R630500A. Selections (1863).
The Eclectic Review, May 1863, pp. 436–454.
Listed in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 30, 385.
We suppose many readers will be glad to receive this judiciously compiled little volume; it sets in a clear and admirable light the distinguished genius of the second of our great English living poets, who might be first but for the native impatience of artist forms and settings. Few selections with which we are acquainted more faithfully render the genius of an author. At the same time, it is perhaps necessary to say that it is compiled with the author’s sanction, but without his knowledge of the especial selections. For ourselves, we usually have but few words of praise to give to selections, but this seems necessary for those whose minds claim any relationship of sympathy with this author, and it will be a most admirable and pleasant companion for leisure hours and recreative travels.
Robert Browning is one of the least known of our great modern writers, although his name has been now so long before the world; yet it may perhaps be questioned whether, with all his native prodigality and munificent endowment of thought, scholarship, and genius, he is not better known as the husband of Mrs. Browning than by the productions of his own pen. He is now in about his fifty-third year, and far as his verses rise above the cockney school of literature, so much the subject of the sneers of the fine-gentlemen critics, he is a Londoner by birth; born in Camberwell, educated in the then especially pleasant little village of Dulwich. The broad and liberal tone of his mind, which never degenerates into the cant of Church-of-Englandism, may perhaps be in some measure attributed to the fact, that as a scholar he graduated at the London University. His first effort as a poet—“Pauline”—we suppose has passed from everybody’s recollection. Its author does not seem desirous that it should be retained. We have never seen it. We suppose it gives no evidence of its author’s powers. Nearly thirty years have passed by since the publication of “Paracelsus,” a most extraordinary poem to read now. It is not wonderful that it was received with chilling coldness then. At that time [p. 437→] our country had no audience for that kind of literature. It is intensely subjective. Much has been done since: Wordsworth has been appreciated, and Tennyson has risen; teaching the cultivation of this poetry of thought. At the time of its publication there was neither school nor class; only here and there existed a solitary mind able to appreciate, and with one or two favourable notices, it fell powerless from the press. The audience would be a small one disposed to read or to listen to it now. Soon after “Paracelsus,” was published “Sordello.” Again we have to confess our ignorance. This poem is out of print, and it probably never will be reprinted. We are willing to accept the verdict which pronounces it to be the most utterly and completely unintelligible poem in the English language. Our readers have probably met with a good story of Douglas Jerrold. “In those days he was recruiting himself at Brighton. A parcel of books was sent him down from London, among the rest ‘Sordello.’ The health of the wit was shattered, and all books were forbidden excepting lighter fiction. But Mrs. Jerrold, or as one has expressed it, the ‘domestic lifeguard,’ was out of the way. The parcel was opened, and ‘Sordello’ plunged into. When Mrs. Jerrold returned, she found her husband, to her horror, a cold sweat breaking out over his face, exclaiming, ‘I am mad, I am mad! my mind is gone, I can make nothing of it.’ He put the book into her hand, and asked her to read, and as she read, he exclaimed, ‘Thank God, it’s only gibberish, I am not mad after all!’” This is a very well known and oft-repeated story. We suspect that it is only the judgment of that clever and brilliant wag, Jerrold; but it shows the estimation in which the poem was held by contemporaries able to judge. On the contrary, Mr. Browning still insists to his friends that “Sordello” is amongst the simplest and clearest poems in the English language. It was in 1846 Robert Browning married Elizabeth Barrett, thus furnishing no doubt one of the rarest and most charming instances of the happy marriage of equal and congenial poets. Their courtship was very short, and we give as apocryphal the statement that it commenced in a Greek note—exceedingly likely, for it was the favourite language of both; Mr. Browning’s mastery of the language is as well known as was his distinguished wife’s; though perhaps it was a joke of Jerrold’s, who, when somebody was insisting that all persons should learn Greek, declared, “Browning did worse than that, for he wrote Greek in short-hand.” How recently the earthly marriage has been dissolved our readers know. During the years of their married life they resided in Florence, and it is something of a drawback [p. 438→] to our exceeding admiration of, and gratitude to, both that England and English scenes and English life never seem to enter into the texture either of their genius, their sympathies, or their writings.
