R641100D. Dramatis Personæ.
The Dublin University Magazine, November 1864, pp. 573–579.
As reprinted in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 31, 354–358.
Regarded æsthetically, and in relation to the poetic literature of England from its origin onwards, the productions of the current era will undoubtedly hold a high place in the estimation of posterity. The retrospect is like that over a varied country, with here a magnificent range of mountains; here a sublime peak over which the thunder-clouds gather; there a long interval of lowland, rising as it approaches the point from which we view the prospect into a series of undulations of various size, beauty, and cultivation. First—for though Chaucer displays exquisite humour and observation, the morning star of British poesy reflected not a little of its light from the early Italian writers—the works of the dramatists of the Elizabethan age assume a gigantic prominence, dominated by the genius of Shakspeare—a genius which for power, variety, reach, depth, and subtlety of thought and imagination has no parallel in any literature; then, after an interval, that of Milton, a summit higher, but less ample [p. 574→] in its base and less universal in its aspects, towers supreme; then, for a period, true poetry disappears, and the plain beneath those great landmarks is occupied by the works of versifiers, the Dryden and Pope school, and their succedent imitators, Goldsmith, Akenside, and other bards of description and thought; until again poetic genius begins to exhibit a truer sense of the imaginative faculty in Byron, Wordsworth, Shelley, and above all, Keats—here and there a little in Coleridge, not at all in South[e]y. Byron excelled in description and wit; Moore, in fancy and image; Wordsworth, in meditative imagination, subjective and objective; Keats, in the sense of beauty—a sense in which he has been rarely equalled, never surpassed. At length our survey reaches the current period, whose poetry, while distinguished by much true and original display of imaginative faculty, is an illustration of a cultivated age, inasmuch as no small portion of it has been turned to form under the influence of that conscious art inspired by the principles of æsthetical criticism.
Much of this tendency toward the truer expression of the ideal faculties, is doubtless attributable to the influence of the productions of Tennyson, of which we took a brief survey in the October number of this Magazine, and to the appreciative study of Shakspeare and the writers of his epoch. In the “Festus” of Bailey and the “Life Drama” and “City Poems” of Smith, we see productions characterized by great natural spontaneity. In the first we see an imagination for thought and image chiefly; in the second, a fine descriptive faculty. Though, however, both these first-named poems are thrown into a dramatic form, they are essentially undramatic; the attraction is purely poetic, attaching to the abundance of ideas and fine lines of fancy, frequently beautiful, though too often bizarre. Bailey, indeed, appears to have modelled himself on Byron, as Smith on Tennyson; whom, though he approaches sometimes in description, he is far behind in art culture. In their ideal and execution many of Arnold’s compositions are in the highest degree poetic, and while evincing more of the strict purity of classical taste and manner, may, as a class, be compared to those of Browning in originality and independence of conception. Some pieces of Owen Meredith also possess much merit; but he rather belongs to the order of energetic prose versifiers of the Byron and Bulwer school, than that of imagination, in which in English literature the highest names are Shakspeare, Milton, Keats, Wordsworth, Tennyson, and Browning.
