Dramatis Personæ

By ROBERT BROWNING. Boston : Ticknor and Fields.

THE title of this new volume of poems expresses the peculiarity which we find in everything that Mr. Browning composes. Notwithstanding the remoteness of his moods, and the curious subtilty with which he follows the trace of exceptional feelings, he impersonates dramatically : there may be few such people as these choice acquaintances of his genius, but they are persons, and not mere figures labelled with a thought. Pippa, Guendolen, Luria, the Duchess, Bishop Blougram, Frà Lippo Lippi, are persons, however much they may be given to episodes and reverie. You find a great deal that is irrelevant to the thorough working-out of a character, much that is not simply individual: Mr. Browning gets sometimes in the way, so that you lose sight of his companion, but it is not as Punch’s master overzealously pulls the wires of his puppets. You would not say that a man can find many such companions, but you cannot deny that they are vividly described. Perhaps they appear in only one or two moods, but these have individual life. They are discovered in rare exalted or peculiar moments, but these are in costume and bathed in color. Shutting and opening many doors, balked at one vestibule and traversing another, suddenly you surprise the lord or mistress of the mansion, or from some threshold you silently observe their secret passion, which is unconscious of the daylight, and is caught in all its frankness. You come upon people, and not upon pictures in a house.

But the pictures, too, in all Mr. Browning’s interiors, seem to have grown out of the life of the persons. He has not merely come in and hung them up, as poor artist or upholsterer, to make a sumptuous house for fine people to move into. The character in any one of his poems seems to have devised the furnishing ; it is distinct, exterior, not always helping or expressing the character’s thought, sometimes to be referred to that only with an effort, but still no other character could have so furnished his house. You can find the individuality everywhere, if you care to take the trouble. But if you are in haste, or do not particularly sympathize with the person whose drama you surprise, you and he will be together like vagrants in a gallery, who long tor a catalogue, dislocate their necks, and anathematize the whole collection. But do not then say that you have gauged and criticized the life that streams from Mr. Browning’s pen.

How vivid and personal is, for instance, “ Pictor Ignotus,” one of the earlier poems ! The painter is no longer unknown, for his mood betrays and describes him. It is not merely his speaking in the first person which saves him front melting into an abstraction, but it is that the “ I” takes flesh and lives; the poet dramatizes or shows him.

Of this class of poems is the one entitled “ Abt Vogler ” in the present volume. The Abbot was a famous musician and organist, the teacher of Meyerbeer. Concerning the new kind of organ which he invented, and which he called an “ Orchestricon,” we know nothing, save that its effects were merely amplifications of those belonging to an organ. The poem describes the awe and rapture which fill the soul of a great organist when the instrument shudders, soars, rejoices in his inspiration. It is not the description of a musical mood, but the showing of a man who has the mood. It is the exultation and religious feeling of a man in the very act. The noble lines are not fine things attempting to set forth the metaphysics of musical expression and enjoyment, but they represent a man at the very climax of his musical passion. Is the effect any the less dramatic because the man is not committing a murder, or conspiring, or seducing, or overreaching, or infecting an honest ear with jealousy ? It is not so theatrical, because the emotion itself is not so broad and popular, but its inmost genius is dramatic.

“A Death in the Desert” is another poem that attempts to restore a fleeting moment, full of profound thought and feeling, by giving it individuals, and showing them living in it, instead of meditating about it with fine after-thoughts. Pamphylax describes the death of St. John in a desert cave. At first the individuals are clearly seen ; but the poem soon lapses into philosophizing, and winds up with theology. Still, here is the power of reproducing the tone and sentiments of a long-buried and forgotten epoch, as if the matters involved had immediate interest and were vigorously mauled in all the newspapers. St. John might have died last week, or we might be Syrian converts of the second century, dissolved in tenderness at the thought that the Beloved Disciple at last had gone to lay his head again upon the Master’s bosom. The poem talks as if it were trying to satisfy this mixture of memory and curiosity.

Some of the best lines ever written by Mr. Browning are here. Take these, for instance. Pamphylax, reporting Johns last words, as the hoary life flickered and clung, gives this: —

And after recalling the inspirations of Patmos : —

The poem entitled “ Caliban upon Setebos ; or, Natural Theology in the Island,” has for a motto, “Thou thoughtest that I was altogether such an one as thyself.” Caliban talks to himself about “ that other, whom his dam called God.” Setebos is the great First Cause as conceived and dreaded in the heart of a Caliban. The poem is by no means a caricature of the natural theology which springs from selfishness and fear. All the phenomena of the world are neither

The materialist who believes in Forces is brother to the Calvinist who preaches Sovereignty and the Divine Decrees. The preacher lets loose upon the imagination of mankind a Setebos, who after death will plague his enemies and feast his friends. The materialist believes, with Caliban, that

The grave irony of this poem so bespatters the theologian’s God with his own mud that we dread the image and recoil. From the unsparing vigor of these lines we turn for relief to “ Rabbi Den Ezra ” and “Prospice.” In both of these we have glimpses of Mr. Browning’s true theology, which is the faith of his whole soul in the excellence of that world whose beauty he interprets, of the human nature whose capacity he does so much to “ keep in repute,” and of the Infinite Love.

