official who keeps the records of the collectorate-for such is the building-ticketed and arranged on shelves reaching from the floor to the top of the ceiling, will bring out papers that give every information, not merely as to what the village in question pays in the aggregate, and by what particular castes it is inhabited, but as to the exact number of holdings into which it is subdivided, and what is the demand of revenue on account of Government assessed upon each. Nay, if necessary, every field can be pointed out in a map yearly furnished by an official, termed the Putwarree, or village accountant, with the changes that have taken place by death or otherwise during the last twelvemonth: further statistics, if needful, are forthcoming, and the inquisitive visitor may satisfy himself as to the amount of litigation connected with the land, the division of the inheritance of a father among four brothers, the expense necessary to sink a well-for irrigation must obviously be considered in fixing the revenue-the kind of soil prevalent, cultivated, culturable, or sterile and irreclaimable; the crops, and fruit or timber trees grown in the locality, the special endowments for charitable or religious purposes, if any; the local manufactures, and the neighbouring markets. To add to this mass of information, a census has lately been taken by the careful and judicious inquiries of the European local authorities and their active local subordinates, who between them have managed to get at details which can be depended on, and without exciting distrust and opposition, have numbered the inmates of every house in whole districts. For it must be understood, that as taxation in India of articles of comfort, convenience, or luxury is unknown, and as the Indian peasant, or landlord, pays literally nothing but his land revenue and a moderate salt-tax, while further taxation is, though not dreaded, sometimes discussed as a possibility -it has hitherto been considered almost impossible to send round a batch of officials to make any requisite inquiries without their being baffled by apathy or assumed stu pidity, and perhaps, being met with violence. When an inquisitivenative official, with a brass badge, a reed behind his ear, and an inkhorn in his hand, is seen going the rounds of every house in a village, and making curious inquiries as to the number of its inmates, the population, often quick and intelligent, suddenly become cloudy and dull: the women shriek: the children abscond: some men mutter indignantly at the illbred official impertinence which presumes to inquire after a man's womankind: while others, who have a vague dread of some visitation, they know not what, get up a rumour that the Koompani Bahadur is going forcibly to convert the natives, to tax their earthern pots and kitchen utensils, to carry off their cattle to feed the army of the Punjab, to sell their wives in slavery to the Emperor of Madras (!), and to send their children to be sacrificed at the altar of a Raja, who lives far away to the south, and who is in want of a whole batch of tender young innocents to appease the anger of some incensed divinities. No matter how absurd the rumour, how monstrous the supposition, how solemn the denial of the hapless official. That these absurdi ties have arisen, no one knows how, without the slightest foundation, in the teeth of common sense, and in spite of the universal belief that the British government is the poor man's stay, is well known to every officer of experience; and we can ourselves testify to some within our own knowledge. A day afterwards, the whole village may be ashamed of its credulity: the elders may bow down in humiliation before the reproaches of the collector: half the ryots may abscond for very shame: but, at the time, the report, originating sometimes in ignorance and sometimes in malice, runs like fire amongst stubble: words are fol lowed by blows: the quick passions of the peasantry are excited, and the luckless inquirer into Malthusian statistics is glad if he can get away with a whole skin. W. S. S-K. 1856.] 105 MEN AND WOMEN.* OBERT BROWNING is a name ROBE which will serve the future historian of the English literature of the nineteenth century to point the moral of genius unfaithful to its trust. Endowed by nature with those gifts which, duly cultivated, enable a man to become a fine poet, he has chosen to let them run wild; and what might have been a beautiful garden is but a wilderness overgrown with a rank and riotous vegetation. Writer of plays, of philosophical poems, of dramatic lyrics, he has in each class given evidence of strong natural powers weakened by self-indulgence, by caprice, by hankering after originality, by all the mental vices which are but so many names of vanity and self-seeking. Instead of looking on his gifts of imagination and of intellect as entrusted to him for the benefit of others, and as imposing on him the duty of training their rude forces into a perfect faculty of song, he has just got out of them the utmost personal pleasure that they would yield with the least possible trouble. The new thoughts, the passionate emotions, which make life so rich to men of the poetic nature, he has enjoyed keenly, and they have been to him impulses to express himself in various forms of rhythmical art. But art, except as this mere vehicle and vent for his own intellectual energy, he has neglected; its mechanism is troublesome, its processes imply self-restraint, laborious discipline, and patient exercise of judgment; its principal object is to communicate to others what the artist feels and knows. And Mr. Browning not seeming to care for the enjoyment, or the instruction he could afford his fellow-creatures, but only to ease his own conceiving mind and fervent heart, naturally enough refuses to submit to toil which, after all, would probably lessen the actual pleasure of composition, and by refining his taste, lower his