1856.] Poems in Mr. Browning's best and worst Style. Deep as drops from a statue's plinth Girdle me once! But no-in their old measure They circle their rose on my rose tree. Dear rose without a thorn, Thy bud's the babe unborn: First streak of a new morn. Wings, lend wings for the cold, the clear! What's far conquers what is near. Roses will bloom nor want beholders, Sprung from the dust where our own flesh moulders. What shall arrive with the cycle's change? A novel grace and a beauty strange. I will make an Eve, be the artist that began her, Shaped her to his mind!-Alas! in like manner They circle their rose on my rose tree. Our next evidence shall be a pair of poems, the first of which is in Browning's best style; the second in nearly, though not quite, his worst. It is not, of course, because the first is tender, devoted, and full of a gracious sweetness, while the second represents caprice, affection on the wane, the ungracious side of love and marriage, that the former is to be preferred; but because in the former the images are clear, their symbolic meaning apprehended with no more effort than belongs to poetry of this kind, the rhythm musical, and the phrase natural, and in good taste,-while in the latter the language of things employed to express the sentiment is of the obscurest interpretation; the connexion of the thoughts broken and abrupt; two passages-though the poem is so short-disfigured, the one by inanity, the other by an allusion, the irrelevance of which would shock most persons, if its profanity did not; and the conclusion most lame and impotent. We do not say that a wife might not write such a poem in playful menace to her husband, or by way of serious warning, and prefer in the latter case to veil her serious meaning in a cipher of which her husband held the key; but as written for the public it contrasts 109 in all the points we have mentioned most disadvantageously with its pendant. We mark in italics the two passages to which we particularly refer above:— ONE WAY OF LOVE. All June I bound the rose in sheaves. She will not turn aside? Alas! eye. How many a month I strove to suit She will not hear my music? So! She will not give me heaven? 'Tis well! Those who win heaven, blest are they. ANOTHER WAY OF LOVE. Though past the full, Turned him and said with a man's true air, Half sighing a smile in a yawn, as 'twere, "If I tire of your June, will she greatly care?' Well, Dear, in-doors with you! What's in the blossom Go, let me care for it greatly or slightly! If June mends her bowers now, your hand left unsightly By plucking their roses,-my June will do rightly. And after, for pastime, Or if, with experience of man and of spider, She use my June-lightning, the strong insect ridder, To stop the fresh spinning,-why, June will consider. IfMr. Browning showed symptoms of indifference early in his honeymoon, this Another Way of Love would have been a very pretty and meaning reproof and warning to him-with the exception of the sacramental wine allusion,-just the sort of note in verse a poetical wife might write to her poetical husband; but, coram populo, such lover's talk of broken sentences, hints significant to the parties talking and no one else, is almost impertinent. We should not of course lay one such poem as a very heavy charge against any man, but it is a specimen of a style which disfigures the majority of Mr. Browning's shorter poems-a preference for allusive writing which has an air of cleverness and refinement, and ends in being too often simply unmeaning, because it may mean anything or nothing. And that most ineffective conclusion-why, June will consider -is just an example of Mr. Browning's favourite plan of writing a poem that, so to speak, leads to nothing, has no end, is but a fragment of versified talk, as if the very essence of art was not to present things completely from a particular point of view. We have in these volumes abundant instances of this most provoking of faults in a writer whose fragments are good enough to interest one, none more striking than a comparatively long and highly wrought poem, with the title Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came. The poem consists of thirty-four stanzas of six lines each, and is, we suppose, allegorical; but from beginning to end we can discover no hint as to what the allegory means, and find only description preparatory to some adventure which is to disclose the symbol of the dark tower' and its terrible neighbourhood but the adventure never comes off in the poem, which thus closes : There they stood, ranged along the hillsides-met To view the last of me, a living frame For one more picture! in a sheet of