fails to represent the process by which Homer and Virgil contributed to form a Milton, there is yet no doubt that he was far other than he would have been had they not written, and that much of what he wrote is distinctly traceable to them; and in like manner, it may be, the critics of the twentieth century will be able to point out the influence of Browning, Tennyson, and Keble on some bard who may at the present moment be in long clothes, or reading for honours by the banks of Cam or Isis, or, at the farthest, waiting with tremulous expectation for the decision of a publisher. In entering, as we purpose to do, on an estimate of the writings of the poet whose name stands at the head of this article, it must be remembered that his fame, such as it is, has been attained under conditions singularly unfavourable. His first poem, "Paracelsus," published in 1836, gave indeed promise of the highest excellence, and its merits were recognised by many critics, but "Strafford," which appeared in 1837, in spite of all Mr. Macready's efforts to perfect its representation on the stage, was unquestionably a failure there, and could hardly be said to have succeeded as a book; and the next poem, published in 1840, "Sordello," was then, and continues still, at once in the intricacy of its plot and the obscurity of its language, the most repellent of all his poems, perhaps of all poems ever written by a man of true poetic power. In vain, once and again, the reader, tempted by the delusive promise of the opening line, "Who will may hear Sordello's story told," girds himself to the task; in vain he tries to use the page-headings, which profess to give him an analysis of the history, as clues to guide him through the labyrinth; in vain he gets glimpses here and there of pictures sketched with a master's hand, or even into that which forms the main theme, the story of the inner life of a character oscillating between the work of a minstrel and a soldier, writing poems or acting them. He remains to the last embarrassed and confused, uncertain as to the political relations of Ferrara and Mantua, of Ecelin and Azzo and Salinguerra, still more so as to the human life which is portrayed as developing itself on this stage and among these surroundings. It presents itself as a curious problem to an inquiring intellect, What would be the result of an examination paper in "Sordello," set before competitors, let us say, for the Indian Civil Service, of average intellect and culture, who had been offered their choice of that or the "Mahabharata?" We do not now notice this characteristic as giving an adequate account of the poem itself, but as helping us to estimate its effect on Mr. Browning's reputation. This, we think it will be allowed, was simply negative. It came as a minus, not a plus quantity, on his side of the account with readers and critics. They look, for the most part, to a writer's second and third works as decisive of his future career, indicating whether the first, if that were successful, was the beginning or the end, the promise of the work of a strong man or the exhausting effort of a precocious and fevered intellect; whether the author has had the wisdom to profit by experience, correcting his faults and developing his excellences, or takes to an evil mannerism in which the weeds of affectation and unreality choke the good seed of genius. What is most promising in the opening career of Mr. Robert Buchanan is that each volume that he has published since the first has been really an advance on its predecessor, and has been recognised as such. It will take Mr. Swinburne, on the other hand, a long quarantine, even after the brilliant and deserved success of his "Atalanta in Calydon," before he regains the position which he has forfeited by the pruriency of "Chastelard," and the mingled misotheism and Messalinism of the volume which his first publishers wisely withdrew from a circulation on which they ought never to have ventured. "Sordello," it need hardly be said, showed neither feebleness nor pruriency, but the defiance offered in it, not only to the conventional standard of form and structure and beauty, but to the craving of the reader for something more than a Chinese puzzle, enigma within enigma, was likely to be quite as perilous to the reputation of the writer. The next stage in Mr. Browning's progress, though it included many of his noblest works, had even less in its favour, as regards the usual outward conditions of success. Few poems of equal worth, probably, have ever presented themselves, for the first time, with so little regard to outward comeliness as those published between 1842 and 1846 under the quaint title of "Bells and Pomegranates." Shilling numbers, appearing at irregular intervals, in yellow paper covers, with the small type and double columns which we just tolerate in collected editions of the works of great poets, but which we never learn to love;-it was in spite of these that Mr. Browning's reputation had to struggle forward till it became