say rarely, happened, that, as in the present instance, we have been
able to deal out unqualified praise, but never found that the dose in
this case disagreed with the most squeamish stomach; on the contrary,
the patient has always seemed exceedingly comfortable after he had
swallowed it. He has been known to take the 'Review' home and keep his
wife from a ball, and his children from bed, till he could administer it
to them, by reading the article aloud. He has even been heard to
recommend the 'Review' to his acquaintance at the clubs, as the best
number which has yet appeared, and one, who happened to be an M.P. as
well as an author, gave a _conditional_ order, that in case his last
work should be favourably noticed, a dozen copies should be sent down by
the mail to the borough of ----. But, on the other hand, when it has
happened that the general course of our criticism has been unfavourable,
if by accident we happened to introduce the smallest spice of _praise_,
the patient immediately fell into paroxysms--declaring that the part
which we foolishly thought might offend him had, on the contrary, given
him pleasure--positive pleasure, but _that_ which he could not possibly
either forget or forgive, was the grain of praise, be it ever so small,
which we had dropped in, and for which, and _not for our censure_, he
felt constrained, in honour and conscience, to visit us with his extreme
indignation. Can any reader or writer inform us how it is that praise in
the wholesale is so very agreeable to the very same stomach that rejects
it with disgust and loathing, when it is scantily administered; and
above all, can they tell us why it is, that the indignation and nausea
should be in the exact inverse ratio to the quantity of the ingredient?
These effects, of which we could quote several cases much more violent
than Mr. Tennyson's, puzzle us exceedingly; but a learned friend, whom
we have consulted, has, though he could not account for the phenomenon,
pointed out what he thought an analogous case. It is related of Mr.
Alderman Faulkner, of convivial memory, that one night when he expected
his guests to sit late and try the strength of his claret and his head,
he took the precaution of placing in his wine-glass a strawberry, which
his doctor, he said, had recommended to him on account of its cooling
qualities: on the faith of this specific, he drank even more deeply,
and, as might be expected, was carried away at an earlier period and in
rather a worse state, than was usual with him. When some of his friends
condoled with him next day, and attributed his misfortune to six bottles
of claret which he had imbibed, the Alderman was extremely
indignant--'the claret,' he said, 'was sound, and never could do any man
any harm--his discomfiture was altogether caused by that damned single
strawberry' which he had kept all night at the bottom of his
glass.--_The Quarterly Review_.
[Footnote O: See Quarterly Review, vol. XIX, p. 204.]
[Footnote P: The same Camelot, in Somersetshire, we presume, which is
alluded to by Kent in 'King Lear'--
'Goose! if I had thee upon Sarum plain,
I'd drive thee cackling home to Camelot.'
]
_The Princess; a Medley_. By Alfred Tennyson. Moxon.
That we are behind most even of our heaviest and slowest contemporaries
in the notice of this volume, is a fact for which we cannot
satisfactorily account to ourselves, and can therefore hardly hope to be
able to make a valid excuse to our readers. The truth is, that whenever
we turned to it we became, like the needle between positive and negative
electric poles, so attracted and repelled, that we vibrated too much to
settle to any fixed condition. Vacillation prevented criticism, and we
had to try the experiment again and again before we could arrive at the
necessary equipose to indicate the right direction of taste and opinion.
We will now, however, note our variations, and leave them to the public
judgment.
The first lines of the prologue were repulsive, as a specimen of the
poorest Wordsworth manner and style--
"Sir Walter Vivian all a summer's day
Gave his broad lawns until the set of sun
Up to his people: thither flock'd at noon
His tenants, wife and child, and thither half
The neighbouring borough with their Institute
Of which he was the patron. I was there
From college, visiting the son,--the son
A Walter too,--with others of our set."
The "wife and child" of the tenants is hardly intelligible; and the
"set" is but a dubious expression. Nor can we clearly comprehend the
next line and a half--
"And me that morning Walter show'd the house,
Greek, set with busts:"
Does this mean that Sir Walter Vivian inhabited a Greek house, and that
the college "set" were guests in that dwelling "set with busts"? To say
the least, this is inelegant, and the affectations proceed--
"From vases in the hall
_Flowers of all heavens, and lovelier than their names_,
Grew side by side."
