E450100B. A Drama of Exile.
Graham’s American Monthly Magazine of Literature and Art, January 1845, pp. 46–47.
As reprinted in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 10, 342–343.
Every person who pays any attention to the mutations of poetical taste, and, especially, who observes the tone of feeling and thinking in his own time, cannot fail to see that, within the last ten years, a kind of revolution has occurred in the spirit and style of poetry. The word in which the character of this change is either expressed, or rendered inexpressible, is Transcendentalism. This tremendous phrase has the advantage of operating both as a lure and a scarecrow. To some it is a will-o’-the-wisp, leading into the bogs and marshes of language, and compelling the poor versifier’s poetic feet to wade and stumble in dark and muddy verbiage; to others, it is a phantom to be feared, rising in this our nineteenth century from the dead and damned literature of an elder day, and prowling about distempered brains and mawkish hearts, to build up the empire of sensibility on the ruins of sense. Persons are pointed out, who, before they became haunted by this demon, were very valuable, respectable and stupid members of the social body, unsuspected of genius, and in thought and action keeping on the straight line of mediocrity; and it is urged that these same persons could not now be talking mystically of the “mysteries of being,” and launching out into bold invasions of metaphysical vocabularies, if some element of madness had not been added to their dullness—if they had not in some way “eaten of the insane root, which takes the reason prisoner.” That those readers of poetry, who have been accustomed to Dryden and Pope, to tangible images and harmonious numbers, should fall into lamentations or anathemas at the innovations of the “new school” is not singular. From the ruddy flush, or from the cold glitter, of the past race of poets, no one can pass to those whose compositions are “sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought,” without being conscious of a difference in tone, object, and mode of expression, which naturally shocks his taste and confounds his understanding. When we add to this the fact that the revolution has been accompanied by a more than usual amount of simulated spirituality and affected aspiration, that the discordant jargon it has introduced into verse has served as a cloak to numerous literary charlatans, and that the genius of many of its best exponents has suffered from the elaborate oddity of the verbal dress in which it is encased, it is not surprising that it is as impossible to induce many sensible men to admit a transcendental bard into their fellowship of poets, as to make them allow refinement to a Hottentot, or veracity to a Hindoo.
Miss Barrett belongs to the new school, and in originality and power is among those in the front rank. Her poems are certainly remarkable compositions, especially when considered as the productions of a woman’s mind. Her ideal is different from the ideal of a large majority of her sex. She is not so much solicitous of grace and elegance in her language as of a tough, muscular, rugged strength. Her faults of style are numerous, and she has the common fault of defective expression. Her poetic feeling is greater than her poetic power. She has more of the “vision” than the “faculty” divine. Her poetry is the production of a mind reared in solitude, and keeping company chiefly with the “the great of old.” She has had little of the mental discipline which comes from a familiarity with the actual life of men and women. Her own existence has been passed chiefly in the world of thought and imagination. She has brooded, and studied, and meditated more than she has written, or conversed. She has not much skill in the use of language, nor much knowledge of those avenues to the heart and understanding through which the words of the poet must travel in order to reach home. She is continually offending the ear by harsh lines, and the eye with words that are coined or clipped of their rightful syllables. At times she even uses ’las! for alas! Her study of the Hebrew Prophets and Æschylus has impressed her mind with a gigantic grandeur of feeling which she can only express in a phraseology elaborately indefinite, or inartistically rugged. The formless and the unutterable she admires in their formlessness and unutterability. Sometimes a vague grandeur, a sublime obscurity, a mysterious and unspeakable something, which is substance without name or form, seems to weigh heavily upon her heart, and to crush her thoughts and fancies into a confused mass of half-shaped images and broken fragments of ideas. She often heaps words on words, and metaphor on metaphor, to no other purpose than to form a pile of magnificent language, which still does not reach up to the thought. Things swell into indistinct but colossal proportions as her eye lights on them, and their corporal substance is turned into huge masses of vapor. Some of her poems remind the reader of a cloudy day, without rain, occasionally lit by a keen flash of lightning or a warm burst of sunshine. Words are personified instead of things, and capital letters take the place of ideas. She hymns praises to the dark, and falls into raptures with the inscrutable. Her fancy resembles a sombre hall, through which occasionally a strain of sweet or powerful music winds or peals,
And shapes, which have no certainty of shape,
Drift duskly in and out.
