R631000B. Poetical Works (1863).
The National Review, October 1863, pp. 417–446.
As reprinted in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 30, 386–397.
Mr. Browning, though commanding a wider intellectual sweep of view than almost any artist of our day, is yet a poet not of European, nor even of national celebrity, but rather the favourite of an intellectual sect; and this, not from any sectarian tendency in his poetry,—nothing could be more catholic,—but from the almost complete absence of that atmosphere of fascination about his verse, that melody of mind and speech, which is the main attraction of poetry to ordinary men, and but for which, mere imaginative power, however great, would scarcely arrest their attention at all. Coleridge once defined poetry—very badly we conceive—as “that species of composition which is opposed to works of science, by proposing for its immediate object pleasure, not truth; and from all other species (having this object in common with it) it is discriminated by proposing to itself such delight from the whole as is compatible with a distinct gratification from each component part.” Now Coleridge certainly did not intend to exclude Mr. Browning’s works by anticipation from all claim to the title of poems; if he had lived to read Mr. Browning, Coleridge’s profound, rich, and catholic imagination would scarcely have failed to appreciate fully the power and insight of the younger poet; but no definition of a poem could have been contrived more ingeniously calculated to exclude Mr. Browning’s works from that class of composition. Most of Mr. Browning’s poems might be described precisely “as proposing for their immediate object truth, not pleasure, and as aiming at such a satisfaction from the whole as is by no means compatible with any very distinct gratification from each component part.” In other words, Mr. Browning’s poems, though, when clearly apprehended, they seldom fail to give that higher kind of imaginative satisfaction which is one of the most enviable intellectual states,—give scarcely any immediate sensitive pleasure. There is none of the thrill through the brain, of the vibrating melodious sweetness, of the tranquillising touch and atmosphere of loveliness which we usually associate with the highest powers of poetical expression. And then, as to the relation of the whole to the part, which is Coleridge’s second test of a poem, Mr. Browning’s poems are not so organised that the parts have any gratification for you at all, till you catch a view of his whole. Coleridge says, that “the reader should be carried forward, not [p. 418→] merely or chiefly by the mechanical impulse of curiosity, or by a restless desire to arrive at the solution, but by the pleasurable activity of the mind, excited by the attractions of the journey itself. Like the motion of a serpent, which the Egyptians made the emblem of intellectual power, or like the path of sound through the air, at every step he pauses and half recedes, and from the retrogressive movement collects the force which again carries him onward.” Nothing could be farther from describing the movement of Mr. Browning’s poems. Instead of fascinating you with his harmony of movement, and gradually insinuating the drift and spirit of the poem into your imagination, Mr. Browning rushes upon you with a sort of intellectual douche, half stuns you with the abruptness of the start, repeats the application in a multitude of swift various shocks from unexpected points of the compass, and leaves you at last giddy and wondering where you are, but with a vague sense that, were you but properly prepared beforehand, and warned as to its laws of approach, you might discern a unity and power in this intellectual water-spout, though its first descent only drenched and bewildered your imagination. Take the following short poem for example, one of really marvellous force, indeed of true genius, but which we purposely decline to present to our readers with any further introduction than Mr. Browning has himself accorded us; in order to illustrate this characteristic of his, that the whole must be fairly grasped before any of the “component parts” are intelligible,—the component parts, indeed, being little more than diminutive wholes, too diminutive in scale to be clearly legible until you have seen the whole, whence you go back to the component parts again with a key to their meaning that at last gradually deciphers them;
Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister.
Gr-r-r—there go, my heart’s abhorrence!
Water your damned flower-pots, do!
If hate killed men, Brother Lawrence,
God’s blood, would not mine kill you!
What? your myrtle-bush wants trimming?
Oh, that rose has prior claims—
Needs its leaden vase filled brimming?
Hell dry you up with its flames!
At the meal we sit together:
Salve tibi! I must hear
Wise talk of the kind of weather,
Sort of season, time of year:
Not a plenteous cork-crop: scarcely
Dare we hope oak-galls, I doubt:
What’s the Latin name for “parsley”?
What’s the Greek name for Swine’s Snout? [p. 419→]
Whew! We’ll have our platter burnished,
Laid with care on our own shelf!
With a fire-new spoon we’re furnished,
And a goblet for ourself.
Rinsed like something sacrificial
Ere ’tis fit to touch our chaps—
Marked with L. for our initial!
(He-he! There his lily snaps!)
Saint, forsooth! While brown Dolores
Squats outside the Convent bank,
With Sanchicha, telling stories,
Steeping tresses in the tank,
Blue-black, lustrous, thick like horsehairs,
Can’t I see his dead eye glow,
Bright as ’twere a Barbary corsair’s?
(That is, if he’d let it show!)
When he finishes refection,
Knife and fork he never lays
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!
Oh, those melons! If he’s able
We’re to have a feast so nice!
One goes to the Abbot’s table,
All of us get each a slice.
How go on your flowers? None double?
Not one fruit sort can you spy?
Strange!—And I, too, at such trouble,
Keep them close-nipped on the sly!
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 as can be,
Spin him round and send him flying
Off to Hell, a Manichee?
Or, my scrofulous French novel
On grey paper with blunt type!
Simply glance at it, you grovel
Hand and foot in Belial’s gripe:
If I double down its pages
At the woeful sixteenth print,
When he gathers his greengages,
Ope a sieve and slip it in’t?
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, [p. 420→]
Blasted lay that rose-acacia
We’re so proud of! Hy, Zy, Hine …
’St, there’s Vespers! Plena gratiâ
Ave, Virgo! Gr-r-r—you swine!
When we have caught the idea that Mr. Browning is painting the jealous disgust and tricky spite felt by a passionate, sensual, self-indulging, superstitious monk for the pale, blameless, vegetating, contented sort of saint who takes kindly to gardening, and “talks crops” at the monastery table, we see how living and strongly conceived the picture is: but the wording, though vigorous, and one verse at least (that concerning Sanchicha) highly picturesque, is neither melodious nor even very lucid for its purpose; and the parts, as we said, are diminished images of the whole, and hence enigmatic till the whole has been two or three times read. Yet we take it that the versification, and the verbal efficiency generally, in this little poem is a good deal above the average power of expression of the pieces called “lyrical,” chiefly because it is lyrical only in name, and does not attempt to be in form much more than it really is in essence, a dramatic fragment.
Mr. Browning’s deficiency in the power of sensuous expression, and in the art of giving an independent interest and attractiveness to the component parts of his poems, as distinguished from the whole, is of course most strikingly seen in the deficiencies of his metre and rhyme, which are the natural gauge of poetic expressiveness and harmony of poetic structure. A metre that does not fit the movement of the thought gives the painful sense of a man rattling in a case of armour quite too large for him; and rhyme that is only rhyme, and that does not bring with the regular beat of the language something of new power to the sense, annoys with a sense of something artificial, ingenuity at best, which interferes with the imaginative effect instead of heightening it. Mr. Browning is never happy in his lyrical metres, and his rhymes have the careless wilful effect of being cast off at random in order to conform to a barren and tyrannic custom. His versification is almost always best where it is nearest to prose, where, as in the dramas, the metre is blank verse without rhyme. Elsewhere there is no elasticity in the rhythm; and rarely indeed, when he tries rhyme, does he use it to effect its legitimate function,—the delicate and definitive clasping of thought to thought. Except in “The Lost Leader,” “Bringing the Good News from Ghent to Aix,” and one or two other ballads of the same kind, which have a stately gallop in their movement that corresponds well to the movement of the thought, there is not a metre or a rhyme in the poems that strikes you by its felicity, and but few, except some of the [p. 421→] blank metres, that do not painfully drag or jar. And this deficiency in the verse is only the reflection of the deficiencies of the style generally; whenever, at least, it attempts to be lyrical.