And here we touch at once the most prominent of those obstacles interfering with the fame of Robert Browning. He writes for men—for men and women—but not for Englishmen. He unconditions himself from those circumstances which would attract English readers, lives in other ages and other countries, and with a power we believe to be felicitously transparent and clear he seems to determine on making himself obscure. In this particular there is a contradiction between the essentially dramatic structure of his scenery and the magnificent dramatic grandeur of the passions he portrays and embodies, and the frequently involved tortuousness of his versification. A second thought shows us that this is indeed very natural to his peculiar genius. How he delights to work and worm and wind his way to the subtlest places of the soul, and to the mazy problems which the soul is perpetually seeking to solve! His knowledge is most recondite. Out-of-the way magnificent scenes attract and claim and charm him—great historic incidents and historical characters, though great not by the rustle of the robe, or the clash of the armour along the chief streets of history, but by the exhibition they have made of the greatness of souls. He is a dramatist in all that we usually imply by that word, entering into the innermost arena of the being. His poems are, to quote the title of one of his dramas, “Soul tragedies.” We trust we shall not be misunderstood when we say they present an order of tragedy differing from Shakspeare’s—the agony, the strife, the internal stress are more internalised. He transfers the circumstances of our being from the without to the within. In this way they all become noble pictures of the striving and the attaining soul. “Paracelsus” is one of the most extraordinary poems in our language—a tragedy, if a tragedy were ever written—but it has no incident, or but little. We have heard it mentioned by the side of Bailey’s “Festus”; it is likely to have done something in the production of “Festus,” for it preceded it by many years. “Paracelsus,” in the thought of the poet, no longer the Cagliostro of his age, but the great arch-priest of knowledge, falling into the frequent mistake of seeking to know and to enjoy at once,—a world-believer inoculated, as most great world-believer’s have been, with contempt for the world he relieves, longing at once to trample on yet save mankind, scorning their kindness while living on the opportunities of lifting them into the regions of knowledge and power. If man- [p. 439→] kind can be served, well, there all intercourse ends, determining never to be served by those whom he serves.
Like some knight traversing a wilderness,
Who, on his way, may chance to free a tribe
Of desert-people from their dragon-foe;
When all the swarthy race press round to kiss
His feet, and choose him for their king, and yield
Their poor tents, pitched among the sand-hills, for
His realm; and he points, smiling, to his scarf,
Heavy with riveled gold, his burgonet,
Gay set with twinkling stones—and to the east,
Where these must be displayed!
No doubt, in reading “Paracelsus,” the reader has to do very much himself; it is by no means a poem for those whose verses must be thoughtless and sensuous. Abjuring all human love, Paracelsus breaks away from his friend Festus, the curate of Würzburg, the first scene depicting their parting conversation, he travelling away to cities, thirsting for knowledge, treating knowledge as the chief good of man, indulging in every kind of perplexed and difficult problem about God, Nature, Providence. Through a series of years the two friends meet together occasionally, and the poem is simply occupied with noting the progress of Paracelsus in his daring and dizzy pathway. The wild dreams and speculations and abstractions of Paracelsus involve the faith of his friend, Festus, who, in one of the interviews, implores him to remember—
Not our love alone,
But that my faith in God’s desire for man
To trust on his support (as I must think
You trusted) is obscured and dimmed thro’ you.
Thus “Paracelsus,” Mr. Browning’s longest poem, like most, may be not inappropriately described as a metaphysical or psychological dialogue. It is the picture of a great, noble, yet scornful mind, wrecked by its mere desire to know. In the last scene, a scene of ineffable beauty, Paracelsus is discovered on his death-bed, in a cell in the hospital of Salzburg, by Festus. In the first scene, Festus sat by the fireside with his wife; she is gone now, which leads the dying man to the following beautiful and pathetic burst from his delirium:—
And she is gone; sweet human love is gone!
’Tis only when they spring to heaven that angels
Reveal themselves to you; they sit all day
Beside you, and lie down at night by you,
Who care not for their presence—muse or sleep—
And all at once they leave you and you know them!
We are so fooled, so cheated! [p. 440→]
Persecution, which haunted him during his life, and has dogged his name and shade ever since his death, has brought him to the pass of pain and delirious despair. Dying, however, the spirit becomes filled with music as a star is freighted with light. The dying man reviews his life and his mistakes in an autobiography as marvellously touching and true as it is overwhelmingly tender. Love and the love of God resumes its sway over a soul mere knowledge had wrecked. The whole of these dying words are a swell of the richest melody to the close, when faith exclaims—
If I stoop
Into a dark tremendous sea of cloud,
It is but for a time; I press God’s lamp
Close to my breast—its splendour, soon or late,
Will pierce the gloom: I shall emerge one day!
If our readers can do so, if they be devotees to knowledge—mere knowledge, which was the curse of Eden, and threatens to be the curse of our age—we would have them to read “Paracelsus.” It is not the only one of Mr. Browning’s poems—rather it is one of many—in which he asserts, but not merely asserts, that love solves where knowledge perplexes. The same lesson is taught in “Saul,” which, in its condensed and subdued majesty of expression, and its intricate subtlety in dealing with the most perplexed affairs of the human spirit, may rank among the most wonderful productions of the English language, too long to cite here, yet if we desired to read aloud that which would furnish the best illustration of the genius of Robert Browning, we would select “Saul.” The poet seizes the period of Saul’s first madness, and his ambitious flight is no other nor less than to present those snatches and refrains, those subtle strokes of harmony and truth, by which the stripling David wound his way into the soul of the king, and disimprisoned and set it free:—
He is Saul, ye remember in glory,—ere error had bent
The broad brow from the daily communion; and still, though much spent
Be the life and the bearing that front you, the same, God did choose,
To receive what a man may waste, desecrate, never quite lose.
