"That bard"s a Browning; he neglects the form!" one of the characters exclaims with irresponsible frankness. That Mr. Browning knows he "neglects the form," and does not particularly care, does not very much help matters; it only deepens the reader"s sense of the graceless and thankless and altogether unavailable character of the poem. And when we say unavailable, we make the only reproach which is worth addressing to a writer of Mr. Browning"s intellectual power. A poem with so many presumptions in its favour as such an authorship carries with it is a thing to make some intellectual use of, to care for, to remember, to return to, to linger over, to become intimate with.
But we can as little imagine a reader (who has not the misfortune to be a reviewer) addressing himself more than once to the perusal of _The Inn Alb.u.m_, as we fancy cultivating for conversational purposes the society of a person afflicted with a grievous impediment of speech.
Two gentlemen have been playing cards all night in an inn-parlour, and the peep of day finds one of them ten thousand pounds in debt to the other.
The tables have been turned, and the victim is the actual victor. The elder man is a dissolute and penniless n.o.bleman, who has undertaken the social education of the aspiring young heir of a great commercial fortune, and has taught him so well that the once ingenuous lad knows more than his clever master. The young man has come down into the country to see his cousin, who lives, hard by at the Hall, with her aunt, and with whom his aristocratic preceptor recommends him, for good worldly reasons, to make a match.
Infinite discourse, of that formidable full-charged sort that issues from the lips of all Mr.
Browning"s characters, follows the play, and as the morning advances the two gentlemen leave the inn and go for a walk. Lord K. has meanwhile related to his young companion the history of one of his own earlier loves--how he had seduced a magnificent young woman, and she had fairly frightened him into offering her marriage. On learning that he had meant to go free if he could, her scorn for him becomes such that she rejects his offer of reparation (a very fine stroke) and enters into wedlock with a "smug, crop-haired, smooth-chinned sort of curate-creature." The young man replies that he himself was once in love with a person that quite answers to this description, and then the companions separate--the pupil to call at the Hall, and the preceptor to catch the train for London.
The reader is then carried back to the inn-parlour, into which, on the departure of the gentlemen, two ladies have been ushered. One of them is the young man"s cousin, who is playing at cross-purposes with her suitor; the other is her intimate friend, arrived on a flying visit. The intimate friend is of course the ex-victim of Lord K. The ladies have much conversation--all of it rather more ingeniously inscrutable than that of their predecessors; it terminates in the exit of the cousin and the entrance of the young man. He recognizes the curate"s wife as the object of his own stifled affection, and the two have, as the French say, an _intime_ conversation.
At last Lord K. comes back, having missed his train, and finds himself confronted with his stormy mistress. Very stormy she proves to be, and her outburst of renewed indignation and irony contains perhaps the most successful writing in the poem. Touched by the lady"s eloquence, the younger man, who has. .h.i.therto professed an almost pa.s.sionate admiration for his companion, begins to see him in a less interesting light, and in fact promptly turns and reviles him. The situation is here extremely dramatic. Lord K. is a cynic of a sneaking pattern, but he is at any rate a man of ideas. He holds the destiny of his adversaries in his hands, and, s.n.a.t.c.hing up the inn alb.u.m (which has been knocking about the table during the foregoing portions of the narrative), he scrawls upon it his ultimatum. Let the lady now bestow her affection on his companion, and let the latter accept this boon as a vicarious payment of the gambling debt, otherwise Lord K. will enlighten the lady"s husband as to the extent of her acquaintance with himself.
He presents the open page to the heroine, who reads it aloud, and for an answer her younger and more disinterested lover, "with a tiger-flash yell, spring, and scream," throws himself on the insulter, half an hour since, his guide, philosopher, and friend, and, by some means undescribed by Mr. Browning puts an end to his life. This incident is related in two pregnant lines, which, judged by the general standard of style of the _Inn Alb.u.m_, must be considered fine:
"A tiger-flash, yell, spring and scream: halloo!
Death"s out and on him, has and holds him--ugh!"
The effect is of course augmented if the reader is careful to make the "ugh!" rhyme correctly with the "halloo!" The lady takes poison, which she carries on her person and which operates instantaneously, and the young man"s cousin, re-entering the room, has a sufficiently tremendous surprise.
The whole picture indefinably appeals to the imagination. There is something very curious about it and even rather arbitrary, and the reader wonders how it came, in the poet"s mind, to take exactly that shape. It is very much as if he had worked backwards, had seen his denouement first, as a mere picture--the two corpses in the inn-parlour, and the young man and his cousin confronted above them--and then had traced back the possible motives and sources. In looking for these Mr.