Mr. Browning has himself suggested to us, not perhaps with any conception of the full scope of his remark, the reason why many of his so-called lyrics are unsatisfactory in form; and if we follow the clue his suggestion gives, we shall probably find that it accounts for much both of his great power and great uncouthness. He says in a note to the first of the “Lyrics,” “Such poems as the majority in this volume might also come properly enough I suppose, under the head of ‘Dramatic Pieces;’ being, though often Lyric in expression, always Dramatic in principle, and so many utterances of so many imaginary persons, not mine.” This is most true, except that we should very seldom indeed allow these pieces to be truly “lyric in expression.” They try to be indeed, but fail. They make an effort to take the lyric form; but having another essence, they wriggle about uncomfortably in their artificial attitude, and show, by the rasping and the friction of the style that they have somehow got embodied in a wholly unsuitable poetic organism. The truth is, we think, that Mr. Browning combines in his own person the half of a great dramatist with a large capacity for pure intellectual thought, but has none of that liability to flashes of emotion tingeing his whole creative power which generates lyric poetry. His mind seldom or never seems to fall under the dominion of a single sentiment or passion, without which poetry cannot properly be lyric. He can throw himself into such a mood as a dramatist, but that has an altogether different effect. A dramatic picture of emotion has not the same spontaneity, the same ease, the same singleness of effect; for almost always (usually even in soliloquies) it has direct relation to the minds and actions of others. Mr. Browning is a dramatic thinker,—always thinking within the imaginative fetters of dialogue, even when not throwing his thoughts into that external form; always speaking and writing for a resisting medium of thought or feeling foreign to that which he is expressing at the moment. You feel that he invariably contemplates some other phase of character, against which his thought has to justify itself, or into the heart of which it has to force an entrance. A genuine lyric is not written under the sense of external limits, and with direct reference to the presence of some other form of thought or character. Dramatic thought must always be a compressed form of imaginative power; it must be distinctly outlined, and fit piece into piece. Lyrical poetry is “a law unto itself,” defined by its own nature, but without defined end or purpose, falling into shapes due only to the inward har- [p. 422→] mony of the mind in which it originates, and essentially free from the control of any immediate foreign influence. It is obvious that far more variety and flexibility of metre is needed for the lyric than for the drama. Dramatic verse must be open to all sorts of moods alike; must be the common ground on which they meet; and consequently takes a very general form, which will suit alike the most different humours and admit the sharpest collisions. But a lyric is complete in itself, and should justify itself by the perfect individual organisation of its versification.
Why, then, it may well be asked, does a mind so essentially dramatic ever feel tempted to adopt the lyric form? The answer we believe to be, because Mr. Browning is only half a dramatist,—his dramatic powers being controlled entirely by intellectual interests, and never hurrying on his imagination deep into the play of those practical forces which constitute the life of a great drama. He does not enter into character as a prelude to the excitement of a conflict, but at most only indicates the conflict to illustrate the character. He conceives men in their relation to each other, and in mental collision with each other; but, after all, he does not care which way the battle goes, except so far as it is involved in his intellectual conception. There is no narrative force in him at all. He never enters into the story, and even in his dramas evades a plot as far as he possibly can. The consequence is, that he is constantly tempted to throw his dramatic conceptions into a form which rids him altogether of the necessity for affecting a plot. It is intellectual dramatic sketches to which his genius leads him, not drama; intellectual portraits of dramatic states of mind, never of dramatic scenes and dénouements. And in order to disguise more effectually the fragmentary character of these pieces torn from their dramatic connexion, they are too often forced into an artificial mould of lyrical shape. Yet, as they are really bits of dialogue addressed to a visionary but half-indicated auditor, the lyrical metres and rhymes are too often the most awkward of artificial accomplishments, which, instead of setting them to a soft melody, produce the same kind of effect as paving-stones placed at regular short intervals in the track of a carriage. Of course the periodic jolt marks a kind of time, and to nerves of bendleather might serve to measure the flow of the thought; but it is the measure of artificial obstacles methodically upsetting the thought at fixed intervals, not of its natural ebb and flow. A very short extract will show what we mean; we take it from a poem of fine conception, called “The Grammarian’s Funeral;” the idea of which is to bring out the strong implicit faith in an eternal career [p. 423→] which there should be in any man who devotes this life wholly to the preliminary toil of mastering the rudiments of language:
Was it not great? Did not he throw on God
(He loves the burthen)
God’s task to make the heavenly period
Perfect the earthen?
Did not he magnify the mind, show clear
Just what it all meant?
He would not discount life, as fools do here,
Paid by instalment!
He ventured neck-or-nothing—heaven’s success
Found, or earth’s failure:
“Wilt thou trust death, or not?” He answered, “Yes!
Hence with life’s pale lure!”
* * * *
So, with the throttling hands of death at strife,
Ground he at grammar;
Still, through the rattle, parts of speech were rife:
While he could stammer
He settled ὁτι’s business—let it be!
Properly based οὖν—
Gave us the doctrine of the enclitic δε
Dead from the waist down.
Now that is a very dramatic defence of a grammarian’s life; and if the substance of it had fallen naturally into a grammarian’s own mouth, instead of being forced out of shape into a kind of hoarse triumphal recitative—chant we cannot call it—over his grave, it might have made a fine dramatic fragment. But as it is, this is in form not meant to be dramatic, but a sort of rhapsody of praise. While the thought throughout suggests simply an imaginative effort in the poet’s mind to explain and defend the narrow range of a grammarian’s studies, the form of the expression tries to pour out a flood of lyrical enthusiasm over him which the writer does not feel, and the striving after which, therefore, comes out in the quick awkward limp of the lame metre.
Nothing is easier than to multiply instances of the same kind of blunder in Mr. Browning’s so-called lyrics. As a rule, wherever we have a peculiarly jarring metre and jingling rhymes, there Mr. Browning is attempting to disguise sharp dramatic sketches in the flowing forms of lyrical melody,—to disguise a speech in a song, to throw over the tight-fitting costume of dialogue the easy undress of spontaneous feeling,—in short, to give the effect of “wandering at its own sweet will” to a stream of thought or emotion which is strongly and pointedly directed on a specific object. Here, for instance, is a young lady complaining of her lover for ceasing to care for her, [p. 424→] because she had allowed him to see too fully her love for him. She makes a fair speech, but a wretched monody, or whatever else this species of confession ought to be called; and the attempt to put it into a lyrical form results in a funny compromise between a firm step and the beat of wings, which reminds one most perhaps of a duck’s waddle:
Never any more
While I live,
Need I hope to see his face
As before.
Once his love grown chill,
Mine may strive—
Bitterly we re-embrace,
Single still.
Was it something said,
Something done,
Vexed him? was it touch of hand,
Turn of head?
Strange! that very way
Love begun:
I as little understand
Love’s decay.
When I sewed or drew,
I recall
How he looked as if I sung,
—Sweetly too.
If I spoke a word,
First of all
Up his cheek the colour sprung,
Then he heard.
Sitting by my side,
At my feet,
So he breathed the air I breathed,
Satisfied!
I, too, at love’s brim
Touched the sweet:
I would die if death bequeathed
Sweet to him.
“Speak, I love thee best!”
He exclaimed.
“Let thy love my own foretell,”
I confessed:
“Clasp my heart on thine
Now unblamed,
Since upon thy soul as well
Hangeth mine!”
Was it wrong to own,
Being truth?
