R640700C. Dramatis Personæ.
The Eclectic & Congregational Review, July 1864, pp. 62–72.
Listed in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 31, 343.
We suppose we are not alone in making the confession that, of the living masters of English poetry, Robert Browning gives to us the greatest measure of delight. We are not careful to contest for him the chief place among his brethren, but we know not how to admit the right of any other to a higher. Before that discussion, however, could arise, or be settled, it would be necessary to define the chief properties demanded in the poet. In painfully anxious yearning after artistic and lyrical melody Browning is certainly transcended by his only possible rival, Tennyson. We do not meet the wonderfully happy artfulness of expression which seems not like a making [p. 63→] but a happening; but this is the only feature in which he is transcended, and we are quite aware that many would prefer, in many instances we should ourselves greatly prefer, the more unwrought, the sometimes weird, and frequently awakening flash of mystical expression which wins more from the heart than the highest combination of mere music regarded as the arrangement of notes and tones. But it is in the converse with distant persons and scenes, and the making the ages and their histories, events and persons, vehicles for living instruction—it is in the exploring the profoundest recesses of human spirits—the loitering and the marvelling over, and seeking the solution of the most tough and knotty problems of human nature—it is in the making all this the disc on which a strange and most unusual imagination plays off its powers—it is in a pathos infinitely too deep for any but eclectic hearts, sufferers, doubters, and seers, to have much sympathy—it is in a reticence and reserve of verse which leaves you wondering, broken presently by a gush and sweep, and wing of verse which leaves you panting—it is by allusions and eruditions which mark the scholar but instruct the learner, set in words which make a carcanet of precious jewels over the pages that this author’s superabundant power is made known. He has no sort of popularity in the general sense of that word; he is a poet for scholars and students, and only for those who have in them the faculty or the appreciation of the faculty of poetry, not patent to common eyes. Of course, we express no disrespect to such poets as Tennyson and Longfellow when we say that popular as they are, Mr. Browning neither is nor ever can be. We cannot conceive the subjects of his thought and feeling rendered into a verse which could meet the ears of multitudes of not very superior people charmed by their admirable and piercing expression; and yet, what music there is in Mr. Browning’s verse! No music like it, only that it needs a certain education in life; a certain ear-experience and culture not merely to appreciate it but even to apprehend it. It is not long since we devoted some space to the notice of the method and character of our author; since then, his works have been reprinted in a comprehensive edition including that extraordinary and, some readers think, unanalyzable poem Sordello. It is certainly a succession of great studies fetched from history and from life—a very fine, if as surely a very strange, picture of the ways and means of a human soul in the accomplishment of its purposes. The heading of the pages in the new edition of Sordello is very helpful and characteristic. The following passage illustrates how the last of each series of workers sums up in himself all predecessors. Thus we see the work of [p. 64→]
charlemagne and hildebrand.
Dissect
Every ideal workman—(to reject
In favour of your fearful ignorance
The thousand phantasms eager to advance,
And point you but to those within your reach)—
Were you the first who brought—(in modern speech)
The Multitude to be materialized?
That loose eternal unrest—who devised
An apparition i’ the midst? The rout
Was checked, a breathless ring was formed about
That sudden flower: get round at any risk
The gold-rough pointel, silver-blazing disk
O’ the lily! Swords across it! Reign thy reign
And serve thy frolic service, Charlemagne!
—The very child of over-joyousness,
Unfeeling thence, strong therefore: Strength by stress
Of Strength comes of that forehead confident,
Those widened eyes expecting heart’s content,
A calm as out of just-quelled noise; nor swerves
For doubt, the ample cheek in gracious curves
Abutting on the upthrust nether lip;
He wills, how should he doubt then? Ages slip:
Was it Sordello pried into the work
So far accomplished, and discovered lurk
A company amid the other clans,
Only distinct in priests for castellans
And popes for suzerains (their rule confessed
Its rule, their interest its interest,
Living for sake of living—there an end,—
Wrapt in itself, no energy to spend
In making adversaries or allies),—
Dived you into its capabilities
And dared create, out of that sect, a soul
Should turn the multitude, already whole,
Into its body? Speak plainer! Is’t so sure
God’s church lives by a King’s investiture?
