Recent English Poetry

AN author’s influence upon other authors may be expressed in terms of either attraction or repulsion ; and the one who repels is often found to be the one whose influence is deepest although it be more tardily acknowledged. Today Robert Browning exhibits the most sharply accented personality among writers of English poetry ; and his latest publication ¹proves that he is not likely to lose the distinction with advancing age.

personality, too, with spontaneous vehemence. He is more various, though lyrically less great and in art less wellbalaneed, than Tennyson. The most masculine nature and the most subtile perception of character owned by any contemporary English poet are admitted to be his. And yet he is not the leader of the younger school, which — for instance through one of its most skilled and winning representatives, Mr. Edmund Gosse — shows a decided affinity with Rossetti. On the other hand we know that Rossetti himself, in the earlier part of his career, felt deeply the “ Darkling, I keep my sunrise-aim,” he reminds us, in the closing lines of influence of Browning. Is there not some plausibility in the speculation that the younger men, by following Rossetti, will turn out to have been paying tribute indirectly to the genius which at first commanded Rossetti’s own ? The fact that their work moves in a direction so opposed to Browning’s ought perhaps to be regarded as merely one swing of the pendulum, which will be followed by an action precisely reverse. But, whatever the case may be as to that point, one will very naturally look to this latest volume by the author of Sordello and The Ring and the Book for some further clue as to what the " sunrise-aim ” really has been, to which he alludes. Without entering into any lengthy analysis, we may say that it has consisted apparently in a resolve to depict through the medium of verse, regardless of technical tradition, every possible phase of life just as it chanced to impress the writer. All the jagged prominences, the deep abysses of crime or imperfection, the strange sinuosities of passion eating its way into the heart of man, the dewy valleys in which pure love rests, the sudden bursts of feeling, the stretches of barrenness not without meaning, which present themselves on a general view of human nature, were to be reproduced as if upon a raised map ; or we might say by means of an orrery, having suitable apparatus to demonstrate the movements of bodies terrestrial and celestial. Mr. Browning’s own comment was to supply a sort of poetic anthropology. There had always been a somewhat scientific bias in his view of life ; but it was empirical, wanting in method, and continually swayed this way or that by a desire for purely poetic expression. The very essence of his aim, however, seems to have been to avoid bringing observation within the bounds of any symmetrical or classically moulded design : he has wished his poetry to be like that which it represents, — rough, bristling, unexpected, heterogeneous. Beauty and ugliness, the lovely and the grotesque, must according to his practice be treated with a commanding impartiality, which shall leave chiefly with the reader the task of striking the balance. Hence proceed his many deficiencies of form; and the same cause may be assigned for the result that his eminence as a dramatist (not for the modern stage) is hardly surpassed by his power as a writer of lyrical and meditative verse. Such a man must be equally capable in the management of several dissimilar modes of imparting thought. It is not surprising, either that his impartiality should issue in something allied to a buoyant indifference, which might be said fitly to terminate with a collection like Jocoseria ; because we find in its contents a mingling of sober and even tragic elements with others of a facetious or half-cynical cast, and there runs through the whole a vein of mildly contemptuous pity for the lot of mankind, their illusions, their meannesses, aspirations, and self-deceits. A compensation for the unsatisfactoriness of life is suggested in the nameless prelude, the airy chanson, in which these verses occur : —

The suggestion, it is true, is vague; but we credit the poet with meaning that without love, which is the “ complete incompletion,” nothing avails. On this thread the several poems of the series appear to string themselves. The first one, Donald, treats of the relation of man and brute, in a way that makes it serve as a sort of pendant to the Mouleykeh of the Dramatic Idylls. A daring Highlander ascends some indefinite mountain, and on a narrow path meets a large red stag, where there is no room to pass.

Accordingly Donald lies down, breast upwards ; and the stag, recognizing the emergency, steps carefully over him with delicate feet: —

But at the last moment the brilliant idea occurs to the Highlander of stabbing the stag, while he holds with his hand the hind leg that is being lifted over him. Donald is carried down the mountain-side by the wounded animal, and maimed for life. Mere is an instance of the want of love, in a broad sense ; yet while Mr. Browning renders the lesson plainly, he chooses to strike an attitude of worldly savoir faire in respect of it. He professes to have met the crippled Donald relating the adventure and receiving gratuities from sportsmen ; whereupon, “ I hope I gave twice as much as the rest,” he exclaims, and proceeds to name the man an ingrate, rightly rewarded for his dastard conduct. We have no space to analyze the other short pieces, in their bearing on the central theme. Solomon and Balkis is a pungent satire, which reveals the immanence of vanity in the king, and of feminine desire for conquest on the part of the Queen of Sheba, just when they are expressing the most abstract admiration for wisdom and unalloyed goodness. Christina and Monaldeschi, in somewhat wooden stanzas, sets forth the vengeance of another queen upon her treacherous favorite; there is a brief exposition of Mary Wollstonecraft’s hopeless passion for Fuseli; and then we are given a little fable concerning Adam, Lilith, and Eve to illustrate the cases of a woman who pretends less love than she really feels, and of one who puts on the air of a greater affection than she in fact has ; neither of them deceiving the man. Only in Ixion, and the song called Never the Time and the Place, preceding the epilogue, does the author surrender to a free play of enthusiasm or sentiment. We may leave it to the Browning societies to settle the exact construction which should be placed upon Ixion : whether or not it be an indirect protest against the anthropomorphic idea of God, we discern in these sonorous elegiac verses a grand and passionate sense of the indomitableness of man. Assuredly they offer a new view of the myth ; they set aside the traditional notion that Ixion was justly punished for his temerity, and bring him forward as an exponent of a high principle. Thus —

Incidentally we may pay our tribute to the aptness and maturity of art indicated in the trip-hammer force of that spondaic measure, “ Thunderstruck, downthrust.” The lyric which we have mentioned deserves quotation as one of the most exquisite in the whole range of the writer’s production.