Her poems are full of expressions and imaginations which seem to have been torn out of her mind by the roots—if the phrase be allowable. Few writers have more passages which we are puzzled at first whether to call sublime or unmeaning. The first reading of her poems produces pain in the eyes. The brain staggers beneath the weight of her compound epithets, or falls back exhausted in striving to follow or unriddle her dark subtlety of fancy.
We are willing to admit that, with all these faults in her mode of thinking and mode of expression, Miss Barrett has still perhaps displayed more genius in her compositions than any poetess in the present century. She possesses an imagination which endows the least intelligent and rudest shows of nature with life and motion, and a heart capable both of stern passion and delicate feeling. Strength, tenderness, beauty—these are hers when her style will admit of their expression. Her volumes are filled with the raw material of genius, but it is not always worked with skill. We feel in reading her poems that she ought to take the first rank; and are nettled that her love for uncouth and discordant jargon should prevent her mind from doing justice to itself. A [p. 47→] critic might build up the warmest eulogium on her powers, from a judicious selection of brilliant passages, in which the bad qualities of her diction were not manifested, but he could not honestly praise her poems in the mass, without being willing to part with the proprieties of language, and take an affectionate adieu of his “well of English undefiled.” If there be any such thing as Taste, Miss Barrett is certainly an offender against its laws. As long as she writes for the world, she should choose some neutral ground of language where her own mind and that of the public can meet and mingle.
Miss Barrett’s poems give evidence of so much purity and elevation of nature, and are marked by so many loving traits of the heart, that her readers would naturally be inclined to praise rather than to blame; and most of them who have criticised her compositions, have followed their inclinations. A few extracts will illustrate the depth and originality of her powers, and enable our readers to judge of the value of the sacrifice she has made to her perverse and perverted mode of expression. “The Drama of Exile” contains some of the most splendid imaginations ever conceived by a woman’s mind, and might have been a great poem, had the authoress done any justice to her powers and her materials. For instance, Eve, in telling Adam some of the consequences of their sin and loss of Eden, says to him,
I am ’ware, indeed,
That absolute pardon is impossible
From you to me, by reason of my sin—
And that I cannot ever more, as once,
Behold the traces of the holy hills
Beneath the leaning stars; or watch the vales,
Dew-pallid with their morning ecstasy;
Or hear the winds make pastoral peace between
Two grassy uplands—and the river-wells
Work out their bubbling length beneath the ground—
And all the birds sing, till, for joy of song,
They lift their trembling wings, as if to heave
The too much weight of music from their heart,
And float it up to ether!
——
For was I not
At that last sunset seen in Paradise,
When all the westering clouds flashed out in throngs
Of sudden angel-faces, face by face,
All hushed and solemn, as a thought of God
Held them suspended—was I not that hour,
The lady of the world, princess of life,
Mistress of feast and favor? Could I touch
A rose with my white hand, but it became
Redder at once?
The following we cut from their connection with the Drama, for their independent beauty:
The burden of the song
Drops from it like its fruit, and heavily falls
Into the lap of silence!
——
Colossal shapes—twin sovran images—
With a disconsolate blank majesty,
Set in their wondrous faces! with no look,
And yet an aspect—a significance
Of individual life and passionate ends,
Which overcomes us gazing.
——
How doth the wide and melancholy earth
Gather her hills around us, gray and ghast,
And stare with blank significance of loss
Right in our faces.
——
Shall I be mother of the coming life?
Hear the steep generations, how they fall
Adown the visionary stairs of time,
Like supernatural thunders—far, yet near;
Sowing their fiery echoes through the hills.
——
By the memory of Edenic joys
Forfeit and lost; by that last cypress tree,
Green at the gate, which thrilled as we came out;
And by the blessed nightingale, which threw
Its melancholy music after us;
And by the flowers, whose spirits full of smells
Did follow softly, plucking us behind
Back to the gradual banks and vernal bowers,
And four-fold river courses.
We might multiply extracts like these, full of the living fire of genius, in illustration both of her capacity and perversion of it. She certainly possesses a most deep and acute sense of the poetical in nature and life; and if she do not take the first rank among contemporary minds, in the estimation of the people, it will be owing to her indisposition to write English.
[Rufus W. Griswold]
Reviewed:
A Drama of Exile, and Other Poems (EBB), New York: Henry G. Langley, 1845.
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