R641200B. Dramatis Personæ (Boston, 1864).
The Continental Monthly, December 1864, p. 709.
Listed in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 31, 358.
This book has been already reviewed by the English critics, who are always appreciative of Browning’s merits, and tender to his faults. It is as wilful as its predecessors, as unintelligible, as fragmentary, its rhythm as distorted and broken, its diction as peculiar, its sequences as disconnected. Yet we think it shows gleams of higher poetic talent than anything he has yet published. It contains eighteen poems. “A Death in the Desert” is an imaginary portrayal of the death of St. John in his old age in a cave, to which he had been taken by some faithful adherents to save him from persecution. It is a sketch of power and originality. St. John is supposed to speak:
“If I live yet, it is for good, more love
Through me to men: be nought but ashes here
That keeps awhile my semblance, who was John—
Still when they scatter, there is left on earth
No one alive who knew (consider this!)
—Saw with his eyes and handled with his hands
That which was from the first the Word of Life.
How will it be when none more saith ‘I saw?’”
Very original and very disagreeable in its highly wrought and subtile Realism is “Caliban upon Setebos, or Natural Theology in the Island,” a study from Shakspeare’s “Tempest.” It is a curious exposition of the philosophy of such a being. At the close, when Caliban, who speaks in the third person, is beginning to think of Setebos, “his dam’s god,” as not so formidable after all, a great storm awakes, which upsets all his reasoning, and makes him fall flat on his face with fright:
“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 mouth
One little mess of whelks, so he may ’scape!”
“Mr. Sludge, the Medium,” one of the longer poems, is intended, according to rumor, to demolish Mr. Home, and includes some sharp thrusts at various persons who still patronize him after having found him guilty of fraud.
The story runs that a lady and gentleman of eminence, devout spiritualists, residing at Rome, confessed to Mr. Browning that during Mr. Home’s stay at their house they once forbade his putting his hand under the table, and the spirits wouldn’t rap, and Home burst into tears, and confessed that on that occasion only he had deceived them; that on one other occasion he had put phosphorus on the tips of wires and stretched them from the roof of their house to represent certain spiritual apparitions. “And what did you say, how did you act, upon the discovery?” asked Mr. Browning. “Oh,” replied the lady, “I rebuked him severely; told him plainly how shameful it was that one who had been so supernaturally gifted should act so, and told him that he ought to repent.” “And he still remained with you, and—” “Oh, yes, we are perfectly sure that everything was genuine afterward.” Upon which the poet was so disgusted that he vented his indignation in “Mr. Sludge.”
Reviewed:
Dramatis Personæ (RB), Boston: Ticknor & Fields, 1864.
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