R560400A. Men and Women.
The Christian Remembrancer, April 1856, pp. 281–294.
As reprinted in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 22, 387–392.
[The article in which this review appears also contains notices of works by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Alfred Tennyson, Philip James Bailey, Nicholas Michell, and Ernest Jones; these we omit.]
Such of our readers as are acquainted with Mr. Browning’s poetry, if only through the medium of these pages, will know that affected singularity can be no new feature; nevertheless, the influence which we have attributed to the year has not been without its effect. And his last volume, “Men and Women,” is by many degrees more eccentric, affected, resolutely strange, and in parts deliberately unintelligible than its predecessors. Nor are these by any means the book’s worst characteristics. No doubt other poets have more grossly transgressed the bounds of propriety, more unscrupulously outraged decorum; but we doubt if any writer of verse amongst such as have a place at all in the literary world, and have their little circle of admirers, ever represented “Men and Women” under a more uniformly offensive aspect, or more utterly without moral elevation. We presume Mr. Browning’s design is to represent human nature as he sees it. But our nature is twofold. It may have low propensities, but it has also high instincts and aspirations. Such he either despises or ignores. To him, it cannot be doubted, the only interesting part of humanity is its fallen earthly elements. These he fastens upon, gloats over, and depicts with curious minuteness and evident relish; and undoubtedly with some ingenuity, but in our estimation with scarce a spark of genuine poetry either in matter or execution. Mr. Browning, conscious of certain coarse powers of emphasis and realization, thinks and calls himself a poet, and he has followers who claim the rank for him, and use very grand language indeed concerning his reach of thought, and fine ear for all the intricacies of harmony. [p. 282→] But no man can turn such themes as he constantly chooses for his verse into poetry, nor could a man endowed with anything so divine as the real poetic faculty ever apply his thoughts to such revolting subjects as are many in this volume. The muse is avenged for the attempt; for anything so crabbed, harsh, grotesque, as many of these so-called poems, we never encountered before. The weary and exasperated reader perpetually pauses in search of epithets to express the ungrateful toil of perusal: all images of obstruction and little-ease crowd into his fancy; stitches, cramps, and spasms, grinding cart-wheels, clanking chains, Charivaris, shrieks, insane utterances, all suggest themselves by turns. This is where the sense is to be learnt by a steady unrelaxed attention, which he feels the subject is not worth; but there are various passages, and whole poems, where a conscientious desire to get at the meaning can only be compared to a search in the dark. We grope and stumble along, encountering unexpected obstructions at every turn, now hitting a shin, now fraying an elbow, and emerging at length unsuccessful, irritated, humbled, and with resolutions against such expeditions for the future.
The subjects are various, but the mode of treating them tolerably uniform—themes of small interest, acted on by men and women of low ideas, and resulting in some grovelling end. A sort of chemical process may be observed throughout, by which the dregs of each feeling and passion remain, the purer emotions having vanished we know not whither. His pictures of love are coarse passion, or at best a subjugation of conscience and reason to passion; his idea of beauty is sensual, his religion bigotry or hypocrisy, his patriotism selfishness, his philosophy scepticism. His respect is given not to purity but strength of purpose; his moral is a deliberate preference of the present over the future. These are hard charges; but what can we think of such poems as “The Statue and the Bust,” the point of which is to hold up to our contempt a man and woman who had not courage enough to act out a wicked intention? of another (Fra Lippo Lippi),—where we are called upon to sympathise with a licentious monk artist, compelled to paint saints against the grain, and apologising with unctuous minuteness for his shameless course of life?—of another (The Heretic’s Tragedy; a middle age interlude), where a bigot exults in roasting a heretic over a slow fire, and malignantly gloats over the process of torture, indulging his fancy the while in certain pious conceits?—of another (Holy-Cross Day), where we are made to hear the hissing, croaking spite of certain Jews, compelled to the obsolete discipline of listening to a Christian sermon for their conversion; the malignity, the insinuations, the self-contempt, [p. 283→] all venting themselves in scarcely human language—squeaking, groaning, barking? Even where these heights of impropriety are not reached, the tone is almost as bad. One of the most elaborate poems, so to call it, is an apology for infidelity, (Bishop Blougram’s Apology) by a cardinal bishop of the Roman Catholic Church; unjustifiable, as pointing unmistakeably to a living person much in the world’s eyes and thoughts, and also as a really clever defence of a life-long course of conscious deliberate hypocrisy; so ingeniously done, that it is difficult to believe the author is representing another’s supposed feelings, without in a measure justifying them. Even where we cannot bring any moral charge, the moral impression is often very painful; as where a husband (Andrea del Sarto), is pouring his feelings into the ears of his wife, bribing her, heartless and faithless as he knows her to be, for a little sympathy by the promise of money and fine clothes; or, again, where the mesmerist is represented as having absolute mastery by the mystic power of his art over the woman he loves, compelling her presence, and constraining her will, by the simple fixing of his thoughts upon her. Or where the woman, in “A Woman’s Last Word,” a poem with more claim to beauty than most in the volume, lays herself, soul as well as body, in abject subservience at the feet of the man she loves—we suppose her husband—in these words, and others like them:—
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!—Browning, vol. i. p. 33.