Why should all the giving prove
His alone? [p. 425→]
I had wealth and ease,
Beauty, youth—
Since my lover gave me love,
I gave these,” &c.
This marked genius of Mr. Browning for sketching character in position, as we may say—that is, in its most characteristic attitude towards the rest of the world—is probably the secret not only of his lyrical failures, but of his generally defective powers of poetical expression; for it implies an intellectual basis for his dramatic power, and suggests that Mr. Browning is rather a highly-intellectual actor, throwing himself into a new part, and feeling its characteristic points, as a good rider just feels his horse’s mouth with the bit,—or, to use a better image, perhaps, that he throws out all his nervous perception into the defining outline and moral profile of his part, as a blind man will finger the contour of a face that is dear to him, to secure his image of the characteristic lines,—rather than that he works, like Shakespeare or Goethe, by intense sympathy from within, leaving the final outline to crystallise as it may, according to the internal law and nature of the life thus germinating in his imagination. And no doubt the basis of Mr. Browning’s whole genius is keenly intellectual,—not meditatively intellectual, but, on the contrary, observingly, definingly, speculatively intellectual,—of which we may see one great proof in the far superior character of his masculine than of his feminine sketches, of his “men” than of his “women.” Educated men’s characters are naturally in position, and most vigorous masculine characters of any kind have a defined bearing on the rest of the world, a characteristic attitude, a personal latitude and longitude on the map of human affairs, which an intellectual eye can seize and mark out at once. But it is not so usually with women’s characters. They are not best expressed by attitude and outline, but by essence and indefinite tone. As an odour expresses and characterises a flower even better than its shape and colour, as the note of a bird is in some sense a more personal expression of it than its form and feathers; so there is something of vital essence in a great poet’s delineations of women which is far more expressive than any outline or colour. When Shakespeare makes Cleopatra say, over the body of Antony,
And there is nothing left remarkable
Beneath the visiting moon,
he somehow contrives to embody in a sentence the concentrated essence of the imperial and voluptuous queen. When Goethe makes Klärchen, in Egmont, sing,
Freudvoll und leidvoll,
Gedankenvoll seyn, [p. 426→]
Langen und bangen
In schwebender Pein,
Himmelhoch jauchzend
Zum Tode betrübt,
Glücklich allein
Ist die Seele die liebt,—
he has given you the whole character in an aroma of brief but surpassing sweetness. There is no trace of this power in Mr. Browning. He throws his feminine characters into as strongly-defined attitudes as his masculine, and the consequence is, that they are not nearly so effective; and also that, half-conscious of this intellectualising mould of his mind, he attempts them very much less often. He has drawn women, indeed, of a certain grandeur of outline,—as, for instance, the guilty Ottima, in “Pippa Passes,” who stimulates her lover to the murder of her husband, and then asks him to crown her his queen, his “spirit’s arbitress, magnificent in sin;” but the picture is painfully inflamed, and though it impresses one as true, it is because, under such exceptional circumstances, the pronounced attitude which Mr. Browning loves to draw is to be found even more sharply defined in the passionate woman, fearful that the guilt may alienate love, than in the most masculine of men .
Otti. Well, then, I love you better now than ever,
And best (look at me while I speak to you)—
Best for the crime; nor do I grieve, in truth,
This mask, this simulated ignorance,
This affectation of simplicity,
Falls off our crime; this naked crime of ours
May not, now, be looked over: look it down, then!
Great? let it be great; but the joys it brought,
Pay they or no its price? Come: they or it!
Speak not! The Past, would you give up the Past
Such as it is, pleasure and crime together?
Give up that noon I owned my love for you?
The garden’s silence! even the single bee
Persisting in his toil, suddenly stopt;
And where he hid you only could surmise
By some campanula’s chalice set a-swing:
Who stammered—“Yes, I love you?”
But this too is essentially an intellectual picture; a passionate attitude, with its swollen veins and starting muscles, delineated powerfully by an intellectual mind. And of the only other feminine pictures that strike us at all,—those, namely, in the fine piece called “In a Balcony,”—it may be equally said that they are not perhaps overdrawn, but drawn on the stretch and not in the way in which women most naturally express themselves. In general, all Mr. Browning’s power is expended on masculine characters in intellectually defined relations to the rest of the world. [p. 427→]
And, again, this defective, because too intellectual, basis of Mr. Browning’s powers of expression betrays itself most clearly in his choice of language. In that strange freak of creative self-will, Sordello, which probably no man or woman except the author ever yet understood,—we do not at all doubt that he understands his own drift clearly enough,—there are one or two flashes of intelligible thought which give us some insight into Mr. Browning’s own troubles. Sordello is an ambitious poet of the ancient Troubadour type and times, divided with himself whether he should try to influence the world directly or only through his song. And it is the psychological history of this conflict which Mr. Browning apparently wishes to describe. One of Sordello’s first difficulties, during his poetic period, in getting at mankind, is, language. He is oppressed apparently (like our Lake poets of the end of the last century) by the unreal character of the poetic phraseology, and he leaves off imagining for a season, to see if he can make something more effective of the medium through which his imaginations must be presented to the world:
He left imagining, to try the stuff
That held the imaged thing, and—let it writhe
Never so fiercely—scarce allowed a tithe
To reach the light,—his Language.
Certainly Sordello was quite right in supposing that this was the great obstacle to fame, if we have any measure of his powers of expression in this poem; for a more completely opaque medium than the wording either of his own thoughts or of the author’s thoughts about him, Talleyrand himself would have failed to invent. However, it is something that he so keenly felt the obscurity, while the attempt to remedy it, and the reason of the failure, are instructive:
How he sought
The cause, conceived a cure, and slow re-wrought
That Language,—welding words into the crude
Mass from the new speech round him, till a rude
Armour was hammered out, in time to be
Approved beyond the Roman panoply
Melted to make it,—boots not. This obtained
With some ado, no obstacle remained
To using it; accordingly he took
An action with its actors, quite forsook
Himself to live in each, returned anon
With the result—a creature, and, by one
And one, proceeded leisurely to equip
Its limbs in harness of his workmanship.
“Accomplished! Listen, Mantuans!” Fond essay!
Piece after piece that armour broke away,
Because perceptions whole, like that he sought [p. 428→]
To clothe, reject so pure a work of thought
As language: thought may take perception’s place,
But hardly co-exist in any case,
Being its mere presentment—of the whole
By parts, the simultaneous and the sole
By the successive and the many.
Whether this expresses Sordello’s process of poetical construction or not, we strongly suspect that it expresses Mr. Browning’s. To cast his language, like bronze armour, in moulds of its own; to conceive and imagine in a separate intellectual world far removed from this verbal armour of the imagination, and then bring “the result, a creature,” to have the armour of language “leisurely” fitted on to it; and finally to find that armour break away,
Because perceptions whole, like that he sought
To clothe, reject so pure a work of thought
As language,—
seems to us a very graphic, though not very poetical—in one small respect only erroneous—account of Mr. Browning’s own struggles with the difficulties of poetic expression. We say, in one respect erroneous, because it is only to intellects like Mr. Browning’s that language is “so pure a work of thought;” and to them only because they see mainly the intellectual side of language, and look at its defined meanings so much more than its often far more vital undefined associations. Instead of language being too pure a work of thought to clothe Mr. Browning’s perceptions adequately, we suspect that it would be nearer the truth to say that his perceptions are too much overruled and concentrated by thought to admit of the most poetical use of language.