fame. When we think of the care and cost lavished by Messrs. Moxon, and Strahan, and Macmillan, on the volumes of poetry which have issued from their presses during the last few years, it is hard to suppress a wish that a like attractiveness had been given to the works of a far greater poet than any they have lately introduced to us, still harder not to admire the genius and strength which could afford to do without it. As it was, however, the years covered by the publication of "Bells and Pomegranates" were years, every way, of growth. They included many of the poems which his admirers most love, the whole series of the dramas and dramatic lyrics, which have since been republished,* and though as yet the circulation was not large, the writer's name became more and more known, and a welcome was secured for anything that might follow. In 1849, "Paracelsus" and most, if not all, of the poems which had appeared in "Bells and Pomegranates" were republished, without that somewhat affected title, and they were followed, in 1850, by what are in some respects the most characteristic and the highest in their aim of all, "Christmas Eve" and "Easter Day." After an interval of five years, in 1855, with every mark of full maturity and power, appeared two volumes, under the title of "Men and Women," including, among other memorable poems, the "Epistle of Karshish," "Bishop Blougram's Apology," and the wonderful completion of "Saul." Then came another collected republication of these, and all previously printed, in 1863, followed by the "Dramatis Persona" in 1864. The strength of one who is not impatient for popularity and can afford to wait, while others of far inferior power catch the clamorous applause of the day, had at last done its work. The more authoritative Reviews, which are supposed to constitute the highest critical tribunalt in our courts. of literature, at last, with various degrees of heartiness and discernment, recognised the fame which had been won without them; and though Longfellow and Tupper are still, perhaps, the favourite poets of middle-class readers, there is hardly a sixth-form boy or undergraduate of any culture who would not bracket together the names of Tennyson and Browning as the great poets of our time, and discuss with his fellows, in study talks or at debating clubs, which of the two stands on the highest level of excellence. Mr. Browning has himself portrayed with his usual vividness, in It may interest those who only know the poems in their later forms to learn in what order they appeared in this series : I. Pippa passes. II. King Victor and King Charles. III. Dramatic Lyrics. IV. The Revolt of the Druses. V. The Blot on the 'Scutcheon. VI. Colombe's Birthday. VII. Romances and Lyrics. VIII. Luria and the Soul's Tragedy. It may be noted further (1) that some of the shorter poems thus published, "Rudel" and "Cristina," were then grouped under the head of “Queen-Worship," and are now printed far apart; (2) that one of the most startling of all Mr. Browning's writings, "Porphyria," which is now left to explain itself, then appeared in Part III. as one of a series of poems under the title of "Madhouse Cells," and so had its tale half-told in advance; (3) that Part VII. included the magnificent fragment of "Saul," which, with a rare felicity, the author afterwards completed, so that it became, as we venture to think, the noblest utterance of his genius. By far the ablest of these notices, in many respects a satisfying critical estimate of Mr. Browning's characteristics as a poet, is to be found in the National Review, vol. xlvii. The Edinburgh Review, in 1864, has "a sincere respect for Mr. Browning's literary industry," but finds it "a subject of amazement that poems of so obscure and uninviting a character should find numerous readers;" and thinking "his works deficient in the qualities we should desire to find (in) them," does not believe they "will survive, except as a curiosity and a puzzle." what, so far as we know, is the one prose publication that bears his name, the desire which we feel to be able to connect a public career like that which has just been traced with the facts of the writer's life. Speaking of one whose genius, like his own, is essentially creative, he says: "We ask, did a soul's delight in its own extended sphere of vision set it, for the gratification of an insuppressible power, on labour, as other men are set on rest? Or did a sense of duty or of love lead it to communicate its own sensations to mankind? Did an irresistible sympathy with men compel it to bring down and suit its own provision of knowledge or of beauty to their narrow scope? Did the personality of such an one stand like an open watch-tower in the midst of the territory it is erected to gaze on, and were the storms and calms, the stars and meteors its watchman was wont to report of, the habitual variegations of his every-day life, as they glanced across its open roof, or lay reflected on its four-square parapet?" * For us, however, strong as may