R630919A. Poetical Works (1863).
The London Review, 19 September 1863, pp. 310–311.
Listed in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 30, 385.
The publication of a complete edition of Mr. Browning’s poems is a fact which must gratify every lover of good poetry. It shows that a great singer, if not the greatest of those amongst us, is gaining acceptance, which we may hope is all the surer since it has been somewhat slow. In spite of the objections which the mass of readers feel to the attempt to comprehend anything new and strange, a time must arrive when the productions of real genius receive recognition. A critic here and there discovers their beauties or illustrates their greatness; the difficulties are removed and the obscurities explained; the circle of intelligent readers widens, and presently it happens that the poems which were the enigmas of the poet’s own time become the delight of later generations.
It is no doubt true that a slow growth of popularity is not the fate of every order of genius, but it is the inevitable doom of the class to which Mr. Browning belongs. He is a dramatic poet, and the dramatic poet has to undergo an ordeal of neglect to which the lyric poet is in a less degree exposed, and which the epic may never have to encounter. The epic poet—the tale-teller—whilst he pours his narrative into song has the immense advantage of interpreting and explaining as he proceeds; he reveals to us the motives of the actors at the same time that he describes the conduct of the action; and there exists little or no reason why his poem should not be received with acclamation by his contemporaries. There can, indeed, be no doubt that the singers of the Homeric episodes were instantaneously popular; and although our own Chaucer had to overcome the difficulty involved in the fact that he was making a new language, we may be sure that our ancestors of the fourteenth century enjoyed his humour as keenly, and felt his pity as truly as can his heartiest admirers of five centuries later. If the lyrical poet is not at once greeted by so large an audience, he has still but a little time to wait: expressing, as is his function, the rising emotion of his time, he will find amongst his younger contemporaries many readers who eagerly recognize their half-known thoughts set forth in clearer vision; when these readers have arrived at maturity the lyrist is at the high tide of his success which may too probably soon begin to ebb. This was the course of the Byronic fever and of the Wordsworthian worship; and though Mr. Tennyson has other and stronger claims to lasting fame, it may fall out in time—dreadful thought—that men shall yawn over “Locksley Hall.” But the true dramatist has to work under different conditions; setting before us the very men themselves as he conceives them to have acted and spoken in the crisis of their existence, he requires in his audience an imagination subsidiary to his own. How shall the “general reader,” who has no time to think, scarcely, indeed, time to remember the information with which he is drenched, bring such a faculty to the understanding of an author? The effort is too great, is impracticable, and the dramatist must wait till, by the help of successive commentators, the world is enabled to guess at his meaning. Two centuries after Shakespeare had written, the imaginations of a Goethe and a Coleridge were engaged in explaining “Hamlet,” and even now it seems true that the countrymen of Shakespeare take his fame upon trust.
This is the first great obstacle to Mr. Browning’s popularity, that he is essentially a dramatic poet: a “writer of plays,” he calls himself somewhere, and though it is true that he has written other things besides plays, yet even his minor poems are for the most part dramatic. Add to this, that his spirit is mainly historical, and we can at once see what an obstacle he has raised to rapid popularity. Mr. Browning’s genius has led him to enter into modes of life and forms of thought which are often far removed in spirit as well as in time from those prevalent amongst us. From yesterday, back to the days of King Saul, he ranges to and fro; he bodies forth in Karshish and Cleon the men who saw the old world about to pass away; in Luria, in Fra Lippo Lippi, St. Praxed’s Bishop, Ferrara’s Duke, the Grammarian’s Funeral, and many another poem, we see the mediæval world reproduced and again perishing before the “Renaissance.” “Colombe’s Birthday,” and our own Strafford conduct us downwards to the Sardinian episode of King Victor and King Charles,” whilst “Christmas Eve” and “Bishop Blougram,” and a score more, illustrate our own times. Poems drawn from such a variety of subjects often irritate readers by convincing them of their ignorance; and if this feeling is only one of embarrassment, that is not lightened by the discovery of the local colouring which each poem preserves. The plays of Shakespeare range over a sufficiently vast field of time; but there is in truth little of the quality which we call “local colour” shown in them. An Italian count scarcely differs from an English noble; Duke Theseus might have married and hunted in Warwickshire; the worthies of Greece and Rome might have lived in the sixteenth century; the change of scene is rather nominal than real. This absence of historical character detracts little or nothing from the overwhelming greatness of the Prince of Poets, but by contrast it shows us the peculiarity of Mr. Browning’s genius. The modern poet probably could not help giving us the tone of each particular age which Shakespeare could lightly neglect; but, however that may be, it is certain that Mr. Browning is not only a poet but a subtle historian.
Another characteristic of Mr. Browning should be noticed before we turn to any of his poems; though in truth it is not a new characteristic, but only a consequence of the possession of that dramatic faculty which we have claimed for him. As we turn from poem to poem, the thought soon steals upon us that we are in the presence of a genius who is mastering the world—subduing it to himself. In truth, Mr. Browning is neither, on the one hand, ascetic or formal, nor, on the other, spasmodic or anarchic; in some way the movement of the world—the course of life in the past and present ages—is beating out a tune which the poet is singing to us. The words which the painter Lippo Lippi addressed to the captain of the watch might, with slight alterations, be used by the poetic artist:—
You’ve seen the world,
The beauty and the wonder and the power,
The shapes of things, their colours, lights and shades,
Changes, surprises,—and God made it all!
* * * * *
But, don’t you mark, we’re made so that we love
First when we see them painted, things we have passed
Perhaps a hundred times nor cared to see;
And so they are better, painted—better to us,
Which is the same thing. Art was given for that—
God uses us to help each other so,
Lending our minds out. Have you noticed, now,
Your cullion’s hanging face? A bit of chalk,
And trust me but you should though! How much more,
If I drew higher things with the same truth!