David has been sent for, famed young minstrel, harper, and poet, to visit and to charm the king:—
Said Abner, “At last thou art come! Ere I tell, ere you speak,
Kiss my cheek, wish me well!” Then I wished it, and did kiss his cheek.
And he, “Since the King, O my friend, for thy countenance sent,
Neither drunken nor eaten have we; nor until from his tent
Thou return with the joyful assurance the King liveth yet,
Shall our lips with the honey be bright, with the water be wet. [p. 441→]
For out of the black mid-tent’s silence, a space of three days,
Not a sound hath escaped to thy servants, of prayer or of praise,
To betoken that Saul and the Spirit have ended their strife,
And that, faint in his triumph, the monarch sinks back upon life.”
In strong, short, clear verse, he describes how the young harper, having knelt down to the God of his fathers, ran along, lifting the unlooped tent, pulled up the obstructing spear, groped on his hands and knees to the second enclosure, felt his way to the fold and skirts, prayed once more, and entered, exclaiming, “Here is David, thy servant,”—
And no voice replied.
At the first I saw nought but the blackness; but soon I descried
A something more black than the blackness—the vast, the upright
Main prop which supports the pavilion: and slow into sight
Grew a figure against it, gigantic and blackest of all;—
Then a sunbeam, that burst through the tent-roof,—showed Saul.
The king stood there agonized, drear, stark, blind, and dumb; not a muscle relaxed at the presence of the stripling; he hung there like a great king serpent caught in a pine. The effort of the harper was to recal and wake him from the trance of madness. What strain should he try: What song should he sing? Having removed the lilies from the chords of his harp, bound round them to prevent them from snapping with the stress of the noontide, he essayed the song of creatures, the song of the sheepfolds, the song loved by birds, or by the wild wood creatures in the brake, with the sweet morality—
God made all creatures, and gave them our love and our fear,
To give sign, we and they are his children, one family here.
Then the young harper tries the song of the reapers, as the song of creatures has been waked in vain, and then the song of funerals, and then of marriage, and then, rising to a higher flight, the song of the Temple:—
The chorus intoned
As the Levites go up to the altar in glory enthroned....
But I stopped here—for here in the darkness, Saul groaned.
The groan of the king is so far a conquest for the harp; there is something stirring and seeking a return to life, and the king shudders, and the sparkles dart from the jewels of his turban, from the rubies and the sapphires in the darkness; still it is a movement of the head, not of the body; the cataleptic rigidity holds it there still. Then comes a burst of higher music:—
How good is man’s life, the mere living! how fit to employ
All the heart and the soul and the senses, for ever in joy!
The young minstrel becomes bolder, sings of the white locks of [p. 442→] Saul’s father, the thin hands of his mother held up in attestation of God’s faithfulness, even over the death bier. Then the song becomes personal—a rapid glance over the youth of the king, his boyhood of promise, and hope, and wonder:—
Till lo, thou art grown to a monarch; a people is thine;
And all gifts which the world offers singly, on one head combine!
On one head, all the beauty and strength, love and rage, like the throe
That, a-work in the rock, helps its labour, and lets the gold go:
High ambition and deeds which surpass it, fame crowning it,—all
Brought to blaze on the head of one creature—King Saul!
And how cunning the art of the poet in this, who, in the midst of such a train of association, dexterously introducing in that burst the name of the king, restores him to the first real dawn of consciousness. Death was past, life not come, so he waited.
What next should I urge
To sustain him where song had restored him?
Now comes the difficult part the minstrel has to play, and then come thronging the rife fancies indulged of old in the pastures—the sheep all round, the solitary eagle sweeping slowly, as if sleeping on the wing, and the young poet peopling the hollow in which he lay with thoughts and dreams of life—a life it seemed then, never to be mixed with the rules, the schemes, the uses of men, the courage that gains, the prudence that keeps. And now all these fancies coming back, old trains of vague thought giving the sentiments of assurance to the responses and the teachings of the harp, first the song rose to the thought of the worth of fame, mind rejecting the mere comforts of the mere mortal life; then, the soul rising above sorrow, even as, though the palm tree be broken, stem and branch decaying, the palm wine remains to stanch the wounds of the spirit. So the king is invoked to remember that the fruit and the vintage of life is in deeds. The king, rising out of his trance, is called to look from the actual to the ideal. The first king of Judea is called to look out into the vale where the first king slumbers beneath his tomb, “the grey mountain of marble heaped four square” commemorating great deeds, while the story of Saul, the great statesman, is told with the poet’s sweet comment:—
So the pen gives unborn generations their due and their part
In thy being! Then, first of the mighty, thank God that thou art.
