R560100F. Men and Women.
The Rambler, January 1856, pp. 54–71.
As reprinted in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 22, 348–354.
In an article on Mr. Bailey’s Festus, in the Rambler of last month, we explained how it was that the modern poet cannot act the part of the ancient vates, nor aspire to be the channel of communication between God and man. If he teaches truth, he must in religious matters be the mere interpreter of the [p. 55→] Church, the rhymer of her dogmas, the musician who adapts her words and thoughts to the requirements of the popular ear, or the powers of the popular tongue; while in subjects of science and learning he must follow the decisions of the philosopher and the scholar. If he does not do this, he becomes a mere impostor, like Joe Smith, and an antiquarian restorer of dead opinions which he does not believe himself, or a frigid imitator of the antique, like Mr. Bailey. But though we thus denied the prophetical office of the modern poet, we certainly never thought of refusing him spacious territories for the exercise of his calling; indeed we think that we should be on the whole much more liberal than modern critics in general in estimating the subjects about which a poet may write. We cannot see why, if Dante, with his cantos upon cantos of St. Thomas in terza rima,—if Milton, with his versified treatises on theology,—if Shakespeare, with his subtle analyses and deep philosophies,—are to be reckoned poets, we are to make it a ground of objection to the modern singer that he turns into rhyme “the pleadings of a casuist, the arguments of a critic, or the ponderous discourses of some obsolete schoolman.” Nor, again, if the choruses of Æschylus, or the odes of Pindar, are poetry; or, to come down to modern days, if Keble’s Sunday Puzzle deserves its popularity and its fortieth edition or so,—can we say, a priori, that obscurity and true poetry are incompatible. If the poet is to be allowed to write on obscure subjects, he must be allowed to write obscurely; if he is to state the enigma of life, we must be content to let an enigma remain an enigma. Not that we defend the practice of veiling what in itself is clear enough in the mists of verbiage, or of enclosing a whim in a shell of triple brass, that first breaks your teeth in the cracking, and then ruffles your temper when you find only a maggot inside.
In this we do but say, that “thought’s what we mean by verse, and seek in verse;” poetry of a high order must give us reason, not merely melody. Not that we seek reason in poetry as we seek it in a treatise on the differential calculus, in Tredgold on the steam-engine, or in somebody else on predestination; we don’t want lists of things added to things, like Horace Mann’s statistics; or words added to words, like a blarney of Dr. Cumming’s; but we want the thoughts and the visions of a man who knows what things mean, who can read the sermons in stones, and listen to the words that “plants can speak;” and can report to us, or rather can set before us, the stones and the plants in such a way that with our own eyes we can read their sermons, and with our own ears hear the remarks of the daisy and the buttercup. True, a great many [p. 56→] sawneys ramble out into fields, and pluck you a toadstool or a mangel-wurzel, and straightway set it up as a fetish, and display their agility in their uncouth worship; many more, too, will assure you that they read in the gills of the mushroom, or the flakes of the onion, “thoughts too deep for tears,” much more for words. But, of course, the failures of the small fry never prove that the great fishes cannot leap up the fall. There are voices to be gathered from the trees and the rocks and the stars (especially the moon), though we do not trust every spoony that professes to have jotted them down on the spot into his note-book.
What is true, in a measure, with respect to the lifeless objects of nature, is most true with regard to man. To exhibit man such as he is, in his doubts, his trials, his affections, his fortunes and misfortunes; to exhibit character; to relate histories which, though individual, are, like algebraic formulas, of universal application, so that, after the poet has once expressed the type, we know exactly what is meant when a man is called an Iago, or a Hamlet, or a Hector, or a Maw-worm, or a Bottom,—this is the real drama, the true epos. Man, as living for realities, man as destined to be and to do something more than to get married to a beautiful girl, and then to be snuffed out,—such as our fashionable novels represent him,—is the object of the poet who is really a poet. As man in real life puzzles his head and breaks his heart over mysteries which he cannot solve, who shall forbid the poet from expressing these mysteries? and who shall complain if they are only expressed, not solved? For our poet is only a poet, a painter, a representer; not a vates, or solver of mysteries. It is very fine for Smith to like nothing but ballads—easy songs, in which a simple fact is simply narrated, or Jones to admire no poetry but that of the affections. It is an old complaint, that some men’s fancies never change, but make all people do and say the same things in the selfsame way; but there are more things in the universe of poetry than such people’s philosophy dreams of.