That were to take the Prior’s pulpit-place,
Interpret God to all of you!
* * * * *
This world’s no blot for us,
Nor blank,—it means intensely, and means good:
To find its meaning is my meat and drink.
It is this supreme manifestation of dramatic power which makes Mr. Browning’s poems so dear to those who have entered into them. In an age sick of self-love, and crowded with good creatures who go about in a maimed, lop-sided fashion, with their little theories of art, of politics, and of religion, which they have cut off some corner of history or of contemporary life, it is good to meet with a balanced, rounded intellect, which loves nature without despising man, comprehends at once the Gothic and the Renaissance, and admits within its vision the worldling as well as the pietist.
Let the reader then take up this edition of Mr. Browning’s poems, and give himself up to the guidance of the master. By a judicious arrangement the first volume is occupied with the shorter pieces, which, though dramatic in character, are not cast in the dramatic form; these form the easier portion of Mr. Browning’s writings, and a beginner may throw himself into them without trepidation. Every one can appreciate the power of the Cavalier songs with which the volume opens. The staunchest admirer of the Puritan may acknowledge the truthfulness with which the spirit of personal loyalty and gallantry which animated the Cavaliers is here rendered. Take, for instance, “Boot and Saddle,” which we may suppose sung by some Earl of Derby galloping to the relief of Latham-house, defended by his Charlotte; in this case Castle Brancepeth defended by Gertrude:—
Boot, saddle, to horse, and away!
Rescue my castle, before the hot day
Brightens to blue from its silvery grey,
(Chorus.) Boot, saddle, to horse, and away!
Ride past the suburbs, asleep as you’d say;
Many’s the friend there, will listen and pray,
“God’s luck to gallants that strike up the lay—
(Chorus.) Boot, saddle, to horse, and away!”
Forty miles off like a roebuck at bay,
Flouts Castle Brancepeth the Roundhead’s array:
Who laughs, “Good fellows ere this, by my fay,
(Chorus.) Boot, saddle, to horse, and away!”
Who? My wife Gertrude; that, honest and gay,
Laughs when you talk of surrendering, “Nay!
I’ve better counsellors; what counsel they? [p. 311→]
(Chorus.) Boot, saddle, to horse, and away!”
Still more striking is the lyric which tells “How they brought the good news from Ghent to Aix.” It is too long for quotation, nor is it fair to mutilate it by cutting out extracts, which is perhaps less necessary, because it is the best received of all Mr. Browning’s poems; no one can read it without being carried away by the gallop from midnight to midday, told with such touches of scenery as would burn into the memory of one carrying, under such circumstances, the news of life and death. Very different is a poem which follows a little later, the “Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister.” It is said by those who have passed a little time as resident fellows in the universities that they have been able to detect faint adumbrations of the life which Mr. Browning has imagined in this lyric. The societies of Oxford and Cambridge are too shifting, their members change too often and are too much employed, to permit the complete generation of the intense hatred bred within the life-to-life bonds of a convent; but rudimentary traces of the rancorous spite, the formal devotion, and the idle gossip of the Spanish monk may be discovered. The scene is the convent garden, in which are two monks, one of whom watches the other, Brother Laurence, with feelings which he is at no pains to conceal from himself. He has seen him sitting not
Cross-wise, to my recollection,
As do I, in Jesu’s praise.
I, the Trinity illustrate,
Drinking watered orange-pulp—
In three sips the Arian frustrate;
While he drains his at one gulp!
There’s a great text in Galatians,
Once you trip on it, entails
Twenty-nine distinct damnations,
One sure, if another fails:
If I trip him just a-dying,
Sure of Heaven as sure can be,
Spin him round and send him flying
Off to Hell, a Manichee?
Or there’s Satan!—one might venture
Pledge one’s soul to him, yet leave
Such a flaw in the indenture
As he’d miss till, past retrieve,
Blasted lay that rose-acacia
We’re so proud of! Hy, Zy, Hine.
’St, there’s Vespers! Plenâ gratiâ
Ave Virgo! Gr-r-r- you swine!
But Mr. Browning can be tender as well as forcible; the reader of “Count Gismond,” “The Woman’s Last Word,” “Evelyn Hope,” “In a Year,” “The Last Ride Together,” will acknowledge the futility of the complaint of harshness sometimes alleged against him. In a somewhat different way “The Patriot,” “The Toccata of Galuppi,” “The Guardian Angel,” and “Two in the Campagna,” prove the same conclusion;” nay, even the “Grammarian’s Funeral” shows, in quaint fashion, the author’s tenderness. It is, however, true that tenderness is not a striking characteristic of Mr. Browning’s genius; when it appears it is often in a guarded, ironical form, sufficient to show the author’s sense of “the pity on’t” without forgetting its relation to the rest of life. The gushing sensibility which some readers desiderate is never found in the great masters, and it is often made a ground of complaint against them; the sensibility is however there; without it their creations are inexplicable; but it is not directly manifested, being, to use Mr. Ruskin’s phrase of Titian, hidden behind their magnificent equity.
We have not referred to any but the shorter pieces in Mr. Browning’s first volume, but these are insufficient to show the full character of the poet. They exhibit his dramatic insight in all its depth and reality, but they fail to prove him capable of conducting a continuous action. The faculty of conceiving and presenting to us a particular phase of emotion or of thought may be possessed by one unable to carry out the action of a drama. To what extent Mr. Browning is endowed with this latter power can be determined only by an examination of his plays, which we must reserve for another opportunity.
Reviewed:
Poetical Works (RB), London: Chapman & Hall, 1863.
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