R650111A. Poetical Works (1863) and Dramatis Personæ.
The Times, 11 January 1865, p. 12.
Listed in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 31, 358.
We have a long score to settle with the poets, and are going to try to do something to clear the reckoning. At the foot of this column we have set down a list of poetical works lately published, which, notwithstanding its length, does not include all the productions of merit which have recently appeared, and gives but a poor idea of the poetical activity that is stirring, for the most part unnoticed, in our literature. Of the quality of the work which is thus produced we shall speak immediately, but now we are noting the mere quantity. Most of the volumes which are enumerated below have passed through the ordeal of a first edition, and have reached the dignity of a second or a third. One of them, of which Miss Jean Ingelow is the authoress, was published only last year, and now it is in the fifth edition. Mr. Robert Browning’s collected works, in three stout volumes, are now in the third edition. Facts like these, which there would be no difficulty in multiplying, seem to make it clear that the poetical movement among us must be stronger than is usually supposed, and that our living poets are able to command a numerous audience; yet, if we mistake not, the great body of the public scarcely recognizes this fact. There is only one living poet among us who can fairly be described as popular in the larger sense of the word—who commands all England. There is not one of the other poets whose popularity is other than sectional. Each may have a pretty large and a most enthusiastic band of followers and admirers, but still it is only a band—a sect. We had to refer to this phenomenon not long ago, when making some remarks on Mr. Tennyson’s last poem. We had to point out that there is a poetical monarchy rising up among us—a despotism of taste; that one poetical voice dominates over all, and dominates so imperiously as to drown criticism in panegyric. In pursuance of this train of thought, let it now be observed that the recognition of an autocracy in literature is the recognition of a state of things which is opposed to the traditions and to the spirit of literature. There is a profound truth to which all history will bear witness in the description of the literary world as a republic. Great artists, great poets, are never alone. One man may overtop his fellows, but still with fellows he is surrounded. If Mr. Tennyson be a great poet, then it would seem that he must have great fellow-poets around him whom it is unjust to ignore. If, on the other hand, these fellow-poets are so far beneath him as to be unworthy of our notice, then it must be said that the apparition of a great poet solitary among us is one of the most extraordinary events in literature, and we must begin to doubt the correctness of our judgment in admiring Mr. Tennyson so much. The historic muse has a bad memory, and contrives to forget all but a few of the greatest names, which stand forth, each in its time, with a certain solitary grandeur. But the solitariness of great men is rather an appearance than a reality; and to contemporary judgment it is generally not even an appearance. And whereas this is true, more or less, of every species of greatness, it more particularly applies to that greatness of thought, of feeling, and of language which flows into the forms of art. If the poet be great, depend upon it he lives in a great time. If the time be great, depend upon it that it produces more than one great man. One swallow does not make a summer; the swallows come in a flight. The poet is the creature of his epoch, and if we find that his epoch has a thorough appreciation and enjoyment of his works, then we may rest assured that the same afflatus which has made him has made others also.
There is a great unsightly gap in the history of our poetry, which, speaking roughly, may be said to extend over the quarter of a century succeeding the death of Byron. In 1824 Byron died in his prime, and, though brilliant contemporaries survived him, yet most of them were older than he, and they survived him to no purpose. It was but a very few years before that Keats and Shelley, the rising hopes of our poetical literature, died in all the immaturity of youthful genius. The death of these three men made a break in the succession of our poets, and brought about the perplexities of an interregnum in which it came to be seriously doubted whether the capacity for poetry had not passed away from us. We, who are now thinking and judging of poetry, have to remember that our education belongs to this period, the second quarter of the century, in which we were taught to believe, what, indeed, seemed then the fact, that the race of the giants had departed and left no heirs. For five-and-twenty years the country, immersed in political disputes, overridden by utilitarian theories, scared by the first appearance of railways and by a new importance given to machinery of every sort, nourished the belief that the very materials of poetry were destroyed, that the fat kine were to be followed by the lean, and long years of super-abundant harvests by long years of famine. Contentedly we accepted that quarter of a century and more as years of dearth, and did not recognize that we had poets and the materials of poetry among us. The poets, too, that sprung up in those five-and-twenty years of famine seem to have been not a little oppressed by a consciousness of their position. This consciousness showed itself sometimes in an excessive refinement and farfetchedness of speech, as if the poet were determined to be exquisite and prove beyond all question his originality; sometimes in choice of extravagant themes; sometimes in amazing egotism, that found its expressions in art poems and art novels, in which the poets were their own heroes, and wrote of themselves and their works as of immortal gods and the creation of world. We did not believe in our young poets, and to make us believe in them they played pranks and went into contortions that, far from exciting admiration, only confirmed our incredulity.