Browning has of course encountered a vast number of deep discriminations and powerful touches of portraitures. He deals with human character as a chemist with his acids and alkalies, and while he mixes his coloured fluids in a way that surprises the profane, knows perfectly well what he is about. But there is too apt to be in his style that hiss and sputter and evil aroma which characterise the proceedings of the laboratory. The idea, with Mr. Browning, always tumbles out into the world in some grotesque hind-foremost manner; it is like an unruly horse backing out of his stall, and stamping and plunging as he comes. His thought knows no simple stage--at the very moment of its birth it is a terribly complicated affair.
We frankly confess, at the risk of being accused of deplorable levity of mind, that we have found this want of clearness of explanation, of continuity, of at least superficial verisimilitude, of the smooth, the easy, the agreeable, quite fatal to our enjoyment of _The Inn Alb.u.m_. It is all too argumentative, too curious and recondite. The people talk too much in long set speeches, at a moment"s notice, and the anomaly so common in Browning, that the talk of the women is even more rugged and insoluble than that of the men, is here greatly exaggerated. We are reading neither prose nor poetry; it is too real for the ideal, and too ideal for the real. The author of _The Inn Alb.u.m_ is not a writer to whom we care to pay trivial compliments, and, it is not a trivial complaint to say that his book is only barely comprehensible. Of a successful dramatic poem one ought to be able to say more.
SWINBURNE"S ESSAYS
A review of _Essays and Studies_, by Algernon Charles Swinburne.
London: Chatto & Windus, 1875. Originally published in _The Nation_, July 29, 1875.
SWINBURNE"S ESSAYS
Mr. Swinburne has by this time impressed upon the general public a tolerably vivid image of his literary personality. His line is a definite one; his note is familiar, and we know what to expect from him.
He was at pains, indeed, a year ago to quicken the apprehension of American readers by an effusion directed more or less explicitly to themselves. This piece of literature was brief, but it was very remarkable. Mr. Emerson had had occasion to speak of Mr. Swinburne with qualified admiration and this circ.u.mstance, coming to Mr. Swinburne"s ears, had prompted him to uncork on the spot the vials of his wrath. He addressed to a newspaper a letter of which it is but a colourless account to say that it embodied the very hysterics of gross vituperation.
Mr. Swinburne has some extremely just remarks about Byron"s unamenableness to quotation, his having to be taken in the gross. This is almost equally true of our author himself; he must be judged by all he has done, and we must allow, in our judgment, the weight he would obviously claim for it to his elaborate tribute to the genius of Mr.
Emerson. His tone has two distinct notes--the note of measureless praise and the note of furious denunciation. Each is in need of a correction, but we confess that, with all its faults, we prefer the former. That Mr.
Swinburne has a kindness for his more restrictive strain is, however, very obvious. He is over-ready to sound it, and he is not particular about his pretext.
Some people, he says, for instance, affirm that a writer may have a very effective style, yet have nothing of value to express with it. Mr.
Swinburne demands that they prove their a.s.sertion. "This flattering unction the very foolishest of malignants will hardly, in this case (that of Mr. D. G. Rossetti), be able to lay upon the corrosive sore which he calls his soul; the ulcer of ill-will must rot unrelieved by the rancid ointment of such fiction." In Mr. W. M. Rossetti"s edition of Sh.e.l.ley there is in a certain line, an interpolation of the word "autumn." "For the conception of this atrocity the editor is not responsible; for its adoption he is. A thousand years of purgatorial fire would be insufficient expiation for the criminal on whose deaf and desperate head must rest the original guilt of defacing the text of Sh.e.l.ley with this most d.a.m.nable corruption."
The essays before us are upon Victor Hugo, D. G. Rossetti, William Morris, Matthew Arnold as a poet, Sh.e.l.ley, Byron, Coleridge, and John Ford. To these are added two papers upon pictures--the drawings of the old masters at Florence and the Royal Academy Exhibition of 1868. Mr.