It is almost necessary to introduce a review of Mr. Browning’s late volumes by some remarks of this sort, because people with eyes only on one side of their heads (like flat-fish), and hearts all ventricle, or all auricle, have bitterly complained that a poet of his richness of fancy, his wonderful facility of expression, and, let us add, powerful intellect, has turned away from themes and from melodies which touch all hearts, to these more recondite, but, after all, deeper and more difficult phases of life and thought. That Mr. Browning has aimed at this highest sphere of poetry is evident by the title he gives his poems: he calls them “men and women,”—not [p. 57→] sticks and stones, not small celandines and daisies, storm and stress, sunbeams, shadows, or night-sides of nature. He evidently wishes to make his Cleons, Norberts, Lippos, and Andreas types of character, and to exhibit the subtle workings of particular temperaments in instances that shall have the value of general formulæ. Whether he has succeeded, and how far, of course requires a detailed examination.
Perhaps one of the first things that strikes a person in turning over the leaves of these volumes is a certain Hudibrastic recklessness of thought and diction; a higgledy-piggledy mixture of the grand rage of Lear, the sly wisdom of the fool, and the maniac ravings of mad Tom. Allied to this, the reader will also discover a keen enjoyment of dirt as such, a poking of the nose into dunghills and the refuse of hospitals, into beggars’ wallets and into Jews’ old-clo’ bags, accompanied by the peculiar grunt which expresses not only the pleasure experienced, but also the nature of the experiencer. What animal but a pig could find delight in such accumulations and similes, as “grass growing scant as hair in leprosy on mud kneaded up with blood;” “the leanness of the soil breaking out into substances like boils;” “a cleft in the palsied oak like a distorted mouth that splits its rim;” or the opening of “Holy Cross Day,” a ballad of Jews driven to church to hear the annual Christian sermon:
Fee, faw, fum! bubble and squeak!
Blessedest Thursday’s the fat of the weak [sic].
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.
* * * * *
Higgledy-piggledy, packed we lie,
Rats in a hamper, swine in a sty,
Wasps in a bottle, frogs in a sieve,
Worms in a carcass, fleas in a sleeve.
Hist! square shoulders, settle your thumbs,
And buzz for the bishop—here he comes.
Here is a real Hogarth-like picture of the frowzy saturnalia of the votaries of the nauseous mythological triad, Old Clo’, Cloaca, and Cloacina. There is another ballad of the burning of a heretic, equally greasy, grimy, and grim. In fact, abundant evidence might be produced that in one phase at least of his character our poet is, so to say, a Saxon swine. But this phase of his powers may only serve to enhance other sides of his character; the fooleries of mad Tom unquestionably act as a foil to the imprecations of Lear. And it may be that the poet gives evidence of other faculties besides mere power, [p. 58→] when he can wave one hand in the pure regions of the ether above the mountain-tops, and with the other grub for offal among the mud of a duck-pond. It often happens that the strong well-developed man, animal as he must be, must also, quà animal, have one side related to animality, to uncouthness, and to dirt, however much, from motives of cleanliness, or in obedience to the laws of refined society, he curbs his inclination. Any how, the laws of society permitting it, the world in general finds no fault with such sallies. The most fastidious Protestant can accept the grotesque buffoonery and grosser blackguardism of Luther, and only think him a grander and stronger man for it. Who blames Shakespeare for Falstaff? and why refuse to acknowledge Robert Browning’s right to disport himself in the same regions? If the style of thing was wrong, by all means condemn it in Shakespeare, and in better men than he; but if it is only contrary to present etiquette, it is mere conventionalism and dandification to turn up your nose at it. It is well to be a gentleman; but if you push the thing too far, you may become a gentleman-heretic, a fellow who would renounce the Trinity if he saw vermin creeping upon the skirt of St. Athanasius.
Of course, “there be roses and roses;” we are not excusing that which offends against morals; only that which, though it may offend prudery, does not shock modesty. However, there is really no occasion to defend Mr. Browning so seriously; his critics have only accused him of the faults of an ancient artist, by whose martyrdoms in a picture-gallery one passes shuddering, though their reality and the brightness of their colouring forbid all thought of their expulsion. Mr. Browning’s fancy is rather ghastly than unctuously coarse. Every thing reminds him of blood; the mire is kneaded up with it; the crimson on the creeper’s leaf in autumn is like a splash of it on a golden shield—
The wild tulip, at end of its tube, blows out its great red bell
Like a thin clear bubble of blood:
the lightning darts forth from heaven and in again; where it breaks the roof, there are shed, “bloodlike, some few drops of rain.” But we must apply ourselves to a more detailed account of the contents of these two volumes.
