R640604C. Dramatis Personæ.
The Reader, 4 June 1864, pp. 704–705.
Listed in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 31, 340.
A new volume of poems by Mr. Browning is an event of no small importance. Already, though the present volume has been but a few days out, most of Mr. Browning’s admirers will have had it in their hands, and will have been estimating the impression made by it on themselves, and its probable effect upon the reputation of their favourite poet. On the whole, they will have had to conclude that, while the volume is a precious one to themselves, inasmuch as it is a gift of so much fresh cogitation from a mind that they know to be powerfully unique among its contemporaries, and to be incapable of producing anything that shall not be rare and valuable, yet it is so much after the author’s most peculiar manner, and contains so little that appears like a break into a new or more popular vein, that there is little chance the Mr. Browning’s constituency of admirers will be increased by it, if even it does not provoke, within that constituency, a repetition of old criticisms. In short, Mr. Browning’s present volume is as thoroughly Browningish, and will be as much “caviare to the general,” as any of its predecessors.
The volume consists of eighteen pieces, of different length and metres, reminding us of those which formed the volumes published under the title of “Men and Women.” To these volumes, indeed, the present may be regarded as a supplement of new pieces that have been written by the author more recently—though it might be possible to trace in the present collection a reason for the special title “Dramatis Personæ,” under which they appear. Of the eighteen pieces, the majority are short, and lyrical in form; and it is with respect to these short pieces that there will most surely occur to the ordinary reader the old complaint of Mr. Browning’s obscurity and unintelligibility. Some of them, indeed, are direct and intelligible enough for any class of educated readers; as, for example, this:—
Prospice.
Fear death?—to feel the fog in my throat,
The mist in my face,
When the snows begin, and the blasts denote
I am nearing the place,
The power of the night, the press of the storm,
The post of the foe;
Where he stands, the Arch Fear in a visible form,
Yet the strong man must go:
For the journey is done and the summit attained,
And the barriers fall,
Though a battle’s to fight ere the guerdon be gained,
The reward of it all.
I was ever a fighter, so—one fight more,
The best and the last!
I would hate that death bandaged my eyes and forbore,
And bade me creep past.
No! let me taste the whole of it, fare like my peers
The heroes of old,
Bear the brunt, in a minute pay glad life’s arrears
Of pain, darkness and cold.
For sudden the worst turns the best to the brave,
The black minute’s at end,
And the elements’ rage, the fiend-voices that rave,
Shall dwindle, shall blend,
Shall change, shall become first a peace, then a joy,
Then a light; then thy breast,
O thou soul of my soul! I shall clasp thee again,
And with God be the rest!
In not a few of the other short pieces, however, it will be possible for even a reader of subtle apprehension, and accustomed to Mr. Browning, to feel himself puzzled, from beginning to end, as to the meaning or drift—above all, as to the situation, story, or set of circumstances which the author had in his mind when he wrote the poem, and to which he meant it dramatically to appertain. That the author had some set of circumstances distinctly in his mind, and that, if this could be divined, the poem would be intelligible—nay, that, by hovering over the poem, and scrutinizing it, the situation or set of circumstances to which it appertains might be gradually ascertained—the reader who knows Mr. Browning does not doubt; but, in the absence of any such introduction or narrative passage as might have afforded the necessary explanation at once, even such a reader feels, at the end of the poem, that he has been passing through an intellectual haze, and that, whatever may have been the suggestion of the poem, Mr. Browning has run with it so far into the interior of his own mind in elaborating the poem that the thread of connexion with the outer world has snapped. Hence, whatever might come to be the appreciation of these poems, if they were read again and again till they had been made to yield the moans of their own elucidation, their first impression is somewhat disappointing, not to say irritating—the reader, to say the truth, not discerning, during this first impression, any sufficient reason, in the shape of mighty undefined effect, why he should be put to the trouble of going over such brief lyrics again and again in order to master their meaning completely. The probability, therefore, is that, in the case of these shorter poems of the volume, the reader will be content with the striking or witty phrases, and the subtle and occasionally powerful bits of thinking, which he meets by the way, and which, even if the poems are farther let alone, will be a sufficient reward for having read them. Such reward every cultured reader will find. Here, for example, from a poem entitled “Rabbi Ben Ezra,” is a passage which, even when detached from the context, is noble and like Browning at his best:—
Not on the vulgar mass
Called “work” must sentence pass—
Things done, that took the eye and had the price;
O’er which, from level stand,
The low world laid its hand,
Found straightway to its mind, could value in a trice:
But all, the world’s coarse thumb
And finger failed to plumb,
So passed in making up the main account;
All instincts immature,
All purposes unsure,
That weighed not as his work, yet swelled the man’s amount:
Thoughts hardly to be packed
Into a narrow act,
Fancies that broke through language and escaped;
All I could never be,
All, men ignored in me,
This, I was worth to God, whose wheel the pitcher shaped.
Ay, note that Potter’s wheel,
That metaphor! and feel
Why time spins fast, why passive lies our clay,—
Thou, to whom fools propound,
When the wine makes its round,
“Since life fleets, all is change; the Past gone, seize to-day!”