Swinburne, in writing of poets, cannot fail to say a great many felicitous things. His own insight into the poetic mystery is so deep, his perception in matters of language so refined, his power of appreciation so large and active, his imagination, especially, so sympathetic and flexible, that we constantly feel him to be one who has a valid right to judge and pa.s.s sentence. The variety of his sympathies in poetry is especially remarkable, and is in itself a pledge of criticism of a liberal kind. Victor Hugo is his divinity--a divinity whom indeed, to our sense, he effectually conceals and obliterates in the suffocating fumes of his rhetoric. On the other hand, one of the best papers in the volume is a disquisition on the poetry of Mr. Matthew Arnold, of which his relish seems hardly less intense and for whom he states the case with no less prodigious a redundancy of phrase.
Matthew Arnold"s canons of style, we should have said, are a positive negation of those of Mr. Swinburne"s, and it is to the credit of the latter"s breadth of taste that he should have entered into an intellectual temperament which is so little his own. The other articles contain similar examples of his vivacity and energy of perception, and offer a number of happy judgments and suggestive observations. His estimate of Byron as a poet (not in the least as a man--on this point his utterances are consummately futile) is singularly discriminating; his measurement of Sh.e.l.ley"s lyric force is eloquently adequate; his closing words upon John Ford are worth quoting as a specimen of strong apprehension and solid statement. Mr. Swinburne is by no means always solid, and this pa.s.sage represents him at his best:--
"No poet is less forgettable than Ford; none fastens (as it were) the fangs of his genius and his will more deeply in your memory. You cannot shake hands with him and pa.s.s him by; you cannot fall in with him and out again at pleasure; if he touch you once he takes you, and what he takes he keeps his hold of; his work becomes a part of your thought and parcel of your spiritual furniture for ever; he signs himself upon you as with a seal of deliberate and decisive power. His force is never the force of accident; the casual divinity of beauty which falls, as though direct from heaven, upon stray lines and phrases of some poets, fails never by any such heavenly chance on his; his strength of impulse is matched by his strength of will; he never works more by instinct than by resolution; he knows what he would have and what he will do, and gains his end and does his work with full conscience of purpose and insistence of design. By the might of a great will seconded by the force of a great hand he won the place he holds against all odds of rivalry in a race of rival giants."
On the other hand, Mr. Swinburne is constantly liable on this same line to lapse into flagrant levity and perversity of taste; as in saying that he cannot consider Wordsworth "as mere poet" equal to Coleridge as mere poet; in speaking of Alfred de Musset as "the female page or attendant dwarf" of Byron, and his poems as "decoctions of watered Byronism"; or in alluding jauntily and _en pa.s.sant_ to Gautier"s _Mademoiselle de Maupin_ as "the most perfect and exquisite book of modern times."
To note, however, the points at which Mr. Swinburne"s judgment hits the mark, or the points at which it misses it, is comparatively superfluous, inasmuch as both of these cases seem to us essentially accidental. His book is not at all a book of judgment; it is a book of pure imagination.
His genius is for style simply, and not in the least for thought nor for real a.n.a.lysis; he goes through the motions of criticism, and makes a considerable show of logic and philosophy, but with deep appreciation his writing seems to us to have very little to do.
He is an imaginative commentator, often of a very splendid kind, but he is never a real interpreter and rarely a trustworthy guide. He is a writer, and a writer in constant quest of a theme. He has an inordinate sense of the picturesque, and he finds his theme in those subjects and those writers which gratify it. When they gratify it highly, he conceives a boundless relish for them; they give him his chance, and he turns-on the deluge of his exorbitant homage. His imagination kindles, he abounds in their own sense, when they give him an inch he takes an ell, and quite loses sight of the subject in the entertainment he finds in his own word-spinning. In this respect he is extraordinarily accomplished: he very narrowly misses having a magnificent style. On the imaginative side, his style is almost complete, and seems capable of doing everything that picturesqueness demands. There are few writers of our day who could have produced this description of a thunderstorm at sea. Mr. Swinburne gives it to us as the likeness of Victor Hugo"s genius:--
"About midnight, the thundercloud was full overhead, full of incessant sound and fire, lightening and darkening so rapidly that it seemed to have life, and a delight in its life. At the same hour, the sky was clear to the west, and all along the sea-line there sprang and sank as to music a restless dance or chase of summer lightnings across the lower sky: a race and riot of lights, beautiful and rapid as a course of shining Oceanides along the tremulous floor of the sea. Eastward, at the same moment, the s.p.a.ce of clear sky was higher and wider, a splendid semicircle of too intense purity to be called blue; it was of no colour nameable by man; and midway in it, between the stars and the sea, hung the motionless full moon; Artemis watching with serene splendour of scorn the battle of t.i.tans and the revel of nymphs from her stainless and Olympian summit of divine indifferent light. Underneath and about us, the sea was paved with flame; the whole water trembled and hissed with phosphoric fire; even through the wind and thunder I could hear the crackling and sputtering of the water-sparks. In the same heaven and in the same hour there shone at once the three contrasted glories, golden and fiery and white, of moonlight, and of the double lightning, forked and sheet; and under all this miraculous heaven lay a flaming floor of water."
