R570129A. Men and Women (Boston, 1856).
The Independent (New York), 29 January 1857, p. 8.
As reprinted in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 23, 407–408.
Robert Browning we have studied by day and by night—sometimes with admiration, sometimes with vexation, sometimes almost in despair of his meaning. What gems of thought and sentiment he has in a most exquisite setting of words; what uncouth pudding-stone he sometimes offers us in place of well-cut gems.
With Browning’s philosophy or his religion, especially as these underlie his “Old Pictures in Florence,” and his “Bishop Blougram’s Apology,” we can have no sympathy; and that conception of married life which would dictate “Any Wife to Any Husband” as its ordinary picture, is thoroughly detestable. Yet we always come back to Browning’s pages with renewed interest. Where before he seemed not only deep but turbid, we sometimes find that, by adding a few fathoms to our sounding-line, we reach the bottom, and find it like the deepest bottom of the sea, smooth and clear.
We can pardon a good deal of mysticism, and obscurity of thought, and hardness of versification, to one who can write such sweet and tender lines as these from “One Word More,” addressed to his poet-wife:
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.
* * * * * *
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.
* * * * * *
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 the poet, “Then I stopped my painting.”
You and I would rather see that angel,
Painted by the tenderness of Dante,
Would we not?—than read a fresh Inferno.
* * * * * *
What of Rafael’s sonnets, Dante’s picture?
This: no artist lives and lives 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—
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.
* * * * * *
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.
Reviewed:
Men and Women (RB), Boston: Ticknor & Fields, 1856.
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