Mr. Browning, it is notorious, is a dramatic writer; his real vocation is to the drama; and the contents of these volumes seem to us to be meritorious in direct ratio to their dramatic form or intention. One of the best things is a sketch in three parts, entitled “In a Balcony.” There are but three persons concerned: Norbert a minister of state; the Queen; [p. 59→] and Constance, her niece. In the first part Norbert declares his love for Constance, and prevails on her to let him speak to the Queen. In the second the Queen, who has mistaken Norbert’s diplomatic talk for a declaration of love to herself, comes and talks in the fulness of her joy to Constance, who is, of course, unable to comprehend her meaning. In the third, Norbert enters and explains himself; the Queen withdraws; and the sketch ends with the approach of the guards. The intimate knowledge, the delicacy and the subtlety with which the devotion of Constance and Norbert, and the fiery and illicit love of the old Queen, are expressed, bespeak dramatic power of a very high order. There is also a ballad entitled “The Light Woman,” in which a plot, disagreeable enough, it is true, but natural and probable, and leading to seemingly inextricable difficulties, is admirably sketched out.
But the poems that have had the most attraction for us form a series on the different phases of artist-life, and the comparison of it with that of the unartistic portion of mankind. Most of these pieces have a dramatic character, though only one person speaks, who is the representative of some one type of artist-life. Together these poems may be said to form, not a philosophy of art, but a philosophy of artists.
First comes the school of flesh. The representative of this class is Fra Lippo Lippi, the profligate friar, who being caught by the guard of Florence in a disreputable neighbourhood after midnight, defends himself in a long speech, in which he describes his life,—how he became a monk, and how he has been attracted to the school of art which he followed, or rather founded. He is a type of the rollicking student, frequenting dens of vice, and yet, in the midst of danger and disgrace, having his eyes open for every piece of nature, sketching off on his thumb-nail the face of the policeman who collars him, to be immortalised in a picture as the slave who holds “John Baptist’s head a-dangle by the hair,” boasting of his being under the protection of the Medici, the people of the great house at the corner, and finally making friends with the guard, and entertaining them with his chat till daybreak. The picture is admirably put before our eyes; the painter’s life is sketched from the time that he was left a mere child to starve in the streets, where he lived
——God knows how, a year or two
On fig-skins, melon-parings, rinds, and shucks,
Refuse and rubbish—
till he is found by his aunt in a state of collapse, and dragged straight to the convent, where he gets a bit of bread, and a vocation, such as it is: [p. 60→]
While I stood munching my first bread that month,
“So, boy, you’re minded,” quoth the good fat father,
Wiping his own mouth (’twas refection-time)
“To quit this very miserable world?
Will you renounce?” The mouthful of bread? thought I.
By no means! Brief, they made a monk of me.
And all the world knows what kind of monk he turned out. In the streets, he says, as a beggar, he had not watched folks’ faces in vain; he came to know by intuition who would fling him a bit of biscuit, or would only kick him; he had learnt the look of things, he knew what faces and limbs meant, and he painted them; he could not endure to paint soul by painting the body so ill that the eye could not stop there; his principle was, that if you paint nature, soul must shine through. The use of art is to reproduce nature, which we pass by without notice till the artist arrests our attention by his imitation. This, he says, is to get into the pulpit, and to interpret God to the people. Mere symbolism is no element of art; there is no need of art for your skull and cross-bones, your two bits of stick nailed crosswise, or your triangle. So the profligate rollicking monk inaugurates the school of flesh and limbs; copy whatever flesh you see; expression and soul will be sure to be there.
The next in our series is an epistle from a travelling Arab physician of the time of Tiberius, who comes to Jerusalem, and there examines the case of a madman named Lazarus, labouring under the delusion that he had been dead and had been raised from the grave. Mr. Browning obiter takes the occasion of painting what he conceives to be the tenets and the conduct of the primitive Christians: thus Lazarus never attempted to convert his neighbours, never to
Make proselytes as madmen thirst to do.
How can he give his neighbour the real ground,
His own conviction?
He answers every objection with the same words: “Be it as God please.” The point, however, of the poem, which is very dramatically wrought up, is the cool indifference of the man of science in the presence of Christianity. Lazarus has told the physician of the Incarnation; he is quite ashamed of mentioning such a trivial subject when he has such important communications to make as the discovery of a bed of burrage, of a new symptom in fevers, or of a new charm. Yet the words of Lazarus force themselves upon his remembrance; and after closing the letter, he adds as a kind of postscript the following sublime lines: [p. 61→]
The very God! think, Ahib; dost thou think?