The mere dramatic power, or that which produces structural effects by contrasts of suspense and surprise, is no very uncommon talent; but when it is united with the poetic, the faculty of character creation, and development, inspired with the sense of beauty and power, it is one of the rarest, as all literature testifies. This complex gift Browning possesses, possibly in a larger degree than any dramatic poet since the great Elizabethan period; and so strong is the bent of his genius in this direction, that it determines the form of even his shortest compositions. His early poem, “Paracelsus,” must be admitted to be a splendid piece of ideal character conception, exhibiting a peculiar phase of mind, worked out with the most subtle analysis of motive and knowledge of nature, and interspersed with many and true flashes of imagination. His “Blot on the Scutcheon” and “Luria” present us in their concluding scenes with possibly the most pathetic situations in modern dramatic literature. Of the interest and beauty which give such a prevailing charm to his romances and dramatic lyrics we need not speak. To such poems as the “Flight of the Dutchers [sic],” “Pippa Passes,” “In a Gondola,” “How they brought the good news from Ghent to Aix,” the “Bishop at the Tomb of St. Praxted [sic],” “Warring [sic],” and many others, both in the two volumes of his Poems and “Men and Women,” all inspired with a sense of true poetry, recur with never-failing interest. Indeed, the dramatic-poet talent which is displayed in all Browning’s compositions creates a much stronger impression on the mind than that which arises from works far more artistically finished; for Browning, great as a poetic conceiver and dramatic artist, is far from always being a poetic one. Most of his pieces, long and short, appear to be rather sketches [p. 575→] thrown off in the first heat of the mind and never revised; while all are forcible and emotive, and many are distinguished by a profound knowledge of passion and a high descriptive faculty, hardly one of them can be called a finished composition. Several, indeed, remind us of the sketches of Michel Angelo—outlines full of power, passion, grace, beauty, rudely sketched in a moment of inspiration, and then thrown by for ever. His primary purpose is to give nature and dramatic force to his subjects, and this is of course the highest object a poet can have in view; but in working them out he is often so obscure as to be well-nigh unintelligible. Such is especially the case in his “Sordello”—a work in which, it has been said, if the author understood his own meaning, he possessed an advantage which scarcely any of his readers have attained. Everyone has heard of the great German philosopher, who, alluding to his chef d’œuvre, remarked, proudly, “that there was but one man beside himself on the Continent who could comprehend it, and even he not thoroughly”—a comment which, while indicating that he was really beside himself, would not be inapplicable to the “Sordello,” respecting which the following anecdote is told:—On one occasion Jerrold, then in indifferent health, was residing at Brighton, and, to pass an hour, brought Browning’s poem with him. For some time he read page after page, but without comprehending a single line. At length, finding it equally unintelligible as he proceeded, the horrible thought occurred to him that his attack of illness had weakened his understanding. He rushed home, and, giving the book to his wife, asked her to tell him what she thought of it. After reading a while, the lady exclaimed, “Why, its gibberish!” “Thank God,” said the wit; “then my mind is safe.”
Several of the earlier poems in Browning’s last volume, “Dramatis Personæ,” partake but too much of that obscurity, of which he gave so surpassing an example in “Sordello.” “James Lee” is, we believe, a theme of unrequited love; and here and there, where the meaning is intelligible, the feeling is delicately touched, and the verses musical. “Gold Hair,” a legend of the Pornic, is a pretty story, and worked out with a little more definition than the other. “The Worst of It” is very cloudy, as is also “Dis Aliter Visum, or Le Byron de nos Jours,” and “Too Late.” The first theme in the volume, indeed, which possesses a clear poetic interest, is that entitled “Abt Vogler,” a monologue of the musician, after he had been extemporizing on a musical instrument of his invention. The dramatic soliloquy or monologue is a form which Browning much affects, and which is admirably chosen to body forth the peculiar turn of his mind. Many of the first pieces in his previous volumes are thrown into this shape, and, with the exception of three or four, all in his “Dramatis Personæ.” “Abt Vogler” is certainly a fine illustration of the aspiring musician, embodying his imaginations from the harmonies of the grand voluntary he evokes. As the keys give their sound to the wish of his soul, he builds fancy on fancy, reverie on reverie, piling up a palace of thought from the soaring vibrations. At length he turns to the great Creator of the harmonies of nature for inspiration.
Therefore to whom turn I but to Thee, the ineffable Name?
Builder and maker, Thou, of houses not made with hands!
What, have fear of change from Thee who art ever the same?
Doubt that Thy power can fill the heart that Thy power expands?
There shall never be one lost good! What was, shall live as before;
The evil is null, is nought, is silence implying sound;
What was good, shall be good, with, for evil, so much good more;
On the earth the broken arcs; in the heaven, a perfect round.
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.
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-by. [p. 576→]
And what is our failure here but a triumph’s evidence
For the fulness of the days? Have we withered or agonized?
Why else was the pause prolonged but that singing might issue thence?
Why rushed the discords in, but that harmony should be prized?
Sorrow is hard to bear, and doubt is slow to clear,
Each sufferer says his say, his scheme of the weal and woe:
But God has a few of us whom He whispers in the ear;
The rest may reason and welcome: ’tis we musicians know.
