R560300B. Men and Women.
The Irish Quarterly Review, March 1856, pp. 21–28.
As reprinted in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 22, 376–380.
[The article in which this review appears begins with notices of works by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Philip James Bailey; these we omit.]
“Men and Women,” by Robert Browning, a work in two volumes, containing fifty poems, is now lying before us, and constitutes a subject for more melancholy reflections than does that of any other of the three, we have chosen for notice on this occasion. Longfellow in Hiawatha has evidenced a departure from the dignified and philosophical character of his former poems, but his late production is not the unmistakeable manifestation, of obstinate adhesion to false principles of taste and structure; Bailey’s Mystic, is a still more ludicrous exaggeration than Festus, but we never had such an opinion of the creative power of the Author, as to entertain the hope that his genius would endow our literature, with material gifts from its salutary idiosyncrasies; Browning, however, whom we still look upon as a poet of much originality, power and reflection, whom we regard as the possessor of attributes enabling him to confer considerable benefits on his countrymen, in the improvement of their intellects, and their hearts, has given, in his late volumes, to our very great regret, but too great a profusion of instances to demonstrate the dogged pertinacity with which he clings to vices, which would swamp in their fatal vortex the giant mind of Shakspere himself. Obscurity is the evil genius that is working the ruin of this poet: Browning is, pre-eminently, the King of Darkness; like Charles Lambe, whose passion for “Roast Pig,” was of that violent kind, that he confessed himself ready to give up anything to his friends, save and except that beloved dish, so Browning, (but with much less reason), appears equally as resolute in maintaining possession [p. 22→] of his darling hobby, which is never permitted to be absent even from the most trifling conceptions of his brain. The poet’s imagination is of that lofty order which stamps the impress of high intellectuality on all his thoughts, and his power of language can invest those thoughts with the most brilliant dress; but he is defeated in all his undertakings by this foul demon which ever marches by his side, and snatches the wreath descending on his brow. Mistaking the allegorical meaning of the Owl of Minerva, he would seem to have supposed that a somnolent and gloomy visage, and a love of darkness, were the striking traits which recommended that bird to the Goddess of Wisdom; never jogging his memory to call back the fact, that it was the power of “seeing in darkness,” to which the “Bird of Night” is indebted for his appearance on her shield. But Browning has other faults, all more or less disfiguring, and constantly exhibiting themselves. In the two volumes now before us, there are sufficient crudities, contortions, and dissections of the language, to ruin the reputation of fifty poets: in almost every one of the poems they contain, concatenated verse, transposed sentences, direct inversion of grammatical rules, substitution of one part of speech for another, and obsolete or self-coined words are constantly visible. Besides these sad facts, the subjects of the poems themselves are the most tasteless, and the most unmeaning it is possible to conceive; the Author would appear to have sedulously searched the most dusty shelves of the most antiquated book cases; to have taken therefrom the most musty tomes, and like a veritable book-worm of the Dominie Sampson school, to have selected the most trifling quips and quiddities of the schoolmen for public parade, and as fit stalking horses, for his ponderous and drowsy amplification.
The first impression a perusal of these poems necessarily makes, is, how an Author who can create such beauties, can perpetrate such literary atrocities. It is a problem impossible of solution, unless we suppose that Mr. Browning has arrived at the conclusion, that to be ridiculous is to be great; or that the only way to make his books sell, is to distinguish them by some peculiarities, which at the cost of everything rational and consistent, will establish his name as a caterer for the morbid curiosity of the public. If indeed we reflect upon the great pervading taste which exists for anything that [p. 23→] smacks of notoriety, we may be inclined to consider this latter motive a more sagacious one: in the same way as we give credit to Madame Tussaud, for the ingenuity with which her “Chamber of Horrors,” with its interesting inmates, was devised, or as we applaud the inventive capacity of the manager who drew crowded houses to witness the performance of a lap-dog, when the glorious Siddons played to empty benches, and the genius of Kemble could not even fill the pit. But will the poet who respects his own intellect, who is conscious of the duty he owes his kind, who knows the more solemn debt he owes his God, for the gifts which he has conferred upon him, willingly barter the splendid promises of noble and enduring fame, which belong to him who can stamp the impress of wisdom, and beauty, on the workings of his mind, for such ephemeral admiration, as the buffoon, the conjuror, or the mountebank can command? We would prefer to think that the errors of Browning arose from any cause but this; for abstracting altogether the pecuniary character of the proceeding, he who panders to a vitiated public taste, is not alone quite unworthy to wear the poet’s bays, but must inevitably bring upon himself the most thorough contempt of every honest mind. Now to substantiate our charges: the following extract is taken from an early part of “an epistle containing the strange medical experience of Karshish, the Arab Physician,” and beyond all doubt, the doctor’s experience was “passing strange.”