We find in this new volume more distinct and tranquil expressions of Mr. Browning’s thought upon the relation of the finite to the infinite than he has given us before. And his pen has turned with freedom and satisfaction towards these things, as if the imagination had broken new outlets for itself through the world’s beautiful horizon into the great sea. How “ like one entire and perfect chrysolite ” is the little piece called “Prospice”! But we are all the more surprised to see occasionally a touch of the genuine British denseness, whenever he recollects that there are such people as Strauss, Bishop Colenso, and the men of the “ Essays and Reviews ” prowling around the preserve where the ill-kept Thirty-Nine Articles still find a little short grass to nibble. When we read the last three verses of “ Gold Hair,” we set him down for a High-Church bigot: the English discussions upon points of exegesis and theology appear to him threatening to prove the Christian faith false, but for his part he still sees reasons to suppose it true, and this, among others, that it taught Original Sin, the Corruption of Man’s Heart! We escape from this to “Rabbi Ben Ezra” for reassurance, not greatly minding the inconsistency that then appears, but confirmed in an old opinion of ours, that John Bull, in this matter of theology, has his mumps and scarlatina very late, and they are likely to go hard with a constitution that is weaned from the pure truth of things.

“ Gold Hair,” notwithstanding its picturesque lines, is weak and inconclusive. Its moral is conventional, while the incident is too far-fetched for sympathy. The series of little poems called “ James Lee” is full of beauties, but it is too vague to make a firm impression. We suppose it tells the story of love that exaggerates a common nature, clings to it, and shrivels away. What can be finer than the way in which an unsatisfied heart makes the wind the interpreter of its pain and dread? This is the sixth poem, “ Under the Cliff.” _

But in this very poem the figure of the nun is artificial, and interrupts the pathetic feeling. And we cannot make anything out of the piece, “Beside the Drawing-Board,” unless we first detach it from its position in the series, and like it alone. On the whole, many fine lines are here, but no real person and no poetic impression.

Neither the dramatic nor the lyrical quality appears in this volume as it did once in the splendid “ Bells and Pomegranates,” which gave us such vivid shapes, and emotions so consistent and sustained, even though they were so often flawed by overreflection. In this volume the purposes are less palpable, and the pen seems to have pursued them with less tenacity than usual, It has the air of having been scraped together. Yet how charming is “ Confessions,” and “Youth and Art,” and “A Likeness” ! Besides these, the best pieces are those which touch upon the highest themes.

“Mr. Sludge, the Medium,” cannot be called a poem. It would not be possible to write satire, epic, idyl, not even elegy, upon that “ rat-hole philosophy,” as Mr. Emerson once styled the new fetichism of the mahogany tables. It has not one element that asks the sense of beauty to incorporate it, or challenges the weapon of wit to transfix it. It is humiliating, but not pathetic, not even when yearning hearts are trying to pretend that their first-horn vibrates to them through a stranger’s and a hireling’s mind. It is not even grotesque, but it is gross, and flat, and stale ; its messages are fatuous, its machinery the rickety heirlooms of old humbugs of Greece and Alexandria. No thrill, no terror, no true awe, nothing but “ goose-flesh ” and disgust, creep from the medium’s presence. Pegasus need not be saddled ; summon, rather, the police.

Yet this composition, which Mr. Browning must have undertaken in a moment of high indignation, with the motive of self-relief, is full of common sense. Mr, Sludge’s vindication of his career turns upon the point that people like on the whole to he deceived, especially in matters relating to the invisible world. Sludge must be right in this; otherwise the theologians would not have had such a successful run. The facile and eager “circle” betrays the imaginative medium into reporting what it appears most to desire. The superstition of the people excites and feeds his own. He is only one against a crowd which deluges him with its expectation, and resents a scarcity of the supernatural. Mr. Sludge is not so much to blame : the people at length push the thing so far that he is obliged to cheat in self-defence. And when a man tasks his wits successfully, if it be only to mislead the witless, he has a sense of satisfaction in the effort akin to that of the rhetorician and the quack.

But shrewdness and good sense cannot make a poem by assuming the measure of blank verse. And a few Yankee phrases are pasted into Mr. Sludge’s talk, such as “ stiffish cock-tail,” “V-notes,” “sniggering,” allusions to “ Greeley’s newspaper,” Beacon Street, etc.: there is no character in them at all. Mr. Sludge is a bad Yankee, as well as impudent pleader. The lines never sparkle, even with the poet’s indignation, but they seem to be all the time blown into a forced vivacity and heat. Nemesis attends the poet who plunges his arm for a subject into this burrow of Spiritualism.

Let us pass from this to note the noble lesson that the last poem, entitled “ Epilogue,” conveys. Three speakers tell in turn their feeling of the Divine Presence. The first intones the old Hebrew notion, loved by the childhood of all races and countries, that the Lord’s Face fills His earthly temple at stated periods, culminating with the human glory of psalms and hallelujahs, to absorb and shine in the rejoicing of the worshippers, to sink back again into the invisible upon the dying strain. The second speaker describes the reaction, when the enthusiastic belief of early times is replaced by a dull sense that no Face shines, by a doubt if beyond the darkness and the distance there be yet a God who will answer to the old rapture, a sun to rise when man’s heart rises, a love corresponding to his ecstasy : —

But the third speaker bids the records be closed, that man may worship the God who lives, instead of regretting that He lived of old. Take the least man, observe his head and heart, find how he differs from every other man ; see how Nature by degrees grows around him, to nourish, infold, and set him off, to enrich him with opportunities, as if he were her only fosterchild, and to flatter thus every other man in turn, making him her darling as though in expectation of finding no other, till, having extorted all his worth and beauty, and cherished him to the utmost of his possible life, she rolls away elsewhere, continually keeping up this pageant of humanity : —

This is the true religion, hallowing the poet’s gifts and inviting them to celebrate and express it. We wish that the lines would lot their meaning meet us with a more level gaze. In the poems of this class there is riper thought and a clearer intuition, toward which all the previous poems of Mr. Browning appear to have struggled, faring from the East to contribute myrrh, frankincense, and gems to this simplicity.