These are all unwholesome, unpleasant ideas, to say the least of it; and these curious, creeping, morbid fancies, this imagination too often let loose upon low pleasures, low sins, low revenges, take the place of the true poet’s frank, generous, world-wide sympathies.
In themes absolutely blameless, the grotesque mode of treatment is perhaps most conspicuous of all. It is as though the writer’s aim were simply to baffle the reader and tire out his patience. We must suppose, however, that he designs us to see humour and point in such rhymes and comparisons as we will adduce. There is a very long poem, descriptive of a fugue in music, [p. 284→] (“Master Hugue of Saxe Gotha,”) of which we may say that, granting it ingenuity, and some cleverness—for Mr. Browning has the knack of Hudibrastic rhyming—we know no more tormenting task than its perusal. These are some of its twenty-nine stanzas; the rest are all as affected and discordant. We should premise that the numerals one, two, three, four, five, are the several strands, so to say, of the harmony—
One disertates, he is candid—
Two must discept,—has distinguished!
Three helps the couple, if ever yet man did:
Four protests, Five makes a dart at the thing wished—
Back to One, goes the case bandied!
One says his say with a difference—
More of expounding, explaining!
All now is wrangle, abuse, and vociferance—
Now there’s a truce, all’s subdued, self-restraining—
Five, though, stands out all the stiffer hence.
One is incisive, corrosive—
Two retorts, nettled, curt, crepitant—
Three makes rejoinder, expansive, explosive—
Four overbears them all, strident and strepitant—
Five … O Danaides, O Sieve!—Vol. i. pp. 198, 199.
And in the poem “the Grammarian’s Funeral”—the only person, by the way, who has an aim to which the present is sacrificed—the student’s aspirations are thus described:—
Did not he magnify the mind, shew clear
Just what it all meant?
He would not discount life, as fools do here,
Paid by instalment!
He ventured neck or nothing—heaven’s success
Found, or earth’s failure:
“Wilt thou trust death or not?” he answered “Yes.
Hence with life’s pale lure!”
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.
So, with the throttling hands of Death at strife,
Ground he at grammar;
Still, thro’ the rattle, parts of speech were rife.
While he could stammer
He settled Hoti’s business—let it be!—
Properly based Oun—
Gave us the doctrine of the enclitic De,
Dead from the waist down.—Vol. ii. pp. 215–217. [p. 285→]
In such lines does he win us to honour “a man decided not to love but know.” There is no better passage to be found in eight pages of the same convulsed and galvanized measure. All this discordance is deliberate on Mr. Browning’s part. He cannot, it is true, write really harmonious verse, but finding this gift denied him he makes a merit of his deficiencies, depreciates what he does not possess, and announces that he does not write for boys, but men; as though there were manly force and virtue in harsh sounds, violent rhymes, halting accents, and meaning involved beyond hope of distentanglement. A friend thus addresses him:—
But here’s your fault; grown men want thought, you think;
Thought’s what they mean by verse, and seek in verse:
Boys seek for images and melody,
Men must have reason—so you aim at men.—Vol. ii. p. 224.
