R630700A. Selections (1863).
The London Quarterly Review, July 1863, pp. 527–532.
Listed in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 30, 385.
Mr. Browning is not a popular poet; his Poems, published in 1849, have only just reached a second edition; and his Men and Women, which appeared some eight years ago, has not yet arrived at the same dignity. There are many educated persons who have scarcely heard of him, and many more who have never read a line of his works. And yet, amidst this general neglect, he has a small band of very devoted admirers, and his name has for some years been mentioned with honour, whenever it has occurred in any of the leading literary journals. How is it that the general public has refused to ratify the verdict of the critics, and that Mr. Browning’s poems remain unsold?
The reasons are, we think, obvious: his style is so obscure that it is often exceedingly difficult to determine his meaning. There are whole passages—nay, more, there are whole works, from which the reader turns with only a very indistinct and cloudy notion of what the poet was trying to say. Nor is this merely occasional obscurity, such as is to be found scattered here and there in the works of Shakespeare, Shelley, and Tennyson—the obscurity of some great and novel thought struggling for utterance. It is an habitual fault, running through everything Mr. Browning has written, mar- [p. 528→] ring the beauty of many of his finest passages, and making it a toil to read what might have been made a pleasure. It springs from the fact, that he either cannot or will not put his ideas into their simplest and most intelligible forms; but clothes them in a quaint and outlandish dress of words, and sends them forth into the world with much these sentiments: “If people like your appearance and receive you, well—why, so much the better for them; but if not, let no one think that I shall ever change one gaudy ribbon in your bright attire to suit the taste of a race of men for whom I care nothing.” It is only by some such process that we can account for the impenetrable mistiness of such poems as “Sordello,” which even we—admirers as we are of Mr. Browning’s genius—have been unable to get through. It is, however, but just to say that this book, in which Herod out-Herods himself, was not reprinted with the collected edition of the Poems in 1849. Milton’s description of poetry has been so often quoted and requoted, that one is half ashamed to make it do service again, and yet, after all the numberless essays which have been written to show what poetry is, and what it is not, his definition of it, as that which is “simple, sensuous, passionate,” is one of the best, as it is unquestionably the shortest. Mr. Browning’s works possess the two latter qualities in a very high degree: the first he has unfortunately neglected, and apparently despised.
Another defect which has also interfered, though by no means to the same extent, with his popularity, is a frequent hardness and want of music in the versification, and a habit of breaking a verse or a line at any point, no matter where, and beginning a new and totally different sentence. In these respects he almost seems to imitate the very objectionable peculiarities of the school of Donne and George Herbert. It is indeed strange that a man who professes such admiration for Shelley, the most harmonious and musical writer in the English language, should have published such a verse as the following, which is by no means one of the worst:—
Yonder’s a plum-tree, with a crevice
An owl would build in, were he but sage;
For a lap of moss, like a fine pont-levis
In a castle of the middle age,
Joins to a lip of gum—pure amber.
When he’d be private, there might he spend
Hours alone in his lady’s chamber:
Into this crevice I dropped our friend.
But now, having said all we mean to say of the just reasons of complaint which the reading public has against Mr. Browning, we turn to the far more welcome task of pointing out certain great talents which he unquestionably possesses, and for the sake of which all, and much more than all, his faults should be overlooked. In the first place, he has, more than any other dramatic writer we know, the faculty of throwing his mind into another age and country, and reproducing in a marvellous way the modes of thought which were [p. 529→] then and there prevalent. Mr. Ruskin has mentioned, with deserved commendation, the poem entitled, “The Bishop orders his Tomb at St. Praxed’s Church.” It is a picture, painted with wonderful fidelity, of the revived paganism of the Renaissance, of its devotion to art and articles of luxury, of its dilettantism and godlessness. Equally fine is the letter from Karshish, the Arab physician, to his friend Abib, describing an interview with Lazarus some years after he had been raised from the dead, and giving various medical opinions on his case. This last poem is a consummate piece of art: notwithstanding the straitness of our space, we cannot forbear to give the following quotation:—
Thou wilt object—Why have I not ere this
Sought out the sage himself, the Nazarene
Who wrought this cure, inquiring at the source,
Conferring with the frankness that befits?
Alas! it grieveth me, the learned leech
Perished in a tumult many years ago,
Accused—our learning’s fate—of wizardry,
Rebellion, to the setting up a rule
And creed prodigious as described to me.
His death, which happened when the earthquake fell,
* * * * *
Was wrought by the mad people—that’s their wont—
On vain recourse, as I conjecture it,
To his tried virtue for miraculous help.—
How could he stop the earthquake? That’s their way.
The other imputations must be lies:
But take one—though I loathe to give it thee,
In mere respect to any good man’s fame!
(And after all, our patient Lazarus
Is stark mad; should we count on what he says?
Perhaps not: though in writing to a leech
’Tis well to keep back nothing of a case.)
This man so cured regards the curer, then,
As—God forgive me—who but God himself,
Creator and Sustainer of the world,
That came and dwelt in flesh on it awhile!
* * * But
Why write of trivial matters, things of price
Calling at every moment for remark?
I noticed on the margin of a pool
Blue-flowering forage, the Aleppo sort,
Aboundeth very nitrous. It is strange.
