EDINBURGH REVIEW

Vol. 120, No. 246, October 1864.

ROBERT BROWNING'S POEMS

(Author unknown, but possibly John Camden Hotten)

1. Robert Browning's Poems. 3 vols. London: 1863.
2. Dramatis Personæ. By ROBERT BROWNING. London: 1864.

[Ed. see also Gerald Massey's response to this highly critical review]

IF the shades of Jeffrey and of Gifford were to appear among us and to survey the poetic literature of the present generation, they would feel a stern satisfaction and a self-gratulatory delight at the remembrance of the hard-handed castigations which they had inflicted on the young poets of the commencement of this century.  For a style of poetry more at variance with the canons of  criticism then  recognised than that in which it is now the ambition of most of our poets to express themselves, is hardly conceivable.  Even the chief offenders of those days would refuse to recognise their own offspring in many of the most belauded poetic flights of the present time, which frequently unite an affected simplicity with such tortured, artificial, and foppish vagueness of expression and fantastic flimsiness of ideas, that it is generally a labour of infinite pain to extract from them the little meaning they possess.  Indeed, the age now appears to be ripe for some 'Theory of the Obscure,' which, like Pope's famous 'Treatise on Bathos or the Art of sinking in Poetry,' might be copiously illustrated from the works of contemporary poets, and afford at least a warning to the young aspirant for the honours of verse.  For such a book Mr. Browning's volumes would form an inexhaustible mine of examples, and the last volume which he has published is, perhaps, richer than any that have preceded it in materials for such a purpose.  Yet much as we may lament the great defects of expression which enshroud his thoughts and distort his compositions, it were vain to deny that his steady perseverance in the course which he has chosen has won at length for himself an influence among readers of poetry second only to that of the Laureate, and no one pretending to be at all conversant with the literature of our time can forbear from making acquaintance with and forming some estimate of his labours.  Every reader who glances at Mr. Browning's volumes however cursorily, must perceive that he is a man of rare accomplishments, with a singularly original mind capable of sympathising with a multiplicity of tastes and characters very far removed from everyday experience.  We may regret that he has omitted to draw from those sources of the sublime, the tender, and the pathetic which will ever be the most potent means of touching and purifying the heart, refining the feelings, and elevating the imagination.  We may regret also the habitual neglect of the ordinary canons of taste and judgment which lamentably diminishes the effectiveness of his poetry; but Mr. Browning now lays the work of thirty years before us, and we have but to take it to ourselves and to enjoy it and understand it as well as we can.  For it is clear that he has so wedded himself to what is quaint and obscure in his forms of expression and choice of subject, that no change in these is to be hoped for from him; far different in this respect from Mr. Tennyson, whose last volume shows a power of adapta­tion and a pliability of invention which even his strongest admirers hardly anticipated.  His two rustic sketches, 'The Grandmother' and 'The Northern Farmer,' have enriched the language with two scenes of homely and rural life scarcely to be surpassed in truthfulness and simplicity of expression; while his two tales, 'Enoch Arden' and 'Aylmer's Field,' although open to some objection as to the character and construction of the stories, are yet rare triumphs of poetic diction, and in their chastened strength form a very striking contrast with the highly-wrought and fastidious execution of 'Locksley Hall' and 'Œnone.'  On the other hand, there is hardly a fault with which Mr. Browning has ever been charged which is not, in the 'Dramatis Personæ,' intensified to an extravagant degree.  It was said of an eminent lawyer that he wrote his opinions in three different kinds of handwriting—one which he and his clerk could read, another which only he himself could decypher, and a third which neither he or anybody could make out; and into similar categories we are compelled to parcel out the poems of the 'Dramatis Personæ.'