This may seem obscure; but we can explain what we mean about Mr. Browning’s style, and we think justify it, in a few words. Every one must have noticed that the style introduced by Mr. Carlyle is far from poetical, and yet in the highest degree picturesque, while also open to the charge of being not a little obscure. It is a style the essence of which consists in driving your perceptions into the service of your intellect, and talking a sort of hieroglyphic, every picturesque symbol in which expresses a thought. Thus, to open Mr. Carlyle at random: “To such length can transcendental moonshine, cast by some morbidly radiating Coleridge into the chaos of a fermenting life, act magically there, and produce divulsions and convulsions and diseased developments. So dark and abstruse, without lamp or authentic finger-post, is the course of pious genius towards the eternal kingdoms grown.” Here we have the rather ordinary thought that the “high philosophy of a genius like Coleridge’s is able to [p. 429→] cast a charm over minds in difficulty and doubt, and persuade them this way and that, when they have no really safe guide to look to,”—illuminated, like the old missals, by a little series of images, in which vision is made the instrument for sharply accentuating thought. Hence it is a style crowded with stress, and makes the same kind of fatiguing impression on the mind which a handwriting sloped the wrong way makes on the eye,—an impression of strain and effort. It is therefore apt to be obscure, and certain not to be poetical, for one and the same reason,—namely, that over-emphasis is both exhausting and unnatural; and while an exhausted attention is necessarily enveloped by a mist of obscurity, emphasis too crowded for nature misses the under-tones and the neutral tints which are absolutely essential to the harmony of poetry. Now we do not mean to say that Mr. Browning’s style is the illuminated style of Mr. Carlyle. He is too much of a poet for such disproportion of the picturesque, such fatiguing gold-and-crimson. But it is true that his style also is fatiguing and destitute of lower tints and under-tones, and that when he is pictorial, as he very often is, he crowds and accentuates the striking points, so as to miss the harmony of poetry. It gives one the impression of a vigilant intellect noting all the principal features of the scene acutely, and concentrating his perceptive faculties so completely in the gaze of attention as to miss those numberless under-growth of half-dreamy observation which constitute so great a charm of poetic insight. Mr. Browning’s style is too keen, too restless, too startling,—his soul is too much in his eyes, his mind too devoid of that lazy, receptiveness which fills-in and softens and warms the effect of the whole,—for a really high poetic style. Compare, for instance, his purely descriptive talent, which is highly picturesque, but not poetical, with Tennyson. Thus Mr. Browning describes a lunar rainbow:
For lo, what think you? suddenly
The rain and the wind ceased, and the sky
Received at once the full fruition
Of the moon’s consummate apparition.
The black cloud-barricade was riven,
Ruined beneath her feet, and driven
Deep in the West; while, bare and breathless,
North and South and East lay ready
For a glorious Thing, that, dauntless, deathless,
Sprang across them, and stood steady.
’Twas a moon-rainbow, vast and perfect,
From heaven to heaven extending, perfect
As the mother-moon’s self, full in face.
It rose, distinctly at the base
With its seven proper colours chorded, [p. 430→]
Which still, in the rising, were compressed,
Until at last they coalesced,
And supreme the spectral creature lorded
In a triumph of whitest white,—
Above which intervened the night.
But above night too, like only the next,
The second of a wondrous sequence,
Reaching in rare and rarer frequence,
Till the heaven of heavens were circumflext,
Another rainbow rose, a mightier,
Fainter, flushier, and flightier,—
Rapture dying along its verge!
Oh, whose foot shall I see emerge,
Whose, from the straining topmost dark,
On to the keystone of that arc?
This is powerful, keen-eyed, piercing,—too much of all these for the full harmony of poetry. The style is to the poetic like the secondary rainbow to the primary, “fainter, flushier, and flightier:” “fainter,” because the colours are washed on with a thin hasty hand; “flushier,” because they come and go with a certain flush of attentive perception that subsides back into pure thought; and “flightier,” from the palpitating breathless air of the whole metre. The sense of rest which a still lunar rainbow after a storm should produce on the heart is entirely absent. Tennyson also is one of the greatest of poetic painters; but how much of the still undergrowth of perception, or rather reception, which does not, nay cannot, come if you watch for it which steals into the brooding mind when the attention is relaxed and the mind’s eye half shut, is there in every fragment of his descriptions! Take a fragment from In Memoriam, for instance:
Doors, where my heart was used to beat
So quickly, not as one that weeps
I come once more; the city sleeps
I smell the meadow in the street.
I hear a chirp of birds; I see
Betwixt the black fronts long withdrawn
A light-blue lane of early morn,
And think of early days and thee.
That is poetry in which the brooding, silent, receptive mind drinks-in much that the restless eye and ear could never catch; that absorbs the silence as well as the sound, the middle tints as well as the flashes of light and colour. And the want of this power in Mr. Browning seems to us to show that for him language is not in reality “too pure a work of thought” to contain his perceptions, but that his perceptions are too pure a work of thought, too full of vigilant intellectual activity, to give him [p. 431→] the full command of the associative charms and latent riches of language. His imagination is impatient; it never broods.
And hence, too, all the obscurity of style there is in Mr. Browning; and in some of his works it is predominant. It is mere abruptness and hurry, the rapid sketchy accumulation of too many points of emphasis tumbling one upon the other in a bewildering crowd. In the dramas, where Mr. Browning’s dramatic genius corresponds to the form of his thought, and in the confessedly dramatic fragments called “Men and Women,” where there is no effort to be lyrical, nothing can be more lucid and simple than his style, so soon as you have once found your true latitude and caught the spirit of the situation. The only really unintelligible poem is Sordello, and that, not because there is any great mysticism, as far as we can see, in the substance of what he wishes to say, but because it is elliptical, laconic, crowded with hints, and pronouns which may belong to half a dozen distinct nouns; because it is a mere tangle of thought. It reads like a corrupt edition of an old poem, in which the very language has got into hopeless confusion. Mr. Browning has attempted to guide the guesses of his readers by a running head-line to the pages, directing their attention to his real drift: but, after all, this can do but little, and we suspect that, if it be true, as his dedication appears to indicate, that there is really one mortal who to his own satisfaction has understood him, it would be found on cross-examination of that one, that (like Hegel’s sole philosophical confidant) even he has misunderstood him. A specimen of the sort of obscurity we mean is the following. Sordello, at Palma’s advice,—Palma is his lady-love, and (we believe) the daughter of Ecelin, one of the tyrants of Treviso, and sister of the second Ecelino, called “the enemy of mankind,”—decides to enter with her upon a political career, instead of the musing, solitary life of a troubadour. Palma has just left him, after exhorting him to aid her, and he has been debating with himself the comparative value of the dreamy poetic life and the practical. The poet goes on:
Thus
I bring Sordello to the rapturous
Exclaim at the crowd’s cry, because one round
Of life was quite accomplished; and he found
Not only that a soul, whate’er its might,
Is insufficient to its own delight,
Both in corporeal organs and in skill
By means of such to body forth its Will—
And, after, insufficient to apprise
Men of that Will, oblige them recognise
The Hid by the Revealed—but that, the last
Nor lightest of the struggles overpast, [p. 432→]
His Will, bade abdicate, which would not void
The throne, might sit there, suffer be enjoyed
Mankind, a varied and divine array
Incapable of homage, the first way,
Nor fit to render incidentally
Tribute connived at, taken by the by,
In joys. If thus with warrant to rescind
The ignominious exile of mankind—
Whose proper service, ascertained intact,
As yet (to be by him themselves made act,
Not watch Sordello acting each of them)
Was to secure—if the true diadem
Seemed imminent while our Sordello drank
The wisdom of that golden Palma,—thank
Verona’s Lady in her Citadel
Founded by Gaulish Brennus, legends tell:
And truly when she left him, the sun reared
A head like the first clamberer’s that peered
A-top the Capitol, his face on flame
With triumph, triumphing till Manlius came.