“Well, it is earth with me; silence resumes her reign:
I will be patient and proud, and soberly acquiesce.
Give me the keys. I feel for the common chord again,
Sliding by semitones, till I sink to the minor,—yes,
And I blunt it into a ninth, and I stand on alien ground,
Surveying a while the heights I rolled from into the deep;
Which, hark, I have dared and done, for my resting-place is found,
The C major of this life: so, now I will try to sleep.”
Browning delights in throwing his imagination into the characters and lives of individuals whose works and memory glimmer in the side-walks of history and art, and in resuscitating his alchymists, philosophers, Italian painters, and such-like, his minute technical knowledge on relational subjects, and the power and ease with which he fuses such details into his soliloquies or descriptions, gives at times a marvellous vitality and naturalness to their embodiment.
Every reader will be charmed also with the Rabbi Ben Ezra’s discourse on life, its problems, virtues, and ultimate purpose.
Ay, note that potter’s wheel,
That metaphor! and feel
Why time spins fast, why passive lies our clay,—
Thou, to whom fools propound,
When the wine makes its round,
“Since life fleets, all is change; the Past gone, seize to-day!”
Fool! All that is, at all
Lasts ever, past recall;
Earth changes, but thy soul and God stand sure;
What entered into thee,
That was, is, and shall be:
Time’s wheel runs back or stops: Potter and clay endure.
He fixed thee mid this dance
Of plastic circumstance,
This present, thou, forsooth, wouldst fain arrest:
Machinery just meant
To give thy soul its bent,
Try thee and turn thee forth, sufficiently impressed.
What though the earlier grooves
Which ran the laughing loves
Around thy base, no longer pause and press?
What though, about thy rim,
Scull-things in order grim
Grow out, in graver mood, obey the sterner stress?
Look not thou down but up!
To uses of a cup,
The festal board, lamp’s flash and trumpet’s peal,
The new wine’s foaming flow,
The Master’s lips a-glow!
Thou, heaven’s consummate cup, what needst thou with earth’s wheel?
By far the finest poems in the volume, however, are “A Death in the Desert,” and “Caliban upon Setebos, or Natural Theology in the Island.” In the first, which is finely conceived, and worked out with admirable truth of detail, colour, and suggestiveness, Browning represents St. John expiring, in his hundredth year, in a desert cavern, attended in his last hours by three of his disciples and a convert Bactrian. The centenarian apostle lies in a sort of trance. One places the wet lappet of a linen robe on his forehead, and another chafes his hands; then Zanthus administers a sip of wine, upon which—
Only he did not so much wake as turn,
And smile a little, as a sleeper does
If any dear one call him, touch his face,
And smiles and loves, but will not be disturbed.
Presently the old man awakes, sets himself up, and pours forth a discourse, in which he recounts the incidents of his mission, his recollections of the Saviour, and then proceeds to develop his last gospel of love.
For life, with all it yields of joy and woe,
And hope and fear,—believe the aged friend,—
Is just our chance o’ the prize of learning love,
How love might be, hath been indeed, and is; [p. 577→]
And that we hold thenceforth to the uttermost
Such prize despite the envy of the world.
And, having gained truth, keep truth: that is all.
But see the double way wherein we are led,
How the soul learns diversely from the flesh!
With flesh, that hath so little time to stay,
And yields mere basements for the soul’s emprise,
Expect prompt teaching. Helpful was the light,
And warmth was cherishing and food was choice
To every man’s flesh, thousand years ago,
As now to yours and mine; the body sprang
At once to the height, and stayed: but the soul,—no!
Since sages who, this noontide, meditate
In Rome or Athens, may descry some point
Of the eternal power, hid yestereve;
And as thereby the power’s whole mass extends,
So much extends the æther floating o’er,
The love that tops the might, the Christ in God.
Then, as new lessons shall be learned in these
Till earth’s work stop and useless time run out,
So duly, daily, needs provision be
For keeping the soul’s prowess possible,
Building new barriers as the old decay,
Saving us from evasion of life’s proof,
Putting the question ever, “Does God love,
And will ye hold that truth against the world?”
