R640618A. Dramatis Personæ.
The Saturday Review, 18 June 1864, pp. 753–754.
As reprinted in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 31, 340–343.
Mr. Browning’s new poems display, in a striking form, the peculiar characteristics of his genius. He takes little pleasure in representing the superficial appearances either of moral or of material objects. Even his descriptive passages, while they are thoroughly true to nature, indicate, by their minute and elaborate accuracy, the vigour and subtlety of an intellect which never acquiesces in passive receptivity. It is impossible to think of Mr. Browning, in his poetic capacity, as sitting half the day with Wordsworth “on the old grey stone,” and “dreaming his time away” in the faith that thought and feeling will come without the effort of seeking. There is some foundation for the charge that the obscurity of Mr. Browning’s works may prevent them from becoming widely popular, but the difficulty is for the most part inherent in the subject-matter, and it is often diminished as far as possible by felicity of expression. The mysteries of thought and the paradoxes of human nature are not to be apprehended without an effort even by the aid of masterly exposition; nor can it be denied that Mr. Browning frequently baffles a careless reader by a fragmentary and oracular utterance of results which are to himself only parts of a clear and consecutive process of thought. A close psychological observer, he would have been an acute metaphysician if the predominance of the imaginative faculty had not made him pre-eminently a poet. The recondite sophistries and oblique impulses which he delights to trace are always embodied in a dramatic impersonation, and the impostors whose character he analyses are compelled, like the inhabitants of Dante’s hell to tell their own story with involuntary candour. Of all vices, Mr. Browning appears especially to abhor the ingrained falsehood of successful charlatans, and although the morality of a poem has little to do with its value, the marvellous astuteness with which hypocrisy is traced through its remoter windings is essentially imaginative and poetic. Mr. Browning’s admirers submit, with enforced patience, to the singular choice of names by which he expresses his personal antipathy to certain types of character. The repugnance which is provoked by such designation as Bluephocks or Gigadibs must be considered as a tool exacted, as the caprice of the owner, for admission into a noble domain. Poets, like the boroughmongers of former times, do what they will with their own, and Mr. Browning chooses to assert his proprietorship in an unaccountable fashion.
“Mr. Sludge the Medium” is the unattractive hero of one of the most remarkable poems in the volume. “Bishop Blougram’s Apology” had already illustrated Mr. Browning’s faculty of tracing wilful falsehood to the boundary where it blends inextricably with the more incurable taint of half-conscious self-deception. The polished and respectable mendacity of the dignified ecclesiastic was not truer to nature than the mercenary fraud of the humble and malignant American impostor. It may be presumed that Mr. Browning entertains a manly scorn for all belief, or affectation of belief, in the stupid inventions of modern mock superstition; but his business as a poet is not with the abstract doctrine, but with the motives of its professors, and with the half-conscious dishonesty of their sham disciples. By a necessary artifice he makes Mr. Sludge, like Bishop Blougram, tell his own story with a detailed candour which would scarcely be exhibited in real life; but in both cases the improbability is excused or concealed by plausible occasions for confession. Sylvester Blougram, styled in partibus
Episcopus, necnon [sic] (the deuce knows what
It’s changed to by our novel hierarchy),
is proud of his accomplishments, of his worldly success, and above all of the skill with which he reconciles the orthodoxy of a prelate with the dispassionate perspicacity of a man of the world:—
The sum of all is, yes, my doubt is great,
My faith’s the greater, then my faith’s enough.
The enlightened bishop is aware that his intellectual equals or inferiors may suspect and despise him as simply insincere, and accordingly he proves with elaborate ingenuity that every weak point in his system is covered by a sophism or a fallacy. His apology is, however, an intellectual amusement as well as a scheme of defence. The exercise of fancy and of logical ability is exhilarating even when it is directed to the establishment of unsound conclusions. Bishop Blougram is justly confident in his power as an advocate, and he is uneasy only when he remembers from time to time that he is a principal in the discussion. The sensitive fear of contempt which attends his argumentative triumph is admirably dramatic.