Look to the last step! a staggering—a shock—
What’s mere sand is demolished, while the rock
Endures: a column of black fiery dust
Blots heaven—that help was prematurely thrust
Aside, perchance!—but the air clears, nought’s erased
Of the true outline; Thus much being firm based,
The other was a scaffold. See him stand
Buttressed upon his mattock, Hildebrand
Of the huge brain-mask welded ply o’er ply
As in a forge; it buries either eye
White and extinct, that stupid brow; teeth clenched,
The neck tight-corded, too, the chin deep-trenched,
As if a cloud enveloped him while fought
Under its shade, grim prizers, thought with thought
At dead-lock, agonizing he, until
The victor thought leapt radiant up, and Will,
The slave with folded arms and drooping lids
They fought for, lean forth flame-like as it bids. [p. 65→]
Call him no flower—a mandrake of the earth,
Thwarted and dwarfed and blasted in its birth,
Rather, a fruit of suffering’s excess,
Thence feeling, therefore stronger: still by stress
Of Strength, work Knowledge! Full three hundred years
Have men to wear away in smiles and tears
Between the two that nearly seem to touch,
Observe you! quit one workman and you clutch
Another, letting both their trains go by—
The actors-out of either’s policy,
Heinrich, on this hand, Otho, Barbaross,
Carry the three Imperial crowns across,
Aix’ Iron, Milan’s Silver, and Rome’s Gold—
While Alexander, Innocent uphold
On that, each Paple key—but, link on link,
Why is it neither chain betrays a chink?
How coalesce the small and great? Alack,
For one thrust forward, fifty such fall back!
Do the popes coupled there help Gregory
Alone? Hark—from the hermit Peter’s cry
At Claremont, down to the first serf that says
Friedrich’s no liege of his while he delays
Getting the Pope’s curse off him! The Crusade—
Or trick of breeding strength by other aid
Than strength, is safe. Hark—from the wild harangue
Of Vimmercato, to the carroch’s clang
Yonder! The League—or trick of turning strength
Against pernicious strength, is safe at length.
Yet hark—from Mantuan Albert making cease
The fierce ones, to Saint Francis preaching peace
Yonder! God’s Truce—or trick to supersede
The very use of strength, is safe. Indeed
We trench upon the future! Who is found
To take next step, next age—trail o’er the ground—
Shall I say gourd-like?—not the flower’s display
Nor the root’s prowess, but the plenteous way
O’ the plant—produced by joy and sorrow, whence
Unfeeling and yet feeling, strongest thence!
Knowledge by stress of merely Knowledge? No—
E’en were Sordello ready to forego
His life for this, ’t were overleaping work
Some one has first to do, howe’er it irk,
Nor stray a foot’s breadth from the beaten road.
Who means to help must still support the load
Hildebrand lifted—“why hast Thou,” he groaned,
“Imposed on me a burthen, Paul had moaned,
And Moses dropped beneath?” Much done—and yet
Doubtless, that grandest task God ever set
On man, left much to do; at his arm’s wrench,
Charlemagne’s scaffold fell; but pillars blench
Merely, start back again—perchance have been
Taken for buttresses: crash every screen,
Hammer the tenons better, and engage
A gang about your work, for the next age
Or two, of Knowledge, part of Strength and part [p. 66→]
By Knowledge! Then, in deed, perchance may start
Sordello on his race—would time divulge
Such secrets!
The volume before us will then, by those to whom Mr. Browning is what we have expressed him as being to ourselves, be received with all the old feelings of expectation and delight. It is like The Men and Women with which we are familiar. Many of the poems might form another series of The Men and Women; and, as illustrating that power of combining music and thought to which we have referred, we must quote the following. The meditations of Abt Vogler after he has been extemporising upon the musical instrument of his invention—whether Abt Vogler were able to say all that Mr. Browning has said we may doubt, but probably to every Beethoven or Mendelssohn all nature and spirit became symmetrical sometimes in some such palace of music—is the true ideal—the conception of the artist, the poet, the creator, rising to the what shall be over the what is, seeing a divine purpose as much in the incompleted instrument as in the fulfilled work.
1.
Would that the structure brave, the manifold music I build,
Bidding my organ obey, calling its keys to their work,
Claiming each slave of the sound, at a touch, as when Solomon willed
Armies of angels that soar, legions of demons that lurk,
Man, brute, reptile, fly—alien of end and of aim,
Adverse, each from the other heaven-high, hell-deep removed,—
Should rush into sight at once as he named the ineffable Name,
And pile him a palace straight, to pleasure the princess he loved!
2.
Would it might tarry like his, the beautiful building of mine,
This which my keys in a crowd pressed and importuned to raise!
Ah, one and all, how they helped, would dispart now and now combine,
Zealous to hasten the work, heighten their master his praise!
And one would bury his brow with a blind plunge down to hell,
Burrow awhile and build, broad on the roots of things,
Then up again swim into sight, having based me my palace well,
Founded it, fearless of flame, flat on the nether springs.
3.
