R640700H. Dramatis Personæ.
The Rose, the Shamrock and the Thistle, July 1864, pp. 253–256.
Listed in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 31, 343.
At last Mr. Browning is getting a large audience, and that not confined to old admirers and friendly critics, who have scarcely dared to say of him all the good they have long thought. The gradual but certain rise which he has made in the public esteem has been worthy of note. “Paracelsus” made its appearance thirty years ago, and by a few attentive readers its author was at once recognized as a poet of great power, marred by some obscurity. Other poems, by the same writer, quickly followed; dramas that deserved, as we think, to be successful, but which were not so. It was said that Mr. Browning was clever and original, but there he did not always care to make himself understood. Of his “Bells and Pomegranates,” she who was afterwards his wife wrote in “Lady Geraldine’s Courtship:”—
Or, from Browning some Pomegranate,
Which, when cut deep down the middle,
Shows a heart within, blood-tinctured,
Of a veined-humanity.
“Sordello” gave some grounds for the charge of obscurity; and for a time it was settled beyond dispute that to get at the meaning of Mr. Browning’s poems was quite impossible. For many years this opinion was steadily maintained, but at length the change came. The publication, in 1855, of that wonderful series of character pictures, called “Men and Women,” set the author right—at least, in some measure—with the critics; and he began to be warmly praised. The exquisite little poem, “Evelyn Hope,” melancholy but not morbid, full of fancy but in nowise fantastic, delighted all who read it; the pathos of “In a Year” was soon discovered and valued; a lesson in resignation was learned from the gentleness of “Andrea del Sarto;” lusty life beat through “Fra Lippo Lippi;” the modern sceptic spoke in “Bishop Blougram;” and the searching mind of ancient Greece found utterance in the questionings of “Cleon.” And still the poet was not popular. Eighteen months ago, two friends who had from the first been fascinated by him, put forth, with his sanction, a selection from his published works. To the reader who hitherto had not known him, this selection—which could not have been better made—showed at once his wide range of power. It has had, we believe, a very large sale; and doubtless it has prepared the way for the reception which his new volume, “Dramatis Personæ,” is now getting.
“Dramatis Personæ” is nothing more than a second series of “Men [p. 254→] and Women.” Of the persons, some are living, others died a thousand years ago; and the drama is the drama of Life, with its unstable scenes. We are not to attempt an analysis of each poem. That would be useless at the present time, for the book has yet to be known.
The first set of verses chronicle the growing fears of a woman whose husband neglects her. She loves him deeply, but it is gradually unfolded to her that the love is not returned. The disappointment and sorrow that follow the discovery are finely expressed in the first lines of the poem:—
Ah, love, but a day,
And the world has changed:
The sun’s away,
And the bird’s estranged.
Her love does not quite blind her to the faults of the man: she sees in him—
Many a weed,
And plenty of passions run to seed,
But a little good grain too.
She gives him credit, we suspect for more “good grain” than he possesses; or he would not so have deserted her, and she would not so greatly mourn for him.
“A Legend of Pornic,” the story of a girl who wrapped a number of louis d’or, the price of her sin, in the folds of her “great gold hair,” and was buried with the money—having begged that her beautiful hair might be left as it lay when she died—is admirably told, and at the end of the story Mr. Browning finely says:—
Evil or good may be better or worse
In the human heart; but the mixture of each
Is a marvel and a curse.
The moral he draws from the tale is perhaps more curious than just. He cites this girl of Pornic as a proof of “original sin, the corruption of man’s heart:” and argues that the Christian faith is the true faith; because, in asserting “original sin,” it was the first to “launch, point blank, its dart at the head of a lie.” We leave this violent and by no means closely reasoned defence of the faith to be judged by our readers.
“Abt Vogler” bears some resemblance to an earlier, and as we think a yet finer poem—“Saul.” It is the expression of the Abbot’s thoughts upon the musical instrument of his invention. He is dissatisfied with this work of his, in that he finds it unable to give voice to the hopes of his heart. The strains of his music pass too quickly away; the wondrous palace he has reared falls too soon to the ground. And yet it has been, and shall be again. He cannot doubt that.
