R630815A. Poetical Works (1863).
The Saturday Review, 15 August 1863, pp. 222–224. [William Bodham Donne].
Listed in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 30, 385.
Had Mr. Robert Browning lived two hundred years ago, his plays would have furnished that delicate and genial critic, Charles Lamb, with many exquisite specimens of dramatic poetry, pathos, and fancy, and with opportunities for just and graceful comment. On the stage, his plays might not have held firm footing, even at a time when audiences were more susceptible of the poetical element of tragedy than they are at present. His Blot on the ’Scutcheon and Colombe’s Birthday would, indeed, have sent the hearers weeping to their beds; but the other dramas in the volumes now before us would always be more suitable to the closet than the stage.
Great, indeed, is the worth of the unacted and really unactable drama of the present century—great also its amount. But so, virtually, it has always been. Of the three or four hundred plays that make up the sum of the old English drama, not a tenth part has ever lived beyond a few evenings in representation. Of Ben Jonson’s comedies and tragedies, three only, the Fox, the Alchemist, and Every Man in his Humour, are—or rather, as regards the first two of them, were—often repeated after their original production. The Alchemist owed its favour to the single character of Abel Drugger; the Fox, to certain opportunities for the actors in Volpone, Corbaccio, and Corvino; but, as entire pieces, they dragged their weary length along. Of Beaumont and Fletcher’s pieces, Rule a Wife and Have a Wife, and the Maid’s Tragedy, alone are tolerated by audiences to whom the Bloody Brothers, the Knight with the Burning Pestle, and other plays of original merit [p. 223→] would be utterly insufferable in representation. Massinger’s New Way to pay Old Debts and his Duke of Milan still pass current when they find actors to represent them; but those far finer compositions, the Virgin Martyr and the Roman Actor, are “ caviare to the general” for ever. It is, accordingly, no blot on Mr. Browning’s ’scutcheon that his Tragedies and other Plays are rarely brought before an audience. For their suitableness to the closet and their unsuitableness to the stage the reasons are obvious, especially in the present condition of the drama. We are not going to repeat the cuckoo-cry that “we have now no actors.” It is, in the first place, untrue; and in the next, it is a want that would soon be supplied were there really a demand for them. But it is true, and it is pity, that we have no audiences—such, at least, as encourage the poet and help to form the actor. Whether through the stage itself, or whether through literature, it is unnecessary to inquire, but the fact is, that spectators at the present moment are for the most part incapable of relishing such plays as Henry Taylor or Robert Browning could provide. They—the spectators—are vitiated, on the one hand, by “sensation,” on the other by burlesque.
The title of this volume, Tragedies and other Plays, is not quite correct, inasmuch as Pippa Passes might be more aptly entitled a scenic vision, and a Soul’s Tragedy a philosophic dialogue. Strafford, again, both in Mr. Browning’s and the late John Sterling’s hands, is history in dramatic form. It comes too near the State Trials, Rushworth’s Collections, and Clarendon’s History to be an acting play. The historic drama demands more picturesque and remote elements than Privilege and Prerogative, or the great controversy between a waning monarchy and a rising imperial commonwealth. Neither would King Victor and King Charles, in our opinion, survive a third night. For a history, such as King John or Henry VIII., there must be some link in common between the stage and the house in front of it. Now hardly a gallery contains many persons quite ignorant that King John murdered a nephew or so, paid shameful homage of some kind or other to that standing bugbear of both North and South Britain, the Pope, and had something to do with England’s pride, her Great Charter. Again, bluff Hal has come down to us, pictorially and traditionally, as a jolly, though often perilous, companion, who smote the Pope aforesaid a swashing blow, and got verdicts in his favour from the Divorce Court in an extremely curt and truculent fashion. Our Henries and Edwards, also, are “the boast of fame,” and still visible, through a hazy medium it may be, both to gods and men in the theatre. But what of King Victor? τίς; πόθεν εἶς