Again, giving a story of Luther’s:—
Grand rough old Martin Luther
Bloomed fables—flowers on furze,
The better the uncouther:
Do roses stick like burrs?—Vol. ii. p. 190.
He is splenetic on “Popularity,” to which he devotes a poem, where he likens true poetry to the old Tyrian purple. The poet par excellence finds the shell, the popular man makes the extract and gets the reward. We cannot see that the simile holds: our great minstrels have left us abundant evidence that they could apply their discoveries better than any one else. However, Mr. Browning leaves us to infer that he finds the shell and others profit by it. Our readers may judge how much divine purple lies hid in the following stanzas:——
Mere conchs! not fir for warp of 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?—Vol. ii. 196, 197.
Mr. Browning has clearly a morbid horror of common-place sweetness; he, therefore, is always refreshing his style and startling his readers by revolting or monstrous allusions. An [p. 286→] Arab physician writes his adventures to a friend, or, in other words, “voids the stuffing of his travel-scrip.” It is thus he measures distances.
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!—Vol. i. p. 92.
As an instance of obscurity, we should like to give the poem entitled “Before,” which would abundantly prove our charge; but to extract a whole poem only because it is unintelligible, would be imposing on the forbearance of our readers. We owe apologies to them for some of the extracts we shall adduce; but having said strong things, we must support them by evidence. If Mr. Browning were simply a writer of doggrel verses, or simply a man naturally predisposed to low and vulgar ideas, or simply a person of prurient imaginations, we should pass his works by altogether. But we believe these sins both of thought and execution are not so much natural as the results of deliberate choice. He was meant for better things. He has real powers; not perhaps such as he supposes himself to possess, but such as would have won him estimation with men of taste and judgment, had not the canker of scepticism blighted his whole view of things. Every moral, every religious question is tinged by it; even matters of mere taste show signs of the infection. Men and women are viewed under a totally different aspect by a man who doubts; who will not see this world as a probation. If this world were really all, the maxim, “Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die,” would be a wise one; but on its adoption would follow a total change, not only in our avowedly religious and moral creed, but in our universal estimate of things. Our respect would be destroyed. From a human being to a flower, we should see all things differently. We believe it is this failure of respect for humanity, arising from a doubt as to our future destiny and an uncertainty as to any eternal consequences accruing to men from their actions, which produces much of the bad taste of this volume. The following lines are more than vulgar; they are an insult to humanity; they represent the feelings of the Jews, setting forth on compulsion, to hear the sermon preached for their conversion. Of course, Mr. Browning sides with them, but no bigot while he persecuted ever estimated a Jew’s feelings and nature so low.—
Fee, faw, fum! bubble and squeak!
Blessedest Thursday’s the fat of the week. [p. 287→]
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.
Boh, here’s Barnabas! Job, that’s you?
Up stumps Solomon—bustling too?
Shame, man! greedy beyond your years
To hansel the bishop’s shaving-shears?
Fair play’s a jewel! leave friends in the lurch?
Stand on a line ere you start for the church.
Higgledy piggledy, packed we lie,
Rats in a hamper, swine in a stye,
Wasps in a bottle, frogs in a sieve,
Worms in a carcase, fleas in a sleeve.
Hist! square shoulders, settle your thumbs
And buzz for the bishop—here he comes.
Bow, wow, wow—a bone for the dog!
I liken his Grace to an acorned hog.—Vol. ii. pp. 158–160.
with much more to the same effect.
