R640720A. Dramatis Personæ.
The Guardian, 20 July 1864, p. 722.
Listed in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 31, 343.
In Mr. Allingham’s pleasant poem of Laurence Bloomfield in Ireland, we read that when an educated party is gathered for evening conversation,
Amelia thinks Pre-Raphaelites are wrong,
Complains of Robert Browning’s knotty song,
And Pictor, hot in check, confutes the fair,
But soon forgives her for her gold-red hair.
After all Pictor’s confutation, Mr. Browning’s song is knotty; and its knottiness is a fair subject of complaint. He is not occasionally obscure, as genius has a right to be when it passes the ordinary limits of thought or imagination; he is contorted, convoluted, twisted, entangled. He offers you an idea, and you do not know by which end to take it; he speaks emphatically, and you cannot quite make out if he is in jest or earnest. The present volume of his poems is full of his usual merits; it will also serve to illustrate what is perhaps his greatest fault.
The first poem among Mr. Browning’s Dramatis Personæ is called “James Lee.” It runs to considerable length, and describes some love-making, and love-breaking too, apparently on the coast of Brittany. It is divided into nine shorter poems, some of which Mr. Browning puts into the mouth of the lady, and others into that of the gentleman. Unfortunately, we are not told which belong to James Lee, and which to the unfortunate girl who has made the great mistake of loving him; and as both parties talk, of course, in Mr. Browning’s own vein, curtly, sententiously, and obscurely, it is sometimes rather hard work making out which of the two we are supposed to be listening to. This is a clear defect of literary workmanship. We ought not to be left in doubt about our dramatis personæ, not clearly knowing one from the other, till the drama is nearly over.
Another of Mr. Browning’s new poems is entitled “A Death in the Desert;” and the dying person is St. John the Evangelist. Perhaps the subject is not altogether well chosen; for both early and later Christianity has preferred to think of the beloved disciple as retiring in old age softly and imperceptibly from the eyes of man—falling asleep rather than dying. But instead of dwelling on the choice of the subject, we will pass to the manner of treating it. It ought to be treated assuredly in the utmost simplicity of spirit; the venerable Apostle should be seen, almost a single figure, in the pure atmosphere of love, telling, perhaps, a few of his disciples of that Light and Life which had come so close to him in his early years, and had not deserted him in his old age. The manner of the speaker should be direct and dogmatic, like that of one describing the things which he had seen and heard; argument should be silent in the presence of deep, matured, and habitual conviction. No other voice than that of the Apostle should interrupt the stillness of the scene; no other individuality should interfere with that of the venerable saint. So, at least, it seems to us, but not to Mr. Browning, who prefixes the following introductory lines to the Death in the Desert:—
Supposed of Pamphylax the Antiochene:
It is a parchment, of my rolls the fifth,
Hath three skins glued together, is all Greek,
And goeth from Epsilon down to Mu:
Lies second in the surnamed Chosen Chest,
Covered with cloth of hair, and letter Xi,
From Xanthus, my wife’s uncle, now at peace:
Mu and Epsilon stand for my own name,
I may not write it, but I make a cross
To show I wait his coming, with the rest,
And leave off here: beginneth Pamphylax.
So we are to look at St. John through the eyes of Pamphylax, not without a sense that the Greek alphabet has just been waved before us as a charm, and that as we read, the whole place is full of a rich musty smell, half perfume and half decay, like the odour of an old library. It might have been more pleasant to see St. John for ourselves, but that is now out of the question. Among much powerful and thoughtful writing, we stumble on the following passage:—
That fable of Prometheus and his theft,
How mortals gained Jove’s fiery flower, grows old
(I have been used to hear the Pagans own)
And out of mind; but fire, howe’er its birth,
Here is it, precious to the sophist now
Who laughs the myth of Æschylus to scorn,
As precious to those satyrs of his play,
Who touched it in gay wonder at the thing.
These words are put into the mouth of St. John, whom it is clear they do not suit. His talk was not of the theft of Prometheus, the myth of Æschylus, the sophists, the dramatic satyrs. We must therefore suppose that they really belong to Pamphylax the Antiochene, who cannot have reported St. John’s utterances quite accurately. Antecedently, indeed, this freedom of classical allusion was not likely to belong to Pamphylax, who lived in the age of martyrs, when the Greek stage was not popular among Christians. We are told in the poem that a Xanthus, who said a prayer by the side of the camel-skin on which St. John slept, escaped to Rome, and was burned there. Could this be any relation to Xanthus, wife’s uncle to the writer of the Introduction? As we turn back to study the point, our eyes are caught by the following lines, which had previously been read without any thought of chronology:—
An optic glass
I wondered at erewhile, somewhere in the world,
It had been given a crafty smith to make;
A tube, he turned on objects brought too close,
Lying confusedly insubordinate
For the unassisted eye to master once:
Look through his tube, at distance now they lay,
Become succinct, distinct, so small, so clear.
If it were not for the world small which occurs in the last line, and perplexes us as to the nature of the optical instrument in question, we should say that the thought of two passages belonged to a person who used a microscope, and that this person must be neither St. John nor Pamphylax, but Mr. Browning. If so, it is not surprising that parts of the poem are obscure. The literary artist is endeavouring to paint on three planes at once. One moment we breathe the cool air of the cave in the desert; the next we are half suffocated by the antique dust of an Oriental library; a minute after, we are palpably in England, sitting by Mr. Browning in his study.
