II

"Mr. Kenyon," wrote Miss Barrett, "was with me yesterday.... he accused

me of writing a certain paper in the _Athenaeum_, and convicted me

against my will; and when I could no longer deny and began to explain

and pique myself upon my diplomacy, he threw himself back in his chair

and laughed me to scorn as the least diplomatic of his acquaintance,

'_You_ diplomatic!'"

Mr. Kenyon, without perhaps intending it, gave expression to a feeling

which rises again and again half unconsciously in the mind even of the

most sympathetic reader of Mrs. Browning's poetry: there is no diplomacy

about it. The diplomatist achieves his successes not only by saying what

he has to say in the most lucid possible manner--that is not enough--but

by a discreet reticence, by implying possibilities rather than stating

them, by guarded admissions, by suggestive silence.

There is a well-known rhetorical device, upon which Mrs. Browning in her

classical studies must have not unfrequently stumbled, called the

Aposiopesis--in plain English, the art of breaking-off. Classical

writers are often hastily accused by young learners of having framed

their writings with a view to introducing perplexing forms and

intolerable constructions, so as unnecessarily to obscure the sense. But

it is a matter of regret that Mrs. Browning did not employ this

particular construction with greater frequency,--to use a colloquial

expression--that she did not let you off a good deal. Many of her poems

are weighted with a dragging moral; many of them fly with a broken wing,

stopping and rising again, dispersing and returning with a kind of

purposeless persistency, as if they were incapable of deciding where to

have done. Poems with passage after passage of extraordinary depth of

thought and amazing felicity of expression, every now and then droop and

crawl like the rain on a November day, which will not fall in a

drenching shower nor quite desist, but keeps dropping, dropping from the

sky out of mere weakness or idleness.

To secure an audience a poet must be diplomatic; he must know whose ear

he intends to catch. It is mere cant to say that the best poetry cannot

be popular; that it should be read is its first requisite. When Gray

wrote [Greek: _phonanta sunetoisin_] on his Odes he meant that there

would be many people to whom they would not appeal; but it is ridiculous

to say that the merit of poetry is in proportion to the paucity of its

admirers. If Mrs. Browning aimed at any particular class it was perhaps

at intellectual sentimentalists. As the two characteristics are rarely

found united, in fact are liable to exclude one another, it may perhaps

be the reason why she is so little appreciated in her entirety: she is

perhaps too learned for women and too emotional for men.

Let us consider for a moment where her intellectual training came from.

Roughly speaking, the basis of it was Greek from first to last; at nine

years old she measured her life by the years of the siege of Troy, and

carved a figure out of the turf in her garden to represent a recumbent

warrior, naming it Hector. Then came her version of the "Prometheus

Vinctus"; her long studious mornings over Plato and Theocritus with the

blind scholar, Mr. Boyd, whom she commemorates in "Wine of Cyprus," when

she read, as she writes, "the Greek poets, with Plato, from end to end";

her dolorous excursion with the Fathers; and at last, in the Casa Guidi,

the little row of miniature classics, annotated in her own hand,

standing within easy reach of her couch. Of course she was an omnivorous

reader besides. She speaks of reading the Hebrew Bible, "from Genesis

to Malachi,--never stopped by the Chaldean,--and the flood of all

possible and impossible British and foreign novels and romances, with

slices of metaphysics laid thick between the sorrows of the

multitudinous Celestinas." But it was evidently in Greek, in the

philosophical poetry of Euripides and the poetical philosophy of Plato,

that she found her deepest satisfaction.

At the same time she was not in the true sense learned, though

possessing learning far greater than commonly falls to a woman's lot to

possess. Her education in Greek must have been unsystematic and

unscholarly; her classical allusions, which fall so thick in letters and

poems have seldom quite the genuine ring; we do not mean that she did

not get nearer the heart of the Greek writers and appreciate their

spirit more intimately than many a far more erudite scholar; that was to

be expected, for she brought enthusiasm and insight and genius to the

task; but her learning is not an animated part of her; it is sometimes

almost an incubus. The character of her allusions too is often remote

and fanciful. They fall, it is true, from a teeming brain, but they are

not the simple direct comparisons which would occur to a man who had

made Greek literature his own, but rather the unexpected, modern turns

which so often surprise a student, like the red bunches of valerian

which thrust out of the sand-stone frieze of a Sicilian temple--such

comparisons, for instance, as the celebrated one in _Aurora Leigh_ of

the peasant who might have been gathering brushwood in the ear of a

colossus had Xerxes carried out his design of carving Athos into the

likeness of a man. Her characterization of the classical poets in "The

Poet's Vow" will also illustrate this; now so extraordinarily felicitous

and clear-sighted, as for instance in the case of Shakespeare and

Ossian, and now so alien to the true spirit of the men described.