flame This seems to us very much like making a fool of the public, and all the worse for the striking ability lavished upon the fragment, as if a showman should hang round his caravan-front with the most wonderful pictures of the rarities on view inside, and the public after 'walking up, walking up,' should find nothing behind the front, not even four bare walls. We guess what the fate of the showman would be if a pump or a pond were at hand. Such impatience of the labour necessary to work out fine conceptions, such a resting satisfied with the portico to which a temple naturally belongs, is at least as good an instance of indolence which aspires to strive' as the story of The Statue and the Bust, one of the best poems, undoubtedly, in these volumes, interesting in itself as a history, and well told in a terza rima new, if we mistake not, to the English language, but as usual with Browning, marred by a close, in which a fine moral struggles obscurely through slovenly phraseology, and-its counterpart and cause -thought only half elaborated. The story is of a Grand Duke of Florence, who loved and was loved by the bride of one of his ministers, both resolving to act out their love, and both dallying with this purpose till years flew by, and the lady and her lover grew old and died baffled of their life's set prize. Before this, however, the lady has her bust, in scorn of her feebleness of will, executed by Robbia, and set in the cornice over the window at which she used to watch the Grand Duke pass daily; and the duke has himself, from a similar feeling, cast in bronze, by John of Douay, on horseback, in the square, looking up to the window where his lady-love sat. Mr. Browning fancies the two in their tombs pondering what a gift life was, and sensible they had missed its aim, and thus delivers his moral of their story I hear your reproach-' But delay was best, For their end was a crime!'-Oh, a crime will do As well, I reply, to serve for a test, 1856.] Mr. Browning's Injustice to Himself. As a virtue golden through and through, And prove its worth at a moment's view. Where a button goes, 'twere an epigram a dram. Stake your counter as boldly every whit, Was, the unlit lamp and the ungirt loin, Though the end in sight was a crime, I say. You of the virtue, (we issue join) Here is the bold morality of a man who refuses to see life through conventional spectacles; but unless one were tolerably familiar with the train of thought that energy of act and force of purpose are the most important elements in character, and that life is given to test these, we should hardly make out Mr. Browning's meaning clearly from the slovenly and careless enunciation of it in these stanzas. Nor ought a poet of Mr. Browning's principles to state thus nakedly what is only a half-truth after all, and which Mr. Browning knows as well as we do to be only a halftruth. But it would have given him some trouble, we suppose, to re-write these concluding stanzas so as to express his meaning less obscurely, and with its proper limitation. So he leaves his word-puzzles to acute people, and his morality to shift for itself: one consequence of which is that he has spoiled the effect of what would otherwise be one of the most complete and striking poems in his collection. Our main object in this paper is to show how Mr. Browning defrauds himself of sympathy and fame, and his readers of enjoyment, by not doing justice to his own genius,-by wilfulness, caprice, and carelessness. Here is a pair of poems that are short VOL. LIII. NO. CCCXIII. 111 enough to be quoted largely, the first of which is almost perfectquite perfect but for an occasional awkwardness of phrase, perhaps mainly due to the frequency and doubling of the rhyme. While the second, conceived as tenderly and as truly, is wholly sacrificed to a metre that is but disjointed prose, and an arrangement of rhymes that baffles ordinary ears to catch,— rhymes that are so to the eye merely, like an occasional unintentional jingling of like sounds in careless prose :— A WOMAN'S LAST WORD. Well, this cold clay clod Was man's heart. Crumble it-and what comes next? We that the man who could say write the first of these poems, and did write the second, must be utterly reckless in the employment of his faculties, utterly careless whether his art produce beauty or deformity. More often, however, Mr. Browning's caprice mixes in the same poem the best and the worst, and that is to our thinking a still greater offence. The two first poems of the collection are instances. Love among the Ruins is really a description of some such place as Old Sarum, vivid with touches of wonderful pictorial power, but which is continually marred by the sacrifice of meaning and appropriate language to a metre quite unadapted for the subject predominant, though not unadapted for the subject indicated in the title. Talk about the old city and its ruins fills eleven and a half of fourteen stanzas, the love occupies a stanza and a half, and the moral the concluding stanza. How beautiful The next poem-A Lover's Quarrel-is one of our especial favourites, because it is at once so intensely passionate, so Maud-like in parts, and so thoroughly modern and domestic. Yet such stanzas as these come in and spoil our pleasure : What's in the 'Times?'