Now, whowever can construe this, we confess ourselves altogether unable to do so. What, for instance, the parenthetic
to be by him themselves made act,
Not watch Sordello acting each of them,
means, we have not the most distant notion. Mr. Browning might as well have said, “to be by him her himself herself themselves made act,” &c., for any vestige of meaning we attach to this curious mob of pronouns and verbs treading on each other’s heels. The style is faulty from no mysticism, but sheer clumsiness. And this is the case in large portions all through. It gives the impression of breathless hurry, not even caring to be articulate, so long as the style should jot down to the writer’s mind what he meant to say. Mr. Browning should publish an annotated edition, with a note on every ellipsis, obscure pronoun, and abrupt turn of the subject,—in which case the notes would be three times as long as the poem. There are fine sentences in it, but, for the most part, reading it is like walking in the catacombs with a light falling vividly here and there on the emblems of a great life and a greater death.
But we have devoted enough, perhaps more than enough, space to the discussion of Mr. Browning’s poetic deficiencies. They mark distinctly the limits of his imaginative power, which is nevertheless very high. In range of thought he certainly surpasses all his poetic contemporaries, and in vividness of conception he is second to none but Mr. Tennyson, though far his inferior. Altogether he must certainly rank second of our living poets; though Mr. Arnold, and perhaps [p. 433→] even others, may greatly surpass him in the gift of harmoniously expressing what they have once conceived. To a considerable extent he has lost merited popularity by belonging neither to this country nor to this time. Saturated with foreign, and especially with Italian, culture, possessed by the human genius, though keenly alive to the frauds and falsehood of Roman Catholicism, and occupying himself with both forms of character and modes of thought that seem more native to the Middle Ages than to modern England,—Mr. Browning’s poems have naturally failed to take quite their true level in English literature. Still, the place he does take is undoubtedly a very high one, and is likely to rise steadily the more thoroughly he is studied. We shall be satisfied if we can diminish in any degree the obstacles to a true appreciation of his genius.
We have said that Mr. Browning’s chief power lies in the intellectual side of drama,—the dramatic delineation of characters, especially of masculine characters, in their characteristic relation to the world, but that his interest in the dramatic “situation” is purely intellectual, and fails therefore to impart any vigorous movement or practical excitement to the plot. We must add, that there is one cardinal interest which so greatly overpowers all others in Mr. Browning’s creations that it forms more or less the staple interest of all his best poems, and not only explains his wonderful artistic grasp of the genius of the Catholic Church, but gives an additional reason why the living centre of his imaginative power is almost always in a man’s mind, and never in a woman’s heart. This central imaginative interest of Mr. Browning’s arises from his intimate and keen apprehension that human knowledge and worldly wisdom are faint shadows, often just blending with the actual substance, of divine knowledge and spiritual wisdom; and that the desire for the latter is often temporarily assuaged by the possession or the vision of the former. Mr. Browning has the keenest sympathy with the passion for knowledge, at least for the knowledge of living minds, of man, and God; and has, too, an intuitive sense of how easily the one takes the place of the other, and how subtly they mingle in all the more artful and politic forms of character. It is evident how much a long residence in the country of Machiavelli and Cavour, and a close study of the ecclesiastical wisdom, craft, and subtlety produced by the system of the confessional, must intensify his interest in this border-land between the supernatural and the worldly wisdom. The command of motives which is given by a constant study of the secrets of the heart, either for saintly and mystical or for worldly and selfish reasons, is necessarily of the same order of practical importance; and none [p. 434→] knows better than Mr. Browning how strangely they interweave. By far the greatest intellectual fascination of his poems consists in his marvellous mastery of the infinitely various compounds between the religious and the worldly wisdom, and the passionate respect and yearning that both alike, in their higher degrees, whether pure or blended, inspire in the simpler minds over which they cast their influence. Every one of the greater poems includes in some shape—very seldom indeed involving a repetition, for his power of dramatic variation of this theme is endless—a study of some striking conflict or some still more striking combination between the craft of the visible world and the craft of the invisible, and of the many threads of connexion between the two.
Mr. Browning’s earliest poem, “Paracelsus,” which bears all the marks of youth, is nothing but a study of the craving for a knowledge of the absolute principle of life on the mind of a medieval aspirant who might have hoped eventually to attain such knowledge. The poem is one of the least successful, partly because it is scarcely more than in name dramatic, and wants the local colour, and the intimate knowledge of the ambitious heart and intellect, which his later poems abundantly show. Paracelsus aspires at first only to absolute knowledge; when, after long wanderings, his heart is beginning to fail him, he meets a true poet, who in like manner has aspired passionately to love, and has failed even more bitterly than Paracelsus in attaining the fulfilment of his desire. From him Paracelsus learns that true life consists in seeking to blend love for man with knowledge (however incomplete) of the laws of man’s life; and accordingly begins to devote himself to teaching (at Basle) what little he knows. Then comes the temptation to affect more knowledge than he has, in order to gain a fit audience for what he has, and the consequent dabbling in pretended magic. The only powerful part of the poem consists in the delineation of the strange mixture of self-scorn and self-belief,—the compunction for affecting false powers, and the lingering faith in a transcendental method of mastering the secret of life,—the conviction that God disapproves his pious frauds to gain influence with the world, and that He approves the effort to teach and serve the world, which seems to necessitate them. This struggle, no doubt, is finely delineated. The bitter hope that even in cheating the world for its good he is doing better than in mere solitary study without any attempt to serve it; at all events, that thus, if not doing “most good,” he is yet effecting “least harm;” the almost cynical remonstrance with God for not showing him his way clearer—are all powerfully drawn: [p. 435→]
You little fancy what rude shocks apprise us
We sin: God’s intimations rather fail
In clearness than in energy: ’twere well
Did they but indicate the course to take,
Like that to be forsaken.
That is a very fine expression of the half-angry, half-mournful disappointment of a proud and shadowy mind; and all this portion of “Paracelsus,” where he is openly and furiously at war with himself for the false assumption of secret lore by which he renders his teaching popular, and with God for not either giving him knowledge enough to do without falsehood, or else at least relieving him from the heavy obligation to teach others with the imperfect knowledge he has, is strikingly brought out. But, on the whole, “Paracelsus” appears to us vague and unimpressive in execution, though not perhaps in the design.
Mr. Browning’s favourite, and perhaps highest, exercise of art, however, is shown in the various delineations of the worldly force of ecclesiastical dignities struggling with, or flavouring, the Catholic faith. Of this he has given us many and very remarkable dramatic pictures, ranging from the childish, full-fed, superstitious, sensual-creeded “bishop, who orders his tomb at St. Praxed’s church,” to the shifty, unscrupulous, gallant old papal Nuncio, who, standing boldly at bay, and gaining time by lie upon lie, makes so many skilful though useless bids to gain over the wavering Druses for his church, in the piece called “The Return of the Druses.” And these are but two out of many of the same genus, though different species. We scarcely know whether the St.-Praxed’s bishop’s flushed physical appetite for the splendid Roman Catholic rites, or the keen laughing twinkle that glitters in the eyes of the aged Legates and Nuncios, when they deal with captious children of the church, is the more powerfully painted. No painting can be more striking than the pleading of the dying bishop with his own natural sons to fulfil their pledge to him in giving him a tomb of jasper handsomer than that of his rival Gandolf, who died before him, with an inscription of purer Latinity:
Nay, boys, ye love me—all of jasper, then!
’Tis jasper ye stand pledged to, lest I grieve
My bath must needs be left behind, alas!