Sophocles

With that king's-look which down the trees

Followed the dark effigies

Of the lost Theban. Hesiod old,

Who, somewhat blind and deaf and cold,

Cared most for gods and bulls.

The fact was that she read the Greeks as a woman of genius was sure to

do; she passed by their majestic grace, amazed at their solemn

profundity, and yet unaware that she was projecting into them a feeling,

a sentimental outlook which they did not possess, attributing directly

to them a deliberate power which was merely the effect of their

unconscious, antique, and limited vision upon the emotional child of a

later age.

The strangest thing is that a woman of such complex and sensitive

faculties should have given in her allegiance to such models. Never was

there a writer in whom the best characteristics of the Greeks were more

conspicuously absent. Their balance, their solidity, their calm, their

gloomy acquiescence in the bitter side of life, have surely little in

common with the passionate spirit that beat so wildly against the bars,

and asked the stars and hills so eagerly for their secrets. Such a

passage as the following, grand as is the central idea, is surely enough

to show the utter incompatibility which existed between them: "I thought

that had AEschylus lived after the incarnation and crucifixion of our

Lord Jesus Christ, he might have turned, if not in moral and

intellectual, yet in poetic faith, from the solitude of Caucasus to the

deeper desertness of that crowded Jerusalem, where none had any

pity,--from the faded white flower of a Titanic brow to the withered

grass of a heart trampled on by its own beloved--from the glorying of

him who gloried that he could not die, to the sublime meekness of the

Taster of death for every man: from the taunt stung into being by the

torment, to his more awful silence, when the agony stood dumb before the

love." ... It was characteristic of a woman to bring the two

personalities together, to dwell on what might have been; but this is

not Greek.

The two poems which are the best instances of the classical mood, are

the two of which Pan, the spirit of the solitary country, half beast,

half god, is the hero. In these Mrs. Browning appears in her strength

and in her weakness. In "The Dead Pan," in spite of its solemn refrain,

the lengthy disordered mode of thought is seen to the worst advantage:

the progression of ideas is obscure, the workmanship is not hurried, but

deliberately distressing; the rhymes, owing to that unfortunate fancy

for double rhyming, being positively terrific; the brief fury of the

lyric mood passing into the utterances of a digressive moralist. But

when we turn to the other, "A Musical Instrument," what a relief we

experience. "What was he doing, the great god Pan, down in the reeds by

the river?" The splendid shock of the rhythm, like the solid plunge of a

cataract into a mountain-pool, captivates, for all its roughness, the

metrical ear. There is not a word or a thought too much: the scene

shapes itself, striking straight out into the thought; the waste and

horror that encircle the birth of the poet in the man; the brutish

elements out of which such divinity is compounded--these are flung down

in simple, delicate outlines: such a lyric is an eternal possession of

the English language.

As a natural result of a certain discursiveness of mind, there is hardly

any kind of writing unrepresented in Mrs. Browning's poems. She had at

one time a fancy for pure romantic writing, since developed to such

perfection by Rossetti. There is a peculiar charm about such

composition. In such works we seem to breathe a freer air, separated as

we are from special limitations of time and place; the play of passion

is more simple and direct, and the passion itself is of a less complex

and restrained character. Besides, there is a certain element of horror

and mystery, which the modern spirit excludes, while it still hungers

for it, but is not unnatural when mediaevalized. Nothing in Mrs. Browning

can bear comparison with "Sister Helen" or "The Beryl Stone"; but "The

Romaunt of the Page" and the "Rhyme of the Duchess May" stand among her

most successful pieces.

The latter opens with a simple solemnity:

To the belfry, one by one, went the ringers from the sun,

_Toll slowly_.

And the oldest ringer said, "Ours is music for the dead,

When the rebecks are all done."

Six abeles i' the churchyard grow on the north side in a row,

_Toll slowly_.

And the shadow of their tops rock across the little slopes

Of the grassy graves below.

On the south side and the west a small river runs in haste,

_Toll slowly_.