We cannot extract from the “Heretic’s Tragedy,” to which we have before alluded, from the ghastly horror of the subject, and the mode of treatment, which is really atrocious. No man who can blush for mortal error could have written it. We presume he affects the subject as exhibiting the workings of a blind unreasoning faith, for which he elsewhere expresses contempt. In the workings of the affections we may trace the same evil influence. Whether Mr. Browning would deliberately recommend to his readers a disregard of the old-fashioned code of morals we do not know, but he represents such disregard as natural, and he does not blame it. In the dramatic sketch called “In a Balcony,” the actors in which are two passionate lovers and a poor old queen, shamefully duped between them; we find the lady oppose, against a public avowal of their attachment, to which there was no rational objection, the following argument:—
Had I not loved you from the very first,
Were I not yours, could we not steal out thus
So wickedly, so wildly, and so well,
You might be thus impatient. What’s conceived
Of us without here, by the folks within?
Where are you now? immersed in cares of state—
Where am I now?—intent on festal robes—
We two, embracing under death’s spread hand!
What was this thought for, what this scruple of yours
Which broke the council up, to bring about
One minute’s meeting in the corridor?
And then the sudden sleights, long secresies,
The plots inscrutable, deep telegraphs,
Long-planned chance-meetings, hazards of a look,
“Does she know? does she not know? saved or lost?” [p. 288→]
A year of this compression’s ecstasy
All goes for nothing? you would give this up
For the old way, the open way, the world’s,
His way who beats, and his who sells his wife?
What tempts you? their notorious happiness,
That you’re ashamed of ours? The best you’ll get
Will be, the Queen grants all that you require,
Concedes the cousin, and gets rid of you
And her at once, and gives us ample leave
To live as our five hundred happy friends.—Vol. ii. pp. 60, 61.
It is hardly a less injury to women to suppose such reasoning natural than to think it right. Mr. Browning is a contemner of prejudice. No doubt he feels it his mission to dispel illusions; if his book has an apparent aim, it is this. It is pretty clear that love of country is in Mr. Browning’s eyes an old-fashioned notion. His native land has no hold either on his taste or his principles; Italy is the land of his adoption. Italy, no doubt, is a very beautiful and interesting country, but we are, nevertheless, fastidious as to the motives of all who give it exclusive preference. All men, whose manhood is connected with their youth and childhood by natural and vigorous ties, whose education has been what it ought, who have learnt what nature in those plastic early years was designed to teach, admire and love their own country most and best. Wherever this is not the case, the mind has received some injury; early faith and trust have been trampled on, and some violent wrench has disjointed the man from the boy. Not seldom a so-called conversion is this wrench; but more frequently it is a breaking from old restraints rather than the adoption of new ones. From whatever cause Italy has Mr. Browning’s heart, its climate, its women, its pictures, its music, its cities, its history, its careless easy life—all are reviewed as though there was no moral bearing in any of them, none, at least, with which the stranger amongst them has anything to do.
Italy, my Italy!
Queen Mary’s saying serves for me—
(When fortune’s malice
Lost her, Calais.)
Open my heart and you will see
Graved inside of it, “Italy.”
Such lovers old are I and she;
So it always was, so it still shall be.—Vol. ii. 49.
“Bishop Blougram’s Apology,” in conversational blank verse, a very stiff piece of reading indeed, is yet useful and curious, as furnishing the key to a great deal that has apparently no connexion with its subject. We know not whether to call it an apology for hypocrisy, or an argument for scepticism. The author evidently desires to show that he can sympathise with [p. 289→] both states, and is much too enlightened a person to recoil with contempt from a man who professes himself, and imposes upon others, an implicit unreasoning faith, while he has no real belief whatever. So long as the thing is done effectually, so long as the world is imposed upon, and the hypocrite gets what he aims at, he can see something almost to respect in the position. Fortunately for us, our Church awakes no sympathy in Mr. Browning; Romanism is much more to his taste. Mindful therefore of his Italian predilections, he chooses a Roman Catholic Bishop as the actor in this anomalous position; one born in Italy and impregnated with foreign tastes, though bearing an English name, and naturalized amongst us. The higher he estimates a man’s intellect, the less, evidently, can he believe in the sincerity of any dogmatic creed he may profess. We do not deny, that to many others it may be a standing difficulty how some men, with the intellects we know them to have, can believe the extravagancies they do apparently believe. Mr. Browning cuts the difficulty at once by assuming that they do not believe them. His respect evidently would suffer least diminution by supposing such an one a hypocrite; it is, indeed, the only assumption by which his interest can be sustained. In “Bishop Blougram” he shows us how it may be done. This ecclesiastic is represented in a fit of after-dinner confidence explaining and defending his position to an avowed sceptic, a clever sort of fellow in his way, but too far beneath his companion in the world’s estimation for any risk to be run by a betrayal of these singular admissions. The Bishop begins by assuming that his more honest friend despises him. He is enjoying himself over a good cool glass of wine after “some hot long ceremonies of our Church,” which had occupied the morning; and after pluming himself on certain worldly advantages, in which he has the better of the avowed sceptic, concludes with the question,—
Why won’t you be a bishop too?