Ye know there needs no second proof with good
Gained for our flesh from any earthly source:
We might go freezing, ages,—give us fire,
Thereafter we judge fire at its full worth,
And guard it safe through every chance, ye know!
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.
While were it so with the soul,—this gift of truth
Once grasped, were this our soul’s gain safe, and sure
To prosper as the body’s gain is wont,—
Why, man’s probation would conclude his earth
Crumble; for he both reasons and decides,
Weighs first, then chooses: will he give up fire
For gold or purple once he knows its worth?
Could he give Christ up were His worth as plain?
Therefore, I say, to test man, shift the proofs,
Nor may he grasp that fact like other fact,
And straightway in his life acknowledge it,
As, say, the indubitable bliss of fire.
After alluding to the opposition and scepticism with which the great mission which he preached during his life was received even at a late date after the Saviour’s death, so that he had to restate much of the Lord’s life forgotten or misdelivered, and let it work, he goes on to conceive that a day may come when even his personal existence will be ignored, people inquiring was John at all, and did he say he saw the marvels delivered; and suggests, if any doubt exists, let it be stated and answered, while yet he can explain:—
What is the doubt, my brothers? Quick, with it!
I see you stand conversing, each new face,
Either in fields, of yellow summer eves,
On islets yet unnamed amid the sea;
Or pace for shelter ’neath a portico
Out of the crowd in some enormous town
Where now the larks sing in a solitude;
Or muse upon blank heaps of stone and sand
Idly conjectured to be Ephesus:
And no one asks his fellow any more
“Where is the premise [sic] of His coming?” but
“Was he revealed in any of His lives,
As Power, as Love, as Influencing Soul?”
As the “Death in the Desert” is intended to illustrate the religion of Christian love, in the poem entitled “Caliban upon Setebos,” Browning has given us the theories of a savage mind on the problems of a superior power, the world, life, death, &c. In this picture of the modern poet we find Caliban exhibits an advance from the state in which we first formed his acquaintance in Shakespeare’s “Tempest;” his brutal mind has developed, he has begun to make his surroundings—his present and future—the object [p. 578→] of his thoughts. In speculating on his god, Setebos, in the manner of savages, he projects his individuality, with its fear, baseness, passion, into the conception—idealizes, in rude fashion, a powerful being, who made all things less potent than himself, who is not all evil, and placable, though terrible. In the beginning of the poem we are presented with a glimpse of the creature whose speculative monologue follows:—
Will sprawl, now that the heat of day is best,
Flat on his belly in the pit’s much mire,
With elbows wide, fists clenched to prop his chin;
And while he kicks both feet in the cool slush,
And feels about his spine small eft-things course,
Run in and out each arm, and make him laugh,
And while above his head a pompion plant
Coating the cave top, as a brow its eye,
Creeps down to touch and tickle hair and beard,
And now a flower drops with a bee inside,
And now a fruit to snap at, catch, and crunch:
He looks out o’er yon sea, which sunbeams cross
And recross, till they weave a spider’s web,
(Meshes of fire some great fish breaks at times,)
And talks to his own self, howe’er he please.
Touching that other, whom his dam called God,
Because to talk about him, vexes—ha,
Could He but know! and time to vex is now,
When talk is safer than in winter-time.
Moreover Prosper and Miranda sleep
In confidence he drudges at their task,
And it is good to cheat the pair, and gibe,
Letting the rank tongue blossom into speech.
He then commences to speculate on his dam’s god, Setebos, in a long monologue, in which Browning has worked out the lowest phase of fetic[h]ism with considerable power; and here at least, if not otherwhere, the uncouthness of the style in which he makes the half bestial savage utter his reflections, adds not a little to the artistic effect of the piece:—
Setebos, Setebos, and Setebos!
Thinketh, He dwelleth i’ the cold o’ the moon.
Thinketh He made it, with the sun to match,
But not the stars; the stars came otherwise;
Only made clouds, winds, meteors, such as that:
Also this isle, what lives and grows thereon,
And snaky sea which rounds and ends the same.
