R630715A. Poetical Works (1863).
The Guardian, 15 July 1863, p. 671; 5 August 1863, p. 742; 9 December 1863, p. 1155.
Listed in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 30, 385.
[The article in which this review appears also contains notices of works by EBB (see p. 000), R. Owen, Bessie Rayner Parkes, Maresco Pearce, and Matthew Brydie; these we omit.]
Reverence is an element in all true poetry; and we are sure that all worthy aspirants for the poet’s crown will gladly stand aside for a moment, while two writers pass who have already won their laurels. The first volume of the new edition of Mr. Browning’s poems contains, in a new arrangement, his Lyrics, Romances, Men, and Women. It is not every poem of Mr. Browning that is like a pomegranate, which, if cut deep down the middle—
Shows a heart within blood-tinctured, of a veined humanity.
Some of his most careful and effective verses are more like olives as we have them in England—salt and bitter, yet cleansing the taste, and grateful to the palate which is once used to them. They should be found wherever the table of English poetry is spread bountifully, together with the peaches and the wine.
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[Continued in the issue of 5 August 1863.] [p. 742→]
[The article in which this review appears also contains notices of works by John Edmund Reade, W.P.J. Purcell, Algar, and John Haskyns Abrahall; these we omit.
It would be pleasant to close a notice which has traversed rather unprofitable ground with a few words of unmixed praise. Yet these cannot be given, even to Mr. Browning’s Tragedies and other Plays. We welcome the volume as a part of the new edition of his collected works; but we feel at the same time that he is not a great dramatic writer. He can compress the spirit of a period into a single character; he cannot animate a whole group of moving figures with the glow of life, incident, and adventure. The drama of “Pippa Passes” is excellent in its way as a series of effective tableaux; but his Charles the First is utterly destitute of a backbone, his Strafford is little more than a dreamer, and his Presbyterians are not the sort of men to be sternly constant to Kirk and Covenant. A play of Mr. Browning’s is sure to have something in it, but not the spirit of his best ballads, or the heart of his “Men and Women.”
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[Continued in the issue of 9 December 1863.] [p. 1155→]
[The article in which this review appears also contains notices of works by Roden Noel, Francis Charles Weedon, L.H.G.W., and Janet Hamilton; these we omit.
The reissue of Mr. Browning’s poems is now complete. His third volume must not be hastily placed by his admirers before any of their uninitiated friends whom they wish to learn to admire him. Paracelsus may strike such as having a flavour of that irregular practitioner’s opium about it; Christmas Day and Easter Eve, while full of thought, strong sense, and earnestness, may tease them as pervaded by a subtle irony, and perplex them by frequent and sudden changes of plane, which leave them in doubt whether they stand on their feet or their head, in his world of fact or imagination; and of Sordello, what will they dare to say, except that they really do not understand it? But those who approach Mr. Browning properly through his Lyrics and Romances will soon be convinced that he has always a meaning, though they cannot always find it out.
Sordello contains the history of a subtle, sensitive, self-contemplating mind.
Reviewed:
Poetical Works (RB), London: Chapman & Hall, 1863.
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