Fool! All that is, at all,
Lasts ever, past recall;
Earth changes, but thy soul and God stand sure:
What entered into thee,
That was, is, and shall be:
Time’s wheel runs back or stops; Potter and clay endure.
He fixed thee mid this dance
Of plastic circumstance,
This Present, thou, forsooth, wouldst fain arrest:
Machinery just meant
To give thy soul its bent,
Try thee and turn thee forth, sufficiently impressed.
What though the earlier grooves
Which ran the laughing loves
Around thy base no longer pause and press?
What though, about thy rim,
Scull-things in order grim
Grow out, in graver mood, obey the sterner stress?
Look not thou down but up!
To uses of a cup,
The festal board, lamp’s flash and trumpet’s peal,
The new wine’s foaming flow,
The Master’s lips a-glow!
Thou, heaven’s consummate cup, what needst thou with earth’s wheel?
The portions of the volume that will be fastened on as its substantial additions to the series of Mr. Browning’s poems which we are accustomed to remember as most remarkable in themselves, and most characteristic of the author, are some four or five pieces of more considerable length interspersed among the short lyrics. In one of these, entitled “Abt Vogler (after he has been extemporizing upon the musical instrument of his invention),” we have another specimen of Mr. Browning’s extraordinary power of throwing himself into the state of mind of a great artist and imaginatively representing his mode of thinking and feeling; and, though here again, from the peculiar and out-of-the-way character of the subject, Mr. Browning will seem to many still the same “fantastical duke of dark corners” that he has appeared all along, the poem will take its place, with competent judges, among those well-remembered ones in his “Men and Women” which illustrated in a similar manner the history of Art and the moods of artists. The most important poems in the volume, however, and those on account of which, even if they stood by themselves, the volume would have to be welcomed as a worthy contribution to our literature, are three in blank verse, entitled respectively “A Death in the Desert,” “Caliban upon Setebos; or, Natural Theology in the Island,” and “Mr. Sludge, the Medium.” These poems, being either in part narrative or at least accompanied by a sufficient suggestion of the story or set of circumstances they suppose, are perfectly intelligible—perfectly intelligible, that is, to such readers (and they are certainly of a high class) as Mr. Browning can have meant to address in them. And they are thoroughly worth understanding. Whatever may be thought of Mr. Browning as a poet, all must acknowledge him to be a most remarkable thinker—at once sharp, subtle, versatile, and deep; and, taken only as tissues of metrical cogitation on problems of metaphysical and moral interest, and particularly on certain forms of such problems having a powerful interest at the present time, these three pieces are wonderful. To give any adequate account of them individually is here impossible. A word or two must suffice.
“A Death in the Desert” is an imagination of the death of St. John, the last of the disciples, in his extreme old age, in a cave in the desert whither he has been carried, to avoid the persecution, by one or two faithful adherents. The circumstances are most powerfully and poetically conceived, so that one sees the cave as in a picture, and the death going on within it; and whoever has doubts as to Mr. Browning’s being a poet need only take this as an example of his poetry. But it is in the discourse which St. John is supposed to speak when dying, and which the hearers treasure up as his last words, that the chief interest lies. In this discourse he is made to look backward upon his own life to that period when he saw and walked with Christ in the flesh, and then forward to the future history of Christianity in the world, with a prophetic vision of times coming when it should be doubted whether all these things had ever really been, whether there had ever been a real Christ in the flesh, or he had been such as John and others had declared him to be. Out of a subject like this, with the power of allusion which it permits to present speculations and controversies, it may be guessed what Mr. Browning has made; but, for a full appreciation of the poem, both as an exercise for the intelligence and as an exhibition of thought valuable in itself, it must be perused carefully. Here is the gloss of one of John’s disciples on a doctrine of his—the gloss being introduced parenthetically to explain some of John’s dying words:—
This is the doctrine he was wont to teach,
How divers persons witness in each man,
Three souls which make up one soul: first, to wit,
A soul of each and all the bodily parts,
Seated therein, which works, and is what Does,
And has the use of earth, and ends the man
Downward: but, tending upward for advice,
Grows into, and again is grown into
By the next soul, which, seated in the brain, [p. 705→]
Useth the first with its collected use,
And feeleth, thinketh, willeth,—is what Knows,
Which, duly tending upward in its turn,
Grows into, and again is grown into
By the last soul, that uses both the first,
Subsisting whether they assist or no,
And, constituting man’s self, is what Is—
And leans upon the former, makes it play,
As that played off the first: and, tending up,
Holds, is upheld by, God, and ends the man
Upward in that dread point of intercourse,
Nor needs a place, for it returns to Him.
What Does, what Knows, what Is; three souls, one man.
I give the glossa of Theotypas.
“Caliban upon Setebos; or, Natural Theology in the Island” has its origin in a hint in one of Caliban’s speeches in the Tempest, where, being threatened by Prospero with punishment if he neglects his work, he mutters to himself
“I must obey: his art is of such power,
It would control my dam’s god, Setebos,
And make a vassal of him.”
Expanding this hint, Mr. Browning fancies Caliban in a fit of speculation as to the nature and ways of this Setebos, dimly conceived, in his brutish mind, as the maker of the Island and the lord of most things he sees. In the opening lines of the poem we are introduced to Caliban beginning his meditations.
