R630207B. Selections (1863).
The Saturday Review, 7 February 1863, pp. 179–180.
Listed in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 30, 385.
The irresistible impression made upon the mind of an unprejudiced reader by these selected poems of Mr. Browning must be, that he is, beyond all question, a man of very remarkable faculties. We perhaps may incline to the belief that his special intellectual province is to be looked for rather in an extraordinary power of psychological analysis than in what is usually regarded as poetical inspiration; but even if this attribute were separated from his other gifts, and not allowed to count at all, there would still remain behind so much real originality and strength that we cannot wonder if the partial friends whom genius such as his is sure to make and to keep are surprised and mortified at his comparative unpopularity. We say comparative unpopularity, because we have always understood that among those who are fond enough of poetry not to be repelled by a manner which his friends describe as “marked and peculiar,” but which we should speak of in terms somewhat more unfavourable, he has never wanted an attentive, and seldom an admiring audience. Comparatively unpopular, however, he certainly is. For example, Mr. Longfellow, of whom we wish to speak with the utmost respect as a thoroughly accomplished versifier and something more, has taken the young ladies of England by storm. Now, in our judgment (and we say again, with perfect sincerity, that no sneer is aimed at the American author) Mr. Browning contains within himself a mass of solid metal which might be beaten thin into a couple of Longfellows at least. And yet we apprehend that (on principles somewhat similar to those on which the Dutch estimate of female beauty is said to rest) what Horace calls the columnæ, and what we call the trade, would pronounce the latter to be the greater poet of the two by ever so many copies annually sold. The truth is, we believe, that, for the merely popular poet, what is wanted is that he should be born with his own special faculty entirely predominating over the rest of his mind. If his talent be a decided one, an ordinary understanding in other respects will suffice for his immediate purposes. As for what Mr. Carlyle calls the World-Poet, we presume that he also must have the poetical faculty predominant, but predominant over vast general powers, and with energy enough to absorb them all into itself. There is, however, an intermediate man, who often possesses real genius, and also a powerful understanding, who may or may not succeed. Such a writer now and then contrives, by some mismanagement of this very understanding, by too great self-indulgence in misplaced wit, or fantastic ingenuity, or severely abstract thought, or (as is the case with Mr. Browning) by lingering too long over subtle reproductions of characters not generally interesting, to darken his poetical gifts, and to deprive himself of a reputation, his right to which, if it depended upon talent alone, no one would dream of disputing. He will find, no doubt, among congenial minds a certain number of admirers—admirers who make up for the comparative smallness of their numbers by the unflinching intensity of their zeal; but still he cannot hope for the same general acceptance as his straightforward competitors, who aim only at broad and simple effects.
Some such incapacity, or disinclination at least, on the part of Mr. Browning, to adapt himself to the taste of the day, appears to intercept the natural effect of his genius upon the public mind. There are also, we think, certain defects of manner and taste in his compositions, which the indolent and luxurious readers of the nineteenth century will not tolerate. We doubt, therefore, whether the appearance of this little book will materially alter his position before the world, though, as we honestly appreciate his great and various merits, we shall be glad if we find ourselves mistaken. One of these faults of form, as it appears to us, is an ineradicable passion for every contorted and unimaginable rhyme which the English language, turned inside-out, can be coaxed or tortured into supplying. We readily concede that Mr. Browning dances in his self-imposed fetters with unusual lightness and ease: nevertheless, he is forced often to sacrifice conciseness and propriety of style, and sometimes the whole beauty of his image, to this somewhat mean exhibition of a merely mechanical skill. For instance, taking the “Glove,” a well-known story, in which Mr. Browning, with great ingenuity, pleads the cause of the lady against the knight whose life has been endangered by her apparently ruthless caprice, we find in it these lines:—
Sound the trumpet, no true knight’s a tarrier!
De Lorge made one leap at the barrier,
Walk’d straight to the glove—whilst the lion
Ne’er moved, kept his far-reaching eye on
The palm-tree-edged desert-spring’s sapphire,
And the musky oil’d skin of the Kaffir.