Some 14 years ago, as the second half of the century was beginning to dawn, three poets, each of them about 40 years of age, stood forward as the best of the time. These were Mr. Tennyson, Mr. Robert Browning, and a lady, then best known by her maiden name, Miss Barrett. There was not much to choose between these three, for, although all had shown extraordinary power, they had also displayed so many faults—so much weakness in the choice of subjects, so much mannerism and distortion in dealing with the subjects, that it was doubted whether at their age they had the ability to work themselves free from their fetters and to find expression in any style of art which might be called pure. On the whole Mr. Tennyson was deemed worthy of the foremost place among them, chiefly by reason of the exquisite finish of his diction and his perfect command of melody. He has justified that opinion, too, by what he has since done. He was very timid at first, he has always had the weakness to be much fretted by criticism, and he really never satisfied criticism until he acquired such confidence in himself as to be fearless of it, and willing now and then to let pass a hasty line. Our voice goes entirely with the verdict of the public in pronouncing him the first poet of our time, and worthy of an exalted rank in the hierarchy of song. Nevertheless it must not be ignored that men of no mean faculty among us take a different view, and place him below the Brownings as a poet. We do not agree with them, but we maintain that it is easier for a critic who takes a broad survey of literature to agree with them than to understand what the taste of the great public seems to be asserting just now, that we have one poet among us—Mr. Tennyson—and no other. Why, Mr. Tennyson could not be the Mr. Tennyson we take him to be except he had his peers and rivals. Therefore it does not surprise us to know that there are thoughtful men among us who place both the Brownings, and certainly Mrs. Browning, above Mr. Tennyson; but it does surprise us that in popular regard the Laureate should be so far ahead of all our other poets that it would seem even as though they had no existence.
Mrs. Elizabeth Barrett Browning has passed away, and no more competes among the poets; but we must in a parenthesis say a word or two about her poetry, which in any history of the literature of this Victorian era will deserve prominent notice. Aurora Leigh is not only her greatest work, it is also one of the greatest works of art which this century has produced. Although it is full of faults, and the workmanship is often exceedingly rough, yet there is a wild, intense life in it that effectually secures our sympathy and hurries us along. It is the greatest single poem that has been produced in our time, and people argue from such a fact as this that the writer of it must be the greatest poet of her period, greater even than Tennyson. The inference, however, does not follow. We have described Mr. Tennyson’s mode of working to be episodical. The episodes which engage his pen shun comparison with writers of extensive plan. He has produced no single work that is to be brought into comparison with epics or versified novels in a dozen books. But still if we consider not any one piece, but the whole mass, the variety and extent of his work, and the wonderful excellence of its details, it would be difficult to deny him the praise of being our first poet, simply because no one of his pieces is conceived on so broad a plan as that of Aurora Leigh. The question, however, has been raised, as we should remember it in honour of Mrs. Browning. That she failed to reach the highest excellence in her poems was probably her misfortune. Both she and her husband lived for long years in Italy, where, indeed, she died. The biographical dictionaries tell us that they went to live there immediately after their marriage in 1846. We say that this was a misfortune; for we believe that a poet who will command our hearts, who has any chance of taking the highest place in our regards, cannot afford to live for a dozen years together an exile from his country. He or she may not be able to trace the influences that work against him or her; they may imagine that by means of newspapers and books and passing travellers, and through the facilities of the post they are sufficiently near their native land, but imperceptible influences bear them down, and prevent them from perfectly reaching the English heart and thinking with us. The poet must be in his country and in his time, or he is nothing. What came of Byron and Shelley who tried to sing to us all the way from the Apennines? Conceive what genius was theirs, and yet how they missed their mark! Shelley never became popular, and Byron so outraged public opinion, so buffeted the public taste, that his popularity was short lived, and he is now unduly depreciated. Don Juan is probably the greatest poem of our century, but surely it could not have been written by any man living in England and able to show his face in decent society. If Byron had lived and had gone on writing, while he still chose to remain an exile from his country, there is a moral certainty that every year he would have more and more failed to catch the public ear, and to have that close interplay of sentiment with his countrymen which is necessary to the success of the poet. Now, for some good reason, we believe on account of the delicate health of Mrs. Browning, she and her husband went to reside in Italy about 16 or 17 years ago; and they, too, like Byron and Shelley, sung to us from the Apennines. They sung so far away that we could scarcely hear them, and they, at such a distance, could not easily modulate their voices for the ears of their fellow-countrymen and women. Mrs. Browning produced a grand poem. It was and is much admired notwithstanding a roughness and want of finish about it that suggests masculine rudeness of power rather than feminine delicacy of touch; but, although it has run through six editions, it cannot be said to have made that impression on the popular mind which one would have expected from such a display of power.