Persons conversant with the botanical names of flowers will hardly be
able to realize (as the Yankees have it) the idea of their loveliness;
the loveliness of Hippuris, Dolichos, Syngenesia, Cheiranthus,
Artocarpus, Arum dracunculus, Ampelopsis hederaca, Hexandria, Monogynea,
and the rest.
A good description of the demi-scientific sports of the Institute
follows; but the house company and inmates retire to a ruined abbey:--
"High-arch'd and ivy-claspt,
Of finest Gothic, lighter than a fire."
This is a curious jumble in company, two lights of altogether a
different nature; but the party get into a rattling conversation, in
which the noisy babble of the College Cubs is satirically characterized:
we
"Told
Of college: he had climb'd across the spikes,
And he had squeez'd himself betwixt the bars,
And he had breathed the Proctor's dogs; and one
Discuss'd his tutor, rough to common men
But honeying at the whisper of a lord;
And one the Master, as a rogue in grain
Veneer'd with sanctimonious theory."
The dialogue happily takes a turn, and the task of writing the
_Princess_ is assigned to the author, as one of the tales in the
Decameron of Boccaccio. A neighbouring princess of the south (so the
story runs as the prince tells it) is in childhood betrothed to a like
childish prince of the north:--
"She to me
Was proxy-wedded with a _bootless calf_ [?]
At eight years old."
Both grew up, the prince, all imaginative, filling his mind with
pictures of her perfections; but she turning a female reformer of the
Wolstencroft [_sic_] school, resolved never to wed till woman was raised
to an equality with men, and establishing a strange female colony and
college to carry this vast design into effect. In consequence of this
her father is obliged to violate the contract, and his indignant father
prepares for war to enforce it. The prince, with two companions, flies
to the south, to try what he can do for himself; and in the disguise of
ladies they obtain admission to the guarded precincts of the new
Amazonian league. He, meanwhile, sings sweetly of his mistress--
"And still I wore her picture by my heart,
And one dark tress; and all around them both
Sweet thoughts would swarm as bees about their queen."
And of his friend--
"My other heart,
My shadow, my half-self, for still we moved
Together, kin as horse's ear and eye."
His evasion is also finely told--
"But when the council broke, I rose and past
Through the wild woods that hang about the town;
Found a still place, and pluck'd her likeness out:
Laid it on flowers, and watch'd it lying bathed
In the green gleam of dewy-tassell'd trees:
What were those fancies? wherefore break her troth?
Proud look'd the lips: but while I meditated
A wind arose and rush'd upon the South,
And shook the songs, the whispers, and the shrieks
Of the wild woods together; and a Voice
Went with it 'Follow, follow, thou shalt win!'"
Almost in juxtaposition with these beauties, we find one of the
disagreeable blots, so offensive to good taste, which disfigure the
poem. The travellers are interrogating the host of an inn close to the
liberties where the princess holds her petticoated sway:--
"And at the last--
The summer of the vine in all his veins--
'No doubt that we might make it worth his while.
For him, he reverenced his liege-lady there;
He always made a point to post with mares;
His daughter and his housemaid were the boys.
The land, he understood, for miles about
Was till'd by women; all the swine were sows,
And all the dogs'"--
This is too bad, even for medley; but proceed we into the interior of
the grand and luxurious feminine institution, where their sex is
speedily discovered, but for certain reasons concealed by the
discoverers. Lectures on the past and what might be done to accomplish
female equality, and description of the boundaries, the dwelling place,
and the dwellers therein, fill many a page of mingled excellence and
defects. Here is a sample of both in half a dozen lines:--
"We saw
The Lady Blanche's daughter where she stood,
Melissa, with her hand upon the lock,
A rosy blonde, and in a college gown
_That clad her like an April daffodilly_
(Her mother's colour) with her lips apart,
And all her thoughts as fair within her eyes,
_As bottom agates seem to wave and float
In crystal currents of clear morning seas_."
Curious contradictions in mere terms, also occasionally occur. Thus, of
a frightened girl, we are told that--
"_Light_
As flies the _shadow_ of a bird she fled."