    To form, however, a proper estimate of Mr. Browning as a poet it would not be fair to dwell exclusively upon this volume, and we shall proceed therefore to pass in review the collected edition of his works as last given to the pubic.  'Paracelsus,' published in 1835, was the first poem by which Mr. Browning became known to the world; its reception was not unfavourable, and this and one or two of Mr. Browning's tragedies may be regarded as the most perfect of his productions, besides being the most ambitious in conception.  There is nothing particularly original in the scheme of 'Paracelsus;' it depends for its interest, like Faust, René, Manfred, Jacopo Ortia, Oberman, El mundo diablo, Festus, and a crowd of lesser known productions, on psychological incidents and transformations—works which have their prototypes in the Book of Job and the Confessions of St. Augustine.  The hero of the poem is a shadowy transfiguration of the notorious doctor, alchemist, and quack of the sixteenth century, who filled for a time the chair of physic and surgery at the University of Basle, and began his course by publicly burning in the amphitheatre the works of Galen and Avicenna, and informing his auditory that he was henceforth to hold the monarchy of science; one of his proper names was Bombastus, which from the inflated character of his discourse has passed into modern language, with a signification which will render it immortal.  The 'Paracelsus' of Mr. Browning is a very different character, however, from the vain and drunken Swiss empiric, as his drunken­ness becomes converted into a sentimental attachment to the wine-cup, and his familiar demons, one of whom was said to reside in the handle of his sword, are kept for the most part unobtrusively behind the scenes.  In the first division of the poem, Paracelsus, inspired by the conviction that he has been selected by God for a special mission, determines to go forth in search of knowledge,—having set before him knowing as the great end of achievement.  He departs, contrary to the wishes of his friends, on a lonely pilgrimage to various countries to gather

    In reply to the persuasions of his friend Festus to remain with him and to avoid so perilous a career, he answers—

    In this sublime self-confidence, with this contempt of his kind and scorn of help from all his forerunners, Paracelsus sets forth in pursuit of knowledge—though what kind of knowledge he seeks is uncertain; apparently it consists of secrets, however, of some kind which are to lift the entire race up to a new heritage of glory.  In the course of his travels he comes to Constantinople, and there pauses for awhile, partly wearied, and partly to sum up the results already attained.  While at Constantinople, he falls in with Aprile, an Italian poet, who has failed in the search after love as the end of existence, and dies before Paracelsus of exhaustion and suffering.  The seemingly invincible confidence of Paracelsus had already abandoned him before the meeting with Aprile, but a considerable portion of assurance still remains:—

    This superb egotism melts away, however, before the presence of Aprile, whose desire of love has found vent in a passion for art, which is thus described by Mr. Browning in a passage not unworthy of Keats, though it is disfigured here and there by grotesque and extravagant conceits:—

A new truth burst in upon Paracelsus from the ravings of Aprile, and he says:—

Aprile, however, dies, but his example left on the mind of Paracelsus an ineffaceable influence:—

Paracelsus had yet, however, other lessons to learn, which are the subject of the Third and Fourth Parts of the poem; he had to come to a due appreciation of the value of the praise and dispraise of his fellow-men, of both of which he had suf­ficient experience in his professorial chair; and the haughtiness of his nature led him of itself to despise men for the one and to hate them for the other, but in the final scene on his death­bed he sees his error:—

He dies in the conviction that men will ultimately recognise his worth:—

    We have stayed somewhat long over 'Paracelsus,' as it is, as we observed, the most complete of Mr. Browning's productions, and embodies a vital truth—although it costs an effort to extricate it from the obscurity of the text,—for Mr. Browning's diction, if not so obscure here as elsewhere, is still suffi­ciently so to render continuous perusal a laborious process.  The moral of the fate of Paracelsus is expressed in his own words:—

The prose rendering of which would appear to be that the culture of science must, in order to bear salutary and lasting benefits for humanity, be allied with the culture of beauty,—a truth which the present generation have especial need to lay to heart.  We will not separate from this poem without quoting two or three of the beautiful passages which it contains:—

    'Paracelsus' was evidently written with some consideration for the public, and some fear of the critics before his eyes, which is more than be can asserted of Mr. Browning's next work, 'Sordello,' published five years afterwards.  This production alone would be amply sufficient to furnish all examples for the 'Theory of the Obscure,' which we suggested at the outset of our article. Singularly enough, too, this appears to be the only piece of the collection by the neglect of which Mr. Browning feels aggrieved.  In a dedication to one of his French critics, who appears to have arrived at the singular felicity of understanding 'Sordello,' Mr. Browning says that the poem was written only for a few, but he counted even on these few caring more for the subject than proved to be the case, and he is still sanguine enough to expect a wider public for 'Sorclello' than it has yet received.