If banishment from England may be described as a misfortune for Mrs. Browning, who, it may be, in our trying English climate might never have been able to do any work at all, what was it for her husband? He, of all men, needed the English air, and he went away from it. His writings abound in faults which, perhaps, it never was in his power to get rid of; but his only chance of working himself free from them was in living among us, and learning to think more as we think, to feel as we feel, and to understand what language suits us best. How could he do so beside the Arno? We regret to say that the difficulties of his style are at present so great as to prevent him not only from being enjoyed , but even from being understood. Poetry is with him an occult science. All poetry has to do with occult associations, and meanings of words and thoughts which it is impossible to analyze, but on the surface it is generally simple and clear enough. Mr. Browning, however, having a strong sense of an occult power behind and within the language of the poet, is determined to be obviously occult, and by elliptical constructions, digressions, interpolations, dark hints, and darker sayings, seems to talk riddles and to make poetry a game of hide and seek. It has been said of one of his most elaborate poems that it contains only two intelligible lines, and that these are not true. The first line is
Who will may hear Sordello’s story told,
with which the poem commences, and the other is that with which it ends:—
Who would has heard Sordello’s story told.
These are grave faults which cannot be too severely reprehended. Mr. Browning asks too much of his readers. He has no right to expect that for the sake of the good things which he has to bestow he will find readers to encounter the difficulties of his style which he deliberately sets in their way. It is sometimes as difficult to follow out the line of his thought as to keep up with an argument conducted by Kant, or Schelling, or Hegel. Kant said, when he was dying, that none of his disciples quite understood him except Hegel, and Hegel did not agree with him. It may be doubted whether Mr. Browning might not say something like this of many a reader, perplexed over more than one of his poems.
After we have said the worst, however, about Mr. Browning’s obscurities, there remain in his pages the materials of great poetry, there remains in him the semblance of a great poet. If his thought is difficult to reach, it is generally worth reaching. He may be described as a most learned poet whose learning oppresses him and makes him stagger, but his erudition, nevertheless, is very valuable, and gives a rich flavour to his sentiment. Nobody ever accused Robert Browning of having little to say. His fault is that he has too much to say, and that he compresses it into too small a compass. His style is full of jerks and wants continuity, but those who are willing to submit to a good deal of jolting will find themselves in company with a man of large mind and of deep thought. The true Browningites are so keenly impressed by his power that they place him above everybody else, and one of them has been heard to say in deprecation of his own liking—“I must confess that to read Browning is like dram drinking; it destroys the taste for everything else; every other liquor seems poor in comparison.” He will be found at his best in the first volume of his collected works, but also he shows extraordinary power in his last volume, published a few months ago under the title of Dramatis Personæ. Here it is true that he defies us with his obscurities, as in the first poem of the volume, James Lee, which it will puzzle many a reader to follow out; but, on the other hand, no one can master the subtleties of such a poem as The Death in the Desert, in which the Apostle John discourses of the mysteries of the faith, or Caliban upon Setebos, in which the monster of the island gives in his rude way his notions of what God is, and what are his relations to the world, without recognizing in them the profound thinker, the dramatic thinker. The two poems we have just mentioned with praise, being the most remarkable in Mr. Browning’s new volume, remind us that he is pre-eminently a religious poet, and that his greatest efforts have been directed to the setting forth of some phase of religious thought. He puts himself in the place of the Apostle John, the monster Caliban, or Bishop Blougram, and for them begins to think vicariously. We may not always like what he says; sometimes we may find it difficult to follow him