R640700D. Dramatis Personæ.
The Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine, July 1864, pp. 139–140.
Listed in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 31, 343.
Some good long time ago there was a rumour that a great poetess, now no more, was turning a listening ear to the claims of spirit-raising; and shortly afterwards another rumour that the husband of the great poetess, himself a great poet, had kicked a certain medium bodily out of doors. Whether these rumours were true or false (and nine rumours out of ten are smoke for which there is, in the teeth of the proverb, no fire), it is certain that the poem in the present collection called “Mr. Sludge, the Medium,” is just such a poem as might have been written about a medium by a poet who had kicked him. It is, in fact, a very prolonged kick in blank verse. The question may well be now, Is not the medium a great deal too highly honoured? To be kicked in the body by a great immortal was enough to send any medium to his grave a happy man, with a triumphant “Vixit” as his coffin-plate; but to be kicked in the spirit in foolscap octavo before all the universe is surely more than any medium could in reason expect. We sincerely hope Mr. Sludge will get over it—sufficiently, that is, to be kicked again by somebody else, and so go on until he is fairly kicked out of creation and into the limbo of effete scoundrelism, wherever in the country of chaos that limbo may be. Out on him, and may his bed be rattlesnakes, wherever it is laid! This is all the notice he will, just now, get from us, for we do not intend to pay him the compliment of quoting a line from Mr. Browning’s new volume. Let him be simply hateful, and go. Hateful he must be. There is a strong impression on people’s minds that the great poetess died of a broken heart—broken, not by any private personal grief (the glorious creature was too great for that), but broken by weariness at seeing
“Captive Good attending Captain Ill.”
And we cannot do otherwise than loathe Mr. Sludge for his share of the breaking. Good-bye, Mr. Sludge.
What we intend to do in this place is, first, to quote from Mr. Browning’s new volume some of the verses which are most likely to speak easily for themselves to the reader, and then to say a few words about the general characteristics of the poet. There is no doubt in the world that his writing is a hard nut to crack, but we shall select specimens which a child, or at least a woman, will be sure to understand.
First of all—
YOUTH AND ART.
It once might have been, once only:
We lodged in a street together,
You, a sparrow on the housetop lonely,
I, a lone she-bird of his feather.
Your trade was with sticks and clay,
You thumbed, thrust, patted, and polished,
Then laughed “They will see some day
Smith made, and Gibson demolished.”
My business was song, song, song;
I chirped, cheeped, trilled, and twittered,
“Kate Brown’s on the boards ere long,
And Grisi’s existence embittered!”
I earned no more by a warble
Than you by a sketch in plaster;
You wanted a piece of marble,
I needed a music-master.
We studied hard in our styles,
Chipped each at a crust like Hindoos,
For air, looked out on the tiles,
For fun, watched each other’s windows
You lounged, like a boy of the South,
Cap and blouse—nay, a bit of beard, too;
Or you got it rubbing your mouth
With fingers the clay adhered to.
And I—soon managed to find
Weak points in the flower-fence facing,
Was forced to put up a blind,
And be safe in my corset-lacing.
No harm! it was not my fault
If you never turned your eyes’ tail up,
As I shook upon E in alt.,
Or ran the chromatic scale up:
For spring bade the sparrows pair,
And the boys and girls gave guesses,
And stalls in our street looked rare
With bulrush and watercresses.
Why did you not pinch a flower
In a pellet of clay, and fling it?
Why did not I put a power
Of thanks in a look, or sing it?
I did look, sharp as a lynx
(And yet the memory rankles)
When models arrived, some minx
Tripped up-stairs, she and her ankles.
But I think I gave you as good!—
“That foreign fellow—who can know
How she pays, in a playful mood,
For his tuning her that piano?”
Could you say so, and never say
“Suppose we join hands and fortunes,
And I fetch her from over the way,
Her, piano, and long tunes and short tunes?”
No, no: you would not be rash,
Nor I rasher and something over:
You’ve to settle yet Gibson’s hash,
And Grisi yet lives in clover.
But you meet the Prince at the Board,
I’m queen myself at bals-paré,
I’ve married a rich old lord,
And you’re dubbed knight and an R.A.
Each life’s unfulfilled, you see;
It hangs still, patchy and scrappy;
We have not sighed deep, laughed free,
Starved, feasted, despaired—been happy.
And nobody calls you a dunce,
And people suppose me clever:
This could but have happened once,
And we missed it—lost it for ever.
The little poem called “In the Doorway,” which is one of a series arranged under the common title of “James Lee,” is, in truth, very unlike Robert Browning, except in the last two verses, which might very well have been omitted:—
IN THE DOORWAY.
The swallow has set her six young on the rail,
And looks seaward:
The water’s in stripes like a snake, olive-pale
To the leeward,—
On the weather-side, black, spotted white with the wind:
“Good fortune departs, and disaster’s behind,”—
Hark, the wind with its wants and its infinite wail! [p. 140→]
Our fig-tree, that leaned for the saltness, has furled
Her five fingers,
Each leaf like a hand opened wide to the world
Where there lingers
No glint of the gold, Summer sent for her sake:
How the vines writhe in rows, each impaled on its stake!