Step by step the young poet wins his way to the king’s heart. He sank and sat down, and presently his vast giant knees encircle the young singer, who reaches now the true height of [p. 443→] his inspiration, and our readers will thank us for quoting the remainder of the poem:—
Then the truth came upon me. No harp more—no song more! outbroke—
“I have gone the whole round of Creation: I saw and I spoke!
I, a work of God’s hand for that purpose, received in my brain
And pronounced on the rest of his handwork—returned him again
His creation’s approval or censure: I spoke as I saw.
I report, as a man may of God’s work—all’s love, yet all’s law!
Now I lay down the judgeship he lent me. Each faculty tasked
To perceive him, has gained an abyss, where a dewdrop was asked.
Have I knowledge? confounded it shrivels at wisdom laid bare.
Have I a forethought? how purblind, how blank, to the Infinite care!
Do I task any faculty highest, to image success?
I but open my eyes,—and perfection, no more and no less,
In the kind I imagined, full-fronts me, and God is seen God
In the star, in the stone, in the flesh, in the soul and the clod.
And thus looking within and around me I ever renew,
(With that stoop of the soul which in bending upraises it too)
The submission of Man’s nothing-perfect to God’s All-Complete,
As by each new obeisance in spirit, I climb to his feet!
Yet with all this abounding experience, this Deity known,
I shall dare to discover some province, some gift of my own.
There’s one faculty pleasant to exercise, hard to hoodwink,
I am fain to keep still in abeyance (I laugh as I think),
Lest, insisting to claim and parade in it, wot ye, I worst
E’en the Giver in one gift.—Behold! I could love if I durst!
But I sink the pretension as fearing a man may o’ertake
God’s own speed in the one way of love: I abstain, for love’s sake!
—What, my soul? see thus far and no farther? when doors great and small,
Nine-and-ninety flew ope at our touch, should the hundredth appal?
In the least things, have faith, yet distrust in the greatest of all?
Do I find love so full in my nature, God’s ultimate gift,
That I doubt his own love can compete with it? here, the parts shift?
Here, the creature surpass the Creator, the end, what Began?—
Would I fain in my impotent yearning do all for this man,
And dare doubt He alone shall not help him, who yet alone can?
Would it ever have entered my mind, the bare will, much less power,
To bestow on this Saul what I sang of, the marvellous dower
Of the life he was gifted and filled with? to make such a soul,
Such a body, and then such an earth for insphering the whole!
And doth it not enter my mind (as my warm tears attest)
These good things being given, to go on, and give one more, the best?
Ay, to save and redeem and restore him, maintain at the height
This perfection,—succeed with life’s dayspring, death’s minute of night?
Interpose at the difficult minute, snatch Saul, the mistake,
Saul, the failure, the ruin he seems now,—and bid him awake
From the dream, the probation, the prelude, to find himself set
Clear and safe in new light and new life,—a new harmony yet
To be run, and continued, and ended—who knows?—or endure!
The man taught enough by life’s dream, of the rest to make sure.
By the pain-throb, triumphantly winning intensified bliss,
And the next world’s reward and repose, by the struggle in this. [p. 444→]
I believe it! ’tis Thou, God, that givest, ’tis I who receive:
In the first is the last, in thy will is my power to believe.
All’s one gift: thou canst grant it moreover, as prompt to my prayer
As I breathe out this breath, as I open these arms to the air.
From thy will, stream the worlds, life and nature, thy dread Sabaoth:
I will?—the mere atoms despise me! and why am I loth
To look that, even that in the face too? why is it I dare
Think but lightly of such impuissance? what stops my despair?
This;—’tis not what man Does which exalts him, but what man Would do!
See the King—I would help him but cannot, the wishes fall through.
Could I wrestle to raise him from sorrow, grow poor to enrich,
To fill up his life, starve my own out, I would—knowing which,
I know that my service is perfect.—Oh, speak through me now!
Would I suffer for him that I love? So wilt Thou—so wilt Thou!
So shall crown thee the topmost, ineffablest, uttermost Crown—
And thy love fill infinitude wholly, nor leave up nor down
One spot for the creature to stand in! It is by no breath,
Turn of eye, wave of hand, that Salvation joins issue with death!
As thy love is discovered almighty, almighty be proved
Thy power, that exists with and for it, of Being beloved!
He who did most, shall bear most; the strongest shall stand the most weak.
