R640602A. Dramatis Personæ.
The Morning Star, 2 June 1864, p. 3.
As reprinted in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 31, 337–340.
Perhaps the distinction of the dramatic from the theatrical genius, was never more clearly shown than in the writings of Robert Browning. The first of living dramatic writers, at lowest estimate, he is not so well known to the stage as the novelists. It is not probable that this results from his scorn of pit and dress-circle, but rather from such a reverence for his own conceptions and characters as will not permit him to dress them in eye-taking colours and trappings, or to put them in attitudes. An intense realism pervades his works; there is nothing conventional in his methods of treatment; and he is so merged in some person his imagination has evoked that there is an impression at times of the absence in the poet of any moral standard. In those poems which relate to religious or abstract questions, we find Mr. Browning not only a man of defined opinions, but of an almost bigoted attachment to them; but when a character is before him with action to be represented correspondent to emotion felt, he seems to have a Protean liberty. Saint and sceptic, Conservative and Radical, Strafford and Pym, all get their full utterance. He never commits the blunder of the young Goethe, who, during the marionette performance, to the great mirth of the company put his hand down to lift up a fallen puppet. There is perfect abandon. He is always artistic—so consummately so, indeed, that many will be surprised at such a judgment, though some analysis will prove it true. It is easy to see how it is that such an author should not have at the same time that ability—which we would not under-estimate—that makes his forms at once theatrically effective. His characters are not acquaintances for an hour. A literary Lavater might tell all about them on sight, but not others. “I cannot heave my heart into my mouth,” said Cordelia: deep things cannot be brought to surface and tongue’s-end in a moment. What characters the true dramatic poet conceives are real to him: their play will be the play of real life, which is never theatrical.
In his later works Mr. Browning has dropped even so much of the theatrical form as linked his persons together into a visible plot or play. The work before us resembles in form his “Men and Women,” and, indeed is, we believe, advertised in America as the second series of “Men and Women.” The title “Dramatis Personæ” seems to us much more felicitous, whilst it recals the quaint naming of one of his earlier plays, “Pippa Passes” from a stage direction. It is no longer any one land or epoch with definitely related persons and forces that he brings before us; but the stage is the world, the plot is life, the time to-day, the persons are the men and women moving around us. His peculiarities, which have been so much discussed, are still preserved. It is said that a man of genius once accounted for his being in a madhouse by saying, “The world said I was mad: I said it was; it had the majority.” We apprehend that the numbers who outvoted Mr. Browning on the subject of “Sordello” will find something in a few poems of this collection to elicit a similar verdict concerning his obscurity and the like; but we apprehend, too, that there is a larger number now who will have the instinct to recognise in the obscurest page of this volume such passages of immortal truth and beauty as the more careful readers discovered in that, and in the many fine poems which followed it. If not, so much the worse—for them.
The first poem of the volume in importance as in position is entitled “James Lee.” It comprises a series of smaller pieces, all variations of the sad minor strain of the first, which suggests the spiritual tragedy of a love grown deeper on one side, outgrown on the other. The brief opening poem, giving so subtly the first shading on a picture hitherto of pure light, is worthy to be quoted entire:—
at the window.
Ah, love, but a day,
And the world has changed!
The sun’s away,
And the bird’s estranged;
The wind has dropped,
And the sky’s deranged:
Summer has stopped.
Look in my eyes!
Wilt thou change, too?
Should I fear surprise?
Shall I find aught new
In the old and dear,
In the good and true,
With the changing year?
Thou art a man,
But I am thy love!
For the lake, its swan;
For the dell, its dove;
And for thee—(oh, haste!)
Me, to bend above,
Me, to hold embraced!
In these verses the poet has, with a fine skill, so introduced the first shadowy presentiment of change as to bring before us in relief the perfect picture of the fair life it is invading. Had he devoted many pages to the earlier life of James Lee and his bride, he could scarcely have conveyed more clearly the transcendent summer that is passing away than in that cry with its undertone:—
Ah, love, but a day,
And the world has changed!
To that season many a heart has cried, “Stay!” but it for ever hastens to its autumn, its winter. As the presentiment is followed by premonition, then by the sad realisation of the great loss and the woman’s pleading against Fate, until all ends with the deck which bears her away from one whom her love will set free, the poet almost wins us to recal our estimate of his theatrical ability by his perception of the true environment of each picture,—of Nature, with her shifting scenery of season, cliff, rock, and wave, and the orchestra of moaning wind, faithfully reflecting the tragedy passing within a human heart. There are inserted but few words in explanation, and these in an interlogue of which one or two verses may be given here as illustrating the idea which forms the substratum of the poem:—
All this, and more, comes from some young man’s pride
Of power to see,—in failure and mistake,
Relinquishment, disgrace, on every side,—
Merely examples for his sake,
Helps to his path untried.
Instances he must—simply recognise?
Oh, more than so!—must, with a learner’s zeal,
Make doubly prominent, twice emphasise,
By added touches that reveal
The god in babe’s disguise.
