R560109A. Men and Women.
The Guardian, 9 January 1856, pp. 34–35.
As reprinted in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 22, 370–372.
Dryden bitterly lamented the corrupt taste of a Court which obliged him to expend his genius upon licentious dramas, and left him time only to write such poems as “Absalom and Ahitophel,” the “Fables,” and the “Hind and Panther.” Our modern poets, with all the advantages of writing for a public at once moral, indulgent, and willing to pay for a gratification, are too prone to dissipate their strength in evanescent trifles, as flimsy in their style as they are devoid of definite aim or consecutive reasoning. They seem to think that when they have hit off an extravagant thought, it is sufficient to clothe it in the first words that present themselves, though far from the most appropriate or the most musical that could be found. Poetic genius, according to them, seems to consist in the power of throwing off at random the phantoms which rise up uncalled in the imagination, without regard to their connection or congruity. Now, all that we know of the great works which have survived the hour of their birth, tends to show that they were the offspring, not only of commanding genius, but of consummate industry. Simple and intelligible writing is always the result of careful arrangement and patient correction. And if this be required in prose, it is doubly necessary in poetry, in which every thought ought to be subservient to the production of that emotion which it is the poet’s object to awaken, and every word carefully weighed before adoption, and rejected unmercifully if it be found wanting. Men are sometimes ambitious of the character of writing without erasures; but if the mss. of the masterpieces of Shakspeare, Milton, Butler, Cowley, or Dryden, presented an unblotted surface—which we believe they did not—it was because these great men had already arranged their subjects by an exercise of [p. 35→] deep and concentrated thought, and had performed the process of correction in their heads before they began to commit their works to writing. If they are sometimes obscure, the difficulty of following them arises from the depth of their reasoning, or our ignorance of the sources of illustration which they had at their command, and not from absence of consecutive thought, or inappropriateness of language. To say that the aggregate amount of poetic genius which exists in the nineteenth century is less than that of any former period of our literary history, is probably not true, and could certainly never be proved. Why, then, is it, that when we take up one of our older poets we find it easy to understand and appreciate his peculiar merits, while we feel conscious that we are setting about a serious business indeed when we institute a search for the meaning, or endeavour to follow the thoughts, of a modern versifier? We have no hesitation in saying that the distinction arises from the fact that a poet in these days is either too indolent to arrange and cull his thoughts and language, or that he is afraid that the flame which informs his poetry is so weak, that to endeavour to concentrate its force would be to incur the danger of extinguishing it altogether.
To this indolence or mistaken principle we attribute the fact that Mr. Browning’s Men and Women, though displaying much poetic feeling, genius, and good sense, are so difficult to read or understand. In some cases the transitions are so brusque, the train of ideas so difficult to follow, and the grammatical structure of the sentences so involved, that most readers will be fain to pass on in contented ignorance of their aim or object. Indeed, we venture to prophesy that no passage from the Men and Women will be more frequently quoted than that in which the very pertinent question is asked, “What does it all mean, poet?”
But if the reader’s brain is racked in endeavouring to follow the ideas, his ear is no less sorely taxed to catch the rhythm of the various metres to which the Men and Women dance, or, some would say, limp, along.
Here we have the story of Saul and David in long anapæstic lines, with a hyper-catalectic syllable, reminding one of a cantering horse suddenly arrested in his course by a ditch; verses in which the ear is expected to appreciate the correspondence of rhyming syllables after an interval of a page; triple rhymes which can only be compared to the painful and spasmodic attempts which a hobbled donkey makes to get out of the reach of a coachman’s whip. But let us give our readers an opportunity of judging for themselves.
Mr. Browning’s Men and Women consists of fifty poems on all possible subjects, including Religion, Philosophy, Taste, and, above all, Love, dedicated in an Envoy, entitled “One Word More,” to “E.B.B.,” the initials of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, the author’s wife, and one of the nine poetesses whose works were reviewed some years ago in the Quarterly. We give the author’s words, but must leave the reader to discover their meaning:—
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.
The love-poems, as might be expected, are the most difficult to understand; they are also the worst.