’Tis the weakness in strength that I cry for! my flesh, that I seek
In the Godhead! I seek and I find it. O Saul, it shall be
A face like my face that receives thee: a Man like to me,
Thou shalt love and be loved by, for ever! a Hand like this hand
Shall throw open the gates of new life to thee! See the Christ stand!”
I know not too well how I found my way home in the night.
There were witnesses, cohorts about me, to left and to right,
Angels, powers, the unuttered, unseen, the alive—the aware—
I repressed, I got through them as hardly, as struggling there,
As a runner beset by the populace famished for news—
Life or death. The whole earth was awakened, hell loosed with her crews;
And the stars of night beat with emotion, and tingled and shot
Out in fire the strong pain of pent knowledge: but I fainted not.
For the Hand still impelled me at once and supported—suppressed
All the tumult, and quenched it with quiet, and holy behest,
Till the rapture was shut in itself, and the earth sank to rest.
Anon at the dawn, all that trouble had withered from earth—
Not so much, but I saw it die out in the day’s tender birth;
In the gathered intensity brought to the grey of the hills;
In the shuddering forests’ new awe; in the sudden wind-thrills;
In the startled wild beasts that bore off, each with eye sidling still
Though averted, in wonder and dread; and the birds stiff and chill
That rose heavily, as I approached them, made stupid with awe!
E’en the serpent that slid away silent,—he felt the new Law.
The same stared in the white humid faces upturned by the flowers;
The same worked in the heart of the cedar, and moved the vine-bowers.
And the little brooks witnessing murmured, persistent and low,
With their obstinate, all but hushed voices—E’en so! it is so.
From these quotations we surely may gather that Mr. Browning belongs in the highest sense to the poets of faith, even [p. 445→] in the delineations of some of the darkest ways of the soul this appears. One of his most extraordinary poems is “Bishop Blougram’s Apology,” a piece of remarkable logical and poetical strength, from which we are not going to quote a word, but of which we must say that, in its way, it is alone in poetry, as an expression of the casuistries of a sceptical epicurean who finds himself in a good place in the Church and determines to abide in it. We turn to another aspect of Mr. Browning’s genius, his condensed, dramatic, passionate effect; indeed, in his shorter pieces, he seems to be master, as in the longer, at once of the power to startle with the mystical and subjective emotion or with the bold, passionate, and dramatic scene. We will present two well-known illustrations of this—well known, that is, to those who have been at all acquainted with the verses of Mr. Browning:—
Beautiful Evelyn Hope is dead,
Sit and watch 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 through the hinge’s chink.
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 beckoned unawares,
And the sweet white brow is all of her.
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 nought to each, must I be told?
We were fellow mortals, nought beside?
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. [p. 446→]
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.
I have lived, I shall say, so much since then,
Given up myself so many times.
Gained me the gains of various men,
Ransacked 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!
I love 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.
This extract will itself be sufficient to illustrate at once the peculiar and subtle genius of the poet, and the indisposition of most readers to concede a deference to his claims upon their regard. Only a mind tolerant to the more familiar aspects of the life to come could read with pleasure, or permit to be read at all, such verses as these. We should expect to see in most faces a smile while they were perused, greeting as the sheerest nonsense the last line:—
You will wake, and remember, and understand.
Far more apprehensible to our Protestant tastes are the following, and vehement passion can seldom find a more intense utterance:—
It is a lie—their Priests, their Pope,
Their Saints, their … all they fear or hope
Are lies, and lies—there! through my door
And ceiling, there! and walls and floor,
There, lies, they lie, shall still be hurled,
Till spite of them I reach the world!
You think Priests just and holy men!
Before they put me in this den,
I was a human creature too,
With flesh and blood like one of you,
A girl that laughed in beauty’s pride
Like lilies in your world outside. [p. 447→]
I had a lover—shame avaunt!
This poor wrenched body, grim and gaunt,
Was kissed all over till it burned,
By lips the truest, love e’er turned
His heart’s own tint: one night they kissed
My soul out in a burning mist.
So, next day when the accustomed train
Of things grew round my sense again,
“That is a sin,” I said—and slow
With downcast eyes to church I go.
And pass to the confession-chair,
And tell the old mild father there.
But when I faulter Beltran’s name,
“Ha?” quoth the father; “much I blame
The sin; yet wherefore idly grieve?
Despair not,—strenuously retrieve!
Nay, I will turn this love of thine
To lawful love, almost divine.
“For he is young, and led astray,
This Beltran, and he schemes, men say,
To change the laws of church and state;
So, thine shall be an angel’s fate,
Who, ere the thunder breaks, should roll
Its cloud away and save his soul.
For, when he lies upon thy breast,
Thou mayst demand and be possessed
Of all his plans, and next day steal
To me, and all those plans reveal,
That I and every priest, to purge
His soul, may fast and use the scourge.”