We think this conception of the lion with his drowsy imagination brooding in a half-dream over the distant solitudes of his native deserts, and therefore unconscious of the intrusion of the knight, a very striking one, but to our taste its beauty is greatly impaired by the last line. Mr. Browning binds himself down to procure a satisfactory partner for that awkward word sapphire, and he very nearly succeeds; but in such cases, according to the old proverb, a miss is as good, or rather as bad, as a mile—nay more, even if we admit that Kaffir responds adequately to sapphire, the Kaffir, we think, is out of place in the visions of a Barbary lion. Besides, [p. 180→] the line itself appears to us a bad one, and the attention of the reader is diverted from the fine poetry of the passage by his anxious desire to watch whether Herr Browning, the rhyming phenomenon, can accomplish his rope-dancing feat, and jump through his paper hoop, with the requisite dexterity and adroitness. The use of rhyme has been justified on the ground that it embodies a constant appeal to memory and to hope; but when this hope degenerates into a gaping expectation of some ingenious surprise, elevating thereby a quaint jingle into part of the promised poetical effect, our sympathy, with anything more serious than good nonsense verses, is perpetually interrupted, and we cannot do justice to thoughts and images which are always being driven into the background by this fantastic metrical harlequinade.
Even the faults of Mr. Browning, however, are the faults of a powerful and deeply original mind. Recollecting, accordingly, Mr. Mill’s dictum, that the tendency of modern society is to sink into a colourless uniformity of thought and feeling, and that therefore eccentricity, in itself and for itself, is to be petted and indulged, as a protest against the threatened extinction of vital force and individual eminence, we gladly pass over what appear to us to be Mr. Browning’s aberrations, in order that we may call attention to his splendid powers. The book opens with one or two slight lyrics which exhibit less of Mr. Browning’s peculiar cast of thought than the subsequent poems. They are intended, we presume, to act as a sort of drawbridge over which unsuspecting readers are to be enticed into the heart of the enchanted castle, in order that when there, the spells native to the place may be woven round their unresisting imaginations. The best composition of this class (it occurs a little further on in the volume) appears to us to be “How they brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix.” The worst is entitled “An Incident in the French Camp.” We should not have paused at this trifle, were it not our opinion that its comparative feebleness is in a great degree owing to the crotchet of which we have spoken already. Mr. Browning chooses to find rhymes for the French proper name Lannes—and is, therefore, obliged to make a French ensign talk of his eagle as a “flag-bird flapping its vans,” and to use other expressions neither strong nor simple enough for a camp ditty. Besides this, however, the snip-snap question and answer at the end break the lyrical flow of the piece, and prevent the catastrophe from telling, as it is meant to do, upon the reader’s mind. Another class of poems are, we think, of a much higher order—they are all of them distinguished by great originality of conception, by a subtle insight into the secret springs of action, and by a power of reproducing modes of thought and feeling the most remote from those of the poet himself, which we believe to be, at any rate among contemporary authors, wholly unequalled. We doubt, indeed, whether the general reader will be patient enough to watch the slow unravelling of those complicated impulses which have formed the character of a sceptical Roman Catholic bishop of the present day—see “Bishop Blougram’s Apology” (p. 280)—of a semi-paganized Catholic Bishop at Rome in the sixteenth century (p. 36), of a profligate monkish painter, Fra Lippo Lippi (p. 234), of an Arabian physician, or Greek litterateur shortly after the death of Christ (pp. 254–400); but that is his affair. We doubt, moreover, whether the extraordinary genius which these compositions display is poetical genius, or metaphysical; but that it is extraordinary we have no doubt whatever. We think the shortest, and perhaps on that account the most effective, of these remarkable productions, will give as good an idea of Mr. Browning’s special merits as any poem which at the present moment it is open to us to quote. It is named “My Last Duchess.” The reader must be good enough to sympathize (we mean by a sympathy of comprehension, of course), with one of the great Italian nobles of the sixteenth century. He must suppose a man of the most polished manners and the most refined tastes, but who knows no more of principle than of the electric telegraph—whose pride is venomously susceptible, and his temper as implacable as the central fires of his own Neapolitan volcano. Having lost, or rather extinguished, his wife, this gentleman wishes to marry again, and thus intimates his peculiar views of the conjugal relation (being, no doubt, great enough to feel sure that he risks nothing by his candour) to the panic-stricken envoy of his intended father-in-law:—
That’s my last Duchess painted on the wall,
Looking as if she were alive; I call
That piece a wonder, now: Frà Pandolf’s hands
Worked busily a day, and there she stands.