One block, pure green as a pistachio-nut,
There’s plenty jasper somewhere in the world—
And have I not Saint Praxed’s ear to pray
Horses for ye, and brown Greek manuscripts,
And mistresses with great smooth marbly limbs?
—That’s if ye carve my epitaph aright,
Choice Latin, picked phrase, Tully’s every word,
No gaudy ware like Gandolf’s second line— [p. 436→]
Tully, my masters? Ulpian serves his need!
And then how I shall lie through centuries,
And hear the blessed mutter of the mass,
And see God made and eaten all day long,
And feel the steady candle-flame, and taste
Good strong thick stupefying incense-smoke!
The piece is full of passionate superstition, equally voluptuous and equally dramatic; but the shades of thought in it are perhaps less delicate and difficult to draw than in some other of Mr. Browning’s ecclesiastical sketches. Perhaps the most striking contrast to it, showing, in its way, equal art and insight, is the wonderful picture of the Göttingen Professor and his Christmas-eve discourse, on the mythical character of Christianity, in “Christmas-Eve and Easter-Day.” There you have the thin intellectual ghost, or hardly distinguishable shadow, of Christian faith, in the place of the high-fed physical form of it we have just seen; and each is painted with such strict dramatic truth, that we scarcely know whether we are most fascinated by the picture of the faith which steams with the “burnt-offerings of rams and the fat of fed beasts,” or of the faded and pallid rationalism that seems just disappearing into the inane:
That sallow, virgin-minded, studious
Martyr to mild enthusiasm,
As he uttered a kind of cough preludious,
That woke my sympathetic spasm
(Beside some spitting that made me sorry)
And stood surveying his auditory
With a wan pure look well nigh celestial,—
Those blue eyes had survived so much.
No theological student in a German university can miss the type; and the lines which follow might certainly have been painted from personal experience:
He pushed back higher his spectacles,
Let the eyes stream out like lamps from cells,
And giving his head of hair—a hake
Of undressed tow for colour and quality—
One rapid and impatient shake,
* * * *
The Professor’s grave voice, sweet though hoarse,
Broke into his Christmas-Eve’s discourse.
This discourse, no less than the portrait, is a striking pendant to the delirious address of the bishop of St. Praxed to his sons, as it explains,
How the ineptitude of the time,
And the penman’s prejudice, expanding
Fact into fable, fit for the clime, [p. 437→]
Had by slow and sure degrees translated it
Into this myth, this Individuum,—
Which, when reason had strained and abated it
Of foreign matter, gave for residuum
A Man!—a right true man, however,
Whose work was worthy a man’s endeavour.
And Mr. Browning’s subtle and striking criticism on his Göttingen Professor’s mythological lecture, though apparently needless for the portrait, really adds its most dramatic touch, when he concludes it by saying to his lecturer,
Go on, you shall no more move my gravity
Than, when I see boys ride a-cockhorse,
I find it in my heart to embarrass them
By hinting that their stick’s a mock horse,
And they really carry what they say carries them.
The whole picture of the exhausted intellectual receiver in the Professor’s mind, of his constant effort to remove husks till the grain was gone, of his cough, which,
like a drouthy piston,
Tried to dislodge the husk that grew to him,—
is completed by this hint, that if you could get at the centre of his mind, his weary and wan and joyless air would be explained by the constant spiritual labour of actually carrying “what he says carries him.”
A poem quite as impressive from its strange mixture of physical and voluptuous passions (richly set in an artistic nature), with an implicit faith in all the legends of the Church, is the sketch of the Florentine monk and artist Fra Lippo Lippi. His promise to himself of how he will atone for his irregularities of life, and paint the fashion of his pardon, is one of the most powerful conceptions in all Mr. Browning’s poems:
I shall paint
God in the midst, Madonna and her babe,
Ringed by a bowery, flowery angel-brood,
Lilies and vestments and white faces, sweet
As puff on puff of grated orris-root,
When ladies crowd to church at midsummer.
And then in the front, of course a saint or two—
Saint John, because he saves the Florentines;
Saint Ambrose, who puts down in black and white
The convent’s friends and gives them a long day.
Into this saintly crowd, secured at their devotions, the artist is to introduce himself in his old serge gown, coming “as one by a dark stair into a great light,” “mazed, motionless, and moon-struck,” and looking anxiously for escape: [p. 438→]
Then steps a sweet angelic slip of a thing
Forward, puts out a soft palm—“Not so fast!”
—Addresses the celestial presence, “nay—
He made you and devised you, after all,
Though he’s none of you! Could Saint John there, draw—
His camel-hair make up a painting-brush?
We come to brother Lippo for all that,
Iste perfecit opus!” So, all smile—
I shuffle sideways with my blushing face
Under the cover of a hundred wings
Thrown like a spread of kirtles when you’re gay
And play hot cockles, all the doors being shut,
Till, wholly unexpected, in there pops
The hothead husband!
This, of course, though a wholly different picture, is closely akin to the St.-Praxed bishop in intellectual conception; showing the same strong mixture of eager fleshly naturalism beneath the robe of superstitious awe; but it is the infinitely varied transformations under which Mr. Browning can present the same elements, which prove how great an intellectual dramatist he is.
The intermediate place between the bishop of St. Praxed and the Göttingen professor, but embodying also some of the shrewd political instinct which Mr. Browning so subtly and thoroughly penetrates, is “Bishop Blougram,” who gives us a rather too extended apology for continuing to hold his place in the Catholic hierarchy, though admitting that a large part of its creed is either doubtful or false to him. Nothing can exceed the tortuous dramatic sophistry of this admirable special-pleading; but for the subject of a work of art it is a bad one, presenting too few points of living interest, and lying wholly in the leaden-coloured region where moral fallacies have their roots. Of course there is as real drama in this subtle struggle between the claims of the world and the claims of sincerity, as in any other region of human life; but to interest men in it as a work of art there should at least be more condensation in form, and some fate hanging on the issue of the struggle. As it is, the great force of the picture is lost for the world in general. It ought to interest deeply clergymen in a false position, who are striving to draw consolation from Mr. Jowett’s theory of casuistry; but few else will recognise the marvellous minuteness and fidelity of this Denner-like painting of every wrinkle on the ecclesiastical conscience and every pucker in its understanding.
The most wonderful picture of the ecclesiastical politician and diplomatist is certainly the pontifical legate Ogniben, in “A Soul’s Tragedy,” who trots into a papal town to suppress a popular revolution, alone on muleback, humming “Cur fre- [p. 439→] muere gentes?” and saying, as he laughs gently to himself, “I have known three-and-twenty leaders of revolts.” The acute knowledge of human motives, and still acuter manipulation of them, which this not unkindly old man shows; the courage, and the real spiritual power over man which the confessional has given him, at the expense of course of uprightness; the Socratic address with which he draws out the selfish ambition in the new leader of revolt, and lures him with it into renouncing the popular cause, and finally disposes of him in words curiously mingling a genuine kind of piety, not unascetic, and ecclesiastical craft, concluding with, “I have known four-and-twenty leaders of revolts,”—constitutes one of the most subtle and striking pictures in modern drama. The pity is that all the subsidiary characters—even Chiappino, the leader of revolt, himself, who is not ill-conceived—are as usual so far inferior to this figure, that the drama is a poor one, though the dramatic sketch is inimitable. Nor is it only the intersecting line between worldly and spiritual wisdom that Mr. Browning has traced so finely. The jealous hatred of the bishop of St. Praxed for his rival Gandolf, and the first extract we made for another purpose from his poems, called the “Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister,” both show how finely he can conceive the union of earthly passions with monastic and ritual ideas. The same power is shown, with much more of poetic form and expression, in the short piece called “A Heretic’s Tragedy,” though here the picture is of the blending of inquisitorial cruelty with the passionate bigotry of faith. The triumphant joy of vindicating the Infinite Justice in the torture applied to the recusant heretic, the pitiless gaiety which the natural cruelty of savage natures engrafts on this directly the belief that the suffering is deserved absolves them from the duty of sympathy, the fine shading-off of the consciousness of wreaking divine retribution into human brutality,—is a work of rare art. It is a pity that Mr. Browning has not chosen a great inquisitor for the theme of one of his longer plays.