Events move on. The prince reasons as a man in a colloquy with the
princess, and speaks of the delights of maternal affections, and she
replies--
"We are not talk'd to thus:
Yet will we say for children, would they grew
Like field-flowers everywhere! we like them well:
But children die; and let me tell you, girl,
Howe'er you babble, great deeds cannot die:
They with the sun and moon renew their light
Forever, blessing those that look on them:
Children--that men may pluck them from our hearts,
Kill us with pity, break us with ourselves--
O--children--there is nothing upon earth
More miserable than she that has a son
And sees him err:"
A song on "The days that are no more," seems to us to be too laboured,
nor is the other lyric introduced, "The Swallow," much more to our
satisfaction. It is a mixture of prettinesses: the first four triplets
run thus, ending in a poetic beauty--
"O Swallow, Swallow, flying, flying South,
Fly to her, and fall upon her gilded eaves,
And tell her, tell her what I tell to thee.
"O tell her, Swallow, thou that knowest each,
That bright and fierce and fickle is the South,
And _dark_ and true and tender is the North.
"O Swallow, Swallow, if I could follow, and light
Upon her lattice, I would pipe and trill,
And _cheep and twitter twenty million loves_.
"O were I thou that she might take me in,
And lay me on her bosom, _and her heart
Would rock the snowy cradle till I died_."
The prince saves the princess from being drowned, when the secret
explodes like a roll of gun cotton, and a grand turmoil ensues. The
rival kings approach to confines in battle array, and the princess
resumes the declaration of war:--
"A tide of fierce
Invective seem'd to wait behind her lips,
As waits a river level with the dam
Ready to burst and flood the world with foam:
And so she would have spoken, but there rose
A hubbub in the court of half the maids
Gather'd together; from the illumin'd hall
Long lanes of splendour slanted o'er a press
Of snowy shoulders, thick as herded ewes,
And rainbow robes, and gems and gemlike eyes,
And gold and golden heads; they to and fro
Fluctuated, as flowers in storm, some red, same pale,
All open-mouth'd, all gazing to the light,
Some crying there was an army in the land,
And some that men were in the very walls,
And some they cared not; till a clamour grew
As of a new-world Babel, woman-built,
And worse-confounded: high above them stood
The placid marble Muses, looking peace."
She denounces the perils outside and in--
"I dare
All these male thunderbolts: what is it ye fear?
Peace! there are those to avenge us and they come:
If not,--myself were like enough, O girls,
To unfurl the maiden banner of our rights,
And clad in iron burst the ranks of war,
Or, falling, protomartyr of our cause,
Die: yet I blame ye not so much for fear;
Six thousand years of fear have made ye that
From which I would redeem ye: but for those
That stir this hubbub--you and you--I know
Your faces there in the crowd--to-morrow morn
We meet to elect new tutors; then shall they
That love their voices more than duty, learn
With whom they deal, dismiss'd in shame to live
No wiser than their mothers, household stuff,
Live chattels, mincers of each other's fame,
Full of weak poison, turnspits for the clown,
The drunkard's football, laughing-stocks of Time,
Whose brains are in their hands and in their heels,
But fit to flaunt, to dress, to dance, to thrum,
To tramp, to scream, to burnish, and to scour
For ever slaves at home and fools abroad."
Ay, just as Shakspere hath it--
"To suckle fools and chronicle small beer."
The hero also meets the shock, at least in poetic grace:--
"Upon my spirits
Settled a gentle cloud of melancholy,
Which I shook off, for I was young, and one
To whom the shadow of all mischance but came
As night to him that sitting on a hill
Sees the midsummer, midnight, Norway sun,
Set into sunrise."
It is agreed to decide the contest by a combat of fifty on each
side--the one led by the prince, and the other by Arac, the brother of
the princess. And clad in "harness"--
"Issued in the sun that now
Leapt from the dewy shoulders of the Earth,
And hit the northern hills."
To the fight--
"Then rode we with the old king across the lawns
Beneath huge trees, a thousand rings of Spring
In every bole, a song on every spray
Of birds that piped their Valentines."
The prince and his companions are defeated; and he, wounded almost to
the death, is consigned at her own request to be nursed by the
princess:--
"So was their sanctuary violated,
So their fair college turn'd to hospital;
At first with all confusion; by and by
Sweet order lived again with other laws;
A kindlier influence reign'd; and everywhere
Low voices with the ministering hand
Hung round the sick."
The result may be foreseen--
"From all a closer interest flourish'd up.
Tenderness touch by touch, and last, to these,
Love, like an Alpine harebell hung with tears
By some cold morning glacier; frail at first
And feeble, all unconscious of itself,
But such as gather'd colour day by day."