Mr. Sludge, the detected spirit-rapper, is more candid, and yet the absence of self-respect which befits an uneducated pretender enables him in a certain sense to believe in himself, even while he is confessing the grossness of his imposture. He may at least fairly boast that he is no worse than his disciples. When he was a servant boy he had overheard their twaddle about the invisible world:—
How wisdom scouts our vulgar unbelief
More than our vulgarest incredulity;
How good men have desired to see a ghost,
What Johnson used to say, what Wesley did,
Mother Goose thought, and fiddle-diddle-dee.
When he had been admitted to their society because he had seen a ghost, and because he had backed up his assertion by various rude experiments in illusion, his patrons resented, as an imputation on their sagacity, the suspicion that they might be the victims of fraud:—
So evidence is redoubled, doubled again,
And doubled besides; once more he heard, we heard,
You and they heard, your mother and your wife,
Your children and the stranger in your gates.
Did they, or did they not?
As the poor medium plaintively asks, who would have the courage to retract after his first success?—
To interpose with “It gets serious, this;
Must stop here. Sir, I saw no ghost at all.
Inform your friends I made .. well, fools of them,
And found you ready made.
After a short time the chief performer is spared all trouble by the eagerness of his voluntary accomplices. Whatever mistakes he commits, an explanation is ready:—
If Francis Verulam,
Styles himself Bacon, spells the name besides
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.”
Mr. Browning’s insight into character is shown by Mr. Sludge’s almost genuine belief in omens and special dispensations for his own behoof. If he sees Charles’s Wain at midnight, he takes it as a sign that he ought to have his hair cut, and he forcibly argues that the personal matter touches him more nearly than the dangers from which his friends may have been providentially preserved:—
Well, sir, I think then, if you needs must know,
What matter had you and Boston city to boot
Sailed skyward, like burnt onion-peelings. Much
To you, no doubt; for me, undoubtedly
The cutting of my hair concerns me more.
The distinction between credulity and falsehood is no wider than the interval which separates the gambler from the sharper. The demand for deceit produces an abundant supply, and in recent, if not in general, mythology the proportion of lying is so preponderant that all the accessory elements may safely be disregarded by the critical analyst. In a certain sense, sympathy may be felt for the marvels of an imaginative age; but the trade of which Mr. Sludge is a typical practitioner ranks in the history of human folly no higher than the necromancy of Canidia, or the rites of Serapis as they were imported into Imperial Rome. The miracles of mediæval saints are comparatively respectable, and even the contemporaneous liquifyers of St. Januarius’s blood have the excuse of long-established custom. For Mr. Browning’s purpose it was necessary to endow Sludge with an acuteness of observation and reflection which could scarcely have belonged to an actual medium. His description of a Government spy at Rome would not have occurred to a Boston cheat, nor could the vulgar spirit-rapper have sympathized with the tenderness on which he deliberately practises. He records how he
begins
At your entreaty with your dearest dead;
The little voice set lisping once again,
The tiny hand made feel for yours once more,
The poor lost image brought back plain as dreams
Which image if a word had chanced recall,
The customary cloud would cross your eyes,
Your heart return the old tick, pay its pang;—
A right mood for investigation this.
One’s at one’s ease with Saul and Jonathan;
Pompey and Cæsar; but one’s own lost child—
I wonder, when you heard the first clod drop
From the spadeful at the grave-side, felt you free
To investigate who twitched your funeral scarf,
Or brushed your flounces? Then it came, of course,
You should be stunned and stupid; then (how else?)
Your breath stopped with your blood, your brain struck work.
But now such causes fail of such effects,
All’s changed; the little voice begins afresh;
Yet you, calm, consequent, can test, and try,
And touch the truth. Tests! Did not the creature tell
The nurse’s name, and say it lived six years,
And rode a rocking-horse? Enough of tests!
Sludge never could learn that.
The tangled web that has to be woven when men take up the business of deceit has never been unravelled so skilfully as in the anatomical demonstrations which Bishop Blougram and Mr. Sludge are made to practise on themselves.
Another form of human perversity is subjected to a similar process in Caliban’s dissertation on the attributes of his mother’s god Setebos. In “Natural Theology in the Island,” the intellect of a man is employed in elaborating an imaginary deity who is the projected image of a savage or a satyr. Anthropomorphic speculations in the mouth of Caliban properly, become theriomorphic, and the lonely monster constructs with melancholy logic a being, not supreme, but irresistible; as coarse, as selfish, and as capricious as himself. The brutalized nature of Caliban is, for some reason best known to Mr. Browning, indicated by the substitution of the third person for the first. The caricatured representative of theologic egotism never speaks of himself as “I”:—
Sebetos, Sebetos, and Setebos!