The first in the collection is entitled “Love among the Ruins.” It exemplifies many of Mr. Browning’s peculiarities. The poet imagines himself to be an Italian shepherd hastening to meet his mistress among the ruins of ancient Rome:—
Where the quiet-coloured end of evening smiles
Miles and miles,
On the solitary pastures where our sheep
Half asleep,
Tinkle homeward through the twilight, stray, or stop
As they crop—
Was the site once of a city great and gay,
(So they say)
Of our country’s very capital; its Prince,
Ages since,
Held his court in, gathered councils, wielding far
Peace or war.
. . . . . .
And I know, while thus the quiet-coloured eve
Smiles to leave,
To their folding, all my 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.
In one year they sent a million fighters forth,
South and North,
And they built their gods, a brazen pillar, high
As the sky,
Yet reserved a thousand chariots in full force—
Gold of course.
“Gold of course!” Does this mean that the thousand chariots were of gold; or rather does the poet mean to suggest by these pregnant words that the spring which set all the vast machine in motion was, to use an Americanism, the “almighty dollar?” But we must hasten to the moral:—
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!
We have a very misty idea of the meaning of this stanza. What heart does the poet apostrophise? But we suppose the moral is, that it is better that an Italian shepherd should make an assignation with his mistress in a ruined tower, than that an Emperor should behold from it all the glory and crimes of Imperial Rome. The last line, “Love is best,” is, no doubt, intended to contrast strikingly, by its simplicity, with the grandeur of the former description.
This is a good and comparatively intelligible specimen of Mr. Browning’s love-poems. But we must pass on to his sketches of Italian life, which appear to us much more successful.
An officer of police, apparently, or at least some person in authority, with attendants and torches, suddenly comes upon a wanderer at midnight in a very disreputable alley of an Italian town. This wanderer turns out to be a certain Fra Lippo Lippi, Carmelite friar and painter, who having been employed by a nobleman in the neighbourhood to paint a picture, profits by the comparative liberty which his sojourn at the great man’s house gives him, by descending from the window and resorting to this “alley’s end,”—
Where sportive ladies leave their doors ajar.
In this very unpleasant situation Fra Lippo tells the story of his life. A starving orphan-boy, living in the streets upon petty larceny and melon-peelings, he is at last carried by an aunt to the Superior of the Carmelites. The incident is thus related:—
One fine frosty day,
My stomach being empty as your hat,
The wind doubled me up, and down I went.
Old Aunt Lapaccia trussed me with one hand,
(Its fellow was a stinger as I knew)
And so along the wall over the bridge
By the straight cut to the convent. Six words there,
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;
I did renounce the world, its pride, its greed,
Palace, farm, villa, shop, and banking house,
Trash, such as these poor devils of Medici
Have given their hearts to.
Fra Lippo Lippi turns out what might be expected from such a beginning. Idle and mischievous; his only occupation is drawing rude pictures with chalk and charcoal; and he is on the point of being expelled the convent, when the Prior bethinks him that the church would be improved by some fresco paintings, and that Fra Lippo Lippi might be useful in the capacity of painter and decorator. His coup d’essai is eminently successful; but, unfortunately, his saints are calculated to excite feelings the very reverse of monastic. Fra Lippo, however, declares that the sole object of art is to minister to man’s sensuous nature, and that for the purposes of religion—
A skull and bones,
Two bits of stick nailed cross-wise, or, what’s best,
A bell to chime the hour with, does as well.
And thus we come to the old Puritan principle that religion is a gloomy task, to be banished from cheerful life, incapable of inspiring art, or taking into its service the love of the beautiful inherent in man’s nature; and that to attempt to unite religion and art is to imperil both. But Fra Lippo shall speak for himself. After adverting to the situation in which he has been caught, and which he mildly describes as “fooleries,” he goes on:—
The old mill-horse, out at grass
After hard years, throws up his stiff heels so,
Although the miller does not preach to him
The only good of grass is to make chaff.
What would men have? Do they like grass or no?
May they, or mayn’t they? All I want’s the thing
Settled for ever one way; as it is,
You tell too many lies and hurt yourself;
You don’t like only what you like too much,
You do like what, if given you at your word,
You find abundantly detestable.
For me, I think I speak as I was taught—
I always see the garden, and God there
A-making man’s wife—and my lesson learned,
The value and significance of flesh,
I can’t unlearn ten minutes afterward.