So, the All-Great were the All-Loving too—
So, through the thunder comes a human voice,
Saying, “O heart I made, a heart beats here!
Face, My hands fashioned, see it in Myself.
Thou hast no power, nor mayst conceive of Mine;
But love I gave thee, and Myself to love,
And thou must love Me, who have died for thee!”
The madman saith He said so: it is strange.
The next in the series, entitled “How it strikes a Contemporary,” is a sketch of the external life of the poet—say of Cervantes wandering about a Spanish town. And the next, impertinent and satirical as it is, and probably supposed by ninety-nine readers out of a hundred to be a squib on Cardinal Wiseman, is still, to our minds, one of the same series. It is a most subtle comparison between, on the one hand, the lowest grade of artistic life,—that of the literary hack and monthly scribbler for Blackwood’s Magazine, who “believes he sees two points in Hamlet’s soul unseized by the Germans yet—which view he’ll print;” but yet lives an artistic life in so far as he strives to reap all his enjoyment from the action of his “imperious necessity of creating” such things as he can; and on the other hand, such a man as Bishop Blougram is a type of the unartistic life,—a man who can enjoy art and artistic creation, but who, whenever these things come into competition with the least enjoyment, with the smallest convenience, at once sacrifices art, and all that elegance, seemliness, and truthfulness, which, in theory at least, the artistic mind requires for its very being. Of such a life there are many degrees, from that of the hard-handed mechanic up to the fat and pampered sinecurist who eats tithe-pigs and flourishes on the fears and superstitions of his neighbours. Of course the most unpleasant specimen of such a man would be the half-sceptical prelate, who sucks means of luxury out of a system the truth of which he does not—cannot believe. The Catholic would, perhaps, pick out an Anglican bishop for an example of this class of persons; he must not, then, be too hard upon the Protestant poet for choosing a Catholic to exemplify his position. At the same time, it is scandalous in Mr. Browning first to show so plainly whom he means, when he describes an English Catholic bishop, once bishop in partibus, now a member of “our novel hierarchy,” one who “plays the part of Pandulph,” one too, who, though an Englishman, was born in a foreign land; and then to go on sketching a fancy portrait which is abominably untrue, and to draw this person not only as an arch-hypocrite, but also as the frankest of fools. It is bad enough to assign a heap of disgusting qualities to a Ca- [p. 62→] tholic bishop in the abstract,—though Catholics are too much accustomed to such impertinence to have their equanimity grievously disturbed; but it is far worse to attribute the hypocrisy and scepticism that he has forged in his own brain to any person whom he designates so plainly.
To return, however, to the class of persons of whom Bishop Blougram is a type; those who smack their lips over the good things of the world; who have a keen relish for fame, honours, comfort, cookery, and so forth; who are by no means indifferent to religion, but (like Dr. Binney) have well settled it in their minds that a man can enjoy both this world and the next; men of strong will, who have faith because they choose to believe, and choose to believe because they have weighed the consequences of believing or not believing on their comfort both here and hereafter;—such a man is put forward as the champion of the practical, unpoetical, unartistic life,—against “Gigadibs, the literary man,” the dreamy, uncertain, sceptical half-artist, who in the voyage of life would fain furnish his six-feet-by-four of cabin with a grand pianoforte and a picture by Guido. “Bishop Blougram’s Apology,” though utterly mistaken in the very groundwork of religion, though starting from the most unworthy notions of the work of a Catholic bishop, and defending a self-indulgence which every honest man must feel to be disgraceful, is yet in its way triumphant. If Gigadibs is not converted so as to wish to be a bishop, at any rate he goes to Australia with a treble set of settler’s implements; he deserts the artist-life, moved by the arguments of the ant-artist.
Will you believe or disbelieve? says Blougram. Men’s minds are full of uncertainty, full of suspicions, which push them now one way, now another. Shall we throw overboard all certainty because we doubt; or throw over our doubt, and act as if we were certain? One way we must decide before we can act, for action requires decision. Which side shall we adopt? shall we call our chequered soul white or black? It will be what we call it, what we choose it to be. Act as an infidel, and you are an infidel, in spite of your occasional remorse and religiosity; act on faith, and you are faithful, in spite of your doubts. Choose your side, and you are already that which you wish to be—
If you desire faith, you’ve faith enough.