in his rapid transitions from one idea to another; but no man who will take the trouble to understand Mr. Browning can fail to recognize that he takes a prodigious grasp of his subject, and that he is full to overflowing of suggestions. He delights in a class of subjects, which in their very nature are dark and difficult to deal with, but which, nevertheless, will ever attract the study of thoughtful minds. Bishop Blougram’s Apology, for example, is an attempt to make conscious and reasonable, and, if possible, respectable the position of a Roman Catholic bishop, who half believes and half disbelieves, but yet holds on his way and prospers, as if every atom of the Romish creed were indisputable. In another poem a bishop is represented giving orders for his tomb after he is dead, and the contrast between the pride of his heart and the humility enjoined by his faith is placed in a strong light. Another poem is devoted to Fra Lippo Lippi, a dissolute painter, and yet a monk, who discourses of himself, and affords an example of the intricate defences wherewith we cheat our consciences. Another is An Epistle containing the Strange Medical Experience of Karshish, the Arab Physician, who visits Bethany shortly after the death of Our Lord, there falls in with Lazarus, is much astonished by his story, and relates it as best he can from his own pagan point of view to his friend Abib. Thus it will be seen that the Muse of Mr. Browning hovers about the doubts, difficulties, and dangers of our religious life. All his profoundest works that have made a lasting impression upon his disciples and bound them to him with intense admiration are records of religious experience and attempts to unveil the mystery of a faith that has to encounter miracle on the one hand and evil on the other. Mr. Browning is to be regarded chiefly as a great religious thinker, who has something to say which it would be futile to put into prose and support with formal argument, and which it is excessively difficult to throw into the forms of verse. If he has not overcome the difficulties which he had to encounter, still even in his failure he shows that he possesses a great intellectual power which all the faults of his style cannot conceal.
Although Mr. Browning’s greatest themes are very difficult to be handled clearly, the chief difficulties of his style arise from his own caprice. When he chooses he can write quite clearly. Here, for example, are some verses on A Pretty Woman, which need puzzle no one:—
I.
That fawn-skin-dappled hair of hers,
And the blue eye
Dear and dewy,
And that infantine fresh air of hers!
II.
To think men cannot take you, sweet,
And enfold you,
Ay, and hold you,
And so keep you what they make you, sweet.
III.
You like us for a glance, you know—
For a word’s sake,
For a sword’s sake,
All’s the same, whate’er the chance, you know.
IV.
And in turn we make you ours, we say—
You and youth too,
Eyes and mouth too,
All the face composed of flowers, we say.
V.
All’s our own to make the most of, sweet—
Sing and say for,
Watch and pray for,
Keep a secret, or go boast of, sweet.
VI.
But for loving, why, you would not, sweet,
Though we prayed you,
Paid you, brayed you
In a mortar—for you could not, sweet!
VII.
So we leave the sweet face fondly there:
Be its beauty
Its sole duty!
Let all hope of grace beyond lie there.
And then Mr. Browning goes on to moralize on the existence of such prettiness as distinguished from beauty—prettiness which we like as distinct from beauty which we love. It will be seen in these verses that though they have a tendency to run into colloquialism, and though they are wanting in the last polish, yet they show great command of language, and prove that if the author fail in his more ambitious pieces to make himself perfectly understood, it is not because the resources of diction are beyond his reach. In confirmation of this we may quote another passage from the poem on The Pied Piper of Hamelin, who by some peculiar magic in his instrument piped away all the rats out of the town of Hamelin, where they had been a great plague:—
Into the street the Piper stept,
Smiling first a little smile,
As if he knew what magic slept
In his quiet pipe the while;
Then, like a musical adept,
To blow the pipe his lips he wrinkled,
And green and blue his sharp eyes twinkled,
Like a candle flame where salt is sprinkled;
And ere three shrill notes the pipe uttered,
You heard as if an army muttered;
And the muttering grew to a grumbling;
And the grumbling grew to a mighty rumbling;
And out of the houses the rats came tumbling.