-a scold There they sit ermine-stoled, 1856.] Mr. Browning's Fondness for the Grotesque. Could but November come, Were the noisy birds struck dumb At the warning slash And the giant's fee-faw-fum! Perhaps Mr. Browning would justify such writing on the ground of its representing fairly the tone of mind depicted; but art's realism is surely not to be confounded with literalness, the artist's business is not to make people speak and look exactly as they would speak and look, with all the accidents of human weakness about them. It is a large subject to discuss, but surely art is not daguerreotyping, even if the literal truth for which we value the sun-picture were attainable by the artist. Mr. Browning seems to us wholly to forget this distinction, and in forgetting it to abdicate altogether the true function of the poet. The blemishes we have been noticing are blemishes for the most part upon poems of a serious or impassioned cast, and may be classed as faults of conception arising from impatience and feebleness of purpose, producing fragments instead of wholes; and as faults of execution, where a similar dislike of labour and carelessness of perfection produce doggrel. But Mr. Browning is fond of the grotesque for its own sake. Odd phrases, startling rhymes, strange arrange. ments, sudden transitions of thought, all kinds of eccentricities of style, have a fascination for him, we imagine, apart from the saving of labour accomplished by their means, and he writes whole poems apparently with little other object than to indulge this taste. It may easily be imagined that the writer who cannot keep himself from doggrel in poems intended to convey grave thoughts and tender sentiments, will play antics sufficiently extravagant when his purpose is to set things in the light of a playful or a tragical humour. But Mr. Browning unfortunately wants both wit to furnish the garb of wisdom in her sportive moods, and taste to warn him where the dangerous edge of sense and nonsense runs. He has not feeling enough of con 113 gruity to venture safely on a style in which airy grace and ease of movement are the condition of success. He tumbles, like a man who cannot keep his legs, not like a man who has such perfect command of his muscles that he can balance himself in a position of unstable equilibrium. And when he seeks to exhibit, as he sometimes does, the true grotesque, the blending of the tragic and comic, the terrible and the ridiculous, he seems to us, from a want of earnestness of feeling, or habitual carelessness of execution, to fall short at buffoonery. We have specimens of both classes of poems in these volumes. Old Pictures at Florence and Master Hugues of Saxe Gotha belong to the former; The Heretic's Tragedy and Holy-Cross Day to the latter. In not one of these are evidences of Mr. Browning's imagination and intellectual capacity wanting-the power to bring realities before his mind, and the power to think about them to some purpose when they are there; but what he sees he scrawls on his canvas with such a rough and ready hand, and what he thinks he expresses in such broken hints and such strange jargon, that the reader has a task to perform in getting through them, quite unnecessary from any profundity natural to the thoughts, or any obscurity to the things themselves, and strikingly illustrating the truth that the labour of a reader is generally in inverse proportion to that of the writer whose works he is studying. Here is a passage in which Mr. Browning is complaining of his ill-luck in finding no buried scrap of any of the early Florentine painters whose praises he is singing, and after a mere tiresome list of names, about as suitable to verse as an auctioneer's catalogue, he goes on: I, that have haunted the dim San Spirito, (Or was it rather the Ognissanti?) Stood on the altar-steps, patient and weary too! Nay, I shall have it yet, detur amanti! My Koh-i-noor-or (if that's a platitude) Jewel of Giamschid, the Persian Sof's eye! So, in anticipative gratitude, What if I take up my harp and prophesy? |