Another poem in Mr. Browning’s new volume bears the title of “Caliban upon Setebos, or Natural Theology in the Island.” The first line which Caliban is made to utter is not peculiarly varied, musical, or intelligible:—
Setebos, Setebos, and Setebos!
It can be explained, however, by a reference to the second scene of the Tempest where Caliban observes that Setebos is his mother’s god. Mr. Browning has prefixed as a motto to his poem the words, “Thou thoughtest that I was altogether such an one as thyself,” and thus leads his readers to suppose that his endeavour has been to illustrate the manner in which a degraded nature forms low and unworthy conceptions of its Maker. The subject is an interesting one; perhaps scarcely fitted for a poem, yet certainly capable of interesting illustrative treatment. As for poor Caliban, no great elevation of idea is to be expected of such a man-monster: he could not articulate till Prospero taught him language, which he employed principally in cursing. He could scarcely rise above a barbarous fetichism, garnished with the charms of his mother Sycorax. We speak of Shakspeare’s Caliban, not of Mr. Browning’s, who is quite metaphysical in his own mischievous way, and thinks that Setebos
Made all we see, and us, in spite. How else?
He could not, Himself, make a second self
To be His mate; as well have made Himself.
He would not make what he mislikes or slights
An eyesore to Him, or not worth His pains:
But did, in envy, listlessness, or sport,
Make what Himself, would fain in a manner, be——
Weaker in most points, stronger in a few,
Worthy, and yet mere playthings all the while,
Things He admires and mocks too;—that is it.
And if this capricious deity appears to be hard and arbitrary in his dealings with his creatures, Caliban tells us that he thinks—
such shows nor right nor wrong in Him,
Nor kind, nor cruel; He is strong and Lord.
’Am strong myself compared to yonder crabs
That march now from the mountain to the sea;
’Let twenty pass, and stone the twenty-first,
Loving not, hating not, just choosing so.
’Say, the first straggler that boasts purple spots
Shall join the file, one pincer twisted off;
’Say, this bruised fellow shall receive a worm,
And two worms, he whose nippers end in red;
As it likes me each time, I do: so He.
The capital letters which in these extracts introduce the personal pronoun, when it stands for Setebos, are not ours; they are either Caliban’s or Mr. Browning’s. The truth is, the Caliban of the poem is but a stalking-horse from behind which the writer shoots at higher game. Caliban was much more apprehensive of being turned into a barnacle, or an ape with a marvellous low forehead, than into a natural theologian. Mr. Browning employs him as a means of attacking the conceptions which far more developed intellects than that of the son of Sycorax have allowed to mingle with their ideas of a Being infinitely higher than Setebos. The attack is, of course, quite legitimate, but odd indeed is the manner in which Mr. Browning chooses to make it, through the uncouth barbarism of a brutal savage, who is impaled on a difficult controversy and wriggles there to attract the curious reader, much as a worm wriggles as a bait on a fisherman’s hook.
The last character which Mr. Browning allows so speak at length among his dramatis personæ is a miserable wretch called Sludge—a Yankee, a spiritualist, and a medium, who has been caught cheating, and apologises for his misdoings as best he may. The main line of his defence is that his patrons are almost as bad as he is, having suggested and encouraged deception, and so made it his interest to practise it. He argues, in fact, that there are a great many virtual Sludges in the world; the fewer the better, certainly, for a more complex and elaborate specimen of cunning, meanness, flattery, and malice, covered with the merest gloss of civilisation and perfumed with the sickliest odour of plausibility, it is not easy to conceive. To read about him is like handling a snake; what must it be to write about him? Mr. Browning, however, appears to enjoy the process; he manipulates Sludge quite as dexterously as Caliban, coiling, like a charmer, the poisonous creature about his neck, and burying its slimy coils in his bosom.
Surely there is something wrong in the turn of Mr. Browning’s mind, leading him away from what is simple and beautiful. He has high and uncommon powers, which enable him to see his way where ordinary men would be wholly in the dark, and to see and fix ideas so subtle and pervading that most people can no more grasp them than they can grasp a shadow. He is often both acute and profound, and sometimes speaks out unpleasant truths with a terrible and withering clearness. He is not insensible to beauty, still less to the mysterious aspirations after perfection which beauty of sight or mind—a colour or a musical note—excites in the poetic nature. Passages of exceeding charm could be quoted from his Dramatis Personæ, and are not quoted now only because they would divert our attention from the question before us—why, with his rare power, he so often teases and perplexes us. Three reasons, perhaps, may be given for his partial failure. First, he is unwise in his choice of subjects, choosing the complex, grotesque, and bizarre rather than the simple and beautiful. Secondly, he is much too fond of prying curiously into those unpleasant recesses of our nature which, like manure-heaps, should not be disturbed except when they are used. Thirdly and lastly, he is like a ventriloquist, who personates several characters at once: he writes a monologue which has to do duty as a dialogue or a polylogue; he tries to make his characters speak for themselves and for other people; he appears simultaneously as author, actor, and critic among his own dramatis personæ,
Reviewed:
Dramatis Personæ (RB), London: Chapman & Hall, 1864.
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