be the wish to know-stronger in proportion to the rare fortune which brought together in this case, as husband and wife, two minds so singularly gifted,-reverence for the sanctity of home-life, and for the sorrow of one who is still living in the midst of us, is stronger still; and, much as we may speculate in our thoughts on the influence which the poet and poetess, Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett, exercised on each other's minds, we must pass, after one tribute of mournful admiration to the memory of the one, to deal with the other, with no other knowledge and on no other data than such as are publici juris in his writings. We are disposed to commence this inquiry with the solitary prose essay from which we have already quoted rather than from any of Mr. Browning's poems. It is characteristic of his genius (if we may be permitted to use one of the cant words of the day) that he is the least subjective, in other words, the least egoistic of poets. He impersonates a thousand characters. He seldom speaks to us in his His verse does not tell us (except as the result of a wide induction) what he aims at, what are his thoughts as to the calling of a poet, and the conditions of the highest excellence attainable by him. The paper of which we speak in part fills up the blank. Writing of Shelley, the English poet of whom he speaks with most own. reverence, "Ah, did you once see Shelley plain, he is led to treat of poetry in general, and of the relation in which a great poet stands to his predecessors, contemporaries, and followers. 'Introductory Essay to Shelley's Letters," published by Moxon in 1852. The letters afterwards turned out to be forgeries-hardly, we think, clever ones; but the value of the Essay remains unaffected by the discovery. From this preface, accordingly, we learn what Mr. Browning has deliberately recognised as the principles of his art, just as we learn from Wordsworth's "Preface to the Lyrical Ballads" what determined him in his choice of subjects and mode of treatment, or find in Mr. Keble's "Prælections" on the "Vis medica" the "healing and soothing influence" of true poetry, or his article on Sacred Poetry in the Quarterly Review, No. lxiii.,* what he deliberately aimed at in his tenderness and beauty. In each case a comparison of the principles with the results attained will show some successes and some failures. Possibly the failures will be found to be fewest, the successes most complete, when the writer was thinking least about his principles, and when therefore they were fashioning his thoughts and language most entirely. Thus, to take one instance, Mr. Browning, speaking of the class of writers to which he himself belongs,-objective, dramatic, realistic, -dwells on "the poet's double faculty of seeing external objects more clearly, widely, and deeply than is possible to the average mind; at the same time that he is so acquainted and in sympathy with its narrower comprehension as to be careful to supply it with no other materials than it can combine into an intelligible whole." It is of course true that this faculty is a condition of excellence, that a poet who is not understood fails of his end; but one is tempted to ask whether Mr. Browning's estimate of the "average mind" leads him to think that it is capable of "combining into an intelligible whole" the materials with which he has presented it in "Sordello"? Perhaps, however, the Augustinian rule, distingue tempora, will come to our aid in answering this question. This may, we think, be fairly regarded as of the nature of a Palinodia, an indirect confession that he had learned wisdom from the comparative failure of what had almost every merit but this one of being intelligible, and was resolved for the future, not indeed to take the beaten paths, but to mount up on slopes, and by crags, where adventurous readers could at least It seems worth while to give a few characteristic excerpta from the article in question:-"If grave, simple, sustained melodies-if tones of deep but subdued emotion, are what our minds naturally suggest to us upon the mention of sacred music, why should there not be something analogous, a kind of plain chant, in sacred poetry also? fervent, yet sober; awful, but engaging. The worshippers of Baal may be rude and frantic in their cries and gestures; but the true Prophet, speaking to or of the true God, is all dignity and calmness. One great business of sacred poetry, as of sacred music, is to quiet and sober the feelings of the penitent." Of all English poets, Spenser is for him "pre-eminently the sacred poet of his country." The "Fairy Queen" is “a continual deliberate endeavour to enlist the restless intellect and chivalrous feeling of an inquiring and romantic age, on the side of goodness and faith, of purity and justice." Milton he characterizes as "partaking largely of the vindictive and republican spirit which he has assigned to Satan," and showing "a want of purity and spirituality in his conception of heaven and its joys." |