ABSTRACT
As specimens of Mr. Browning’s ability in giving poetical shape and expression to simple, transient feelings, whether sweet, gentle, and sprightly, or more grave, passionate, and intense, the reader may take, if he chooses, all the shorter pieces in the volumes. Of this kind are ‘Evelyn Hope’, ‘A Lover’s Quarrel’, ‘Any Wife to Any Husband’, ‘A Serenade at the Villa’, ‘Love in a Life’, ‘Life in a Love’, ‘Women and Roses’, &c. We cannot say, however, that we greatly admire these shorter sentimental pieces of Browning, or think them equal to his genius as shown in others. He does not seem at home in such brief and purely lyrical effusions, requiring, as they do, an instant gush of feeling, a cessation for the time of all merely intellectual activity, and a clear and flowing tune. Other poets greatly excel Mr. Browning in these melodious love-songs and outpourings of immediate emotion. In his case, the head is constantly intruding its suggestions where the heart alone should be speaking; we have strokes of the
he adopts the narrative or dramatic form in lieu of the lyric, and sets himself to the work of representing feeling or passion expanded and complicated into character and mode of existence, he attains a success which few can rival. In the art of characterpainting, as we have said, in the power of throwing himself into states of mind and trains of circumstance the most alien from our present habits, in the intuitive faculty of reconceiving the most peculiar and obsolete modes of thinking, he ranks as a master. Generally, as we have seen, when he exercises his genius in this manner, he works on a basis of history, adopting a story, or appropriating a character, or at least borrowing a hint from the actual records of the past ages of the world; and almost always when he does so we are struck by the strange selection he makes. It is from the bye-laws of history, or, at least, from what are reckoned such, that he derives the hints on which he proceeds; or, if ever he comes upon the great broad track familiar to the traditions of common men, he is seen approaching it by some unexpected byepath. Thus, if you would meet him in the domain of ancient Roman history, it is in the Byzantine portion of it that you must seek him, and even there it is not before the busts of Diocletian or Constantine that you will find him, but most probably before those of the babyemperor Protus, and his successor and dethroner John the Blacksmith with the massive jaws. And yet, finding him there and standing beside him, how you see the busts become animated beneath his gaze, and Protus and John, and the decrepit Byzantine empire, with the Huns raging round its borders till John’s death shall let them in, all again existing as they were. No reader of the volumes should miss the little sketch entitled Protus.…
But Mr. Browning, though he usually exercises his imagination in giving body and expansion to some hint furnished by the actual world of history, can yet, when he chooses, fling reality and history aside altogether, and revel, as well as any poet, in a world of shifting allegoric shapes and sounds and phantasies, where nothing is fixed and nothing literal. This is proved by more than one piece in the present volume, but above all by the one entitled ‘Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came’. Perhaps, indeed, taking the kind of the poetry here attempted into account, as well as the success of the attempt in that kind, this poem deserves all in all to be regarded as the greatest thing in the volumes. The notion of the poem, as in Tennyson’s Mariana, is that of expanding one of those snatches of old ballad and allusion which have such a mystic effect in Shakespeare. ‘Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came’ is one such snatch of old song quoted by Edgar in Lear; and Mr. Browning offers us his imaginative rendering of these gloomy hieroglyphic words. The phantasy is one of the most wild and ghastly within the range of our literature, with more of sheer terror in it than in any corresponding phantasy in Spenser.…
coherent and significant in meaning, though no one will venture to explain what the meaning is!…
Mr. Browning’s familiarity with Italian art and painting is something far beyond that of ordinary connoisseurs. He has studied painting and art generally with an interest and a minuteness of inquiry which, even in technical disquisition on such subjects, might enable him to cooperate or contest with Mr. Ruskin; and few of his poems are more remarkable than those, in which he displays, at length or incidentally, his acquaintance with the history and principles of art. In the present work, in particular, there are two poems in which he shows the most subtle power of conceiving, by a kind of inference from their works, the modes of thinking and personal characters of two of the most eminent of the Italian artists of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. In the piece called ‘Fra Lippo Lippi’, we have a delineation from the very life of the intellectual and moral habits of one kind of painter; and in the piece entitled ‘Andrea Del Sarto’, we have a companion-portrait, equally vivid, of a painter of graver and more melancholy nature. These two poems are, in fact, biographies in miniature, and, probably, give a more perfect idea of the two men as they lived, and of the principles on which they painted, than many more extensive accounts of them, accompanied by criticisms of their pictures. They ought to be read entire to be fully appreciated; and extracts may, therefore, be spared.…
For ourselves, trying to combine what we think just in all this adverse criticism with our already expressed agreement with Mr. Browning’s highest admirers on the ground of his general merits, the final judgment is still immensely more on the side of admiration than on that of dissatisfaction or criticism.