And the agreement is filled up:--
"Dear, but let us type them now
In our lives, and this proud watchword rest
Of equal; seeing either sex alone
Is half itself, and in true marriage lies
Nor equal, nor unequal: each fulfils
Defect in each, and always thought in thought,
Purpose in purpose, will in will, they grow,
The single pure and perfect animal,
The two-cell'd heart beating with one full stroke
Life"
"O we will walk this world,
Yoked in all exercise of noble end,
And so through those dark gates across the wild
That no man knows. Indeed I love thee; come,
Yield thyself up; my hopes and thine are one;
Accomplish thou my manhood and thyself
Lay thy sweet hands in mine and trust to me."
Who will question the true poetry of this production, or who will deny
the imperfections, (mostly of affectation, though some of tastelessness)
which obscure it? Who will wonder at our confessed wavering when they
have read this course of alternate power, occasionally extravagant, and
feebleness as in the long account of the _emeute_? Of the extravagant,
the description of the princess, on receiving the declaration of war, is
an example:--
"She read, till over brow
And cheek and bosom brake the wrathful bloom
As of some fire against a stormy cloud,
When the wild peasant rights himself, and the rick
Flames, and his anger reddens in the heavens."
The heroine, it must be acknowledged, is much of the virago throughout,
and the prince rather of the softest; but the tale could not be
otherwise told. We add four examples--two to be admired, and two to be
contemned, in the fulfilment of our critique.
"For was, and is, and will be, are but is,"
is a noble line; and the following, on the promised restoration of a
child to its mother, is very touching--
"Again she veiled her brows, and prone she sank, and so
Like tender things that being caught feign death,
Spoke not, nor stirr'd."
Not so the burlesque eight daughters of the plough, the brawny ministers
of the princess' executive, and their usage of a herald. They were--
"Eight daughters of the plough, stronger than men,
Huge women blowzed with health, and wind, and rain
And labour. Each was like a Druid rock;
Or like a spire of land that stands apart
Cleft from the main, and clang'd about with mews."
And they--
"Came sallying through the gates, and caught his hair,
And so belabour'd him on rib and cheek
They made him wild."
Nor the following--
"When the man wants weight the woman takes it up,
And topples down the scales; but this is fixt
As are the roots of earth and base of all.
Man for the field and woman for the hearth;
Man for the sword and for the needle she;
Man with the head and woman with the heart;
Man to command and woman to obey;
All else confusion. Look to it; the gray mare
Is ill to live with, when her whinny shrills
From tile to scullery, and her small goodman
Shrinks in his arm-chair while the fires of Hell
Mix with his hearth; but take and break her, you!
She's yet a colt. Well groom'd and strongly curb'd
She might not rank with those detestable
That to the hireling leave their babe, and brawl
Their rights or wrongs like potherbs in the street.
They say she's comely; there's the fairer chance:
_I_ like her none the less for rating at her!
Besides, the woman wed is not as we,
But suffers change of frame. A lusty brace
Of twins may weed her of her folly. Boy,
The bearing and the training of a child
Is woman's wisdom."
--_The Literary Gazette_.
ROBERT BROWNING
_Paracelsus_. By Robert Browning.
There is talent in this dramatic poem, (in which is attempted a picture
of the mind of this celebrated character,) but it is dreamy and obscure.
Writers would do well to remember, (by way of example,) that though it
is not difficult to imitate the mysticism and vagueness of Shelley, we
love him and have taken him to our hearts as a poet, not _because_ of
these characteristics--but _in spite_ of them.--_The Athenaeum_.
_Sordello_. By Robert Browning. London: Moxon. 1840.
The scene of this poem is laid in Italy, when the Ghibelline and Guelph
factions were in hottest contest. The author's style is rather peculiar,
there being affectations of language and invertions of thought, and
other causes of obscurity in the course of the story which detract from
the pleasure of perusing it. But after all, we are much mistaken if Mr.
Browning does not prove himself a poet of a right stamp,--original,
vigorous, and finely inspired. He appears to us to possess a true sense
of the dignity and sacredness of the poet's kingdom; and his imagination
wings its way with a boldness, freedom and scope, as if he felt himself
at home in that sphere, and was resolved to put his allegiance to the
test.--_The Monthly Review_.
_Men and Women_. By Robert Browning. Two Volumes. Chapman and Hall.