All this and more Blougram urges with a fertility of illustration and felicity of argument that (in spite of the miserable shortcoming of his principle) is quite delightful. Who, after reading his apology twice, or thrice perhaps, will object to ar- [p. 63→] gument in poetry? Why, the very first use of poetry was to instruct: he who has to weigh and measure his words to force them into shape, to compress his meaning, and to find out all possible ways of expressing it, if he has average brains will, after all this trouble, say what he has to say in a more striking, a more pertinent, a more memorable way than the man who blurts forth his extempore thoughts in the first words and the loosest order, just as they happen to arrive. But there is a kind of argument which belongs peculiarly to poetry: it is the argument of induction in its widest sense; it is the bringing things forward, and making them speak their own language and utter their own meanings. Its process is the process of nature. Children look at each thing that strikes their eye, and from each gain ideas by some inexplicable process. The poet notices the things that impress him; he describes them, or rather the striking parts of them; and his description makes the same impression on sympathetic minds that the original things did on his own. All our ideas are gained poetically; by the poetry of things, or the poetry of words. Philosophy comes after poetry. The revelation of God comes not as the Summa of St. Thomas, much less as the Elements of Euclid; but in the odes of Isaias, in the parables of the Gospel, in the lyrical mysteriousness of the Apocalypse. We cannot philosophise till we have prepared ideas to philosophise upon. Where there are no ideas, all teaching must be poetical,—a preparation for ideas. Terms must be defined and understood before they can be argued upon. Where there are no ideas, where the very first principles are in question, it is not discourse of reason that is wanted, but simple apprehension. Hence, perhaps, the Englishman’s notorious dislike to cut-and-dry arguments. What is the use of saying, “because this, therefore that,” when he is not certain what this and that mean? Hence, too, the line of argument which you will hear in the pulpits under which he sits. Take the questions at present in dispute: the authority of the Church, baptismal regeneration, preaching in surplice, stone-altars, credence-tables, crosses, hangings, candlesticks, rood-screens, new bishoprics, restoration of minor orders in Bible-readers, parish-clerks, and schoolmasters. If you go into a prim Gothic church, perhaps you will find the Bishop of Bullocksford in the pulpit advocating all these things in a lump; and the way he does it is sure to be by simile. He begins with an elaborate description, say of an oak-tree, its roots, trunk, branches, leaves, acorns, and oak-apples; then he treats you to the application: by the root he proves stone-altars; by the boughs, branch churches; by the leaves, screens and various [p. 64→] hangings, and so forth: for every thing that requires proof, let us return, he says, to the oak; like the oracular tree of Dodona, it has a response for every question; and his audience goes away delighted, perfectly unconscious that no argument has been used, that the preacher has simply been labouring to instil first ideas.
Then go into the square brick chapel-of-ease over the way, and listen to the Archbishop of Sheepsbeth holding forth on the same subject. You will get no more argument from him; still similes; he perhaps will bring in leviathan, and show triumphantly that stone-altars, crosses, credence-tables and hangings, are all and severally “very like a whale.” Parties run high; the case is brought before the supreme tribunals to be decided; Dr. Liquoringham, in his judgment, goes on the lawyer’s ground: he has not to discuss poetry, or analogies, or first principles; he must go simply by law. With bloodless logic he weighs allusions to acts of parliament that say nothing on the subject; to homilies which don’t exist; and to other equally grave authorities. He weighs the practice of college-chapels and cathedrals; and after months of incubation, delivers a trimming decision, consigns stone-altars, crosses, parafronts, and credence-tables to the fishes; but decides that candlesticks may still, like oaks if you please, stick in their places, and that the rood-screen (shortened by the rood) may still stand root-fast.
Both sides appeal; they wanted the first principles made clear,—they did not want a laborious balancing of authorities for which they do not care a straw. The argument of the lawyer carries no conviction. Both parties retire to their own lists, to fight it out as before with similes, with analogies, with figures,—in a word, with the whole furniture of the poet; because it is about the very first conception of religion, of worship, and of God, that the quarrel really is. Protestants only differ in discipline, says Dr. Cumming; you may say with more truth they differ about the very God they worship. They are still disputing about the very first idea of worship, and this must come to them by the poetical method.
We quote the following lines from Bishop Blougram as an illustration of the path of faith being clear on the whole, in spite of difficulties in detail:
——That way
Over the mountain, which who stands upon
Is apt to doubt if it’s indeed a road;
While if he views it from the waste itself,
Up goes the line there, plain from base to brow,
Not vague, mistakeable! what’s a break or two [p. 65→]
Seen from the unbroken desert either side?