My heart shrivels up, and my spirit shrinks curled.
Yet here are we two; we have love, house enough,
With the field there,
This house of four rooms, that field red and rough,
Though it yield there,
For the rabbit that robs, scarce a blade or a bent;
If a magpie alight now, it seems an event;
And they both will be gone at November’s rebuff.
But why must cold spread? but wherefore bring change
To the spirit,
God meant should mate His with an infinite range,
And inherit
His power to put life in the darkness and cold?
Oh, live and love worthily, bear and be bold!
Whom Summer made friends of, let Winter estrange!
Our last specimen shall be
CONFESSIONS.
What is he buzzing in my ears?
“Now that I come to die,
Do I view the world as a vale of tears?”
Ah, reverend sir, not I!
What I viewed there once, what I view again,
Where the physic bottles stand
On the table’s edge,—is a suburb lane,
With a wall to my bedside hand.
That lane sloped, much as the bottles do,
From a house you could descry
O’er the garden-wall: is the curtain blue
Or green to a healthy eye?
To mine, it serves for the old June weather
Blue above lane and wall;
And that farthest bottle labelled “Ether”
Is the house o’er-topping all.
At a terrace, somewhat near its stopper,
There watched for me, one June,
A girl: I know, sir, it’s improper,
My poor mind’s out of tune.
Only, there was a way .. you crept
Close by the side, to dodge
Eyes in the house, two eyes except:
They styled their house “The Lodge.”
What right had a lounger up their lane?
But, by creeping very close,
With the good wall’s help,—their eyes might strain
And stretch themselves to Oes,
Yet never catch her and me together,
As she left the attic, there,
By the rim of the bottle labelled “Ether,”
And stole from stair to stair,
And stood by the rose-wreathed gate. Alas,
We loved, sir—used to meet:
How sad and bad and mad it was—
But then, how it was sweet!
These specimens are about the simplest things Mr. Browning has ever written; and we pick them out for that reason. But, over and above their simplicity, they exemplify very well the poet’s habits of mind. He is great in the drama—the drama proper, no doubt; as some of our readers, who have read, and a very few who may have seen, “The Blot in the Scutcheon,” and “Colombe’s Birthday” (the latter with Helen Faucit, now Mrs. Theodore Martin, in the part of the heroine), may be ready enough to acknowledge. But it is as a writer of (what he has himself called) “Dramatic Lyrics” that Mr. Browning chiefly appeals to his readers. His poems are all snatches, or scraps, or episodes of impassioned autobiography, which have only two faults of any consequence. One is recklessness of versification, so that the mere composition is often let down to doggrel; the other, and the worst fault is, that the meaning is always imperfectly thought out. The poet gets inside the character at some crisis in its history, when the thoughts that arise from the clashing of emotion and conscience are struggling for first utterance. To give them this utterance is, in one sense, very difficult; but in another it is very easy, for the poet is left at liberty to pretend, or to fancy, that he is wiser than his words. So he is constantly winking at you, or giving you a metaphysical dig in the ribs, with a sort of sombre chuckle—“Hah! don’t you see?” “You know my meaning, of course?” “We’ve been through all that, haven’t we, and wasn’t it dreadful?” “I’ve seen the Other Side of the Moon, and so has Matilda, and oh!——” This is awkward for the general reader, and even for the practical reader; but Mr. Browning is unalterable. He might have written the above-quoted poems in 1830; he might write “Paracelsus” next week.
Nobody who is worth reading has more than two or three good things to say. In fact, the universe doesn’t contain more than half-a-dozen. Mr. Browning is always telling us these leading things. I. “All service is the same with God, Whose puppets, best and worst, are we.” (See “Pippa Passes.”) The gulf between the creature and the Creator is infinite, and “less or more” is of no consequence. II. No human being can please himself in the long run who does not connect his own highest personal ends with common ends of “human weal;” an æsthetic life must turn to restlessness. III. Character is determined, not by a man’s ends, but by the manner in which he pursues them. The grounds of the estimate are internal. The R.A. and the lady Singer in the little poem we have quoted were happy and successful people, measured by others from without. But who are “others?” and what does Anybody know of Anybody Else? The poet teaches us that the true happiest and best of this couple knocked once at their door, and that, through indecision and fear of opinion, they missed it. If they had welcomed it, and married poor, opinion would have called them miserable, but they would have had their cake; and regret is for fools. No wise man ever regrets having had what he wanted; he may have to regret having wronged others in the taking of it. These things Mr. Browning puts, at times, into forms so very daring that half of his readers flinch from following his hand as he pours the matter into the mould. Yet Mr. Browning is the most devout of English poets, not excepting even Herbert. It is useless to quote Caliban and the dying St. John, or that wonderful Rabbi poem—as well send a brick as a “sample” of a house—but any who will just take the trouble to look over them two or three times will, some day, find themselves reading them for the hundredth time.
[Moncure Daniel Conway]
Reviewed:
Dramatis Personæ (RB), London: Chapman & Hall, 1864.
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