting the intellectual and moral characteristics of a man or an age, than in giving expression to the affections and the passions. Then, too, the loose blank verse in which these poems are generally written, favours that facility of execution which he affects. Whatever be the cause or causes, these poems certainly appear to us to be by far his best. In the collected edition of his works we prefer My Last Duchess, The Bishop orders his Tomb at St. Praxed, and The Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister, to most of the others; and in these new volumes, Fra Lippo Lippi, The Epistle of Karshish, How it strikes a Contemporary, Bishop Blougram’s Apology, Andrea del Sarto, and Cleon, give us the highest idea of Mr. Browning’s great abilities, and indicate powers of character-painting, and of seizing the points of a speculative or historical question, that would render him a fine biographer or essayist. In fact it is only where perfection of form is a necessary element in success that Mr. Browning fails; and, as we have said all along, not from want of genius but of art—that is, of training, self-restraint, judgment, and labour. Unfortunately, to a lyric poet, these qualities are scarcely less important than genius. Short and perfect is the standard for lyric poetry; the occasional snoozes that are allowed to the authors of Iliads and unpardonable in Horace and Anacreon; and the general brightness, intelligence, and imagination, that atone in a prose writer for all kinds of faults of style and incompletenesses of thought, will go very little way to base a poet’s permanent reputation. But in these character-pieces of Browning’s we do not ask for more than the vigour of a sketch, and that we get. Here, for instance, Fra Lippo Lippi, caught by the police in a very questionable [p. 115→] neighbourhood at night, recounts to the chief of the party his early experience of life, the way he became a monk, and from a monk, who could be taught nothing, a painter, who could paint anything.
Thank you! my head being crammed, their walls a blank,
Never was such prompt disemburdening.
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,—
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!”
* * * *
You be judge!
You speak no Latin more than I, belike—
However, you’re my man, you’ve seen the world
—The beauty and the wonder and the power,
The shapes of things, their colours, lights and shades,
Changes, surprises,—and God made it all!
—For what? do you feel thankful, ay or no,
For this fair town’s face, yonder river’s line,
The mountain round it and the sky above,
Much more the figures of man, woman, child,
These are the frame to? What’s it all about?
To be passed o’er, despised? or dwelt upon,
Wondered at? oh, this last of course, you say.
But why not do as well as say,—paint these
Just as they are, careless what comes of it?
God’s works—paint anyone, and count it crime
To let a truth slip. Don’t object, “His works
Are here already—nature is complete:
Suppose you reproduce her—(which you can’t)
There’s no advantage: you must beat her, then.”
For, don’t you mark, we’re made so that we love
First when we see them painted, things we have passed
Perhaps a hundred times nor cared to see;
And so they are better, painted—better to us,
Which is the same thing. Art was given for that—
God uses us to help each other so,
Lending our minds out.
We do not think any other of the poems of this class equal on the whole to this, but they are all interesting, and thoroughly well worth reading.
And now, in closing Mr. Browning’s volumes we hope neither he nor any of our readers will for a moment mistake the tone and intention of our remarks. If we valued Mr. Browning’s abilities at a lower rate, we certainly should have treated his faults with more leniency, and should have had no difficulty in filling our pages with admirable passages, and some few almost perfect poems. Compared with ninety-nine of a hundred volumes of contemporary poetry, these of Mr. Browning’s are a treasury of beauty, and sense, and feeling; and it is just because we feel how great Mr. Browning’s capacity is still—though his vices of style have the strength of indurate habits—that we think criticism worth bestowing upon him. There is not more than one poet of the present day whose genius is superior to his. If Mr. Tennyson is not to be brought into comparison with him, it is, however, mainly because he respects himself and respects the public, and is too grateful to his Master for the gifts [p. 116→] he has bestowed upon him to play tricks with himself. He gives the world of his best, and the world honours him, and will go on to honour him increasingly. If Mr. Browning covets his fame and usefulness, he must show the same sensitive artistic conscience, which is after all but acting on the principle that great talents are given men for the glory of God and the good of mankind. And if he wants higher authority for this recommendation than ours, or than his own best sense upon the matter, let him take to heart what England’s second greatest dramatist said of her greatest dramatist and poet; and not scorn to follow advice drawn by Ben Jonson from Shakspeare’s example. He probably knows the lines well enough, but they deserve to be constantly repeated, and written in letters of gold round the cornice of every poet’s study:—
Yet must I not give Nature all: thy art,
My gentle Shakspere, must enjoy a part.
For though the poet’s matter Nature be,
His art doth give the fashion; and, that he
Who casts to write a living line, must sweat
(Such as thine are) and strike the second heat
Upon the Muses’ anvil; turn the same
(And himself with it) that he thinks to frame;
Or, for the laurel, he may gain a scorn,—
For a good poet’s made as well as born:
And such wert thou.
G[eorge]. B[rimley].
Reviewed:
Men and Women (RB), London: Chapman & Hall, 1855.
___________________
