R641022A. Dramatis Personæ (Boston, 1864).
The New-York Times, 22 October 1864, p. 2.
Listed in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 31, 354.
The warmth or devotion manifested by a sect, either in literature or religion, is generally in an inverse ratio to its size, and there exist, undoubtedly, the intelligent few to whom a new volume of Robert Browning will prove a dearer possession—a choicer treasure than even the similar present recently offered us by Tennyson. The two poets are contemporaries, and started on the race for fame at a nearly corresponding period of their youth. Browning’s first poem, Paracelsus was given to the world in 1835, when he was in his twenty-third year, and so natural to him is the mode of expression adopted in his poetry, that succeeding years have done little to deepen the characteristics, or bring into more prominent relief the idiosyncrasies exhibited in his first work. In one respect the fortunes of the poets have been different, while half the writing world (especially the more juvenile portion of it) are weighing their syllables and measuring their versification, in the vain hope of reproducing the magic flow of Tennyson’s heroic metre, or the wild and airy charm of his lyrics—Browning can scarcely be said to have found a single imitator. Though the style of no other writer presents so many obvious peculiarities, they are not for every one’s use. His involved and cumbrous sentences are double-shotted with knowledge, reflection and poetical insight. Wanting these, the imitation would be mere blank cartridge, scarcely a passable echo of the original. Browning’s range has been a wider one than that of Tennyson. Narrative poems, dramas, (three of which have met with favor on the stage,) lyrics, and pieces that come within no recognized arrangement, have all flowed freely from his pen, and attest a breadth and variety of power that has left undying traces in the minds of his readers, and has affected, in a manner we are yet too near to estimate, the national poetical literature of the age. It is a shallow aspiration that would desire to see the excellencies of Browning, cleared of his eccentricities and open to the current comprehension of all. The poet is homogeneous, and his radiancies and obscurities are all cognate in their origin. In much of his writings, Robert Browning is less a poet than a “subtle souled psychologist,” flinging himself with all the resources of vast learning and creative art into attempts to reconstruct the mental processes of personages the most remote from ordinary comprehension or sympathy. Such are in the present volume—“Caliban upon Setebos, or Natural Theology in the Island,” “A Death in the Desert,” “Mr. Sludge, the Medium,” and the greater part of his previous collection, Men and Women. Success in this field is not for the plaudits of ordinary readers; for them each poem wants a commentary, and is scarcely intelligible without. We do not believe that there are twenty people in New-York—and are not sure that there is one—who could at the first reading understand the drift of the author in the poem, “A Death in the Desert,” or make out the machinery by which it is introduced, and apportion to each of the characters his share of the narration. Though nothing can be finer than the conception, or more vividly touched in single lines and epithets than the situation. Its subject is the aged apostle St. John dying in the desert, tended lovingly by disciples in the cool of a cave, and uttering a protest against the heresies of the time, while a wild Bactrian convert keeps watch, where “outside was all noon, and the burning blue.” An author who designedly adopts this abstruse form for the communication of his ideas must necessarily be ready to relinquish the suffrages of the many; but there are indications in “Dramatis Personæ” of a capacity for clearer things, where the poet permits himself expression in his own person, instead of vivifying with strange speech the dusky spectres of past ages and remote countries. Some of the shorter poems are admirable in conciseness and strength, and are written in such excellent English as must disgust the painful students of the original Browningese dialect; and make them fear that their oracle is gradually coming down to the vernacular. That a really great poet may in time work himself clear of any willful obscurities, and so become more appreciated by the mass of readers is sincerely to be hoped. We give a short poem, severe in its simplicity, that all will appreciate, and which derives additional interest when the writer’s relation to the highest woman’s intellect of the century—his lately lost wife—is considered, alluded to at the end—
prospice.
Fear death?—to feel the fog in my throat,
The mist in my face,
When the snows begin and the blasts denote
I am nearing the place,
The power of the night, the press of the storm,
The post of the foe;
When he stands, the Arch-fear in a visible form,
Yet the strong man must go;
For the journey is done and the summit attained
And the barriers fall,
Though a battle’s to fight ere the guerdon be gained,
The reward of it all.
I was ever a fighter, so one fight more,
The best and the last!
I would hate that death bandaged my eyes, and forebore,
And bade me creep past;
No! let me taste the whole of it, fare like my peers
The heroes of old;
Bear the brunt, in a minute pay glad life’s arrears
Of pain, darkness and cold,
For sudden the worst turns the best to the brave,
The black minutes at end,
And the elements rage, the fiend voices that rave,
Shall dwindle, shall blend,
Shall change, shall become first a peace, then a joy,
Then a light, then my breast,
O thou soul of my soul! I shall clasp thee again,
And with God be the rest!
Reviewed:
Dramatis Personæ (RB), Boston: Ticknor & Fields, 1864.
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