And between the river flowing and the fair green trees agrowing,

Do the dead lie at their rest.

On the east I sat that day, up against a willow grey:

_Toll slowly_.

Through the rain of willow-branches I could see the low hill ranges,

And the river on its way.

This is like the direct opening notes of the overture of a dirge.

Whatever may be said about such writing we feel at once that it comes

from a master's hand. So the poem opens, but alas for the close! Some

chord seems to snap; it is no longer the spirit of the ancient rhymer,

but Miss Mitford's friend who catches up the lyre and will have her last

word. The poem passes, still in the same metre, out of the definite

materialism, the ghastly excitements of the story into a species of

pious churchyard meditation; and the pity of it is that we cannot say

that this is not characteristic.

Then closely connected with the last comes a class of poems, of

so-called modern life, of which "Lady Geraldine's Courtship" shall stand

for an example. This is a poem of nineteenth-century adventure, which is

as impossible in design and as fantastic in detail as a poem may well

be. The reader does not know whether to be most amazed at the fire and

glow of the whole story, or at the hopeless ignorance of the world

betrayed by it. The impossible Earls with their immeasurable pride and

intolerable pomposities; the fashionable ladies with their delicate

exteriors and callous hearts,--these are like the creations of Charlotte

Bronte, and recall Blanche and Baroness Ingram of Ingram Park. And at

the same time, when we have said all this, we read the poem and we can

forgive all or nearly all--the spirit is so high, the passion is so

fierce and glowing, the poetry that bursts out, stanza after stanza,

contrives to involve even these dolorous mistakes in such a glamour,

that we can only admire the genius that could contend against such

visionary errors.

But we must turn to what after all is Mrs. Browning's most important and

most characteristic work, _Aurora Leigh_. Unfortunately its length

alone, were there not any other reasons, would prevent its ever being

popular. Ten thousand lines of blank verse is a serious thing. The fact

that the poem is to a great extent autobiographical, combined with the

comparative mystery in which the authoress was shrouded and the romance

belonging to a marriage of poets--these elements are enough to account

for the general enthusiasm with which the poem was received. Landor said

that it made him drunk with poetry,--that was the kind of expression

that its admirers allowed themselves to make use of with respect to it.

And yet in spite of these credentials, the fact remains that it is a

difficult volume to work through. It is the kind of book that one begins

to read for the first time with intense enjoyment, congratulating

oneself after the first hundred pages that there are still three-hundred

to come. Then the mood gradually changes; it becomes difficult to read

without a marker; and at last it goes back to the shelf with the marker

about three-fourths of the way through. As she herself wrote,

The prospects were too far and indistinct.

'Tis true my critics said "A fine view that."

The public scarcely cared to climb my book

For even the finest;--and the public's right.

Now what is the reason of this? In the first place it is a romance with

a rather intricate plot, and a romance requires continuous reading and

cannot be laid aside for a few days with impunity. Secondly, it requires

hard and continuous study; there is hardly a page without two or three

splendid thoughts, and several weighty expressions; it is a perfect mine

of felicitous though somewhat lengthy quotations upon almost every

question of art and life, yet it is sententious without being exactly

epigrammatic. Thirdly, it is very digressive, distressingly so when you

are once interested in the story. Lastly, it is not dramatic; whoever is

speaking, Lord Howe, Aurora, Romney Leigh, Marian Earle, they all

express themselves in a precisely similar way; it is even sometimes

necessary to reckon back the speeches in a dialogue to see who has got

the ball. In fact it is not they who speak, but Mrs. Browning. To sum

up, it is the attempted union of the dramatic and meditative elements

that is fatal to the work from an artistic point of view.

Perhaps, if we are to try and disentangle the motive of the whole

piece, to lay our finger on the main idea, we may say that it lies in

the contrast between the solidity and unity of the artistic life, as

opposed to the tinkering philanthropy of the Sociologist. _Aurora Leigh_

is an attempt from an artistic point of view to realise in concrete form

the truth that the way to attack the bewildering problem of the

nineteenth century, the moral elevation of the democracy, is not by

attempting to cure in detail the material evils, which are after all

nothing but the symptoms of a huge moral disease expressing itself in

concrete fact, but by infusing a spirit which shall raise them from

within. To attack it from its material side is like picking off the

outer covering of a bud to assist it to blow, rather than by watering

the plant to increase its vitality and its own power of internal action;

in fact, as our clergy are so fond of saying, a spiritual solution is

the only possible one, with this difference, that in _Aurora Leigh_ this

attempt is made not so much from the side of dogmatic religion as of

pure and more general enthusiasms. The insoluble enigma is

unfortunately, whether, under the pressure of the present material

surroundings, there is any hope of eliciting such an instinct at all;

whether it is not actually annihilated by want and woe and the diseased

transmission of hereditary sin.

