R620220A. Men and Women.
The Jersey Independent, 20 February 1862, p. [4].
Listed in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 30, 376.
The body of Elizabeth Barrett Browning now lies buried, as a soldier’s on the field for which he fought,—with those fit emblems of her purity and her fame, the white rose garland at her feet and the crown of laurel at her head—in the land whose cause she pled so nobly, and which has been and still is proving itself worthy of the noblest championship.
Keats and Shelley sleep at Rome,
She in well-loved Tuscan earth;
Choosing all their death’s long home
Far from their old home of birth:
Italy, you hold in trust
Very sacred English dust!
Now that the first shock of our bereavement is over, while yet the intensity of interest in everything concerning the Brownings which that bereavement excited among all lovers of genuine poetry is but little abated, it seems to me a fit time to consider carefully the literary worth of Robert Browning. I choose for special consideration the last published of his works, “Men and Women;” two volumes from which a young friend of mine, whose character and ability command profound respect wherever they are known, informed me that he had derived a more powerful moral and intellectual stimulus than even from that History of histories—Carlyle’s “French Revolution.”
I am aware that Browning is not a popular poet; but upon whom does this fact cast more reproach, upon him or upon the world of readers? In my poor opinion, undoubtedly upon the latter. The one great fault with which nearly all his readers concur to charge him is obscurity. Few, if any, deny that the richest materials of poetry,—profound and original thought, keen perceptions, knowledge both broad and deep, clear moral insight, wonderful dramatic ability, and passion of the true white heat, abound throughout his works: but on the other hand as few will admit that these materials are thoroughly wrought into the poetic form and brightness which is Beauty; it is generally affirmed that his “creations” are not Cosmic, but only half-developed from Chaos. Although many of the objectors would be fairly answered by the retort that they have no right to a voice in the matter since they have never studied him, being wont to lounge over literature as languidly as if they were inhaling perfumes; it must still be admitted that the broad superstructure of this objection is supported by a certain basis of truth. Beauty is not so supreme in his as it should be in all poetry; and it is not, chiefly because of his restlessness of mind, resulting from the strength and activity of his talents as distinguished from, and often rebellious against, his genius. The keen and rapid eye, when it should be fixed upon some sole central figure, remarks every minute object quiescent or stirring about it; the word-rich mouth rattles on with lively cleverness when its speech should be solemn and slow; the vigorous and learned mind, when it should be concentrated on one supreme idea, courses about through the world and the libraries after remote and subsidiary and often merely distracting thoughts. So that it may be fairly asserted that his talents often ran away with his genius, or—adopting the magnificent language of Coleridge in reference to Shakspeare—that “the intellectual power and the creative energy wrestle as in a war-embrace.”
This restlessness of mind—so inimical to the attainment of that exclusive concentration which whether serene or impassioned, is the loftiest mood of the poet—is evidenced in many ways, and with peculiar prominence in his rhymed verses. Now it cramps up a good thought into a bad line in its haste to be dealing with another, know it hurries off for the matter of a simile or metaphor into regions so remote that one is puzzled to make out the similarity, anon it perturbs the stream of narrative with sudden exclamations and interrogations like rocks and snags; and soon after we find it throwing off a long succession of rapid, noisy, clattering syllables, about as pronounceable as “Peter Piper picked a peck of pepper,” with the mischievous delight of a schoolboy. Nay, the very measures of these rhymed verses nearly all run in a sort of canter, curvetting and prancing on trochaic and anapestic feet.
But some critics (I remember especially a leagued couple in that “Fraser” for which Kingsley used to write poetical critiques!) have found out that his roughness and obscurity are not intellectual, but moral faults, that they are the result of laziness and the lack of conscientious reverence for the Giver of his precious gifts; that he gives out his mind after the fashion in which Carlyle found certain papers given out or edited—“as one might edit a cart-load of stones, by tilting up the cart!” To this charge the best reply is a short passage of his own, in the “Easter Day.”
—And if any blame me,
Thinking that merely to touch in brevity
On the topics I dwell on is unlawful;
Or worse, that I trench with undue levity
On the bounds of the holy and the awful;
I praise the heart, and pity the head of him,
And refer myself to Thee instead of him
Who head and heart alike discernest,—
Looking below light speech we utter,
When the frothy spume and the frequent sputter
Prove that the soul’s depths boil in earnest.