This poem is one of great power, freighted with thought and with beauty, and one which will greatly add to the poet’s reputation. It is remarkable for the new combinations elicited from a world-old theme, and for a certain simplicity in the statement of complex emotions, which one might almost call, borrowing the name of a new art, literary photosculpture.
The second poem in the volume, “Gold Hair,” is a strange legend of Pornic, of a girl, saintly and beautiful—
Too white, for the flower of life is red;
Her flesh was the soft, seraphic screen
Of a soul that is meant (her parents said)
To just see earth, and hardly be seen,
And blossom in Heaven instead.
The girl has wonderfully bea[u]tiful gold hair, and on dying simply requests that it (the hair) shall not be touched. In after years, in digging about the grave, a quantity of gold, which the dying girl had concealed in her hair, is discovered. The legend is one in which the horrible and the grotesque mingle strangely; and the moral which the poet draws from it seem to us, we must confess, somewhat grotesque, and certainly as strange as the story.
The candid incline to surmise of late
That the Christian faith may be false, I find;
For our Essays-and-Reviews debate
Begins to tell on the public mind,
And Colenso’s words have weight:
I still, to suppose it true, for my part
See reasons and reasons; this, to begin—
’Tis the faith that launched point-blank her dart,
At the head of a lie—taught original sin,
The corruption of man’s heart.
Mr. Browning may be pardoned the rather violent petitio principii that the Essayists and Reviewers and Colenso impugn the Christian faith, for we can scarcely suppose him to have given much of his time to the dry bones of theology; but that he should take this very improbable French legend of a mercenary and ingeniously silly girl as a text from which to seriously prove original sin, is as if one should quote the ghost of “Hamlet” in evidence as to the condition of souls in the future life. If, as we suspect, the author simply means to identify the doctrine of original sin with a philosophical view of the organic and hereditary nature of vice, he will find nothing in Colenso or the Essays bearing on the question. Still we must exhort him, in his own words slightly altered,
Watch and pray!
Poets tumble to earth with so slight a tilt!
though we must add that we know no poet who needs the exhortation less. “The Worst of It” is a poem in which there is much tenderness of expression, and also much of that kind of mystery which has caused generations to fret themselves over the sonnets of Shakspere. “Dîs aliter visum; or Le Byron de nos Jours,” embodies a fine romance, reminding one of the fairy tale of Riquet and the beautiful princess who by love added to each other what each needed—wit for one, beauty for the other—only here it is reversed, for by the failure of “le Byron” two lives are for ever incomplete:—
You loved, with body worn and weak;
I loved, with faculties to seek;
Were both loves worthless since ill-clad?
Let the mere star-fish in his vault
Crawl in a wash of weed, indeed,
Rose-jacynth to the finger tips:
He, whole in body and soul, outstrips
Man, found with either in default.
. . . . . .
You know not? That I well believe,
Or you had saved two souls.
“Too Late” is the bitter soliloquy of a lover over the corpse of a woman he loved, but who had married another, and is of terrible intensity. It is one of those poems which show how new and startling an old subject becomes under the ever-fresh touch of genius. In “Abt Vogler” (after he has been extemporising upon the musical instrument of his invention) we have perhaps the finest single poem in the book—a poem in which arise all the wild glories of Kubla Khan’s Pleasure-dome and all of the grandeurs which imagination has piled up in
The wild weird clime that lieth, sublime,
Out of Space, out of Time.
Abt Vogler has seen his notes as angels and demons evoked to labour and build him a stately palace of sound until
The emulous heaven yearned down, made effort to reach the earth,
As the earth had done her best in my passion to scale the sky:
Novel splendours burst forth, grew familiar, and dwelt with mine,
Not a point nor peak but found and fixed its wandering star.
But the palace cannot endure: it is gone. Whereon Abt Vogler reflects:—
All we have willed or hoped or dreamed of good, shall exist;
Not its likeness, but itself; no beauty, nor good, nor power,
Whose voice has gone forth, but each survives for the melodist,
When eternity confirms the conception of an hour.
The high that proved too high, the heroic that proved too hard,
The passion that left the ground to lose itself in the sky,
Are music sent up to God by the lover and the bard;
Enough that He heard it once: we shall hear it by-and-by.
“Rabbi Ben Ezra” is worthy to succeed the last-named poem, in which a good mystic and optimist meditates as he grows aged on the need of all circumstances and seasons to mould man, and see that man, having gathered out of the past, out of the brute world manifold powers of sense, attains his distinctive prize as a man when he sees that all is good.
As the bird wings and sings,
Let us cry “All good things
Are ours, nor soul helps flesh more, now, than flesh helps soul!