These views of art are appropriately placed in the mouth of a friar, who lets himself down from a window by a rope-ladder to frequent the alleys of Florence at midnight; but from other passages in these poems we cannot help thinking that they are Mr. Browning’s own. They are just what might be expected to exist in combination with that excessive theoretical purity which leads Mr. Browning, in Bishop Blougram’s Apology, to reject all established forms of religion as too gross and earthly.
We had intended to extract some characteristic passages from the last-mentioned poem, which professes to relate an interview between a certain Bishop Blougram, intended evidently for Cardinal Wiseman, and a needy litterateur, the former taking Bishop Butler’s argument in favour of Christian faith as being the safest course, and acting the part of both the interlocutors. The following poem tells its story well, and with striking effect, and appears to us to be one of Mr. Browning’s most successful efforts:—
protus.
Among those latter busts we count by scores
Half-emperors and quarter-emperors,
Each with his bay-leaf fillet, loose-thonged vest,
Loric and low-browed Gorgon on the breast;
One loves a baby-face, with violets there,
Violets instead of laurel in the hair,
As those were all the little locks could bear.
Now read here. “Protus ends a period
Of empery beginning with a god:
Born in the porphyry chamber at Byzant;
Queens by his cradle, proud and ministrant,
And if he quickened breath there, ’twould like fire
Pantingly through the dim vast realm transpire.
A fame that he was missing spread afar;
The world from its four corners rose in war,
Till he was borne out on a balcony,
To pacify the world when it should see.
The Captains ranged before him, one, his hand
Made baby points at, gained the chief command.
And day by day more beautiful he grew
In shape, all said, in feature and in hue,
While young Greek sculptors gazing on the child
Were, so, with old Greek sculpture, reconciled.
Already sages laboured to condense
In easy tomes a life’s experience:
And artists took grave counsel to impart
In one breath and one hand-sweep, all their art—
To make his graces prompt as blossoming
Of plentifully-watered palms in spring:
Since well beseems it, whoso mounts the throne,
For beauty, knowledge, strength, should stand alone,
And mortals love the letters of his name.”
Stop! Have you turned two pages? Still the same.
New reign, new date. The Scribe goes on to say
How that same year, on such a month and day,
“John the Pannonian, groundedly believed
A blacksmith’s bastard, whose hard hand reprieved
The Empire from its fate the year before,—
Came, had a mind to take the crown, and wore
The same for six years (during which the Huns
Kept off their fingers from us) till his sons
Put something in his liquor,”—and so forth.
Then a new reign. “Stay—Take at its just worth”
(Subjoins an annotator), “what I give
As hearsay. Some think John let Protus live
And slip away. ’Tis said he reached man’s age,
At some blind northern court; made first a page,
Then tutor to the children; last of use
About the hunting-stables. I deduce
He wrote the little tract ‘On worming dogs,’
Whereof the name in sundry catalogues
Is extant yet. A Protus of the Race
Is rumoured to have died a monk in Thrace,—
And if the same, he reached senility.”
Here’s John the Smith’s rough-hammered head. Great eye,
Gross jaw and griped lips do what granite can,
To give you the crown-grasper. What a man!
Porphyrogenitus, however, is usually supposed to mean, born in the purple, not the “porphyry chamber.”
That Mr. Browning has many faults no one will be disposed to deny. His elliptical mode of expressing himself, and occasionally inappropriate use of words, and his brusque transitions from one train of thought to another, make the endeavour to follow him often a very weariness. His love-poems are occasionally disfigured by a certain grossness of thought and even expression. Like Fra Lippo Lippi, he cannot get “the value and significance of flesh” out of his mind. His philosophy is of that unpleasant kind which leaves an impression upon the mind that God and man, faith and virtue, are all delusions, used by knaves to compass their selfish ends. But he possesses power. From weakness he is generally free. His defects are of the strong, offensive kind which excite the anger rather than the pity of the reader. And if he would but believe that the primary object of poetical language is to convey the idea which exists in the poet’s mind to that of the reader—that familiarity is not necessarily vulgar—and that metre is intended to produce a cadence which shall be pleasing to the ear, we believe that he might take a high rank among living poets.
Reviewed:
Men and Women (RB), London: Chapman & Hall, 1855.
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