And then (to bring in fresh philosophy)
What if the breaks themselves should prove at last
The most consummate of contrivances
To train a man’s eye, teach him what is faith?
The next of the series, “Andrea del Sarto,” and the last, “One Word more,” relate to the influence of woman on the artist.
Andrea was blessed with a fidgety wife, whose only use was to lend her beautiful face to be copied for Madonnas; but who had no mind to appreciate her husband’s talents, and no heart to respond to his devotion. She was too weak to bear her husband’s absence; but recalled him to her side from the most lucrative engagements, even when he had been paid beforehand for his works; she impoverished him too by her love of finery, and by paying the gambling debts of disreputable relations. In this charming poem Andrea, at his window with his wife one evening, gently tells her what he is, and what he might have been, if her sympathy had been with him:
——Had you but brought a mind!
Some women do so. Had the mouth then urged
“God and the glory! never care for gain”—
I might have done it for you. So it seems—
Perhaps not. All is as God overrules.
Besides, incentives come from the soul’s self;
The rest avail not.
In the last piece he tells his wife, to whom he dedicates his “men and women,” what wings the true sympathetic woman adds to the artist’s flight: how for an enthusiastic love the artist goes beyond his own art: how Rafael writes a volume of sonnets for his love, and Dante paints an angel for Beatrice:
What of Rafael’s sonnets, Dante’s picture?
This: no artist lives and loves that longs not
Once, and only once, and for one only,
(Ah the prize!) to find his love a language
Fit and fair, and simple and sufficient;
Using nature that’s an art to others;
Not, this one time, art that’s turned his nature.
Ay, of all the artists living, loving,
None but would forego his proper dowry.
Does he paint? he fain would write a poem;
Does he write? he fain would paint a picture;
Put to proof art alien from the artist’s,
Once, and only once, and for one only.
So to be the man, and leave the artist,
Save the man’s joy, miss the artist’s sorrow.
The remaining poem of the series is entitled “Cleon:” it [p. 66→] is an epistle from an artist to an emperor, answering several questions that have been put to him, the last of which involved a querulous preference of the immortality of the artist to the temporary greatness of the sovereign. To this Cleon answers:
——Thou diest while I survive?
Say rather that my fate is deadlier still,
In this, that every day my sense of joy
Grows more acute, my soul (intensified
In power and insight) more enlarged, more keen;
While every day my hairs fall more and more,
My hand shakes, and the heavy years increase;
The horror quickening still from year to year,
The consummation coming past escape,
When I shall know most, and yet least enjoy;
When all my works wherein I prove my worth
Being present still to mock me in men’s mouths,
Alive still, in the phrase of such as thou,
I, I, the feeling, thinking, acting man,
The man who loved his life so over much,
Shall sleep in my urn.
At the end of the epistle he tells the emperor that he does not know where to find Paulus (the apostle), to whom a letter was to be forwarded, evidently to get answers to the same questions. The philosopher gently rebukes the monarch:
Thou can’st not think a mere barbarian Jew
Hath access to a secret shut from us.
The artist, no more than the king, has the secret of happiness; yet, in the pride of art, he will not seek it outside the domain of pure art. Art is not all we want; yet it ought to be; so we will have nothing else. As Browning sings in one of his lyrics, addressing the poet,
You hold things beautiful the best ....
’Tis something—nay, ’tis much; but then
Have you yourself what’s best for men?
Are you poor, sick, old ere your time,
Nearer one whit your own sublime
Than we who never turned a rhyme?
Our poet, it will be seen, does not exhaust his philosophy in his blank verse; his lyrics are full of it. In the poem “Old Pictures in Florence,” so outrageously dishevelled in rhyme and language, we have an excellent comparison of the spirit of Greek with that of Christian art. In another, “Master Hugues of Saxe-Gotha,” we have an inimitable description of one of Bach’s fugues. The attempt to put the more undefined music of Galuppi into words is not so successful; while in the poem entitled “Saul,” in which David is the speaker, [p. 67→] who relates what he sung to the possessed king, we have the various stages of Mr. Browning’s religious theory.
David, called in to awake the monarch from his trance, first plays him all the tunes he can think of; then sings to him of “the wild joys of living:”
How good is man’s life, the mere living! how fit to employ
All the heart and the soul and the senses for ever in joy!
Then he turns away from this merely animal life, and sings of the human objects of existence—fame and glory. But as yet Saul rises not; David, looking at him, feels the thrill of love, and sings to him that he is ready to die for him to restore him to his former self. Then comes the inspiration; the prophet flings away his harp, and sings of the love of God:
Do I find love so full in my nature, God’s ultimate gift,
That I doubt his own love can compete with it? here, the parts shift?