Why, first, you don’t believe, you don’t and can’t,
(Not statedly, that is, and fixedly
And absolutely and exclusively)
In any revelation called divine.
No dogmas nail your faith—and what remains
But say so, like the honest man you are?
First, therefore, overhaul theology!
Nay, I too, not a fool, you please to think,
Must find believing every whit as hard,
And if I do not frankly say as much,
The ugly consequence is clear enough.
Now, wait, my friend: well, I do not believe—
If you’ll accept no faith that is not fixed,
Absolute and exclusive, as you say.
(You’re wrong—I mean to prove it in due time) [p. 290→]
Meanwhile, I know where difficulties lie
I could not, cannot solve, nor ever shall,
So give up hope accordingly to solve—
(To you, and over the wine). Our dogmas then
With both of us, tho’ in unlike degree,
Missing full credence—overboard with them!
I mean to meet you on your own premise—
Good, there go mine in company with yours!
And now what are we? unbelievers both,
Calm and complete, determinately fixed
To-day, to-morrow, and for ever, pray?
You’ll guarantee me that? Not so, I think.
In no-wise! all we’ve gained is, that belief,
As unbelief before, shakes us by fits,
Confounds us like its predecessor. Where’s
The gain? how can we guard our unbelief,
Make it bear fruit to us?—the problem here.
Just when we are safest, there’s a sunset-touch,
A fancy from a flower-bell, some one’s death,
A chorus-ending from Euripides,—
And that’s enough for fifty hopes and fears
As old and new at once as Nature’s self,
To rap and knock and enter in our soul,
Take hands and dance there, a fantastic ring,
Round the ancient idol, on his base again,—
The grand Perhaps!—Vol. i. pp. 213–215.
He next candidly states his grounds for his choice of line.
I know the special kind of life I like,
What suits the most my idiosyncracy,
Brings out the best of me and bears me fruit
In power, peace, pleasantness, and length of days.
I find that positive belief does this
For me, and unbelief, no whit of this.—Vol. i. pp. 217, 218.
* * * * * *
Well now—there’s one great form of Christian faith
I happened to be born in—which to teach
Was given me as I grew up, on all hands,
As best and readiest means of living by;
The same on examination being proved
The most pronounced moreover, fixed, precise
And absolute form of faith in the whole world—
Accordingly, most potent of all forms
For working on the world. Observe, my friend,
Such as you know me, I am free to say,
In these hard latter days which hamper one,
Myself, by no immoderate exercise
Of intellect and learning, and the tact
To let external forces work for me,
Bid the street’s stones be bread and they are bread,
Bid Peter’s creed, or, rather, Hildebrand’s,
Exalt me o’er my fellows in the world
And make my life an ease and joy and pride,
It does so,—which for me is a great point gained,
Who have a soul and body that exact
A comfortable care in many ways. [p. 291→]
There’s power in me and will to dominate
Which I must exercise, they hurt me else:
In many ways I need mankind’s respect,
Obedience, and the love that’s born of fear:
While at the same time, there’s a taste I have,
A toy of soul, a titillating thing,
Refuses to digest these dainties crude.—Vol. i. pp. 221, 222.