That father’s beard was long and white.
With love and truth his brow seemed bright;
I went back, all on fire with joy,
And, that same evening, bade the boy
Tell me, as lovers should, heart-free,
Something to prove his love of me.
He told me what he would not tell
For hope of Heaven or fear of Hell;
And I lay listening in such pride,
And, soon as he had left my side,
Tripped to the church by morning-light
To save his soul in his despite.
I told the father all his schemes,
Who were his comrades, what their dreams;
“And now make haste,” I said, “to pray
The one spot from his soul away:
To-night he comes, but not the same
Will look!” At night he never came. [p. 448→]
Nor next night: on the after-morn,
I went forth with a strength new-born:
The church was empty: something drew
My steps into the street; I knew
It led me to the market-place—
Where, lo,—on high—the father’s face!
That horrible black scaffold drest—
The stapled block … God sink the rest!
That head strapped back, that blinding vest,
Those knotted hands and naked breast—
Till near one busy hangman pressed—
And—on the neck these arms caressed....…
No part in aught they hope or fear!
No Heaven with them, no Hell,—and here,
No earth, not so much space as pens
My body in their worst of dens
But shall bear God and Man my cry—
Lies—lies, again—and still, they lie!
Quotations like these, and they are abundant enough in Mr. Browning’s works, show his great variety of power. There are still some other characteristics we should notice. We have already referred, as one of the chief objections to Mr. Browning’s style, to its involved character; and the famous poem which has received Mr. Ruskin’s warm eulogy, “The Bishop orders his tomb at St. Praxed’s,” is an illustration of this. A hazy gorgeousness, suffusing stained-glass glory, is not only the impression in this, but in many other poems. It is light seen through a prism; and the strange and quaint images introduced, the determination utterly to abandon the ordinary train of symbol and metaphor, and the selection of such most likely to strike the eye and mind in quaint old Continental towns, in cool marble Italian cities, in their middle-age churches, vast and awful, in quaint and exciting old chronicles. These are the fountains of Mr. Browning’s imagery. Perhaps some, too, would object to him, that the very originality of his genius frequently gives to his treatment of subjects a newness which is doubtful truth. We have a special instance of this in his treatment of the well-known story of the Glove and the Lion, the incident of King Francis’ Court. Whereas all tradition has given to the lady the worst of it, Browning turns the tables, makes the lover of the lady to be one, the truth of whose protestations she had long doubted—who had often given to her endless descriptions of the death he would brave for her sake, and whom now she, having long seen the hollowness of, put to the test. The Knight, it seems, according to the version of the poet, soon married, and thereupon happens a very different story of bravery and cowardice:— [p. 449→]
That he wooed and won … How do you call her?
The beauty, that rose in the sequel
To the King’s love, who loved her a week well;
And ’twas noticed he never would honour
De Lorge (who looked daggers upon her)
With the easy commission of stretching
His legs in the service, and fetching
His wife, from her chamber, those straying
Sad gloves she was always mislaying,
While the King took the closet to chat in,—
But of course this adventure came pat in:
And never the King told the story,
How bringing a glove brought such glory,
But the wife smiled—“His nerves are grown firmer—
Mine he brings now and utters no murmur.”
Sometimes this disposition of originality results in a most pleasant happiness of suggestion, such as the epistle of Karshish, containing the strange medical experience of an Arab physician who had met with Lazarus, whom Christ had raised from the dead. This curiosity of knowledge perpetually flows out in curiosity of thought and style. We have another remarkable illustration of this in “Pippa Passes,” the story of an Italian beggar or peasant girl, whose simple movement affects the character and destiny of every person she passes in the play, and it is truly one of the most singular illustrations of what we must call the subtlety of our author’s genius. It is this subtlety, too, which places him at a greater remove from what is ordinarily conceived of the character of the poet. He not merely seems to disdain the artist function too much, but too much he dwells upon the psychological analogies and distinctions; they so predominate that they make him comparatively unreadable by the ordinary crowd, who, as in everything else, so most especially in poetry, renounce all that calls for labour. With this, however, it must be said that Mr. Browning has a measureless command over versification and language. It rolls on like a great tide, and sweeps up and fills every little bay, or creek, or brook. His versification sometimes runs, sometimes rushes; he is not very particular out of what language he fetches his rhythms, Greek, Latin, Italian, or French. Frequently they are very new. His versification cannot always be said to be happy. Sometimes, again, it is most felicitous in softness and in strength. The story of “The Statue and the Bust” illustrates this—one of those Italian traditions with which those cities abound. A husband, suspecting his wife of some partiality to the Duke, immured her in her chamber for life, from the day of their marriage. When he told her his will, she had determined to fly to the Duke, and the Duke had determined again to attempt to win the lady. On either side the deed died in [p. 450→] the thought, the lady passed her days in her palace, but when the first grey hairs streaked her brow, before her beauty faded, she sent for a sculptor to execute her bust. The Duke, it is to be supposed, forgot the lady, reigned his careless and easy reign, but before he died sent for a sculptor to execute his statue for the city square. There, in the square, stands the statue, and there, in the window of the palace opposite, stands the bust, from which little circumstance Mr. Browning weaves, through a most charming measure, the story, and deduces this most solemn moral:—
So! while these wait the trump of doom,
How do their spirits pass, I wonder,
Night and days in the narrow room?