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. [p. 255→]
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 bye.
His failure he regards but as a triumph’s evidence for the fulness of the days. He is content to soberly acquiesce; yet feels for the common chord, slides by semi-tones into the minor, “blunts it into a ninth,” and reaches at last his resting-place, “the C Major of this life.” In this poem the musician’s earnest hopes and struggles find powerful expression; just as they do in the earlier poem, “Saul,” and as the painter’s aspirations are expressed in “Andrea del Sarto.”
“Rabbi Ben Ezra,” a wise man’s thoughts on growing old, is perhaps the finest poem in the volume before us. Unlike the Greek Cleon, this old Jew fears neither age nor the tomb; but rather welcomes both, for he looks to a better life beyond the grave and gate of Death:—
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!”
With quiet confidence he waits for the Unseen Things. In his youth he had done much that he cannot now approve of, but he does not regret the efforts which have surely taught him something:—
As it was better, youth
Should strive, through acts uncouth,
Toward making, than repose on aught found made;
So better, age, exempt
From strife, should know, than tempt
Further. Thou waitedst age; wait death nor be afraid.
He compares his life to the clay, from which the potter fashions the cup; and he prays that the cup of his life may be perfect; for he knows that it will last—it and the potter—though Time’s wheel should run back or stop.
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.
“A Death in the Death” purports to be the contents of a parchment written by Pamphylax, the Antiochene, and narrating the death of St. John the Evangelist. It will be read with interest, because of its bearing on some of the doubts of our day, if for no other reason. Apart, however, from questions of creed—which no poem can ever settle—it shows Mr. Browning’s power of utter self-abandonment. Here, as in a picture, is this desert scene, the death of St. John. Pamphylax, Xanthus, Valens, and the Boy, are before us: the anxious friends who [p. 256→] moisten his lips with wine, and seek to refresh him by laying on his forehead the broadest plaintain [sic] leaf they can find. At the mouth of the cavern stands the Bactrian convert,
A wild childish man,
Who could not write nor speak, but only loved.
And in this company the Apostle draws his last breath; and it is to these few followers that he speaks of the doubts that shall arise in later ages, “in islets yet unnamed, amid the sea.”
Mr. Browning, as an exposer of shams, is almost as good as Mr. Carlyle himself. “Mr. Sludge,” the “Medium,” is powerfully handled. His confessions are made to a patron who has found out a trick of his, and to him he admits his long deceit, and tries to excuse it. In this work—one of the most important in the book—there are some truths very dreadful to accept as such. We cannot attempt an abridgment of Mr. Sludge’s arguments.
“Apparent Failure” is an account of the writer’s visit to the Morgue, with reflections thereon. Here before him, each on his copper couch, are the three men who did most abhor their life in Paris on the previous day, and who, afraid to struggle with it, were not afraid to end it. Were they made for a fate so wretched? He cannot think so. Their sin must be atoned. His own hope is that the First will come round again after the Last:—
That what begun best can’t end worst,
Nor what God blest once, prove accurst.
The same thought is as finely expressed in “In Memoriam:”
Oh, yet we trust that somehow good
Will be the final goal of ill,
To pangs of nature, sins of will,
Defeats of doubt, and taints of blood.
* * * * *
Behold, we know not anything;
I can but trust that good shall fall
At last—far off—at last, to all,
And every winter change to spring.
On this subject the two great poets of the time are not at variance. We have made our comments on the chief poems in “Dramatis Personæ.” The work—like all the rest of Mr. Browning’s works—is of unequal merit. There are lines which witness of closely-linked thoughts, and of a strong imagination. There are lines, on the other hand, whose ugliness mars the poems in which they are found. As a whole, the book is worthy of the writer; hardly equal perhaps to “Men and Women”—though parts of it, we think, are finer than any portions of the earlier work—yet showing no sign of lessening power in the author, but rather indicative of great things still to come for our pleasure and our good.
T.F.W. [Thomas Frederick Wedmore]
Reviewed:
Dramatis Personæ (RB), London: Chapman & Hall, 1864.
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