Complete Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning

by Elizabeth Barrett Browning

  He is the most wonderful artist in blank verse of all in England, and almost the earliest. We do not say that he first broke the enchaining monotony, of which the Sackvilles and the Marlowes left us complaining; because the versification of Hieronimo ran at its own strong will, and the Pinner of Wakefield may have preceded his first plays. We do not even say what we might, that his hand first proved the compass and infinite modulation of the new instrument; but we do say, that it never answered another hand as it answered his. We do say, this fingering was never learned of himself by another. From Massinger’s more resonant majesty, from even Fletcher’s more numerous and artful cadences, we turn back to his artlessness of art, to his singular and supreme estate as a versificater. Often when he is at the sweetest, his words are poor monosyllables, his pauses frequent to brokenness, and the structure of the several lines less varied than was taught after Fletcher’s masterdom; but the whole results in an ineffable charming of the ear which we acquiesce in without seeking its cause, a happy mystery of music.

  This is little for Shakspeare; yet so much for the place, that we are forced into brevities for our observations which succeed. We chronicle only the names of Chapman, Dekker, Webster, Turneur, Randolph, Middleton, and Thomas Heywood, although great names, and worthy, it is not too much to add, of Shakspeare’s brotherhood. Many besides lean from our memory to the paper, but we put them away reverently. It was the age of the dramatists – the age of strong passionate men, scattering on every side their good and evil oracles of vehement humanity, and extenuating no thought in its word: and in that age, “to write like a man,” was a deed accomplished by many besides him of whom it was spoken, Jonson’s “son Cartwright.”

  At Jonson’s name we stop perforce, and do salutation in the dust to the impress of that “learned sock.” He was a learned man, as everybody knows; and as everybody does not believe, not the worse for his learning. His material, brought laboriously from east and west, is wrapt in a flame of his own. If the elasticity and abandonment of Shakspeare and of certain of Shakspeare’s brothers, are not found in his writings, the reason of the defects need not be sought out in his readings. His genius, high and verdant as it grew, yet belonged to the hard woods: it was lance-wood rather than bow-wood – a genius rather noble than graceful – eloquent, with a certain severity and emphasis of enunciation. It would have been the same if he, too, had known “little Latin and lesse Greek.” There was a dash of the rhetorical in his dramatic. Not that we deny him empire over the passions: his heart had rhetoric as well as his understanding, and he wrote us a Sad Shepherd, as well as a Catiline. His versification heaves heavily with thought. For his comic powers, let ‘Volpone’ and ‘The Alchymist’ attest them with that unextinguishable laughter which is the laughter of gods or poets still more than of the wits’ coffee-house. Was it “done at the Mermaid” – was it ever fancied there, that “rare Ben Jonson” should be called a pedantic poet? Nay, but only a scholastic one.

  And Beaumont and Fletcher, the Castor and Pollux of this starry poetic sphere, (‘lucida sidera!’) our silence shall not cover them ; nor will we put asunder, in our speech, the names which friendship and poetry joined together, nor distinguish by a laboured analysis, the vivacity of one from the solidity of the other; seeing that men who, according to tradition, lived in one house, and wore one cloak, and wrote on one page, may well, by the sanctity of that one grave they have also in common, maintain for ever beyond it the unity they coveted. The characteristics of these writers stand out in a softened light from the deep tragic background of the times. We may liken them to Shakspeare in one mood of his mind, because there are few classes of beauty, the type or likeness of which is not discoverable in Shakspeare. From the rest, they stand out contrastingly, as the Apollo of the later Greek sculpture school, – too graceful for divinity and too vivacious for marble, – placed in a company of the antiquer statues with their grand blind look of the almightiness of repose. We cannot say of these poets as of the rest, “they write all like men:” we cannot think they write like women either – perhaps they write a little like centaurs. We are of opinion in any way, that the grace is more obvious than the strength; and there may be something centauresque and of twofold nature in their rushing mutabilities, and changes on passion and weakness. Clearest of all is that they wrote like poets, and in a versification most surpassingly musical though liberal, as if music served them for love’s sake, unbound! They had an excellent genius, but not a strong enough invention to include judgment; judgment being the consistency of invention, and consistency always, whether in morals or literature, depending upon strength. We do not, in fact, find in them any perfect and covenanted whole – we do not find it in character, or in plot, or in composition; and lamenting the defect on many grounds we do so on this chief one, that their good is just good, their evil just evil, unredeemed into good like Shakspeare’s and Nature’s evil by unity of design, but, lying apart, a willingly chosen, through and through evil – and “by this time it stinketh.” If other results are less lamentable they are no less fatal. The mirror which these poets hold up to us is vexed with a thousand cracks, and everything visible is in fragments. Their conceptions all tremble on a peradventure – “peradventure they shall do well:” there is no royal absolute will that they should do well – the poets are less kings than workmen. And being workmen they are weak – the moulds fall from their hands – are clutched with a spasm or fall with a faintness. After which querulousness, we shall leave the question as to whether their tragic or comic powers be put to more exquisite use – not for solution, nor for doubt, (since we hold fast an opinion,) but for praise the most rarely appropriate or possible.