My journeyings were brought to Jericho,
Thus I resume. Who studious in our art
Shall count a little labour unrepaid?
I have shed sweat enough, left flesh and bone
On many a flinty furlong of this land.
Also the country side is all on fire
With rumours of a marching hitherward—
Some say Vespasian cometh, some, his son.
A black lynx snarled and pricked a tufted ear;
Lust of my blood inflamed his yellow balls;
I cried and threw my staff and he was gone.
Twice have the robbers stripped and beaten me,
And once a town declared me for a spy,
But at the end, I reach Jerusalem,
Since this poor covert where I pass the night,
This Bethany, lies scarce the distance thence
A man with plague-sores at the third degree
Runs till he drops down dead. Thou laughest here!
’Sooth, it elates me, thus reposed and safe,
To void the stuffing of my travel-scrip
And share with thee whatever Jewry yields.
A viscid choler is observable
In tertians, I was nearly bold to say,
And falling-sickness hath a happier cure
Than our school wots of: there’s a spider here
Weaves no web, watches on the ledge of tombs,
Sprinkled with mottles on an ash-grey back;
Take five and drop them .. but who knows his mind,
The Syrian run-a-gate I trust this to?
His service payeth me a sublimate
Blown up his nose to help the ailing-eye.
Best wait; I reach Jerusalem at morn,
There set in order my experiences,
Gather what most deserves and give thee all—
Or I might add Judea’s gum-tragacanth
Scales off in purer flakes, shines clearer-grained,
Cracks ’twixt the pestle and the porphyry,
In fine exceeds our produce. Scalp-disease
Confounds me, crossing so with leprosy—
Thou hadst admired one sort I gained at Zoar—
But zeal outruns discretion. Here I end. [p. 24→]
This shews us that Jericho after all is not the place to send a bore to: what think you, reader, of the next extract, representing a phase in the character of an Epileptic patient?
Should his child sicken unto death,—why, look
For scarce abatement of his cheerfulness,
Or pretermission of his daily craft—
While a word, gesture, glance, from that same child
At play or in the school or laid asleep,
Will start him to an agony of fear,
Exasperation, just as like! demand
The reason why—“’tis but a word,” object—
“A gesture”—he regards thee as our lord
Who lived there in the pyramid alone,
Looked at us, dost thou mind, when being young
We both would unadvisedly recite
Some charm’s beginning, from that book of his,
Able to bid the sun throb wide and burst
All into stars, as suns grown old are wont.
Thou and the child have each a veil alike
Thrown o’ea [sic] your heads from under which ye both
Stretch your blind hands and trifle with a match
Over a mine of Greek fire, did ye know!
Instans Tyrannus, is too perfect a piece of preposterous nonsense, if we may use such an expression, to authorize us in merely giving a portion of it for those uninitiated in the mystic rites, of which Mr. Browning is the “Fons et Principium:” it will be a task, we fancy, something like the cleansing of the Augean stable, to comprehend it.
Of the million or two, more or less,
I rule and possess
One man, for some cause undefined,
Was least to my mind.
I struck him, he grovelled of course—
For, what was his force?
I pinned him to earth with my weight
And persistence of hate—
And he lay, would not moan would not curse,
As if lots might be worse.
“Were the object less mean, would he stand
At the swing of my hand!
For obscurity helps him and blots
The hole where he squats.”
So I set my five wits on the stretch
To inveigle the wretch.
All in vain! gold and jewels I threw,
Still he couched there perdue.
I tempted his blood and his flesh,
Hid in roses my mesh.
Choicest cates and the flagon’s best spilth—
Still he kept to his filth!
Had he kith now or kin, were access
To his heart, if I press—
Just a son or a mother to seize—
No such booty as these!
Were it simply a friend to pursue
’Mid my million or two,
Who could pay me in person or pelf
What he owes me himself.
No! I could not but smile through my chafe—
For the fellow lay safe
As his mates do, the midge and the nit,
—Through minuteness, to wit.
Then a humor more great took its place
At the thought of his face,
The droop, the low cares of the mouth,
The trouble uncouth
’Twixt the brows, all that air one is fain
To put out of its pain—
And, no, I admonished myself,
“Is one mocked by an elf,
Is one baffled by toad or by rat?
The gravamen’s in that!
How the lion, who crouches to suit
His back to my foot,
Would admire that I stand in debate!
But the Small is the Great
If it vexes you,—that is the thing!