It is of course totally impossible to give any idea of a poem of this

kind by quotations, partly, too, because as with most meditative poetry,

the extracts are often more impressive by themselves than in their

context, owing to the fact that the run of the poem is interfered with

rather than assisted by them. But we may give a few specimens of various

kinds. "I," she says,

Will write my story for my better self,

As when you paint your portrait for a friend

Who keeps it in a drawer, and looks at it

Long after he has ceased to love you, just

To hold together what he was and is.

And this is one of those mysterious, sudden images that take the fancy;

she is describing the high edge of a chalk down:

You might see

In apparition in the golden sky

... the sheep run

Along the fine clear outline, small as mice

That run along a witch's scarlet thread.

And this is a wonderful rendering of the effect, which never fails to

impress the thought, of the mountains of a strange land rising into

sight over the sea's rim:

I felt the wind soft from the land of souls:

The old miraculous mountain heaved in sight

One straining past another along the shore

The way of grand, tall Odyssean ghosts,

Athirst to drink the cool blue wine of seas

And stare on voyagers.

We may conclude with this enchanting picture of an Italian evening:

Fire-flies that suspire

In short soft lapses of transported flame

Across the tingling dark, while overhead

The constant and inviolable stars

Outrun those lights-of-love: melodious owls

(If music had but one note and was sad,

'Twould sound just so): and all the silent swirl

Of bats that seem to follow in the air

Some grand circumference of a shadowy dome

To which we are blind; and then the nightingales

Which pluck our heart across a garden-wall,

(When walking in the town) and carry it

So high into the bowery almond-trees

We tremble and are afraid, and feel as if

The golden flood of moonlight unaware

Dissolved the pillars of the steady earth,

And made it less substantial.

It would seem in studying Mrs. Browning's work as though either she

herself or her advisers did not appreciate her special gift. The longest

of her poems are the work of her later years, whereas her strength did

not lie so much in sustained narrative effort, in philosophical

construction, or patriotic sentiment, as in the true lyrical gift. It

seems more and more clear as time goes on that the poems by which she

will be best remembered are some of her shortest--the expression of a

single overruling mood--the parable without the explanation--the burst

of irrepressible feeling.

I should be inclined, if I had to make a small selection out of the

poems, to name seven lyrics as forming the truest and most

characteristic work she ever produced--characteristic that is of her

strength, and showing the fewest signs of her weakness. These are:

"Loved Once," "The Romance of the Swan's Nest," "Catarina to Camoens,"

"Cowper's Grave," "The Cry of the Children," "The Mask," and lastly

"Confessions," which seems to me one of the stormiest and most pathetic

poems in the language. A few words of critical examination may be given

to each.

The first fact that strikes a reader is that all of these, with one

exception, depend to a certain extent upon the use of a refrain. Of

course the refrain is a species of metrical trick; but there is no

possibility of denying, that, if properly used, it gives a peculiar

satisfaction to that special sense--whatever it be, for there is no

defining it--to which metre and rhyme both appeal. At the same time

there is one condition attached to this device, that it should not be

prolonged into monotony. At what precise moment this lapse into monotony

takes place, or by what other devices it may be modified, must be left

to the sensitive taste of the writer, but if the writer does not

discover when it becomes monotonous the reader will do so; and this is

certainly the case in "The Dead Pan," though the refrain is there

varied.

To a certain extent too it must be confessed that this same monotony

affects two of the poems which we have mentioned: "Loved Once," and

"Catarina to Camoens." The former of these deals with the permanence of

a worthy love; and the refrain, "Loved Once," is dismissed as being the

mere treasonous utterance of those who have never understood what love

is. The poem gains, too, a pathetic interest from the fact that it

records the great estrangement of Mrs. Browning's life.

"Catarina to Camoens" is the dying woman's answer to her lover's sonnet

in which he recorded the wonder of her gaze. But alas! of these lines we

may say with the author of _Ionica_, "I bless them for the good I feel;

but yet I bless them with a sigh." The poem is vitiated by the unusually

large proportion of faulty and fantastic rhymes that it contains.