Great rats, small rats, lean rats, brawny rats,
Brown rats, black rats, gray rats, tawny rats,
Grave old plodders, gay young friskers,
Mothers, father, uncles, cousins,
Cocking tails and pricking whiskers,
Families by tens and dozens,
Brothers, sisters, husbands, wives—
Followed the Piper for their lives.
From street to street he piped, advancing,
And step for step they followed dancing,
Until they came to the river Weser,
Wherein all plunged and perished!
—Save one who, stout as Julius Cæsar,
Swam across and lived to carry
(As he, the manuscript he cherished)
To Rat-land home his commentary:
Which was—“At the first shrill notes of the pipe,
I heard a sound as of scraping tripe,
And putting apples, wondrous ripe,
Into a cider press’s gripe:
And a moving away of pickle-tub-boards,
And a leaving ajar of conserve-cupboards,
And a drawing the corks of train-oil-flasks,
And a breaking the hoops of butter-casks;
And it seemed as if a voice
(Sweeter far then by harp or by psaltery
Is breathed) called out, “Oh rats rejoice!
The world is grown to one vast drysaltery!
So munch on, crunch on, take your luncheon!”
And just as a bulky sugar puncheon,
All ready staved, like a great sun shone
Glorious scarce an inch before me,
Just as methought it said, “Come, bore me!”
—I found the Weser rolling o’er me.”
But as this is in a jesting style we may give yet another extract from one of his most serious poems, to show how vigorous and forcible and straightforward he can be when he chooses. It is a poem suggested by a line from Edgar’s song in Lear—
Childe Roland to the dark tower came.
Out of this line Mr. Browning builds an allegory. There is a dark tower in a strange country to be reached and stormed. There is some great duty to be performed, and we have to pass through a barren wild, a region altogether comfortless, to accomplish it. In the following vigorous lines Mr. Browning describes what sort of desert the man must go through who will forswear his ease and turn aside from the beaten path to fight with giants real or metaphorical:—
For mark! no sooner was I fairly found
Pledged to the plain, after a pace or two,
Than pausing to throw backward a last view
To the safe road, ’twas gone; gray plain all round:
Nothing but plain to the horizon’s bound.
I might go on: nought else remained to do.
So on I went. I think I never saw
Such starved ignoble nature; nothing throve:
For flowers—as well expect a cedar grove!
But cockle, spurge, according to their law,
Might propagate their kind with none to awe,
You’d think; a burr had been a treasure-trove.
No! penury, inertness, and grimace
In some strange sort, were the land’s portion. “See
Or shut your eyes!” said Nature peevishly,
“It nothing skills; I cannot help my case:
’Tis the Last Judgment’s fire must cure this place,
Calcine its clods and set my prisoners free.”
If there pushed any ragged thistlestalk
Above its mates, the head was chopped—the bents
Were jealous else. What made those holes and rents
In the dock’s harsh swarth leaves—bruised, as to balk
All hope of greenness? ’Tis a brute must walk
Pushing their life out, with a brute’s intents.
As for the grass, it grew as scant as hair
In leprosy; thus dry blades pricked the mud
Which underneath looked kneaded up with blood.
One stiff blind horse, his every bone astare,
Stood stupefied, however he came there:
Thrust out, past service, from the devil’s stud.
Alive? he might be dead for aught I know,
With that red, gaunt, and colloped neck astrain,
And shut eyes underneath the rusty mane;
Seldom went such grotesqueness with such woe;
I never saw a brute I hated so;
He must be wicked to deserve such pain.
Mr. Browning presents of his own free will so many difficulties to his readers that, though he is great enough to be regarded by some able men as in power of intellect at least the equal of Mr. Tennyson, and in some respects his superior, yet he is outstripped in popularity by more than one writer whom in range and intensity of thinking he surpasses.
[Eneas Sweetland Dallas]
Reviewed:
Poetical Works (RB), London: Chapman & Hall, 1863.
Dramatis Personæ (RB), London: Chapman & Hall, 1864.
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