Toad or rat vex the King?
Though I waste half my realm to unearth
Toad or rat, ’tis well worth!”
So I soberly laid my last plan
To extinguish the man.
Round his creep-hole,—with never a break
Ran my fires for his sake;
Over-head, did my thunders combine
With my under-ground mine:
Till I looked from my labor content
To enjoy the event.
When sudden … how think ye the end?
Did I say “without friend?”
Say rather, from marge to blue marge
The whole sky grew his targe
With the sun’s self for visible boss,
While an Arm ran across
Which the earth heaved beneath like a breast
Where the wretch was safe prest!
Do you see? just my vengeance complete,
The man sprang to his feet,
Stood erect, caught at God’s skirts, and prayed!
—So, I was afraid! [p. 25→]
Browning sometimes takes off the buskin of Melpomene, and puts on the motley of Thalia: however, he does not always succeed in unlocking “the gates of joy,” as the following will evidence; it places us in that curious situation (so beautifully expressed in Mrs. Sigourney’s Death of an Infant,) in which we know not “whether to laugh or weep,” to laugh at the unequalled absurdity of the passage, or to weep at such a ruthless disregard of all the promptings of reason, and all the whisperings of taste.
Est fuga, volvitur rota!
On we drift. Where looms the dim port?
One, Two, Three, Four, Five, contribute their quota—
Something is gained, if one caught but the import—
Show it us, Hugues of Saxe-Gotha!
What with affirming, denying,
Holding, risposting, subjoining,
All’s like … it’s like … for an instance I’m trying …
There! See our roof, its gilt moulding and groining
Under those spider-webs lying!
So your fugue broadens and thickens,
Greatens and deepens and lengthens,
Till one exclaims—“But where’s music the dickens?
Blot ye the gold, while your spider-web strengthens,
Blacked to the stoutest of tickens?”
Bishop Blougram’s Apology, is as odd a discussion on Philosophy as ever was heard, and the author does well to inform us that it was an after dinner argument: we defy any one to say that having read it, he has gleaned anything tangible, or that he considers it possible to deduce any definite conclusion therefrom. Another melancholy instance of perverted talent, is presented to us in a Poem called, Old Pictures in Florence, where indeed we discern the “Membra,” but unfortunately the “disjecta membra Poetae.” Being Christmas times, it brings vividly before our minds the gyrations, somersets, “extraordinary leaps,” and other excellencies of the Clown in the Pantomime, and never was there an instance of physical pliability of limb, in the person of any respectable Acrobat, since the days of the renowned Grimaldi, which could stand comparison, in its own way, with the intellectual kalysthenics this poem displays: take this example—
Not that I expect the great Bigordi
Nor Sandro to hear me, chivalric, bellicose;
Nor wronged Lippino—and not a word I
Say of a scrap of Fra Angelico’s.
But are you too fine, Taddeo Gaddi,
To grant me a taste of your intonaco—
Some Jerome that seeks the heaven with a sad eye?
No churlish saint, Lorenzo Monaco?
Could not the ghost with the close red cap,
My Pollajolo, the twice a craftsman,
Save me a sample, give me the hap
Of a muscular Christ that shows the draughtsman?
No virgin by him, the somewhat petty,
Of finical touch and tempera crumbly—
Could not Alesso Baldovinetti
Contribute so much, I ask him humbly? [p. 26→]
Margheritone of Arezzo,
With the grave-clothes garb and swaddling barret,
(Why purse up mouth and beak in a pet so,
You bald, saturnine, poll-clawed parrot?)
No poor glimmering Crucifixion,
Where in the foreground kneels the donor?
If such remain, as is my conviction,
The hoarding does you but little honour.
They pass: for them the panels may thrill,
The tempera grow alive and tinglish—
Rot or are left to the mercies still
Of dealers and stealers, Jews and the English!
Seeing mere money’s worth in their prize,
Who sell it to some one calm as Zeno
At naked Art, and in ecstacies
Before some clay-cold, vile Carlino!
Or,
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 each trace 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!
Then one shall propose (in a speech, curt Tuscan,
Sober, expurgate, spare of an “issimo”)
Ending our half-told tale of Cambuscan,
Turning the Bell-tower’s altaltissimo.
And fine as the beak of a young beccaccia
The Campanile, the Duomo’s fit ally,
Soars up in gold its full fifty braccia,
Completing Florence, as Florence, Italy.
Shall I be alive that morning the scaffold
Is broken away, and the long-pent fire
Like the golden hope of the world unbaffled
Springs from its sleep, and up goes the spire—
As “God and the People” plain for its motto,
Thence the new tricolor flaps at the sky?
