D

THE

CONTEMPORARY

REVIEW

VOLUME IV. JANUARY-APRIL, 1867

STANFORD LIBRARY

ALEXANDER STRAHAN, PUBLISHER

56 LUDGATE HILL, LONDON

1867

IT

T is now thirty years since the publication of the first poem that bore Mr. Browning's name on its title-page, and, with the one exception of the Laureate, no reputation has during that period advanced so steadily. If his popularity does not as yet approach that of Mr. Tennyson, if the readers of "Paracelsus" or the "Dramatis Persona" are to be counted by thousands, and those of the "Idyls of the King" and "Enoch Arden" by tens of thousands, there are yet not wanting judges who, recognising the characteristic excellences of each, see in Mr. Browning, with all the drawbacks of obscurity, abruptness, and an indifference to beauty of form or subject amounting almost to scorn, some elements of a higher poetic greatness than they find even in the high thoughts and perfect melody of his great rival. If we may venture to forecast the history of English poetry during the coming quarter of a century, we are tempted to predict that, if the followers of the one are likely to be the more numerous, those of the other will take a higher place and exercise a more lasting influence. If echoes of Tennysonian melodies float through the groves of Parnassus and are caught up by the young aspirants who

climb its slopes, there will be some who, treading more devious paths, the "avia Pieridum loca," will show that they have followed their master to the wilder and more solitary crags, and learned from him to breathe their keener air. If, as the history of literature leads us to expect, a true poet, while he is more than the resultant of all poetic forces previously in operation, is yet, consciously or unconsciously, the heir of those that have gone before him,—taking up their excellences as part of the riches of his own treasury, talents with which he is to "occupy," that the Giver may, at the last, receive His own with usury,-we may anticipate that the next representative poet of this century will show that he has learned lessons from both the great "masters of those who sing," to whom we have listened. It may be idle to speculate on a perfection which lies beyond our reach, and we must remember, even in such speculations, that, as things are, the highest excellence in any art is never attained by any mere process of study and combination; but if one were to dream, Frankenstein-like, of the creation of a poet who should interpret the thoughts and meet the wants of this age of ours, we should be tempted to imagine one who should combine with the Laureate's serener thought and more exquisite music, Mr. Browning's power of perceiving and portraying, with dramatic vividness, the subtle processes of thought and feeling in the most widely contrasted characters. It is due to the honoured memory of a great name that we should give utterance, while we are living in this ideal cloud-land, to the wish, that the coming poet may inherit also from the author of the "Christian Year," what is ethically higher than either of these gifts, and can as little be dispensed with in our conceptions of a perfect poetry, his reverence for holiness as distinct from power, his sympathy with the gentler, more tender, more mystical and, as it were, sacramental aspects of Nature,-the heart as of a little child clinging to the skirts of his Father's robe, and afraid, with a filial fear, of venturing beyond the boundaries of the home which his Father has assigned him. Imitation, of course, conscious or unconscious, of either poet is comparatively easy. As there are reproductions of Mr. Tennyson's serene calmness and Mr. Browning's abruptness, so there are, and will be, of Mr. Keble's devotion; but these, in the absence of the higher vitality which can originate as well as combine, will simply pass, respectively, into luscious sweetness, or spasmodic obscurity, or sentimental pietism. And yet it will remain true that, in the genesis of the poet we are imagining, no one of these elements could be dispensed with without loss. If the conceit of Dryden's epigram on "Paradise Lost,"

"The force of Nature could no farther go;

To form a third she joined the other two,”—