Thinketh, it came of being ill at ease:
He hated that He cannot change His cold,
Nor cure its ache. ’Hath spied an icy fish
That longed to ’scape the rock-stream where she lived,
And thaw herself within the lukewarm brine
O’ the lazy sea her stream thrusts far amid,
A crystal spike ’twixt two warm walls of wave;
Only she ever sickened, found repulse
At the other kind of water, not her life,
(Green-dense and dim-delicious, bred o’ the sun)
Flounced back from bliss she was not born to breathe,
And in her old bounds buried her despair,
Hating and loving warmth alike: so He.
The idea Caliban forms of his god is of a being whose power renders him alternately capricious and indifferent; he is strong, just as he himself is, compared with yonder crabs that march now from the mountain to the sea, of whom he lets twenty pass, and stones the twenty-first, without loving or hating, merely choosing so. Thinks he made clouds, winds, meteors; the island, and its forms of life are also his creatures:—
He made all these, and more,
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 marks, too—that is it.
Because so brave, so better though they be,
It nothing skills if he begin to plague. [p. 579→]
He goes on to conjecture that there must be a power superior to Setebos, that made him—something the Quiet over his head, that feels neither joy nor pain. He sees the indications of the god’s nature—his evil and his good—in the habits of the animals around him. Conscious that all things will continue as they are as long as he lives, but for himself ignores a future state of being:—
Believeth with the life, the pain shall stop.
His dam held different, that after death
He both plagued enemies and feasted friends:
Idly! He doth His worst in this our life,
Giving just respite lest we die through pain,
Saving last pain for worst,—with which, an end.
Meanwhile, the best way to escape His ire
Is not to seem too happy. Sees, himself,
Yonder two flies, with purple films and pink,
Bask on the pompion-bell above: kills both.
’Sees two black painful beetles roll their ball
On head and tail as if to save their lives:
Moves them the stick away they strive to clear.
Caliban strives hard to make his god believe that he suffers; thus showing his inferiority to him: that above all things he awes him; for which purpose he moans in the sun, gets under coolest boughs, and never gives his thoughts expression unless when he has hidden himself from his god’s sight; but trusts some strange day that either the supreme Quiet will catch and conquer Setebos, or, likelier, that he will become decrepit, doze, and die. At this point his reflections are interrupted by a sudden storm bursting over the island, with the description of which the poem concludes:—
What, what? A curtain o’er the world at once!
Crickets stop hissing; not a bird—or, yes,
There scuds His raven that hath told Him all!
It was fool’s play, this prattling! Ha! The wind
Shoulders the pillared dust, death’s house o’ the move,
And fast invading fires begin! White blaze—
A tree’s head snaps—and there, there, there, there, there.
His thunder follows! Fool to gibe at Him!
Lo! ’Lieth flat and loveth Setebos!
’Maketh his teeth meet through his upper lip,
Will let those quails fly, will not eat this month
One little mess of whelks, so he may ’scape.
There are many shorter poems in the volume, such as “Confessions,” “May and Death,” “Youth and Art,” &c., which are treated with Browning’s characteristic dramatic power; and also a long soliloquy, “Mr. Sludge, the Medium,” in which he develops, with great power, though somewhat too much at length, the type of a complete scoundrel. So disagreeable a subject, and one admitting so little of any poetic faculty except the dramatic, was hardly worthy of such enlarged treatment; but, taking it as it is, rude and plain, in its prosaic language, it must be admitted to be drawn with great power of characterization, and knowledge of the basest springs of nature.
The power and beauty displayed in Browning’s previous volumes—the striking delineation of character, dramatic interest, daring descriptive faculty, novelty of image therein exhibited, are sufficient to insure him a high place as a poet in the estimation of posterity, even despite the obscurity more than German, in which but too many of the productions of his genius are clouded, and their effect deteriorated. Upon the whole, his “Dramatis Personæ,” in which a large amount of the mistiness referred to is displayed, must be regarded as inferior to his previous poetic essays, with the exception of its most characteristic poem, the Soliloquy of Caliban. The critical eye of succeeding ages will, doubtless, classify, both as regards originality and so far as style is concerned, the prose writer Carlyle with the poet Browning.
[Thomas Caulfield Irwin]
Reviewed:
Dramatis Personæ (RB), London: Chapman & Hall, 1864.
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