But with this extravagant development of the imagination there is no commensurate development either of the reason or of the moral sense. One of these defects is, to our mind, fatal to Mr. Swinburne"s style; the other is fatal to his tone, to his temper, to his critical pretensions.
His style is without measure, without discretion, without sense of what to take and what to leave; after a few pages, it becomes intolerably fatiguing. It is always listening to itself--always turning its head over its shoulders to see its train flowing behind it. The train shimmers and tumbles in a very gorgeous fashion, but the rustle of its embroidery is fatally importunate.
Mr. Swinburne is a dozen times too verbose; at least one-half of his phrases are what the French call phrases in the air. One-half of his sentence is always a repet.i.tion, for mere fancy"s sake and nothing more, of the meaning of the other half--a play upon its words, an echo, a reflection, a duplication. This trick, of course, makes a writer formidably prolix. What we have called the absence of the moral sense of the writer of these essays is, however, their most disagreeable feature.
By this we do not mean that Mr. Swinburne is not didactic, nor edifying, nor devoted to pleading the cause of virtue. We mean simply that his moral plummet does not sink at all, and that when he pretends to drop it he is simply dabbling in the relatively very shallow pool of the picturesque.
A sense of the picturesque so refined as Mr. Swinburne"s will take one a great way, but it will by no means, in dealing with things whose great value is in what they tell us of human character, take one all the way.
One breaks down with it (if one treats it as one"s sole support) sooner or later in aesthetics; one breaks down with it very soon indeed in psychology.
We do not remember in this whole volume a single instance of delicate moral discrimination--a single case in which the moral note has been struck, in which the idea betrays the smallest acquaintance with the conscience. The moral realm for Mr. Swinburne is simply a brilliant chiaroscuro of costume and posture. This makes all Mr. Swinburne"s magnificent talk about Victor Hugo"s great criminals and monstrosities, about Sh.e.l.ley"s Count Cenci, and Browning"s Guido Franchesini, and about dramatic figures generally, quite worthless as anything but amusing fantasy. As psychology it is, to our sense, extremely puerile; for we do not mean simply to say that the author does not understand morality--a charge to which he would be probably quite indifferent; but that he does not at all understand immorality. Such a pa.s.sage as his rhapsody upon Victor Hugo"s Josiane ("such a pantheress may be such a poetess," etc.) means absolutely nothing. It is entertaining as pictorial writing--though even in this respect as we have said, thanks to excess and redundancy, it is the picturesque spoiled rather than achieved; but as an attempt at serious a.n.a.lysis it seems to us, like many of its companions, simply ghastly--ghastly in its poverty of insight and its pretension to make mere lurid imagery do duty as thought.
THE POETRY OF WILLIAM MORRIS
I. A review of _The Life and Death of Jason_: A poem. By William Morris, Boston: Roberts Brothers. 1867. Originally published in _North American Review_, October, 1867.
II. A review of _The Earthly Paradise_: A poem. By William Morris, Boston: Roberts Bros. 1868. Originally published in _The Nation_, July 9, 1868.
_The Earthly Paradise; Parts I and II_ as originally published in London by F. S. Ellis in 1868, is in one volume, and was issued the same year in Boston by Roberts Brothers. Parts III and IV were issued as volumes II and III under the same t.i.tle, in London in 1870, and in Boston in 1870-71.
THE POETRY OF WILLIAM MORRIS
I. THE LIFE AND DEATH Of JASON
In this poetical history of the fortunate--the unfortunate--Jason, Mr.
Morris has written a book of real value. It is some time since we have met with a work of imagination of so thoroughly satisfactory a character,--a work read with an enjoyment so unalloyed and so untempered by the desire to protest and to criticise. The poetical firmament within these recent years has been all alive with unprophesied comets and meteors, many of them of extraordinary brilliancy, but most of them very rapid in their pa.s.sage. Mr. Morris gives us the comfort of feeling that he is a fixed star, and that his radiance is not likely to be extinguished in a draught of wind,--after the fashion of Mr. Alexander Smith, Mr. Swinburne and Miss Ingelow.