It is really high time that this sort of thing should, if possible, be
stopped. Here is another book of madness and mysticism--another
melancholy specimen of power wantonly wasted, and talent deliberately
perverted--another act of self-prostration before that demon of bad
taste who now seems to hold in absolute possession the fashionable
masters of our ideal literature. It is a strong case for the
correctional justice of criticism, which has too long abdicated its
proper functions. The Della Crusca of Sentimentalism perished under the
_Baviad_--is there to be no future Gifford for the Della Crusca of
Transcendentalism? The thing has really grown to a lamentable head
amongst us. The contagion has affected not only our sciolists and our
versifiers, but those whom, in the absence of a mightier race, we must
be content to accept as the poets of our age. Here is Robert Browning,
for instance--no one can doubt that he is capable of better things--no
one, while deploring the obscurities that deface the _Paracelsus_ and
the _Dramatic Lyrics_, can deny the less questionable qualities which
characterized those remarkable poems--but can any of his devotees be
found to uphold his present elaborate experiment on the patience of the
public? Take any of his worshippers you please--let him be "well up" in
the transcendental poets of the day--take him fresh from Alexander
Smith, or Alfred Tennyson's _Maud_, or the _Mystic_ of Bailey--and we
will engage to find him at least ten passages in the first ten pages of
_Men and Women_, some of which, even after profound study, he will not
be able to construe at all, and not one of which he will be able to
read off at sight. Let us take one or two selections at random from the
first volume, and try. What, for instance, is the meaning of these four
stanzas from the poem entitled "By the Fireside"?--
My perfect wife, my Leonor,
Oh, heart my own, oh, eyes, mine too,
Whom else could I dare look backward for,
With whom beside should I dare pursue
The path grey heads abhor?
For it leads to a crag's sheer edge with them;
Youth, flowery all the way, there stops--
Not they; age threatens and they contemn,
Till they reach the gulf wherein youth drops,
One inch from our life's safe hem!
With me, youth led--I will speak now,
No longer watch you as you sit
Reading by fire-light, that great brow
And the spirit-small hand propping it
Mutely--my heart knows how--
When, if I think but deep enough,
You are wont to answer, prompt as rhyme;
And you, too, find without a rebuff
The response your soul seeks many a time
Piercing its fine flesh-stuff--
We really should think highly of the powers of any interpreter who could
"pierce" the obscurity of such "stuff" as this. One extract more and we
have done. A gold medal in the department of Hermeneutical Science to
the ingenious individual, who, after any length of study, can succeed in
unriddling this tremendous passage from "Master Hugues of Saxe-Gotha,"
the organist:--
First you deliver your phrase
--Nothing propound, that I see,
Fit in itself for much blame or much praise--
Answered no less, where no answer needs be:
Off start the Two on their ways!
Straight must a Third interpose,
Volunteer needlessly help--
In strikes a Fourth, a Fifth thrusts in his nose,
So the cry's open, the kennel's a-yelp,
Argument's hot to the close!
One disertates, he is candid--
Two must dicept,--has distinguished!
Three helps the couple, if ever yet man did:
Four protests, Five makes a dart at the thing wished--
Back to One, goes the case bandied!
One says his say with a difference--
More of expounding, explaining!
All now is wrangle, abuse, and vociferance--
Now there's a truce, all's subdued, self-restraining--
Five, though, stands out all the stiffer hence.
One is incisive, corrosive--
Two retorts, nettled, curt, crepitant--
Three makes rejoinder, expansive, explosive--
Four overbears them all, strident and strepitant--
Five ... O Danaides, O Sieve!
Now, they ply axes and crowbars--
Now they prick pins at a tissue
Fine as a skein of the casuist Escobar's
Worked on the bone of a lie. To what issue?
Where is our gain at the Two-bars?
_Est fuga, volvitur rota!_
On we drift. Where looms the dim port?
One, Two, Three, Four, Five, contribute their quota--
Something is gained, if one caught but the import--
Show it us, Hugues of Saxe-Gotha!
What [with] affirming, denying,
Holding, risposting, subjoining,
All's like ... it's like ... for an instance I'm trying ...
There! See our roof, its gilt moulding and groining
Under those spider-webs lying?
So your fugue broadens and thickens,
Greatens and deepens and lengthens,
Till one exclaims--"But where's music, the dickens?
Blot ye the gold, while your spider-web strengthens,
Blacked to the stoutest of tickens?"