Will sprawl, now that the heat of day is best,
Flat on his belly in the pit’s much mire,
With elbows wide, fists clenched to prop his chin;
And, while he kicks both feet in the cool slush,
And feels about his spine small eft-things course,
Run in and out each arm, and make him laugh;
And, while above his head a pompion-plant,
Coating the cave-top as a brow its eye,
Creeps down to touch and tickle hair and beard,
And now a flower drops with a bee inside,
And now a fruit to snap at, catch and crunch:
He looks out o’er yon sea which sunbeams cross
And recross till they weave a spider-web,
(Meshes of fire, some great fish breaks at times)
And talks to his own self, howe’er he please,
Touching that other, whom his dam called God.
Then, as the brute goes on gazing over the sea and thinking about Setebos, we have a kind of exposition of his Natural Theology—here and there in the course of which we can perceive that Mr. Browning is using Caliban metaphorically, and that he has grimly in view the Natural Theology of a race of beings that do not consider themselves of the type of Caliban. The poem, whether in its simple or in its double sense, is one of a rare order of effect. At the end, just as Caliban has worked himself to some conclusions that enable him to think of Setebos as not so formidable after all, there comes a thunderstorm, and the terrified brute falls flat.
What, what? A curtain o’er the world at once!
Crickets stop hissing; not a bird—or, yes,
There scuds His raven that hath told Him all!
It was fool’s play, this prattling! Ha! the wind
Shoulders the pillared dust, death’s house o’ the move,
And fast invading fires begin! White blaze—
A tree’s head snaps—and there, there, there, there, there,
His thunder follows! Fool to give at Him!
Lo! ’Lieth flat and loveth Setebos!
’Maketh his teeth meet through his upper lip,
Will let those quails fly, will not eat this month
One little mess of whelks, so he may ’scape!
“Mr. Sludge, the Medium,” will be the most popular poem in the volume, as it is, in fact, a merciless satire on Spiritualism, Spirit-rapping, and their practitioners. But it is a satire, most subtly conceived—reminding one of the author’s famous “Bishop Blougram” in one of his former volumes. A vulgar American medium is represented talking with one of his patrons whom he has cheated and whom he has in his power—making no secret of the fact that he has imposed upon him, and wishes to extort money from him, but reasoning out the whole subject of Spirit-rapping with a kind of maundering metaphysics of his own, which he seems for the moment half to believe, and which invests his vulgarity and ignorance with a sort of dignity of talent. Here is one passage à propos of the readiness of the public to swallow Spiritualism, and to find apologies for failures in Spirit-rapping exhibitions:——
I’m spared all further trouble; all’s arranged;
Your circle does my business; I may rave,
Like an epileptic dervish in the books,
Foam, fling myself flat, rend my clothes to shreds;
No matter: lovers, friends and countrymen
Will lay down spiritual laws, read wrong things right
By the rule of reverse. If Francis Verulam
Styles himself Bacon, spells the name beside
With a y and a k, says he drew breath in York,
Gave up the ghost in Wales when Cromwell reigned
(As, sir, we somewhat fear he was apt to say,
Before I found the useful book that knows),
Why, what harm’s done? The circle smiles apace,
“It was not Bacon, after all, do you see!
We understand; the trick’s but natural:
Such spirits’ individuality
Is hard to put in evidence: they incline
To gibe and jeer, these undeveloped sorts.
You see, their world’s much like a jail broke loose,
While this of ours remains shut, bolted, barred,
With a single window to it. Sludge, our friend,
Serves as this window, whether thin or thick,
Or stained or stainless; he’s the medium-pane
Through which, to see us and be seen, they peep:
They crowd each other, hustle for a chance,
Tread on their neighbour’s kibes, play tricks enough!
Does Bacon, tired of waiting, swerve aside?
Up in his place jumps Barnum—‘I’m your man;
I’ll answer you for Bacon!’ Try once more!”
Or else it’s—“What’s a ‘medium’? He’s a means,
Good, bad, indifferent, still the only means
Spirits can speak by; he may misconceive,
Stutter and stammer,—he’s their Sludge and drudge,
Take him or leave him; they must hold their peace,
Or else put up with having knowledge strained
To half-expression through his ignorance.
Suppose, the spirit Beethoven wants to shed
New music he’s brimfull of; why, he turns
The handle of this organ, grinds with Sludge,
And what he poured in at the mouth o’ the mill
As a Thirty-third Sonata (fancy now!)
Comes from the hopper as bran-new Sludge, nought else—
The Shakers’ Hymn in G, with a natural F,
Or the ‘Stars and Stripes’ set to consecutive fourths.”
And so, on and on the Medium reasons, undisguisedly a vulgar rogue all through, and yet now and then getting into a vein like that of “There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy,” so that for the moment the reader is perplexed, and does not know whether he may not be serious. In the end, however, all is clear enough; and we should not think that the Spiritualists will thank Mr. Browning for this poem.
Reviewed:
Dramatis Personæ (RB), London: Chapman & Hall, 1864.
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