R640702A. Dramatis Personæ.
John Bull, 2 July 1864, p. 428.
Listed in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 31, 343.
When the announcement was made that Robert Browning was about to publish a new volume of poems, all his former listeners were naturally full of curiosity as well as of expectation. Would he, they wondered, make some concession at last to the tastes and demand of the literary vulgar? We know him, they said, for a truly great and original poet, whom the world in general for some reason or other has not yet been able to appreciate. Will he learn policy by experience and endeavour to conciliate the dispensers of popularity by meeting their requirements in some degree? Will he examine into the qualifications which make Mr. Tupper the favourite poet of our age, and endeavour in some degree at least to emulate the proficiency attained by others in those requisites for popular renown?
Alas! if any such desires were felt or expressed, Mr. Browning has not shown the slightest wish to gratify them. No danger here to Mr. Tupper’s pride of place! There is song here that will amaze, exalt, enchant some, but it will be as much as ever “caviare to the general.” Fit audience though few—it is Browning’s deliberate choice and he means to stick to it. We are glad of this—not that we do not think that much of Mr. Browning’s lack of pleasing the many is due to absolute defects in his compositions. He is self-willed, whimsical, impudently defiant of critical prejudices, and apparently careless not only whether you understand him or not, but whether you read him or not. As he was before, so he is in this volume. There never was a poet who so fully realizes for us the nature of poetry as a gift—that mere “possession” on which Plato expatiates in the Ion—as Robert Browning does. He seems to string verses together in obedience to an instinct which he cannot resist.
He does but sing because he must,
And pipes but as the linnets do.
And this character of his genius involves in it two consequences. First the wondrous power over verse which his “faculty divine” brings with it leads him to a sort of familiarity with rhyme at which ordinary readers are scandalized. They expect the poet to be on punctilious terms with his Muse, to treat her with a sedate and stately politeness befitting the solemn work which the pair have undertaken. But Browning lounges at his ease, and chatters poetry as if it were small-talk. His love of the Italian poets has evidently accustomed him too, to this kind of dealing with poetry. There is marvellous power in his rhymed talk, even when he babbles after such a fashion as this:—
I liked that way you had with your curls
Wound to a ball in a net behind:
Your cheek was chaste as a quaker-girl’s,
And your mouth—there was never, to my mind,
Such a funny mouth, for it would not shut;
And the dented chin, too—what a chin!
There were certain ways when you spoke, some words
That you know you never could pronounce:
You were thin, however; like a bird’s
Your hand seemed—some would say, the pounce
Of a scaly-footed hawk—all but!
The world was right when it called you thin.
A whole legion of poets might have wearied themselves with stanzas of Byronian descriptiveness before they would have accomplished for us such a living picture as we realise from these touches. But the public are dissatisfied with this bold, unadorned phraseology. They expect the Muse to be well-dressed in the fashionable costume of the period, and ushered into their presence with due solemnity.
Secondly this spontaneousness of poetic power makes its possessor somewhat careless of the specific purpose with which he writes—a grievous drawback in the eyes of our reading public. Browning is as unconscious it would seem of a “moral” as the linnets themselves. Mr. Robert Montgomery and Mr. Tupper have made themselves acceptable and famous, above all their contemporaries, by the popular belief that their poems were written with “such a good purpose.” We wholly deny however that the great imaginative poets—the Shakespeares and Wordsworths and Tennysons and Brownings—are morally impeachable on the charge that they are neglectful of a moral. If they have a faith of fancy which enables them to seize with vivid reality the things of beauty which come upon their spirits, they have no less a moral faith which prompts them to believe that these visions of theirs will yield good lessons for their audience, though they themselves may be unable to define such lessons or careless of pressing them on the attention. But the public in general, no doubt, demand a positive, an express, even an obtrusive moral in their poets; and on this ground also Browning is neglected, and will be neglected probably while he lives. He may safely “appeal to the Avenger Time.”
The title of this book is happily chosen. There is a wondrous dramatic power in Browning; and it is almost a curiosity to find it mingled with a total want of theatrical skill. No one could ever think of representing his dramatic works on the stage; and yet his intense insight into special moods of thought has never been surpassed. Witness, for instance, the life of those pictures in his Garden Fancies. In the exercise of this power he naturally delights to let his characters speak for themselves rather than to introduce them by external description. There is one theme on which our author broods with a fondness which tempts us to believe it is associated with a knowledge—and perhaps a sore knowledge—of his own temperament. It haunts him like that sense of world-weariness which seems to have haunted Shakespeare, and which he expresses in Hamlet, in Timon, in Jacques, and in a greater or less degree, in several other of his characters. A man of Mr. Browning’s intense and vehement perception of the imaginative aspect of all things round him would hardly be a man of energetic action. Certain it is that he is prone to dwell in a melancholy vein on the regrets which we feel for opportunities missed through mere inertness. All his readers will retain a vivid remembrance of “The Statue and the Bust.” The same angry wailing of repentance breathes through more than one of these poems. We have already quoted a stanza from “Too Late”—the fierce meditations of a lover on the death of
A woman he loved so well,
Who married the other.
He ponders over the feeling that he “ought to have done more” to attain her; and breaks out in his savage impetuosity after this fashion:—
Handsome, were you? ’Tis more than they held,
More than they said; I was ’ware and watched:
I was the ’scapegrace, this rat belled
The cat, this fool got his whiskers scratched:
The others? No head that was turned, no heart
Broken, my lady, assure yourself!
Each soon made his mind up; so and so
Married a dancer, such and such
Stole his friend’s wife, stagnated slow,
Or maundered, unable to do as much,
And muttered of peace where he had no part:
While, hid in the closet, laid on the shelf,—
On the whole, you were let alone, I think!
So, you looked to the other, who acquiesced;
My rival, the proud man,—prize your pink
Of poets! A poet he was! I’ve guessed:
He rhymed you his rubbish nobody read,
Loved you and doved you—did not I laugh!
There was a prize! But we both were tried.
Oh, heart of mine, marked broad with her mark,
Tekel, found wanting, set aside,
Scorned! See, I bleed these tears in the dark
Till comfort come and the last be bled:
He? He is tagging your epitaph.
If it would only come over again! . . . .
An argument of the like nature is pursued in the conversation between two former lovers who ought to have been joined together, in “Dis Aliter Visum;” the end of which we quote rather to show the strange eccentricities of metre in which Browning is prone to indulge than for any other purpose:—
Let the mere star-fish in his vault
Crawl in a wash of weed, indeed,
Rose-jacynth to the finger-tips:
He, whole in body and soul, outstrips
Man, found with either in default.
But what’s whole, can increase no more,
Is dwarfed and dies, since here’s its sphere.
The devil laughed at you in his sleeve!
You know not? That I well believe;
Or you had saved two souls—nay, four.
For Stephanie sprained last night her wrist,
Ankle or something. “Pooh,” cry you?
At any rate she danced, all say,
Vilely; her vogue has had its day.
Here comes my husband from his whist.
Reviewed:
Dramatis Personæ (RB), London: Chapman & Hall, 1864.
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