R640611A. Dramatis Personæ.
The Press, 11 June 1864, p. 571.
Listed in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 31, 340.
A new volume of poems by Mr. Browning is an unexpected pleasure. There was a rumour that he had resigned the idle craft, and turned painter—and readers of such poems as “Fra Lippo Lippi” or “Andrea del Sarto” know how strong in him is the painter’s instinct. But, though not free from curiosity respecting the success of a great poet upon the canvas, we are heartily glad to find that he has not yet deserted the poetic art.
It is no easy matter to give a fair and thoughtful notice of real poetry on a first reading. Poetry requires to be read many times before it can be completely appreciated. An able critic of the present day, when Mr. Matthew Arnold’s “Scholar Gipsy” first appeared, spoke of it as unworthy of its writer; he is now inclined to rank it above any other of Mr. Arnold’s poems. And in Mr. Browning’s case there is special difficulty. He is the most learned and the most versatile of modern poets. Like Shakespeare, he is often difficult by reason of the subtlety of his thought. The most important poem in this volume, “A Death in the Desert,” deserves to be read reverently. He who dies in a cavern of the wilderness, uttering the while oracular words, is John of Patmos. He foresees the doubts of the far future.
I see you standing conversing, each new face,
Either in fields, of yellow summer eves,
On islets yet unnamed amid the sea;
Or pace for shelter ’neath a portico
Out of the crowd in some enormous town
Where now the larks sing in a solitude;
Or muse upon blank heaps of stone and sand
Idly conjectured to be Ephesus:
And no one asks his fellow any more
“Where is the promise of His coming?” but
“Was He revealed in any of His lives,
As Power, as Love, as Influencing Soul?”
The scientific theologians whose pleasure it is to waste their time in perpetual efforts to reconcile the Synoptical Gospels with the Gospel of St. John would do well to read this poem. Nor they alone: here is a lesson for the materialists:—
When man, appalled at nature, questioned first
“What if there lurk a might behind this might?”
He needed satisfaction God could give,
And did give, as ye have the written word:
But when he finds might still redouble might,
Yet asks, “Since all is might, what use of will?”
—Will, the one source of might,—he being man
With a man’s will and a man’s might, to teach
In little how the two combine in large,—
That man has turned round on himself and stands,
Which in the course of nature is, to die.
The materialist, who believes himself a mere product of the earth, a soulless automaton devoid of free will, is in fact dead. And to this moral and mental death lead all the plausible theories with which learned Professors of the present day enlighten mankind. Slaves of an iron necessity, why should we struggle for unattainable freedom? Why not content ourselves in the belief that we are mere machines with the unpleasant addition of consciousness? Why, the steam-engine is a more fortunate creature, doing its work without weariness, without speculations about the future. We unhappily grow weary, and have baseless visions, and are altogether inferior to steam-engines. This is the theory of the dead men.
Mr. Browning has throughout those later writings of his been attracted by the vigorous and restless speculation of the day. There is no man living more worthy of being heard on these topics. Science seems to have run mad just now; perhaps the prophetic voice and imperial gaze of Poetry may quell its lunacy. “In “Caliban upon Setebos” natural theology receives its lesson. Anthropomorphism is rebuked by gorillamorphism. Here is Caliban’s reasoning on the vicissitudes and anomalies of life:—
Thinketh, such shows nor right nor wrong in Him,
Nor kind, nor cruel: He is strong and Lord.
Am strong myself compared to yonder crabs
That march now from the mountain to the sea;
Let twenty past, and stone the twenty-first,
Loving not, hating not, just choosing so.
Say, the first straggler that boasts purple spots
Shall join the file, one pincer twisted off;
Say, this bruised fellow shall receive a worm,
And two worms he whose nippers end in red;
As it likes me each time I do; so He.
We have already recommended Mr. Milner Gibson to study “Mr. Sludge, the Medium,” wherein it is well shown how the folly of the (self-styled) educated classes produces uneducated impostors. So long as gentlemen in Mr. Gibson’s position will suffer themselves to be amused by pretended necromancy—as long as editors of morning papers and shilling magazines will stimulate morbid curiosity by recording the doings of the Mediums—there will always be plenty of people eager to make money by such absurd exhibitions. Let them study Sludge—especially that able editor who puffed Mr. Forster of Bryanstone-street. A great poet is possibly better occupied in thus dealing with the momentous questions of the day than he would be in turning into melodious verse myths of King Arthur and Queen Boadicea. But to each his function. There is room in poetry for singers as well as thinkers, for Tom Moore as well as Wordsworth—those being greatest who blend both. And admirers of our famous Laureate may admire Mr. Browning also. What delights in Alfred Tennyson is his exquisite art—the perfect music of his verse—the modulated cadences and delicious pictures always at his command. But in Robert Browning one is startled by the daring originality of his conception, the profundity of his thought. Nothing in contemporary literature approaches his marvellous picture of John of Patmos, dying in the Desert, uttering “the burthen of the latest time.”
Beside these three great poems there are others of much beauty, for which let the reader seek the book itself. One only shall be quoted, “May and Death:”—
I wish that when you died last May,
Charles, there had died along with you
Three parts of spring’s delightful things;
Ay, and for me, the fourth part two [sic].
A foolish thought, a worse, perhaps!
There must be many a pair of friends
Who, arm in arm, deserve the warm
Moon-births and the long evening-ends.
So, for their sakes, be May still May!
Let their new time, as mine of old,
Do all it did for me: I bid
Sweet sights and sounds throng manifold.
Only, one little sight, one plant
Woods have in May, that starts up green
Save a sole streak which, so to speak,
Is spring’s blood, spilt its leaves between,—
That, they might spare; a certain wood
Might miss the plant; their loss were small:
But I—whene’er the leaf grows there,
Its drop comes from my heart, that’s all.
Reviewed:
Dramatis Personæ (RB), London: Chapman & Hall, 1864.
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