Here, the creature surpass the Creator? the end, what Began?
Would I fain in my impotent yearning do all for this man,
And dare doubt He alone shall not help him, who yet alone can?
Would it ever have entered my mind, the bare will, much less power,
To bestow on this Saul what I sang of, the marvellous dower,
Of the life he was gifted and filled with? to make such a soul,
Such a body, and then such an earth for ensphering the whole?
And doth it not enter my mind (as my warm tears attest)
These good things being given, to go on, and give one more, the best?
Ay, to save and redeem, and restore him?
Then he goes on; it is not in knowledge or in power that man is an image of his Creator; it is in his will:
’Tis not what man does which exalts him, but what man would do.
From this David can only draw one conclusion:
Would I suffer for him that I love? So wilt Thou, so wilt Thou!
So shall crown Thee the topmost, ineffablest, uttermost crown,
And Thy love fill infinitude wholly.....
He who did most shall bear most; the strongest shall stand the most weak.
’Tis the weakness in strength that I cry for! my flesh that I seek
In the Godhead! I seek it and find it. O Saul, it shall be,
A Face like my face that receives thee: a Man like to me
Thou shalt love and be loved by for ever! a Hand like this hand
Shall throw open the gates of new life to thee! See the Christ stand.
Oh, the misery, that a poet with a soul like this, naturally Christian, should be held aloof by a spirit of mockery, by the hard artistic scepticism, whose bitterness no one has probed more deeply, no one has described more feelingly than himself! That a man, who has such an affection for the earth of Italy, that
Woman-country, never wed,
Loved all the more by earth’s male lands, [p. 68→]
should always stand in an attitude of suspicion, should always have a sneer on his lips for the Church of Italy,—that true woman-church, which alone will really appreciate his art, derided by sceptical critics; which alone can lend him enthusiasm, and give him a real object, instead of the foolish ends on which he wastes his powers,—ends which he knows to be mere vanity and vexation! When one sees how much Mr. Browning must have thought and reflected, and how near he comes to Christianity, one wonders why he has stopped, why he is not a Catholic. As it is, he is held in the trammels of the modern school of Protestants that denies hell; that thinks all men will come right at last; that holds it to be better to do something than nothing,—to do wrong, rather than to idle all day long, because the business of the soul is simply to declare itself by its action, by its fruit:
Be hate that fruit, or love that fruit,
It forwards the general deed of man;
And each of the many helps to recruit
The life of the race by a general plan,
Each living his own, to boot.
A crime, he says, will do as well to serve for a test as a virtue. Do your best, whether winning or losing, if you choose to play:
Let a man contend to the uttermost
For his life’s set prize, be what it will.
Mr. Browning has such a perilous facility of putting himself into the place of the most horrible men, of uttering their thoughts and expressing their feelings, that a religious person reading his works runs great risk of being shocked at each page. The same persons who cried out against Byron for imagining the atrocious blasphemy of Cain and Satan—though if Satan is introduced, it is hardly the thing to make him a respectable and twaddling preacher—will find abundant cause to censure Mr. Browning; he makes no bones of uttering from the housetops that which the decent conventionality of society generally agrees to cover and to forget. He expresses things, of which those who are ignorant had better remain so, but which those who know of them will be glad to find so well expressed, so well prepared for dissection and study. Physicians may study the phenomena of madness in Shakespeare, and divines may examine the difficulties of sceptics or the objections of infidels in Mr. Browning.
From all this it may be understood that our author is not a popular poet. He writes for the few, not for the many. Even those pieces which are most adapted to touch men’s hearts are interrupted by too much allusion, alloyed with too much [p. 69→] brain, to run smoothly and trippingly. His lyre is as obscure as that of Æschylus. Sometimes a mere dreamy shadowy fancy is the sole foundation of a little piece; other poems, again, appear to be chiefly exercises of metre and rhyme. No doubt it is a hard task to have to write some dozen stanzas of four lines, each stanza containing only from twenty-four to twenty-six syllables, of which no less than ten are to be rhymes. This feat has been accomplished in the lines “On a Pretty Woman,” which gain neither beauty nor sense from the fetters. As a better sample of this hornpipe in chains we quote two stanzas of the little poem entitled “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.
