R630131A. Selections (1863).
John Bull, 31 January 1863, pp. 74–75.
Listed in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 30, 376.
The publication of this volume is rather a curious fact in a poet’s life-history. We learn from the preface that it “is published with Mr. Browning’s sanction, though for the choice of the particular pieces he is in no respect responsible.” The volume, it appears, originated with two friends of Mr. Browning, who, regarding him “as among the few great poets of the century,” were naturally desirous that some of his works should be placed before the public in an attractive shape, with a view to familiarising the mind of the ordinary reader with thoughts and images of beauty that have been too little appreciated. The selection is made on the principle that all the extracts from Mr. Browning’s longer poems shall be such as furnish “pictures of character in themselves complete;” and the compilers express a hope that “this little book, by the range and variety of power it brings at once under view, will arrest, without overstraining, the attention of many readers; and, by making less novel and unfamiliar to them the style of a thoroughly original poet, will open to them sooner the full enjoyment of a series of writings as remarkable as any that have enriched the literature of our time.”
We have from time to time stated our belief that the world of English readers would yet learn to do justice to the great poet whom his own contemporaries have neglected. And we are glad to think that this pretty volume—admirable in selection and exquisite in type—is likely to lend no small mechanical aid, as we may call it, towards redressing the wrong which our generation has done to Robert Browning. Nevertheless, we can by no means think, as some say, that Mr. Browning’s is an exceptional or even an unusual case of popular neglect. It is true that there is matter for derision as well as for indignation in the result of the judice quo nosti populo—now as heretofore. Mr. Martin Farquhar Tupper is the favourite poet of our age, just as Mr. Robert Montgomery was some thirty years ago. For one reader of “Paracelsus,” how many are there of “Proverbial Philosophy?” It is a frightful query in statistics. But for out part, if we might choose, give us the one reader of “Paracelsus” rather than the hundreds who delight in “Proverbial Philosophy.” The story is an old one—Beatus Fannius, &c. To find “fit audience though few” has ever been the true poet’s desire: and we cannot think that Mr. Browning has been baulked in this hope. He has hardly passed as yet through his legitimate period of probation. Wordsworth lived to a patriarchal age—but say he had died at the age at which Shakespeare died—how many would have dared to rank him then, as all true thinkers rank him now, the greatest poet since Shakespeare: and how uncertain would then have seemed his appeal to “the Avenger Time!”
We must admit, however, that there are characteristics [p. 75→] of Robert Browning’s poetry which may serve to account for the undeserved neglect with which he has been received, over and above the lack of insight on the part of the mass of readers. In reading his works you cannot help feeling that you are face to face with a man who holds himself aloof from the common run of mankind, their joys and sorrows, their interests and passions. You fancy him a hermit looking with a curious eye from his cave at the fantastic labours and fortunes of his kind, haughtily wrapping himself in his own philosophy and saying with Apemantus, “Rich men sin and I eat root.” His very mode of life suggests this idea of the man. He seems voluntarily to have cut himself off from the ties that weave themselves round the business and bosoms of Englishmen, and to have taken up a post like that of some world-sentinel on a watch-tower—“in a gash of the wind-grieved Apennine.” His love of Italy (and it was the same with Elizabeth Browning) amounts to a personal passion. The English public is jealous in these matters and requires its poets, as it politicians, to take a primary and preponderating interest in its own affairs. We know of no poet so cosmopolitan in his tastes and sympathies as Mr. Browning. Again, he vies with Wordsworth in his imaginative philosophy, in his keen and curious analysis of human emotions. But Wordsworth, living in and with the English people, drinking in all the influences of English nature, saw with a larger and healthier comprehension, discerned in all their bearings the emotions he wished to illustrate. He “loved the common growth of mother Earth,” and hence, when at length his countrymen learned to understand him, his broad humanity reconciled them to the deep philosophy which they would otherwise hardly have appreciated. But Browning, surveying mankind from his lonely height, has his fancy exclusively drawn to some specific and abnormal feature of the complex humanity which he is studying. As the surgeon is apt to regard the whole body as a mere vehicle for some fact in morbid anatomy which monopolises his attention, so Mr. Browning dwells on some morbid feature of the soul with an absorbed attention that will not be diverted. Take for instance that most musical lyric of his “The Statue and the Bust,” which so marvellously tells the story of the Grand Duke and the Florentine lady who, intending to run away with each other, delay the irrevocable step from one cause or another, till
—Weeks grew months, years—gleam by gleam
The glory dropped from youth and love,
And both perceived they had dreamed a dream;
Which hovered as dreams do, still above,—
But who can take a dream for truth?
Oh, hide our eyes from the next remove!
Mr. Browning insists arbitrarily on his moral, namely, to brand the lovers’ infirmity of purpose, though their purpose was a wicked one:—
Stake your counter as boldly every whit,
Venture as truly, use the same skill,
Do your best, whether winning or losing it,
If you choose to play!—is my principle.
Let a man contend to the uttermost
For his life’s set prize, be it what it will!
The counter our lovers staked was lost
As surely as if it were lawful coin:
And the sin I impute to each frustrate ghost
Is, the unlit lamp and the ungirt loin,
Though the end in sight was a vice, I say.
You of the virtue (we issue join),
How strive you? De te, fabula!
The English mind, always agape for a moral, will naturally be dissatisfied with such an one as Mr. Browning offers them. It would easily believe that the poet draws no better argument from his tale than is suggested by the lady’s own Epicurean reflection:—
Where is the use of the lip’s red charm,
The heaven of hair, the pride of the brow,
And the blood that blues the inside arm—
Unless we turn, as the soul knows how,
The early gift to an end divine?