Still, I suppose, they sit and ponder
What a gift life was, ages ago,
Six steps out of the chapel yonder.
Surely they see not God, I know,
Nor all that chivalry of His,
The soldier-saints who, row in row,
Burn upward each to his point of bliss—
Since, the end of life being manifest,
He had cut his way through the world to this.
I hear your reproach—“But delay was best,
For their end was a crime!”—Oh, a crime will do
As well, I reply, to serve for a test,
As a virtue golden through and through,
Sufficient to vindicate itself
And prove its worth at a moment’s view.
Must a game be played for the sake of pelf?
Where a button goes, ’twere an epigram
—To offer the stamp of the very Guelph.
The true has no value beyond the sham.
As well the counter as coin, I submit,
When your table’s a hat, and your prize, a dram.
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
Was, the unlit lamp and the ungirt loin,
Though the end in sight was a crime, I say.
You of the virtue (we issue join),
How strive you? De te, fabula! [p. 451→]
We must draw our article to a close with a searching sense of its great inequality to the worth of the subject of it; but before we do so, we may refer briefly to Mr. Browning’s last poem, “Christmas Eve and Easter Day,” and here we should certainly say, that the compilers of the selection have scarcely been just to the intention of Mr. Browning in the poem. They have, indeed, given “Mount Zion Chapel, at Love Lane,” and the “Pulpit at Göttingen,” and “St. Peters at Rome,” and the first quotation especially looks like a satire upon all conventicles. It does not at all transpire, as in the poem, that the conventicle furnishing the water of life answers its purpose a great deal better than the lecture room, which only furnishes a myth, or the building, which only provides a raree-show. We would have liked to have seen the following quoted:—
Ha! Is God mocked, as He asks?
Shall I take on me to change His tasks,
And dare, despatched to a river-head
For a simple draught of the element,
Neglect the thing for which He sent,
And return with another thing instead?—
Saying … “Because the water found
Welling up from underground,
Is mingled with the taints of earth,
While Thou, I know, dost laugh at dearth,
And couldest, at a word, convulse
The world with the leap of its river-pulse,—
Therefore I turned from the oozings muddy,
And bring thee a chalice I found, instead:
See the brave veins in the breccia ruddy!
One would suppose that the marble bled.
What matters the water? A hope I have nursed,
That the waterless cup will quench my thirst.
—Better have knelt at the poorest stream
That trickles in pain from the straitest rift!
For the less or the more is all God’s gift,
Who blocks up or breaks wide the granite-seam.
And here, is there water or not, to drink?
I, then, in ignorance and weakness,
Taking God’s help, have attained to think
My heart does best to receive in meekness
This mode of worship, as most to his mind,
Where earthly aids being cast behind,
His All in All appears serene,
With the thinnest human veil between,
Letting the mystic Lamps, the Seven,
The many motions of His spirit,
Pass, as they list, to earth from Heaven.
For the preacher’s merit or demerit,
It were to be wished the flaws were fewer
In the earthern vessel, holding treasure,
Which lies as safe in a golden ewer; [p. 452→]
But the main thing is, does it hold good measure?
Heaven soon sets right all other matters!—
Ask, else, these ruins of humanity,
This flesh worn out to rags and tatters,
This soul at struggle with insanity,
Who thence take comfort, can I doubt,
Which an empire gained, were a loss without.
May it be mine! And let us hope
That no worse blessing befal the Pope,
Turn’d sick at last of the day’s buffoonery,
—Of his posturings and his petticoatings,
Beside the Bourbon bully’s gloatings
In the bloody orgies of drunk poltroonery!
Nor may the professor forego its peace
At Göttingen, presently, when, in the dusk
Of his life, if his cough, as I fear, should increase,
Prophesied of by that horrible husk;
And when, thicker and thicker, the darkness fills
The world through his misty spectacles,
And he gropes for something more substantial
Than a fable, myth, or personification,
May Christ do for him, what no mere man shall,
And stand confessed as the God of salvation!
Meantime, in the still recurring fear
Lest myself, at unawares, be found,
While attacking the choice of my neighbours round,
Without my own made—I choose here!