"The Swan's Nest," the story of a childish dream and its disappointment,

is an admirable illustration of the artistic principle that the element

of pathos depends upon minuteness of detail and triviality of situation

rather than upon intensity of feeling.

"The Mask" is not a poem that appears to have been highly praised. But

it will appeal to any one who has any knowledge of that most miserable

of human experiences--the necessity of dissembling suffering:

I have a smiling face, she said,

I have a jest for all I meet,

I have a garland for my head,

And all its flowers are sweet--

And so you call me gay, she said.

Behind no prison-grate, she said,

Which slurs the sunshine half-a-mile,

Live captives so uncomforted

As souls behind a smile.

God's pity let us pray, she said.

If I dared leave this smile, she said,

And take a moan upon my mouth,

And twine a cypress round my head,

And let my tears run smooth,

It were the happier way, she said.

And since that must not be, she said,

I fain your bitter world would leave.

How calmly, calmly, smile the dead,

Who do not, therefore, grieve!

The yea of Heaven is yea, she said.

It is not necessary to quote from either "Cowper's Grave" or "The Cry of

the Children." The former is the true Elegiac; the latter--critics may

say what they will--goes straight to the heart and brings tears to the

eyes. We do not believe that any man or woman of moderate sensibility

could read it aloud without breaking down. It has faults of language,

structure, metre; but its emotional poignancy gives it an artistic value

which it would be fastidious to deny, and which we may expect it to

maintain.

Lastly, "Confessions" is the story of passionate love, lavished by a

soul so exclusively and so prodigally on men that it has, in the jealous

priestly judgment, sucked away and sapped the natural love for the

Father of men. The poor human soul under the weight of this accusation

clings only to the thought of how utterly it has loved the brothers that

it has seen. "And how," comes the terrible question, "have they requited

it? God's love, you have rejected it--what have you got in its stead

from man?"

I saw God sitting above me, but I ... I sate among men,

And I have loved these.

The least touch of their hands in the morning, I keep it by

day and by night;

Their least step on the stair, at the door, still throbs through

me, if ever so light:

Their least gift, which they left to my childhood, far off in

the long-ago years,

Is turned from a toy to a relic, and seen through the crystal of

tears.

"Dig the snow," she said,

"For my churchyard bed,

Yet I, as I sleep, shall not fear to freeze,

If one only of these my beloveds, shall love me with heart-warm

tears

As I have loved these!"

"Go," I cried, "thou hast chosen the Human, and left the

Divine!

Then, at least, have the Human shared with thee their wild

berry wine?

Have they loved back thy love, and when strangers approached

thee with blame

Have they covered thy fault with their kisses, and loved thee

the same?"

But she shrunk and said,

"God, over my head,

Must sweep in the wrath of His judgment-seas,

If He shall deal with me sinning, but only indeed the same

And no gentler than these."

We have been dealing with a poet as a poet; but we must not forget that

she was a woman too. From Sappho and Sulpicia (whose reputations must be

allowed to rest upon somewhat negative proof) to Eliza Cook and Joanna

Baillie, and even Mrs. Hemans, sweet singer as she was--how Mrs.

Browning distances them all! There was something after all in the quaint

proposal of the _Athenaeum_, upon the death of Wordsworth, that the

Laureateship should be offered to Mrs. Browning, as typical of the

realisation of a new possibility for women. That alone is something of

an achievement, though in itself we do not rate it very high. But the

truth is that we cannot do without our poets; the nation is even now

pining for a new one, and every soul that comes among us bringing the

_divinae particulam aurae_, who finds his way to expression, is a

possession to congratulate ourselves upon. If there is that shadowy

something in a writer's work, coming we know not whence and going we

know not whither, unseen, intangible, but making its presence felt and

heard, we must welcome it and guard it and give it room to move. "My own

best poets," writes Mrs. Browning, "am I one with you?"

Does all this smell of thyme about my feet

Conclude my visit to your holy hill

In personal presence, or but testify

The rustling of your vesture through my dreams

With influent odours?

We need not doubt it; she is worthy to be counted among these,

The only teachers who instruct mankind

From just a shadow on a charnel-wall

To find man's veritable stature out

Erect, sublime--the measure of a man--

And that's the measure of an angel, says

The apostle.