Here he supposes his antagonist to object that, though he succeeds in carrying the million imbeciles with him, yet some dozen men of sense eye him apart, and their suffrages he loses. These will say, either he believes in the last winking Virgin, in which case he is a fool, or he disbelieves and is a knave.
—approve in neither case,
Withhold their voices though I look their way:
Like Verdi when, at his worst opera’s end
(The thing they gave at Florence,—what’s its name?)
While the mad houseful’s plaudits near out-bang
His orchestra of salt-box, tongs and bones,
He looks through all the roaring and the wreaths
Where sits Rossini patient in his stall.—Vol. i. p. 225.
But this he disputes altogether, and proves ingeniously that there is distinction in his questionable position. He likens himself to a boy perched on a stack of chimneys; sixty boys a minute may pass along the street, and you take no note of them; but this one, all eyes are fixed on him. “Our interest’s on the dangerous edge of things.”
Your picked Twelve, you’ll find,
Profess themselves indignant, scandalized
At thus being held unable to explain
How a superior man who disbelieves
May not believe as well: that’s Schelling’s way!
It’s through my coming in the tail of time,
Nicking the minute with a happy tact.
Had I been born three hundred years ago
They’d say, “What’s strange? Blougram of course believes;”
And, seventy years since, “disbelieves of course.”
But now, “He may believe; and yet, and yet
How can he?”—All eyes turn with interest.
Whereas, step off the line on either side—
You, for example, clever to a fault,
The rough and ready man that write apace,
Read somewhat seldomer, think perhaps even less—
You disbelieve! Who wonders and who cares?
Lord So-and-So—his coat bedropt with wax,
All Peter’s chains about his waist, his back
Brave with the needlework of Noodledom,
Believes! Again, who wonders and who cares?
But I, the man of sense and learning too,
The able to think yet act, the this, the that,
I, to believe at this late time of day!
Enough; you see, I need not fear contempt.—Vol. i. pp. 226–228. [p. 292→]
The man’s argument is the simply worldly one, he will have this world and let the next take its chance. And we take leave to say, that this is the moral of Mr. Browning’s two volumes: nor can we see that his own mind ever takes a step beyond this Bishop’s, in the whole train of his reasoning. He supposes the unworldly sceptic opposing to this life of his the nobler existences of power and genius. Napoleon he reviews and dismisses, showing how chimerical the conqueror’s gains. The poet’s; it would be all very well to be Shakspere, but not having it in him to write Hamlet and Othello, he prefers remaining his poor self; or Luther’s.
Why to be Luther—that’s a life to lead,
Incomparably better than my own.
He comes, reclaims God’s earth for God, he says,
Sets up God’s rule again by simple means,
Re-opens a shut book, and all is done.
He flared out in the flaring of mankind;
Such Luther’s luck was—how shall such be mine?—Vol. i. p. 235.
and why? because Luther
secured
A real heaven in his heart throughout his life,
Supposing death a little altered things!—Vol. i. p. 236.
One more extract we give from this poem, esteeming it more in character with the author than his puppet the Cardinal Bishop. It might indeed stand for the motto of his whole book.
Pure faith indeed—you know not what you ask!
Naked belief in God the Omnipotent,
Omniscient, Omnipresent, sears too much
The sense of conscious creatures to be borne.
It were the seeing him, no flesh shall dare.
Some think, Creation’s meant to show him forth:
I say, it’s meant to hide him all it can:
And that’s what all the blessed Evil’s for.—Vol. i. 239.
This “blessed Evil,” as he calls it, forms pretty nearly the subject-matter of these volumes. A very spasmodic poem called “Saul,” enlarged from Mr. Browning’s previous works, puts the same in a semi-theological mystical form. David is the prophet of Saul’s ultimate glorification, Saul being probably chosen as a kind of type of power—power, which is the summum bonum of such thinkers as Mr. Browning. But the measure is so insufferable, and the thoughts so obscure, and the task of reading a poem of forty pages, from these combined causes, so irksome, that we pass it over with just a specimen of the verse.
