ABSTRACT
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 selfprostration 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?1 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 Smith1 or Alfred Tennyson’s Maud, or the Mystic of Bailey2-and we will engage to find him at least ten passages in the
entitled ‘By the Fireside’?—… [Quotes lines 101-20]
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:—
[Quotes lines 56-98] Do our readers exclaim, ‘But where’s poetry-the dickens!—in. all this
rigmarole?’ We confess we can find none-we can find nothing but a set purpose to be obscure, and an idiot captivity to the jingle of Hudibrastic rhyme. This idle weakness really appears to be at the bottom of half the daring nonsense in this most daringly nonsensical book. Hudibras Butler told us long ago that ‘rhyme the rudder is of verses’; and when, as in his case, or in that of Ingoldsby Barham3 or Whims and-Oddities Hood,4 the rudder guides the good ship into tracks of fun and fancy she might otherwise have missed, we are grateful to the double-endings, not on their own account, but for what they have led us to. But Mr. Browning is the mere thrall of his own rudder, and is constantly being steered by it into whirlpools of the most raging absurdity. This morbid passion for double rhymes, which is observable more or less throughout the book, reaches its climax in a long copy of verses on the ‘Old Pictures of Florence,’ which, with every disposition to be tolerant of the frailties of genius, we cannot
Browning’s chiefly as a means of showing the extravagant lengths of absurdity to which the tenets of that school can lead a man of admitted powers. We should regret, however, in the pursuit of this object, to inflict injustice on Mr. Browning. This last book of his, like most of its predecessors, contains some undeniable beauties-subtle thoughts, graceful fancies, and occasionally a strain of music, which only makes the chaos of surrounding discords jar more harshly on the ear. The dramatic scenes ‘In a Balcony’ are finely conceived and vigorously written; ‘Bishop Blougram’s Apology’, and ‘Cleon’, are well worth reading and thinking over; and there is a certain grace and beauty in several of the minor poems. That which, on the whole, has pleased us most-really, perhaps, because we could read it off-hand-is ‘The Statue and the Bust’, of which we give the opening stanzas:—.…
Why should a man who, with so little apparent labour, can write naturally and well, take so much apparent labour to write affectedly and ill? There can be but one of two solutions. Either he goes wrong from want of knowledge, in which case it is clear that he wants the highest institutions of genius; or he sins against knowledge, in which case he must have been misled by the false promptings of a morbid vanity, eager for that applause of fools which always waits on quackery, and which is never refused to extravagance when tricked out in the guise of originality. It is difficult, from the internal evidence supplied by his works, to know which of these two theories to adopt. Frequently the conclusion is almost irresistible, that Mr. Browning’s mysticism must be of malice prepense: on the whole, however, we are inclined to clear his honesty at the expense of his powers, and to conclude that he is obscure, not so much because he has the vanity to be thought original, as because he lacks sufficient genius to make himself clear.