Thinketh, he dwelleth in the cold of the moon, [p. 754→]
Thinketh, he made it with the sun to match,
But not the stars; the stars came otherwise;
Only made clouds, winds, meteors, such as that,
Also this isle, what lives and grows thereon,
And snaky sea which rounds and ends the same.
On the whole, the meditative votary is inclined to think that his deity is scarcely either kind or cruel, and perhaps tolerably placable when he is humoured—
But rougher than his handiwork, be sure.
There is, accordingly, nothing which provokes Setebos more than any assumption of merit or independence on the part of his creatures. As Caliban would resent the claim of the whistle which he uses as a bird-call to the credit of catching the birds, his god expects the inhabitants of his realm to admit that all their power comes from him. If the elder-pipe were to rebel—
Would I not crush it with my foot? So He.
The whimsical exception of the stars from the supposed creation of Caliban’s remaining universe is perhaps connected with his conjecture that Setebos was stirred into activity by finding himself cold and ill at ease. For the cause of his discomfort it is necessary to inquire of
The something over Setebos
That made him, or he, maybe, found and fought,
Worsted, drove off, and did to nothing, perchance.
There may be something quiet o’er his head,
Out of his reach, that feels nor joy nor grief,
Since both derive from weakness in some way
I joy because the quails come; would not joy
Could I bring quails here when I have a mind;
This quiet, all it hath a mind to, doth;
Esteemeth stars the outposts of its couch,
But never spends much thought or care that way
It may look up, work up the worse for those
It works on. ’Careth but for Setebos,
The many-handed, as a cuttle fish,
Who, making himself feared through what he does,
Looks up first, and perceives he cannot soar
To what is quiet and hath happy life.
Next looks down here, and out of very spite
Makes this a bauble world to ape yon real,
These good things to match those, as hips do grapes.
It is Caliban’s opinion that things will remain much as they are as long as Setebos lives. In the meantime, the best way to propitiate his wrath is not to seem too happy, and to criticize him, if at all, in secret. The soliloquy is terminated by a thunderstorm, which convinces the rash divine that his speculations had been overheard. As the only possible propitiation, he resorts with instinctive rapidity to immediate penance and to ascetic vows:—
Fool, to jibe 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.
The Calibans of all ages and countries, whether they were fakeers or monks, or Puritan fanatics, have bitten their lips and renounced their messes of whelks as the acknowledge mode of pleasing the Setebos of their distorted fancy.
The most interesting of the Dramatis Personæ belongs to a cycle which Mr. Browning has first discovered or applied to the purposes of poetry. The latter part of the Apostolic age combines in itself nearly all the conditions of grave historical fiction. The characters and the general outline of circumstances are real, while the lost details permit and invite imaginative reconstruction. Experience shows that the highest epic genius needs the groundwork of an acknowledged and credible tradition. Even Dante and Milton found the fables which they perpetuated already built up into the fabric of popular belief. Homer evidently dealt with accepted history, and critics still dispute whether Shakspeare invented a single plot. The “Epistle of Karshish, the Arab Physician,” and the reply of Cleon to his patron, are among the most remarkable of Mr. Browning’s former poems. A direct presentation of Lazarus as he may have appeared in his later life would have been repulsive, if not impossible, and Mr. Browning himself is so careless of his outward history as to describe him as only fifty years of age in the year 68 or 69 a.d. To the learned stranger who is consulted on his case by some elders of his tribe, the story of Lazarus causes a singular conflict between scientific incredulity and involuntary wonder. The “case of mania subinduced by epilepsy” involves symptoms which the supercilious physician finds, as he reflects upon them, more and more mysterious. The philosopher Cleon more summarily rejects the answer which one Paulus, “a barbarian Jew,” might have given to the perplexing questions which beset him:—
Certain slaves
Who touched on this same isle, preached him and Christ,
And (as I gathered from a bystander)
Their doctrines could be held by no sane man.
In “A Death in the Desert,” the last hours of St. John’s life are described from an opposite point of view. One of the disciples who had ministered to the dying Apostle, Pamphylax the Antiochene, records, on the eve of the day on which he was to fight the beasts, the dying words of his master. It was during a persecution in a desert cave.