ἀνδρῶν—the old question of a Greek Amphitryon to any wandering irate who might have called in to supper—would be put to his Sardinian Majesty by an inquisitive and ignorant pit. There is absolutely no hook or eye of association between Victor and the benches, and it would be small satisfaction to refer them to Voltaire or the Biographie Universelle. Darkly might some sharp-sighted pittite discern that Victor, like Lear, had divested himself of his crown, yet not absolutely disposed of his goods in fee to his son Charles; but then, unlike Lear, he retains his faculties, makes a most knavish use of them, reclaims his crown, disconcerts everyone, and dies proclaiming his ex-prime-minister a liar. This is veritable history, and the psychology of the old plotter, Victor, is admirably treated; yet it is not the kind of history that in John, Henry VIII., Antony and Cleopatra, and Julius Cæsar imparts life to the chronicle, and interests the spectator better than Holinshed, Hall, or Plutarch. But none of these impediments for the stage affect Mr. Browning’s Tragedies in the closet. To the reader they afford the delight which melodious verse, brilliant fancy, analysis of the passions, and earnest ethical purpose always command. In form, Robert Browning is of the present day; but in spirit, he is of the past. He combines, it is perhaps needless to say, with the passionate element of the drama, a deep and pure vein of lyrical emotion. In this, as in other respects, the Elizabethan age might claim him. Hardly one of our play-writers before the Restoration was devoid of this twofold power. It imparts a tender grace, not merely to the songs, but also to those portions of the dialogue that give occasion for, and, as it were, enclasp the songs. It is the feminine correlative of masculine passion and action.
We do not envy the reader who should be indifferent to the union of these elements in Pippa Passes. The poor girl, whose occupation is “silk-winding, coil on coil,” has one holiday in the whole long year. “Am I not,” she says—
——This day
Whate’er I please? What shall I please to-day?
My morning, noon, eve, night—how spend my day?
To-morrow I must be Pippa who winds silk
The whole year round, to earn just bread and milk;
But, this one day, I have leave to go
And play out my fancy’s fullest games;
I may fancy all day—and it shall be so—
That I taste of the pleasures, am called by the names
Of the Happiest Four in our Azolo.
She greets sunrise on New Year’s Day, her one day, in these words:—
Day!
Faster and more fast,
O’er night’s brim day boils at last;
Boils, pure gold, o’er the cloud-cup’s brim
Where spurting and supprest it lay—
For not a froth-flake touched the rim
Of yonder gap in the solid gray
Of the eastern cloud, an hour away;
But forth one wavelet, then another, curled
Till the whole sunrise, not to be supprest,
Rose, reddened, and its seething breast
Flickered in bounds, grew gold, then overflowed the world.
Pippa passes through scenes of crime, vice, poverty, remorse, as a presence laden with healing, with songs corroborating the strong heart and piercing the seared conscience, until the close of the day—wondering, as she goes to rest, whether it has been all a vision, or whether she has been successively the rich and the poor, the doers and the suffers whom she has seen in her holiday progress, and falls asleep murmuring these lines:—
God bless me! I can pray no more to-night.
No doubt, some way or other, hymns say right.
All service is the same with God—
With God, whose puppets, best and worst,
Are we, there is no last or first.
In the Return of the Druses there is dramatic power of high order. Two kinds of enthusiasm are represented. Djabal, the Druse, belongs to that class of impostors with whom the means justify the end. Louis de Dreux, a Knight Hospitaller of Rhodes, is a devotee in the holiest of causes—justice and humanity. Djabal has impressed a suffering people with the belief that he is their long foretold prophet and deliverer, and that, in the fulness of time, he will manifest himself in his proper person:—
The Hakeem, the incarnate Dread,
The phantasm Khalif, King of Prodigies!
His aim is lofty, his motives are pure, but the sense of his deception lies like frost or fire on his soul, and he expiates his one fault by voluntary death. He has rescued the ancient and oppressed race, but by the arm of flesh, and not by the assumption or manifestation of indwelling deity. Nor does he suffer alone—his error draws down into the same vortex his friend and his mistress.