Perhaps, however, the most original of all Mr. Browning’s many poems on this class of subjects is the “Epistle containing the strange Medical Experience of Karshish, the Arab Physician;” which is an attempt to bring such medical science, or rather empirical skill, as might have existed in the time of Christ into direct contact with the “case” of the risen Lazarus, whom the Arab physician encounters in Bethany at the time when the siege of Jerusalem by Titus has just begun. Karshish, questioning himself and his friends as to the asserted resurrection, reports his opinion on it to his master in a letter vibrating helplessly between a guess that it was really a cure [p. 440→] of unusually prolonged epilepsy which had left mania behind, and a proudly-resisted inclination to believe that there was something divine in the matter, as Lazarus himself asserted. The artist’s skill, however, is shown, as usual, in delineating the influence of the two opposite sorts of thirst for knowledge in this dignified Arabian leech,—the pride of human science and craft, which makes him eager to penetrate the secret of a new and remarkable cure, and the yearning for divine knowledge, which thrills him with a humiliating sense of awe and hope at the very words he affects to despise from the ignorant peasant. The letter is highly dramatic, beginning, with stealthy Oriental subtlety, far from his mark (for he is evidently bewildered and ashamed at the impression made upon him by the story of Lazarus), explaining, after compliments, a few new recipes; describing his temporary abode at Bethany, which lies, he says, from Jerusalem
scarce the distance thence
A man with plague-sores at the third degree
Runs till he drops down dead;
chronicling his new pathological experiences—“a viscid choler is observable in tertians,” “scalp disease confounds me, crossing so with leprosy,” and so forth; until at length he comes, with many apologies, on his “case of mania subinduced by epilepsy:
The man,—it is one Lazarus a Jew,
Sanguine, proportioned, fifty years of age,
The body’s habit wholly laudable,
As much indeed beyond the common health
As he were made and put aside to show.
And then gradually the physician allows it to be seen how much thought he has spent on his diagnosis of the mania, how its very simplicity subdues and bewilders his wisdom. The effect, he says, on the mind of the patient is as if some new and vast world had been opened out to him, making this world worthless, which he is yet forbidden to leave. The patient has no measure of the true proportions of things; the armaments assembled round Jerusalem are trivial to him, while he is lost in wonder that others do not see the value of the most trivial facts with his “opened eyes.” “Wonder and doubt come wrongly into play, preposterously at cross purposes.” Unbroken in cheerfulness if his child be ill or dying, a word or gesture from the child that he disapproves will startle him into an agony of fear. In short, the patient clings to “a narrow and dark thread of life, which runs across an orb of glory” into which he may not enter, though it gives its law to his spirit. His notions of [p. 441→] right and wrong, instead of being adapted to the narrow conditions of this thread of life and its continuance, are always taking into account a whole universe of invisible and apparently imaginary facts:
So is the man perplext with impulses
Sudden to start off crosswise, not straight on,
Proclaiming what is Right and Wrong across
And not along, this black thread through the blaze—
“It should be” balked by “here it cannot be.”
And oft the man’s soul springs into his face,
As if he saw again and heard again
His sage that bade him rise, and he did rise!
In this antique and patient enumeration of the mental symptoms of the patient, the most startling and impressive is reserved, with a sort of scientific shame, to the last, and only then oozes out involuntarily with the half apology, that, “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!
—’Sayeth that such an One was born and lived,
Taught, healed the sick, broke bread at his own house,
Then died, with Lazarus by, for aught I know,
And yet was .... what I said nor choose repeat,
And must have so avouched himself in fact,
In hearing of this very Lazarus,
Who saith—but why all this of what he saith?
Why write of trivial matters, things of price
Calling at every moment for remark?
I noticed on the margin of a pool
Blue-flowering borage, the Aleppo sort
Aboundeth very nitrous. It is strange.
But the subject fascinates him, in spite of his scientific scorn for it. He goes back to relate the mode of his encounter with Lazarus; and finally there is wrung as it were from him, reluctant as he is to mention the mere ravings of a madman which have no pathological bearing on the case:
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 has 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!
Certainly no more original poetic conception has been worked out in our time than this,—brief as the poem is,—and [p. 442→] very dramatically is it sustained, the dignity and satisfied wisdom of the physician giving way at the times beneath the glory of the poor Syrian’s dream and the strange consistency and simplicity of his demeanour,—but returning again with full elastic force wherever he can regain his complete assurance of the impossibility of the story, and the wholly unprofessional character of the explanation. It is only here and there that Mr. Browning has drawn worldly skill or wisdom half-worshipping, with dazzled eyes, a simplicity above it. Generally in his poetry, as in the world, the prevalent type of sagacity freely makes use of an established faith, but is not willing to recognise it when it is new and disturbing. But this Oriental physician, who has evidently given up his life to study all diseases and remedies with open eyes, is one of the exceptions. When a light shines upon him, if he cannot gaze at it, it is his nature not to ignore it. Mr. Browning finds a deeper humility in science, with all its pride, than in the shifty talent of worldly knowledge.
The true pendant to this picture of the stately Arab physician, bewildering himself with the faith and simplicity of the Syrian peasant, is the striking drama of Luria, which, like all Mr. Browning’s best dramas, is a drama of but one focus of intellectual interest. The idea of it is, the extraordinary spell cast upon the powerful and magnanimous mind of a less intellectual race by the elaborate statecraft and unfathomable political subtlety of a race of born schemers and politicians. Luria is what Othello should have been,—not a negro, but a Moor, commanding the Florentine army during the war with Pisa in the fifteenth century. His courage and genius have all but won the game for Florence when the scene opens, but the suspicious jealousy of the Florentines has already undermined his authority, and is prepared to spring the mine the moment that Luria’s services have answered their purpose and are no more required. This he discovers before he completes his work by the final defeat of Pisa; and the interest of the piece lies in the struggle which ensues in his own mind between the faithless republic’s claim on his imagination, if not on his honour and devotion, and the wrath of retributive justice. The spell on his imagination is very finely portrayed. It is the calm depth and universality of Florentine political intrigue which takes hold of his simple mind as the cold craft of Ulysses took hold of ancient Greece, by embodying the divine subtlety of infinite calculation. Florence appeared to wield with a mighty ease the whole motive force which lies spread like a living nerve beneath the quiet surface of every human society,—and so to have almost a divine right to the use [p. 443→] of Luria’s mere physical courage and strategic skill, even though it were thankless and treacherous in return. Before the discovery of the treachery, when a Florentine remarks that Luria, in place of a Moorish captain, desires to be one of them, he replies:
Oh no!
Not one of you, and so escape the thrill
Of coming into you, of changing thus,—
Feeling a soul grow on me that restricts
The boundless unrest of the savage heart!
And even after Luria is aware of the treachery meditated to him, there remains a chord in his mind which answers to the cold proud claim of the wily Florentine who lays it down that the republic has a right to break hearts and ruin heads, however liberally, in her own service:
And when the fresh heart breaks,
The new brain proves a martyr, what of them?