And another would mount and march, like the excellent minion he was,
Ay, another and yet another, one crowd but with many a crest,
Raising my rampired walls of gold as transparent as glass,
Eager to do and die, yield each his place to the rest:
For higher still and higher (as a runner tips with fire,
When a great illumination surprises a festal night—
Outlining round and round Rome’s dome from space to spire)
Up, the pinnacled glory reached, and the pride of my soul was in sight. [p. 67→]
4.
In sight? Not half! for it seemed, it was certain, to match man’s birth
Nature in turn conceived, obeying an impulse as I;
And 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;
Meteor-moons, balls of blaze: and they did not pale nor pine,
For earth had attained to heaven, there was no more near nor far.
5.
Nay more; for there wanted not who walked in the glare and glow,
Presences plain in the place; or, fresh from the Protoplast,
Furnished for ages to come, when a kindlier wind should blow,
Lured now to begin and live, in a house to their liking at last;
Or else the wonderful Dead who have passed through the body and gone,
But were back once more to breathe in an old world worth their new:
What never had been, was now; what was, as it shall be anon;
And what is,—shall I say, matched both? for I was made perfect too.
6.
All through my keys that gave their sounds to a wish of my soul,
All through my soul that praised as its wish flowed visibly forth,
All through music and me! For think, had I painted the whole,
Why, there it had stood, to see, nor the process so wonder-worth:
Had I written the same, made verse—still, effect proceeds from cause,
Ye know why the forms are fair, ye hear how the tale is told;
It is all triumphant art, but art in obedience to laws,
Painter and poet are proud in the artist-list enrolled:—
7.
But here is the finger of God, a flash of the will that can,
Existent behind all laws, that made them and, lo they are!
And I know not if, save in this, such gift be allowed to man,
That out of three sounds he frame, not a fourth sound, but a star.
Consider it well: each tone of our scale in itself is nought;
It is everywhere in the world—loud, soft, and all is said:
Give it to me to use! I mix it with two in my thought;
And there! Ye have heard and seen: consider and bow the head!
8.
Well, it is gone at last, the palace of music I reared;
Gone! and the good tears start, the praises that come too slow;
For one is assured at first, one scarce can say that he feared,
That he even gave it a thought, the gone thing was to go.
Never to be again! But many more of the kind
As good, nay, better perchance: is this your comfort to me?
To me, who must be saved because I cling with my mind
To the same, same self, same love, same God: ay, what was, shall be.
9.
Therefore to whom turn I but to Thee, the ineffable Name?
Builder and maker, Thou, of houses not made with hands!
What, have fear of change from Thee who art ever the same?
Doubt that Thy power can fill the heart that Thy power expands?
There shall never be one lost good! What was, shall live as before;
The evil is null, is nought, is silence implying sound;
What was good, shall be good, with, for evil, so much good more;
On the earth the broken arcs; in the heaven, a perfect round. [p. 68→]
10.
All we have willed or hoped or dreamed of good, shall exist;
Not its semblance, but itself; no beauty, nor good, power
Whose voice has gone forth, but each survives for the melodist
When eternity affirms the conception of an hour.
The high that proved too high, the heroic for earth 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.
11.
And what is our failure here but a triumph’s evidence
For the fulness of the days? Have we withered or agonized?
Why else was the pause prolonged but that singing might issue thence?
Why rushed the discords in, but that harmony should be prized?
Sorrow is hard to bear, and doubt is slow to clear,
Each sufferer says his say, his scheme of the weal and woe:
But God has a few of us whom He whispers in the ear;
The rest may reason and welcome: ’tis we musicians know.
12.
Well it is earth with me; silence resumes her reign:
I will be patient and proud, and soberly acquiesce.
Give me the keys. I feel for the common chord again,
Sliding by semitones, till I sink to the minor,—yes,
And I blunt it into a ninth, and I stand on alien ground,
Surveying awhile the heights I rolled from into the deep;
Which, hark, I have dared and done, for my resting place is found,
The C Major of this life: so, now I will try to sleep.
Mr. Browning’s readers will, of course, expect from him out-of-the-way topics and strange treatments. The volume has several riches of this kind—perhaps the most remarkable is A Death in the Desert. It reminds us of the strange medical experience of Karshish an Arab physician in the Men and Women; but as a poem it is of a still higher and more instructive order. In the Death in the Desert, Mr. Browning sets himself to reply, with happy point and with a pathos which thrills to the very core, to the flippancies of Strauss and Renan—for, indeed, the form dying in the desert, a brother, rather a disciple, kneeling at each side, chafing the hands, bedded on a camel’s skin in the inmost grotto to which the moon’s light could only penetrate a little—the form that would not move from the death fainting by the wetting of the lips with wine or the moistened plantain leaf laid to cool the forehead just above the eyes, but when the boy sprang to his knees—
Stung by the splendour of a sudden thought,
and fetched from some innermost recess the plate on which was graven, “I am the resurrection and the life,” and pressed the finger of the dying man upon those graven lines, stirred and began to speak, was the apostle John; and here with his five [p. 69→] attendant converts, Mr. Browning sets the most ancient of the apostles a-talking—revived, life flickering up and flaming for a moment or two from its remotest depths, the apostle reviews his past—anticipates and meets the infidel cavillings of the future— discourses from that deep introvisionary wisdom which lettered the epistles and was inspired to express the Gospel, and to behold the apocalypse, discourses of the nature of man and of truth.