After all, the capabilities of these kinds of metre were pretty nearly exhausted by our poets of the seventeenth century. Modern poets are not supposed to write “altars” or “wings” like George Herbert, nor even to count their syllables on the ends of their fingers. Modern verses are not read by feet, but by the rules of musical rhythm; not by syllables, but by accents. The lines are to be divided by bars as in music, rather than by the ordinary prosodiacal pauses. The application of the rules of musical rhythm will often solve the problem of an apparently halting verse. Thus, how difficult to read is a kind of metre in frequent use, where a short line immediately follows after and rhymes with a long line; you feel as if you had mistaken the number of steps in a staircase, and had been brought up by a step in the air at the top. If
Rhyme the rudder is of verses,
By which, like ships, they steer their courses,
doubtless the rhyme ought to indicate the musical answer to the first musical phrase. But the phrase and its answer should be rhythmically equal. Who does not know the curious effect of displacing the rhymes in the ordinary measure of “eights- [p. 70→] and-sixes” (vide Tate and Brady passim), and making the three-foot line rhyme with the four-foot immediately preceding? The ear will never get accustomed to these anomalies till it feels the value of the musical principle of the echo, which allows a rhythm to be broken by the repetition or the imitation of the last few notes of each phrase. If this is the law of the short rhyming line, it seems to follow that, like the musical echo, it should be in sound as well as sense a repetition or imitation, or at least an answer to the concluding measure of the former line. Poems where such a metre is used seem to us to halt when the sense marches forward directly, without a slight pause, or even a slight reflex motion, in every short line. Mr. Browning has two poems in such metres, which seem to us unpleasant for these reasons. We quote a stanza from the first poem of the book:
Now—the single little turret that remains
On the plains,
By the caper overrooted, by the gourd
Overscored,
While the patching house-leek’s head of blossom winks
Through the chinks.
The words are beautifully descriptive; but the music is unpleasant. So is that of the piece called “Instans Tyrannus,” though in this case the style justifies a licentious metre. What effect a master like Mr. Browning may produce by the repetitions and pauses we have mentioned may be seen in his poem entitled “Mesmerism,” where the fixed intention and the persevering manipulations are so excellently imitated by the iteration of the same words and the same ideas.
But, on the whole, Mr. Browning’s lyric power is far inferior to his dramatic vigour. His music is not to be compared with Tennyson’s, nor his faculty of making nature sympathise with the character intended to be described. When Tennyson describes his solitary woman in the moated grange, all nature, without effort, is in harmony with the woman’s solitude. Browning cannot reduce nature to this sympathy without art and trouble; he has an elaborate poem, “Childe Roland to the dark tower came,” in which nature is described as it appears to the man riding on a hateful and desperate undertaking; but what he has scarcely done in thirty stanzas Tennyson would have accomplished in ten. Browning also is too energetic to give us always perfectly pleasing images. As he says in his last poem—
Where my heart lies, let my brain lie also.
He does not give us things as we could wish them to be, but as we know they are and will be. In this he is like Thackeray, [p. 71→] all whose characters have grave blemishes, but such as on reflection we know that they probably would have. Neither writer will submit to give us heart without brain, to give us without alloy that which the affections and sentiments desire. Both throw themselves into a character, and make the character speak, not what we would have it utter, but what they know it would naturally express. Their aim is not abstract beauty, but nature, and the truth of nature. They belong to Fra Lippo Lippi’s school of art, not to that of Beato Angelico or of Overbeck—far less to the drawing-room conventionalities of the Chalons and the rest of the artists of Annuals and Books of Beauty. It is one thing for a writer to establish his own ideal of the pathetic or the humorous, and to distort all nature to this mould, as Dickens does, and another, with Browning and Thackeray, to copy nature in the full confidence that, if she is but truly followed, the copy must imply and suggest soul as much as the original—and more definitively and impressively, inasmuch as in the copy a single object is exhibited, disentangled from all others, concentrated in time, and painted on a plain surface, instead of puzzling the eye with the perspective illusions of solid bodies.
For ourselves, we thank Mr. Browning, sceptical and reckless as he is, for a rare treat in these thoughtful and able volumes. We do not suppose that they will command any extensive popularity; for except the rather select audience to which they are addressed, the rest of the world will probably only use them as a magazine of polemical weapons. Though much of their matter is extremely offensive to Catholics, yet beneath the surface there is an undercurrent of thought that is by no means inconsistent with our religion; and if Mr. Browning is a man of will and action, and not a mere dreamer and talker, we should never feel surprise at his conversion.
[Richard Simpson]
Reviewed:
Men and Women (RB), London: Chapman & Hall, 1855.
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