    'Sordello' is, like 'Paracelsus,' a psychological study, the history of the growth of a soul; and the historical deco­ration is, as Mr. Browning informs us, put in merely by way of background; but, unfortunately, the decorative part is still more hard to comprehend than the crabbed metaphysics and æsthetics which are wrought up into the 'development of 'the soul.  The psychological revolutions and aims of Sordello's mind are so mixed and matted up with an inexplicable knot of tangled and indistinguishable incidents and personages in one of the darkest periods of Italian history, that nothing short or angelic patience is required to make them out at all, and even when the story of 'Sordello's soul' is unravelled from the weeds which adhere to it, there is little interest or novelty discoverable.   Like many other poets, he doubts whether song or action should be his aim in life: in the first part of the poem he is constant to song—in the latter portion he forsakes song, takes to action and dies, it is not clear how, under the burden of it.

    A single passage will suffice to show the nature of the nar­rative and the peculiar character of its obscurity, to which we confess that we are unable to give any meaning whatever:—

    The psychological portions of the poem, in which 'Sorrdello' exhibits a prophetic intimacy with Kantian metaphysics, are plain reading after such passages as the above, and come as a kind of relief; for though, in truth, equally unintelligible, the reader may be beguiled into thinking he understands them:—

    On the whole, however, this poem is, in our Judgment, from its confused and tortuous style of expression, the most illegible production of any time or country.  Every kind of obscurity is to be found in it.  Infinitives without their particles—suppression of articles definite and indefinite—confusion and suppression of pronouns relative and personal—adjectives pining for their substantives—verbs in an eternal state of suspense for their subjects—elisions of every kind—sentences prematurely killed off by interjections, or cut short in their career by other sentences—parentheses within parentheses—prepositions sometimes entirely divorced from their nouns—anacoloutha, and all kinds of abnormal forms of speech for which gramarians have ever invented names—oblique narrations, instead of direct—and puzzling allusions to obscure persons and facts disinterred front Muratori or Tiraboschi, as though they were perfectly familiar to the reader.  Indeed, to be compelled to look at a drama through a pair of horn spectacles would be a cheerful pastime compared with the ennui of tracing the course of 'Sordello' through that veil of obscurity which Mr. Browning's style of composition places between us and his conception.

    By a comparison of 'Sordello' and 'Paracelsus' it is easy to discover that the bent of Mr. Browning's genius has more of a dramatic than of an epic character.  'Sordello' as a narrative is a signal failure, whereas the merits of 'Paracelsus' had already encouraged its admirers to hope for something from Mr. Browning for the Drama.  The stage had not yet become the thing which it now is—tragedies of a high order had not long before obtained distinguished success: Milman's 'Fazio,' Shiel's 'Evadne,' Miss Mitford's 'Rienzi,' Barry Cornwall's 'Mirandola;' the plays of Sheridan Knowles and Talfourd had kept the tone and pathos of real tragic feeling alive in the hearts of the stage-going public.  Great then was the expectation of those in the secret when it was known that Mr. Macready had undertaken to bring out at Drury Lane a play called 'Strafford ' by Mr. Browning—an expectation doomed to disappointment; for 'Strafford ' was as complete a failure as was the 'Blot in the 'Scutcheon,' also produced some six years later at the same theatre.  'King Victor and 'King Charles,' and 'Colombe's Birthday,' were played subsequently at the Haymarket, but none of them succeeded in interesting the audience.  Indeed, the faculty of narration—of easily unfolding the subject and clearly putting the circumstances and incidents of the subject before its hearers—is as necessary to a drama as to an epic, and in this lies Mr. Browning's most remarkable deficiency.  Moreover, a stage writer is bound before all things to be pleasing; and this is an end which Mr. Browning never appears to have had in view.  His manner of introducing his subject is so involved, fragmentary, and tortuous that it must have been utterly impossible to com­prehend the story at a first sitting.  Take, for example, the following passage from the 'Return of the Druses,' where the verb is waiting for its subject over two parentheses and several lines of verse:—

    It is to be observed that the obscurity here arises not from any depth of thought, not even from terseness or any intricacy of poetic expression, the facts to be told being simple, and the obscurity arising simply from clumsiness of diction.  In reading the passage one may overcome the needless difficulty thus manufactured for the reader by looking back and finding out the governing verb.  But for a hearer this is impossible.  So also the dialogue is rendered unmercifully obscure, partly from carelessness and partly from a seeming impossibility to go straightforward with the work in hand.  The personages of the drama have a most uncomfortable way of replying to one question by asking another; of giving entirely a different answer from what one would naturally expect; of breaking each other off in the middle of a sentence; and, above all, alluding to minute circumstances and objects they have been familiar with, as if the audience were equally familiar with them.  For this latter purpose, the demonstrative pronouns that and those are unsparingly employed.  Thus Berthold, in 'Colombe's Birthday,' speaks incidentally of having wooed some girl called Priscilla under some convent wall or other.  Both Priscilla and the convent wall are thrust upon its as old acquaintances, without any introduction:—