Nay, do not give me wine, for I am strong,
But place my gospel where I put my hands.
And so the awful, patriarchal apostle talks on in words we might conceive to come from such lips, while about to close. There are, in this poem, lines and teaching most noble. No other living poet could have approached this great delineation. The following, for instance, is an illustration of its striking, mystical manner. It is the creed attributed to John by the supposed narrator.
[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 upwards for advice,
Grows into, and again is grown into,
By the next soul, which, seated in the brain,
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.
There is more than poetry in this poem, however, there is the point of an argument which may lift the reader over some difficulties; and then the close—
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.
By this, the cave’s mouth must be filled with sand.
Valens is lost, I know not of his trace; [p. 70→]
The Bactrian was but a wild, childish man,
And could not write nor speak, but only loved:
So, lest the memory of this go quite,
Seeing that I to-morrow fight the beasts,
I tell the same to Phœbas, whom believe!
For many look again to find that face,
Beloved John’s to whom I ministered,
Somewhere in life about the world; they err:
Either mistaking what was darkly spoke
At ending of his book, as he relates,
Or misconceiving somewhat of this speech
Scattered from mouth to mouth, as I suppose.
Believe ye will not see him any more
About the world with his divine regard!
For all was as I say, and now the man
Lies as he lay once, breast to breast with God.
Another poem, somewhat similar in order and intention, is Caliban upon Setebos, in which we have Caliban delivering a discourse upon natural theology. We have long been taught to interpret Caliban as the sensual soul of the world. The sensual soul will, of course, frame a theology in harmony with itself and its character, and a pretty theology it is like to be; and we have the god of mischief and of spite—the cold, indifferent, distant and careless god—and the nature and necessity God, and the merely gross and sensual God—and Caliban discourses upon that which he is able to see, and describes that which he is able to believe—a most edifying chapter to innumerable gentlemen of our acquaintance, Darwinians, believers in force and matter, and other such divine and worshipful deities. We cannot indicate all the poems in the volume, although they are not many in number; the most simply sacred and yet not less profound is Rabbi Ben Ezra, a fine setting to English verse of the spirit of all Hebrew psalmody and literature—a soliloquy of the Rabbi in his age.
Grow old along with me!
The best is yet to be,
The last of life, for which the first was made:
Our times are in His hand
Who saith “A whole I planned,
Youth shows but half; trust God: see all, nor be afraid!”
Rejoice we are allied
To That which doth provide
And not partake, effect and not receive!
A spark disturbs our clod;
Nearer we hold of God
Who gives, than of His tribes that take, I must believe.
Then, welcome each rebuff
That turns earth’s smoothness rough, [p. 71→]
Each sting that bids nor sit nor stand but go!
Be our joys three-parts pain!
Strive, and hold cheap the strain;
Learn, nor account the pang; dare, never grudge the throe!
For thence,—a paradox
Which comforts while it mocks,—
Shall life succeed in that it seems to fail:
What I aspired to be,
And was not, comforts me:
A brute I might have been, but would not sink i’ the scale.
Not once beat “Praise be Thine!
I see the whole design,
I, who saw Power, see now Love perfect too:
Perfect I call thy plan:
Thanks that I was a man!
Maker, remake, complete,—I trust what thou shalt do!”
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 amid this dance
Of plastic circumstance, [p. 72→]
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?
But I need, now as then,
Thee, God, who mouldest men;
And since, not even while the whirl was worst,
Did I,—to the wheel of life
With shapes and colours rife,
Bound dizzily,—mistake my end, to slake Thy thirst:
So, take and use Thy work!
Amend what flaws may lurk,
What strain o’ the stuff, what warpings past the aim!
My times be in Thy hand!
Perfect the cup as planned!
Let age approve of youth, and death complete the same!
We have quoted at length, but only in the hope that every one able to read these verses will turn not only to this volume but to all the works of Robert Browning—most far seeing—most deeply feeling—most erudite and reverent of living poets.
[Edwin Paxton Hood]
Reviewed:
Dramatis Personæ (RB), London: Chapman & Hall, 1864.
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