Thy pardon for this long and tedious case
Which, now that I review it, needs must seem
Unduly dwelt on, prolixly set forth!
Nor I myself discern in what is writ
Good cause for the peculiar interest,
And awe indeed, this man has touch’d me with.
And then, after a few lines more, he closes his letter, and bids his friend farewell; but then, as if to show what a strong impression the words and the sight of Lazarus had produced upon him, notwithstanding his affected unconcern, the physician adds:— [p. 530→]
The very God! think Abib; dost thou think?
So the All-Great were the All-Loving too—
So through the thunder comes a human voice
Saying, “O heart I made, a heart beats here!
Face my hands fashioned, see it in Myself.
Thou hast no power, nor mayst conceive of Mine,
But love I gave thee, with Myself to love,
And thou must love Me who have died for thee!”
The madman saith He said so: it is strange.
Strange indeed to the heathen mind must have appeared that tale of a God suffering for the sins of men. These are grand lines; but they are equalled in “Cleon,” the Greek poet, who after having achieved everything, and drunk of the world’s sweetest cup, yet says,—
It is so horrible,
I dare at times imagine to my need
Some future state revealed to us by Zeno,
Unlimited in capability
For joy as this is in desire for joy.
And then proceeds to tell his friend, who had asked him for information concerning “Paulus:”—
Thou canst not think a mere barbarian Jew,
As Paulus proves to be, one circumcised,
Hath access to a secret shut from us?
Thou wrongest our philosophy, O king,
In stooping to inquire of such an one,
As if his answer could impose at all.
He writeth, doth he? Well, and he may write.
Oh, the Jew findeth scholars! certain slaves
Who touched on this same isle preached him and Christ;
And (as I gathered from a bystander)
Their doctrines could be held by no sane man.
Here we have the yearning of the Greek mind for a certain future to complete the present, for an authoritative revelation, and its arrogant rejection of the teachers of the doctrine it needed so much. Such poems as these do not by any means stand alone; it would be easy, had we the space, to multiply such instances of dramatic power, and to show how Mr. Browning has travelled through history, throwing himself into the minds of various men and women at various times, quickening their dead thought, and showing them to us as they were.
Another great beauty in his poems is the occasional force and vividness of the language. There are many passages that almost glow, such is their intensity of colour. Let the following lines be taken as instances:—
Buried in woods we lay, you recollect;
Swift ran the searching tempest overhead;
And ever and anon some bright white shaft
Burnt through the pine-tree roof—here burnt and there,
As if God’s messenger through the close wood screen
Plunged and replunged his weapon at a venture,
Feeling for guilty thee and me; then broke
The thunder like a whole sea overhead. [p. 531→]
This is well-nigh equal to the grand storm-scene in Tennyson’s “Vivien.” Or take, again, the following extract from the description of David’s entrance into the tent to play to Saul when the evil spirit was upon him:—
At 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 sustains 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 effect of light in the last line is worthy of Rembrandt.
Of the merits of the selection we have little to say. “It originated,” as we are informed in the preface “with two friends who, from the first appearance of ‘Paracelsus,’ have regarded its writer as among the few great poets of the century; who have seen this opinion, since, gain ground with the best readers and critics; and who believe that such a selection as the present may go far to render it universal.” With this wish we entirely sympathise; but we scarcely think it is likely to be realised by printing, as has been done here, detached scenes from complicated dramas. This only makes their inherent obscurity more obscure. To our minds it would have been better in such cases to have selected the fine speeches in the several plays; and there are many in “Paracelsus” that would bear separation from their context far better than many of the scenes contained in this volume. But this also points to a great defect which belongs, and must belong, to all selections: viz., that they give as fragments what were intended merely as parts of a grand whole—as single gems, what were meant to be seen as parts of an artistic piece of jewellery in which every stone should not only sparkle with its own light, but with reflected rays from all its brethren. Another grave defect in all selections is, that probably no two admirers of any man’s works would ever choose exactly the same passages. They would most likely agree on many of the pieces; but on many others they would be equally sure to differ. And thus every lover of Mr. Browning’s poems, in going through this book, will probably miss many and many a verse which he can ill spare, and which he would rather have seen here than several that have been retained. Thus we confess that we find, with great regret, that the latter half of “Easter Day,” in which this earth is so grandly described as nothing more than the anteroom of heaven, has not been considered worthy of a place among its peers. We have been in the habit of considering it, not only as one of Mr. Browning’s great pieces, but as one that will live when many of the popular works of the present time have gone to their abiding rest. [p. 532→]
This brief notice of the produce of a life of artistic labour is necessarily incomplete. It will, however, have served its purpose, if it has induced the reader to turn to Robert Browning’s pages and judge patiently for himself. They are a deep and often a dark and difficult mine; but there is gold to be found at the bottom: they are a casket the lock of which is hard to pick, but which contains rich treasures. Because a poet’s works are obscure they are not necessarily bad. Coleridge’s poems, as we learn from his preface, were accused of the same fault, and the riddle of Shakespeare’s sonnets is yet unread.
[Frank T. Marzials]
Reviewed:
Selections (RB), London: Chapman & Hall, 1863.
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