estimate of his own productions. Well, if man was not sent here to help his fellow-man, if men of genius especially were not, by the mere possession of that genius, emphatically singled out to be the helpers of their kind, this wantonness would be quite intelligible. It may fairly be questioned whether the pains by which such a poet as Mr. Tennyson, for instance, makes his poems as good and perfect as he can, before offering them to the public, ever meets with general appreciation, inasmuch as such painstaking in a writer demands a corresponding painstaking in the reader. And still more may it be questioned whether the fervid fluency of a writer who pours his full stream of words, careless how much mud is held in deposit by the flood, is not accompanied by a larger amount of gross self-satisfaction than the rigid self-restraint of the writer who checks the rapidity of his current, and lets the mud fall to the bottom before he presents the cup-which should be the cup of healing-to the nations. On the Epicurean theory, there is small doubt that Mr. Browning is right; it is far pleasanter, for a time at least, to do one's work in the way that gives one least trouble. And as for fame, or its counterfeit, popularity, there are silly people enough in English society, who look on this carelessness as the fitting and only garb of genius; who, if a poet will but be slovenly, will applaud his graceful audacity, and if obscure, will worship his profundity. And thus laziness and vanity-the two most fatal forms of selfishness-do their worst, and the cliques are in admiration at one of the saddest sights under God's sky, when the light that came from heaven burns murkier and murkier in a poet's soul; and instead of making God's world more intelligible by unfolding the beauty and meaning of its objects and events with loving care and grateful painstaking, he scrawls down the first rough hints that suggest themselves to him, and will not even take the trouble to make them legible. We blame the man who wastes bodily strength and beauty in lazior aimless feats, while we ness * Men and Women. By Robert Browning. Two vols. London: Chapman and Hall. 1855 are far too lenient to men of high mental power who allow their faculties to decay through want of proper training, or to become distorted through false and inferior aims. We condemn the man who hides his one talent in the earth, and refuses to put it to its uses; what shall we say to him who, possessed of ten talents, wants the selfrespect which would dictate their perfect development, and the genuine regard for his fellow-creatures, which would enjoin their strenuous employment. deeper, truer, and more human. This may be thought a somewhat harsh and rude tone to adopt towards a man for writing poems disfigured by obscurity, and wanting in the graces of a finished art. If poetical genius were showered upon men and women with unsparing hand-if a man with the capacity for becoming a true poet were of everyday occurrence, one more or less would be very little matter, and the due cultivation of his gifts would chiefly concern himself. It is because such poetical faculties as Mr. Browning had given him by nature are not the ordinary endowment of men—because such faculties rightly employed we believe to be a most precious boon to the nation among which they are exercised, that we are inclined to treat him, not as a whimsical person who chooses to be eccentric in a matter indifferent to the world, and defrauds himself alone by his caprice, but as one who, choosing to make himself a law and idol to himself, defrauds the world at large of what they would be the happier and the wiser for possessing. He commits the crime of a man who, entrusted with the germ of a great scientific discovery, and endowed with faculties to work it out to a clear result, refuses to undergo the labour necessary for this pur-trouble to write the problems out pose. We believe that Mr. Browning might, had he chosen, have become the interpreter of our modern life to us in dramas that would have recalled the force and clearness of the Elizabethan day. We believe that he could have sung the passions and the thoughts of our time with a lyric intensity which would have purified the rough ore of our life of its prosaic dross, and have reacted on that life to make it His legibly for others to study. longest poem, Sordello, is so unintelligible from beginning to end, that we once heard an ardent admirer of his, and an accomplished man, acknowledge that only at the third careful reading could one begin to see what the poem at all meant; and that to the last only faint glimmerings of light flitted amid the chasms of black darkness. Paracelsus is a grand conception, 1856.] Mr. Browning's Carelessness and Haste. utterly abortive, through hasty execution and slipshod verbiage. Pippa Passes is a chaos of fine material, through which a grand purpose begins the creative organising movement, but leaves off with the merest hint of what the work might have become had the natural powers of the writer been effectually disciplined. Even of the short dramatic lyrics, scarce one approaches even completeness of conception, and certainly, with one or two exceptions, they are miserably short of attainable perfection in execution. They are too often mere hints, rough sketches, requiring clearer statement of facts, more careful elaboration of both phrase and rhythm. Everywhere alike one finds evidence of power not half put forth, of first thoughts printed instead of best thoughts, a facility of execution aimed at, the right to and faculty of which have not been earned by previous labour. A genius everywhere profuse, striking, vigorous, but which mixes indiscriminately weeds and flowers, utters itself always at random, and as often misses as hits its mark. Such is, in our opinion, the character of the poems which Mr. Browning has hitherto published. If his aim has been simply to prove himself