Where sixty days since the decree was out
We had him, bedded on a camel skin,
And waited for his dying all the while,
that St. John delivered his last oracular warning against heresies which perhaps border on the theories of Strauss and Rénan. His doctrines partake of the not unfrequent obscurity of Mr. Browning’s oracular responses; but the reminiscences of his apostolate, and of his various writings, are admirably impressive. The Gospel is, for poetical purposes, and in conformity with the opinion of some scholars, attributed to his extreme old age:—
But, at the last, why, I seemed left alive
Like a sea-jelly weak on Patmos’ strand,
To tell dry sea-beach gazers how I fared
When there was mid sea and the mighty things;
Left to repeat, “I saw, I heard, I knew,”
And go all over the old ground again,
And Antichrist already in the world,
And many Antichrists, who answered prompt,
“Am I not Jasper as thyself art John,
Nay young, whereas through age thou mayest forget,
Wherefore explain, or how shall we believe?”
I never thought to call down fire on such,
Or, as in wonderful and early days,
Pick up the scorpion, tread the serpent dumb,
But, patient, stated much of the Lord’s life,
Forgotten or misdelivered, and let it work.
At the end of his discourse St. John declares his willingness to remain on earth, even for another hundred years, if his aid is still required to pluck “the blind ones back from the abyss”:—
But he was dead; ’twas about noon, the day
Somewhat declining; we five buried him
That eve, and then dividing went five ways,
And I, disguised, returned to Ephesus.
The remaining poems in the volume display the excellences, the peculiarities, and the principal defects of Mr. Browning’s vigorous genius. Never speaking in his own person, and passing his subtlest thoughts through the mould of some ideal intellect, he often fails to supply the clue to the character of which he has probably himself a distinct conception. That a strong current runs underground is proved by the copious springs which burst up at intervals to the surface, but the hydrographic chart remains in Mr. Browning’s exclusive possession. His poems are excellent in spite, and not in consequence, of his enigmatic utterance. His regular dramas are more intelligible than his shorter poems, because the personages of the story have time to make themselves understood. The additional commentary which was supplied by the subsidiary art of an accomplished actress when Miss Helen Faucit represented the graceful heroine of Colombe’s Birthday, suggests the nature of the obscurity which requires some artificial light to dispel it. It is, perhaps, too much to expect that, where theatrical representation would be inapplicable, Mr. Browning should write a second set of poems to fill up the gaps of the first. The “Glossa of Theotypas,” which he skilfully appends to St. John’s discourse, is designed rather to authenticate the text than to simplify a recondite theology.
The propriety of mixing up doggrel with poetry may fairly be questioned; but in some instances Mr. Browning gives effect to two or three lines which afterwards dwell on the memory, by inserting them in the midst of careless or lumbering rhymes. “A Likeness” is an etching
of a certain face, I never
Saw elsewhere touch or trace of
In women I’ve seen the face of;
Just an etching, and so far clever.
The owner keeps it in a litter of artistic rubbish, which is perhaps intentionally represented by the bulk of the little poem which describes it. A friend pleases him by admiring the etching, but only by appealing to a hidden enthusiasm:—
Would he try a flight farther and say,
He never saw, never before to-day,
What was able to take his breath away,
A face to lose youth for, to occupy age
With the dream of, meet death with—
and then, as the excitement dies away, the poem once more subsides into doggrel. A finer thought and a deeper feeling are expressed in a poem called “The Worst of It,” which is explained by the first words of an injured husband, “Would it were I had been false, not you.” No reader of Mr. Browning’s poetry would hesitate to recognise among a thousand competitors the authorship of lines like these:—
She ruined? How? No heaven for her?
Crowns to give, and none for the brow
That looked like marble, and smelt like myrrh?
Shall the robe be worn, and the palm branch borne,
And she go graceless, she graced now
Beyond all saints, as themselves aver?
The ingenious plaintiveness of self-torturing reflection more than compensates for the feeble words with which the stanza closes. The passage not unfairly represents the inequalities of a great and careless poet.
[George Stovin Venables]
Reviewed:
Dramatis Personæ (RB), London: Chapman & Hall, 1864.
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