Where is the matter of one moth the more
Singed in the candle, at a summer’s end?
But Florence is no simple John or James
To have his toy, his fancy, his conceit,
That he’s the one excepted man by fate,
And, when fate shows him he’s mistaken there,
Die with all good men’s praise, and yield his place
To Paul and George intent to try their chance!
Florence exists because these pass away;
She’s a contrivance to supply a type
Of Man, which men’s deficiencies refuse;
She binds so many, that she grows out of them—
Stands steady o’er their numbers, though they change
And pass away—there’s always what upholds,
Always enough to fashion the great show.
As, see, yon hanging city, in the sun,
Of shapely cloud substantially the same!
A thousand vapours rise and sink again,
Are interfused, and live their life and die,—
Yet ever hangs the steady show i’ the air
Under the sun’s straight influence: that is well!
That is worth heaven to hold, and God to bless!
And so is Florence,—the unseen sun above,
Which draws and holds suspended all of us,—
Binds transient mists and vapours into one,
Differing from each and better than they all.
And shall she dare to stake this permanence
On any one man’s faith? Man’s heart is weak,
And its temptations many: let her prove
Each servant to the very uttermost
Before she grant him her reward, I say!
This mighty shadow of an omniscient cunning, this earthly edition of the celestial craft of secret government by unattainable knowledge, produces on Luria’s far higher nature much [p. 444→] the same kind of irresistible impression which, in the reverse direction, the simplicity and fidelity of a peasant’s faith had made on the accomplished physician. In the one case faith penetrates worldly knowledge with a sense of its own deficiencies; in the other, wide and worldly knowledge penetrates a generous and sensitive nature with a still profounder sense of its own deficiencies. All knowledge, Mr. Browning thinks,—even the mean diplomatic cunning,—has in it a sort of shadow, however faint, of divine fulness, which gives an excuse if not a justification for its magic spell over human nature. If not really a hem of the divine garment of omniscience, it is at least so striking a forgery that the idolatry may be almost noble. In Luria’s nature certainly it is infinitely noble, and is mingled with every thing short of Christian virtue. The picture is worthy of Mr. Browning’s genius, and constitutes the essence of quite his finest drama.
We must conclude with a few words in review of Mr. Browning’s genius. Its most striking characteristic is the great vigour of his intellectual and spiritual imagination, and of his carnal imagination (if we may be permitted a technical Scripture phrase to express the imagination of all the passions and perceptions), and the almost complete absence of the intermediate psychical or sentimental imagination, which is with most poets the principal spring of all their poetry, and perhaps the only spring of lyrical poetry. We do not know a poem of Mr. Browning’s which can be said to express a mood, as Shelley expresses so vividly moods of passionate yearning, Wordsworth of meditative rapture, Tennyson of infinite regret. Mr. Browning has no moods. His mind seems to leap at once from its centre to its surface without passing through the middle states which lie between the spirit and the senses. Hence we may see from another side why Mr. Browning’s women are so imperfect, for their truest life is usually in this middle region, which seems totally absent from his poems. The nearest approach to a sentiment which he has drawn is, on the one side a passion, which he has drawn repeatedly and powerfully,—on the other a spiritual affection, “the devotion the heart lifts above and the heavens reject not,” such as he has so finely painted in that love of David for Jonathan, which comes flowing in in great waves, like a spring-tide, till it pours on into his love for God; and this he has drawn as scarcely any other man could draw it. But both these are essentially different from what is properly denoted by sentiment, which is apt to lean upon the occasional, lives on memory and association, tinges every thing around it with a secondary glow of its own, and has neither the immediate physical origin of a passion, nor that absolute [p. 445→] independence both of circumstance and instinct, which characterises what is here called a spiritual affection. It is, as we have said, in sentiment that the tempering moods are rooted which give rise to so much of our highest poetry, and touch with a sort of illuminating magic so much more which would otherwise have no intrinsic charm. Gray’s Elegy, for instance, is popular solely for the tender melancholy that hangs around it, and almost constitutes it an incarnation of evening regret. Now, of those sentiments which tune the imagination Mr. Browning’s poems seem destitute, and the consequence is that he is apt to plunge us from cold spiritual or intellectual power into the fever of passion, and back again from this fever into the cold. But we suspect that his dramatic intellect has gained through this hiatus in his imagination. Sentiment, because it is lyrical, because it tempts the mind into dwelling on its own moods, is a great hindrance to that strategic activity of the intellect which enables it to pass easily from one intellectual and moral centre to another. A great dramatist is in some sense a great intellectual and spiritual ventriloquist, and nothing should, one would think, more interfere with the ease of spiritual ventriloquism than the clinging personal sentiments, which never leave the creative mind really free and solitary. For it must require a habit not merely of physical, but, if we may so speak, of spiritual solitude, to migrate rapidly in this way from your own actual centre in the world of intellect and feeling to a totally different centre, where you not only try to speak an alien language, but to think unaccustomed thoughts and feel unaccustomed passions. Mr. Browning says very finely in one of his dramas,
When is man strong until he feels alone?
It was some lonely strength at first, be sure,
Created organs such as those you seek
By which to give its varied purpose shape,—
And, naming the selected ministrants,
Took sword and shield and sceptre—each a man!
This seems to us to describe a dramatic poet’s work not much less powerfully than it describes the royally creative thought of the divine administration. Mr. Browning’s intellectual and spiritual strength has apparently been much braced in this cold solitude. And it has been perhaps easier to him, from the absence of that refracting atmosphere of personal sentiment, which, even when we are alone, creates a kind of twilight of customary influences, and environs us with crowds of associations which are apt to fritter away the creative powers of the mind, and to diminish its power to issue those sharply-defined imaginative decrees which may be said to originate [p. 446→] proprio motu, as the papal language of absolute free-will aptly expresses it. To a dramatic intellect (unless the imagination be of the very highest spontaneous fertility) the power of completely controlling the thoughts and images, of saying to one “go,” and to another “come,” must be of the first moment. No poet of modern days gives us more distinctly this sense of an imagination which acts proprio motu than Mr. Browning. It is one reason why his poems have a cold air; for that resisting medium of restraint,—the atmosphere which surrounds the dramatic intellect,—though it may hamper the practice of intellectual migration, will, if it does not prevent it, lend a warmth and natural ground-colour of harmonising feeling to the new creations which will blend them into a more perfect work of art. Mr. Browning’s mind appears somehow to travel in vacuo, and therefore with greater rapidity than almost any part of his genius; but he carries no vestige of his former self about with him, which necessitates, therefore, a perfectly new plunge for the reader into quite a new world in every new poem. But hence also the bracing effect which his masculine and rugged poetry has on the intellect. Poetry is apt to be enervating, producing the effect of intellectual luxury; or if, like Wordsworth’s, it is as cool and bright as morning dew, it carries us away from the world to mountain solitudes and transcendental dreams. Mr. Browning’s—while it strings your intellect to the utmost, as all really dramatic poetry must, and has none of the luxuriance of fancy and wealth of sentiment which relaxes the fibre of the mind—keeps you still in a living world,—not generally the modern world, very seldom indeed the world of modern England, but still in contact with keen, quick, vigorous life, that, as well as engaging the imagination, really enlarges the range of one’s intellectual and social, sometimes almost of one’s political, experience. Mr. Browning cannot, indeed, paint action; but of the intellectual approaches to action he is a great master. And in spite of more grating deficiencies in the power of expression than any eminent English poet perhaps ever laboured under, these poems cannot fail to win for him slowly a substantial and an enduring fame.
[Richard Holt Hutton]
Reviewed:
Poetical Works (RB), London: Chapman & Hall, 1863.
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