ABSTRACT
Is the Edinburgh, our venerable and distinguished contemporary, behind or before the age? This obviously delicate question, although we hear it asked not less than four times every year, is one which we have, in general, forborne to meddle with. But in its number of last October the Edinburgh presented us with an article on Mr. Browning’s poetry, and on Mr. Browning himself, which, both by the attitude throughout assumed by the writer, and by certain critical frailties that we shall have to point out in his performance, puts the above dilemma so forcibly before us that it is impossible, as a piece of our literary functions, not to bring the case under the eyes of our readers. Having done this, our part will have been fulfilled, and we shall leave to them the task of deciding. We shall riot, of course, attempt here any estimate of Mr. Browning’s place in poetry. The opinion of this journal has been already more than once expressed on the subject, and, in common with the great majority of critics, we have recognised his keen intellectual insight, high moral purpose, depth and tenderness in delineating human passion, and singularly vivid faculty of painting in words-those qualities, we presume, which, to the ‘amazement’ of the Edinburgh Reviewer, have rendered it ‘vain to deny that he has won for himself an influence among readers of poetry second only to the Laureate’. We have also endeavoured to do justice to the novelty and force of the themes selected by the most original of contemporary poets; whilst the fact has not been concealed that Mr. Browning anticipates much too often that his readers will be not only as cultivated, but as intelligent as himself, and has never aimed at a mass-popularity; nay, that, like all writers of a subtle cast of mind (Shakspeare and Shelley are examples), he is apt to entangle the reader in labyrinthine thoughts and verbal perplexities. We have recapitulated these points simply for the sake of clearness;
the method of our Jeffrey Redivivus as shall explain why we think him worth examining. It is not to be understood that he altogether ignores Mr. Browning’s merit. Here and there, indeed, he makes a vague attempt at grasping the subject of a piece, failing where it is not of the simplest character, but more often contenting himself with some indefinite word of compliment, and letting us carefully know that he ‘by no means concurs in the exaggerated praises which have been heaped upon’ such a poem as Evelyn Hope. Of an attempt to judge the poet’s genius as a whole, of poetical discrimination, there is no trace. It is a sufficient proof of the last assertion, that he supposes Browning to resemble Emerson. The poet’s works are submitted to a kind of bit-by-bit process, interspersing two or three lines of verse with a paragraph of prose, in which the writer perfectly accomplishes his purpose of making us feel the whole difference between the style of Mr. Browning and the style of an Edinburgh Reviewer. One is allowed to see throughout that he is half ashamed to have to review such an author at all, and that if he had not, as he is pleased to say-in both senses of the word, impertinently-‘a sincere respect for what we know of Mr. Browning’s character’, he would, in fact, never have thought him deserving of the notice he has bestowed upon him. Everywhere we find him warning Mr. Browning that this or that is quite wrong, and informing him how (on pain of being told that ‘his works are deficient in the qualities we should desire to find [in?] them’), he ought to have composed poems which are among the most finished and deeply conceived in our modern literature. Thus, in the Last Duchess-a page long since placed near Mr. Tennyson’s Ulysses by the admirers of exquisite poetical characterization-Mr. Browning’s main aim or idea was to set forth an historical fact, the security of insolence and lust reached by one of the Italian tyrants of the Sforza breed. That the Duke should speak in accordance with such a nature is precisely what the Reviewer picks out as Very unnatural’. In his Kharshish, again, the poet describes how an Arabian physician, who has met with Lazarus after his restoration to life, speculates and wonders at the miracle. On this the comment is-
The description of Lazarus, and of his three days’ experience of the world beyond the grave, is the reverse of natural;
which, we imagine, is precisely what readers who believe in the miraculous would expect to find it.…
A critic must assuredly be greatly before or greatly behind his age who now-adays can venture to assume this style. We doubt whether, even in Jeffrey’s time, it would have been quite admissible, and must rather look back to the golden period when the relations of literature to the public were expressed by the position of poet and patron. Generally, however, our critic’s aim is to bring as much as he can venture of Browning’s poems within the limits of that ‘theory of
of it, there is nothing which common power to understand English should fail to comprehend. In one case, the critic-who gives us his oracular decision about the drama, as about everything else in or out of his way-is staggered by a graceful but obvious bit of by-play between Strafford and Lady Carlisle. In another, he is unable to comprehend how a window can be opened from the outside. The Ride to Aix, again, is one of the author’s most popular pieces. We have met with it in a child’s collection. And it would be thought a conceited puppy of a child who should pretend that it was ‘utterly spoiled by Mr. Browning’s abhorrence of lucidity’, find it ‘fatal to its general success’ that the poet has not mentioned the specific news which was carried, or proceed, in place of enjoying these brilliant verses, to put to his mother such questions as-
If ‘Dirck’ is ‘he’ in the first line, why should he not be ‘he’ in the second? Why did not Roland’s rider put his riding-gear in good order before starting?