Foreseeing the day that vindicates Giotto
And Florence together, the first am I!
A poem called Popularity, furnishes us with another gem, which we lament to state, bears a disagreeable resemblance to a paste diamond, inasmuch as it assumes the brilliancy of truth, without having the slightest claim to merit the distinction.
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?
But what can surpass this?
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. [p. 27→]
And after for past time
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:
Or if, with experience of man and of spider
She use my June-lightning, the strong insect-rider,
To stop the fresh spinning,—why, June will consider.
And, still, Browning has written passages of poetry which, for eloquent beauty and comprehensive philosophy, Tennyson himself can hardly equal! In a Balcony, like most of this author’s plays, owns many beauties; the language is often akin to the sublime, and that peculiar delicacy of insinuation, and transparency of colouring, which he has so often evidenced, are here sufficiently abundant. However, there is no interest in the plot, without which it is impossible any play can become popular, even in a literary sense. Saul has many fine passages, but why so miserably monotonous? Here at last the heart of the poet breaks out—
a serenade at the villa.
That was I, you heard last night
When there rose no moon at all,
Nor, to pierce the strained and tight
Tent of heaven, a planet small:
Life was dead, and so was light.
Not a twinkle from the fly,
Not a glimmer from the worm.
When the crickets stopped their cry,
When the owls forbore a term,
You heard music; that was I.
Earth turned in her sleep with pain,
Sultrily suspired for proof;
In at heaven and out again,
Lightning!—where it broke the roof,
Bloodlike, some few drops of rain.
What they could my words expressed,
O my love, my all, my one!
Singing helped the verses best,
And when singing’s best was done,
To my lute I left the rest.
So wore night; the east was grey,
White the broad-faced hemlock flowers,
Soon would come another day;
Ere its first of heavy hours
Found me, I had past away.
What became of all the hopes,
Words and song and lute as well?
Say, this struck you—“When life gropes
Feebly for the path where fell
Light last on the evening slopes.
“One friend in that path shall be
To secure my steps from wrong;
One to count night day for me,
Patient through the watches long,
Serving most with none to see.”
Never say—as something bodes—
“So the worst has yet a worse!
When life halts ’neath double loads,
Better the task-master’s curse
Than such music on the roads!
“When no moon succeeds the sun,
Nor can pierce the midnight’s tent
Any star, the smallest one,
While some drops, where lightning went,
Show the final storm begun—
“When the fire-fly hides its spot,
When the garden-voices fail
In the darkness thick and hot,—
Shall another voice avail,
That shape be where those are not?
“Has some plague a longer lease
Proffering its help uncouth?
Can’t one even die in peace?
As one shuts one’s eyes on youth,
Is that face the last one sees?”
Oh, how dark your villa was,
Windows fast and obdurate!
How the garden grudged me grass
Where I stood—the iron gate
Ground its teeth to let me pass!
The Statue and the Bust, a poem in the terza rima metre, is remarkable for wonderful fidelity in the narrative of an Italian story, and, notwithstanding the dulness of the translator here and there, there are few, be they old or young, who [p. 28→] will not experience some pleasure in this curious tale. The lines below, taken from a quaint piece called, A Grammarian’s Funeral, are so true, and so artistically told, as to entitle them to pass into a poetical Apothegm—
That low man seeks a little thing to do,
Sees it and does it:
This high man, with a great thing to pursue,
Dies ere he knows it.
That low man goes on adding one to one,
His hundred’s soon hit:
This high man, aiming at a million,
Misses an unit.
That, has the world here—should he need the next,
Let the world mind him!
This, throws himself on God, and unperplext
Seeking shall find Him.
In these passages Browning evidences his capacity to create the beautiful, making it evident that its appearance is not the result of accident, but design. This is the very fact which excites our indignation: it is nought but the poet’s laziness, or love of notoriety, or greed of gain, by conforming to a vicious taste, which fills his books with so much garbage. We have not so many Poets now-a-days, that we can afford to suffer any of the gifted band, to waste their genius in the indulgence of such ungraceful oddities, or in its prostitution to such unworthy ends; in the name of Apollo, and the nine Muses, let Browning, even at the eleventh hour, register a vow of reformation, and take as a motto for the title-page of his next collection of poems, the following aphorism of the ancient critic—“Non fumum ex fulgore, sed ex fumo dare fulgorem.”
[This article concludes with general comments on English literature and culture, which we omit.]
N[icholas]. J. G[annon].
Reviewed:
Men and Women (RB), London: Chapman & Hall, 1855.
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