Will’t please you sit and look at her? I said
“Frà Pandolf” by design, for never read
Strangers like you that pictured countenance,
The depth and passion of its earnest glance,
But to myself they turned (since none puts by
The curtain I have drawn for you, but I)
And seemed as they would ask me, if they durst,
How such a glance came there; so, not the first
Are you to turn and ask thus. Sir, ’twas not
Her husband’s presence only, called that spot
Of joy into the Duchess’ cheek: perhaps
Frà Pandolf chanced to say, “Her mantle laps
Over my Lady’s wrist too much,” or, “Paint
Must never hope to reproduce the faint
Half-flush that dies along her throat;” such stuff
Was courtesy, she thought, and cause enough
For calling up that spot of joy. She had
A heart .. how shall I say? .. too soon made glad,
Too easily impressed; she liked whate’er
She looked on, and her looks went everywhere.
Sir, ’twas all one! My favour at her breast,
The dropping of the daylight in the west,
The bough of cherries some officious fool
Broke in the orchard for her, the white mule
She rode with round the terrace—all and each
Would draw from her alike the approving speech,
Or blush, at least. She thanked men,—good; but thanked
Somehow .. I know not how .. as if she ranked
My gift of a nine hundred years old name
With anybody’s gift. Who’d stoop to blame
This sort of trifling? Even had you skill
In speech—(which I have not)—to make your will
Quite clear to such an one, and say, “Just this
Or that in you disgusts me; here you miss,
Or there exceed the mark”—and if she let
Herself be lessoned so, nor plainly set
Her wits to yours, forsooth, and made excuse,
—E’en then would be some stooping, and I choose
Never to stoop. Oh, sir, she smiled, no doubt,
Whene’er I passed her; but who passed without
Much the same smile? This grew; I gave commands;
Then all smiles stopped together. There she stands
As if alive. Will’t please you rise? We’ll meet
The company below, then. I repeat,
The Count your master’s known munificence
Is ample warrant that no just pretence
Of mine for dowry will be disallowed;
Though his fair daughter’s self, as I avowed
At starting, is my object. Nay, we’ll go
Together down, sir! Notice Neptune, though,
Taming a sea-horse, thought a rarity,
Which Claus of Innsbruck cast in bronze for me.
This dramatic scene requires to be read carefully. Every word which we find in it carries its own well-considered meaning and carefully anticipated weight. If, therefore, a man rattles through it expecting to sound its depths by one glancing inspection, for anything which he will draw from it to enrich his intellect, or awaken his imagination, he might just as well be reading Tupper; but if, on the other hand, he will only give it time enough and thought enough, we cannot doubt that he will feel himself in the presence of something which emphatically belongs to what De Quincey has somewhere denominated the “literature of power.” And, if so, he will do well to remember, on Mr. Browning’s behalf, how few in number are the men who thus contribute, in their several generations, to the immortality of the nation and the language from which they will stand out through a long succession of centuries as the “bright particular stars.” Of Mr. Browning as a regular dramatist, it is difficult to speak fairly, if we confine ourselves to our actual brief. Seriously, we think that the passages offered to us here from his plays fail for the most part of their intended purpose. These plays are, perhaps, his chief efforts—it was, therefore, we suppose, impossible to pass them over without notice. But Mr. Browning is a poet who works so entirely under the guidance of a farseeing and preorganizing intellect, that everything he completes is, if we may so speak, woven without seam; and does not, in consequence, readily admit of being cut into samples. We recollect many years ago reading “Colombe’s Birthday,” “Pippa Passes,” “Luvia,” [sic] and the “Blot on [sic] the Scutcheon,“ as wholes with great delight. The selections, however, with the exception of the pathetic scene from the “Blot on the Scutcheon” (p. 179), lose much of their power by being detached from the context, and, as may be supposed, by no means represent the dramas from which they are taken with adequate effect. We do not know how, in a work of this nature, such a mishap could be avoided, but we regret it greatly nevertheless.
[William Bodham Donne]
Reviewed:
Selections (RB), London: Chapman & Hall, 1863.
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