However, with regard to “Men and Women,” I dare assert that no person of fair intelligence and enough love of poetry to be willing to expend study on it, will be baffled in this work by obscurity. It is in fact less obscure than almost any play of Shakspeare or any book of “Paradise Lost.” But a scene may be little worth gazing at, even though unclouded: what positive merits, beyond those implied in this negative one, is the reader to look for? Let me mention one or two of the leading characteristics.
First, the bold, vigorous, healthy spirit; the sterling and complete manhood, interested in the world and able to hold its own in any sphere of it, which is akin to the spirit of Chaucer and the great Elizabethan dramatists. It has been remarked that to read Fielding after Richardson is the emerging from a sick chamber into the free light and air of the open fields; and the remark well applies to the reading of Browning after almost any of our popular poets. They are morbid, melancholy, miserable, neither at home in this world nor likely to be at home in the next; he is genial and joyous in that full and free exercise of his faculties here which is surely the best preparation for whatever world he shall go to hereafter. He has illustrated this difference in a remarkable passage of “Bishop Blougram’s Apology.” Hence his poems are rich in facts, and his loftiest idealizations are embodied in that Shakspearian flesh and blood reality which is so cordial a contrast to the vague, dim, spectral productions of all but the supreme mystics.
Second, the intensity of the love inspiring many of the poems. Undoubtedly much of this is due to his marriage with the noble woman whose loss we all deplore. No one who has read with feeling her “Sonnets from the Portuguese” can forget the solemn rapture, the devotional fervour, with which she therein utters love; and they have in this work their true antiphonies. The love is so intense and all-absorbing, that when its pure fire has wholly consumed this world and life it flings out its electric flames into the infinite future, thrilling along the endless life-line of the immortal married souls.
Third, the profound and unsectarian Christianity. Many good people, subject from their childhood to religious influences and quite content with their Bible and a few commonplace pious books, have scarcely any conception of the Missionary value of such authors as the Brownings in upholding the sway of Christianity over the minds of young and thoughtful persons who turn with contempt from the abounding trash of tracts, and find most clergymens’ books vitiated by the special pleading of hired advocates, and scarcely meet with a minister liberal and wise enough to command their intellectual esteem, and know that modern erudition has beaten down and undermined many of what were once considered main bulwarks and buttresses of the Church, and above all ponder frequently on the fact that not a few of those living writers whom they most revere—men like Carlyle and Emerson, Francis Newman and Froude—have found the Christian formula too strait to cover the whole of now-known truth.
Though these remarks must be very brief. I cannot conclude them without a few words on some of the principal poems in “Men and Women.”
“Saul,” in which David relates how he released the first monarch of Israel from the power of the evil spirit, and the “Letter of Karshish, the Arab physician,” concerning Lazarus whom Jesus had raised from the dead, may well compare in sublime spirituality and intense imagination with any poems in the language.
“Fra Lippo Lippi,” the gloriously genial, and “Andrea del Sarto,” the bitterly sad, wonderfully bring to life the two great painters of whom they treat. These, with the letter of Karshish and another of Clevu [sic, for Cleon] who is a sort of Greek Goethe, are in blank verse; a metre which Browning always uses with consummate skill and power, without any of that harsh abruptness which deforms some of his rhymed verses. In the same measure are also the half-ironical, trenchant (with both edges) “Apology of Mr. Worldly Wise-man Bishop Blougram,” the vigorous dramatic scenes of “In a Balcony,” and the quaint description of a poet, entitled “How it strikes a Contemporary.”
“Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came” is developed from the line in “Lear,” as was Tennyson’s “Mariana in the Moated Grange” from a line in “Measure for Measure,” but with far less of precise suggestion in its germ. It is a series of pictures very powerful, weird and Rembrandt-like, elevated above grotesqueness by the stern heroic fortitude of the Childe. It has nothing in common with the yet grander old Scottish ballad of Childe Roland. The “Statue and the Bust,” written in a peculiar terza rima—with mingled iambics and anapaests giving a sway and sweep to the lines which carry us buoyantly over long years, narrates and moralizes superbly a Florentine historiette. “A Toccata of Galup[p]i’s” makes the music interpret the Venice in and for which the artist composed, the Venice of luxury and debauchery, masks and stilettos, that later Venice against which Ruskin had already hurled the thunders of his fierce wrath and contempt. “Mesmerism” details process and result with such vivid verisimilitude that one can hardly help believing that it narrates an actual experience.