Self-sacrifice is a favourite theme in Robert Browning’s Tragedies. It is the subject of Luria also. He, a Moor by birth, has supplanted in the command of the Florentine forces their old general Puccio, and in him, as in others of the old officers, there is much heart-burning at Luria’s preferment. Death by his own hand clears the noble Moor of every shadow of suspicion that he had wrought for selfish ends; not before, however, he has by his generous self-abnegation reconciled to himself even his supplanted rival. The struggle between the commander of the army and the civil government at home—a struggle which has affected and enfeebled every commonwealth, from the time of Demosthenes to that of President Lincoln—is powerfully delineated in this drama. We must find room for one last extract. It comes after Puccio is reconciled, and Tiburzio, the Pisan commander, has become known to the Moor, and it is spoken by Luria. We present it as a fair sample of Mr. Browning’s management of dramatic blank verse:—
My heart will have it he speaks true! My blood
Beats close to this Tiburzio as a friend.
If he had stept into my watch-tent, night
And the wild desert full of foes around,
I should have broke the bread and given the salt
Secure, and when my hour of watch was done
Taken my turn to sleep between his knees,
Safe in the untroubled brow and honest cheek.
Oh, world! where all things pass and nought abides,
Oh, life! the long mutation—is it so?
Is it with life as with the body’s change?
Where e’en though better follow, good must pass,
Nor manhood’s strength can mate with boyhood’s grace,
Nor age’s wisdom, in its turn, find strength,
But silently the first gift dies away,
And though the new stays, never both at once!
Life’s time of savage instinct o’er with me,
It fades and dies away, past trusting more,
As if to punish the ingratitude
With which I turned to grow in these new lights,
And learned to look with European eyes.
Yes, it is better, this cold certain way,
Where Braccio’s brow tells nothing—Puccio’s mouth,
Domizia’s eyes reject the searcher—yes!
For on their calm sagacity I lean,
Their sense of right, deliberate choice of good,
Sure, as they know my deeds, they deal with me.
Such faith stays when mere wild belief would go!
Yes—when the desert creature’s heart, at fault
Amid the scattering tempest’s pillared sands,
Betrays its steps into the pathless drift—
The calm instructed eye of man holds fast
By the sole bearing of the visible star,
Sure that when slow the whirling wreck subsides,
The boundaries, lost now, shall be found again,—
The palm-trees and the pyramid over all.
Mr. Browning has not fallen on evil times or evil tongues, for his name is high on the list of the living poets of England, in an age fertile in genuine poets. That his tragedies could ever take root in theatres is impossible, unless there should happen a total revolution in them, both before and behind the curtain. His plays demand thought and attention. The modern drama, in general, demands none of the former, and attracts the latter by gross appeals to the sense of sight. We still live in days in which—
The Play stands still; damn action and discourse;
Back fly the scenes, and enter foot and horse;
Pageants on pageants, in long order drawn,
Peers, heralds, bishops, ermine, gold and lawn.
Nay, we live even in worse days for those who write Philip Van Arteveldes or Blots on the ’Scutcheon. For has not a stammering fop monopolised one of our principal theatres for more than two hundred evenings? has not a plunge into a painted lake been popular as long? and does not now a magic-lantern prove the sole attraction of a fifth-rate melodrama? Should there ever be a rénaissance of the acting drama in Britain, a restoration of the audiences to their senses [p. 224→] (the actors will soon recover theirs), Robert Browning may then, for some two or three of his tragedies, be summoned to make his bow to an applauding pit. Meanwhile, in Sancho’s phrase, “patience and snuff the candle;” it needs it sorely, for it burns very dimly before our prosceniums. Whether, however, that good time be near or remote, whether it will for ever be a promise lacking performance, these Tragedies and other Plays will live in the remembrance of all who study dramatic compositions, not as the recreation of an idle hour, but as ranking among the purest and noblest creations of the human mind. To this fit but few audience they need not our recommendation; for they have already taken their place among the volumes that have in them the promise of long, at least, if not perpetual, life.
[William Bodham Donne]
Reviewed:
Poetical Works (RB), London: Chapman & Hall, 1863.
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