    Failure in the wooing of a maiden, and failure in obtaining a kingdom, may, we suppose, admit of a comparison; but merely hinted at in this obscure fashion, with the particular image of Priscilla and that convent wall flashed upon us like a momentary scene of a magic lantern, we are simply dazzled and rendered quite unfit for the next sentence.  In the following opening of the scene between Ottima and her paramour Sebald, the German music-teacher, in 'Pippa Passes,' every line is a riddle.  It is morning, and the two lovers are alone in some building called a 'shrub-house,' closed with shutters apparently.  Sebald opens the scene by singing an extremely puzzling song in three jerking lines:—

    If a critic should ever take it into his head to write a commentary on the above passage, the explanatory scholia would require to be three times as long as the original lines.  No doubt Mr. Browning imagined the interior of a shrubhouse, and the relative position of flowers, frames, and lattices, and the movements of Sebald and Ottima on opening the lattice; but he has kept all these a secret from the reader, and as the whole passage stands, it reads (Sebald's song included) as if some drunken or fraudulent copyist had got hold of Mr. Browning's MS., left out all the words necessary to the understanding of the piece, and made a jumble of the remainder.  It is to be observed that here, too, none of the obscurity consists in the thought, nor is there anything approaching to poetry in a single line, but that the obscurity is solely in the description of the most trivial incidents.  'Pippa Passes ' was not, however, written for the stage; we turn, therefore, to 'Strafford,' to take a sample of such dialogue as Mr. Browning thinks adapted to stage purposes.

    After Lady Carlisle has made a speech to which Strafford has not given the least attention, the latter says:—

    Even in the 'Dramatic Lyrics' some of the best-known pieces are utterly spoiled by Mr. Browning's abhorrence of lucidity. The 'Ride to Aix,' for example, labours under this fatal defect.  The poem is a spirited one, in spite of its quaintnesses, of which it has its full share.  For example, if 'Dirck' is 'he' in the first line, why should he not be 'he' in the second?  Then why did not Roland's rider put his riding-gear in good order before starting? and Roland must indeed have been a steady roadster if his bit could be chained slacker without interfering with his galloping.  All these and other singularities do not hinder the poem from being a very spirited one.  But what is fatal to its general success is the impossibility of knowing what all the galloping is about.  Some one a few years ago, we observed, was so moved by Roland's achievements as to write to 'Notes and Queries' to ask what was the news brought, but the inquiry still remains unanswered.

    The incidents and actors represented are not, either in the case of his Tragedies or Dramatic Lyrics, such as to stir deeply the passions or touch the feelings; but are sometimes of an unpleasant character to dwell upon, and sometimes of that super-sublime or fantastic nature which excites no very deep sympathy.  In 'King Victor and King Charles,' father and son are scheming against each other for the possession of a crown, but the plot has none of the tragic awe of a great crime like that of Clytemnestra to subdue the natural repugnance produced by seeing son and parent in unnatural relations.  In the 'Blot on the 'Scutcheon,' a boy and girl of noble family are living in unchastity before marriage.  The circumstances under which the seduction is described as innocently taking place are most improbable; and all sense of proportion of tragic crime and punishment is violated by its termination in a murder and two suicides.  In the 'Return of the Druses,' Djabal, the hero, is a mixture of the impostor and fanatic, for whom one has small concern, while the most interesting personage, Loys de Dreux, the Knight Novice—described as one of the noblest and most generous of men—thinks so lightly of the vows of his order and of his Christian faith, that he is quite ready to go off with the Druses and live with them as a renegade in Mount Lebanon.