The final turn, here, reminds one of Ben Jonson’s closing of Her Triumph, in Underwoods —

— but only as one is reminded of Von Weber in that strain which Mendelssohn borrowed to enrich his music for the Midsummer-Night’s Dream, and made his own, simply by altering the tempo and the manner in which it was used.

Jochanan Hakkadosh, the longest poem in the book, is extremely disappointing, and suggests a melancholy decline from that high level of fine philosophy and terse formulation which the author long ago attained in Rabbi Ben Ezra; and as for Pambo, which concludes the collection, no more may be said than that it contains a grain of wisdom wrapped up in something very like nonsense-verses. To decry Mr. Browning’s latest contribution would not for a moment be justifiable; and a more detailed review could easily make it clear that a consummate literary skill underlies all the surface vagaries of these compositions. The author is not on this occasion, any more than hitherto, thoroughly dramatic, because he is too individual to allow the persons whose situation he imagines to speak in any way but his own. Neither can we agree with the criticism which has been made, that he is too analytic to be creative ; since when lie attempts analysis, it is continually dissolved into images, one following another in a blinding shower. He remains semi-dramatic, vividly picturesque, sometimes strongly lyrical ; but, as we intimated in the first part of this notice, he brings up at a species of cynicism : his restless observation and diversified sympathies end by giving a view of things which is but half-serious, although intermittently he throws off the jocose mood, and trusts wholly to earnest, unsophisticated feeling.

This is not at all the way in which Mr. Gosse approaches the work of transmuting experience or the substance of reverie into poetic literature.² Mr. Gosse sets out to paint something definite in words, to fix upon our minds a beautiful outline, and to imbue us with a specified sentiment, or idea, or association. In looking through the selected series of fifty-four of his poems, lately published in this country, it is likely enough that the reader will sometimes think him imitative ; but if a musician plays upon a silver trumpet with sincere anil charming mastery, it is not profitable to inquire who first made that special form of instrument. Mr. Browning, as we have hinted, never forgets to be himself. Mr. Gosse, apparently, never concerns himself on this point, and yet the mellifluous flow of his verse carries with it irresistibly the sense of a strong, quiet, and sufficient personality, rich in comprehension of the most that is fair and elevating in this world, and endowed with a power to express it in enchanting terms. Whatever of imitativeness may be suspected does not consist in any echo of thoughts or phrases used by others, but in a singular aptitude for reproducing the loveliest effects of poetic inspiration that the best minds have hitherto supplied, at the same time that Mr. Gosse’s personal observation and feeling act spontaneously and leave upon his page the traces of unmistakable genuineness. Nothing could express more delightfully the atmosphere of old romance than his Wind of Provence :

He is especially happy in delicate utterances like those of Sunshine in March, where he says : —

and, voicing the snow-drops : —

There are similar touches in The Charcoal-Burner, the hero of which is “a still old man with grizzled beard ” whom the shyest woodland creatures do not fear.

We are struck, in this case as in that of the poem entitled Palingenesis, with a quality of subtile insight very much like that of Emerson. There can be no doubt that Mr. Gosse possesses an exceedingly keen vision and is rigidly true to it in his rhythmic record of what he sees. It is impossible to enumerate in this place all the felicities of phrase that occur in the volume, or even to do justice to the wide range of his work. His fertility is remarkable, and what is more remarkable still is that he almost without exception satisfies by the fullness, the sweetness, the naturalness, and the polished grace of his exposition. The Cruise of the Rover is quite out of his usual vein, and, notwithstanding, is perfect of its kind, surpassing in depth of conception and in technical force Tennyson’s ballad of The Revenge, which it calls to mind. Mr. Gosse, however, appears nowhere to better advantage than in his sonnets, of which The Bath is an excellent example.

Alcyone, which is a sonnet in dialogue, is chiseled like a Greek marble. Phœbus seeks to console Alcyone for the loss of her husband, and she asks : —

The god answers in one splendid line which ends the sonnet: —

We do not need the evidence of a sonnet addressed to Rossetti to establish a connection between Mr. Gosse and the painter-poet whom he addresses as “ master ; ” for there are many poems in On Viol and Flute which make us think of such an affiliation as inevitable. The volume belongs altogether to the latest rank of Victorian poets. It has nothing to do with the turmoil and the endless agitation of complicated passion which Mr. Browning continues to reflect; but, on the contrary, it summons us away into a region of ideal repose and the luxury of classic form. It proffers, in short, a silent remonstrance against the latter-day clamor which has unquestionably invaded the poetry of Browning. None, but those who have subjected themselves to a set theory of progress, can well object to the defensibleness of Mr. Gosse’s choice ; and indeed it must remain at least an open question whether poetry gains in the long run by trying to occupy the field of science and the newspaper. At all events it is a good fortune which gives the world two such admirable fruits of imagination at one time, in England. If we choose, we may figure Mr. Browning by the oak — tough, gnarled, powerful, and thrusting its growth out at unexpected angles : to carry on this kind of analogy we should have to fancy a resemblance on the part of Mr. Gosse to the English violet growing in a hollow at the foot of the oak. Every one knows that to ascertain the relative value of the oak and the violet, æsthetically, is out of the question, and that we cannot dispense with either.