I say then,—my song
While I sang thus, assuring the monarch, and ever more strong
Made a proffer of good to console him—he slowly resumed
His old motions and habitudes kingly.—Vol. ii. p. 133. [p. 293→]
The little dedicatory poem at the end “to E. B. B.” the poet’s poetess-wife, is at once the most amiable and most intelligible effusion of the whole two volumes. The metre is a sort of amplification of Mr. Longfellow’s; five pure unrhymed trochees instead of four; but it runs flowingly and costs the reader no effort. It betrays, together with a just sense of good fortune in being connected with so congenial mind, a full appreciation of the author’s own position amongst poets. He has clearly no doubt whatever about his mission, and considers anything like a pretty fancy, any departure from his ordinary style, as a condescension from his high path which needs accounting for, which he does by the following high examples of a very natural and amiable impulse of affection.
Rafael made a century of sonnets,
Made and wrote them in a certain volume
Dinted with the silver-pointed pencil
Else he only used to draw Madonnas:
These, the world might view—but One, the volume.
Who that one, you ask? Your heart instructs you.
Did she live and love it all her life-time?
Did she drop, his lady of the sonnets,
Die, and let it drop beside her pillow
Where it lay in place of Rafael’s glory,
Rafael’s cheek so duteous and so loving—
Cheek, the world was wont to hail a painter’s,
Rafael’s cheek, her love had turned a poet’s?
You and I would rather read that volume,
(Taken to his beating bosom by it)
Lean and list the bosom-beats of Rafael,
Would we not? than wonder at Madonnas—
Her, San Sisto names, and Her, Foligno,
Her, that visits Florence in a vision,
Her, that’s left with lilies in the Louvre—
Seen by us and all the world in circle.
You and I will never read that volume.
Guido Reni, like his own eye’s apple
Guarded long the treasure-book and loved it.
Guido Reni dying, all Bologna
Cried, and the world with it, “Ours—the treasure!”
Suddenly, as rare things will, it vanished.
Dante once prepared to paint an angel:
Whom to please? You whisper “Beatrice.”
While he mused and traced it and retraced it,
* * * * * *
Dante, who loved well because he hated,
Hated wickedness that hinders loving,
Dante standing, studying his angel,—
In there broke the folk of his Inferno.
Says he—“Certain people of importance”
(Such he gave his daily, dreadful line to)
Entered and would seize, forsooth, the poet.
Says the poet—“Then I stopped my painting.” [p. 294→]
You and I would rather see that angel,
Painted by the tenderness of Dante,
Would we not?—than read a fresh Inferno.
You and I will never see that picture.
While he mused on love and Beatrice,
While he softened o’er his outlined angel,
In they broke, those “people of importance:”
We and Bice bear the loss for ever.
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 to 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.—Pp. 229–233.
Here follows a long parallel between Moses’ ungrateful task in the desert and the poet’s in the world, when they strike the rock of human ignorance; and some very gratuitous assumptions concerning Moses himself, which we need not enter into. But passing this, the poet has to find an analogy between his present offering of affection and those he first adduced as his examples.
I shall never, in the years remaining,
Paint you pictures, no, nor carve you statues,
Make you music that should all-express me;
So it seems: I stand on my attainment.
This of verse alone, one life allows me;
Verse and nothing else have I to give you.
Other heights in other lives, God willing—
All the gifts from all the heights, your own, Love!
Yet a semblance of resource avails us—
Shade so finely touched, love’s sense must seize it.
Take these lines, look lovingly and nearly,
Lines I write the first time and the last time.
He who works in fresco, steals a hair-brush,
Curbs the liberal hand, subservient proudly,
Cramps his spirit, crowds its all in little,
Makes a strange art of an art familiar,
Fills his lady’s missal-marge with flowerets.
He who blows thro’ bronze, may breathe thro’ silver,
Fitly serenade a slumbrous princess.
He who writes, may write for once, as I do.—Pp. 236, 237.
And so we part from Mr. Browning’s “Fifty Men and Women,” which he could hardly have dedicated in the quarter he has done without something in the likeness of a propitiatory offering.
Reviewed:
Men and Women (RB), London: Chapman & Hall, 1855.
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