    Luria is the grandest character of all Mr. Browning's plays: but we cannot conceive the existence of such a character out of Mr. Browning's pages; and he certainly would be utterly unintelligible to any English audience.  Luria, the Moor of Florence, is a sentimentally magnanimous Othello without his passions and without his Desdemona.  He stands at the head of a devoted army—having often achieved a series of victories which has made Florence superior to all her rivals, and because he becomes aware that the ungrateful city is endeavouring, after the manner of Italian republics, to disembarrass herself of a successful general, he, notwithstanding that he has unlimited opportunities of revenge or of making his escape, forestalls her purpose and takes poison.  It certainly required an immense deal of ingenuity to invent reasons for this act of self-immolation: Mr. Browning has, however, found some, though we apprehend that none but minds of his own subtle and ingenious turn call possibly appreciate them.  Luria, a bold and passionate son of the East, having been converted by his irresistible yearning for European civilisation into a blind and childlike reverence for the beauty and glory of Florence, yielded up himself and his irresistible military genius to be a passive instrument of her aggrandisement.  The wrong done to himself he imagined must have been caused by prior wrong committed by himself.  And rather than that he should run the risk of injuring the city whose inviolability and existence is the prime article of his faith, either by being estranged from her or by his judicial death, he determines to end his existence.  He lives long enough, however, to know that his sacrifice was uncalled for; since the Florentines, on receiving irrefragable evidence of his probity, had repented of their proceedings, and abandoned the evidence against him.  The tragedy, nevertheless, in point of style is the best in the volume; it is true to the manners of Italy in the middle ages, and contains some good characters.  Tiburzio, the commander of the Pisans, Puccio, Luria's chief officer, are both noble natures, and Braccio, the Commissary of the Republic of Florence, and Husain, the Moor, the friend of Luria, are truly conceived and developed.

    The fantastic piece, however, with the fantastic title, 'Pippa Passes,' is perhaps the best known of all Mr. Browning's dramatic efforts, and deservedly so, for it combines all his peculiar exellences at the same time that it omits some of his characteristic defects.  The notion of 'Pippa,' the obscure girl of the silk-mills, exercising, unknown to herself, a good influence over the four little dramas of the piece is pretty enough, notwithstanding that the songs she sings seem little calculated to move the actors of each separate intrigue in the way they do.  The verses overheard by Jules the sculptor are an ingenious and appropriate introduction to his story, which leaves him married and determined to be happy with his bride; although he had been befooled into espousing a girl he had never seen before.  On the other hand, the criminal amour of Ottima and the German Sebald, which contains a description of a love-scene of questionable decency in a forest, has so uncertain an ending that we cannot tell whether simple suicide, or suicide and murder, or double suicide, or anything of the kind, happens—we only know that Luca Gaddi, the old husband, has been made away with, although he does not seem to have interfered with the happiness of the lovers more than enough to give zest to their illicit intercourse.  Luigi goes off on some indefinite errand of assassination, but we are unable to determine whether the strange song which Pippa sings in his hearing had the effect of strengthening or making him waiver in his purpose; and we are quite left in the dark as to what the Monsignore—the most natural character in the piece—means to do after he has circumvented his Intendant and discovers that Pippa is his niece, and the heiress of his brother's property, of which he has arrived to take possession.  It is to be regretted, too, that the conception of Pippa's character, which is simple and playful, should be marred by the grotesque rhymes and metaphors which are put into her mouth.  Can any one imagine a simple village girl getting out of bed and saying?—

    The idea of a 'boiling day' is not likely to be associated with the cool breath of a New Year's morn in the mind of any one but a writer straining a metaphor.  The following playful prattle about the sunbeam is more natural, but the jingle of 'bits' and 'wits' spoils it altogether:—

    The strangest puzzle, however, occurs at the close of the day, where we are entirely at a loss to know what the lark is expected to do:—

    We are led by the concluding line to speak of Mr. Browning's passion for doggerel rhymes, which is one of his most striking peculiarities, and one which no estimate of his poetry can omit to take notice of.  In a piece like that called the 'Pied Piper of Hamelin,' a tale written expressly for children, and which, though of a quainter fashion than the 'Ingoldsby Legends,' is a poem of the same order, we expect to find such rhymes as we meet with in the speech of the rat, the sole sur­vivor of his legion, when describing the peculiar fascination in the tones of the piper's melody, which induced all his brethren to drown themselves in the Weser:—

    Here such rhymes may be in their place, but 'The Flight of the Duchess,' who goes away so strangely to Gypsy-land—a tale intended to have something of the pathetic about it—has still stranger and much coarser rhymes.  The mother of the Duke, the dowager Duchess, who was part of the torment of the young Duchess's life, painted, and the teller of the tale, with some pretence of squeamishness, describes it thus:—