Those who remember, as every reader of Mr. Browning will, that exquisite poem in “Men and Women,” the “Strange medical experience of Kars[h]ish, the Arab physician,” in which in the form of an ancient letter written from Jerusalem in the time of Christ by a learned man, who is ashamed to acknowledge the impression which the mere peasant has made upon him, but whose occasional mention of the events around him gives a marvellous effect of reality, will be glad to learn that there is here a piece somewhat similar in structure, and if not such a felicity—how can a man do such a thing more than once?—quite worthy of the author of that. This piece is entitled “A Death in the Desert.” It purports to be a parchment written by Pamphylax of Antioch, giving an account of the death of St. John and his last utterances. The few who are with him have brought him to a grotto, have moistened his lips with wine, and laid a wet plantain leaf on his brow. Besides the writer, Xanthus, Valens, and a boy are present; and the danger of the time is told in the Bactrian convert’s keeping watch whilst he pretended to graze a goat without. But the wine and wet cloth and Xanthus’s prayer did not bring more than a smile from his lips.
Then the boy sprang up from his knees, and ran,
Stung by the splendour of a sudden thought,
And fetched the seventh plate of graven lead
Out of the secret chamber, found a place,
Pressing his finger on the deeper dints,
And spoke as ’twere his mouth proclaiming first,
“I am the resurrection and the life.”
Whereat he opened his wide eyes at once,
And sat up of himself, and looked at us;
And thenceforth nobody pronounced a word:
Only, outside, the Bactrian cried his cry,
Like the lone desert-bird that wears the ruff,
As signal we were safe, from time to time.
This grouping is very fine. The commentaries appended by others are admirable in assisting the artistic illusion, and there is much pathos throughout. The poem is scarcely so perfect as other efforts of the same class by Mr. Browning—“Saul,” for example—because of a too obvious bearing upon the religious discussions of the present day. St. John replies, not without force certainly, to the anti-supernaturalists; but we cannot help feeling the while that, if he had really so well known the English and German forms of denial, he would have seen to it that the testimonies of the age were conveyed to us in a much more entrenched form. As it is, the poem seems to us much like a real Titian, in some central figure of which, however, is traceable not only the hand of a Royal Academician, but the form of an Anglican defender of the faith. The poem is, however, replete with vigour, and one cannot read it without being moved, for it is written from perfect conviction. “Caliban upon Setebos; or, Natural Theology in the Island,” is a droll and very suggestive discourse on the text, “Thou thoughtest that I was altogether such an one as thyself.”
Our limits compel us to pass over some of these poems, all worthy of special notice; for we must not fail to mention that by which the volume will make itself heard farthest, in the present at least—“Mr. Sludge, ‘the Medium.’” Mr. Home’s honours are falling thickly, and some may think heavily, upon him. If the second edition of “Incidents of My Life,” just issued, had been delayed a little it might have been recorded that this celebrated spiritualist had been proposed as the subject of a political issue between England and Italy, had occasioned a debate in Parliament, and in the same week had been in some sort the hero of a poem, by the author of “Sordello” and “Paracelsus!” For, we take it that few will find any difficulty in fixing the identity of Mr. Sludge. Mr. Sludge, caught in the act of cheating at spirit-raps, finds some thumbs and fingers unpleasantly related to his throat, and escapes further hostilities and exposure by promising to confess all of his tricks and misdealings. It might hardly be anticipated that even Mr. Browning could evoke a great poem from such a subject; yet he has done so. In some regards, this is the most notable work he has ever produced: in some it is the most notable written by any poet. Grotesque here, humorous there, now a satire, now a sarcasm, philosophical, eloquent, and always curious, it is an “Epick” for the hour that will distance poor Mr. Disraeli’s altogether. Mr. Browning has evidently reason to detest spiritualism very heartily, but his most scathing sentences are for those whose weaknesses and follies invite imposture. All the special conceits, the bits of ignorance, the scraps of superstition, which lie scattered far and wide in society, are here traced as they gather into an engine of power to wield which the vulgarest rascal who is only artful and reckless is sufficient. It is useless for us to attempt to convey by quotation any idea of this poem, which will doubtless be very widely read and enjoyed. There are few who will not have to acknowledge themselves fitted by some of the caps which Mr. Browning scatters around him, for most of us have our pet superstitions and our over-courteous ways to falsehood. Mr. Browning has been charged with doing homage to the Sludge of a former age—as some say Paracelsus was—but it is very certain he will not be deceived by any contemporary Sludge, and that he knows well the physiognomy of a lie.
In conclusion, we will observe that this volume has less of the lyrical element—and, but for Mr. Sludge, we might say less of humour in it—than preceding volumes by the same author. The graver experiences and aspirations of life—human and religious—are more fully represented in it. Taken as a whole we should regard it as an improvement upon “Men and Women,” except that we miss from it those lighter lyrics and romances without which Mr. Browning is in danger of producing a sombre effect upon his reader. In the high realm he has gone higher than ever before; and we are convinced that the special friends and admirers of this author will be entirely gratified at the many new proofs of his inexhaustible variety and power afforded by this volume, whilst it will do more to increase his popularity than any he has before written.
[Moncure Daniel Conway]
Reviewed:
Dramatis Personæ (RB), London: Chapman & Hall, 1864.
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