The purely love-poems are very many, and among them must be counted the In a Balcony already noticed. Besides this are Love among the ruins, transcendently beautiful; The Last Ride Together, One Way of Love, In Three Days, In a Year, Love in a Life, Life in a Love, On the Campagna, The Lovers’ Quarrel, Respectability, A Woman’s Last Word, all vehemently impassioned; The Serenade at the Villa, stern and almost fierce in rhythm, brief with the conciseness of despair; At the Fireside, which we may account as directly addressing Mrs. Browning; Any Wife to any Husband, the solemn yearning, hoping-against-hope appeal of a dying Wife to her Husband to be constant in love for her until their reunion in Heaven, which it is inexpressibly mournful to read now; and, fitly concluding the Work, an Address to E. B. B.
I find that I have omitted The Guardian Angel, which is an exposition of a picture by Guercino at Fano, and whose stanza for solemn and pathetic beauty is the finest of all used in the volumes.
Finishing this very rough and imperfect notice, I confess that the Brownings are for me the two great poets of this generation. In all the loftiest qualities and faculties of our nature I know no other bard—no one devoted to metrical expression—who comes near them. Tennyson is a rare “literary luxury” for us all, and especially for our youths and maidens; but Robert Browning is indeed the poet of Men and Women.
As it would be scarcely right to speak so much about a work without giving a specimen of it, I subjoin one short piece; which is of a pathos more tenderly delicate than Browning’s masculine mind will often permit him to indulge in, and which exemplifies the remarks I made upon the nature of the Love in this noble work of his:—
EVELYN HOPE.
i.
Beautiful Evelyn Hope is dead.
Come and sit by her side an hour.
That is her book-shelf, this her bed:
She plucked that piece of geranium-flower,
Beginning to die too, in the glass.
Little has yet been changed I think—
The shutters are shut, no light may pass
Save two long rays thro’ the hinge’s chink.
ii.
Sixteen years old when she died!
Perhaps she had scarcely heard my name—
It was not her time to love: beside,
Her life had many a hope and aim,
Duties enough and little cares,
And now was quiet, now astir,—
Till God’s hand beckon’d unawares,
And the sweet white brow is all of her.
iii.
Is it too late then, Evelyn Hope?
What, your soul was pure and true,
The good stars met in your horoscope,
Made you of spirit, fire, and dew,—
And just because I was thrice as old,
And our paths in the world diverged so wide,
Each was naught to each, must I be told?
We were fellow mortals, naught beside?
iv.
No, indeed! for God above
Is great to grant as mighty to make,
And creates the love to reward the love:—
I claim you still, for my own love’s sake!
Delayed it may be for more lives yet,
Through worlds I shall traverse, not a few—
Much is to learn, and much to forget,
Ere the time be come for taking you.
v.
But the time will come,—at last it will,
When, Evelyn Hope, what meant, I shall say,
In the lower earth, in the years long still,
That body and soul so pure and gay!
Why your hair was amber I shall divine,
And your mouth of your own geranium’s red,—
And what you would do with me, in fine,
In the new life come in the old one’s stead.
vi.
I have lived, I shall say, so much since then,
Given up myself so many times,
Gained me the gains of various men,
Ransack’d the ages, spoiled the climes.
Yet one thing, one, in my soul’s full scope,
Either I missed or itself missed me—
And I want and find you, Evelyn Hope!
What is the issue? let us see!
vii.
I loved you, Evelyn, all the while;
My heart seemed full as it could hold—
There was place and to spare for the frank young smile,
And the red young mouth, and the hair’s young gold.
So, hush,—I will give you this leaf to keep—
See, I shut it inside the sweet cold hand,
There, that is our secret: go to sleep;
You will wake, and remember, and understand.
St. Helier’s, Feb. 1862.
T. J. [James Thomson]
Reviewed:
Men and Women (RB), London: Chapman & Hall, 1855.
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