a clever man, he has succeeded; if he has aimed at making his fellow creatures wiser and happier through the talents bestowed upon him, his success has fallen miserably short of what might have been attained by the simple resolution to speak as intelligibly as he could what he had to say. His new volumes have precisely the same faults in about the same proportion. We could select scarcely one poem from these two volumes-with the exception of a particular class of poems to be specially mentioned-which was not more or less spoiled by the most obvious and easily removable faults, either of conception or execution, or both. Many of them are, as they stand, utterly unintelligible; the incidents to which they refer being neither stated nor deducible from the comment. Mr. Browning may possibly hold the key to these enigmas; or here and there one of Mr. Browning's intimates may guess at the circumstances to which the poems 107 refer. But this is pure impertinence, Grand, rough old Martin Luther A question we might answer by another somewhat more to the purpose,-Are burrs loved and prized like roses? If an irritated feeling of having been balked, disappointed, defrauded, be an essential element in the impression poetry should make, Mr. Browning's burrs undoubtedly often attain their success. Only that as the public has the option of submitting to the burr-infliction or not, even this success is partial. Then again there is a fable applied to Keats, of a fisherman on the Tyrian coast, who fished up the murex, of which straightway artificers and handicraftsmen made purple dyes, and dyed silk, and got fame and riches, while the poor fisherman to whom the raw material of the dye was owing got neither. Mere conchs! not fit for warp or woof! Till art comes,-comes to pound and squeeze And clarify,-refines to proof The liquor filtered by degrees, To paint the future from the past, Hobbs hints blue,-straight he turtle eats. Nobbs prints blue, -claret crowns his cup. Nokes outdares Stokes in azure feats,- Now, this is both unfair to John boy who wrote Endymion may have been; and the fame of Keats stands at least as high as his productions justify, and allows a considerable margin over for the promise of only half-developed powers. And the theory itself, that the socalled originator in poetry is defrauded of his fame by the world, which bestows its admiration on those who seize, and elaborate, and refine his imperfect hints, at once unduly exaggerates the powers implied in such originality, and underrates those of the artist whose genius absorbs, digests, and reproduces, organically recombined, what has been. less serviceably employed by the discoverer. Indeed, we are so dependent on those who have preceded us, and those who surround us, that originality in any other sense than that of thorough assimilation and reproduction in fresh forms is somewhat absurd. And to return to Mr. Browning's illustration, we suppose he would not coolly argue that the fisherman who furnished the material of blue paint was really a greater genius than the painter who employed it upon a picture. And with respect to himself we really do not see in what peculiar sense he can justify his own roughness and obscurity by any claim of originality. The passions he describes are familiar, the characters he draws are not more new than those of any other writer who looks into life for his material. Originality, in our sense of the word, he certainly has; that is, he looks about him with his own eyes, and not through the spectacles of school, or sect, or party; he wanders pretty much at will through God's and the Devil's world, and does not keep himself within four walls, however ample and well furnished. That is the only meaning of originality that is worth anything, and this scarcely excludes necessarily the qualities of the artist by which alone the knowledge gained can be communicated in such a manner as to win the permanent attention of mankind. Keats, his favourite, died almost in his nonage, and yet in the few years he lived, his art grew even more than his genius, if we are reluctantly obliged, for the sake of clear distinctions, to separate what are but form and substance. Mr. Browning has been before the public twenty years at least, and his art is as awkward and rude and ineffective now as it was at first. Neither Keats nor Martin Luther will serve his turn for an excuse. He had much better ponder on the fable he has put into Luther's mouth. Date and dabitur are twins -God has given to him that he might give to others; he has accepted the gift, but refused the labour implied in the condition. It is no question of genius too high and noble for the arts of grammar and rhythm and phrase, but simply of genius allied to a will not resolute enough to earn fairly the renown it seeks, to a vanity seeking by byeways a royal road to enduring poetic fame. And now enough of prologuing; let us see proof of what has been asserted. We have charged some of the poems of these volumes with being utterly unintelligible. Will any one venture to solve the riddle of Women and Roses? which we quote entire, lest it should be supposed the meaning lurks in some passage omitted: I dream of a red-rose tree. . And which of its roses three Is the dearest rose to me? Round and round, like a dance of snow In a dazzling drift, as its guardians, go Floating the women faded for ages, Sculptured in stone, on the poet's pages. Then follow the women fresh and gay, Living and loving and loved to-day. Last, in the rear, flee the multitude of maidens, Beauties unborn. dence, And all, to one ca They circle their rose on my rose tree. Dear rose, thy term is reached, Stay then, stoop, since I cannot climb, Oh! to possess, and be possessed! Hearts that beat 'neath each pallid breast! But once of love, the poesy, the passion, Drink once and die!-In vain, the same fashion, They circle their rose on my rose tree. Dear rose, thy joy's undimmed; |