The giving out of the hymn reclaims me;
I have done!—And if any blames me,
Thinking that merely to touch in brevity
The topics I dwell on, were 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 frequent sputter
Prove that the soul’s depths boil in earnest!
May the truth shine out, stand ever before us!
I put up pencil and join chorus
To Hepzibah Tune, without further apology,
The last five verses of the third section
Of the seventeenth hymn in Whitfield’s Collection,
To conclude with the doxology.
Quotations so simple as these will assure our readers that in Mr. Browning they may expect to meet with a man who has meddled with every kind of knowledge. Far beyond any other poet, we believe, of our day, all his poems deserve the name of studies, and his volumes form a rich mosaic. In this amplitude of knowledge, perhaps, the poet Longfellow more resembles him than any other; but we suppose, as we believe some one has said, there is the material of many Longfellow’s. Pity, too, that a writer so gifted and [p. 453→] faithful to our purest and highest instincts, many of whose verses, too, show such richness of melody, should not have cultivated more the charm of that music which wins, as well as that power which subdues and overawes. Yet how ungrateful this is: as well murmur because Milton has not cut up “Paradise Lost” into pretty little liltings of song. We are impatient because our Milton cannot be a Burns as well, and public opinion, being well pleased with “Paradise Lost,” would thereupon give its gifted author an order for the production of something in the Christy’s Minstrels way, the poor author meantime feeling that the production of the one article was scarcely compatible with the production of the other. We are not aware that any verse of Robert Browning’s has been set to music. The same remark applies to the volumes of Mrs. Browning; indeed, the verses of both the one and the other are too painful for a large popularity. And we remark again of Mr. Browning’s poems, that they are characterised by exceeding painfulness—not the painfulness of passion—but that which, we believe, more frequently tortures to madness, the painfulness of thought. In all his more important efforts this is very manifest, and this manifestation would lead, perhaps, to a mistake with reference to the poet’s character, which we conceive of as reticent and shy and shrinking; while the tramp of logical firmness, as in “Saul,” and “Bishop Blougram’s Apology,” and “Paracelsus,” although in less a degree, and the overwhelming blaze of tropical passion, as in the “Return of the Druses,” and especially that highest of all his dramatic efforts, “Luria,” might give the appearance of an exceedingly easy and susceptive character. It is evident, however, that our author holds his thoughts, and many of them, in a leash at once, stands in the centre and surveys the round, and, in one word, seems beyond any other poet of our age; while sometimes inferior to his loftier brethren in music, to be far beyond any in light, and if apparently not equal to them in the sharpness and definition of his imagination, to be beyond them, not only in his apprehension of the mystery, but his power to front it. While standing on the earth he seems able to wield passion. Nor shall this article be closed without a reference to his inimitably musical verses to his gifted wife. With a few lines of it we will close;—
What, there’s nothing in the moon note-worthy?
Nay—for if that moon could love a mortal,
Use, to charm him (so to fit a fancy)
All her magic (’tis the old sweet mythos)
She would turn a new side to her mortal,
Side unseen of herdsman, huntsman, steersman—
Blank to Zoroaster on his terrace, [p. 454→]
Blind to Galilee on his turret,
Dumb to Homer, dumb to Keats—him, even!
Think, the wonder of the moonstruck mortal—
When she turns round, comes again in heaven,
Opens out anew for worse or better?
Proves she like some portent of an ice-berg
Swimming full upon the ship it founders,
Hungry with huge teeth of splintered chrystals?
Proves she as the paved-work of a sapphire
Seen by Moses when he climbed the mountain?
Moses, Aaron, Nadab, and Abihu
Climbed and saw the very God, the Highest,
Stand upon the paved-work of a sapphire.
Like the bodied heaven in his clearness
Shone the stone, the sapphire of that paved-work,
When they ate and drank and saw God also!
What were seen? None knows, none ever shall know.
Only this is sure—the sight were other,
Not the moon’s same side, born late in Florence,
Dying now impoverished here in London.
God be thanked, the meanest of his creatures
Boasts two soul-sides, one to face the world with,
One to show a woman when he loves her.
This I say of me, but think of you, Love!
This to you—yourself my moon of poets!
Ah, but that’s the world’s side—there’s the wonder—
Thus they see you, praise you, think they know you.
There, in turn I stand with them and praise you,
Out of my own self, I dare to phrase it.
But the best is when I glide from out them,
Cross a step or two of dubious twilight,
Come out on the other side, the novel
Silent silver lights and darks undreamed of,
Where I hush and bless myself with silence.
Oh, their Rafael of the dear Madonnas,
Oh, their Dante of the dread Inferno,
Wrote one song—and in my brain I sing it,
Drew one angel—borne, see, on my bosom!
[Edwin Paxton Hood]
Reviewed:
Selections (RB), London: Chapman & Hall, 1863.
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