A lady of clay is as good, I trow.
A lesson that Comus might have taught. But we know that Mr. Browning does not mean this, nor can we believe that he means what he seems to inculcate, that it is better resolutely to sin than to avoid sin by irresolution. The proverb says—and says very falsely, as many a woman knows—that she who hesitates is lost. But according to Mr. Browning’s apparent rule, the hesitation itself is worse than the consequent loss, if consequent it be. Shakespeare’s morality was not of this kind when he redeemed Lady Macbeth by that one moment of softness:—
Had he not resembled
My father as he slept, I had done’t.
Now, Wordsworth in handling this story would have brought his wealth of human charity to bear upon it, would have suggested to us all the complex circumstances which tempt or hold back our frail nature, would have given more prominence to that beautiful touch which Browning just dashes in and then seems to forget:—
“Not to-morrow”—
(She checked herself and her eye grew dim)—
“My father tarries to bless my state:
I must keep it one day more for him.”
But Mr. Browning, as we have said, has a better and kindlier meaning than he cares to acknowledge. For there is a kind of masculine cynicism about him, well befitting, perhaps, a poet who marks the ways of men from the midst of a pine-grove in the Apennines—aiding that sinewy force wherewith (as one of his brother-poets has said of him) he “strings a harp of Anakim”—but hardly a quality which will attract the bulk of verse-readers. And yet Browning has a vein, too, of most touching tenderness;—can be as tender as Elizabeth Browning herself in that sweetest of love-ditties, “Catarina to Camoens.” Witness those sorrowful and melodious lines, “In a Year,” which end thus:—
That was all I meant,
—To be just,
And the passion I had raised
To content.
Since he chose to change
Gold for dust,
If I gave him what he praised
Was it strange?
Would he loved me yet,
On and on,
While I found some way undreamed
—Paid my debt!
Gave more life and more,
Till, all gone,
He should smile “She never seemed
Mine before.
“What—she felt the while,
Must I think?
Love’s so different with us men,”
He should smile.
“Dying for my sake—
White and pink!
Can’t we touch these bubbles then
But they break?”
Dear, the pang is brief.
Do thy part,
Have thy pleasure. How perplext
Grows belief!
Well, this cold clay clod
Was man’s heart.
Crumble it—and what comes next?
Is it God?
This cynicism of which we have spoken comes out very demonstratively in the matters which concern our religious beliefs and might possibly in some passages give a handle to superficial critics for impeaching Mr. Browning’s orthodoxy. Thus in his “Christmas Eve and Easter Day,” he has set before us with a magical power the meaner and weaker aspects of the three principal forms of Christian belief: the Catholic, the Calvinistic, and the Rationalistic. As a poet his sympathies are evidently drawn towards the æsthetical influences of the first—more perhaps than his philosophical reflections can quite conceal. But he has been hardly fair to the amount of personal religious zeal which Calvinism contributes to the Christian world, despite of all the philosophical blunders on which it is based and all the obliquities of religious thought which it engenders. The phraseology of the Rationalistic school is struck off in a singularly happy vein:—
Whether ’twere best opine Christ was,
Or never was at all, or whether
He was and was not, both together?—
It matters little for the name,
So the idea be left the same:
Only, for practical purpose’ sake,
’Twas obviously as well to take
The popular story,—understanding
How the ineptitude of the time,
And the penman’s prejudice, expanding
Fact into fable fit for the clime,
Had, by slow and sure degrees, translated it
Into this myrth [sic], this Individuum,
Which, when reason had strained and abated it
Of foreign matter, gave, for residuum,
A Man!—a right true man, however,
Whose work was worthy of man’s endeavour;
Work, that gave warrant almost sufficient
To his disciples, for rather believing
He was just omnipotent and omniscient,
As it gives to us, for as frankly receiving
His word, their tradition,—which, though it meant
Something entirely different
From all that those who only heard it,
In their simplicity thought and averred it,
Had yet a meaning quite as respectable:
For, among other doctrines delectable,
Was he not surely the first to insist on
The natural sovereignty of our race?—
These lines will shew the reader one of Mr. Browning’s most remarkable characteristics, his wonderful mastery over rhythmic words. We know of no such manipulator of English metre, unless it be Dryden. It is veritably in his hands as clay in the hands of the potter. Take as an instance a stanza from one of his lyrics—that in which a Frenchwoman, of the Brinvilliers type, bent on poisoning her rival, stands in the laboratory of the poisoner:—
He is with her; and they know that I know
Where they are, what they do; they believe my tears flow—
While they laugh, laugh at me, at me fled to the drear
Empty church, to pray God in, for them!—I am here.
To read these lines with all their due emphasis would be in itself a study for an actor.
Some of these poems (including the one which we have just quoted) are called “dramatic lyrics,” and may be classed as a species of composition which Mr. Browning has made peculiarly his own. Each of them may be termed a picture in itself: only that they reveal so much more of the inner life of the subjects chosen than would be within the sphere of painting. Perhaps, indeed, the works by which Mr. Browning will hereafter be best known will be his dramatic poems more strictly so called. We have not touched on these because the volume before us, though it has given us some selected passages, wholly fails to furnish an idea of the noble thought and true poetical fancy on which these dramas are based. We hope, however, that we have said something that may induce our readers to make acquaintance with the book, as an introduction to the deeper poet-heart of one whom future generations of English readers will be proud to claim among the roll of great English poets.
Reviewed:
Selections (RB), London: Chapman & Hall, 1863.
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