R560200A. Men and Women.
Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, February 1856, p. 137.
As reprinted in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 22, 372–373.
[The article in which this review occurs begins with general commentary on the decline of English poetry, followed by remarks on Alfred Tennyson, Alexander Smith, Sydney Dobell, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and EBB; these we omit here. For the full text of the remarks on EBB, see pp. 000–000.]
And Robert Browning is the wild boy of the household—the boisterous noisy shouting voice which the elder people shake their heads to hear. It is very hard to make out what he would be at with those marvellous convolutions of words; but, after all, he really seems to mean something, which is a comfort in its way. Then there is an unmistakable enjoyment in this wild sport of his—he likes it, though we are puzzled; and sometimes he works like the old primitive painters, with little command of his tools, but something genuine in his mind, which comes out in spite of the stubborn brushes and pigments, marvellous ugly, yet somehow true. Only very few of his Men and Women is it possible to make out: indeed, we fear that the Andrea and the Bishop Blougram are about the only intelligible sketches, to our poor apprehension, in the volumes; but there is a pleasant glimmer of the author himself through the rent and tortured fabric of his poetry, which commends him to a kindly judgment; and, unlike those brothers of his who use the dramatic form with an entire contravention of its principles, this writer of rugged verses has a dramatic gift, the power of contrasting character, and expressing its distinctions.
[This article concludes with further comments on English poetry, which we omit.]
[Margaret Oliphant]
Reviewed:
Men and Women (RB), London: Chapman & Hall, 1855.
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