  One passing word of Ford, the pathetic! – for he may wear on his sleeve the epithet of Euripides, and no daw peck there. Most tender is he, yet not to feebleness – most mournful, yet not to languor; yet we like to hear the warhorse leaps of Dekker on the same tragic ground with him, producing at once contrast and completeness. Ungrateful thought! – the ‘Witch of Edmonton’ bewitched us to it. Ford can fill the ear and soul singly, with the trumpet-note of his pathos; and in its pauses you shall hear the murmuring voices of nature, – such a nightingale, for instance, as never sang on a common night. Then that death scene in the ‘Broken Heart’! who has equalled that? It is single in the drama, – the tragic of tragedy, and the sublime of grief. A word, too, of Massinger, who writes all like a giant – a dry-eyed giant. He is too ostentatiously strong for flexibility, and too heavy for rapidity, and monotonous through his perpetual final trochee; his gesture and enunciation are slow and majestic. And another word of Shirley, an inferior writer, though touched, to our fancy, with something of a finer ray, and closing, in worthy purple, the procession of the Elizabethan men. Shirley is the last dramatist, Valete et plaudite, o posteri.

  Standing in his traces, and looking backward and before, we become aware of the distinct demarcations of five eras of English poetry: the first, the Chaucerian, although we might call it Chaucer; the second, the Elizabethan; the third, which culminates in Cowley; the fourth, in Dryden and the French school; the fifth, the return to nature in Cowper and his successors of our day. These five rings mark the age of the fair and stingless serpent we are impelled, like the ancient mariner, to bless – but not “unaware.” “Ah benedicte!” we bless her so, out of our Chaucer’s rubric, softly, but with a plaintiveness of pleasure! For when the last echo of the Elizabethan harmonies had died away with Shirley’s footsteps, in the twilight of that golden day; when Habington and Lovelace, and every last bird before nightfall was dumb, and Crashaw’s fine rapture, holy as a summer sense of silence, left us to the stars – the first voices startling the thinker from his reverting thoughts, are verily of another spirit. The voices are eloquent enough, thoughtful enough, fanciful enough; but something is defective. Can any one suffer, as an experimental reader, the transition between the second and third periods, without feeling that something is defective? What is so? And who dares to guess that it
may be INSPIRATION?

  PART IV.

  “POETRY is of too spiritual a nature,” Mr. Campbell has observed, “to admit of its authors being exactly grouped by a Linnæan system of classification.” Nevertheless, from those subtle influences which poets render and receive, and from other causes less obvious but no less operative, it has resulted even to ourselves in this slight survey of the poets of our country, that the signs used by us simply as signs of historical demarcation, have naturally fallen or risen into signs of poetical classification. The five eras we spoke of in a former paper, have each a characteristic as clear in poetry as in chronology; and a deeper gulf than an Anno Domini yawns betwixt an Elizabethan man and a man of that third era upon which we are entering. The change of the poetical characteristic was not, indeed, without gradation. The hands of the clock had been moving silently for a whole hour before the new one struck – and even in Davies, even in Drayton, we felt the cold foreshadow of a change. The word “sweetness,” which presses into our sentences against the will of our rhetoric whenever we speak of Shakspeare (“sweetest Shakspeare”) or his kin, we lose the taste of in the later waters – they are brackish with another age.

  In what did the change consist? Practically and partially in the idol-worship of rhyme. Among the elder poets, the rhyme was only a felicitous adjunct, a musical accompaniment, the tinkling of a cymbal through the choral harmonies. You heard it across the changes of the pause, as an undertone of the chant, marking the time with an audible indistinctness, and catching occasionally and reflecting the full light of the emphasis of the sense in mutual elucidation. But the new practice endeavoured to identify in all possible cases the rhyme and what may be called the sentimental emphasis; securing the latter to the tenth rhyming syllable, and so dishonouring the emphasis of the sentiment into the base use of the marking of the time. And, not only by this unnatural provision did the emphasis minister to the rhyme, but the pause did so also. “Away with all pauses,” – said the reformers, – “except the legitimate pause at the tenth rhyming syllable. O rhyme, live for ever! Rhyme alone take the incense from our altars, – tinkling cymbal alone be our music!” – And so arose, in dread insignificance, “the heart and impart men.”

  Moreover, the corruption of the versification was but a type of the change in the poetry itself, and sufficiently expressive. The accession to the throne of the poets, of the wits in the new current sense of the term, or of the beaux esprits – a term to be used the more readily because descriptive of the actual pestilential influence of French literature – was accompanied by the substitution of elegant thoughts for poetic conceptions (“elegant” alas! beginning to be the critical password) of adroit illustrations for beautiful images, of ingenuity for genius. Yet this third era is only the preparation for the fourth consummating one – the hesitation before the crime – we smell the blood through it in the bath-room! And our fancy grows hysterical, like poor Octavia, while the dismal extent of the “quantum mutatus” developes itself in detail.

  “Waller’s sweetness!” it is a needy antithesis to Denham’s strength, – and, if anything beside, a sweetness as far removed from that which we have lately recognized, as the saccharine of the palate from the melodious of the ear. Will Saccharissa frown at our comparison from the high sphere of his verse? or will she, a happy “lady who can sleep when she pleases,” please to oversleep our offence? It is certain that we but walk in her footsteps in our disdain of her poet, even if we disdain him – and most seriously we disown any such partaking of her “crueltie.” Escaping from the first astonishment of an unhappy transition, and from what is still more vexing, those “base, common, and popular” critical voices, which, in and out of various “arts of poetry,” have been pleased to fix upon this same transitional epoch as the genesis of excellence to our language and versification, we do not, we hope it of ourselves, undervalue Waller. There is a certain grace “beyond the reach of art,” or rather beyond the destructive reach of his ideas of art, to which, we opine, if he had not been a courtier and a renegade, the lady Dorothea might have bent her courtly head unabashed, even as the Penshurst beeches did. We gladly acknowledge in him, as in Denham and other poets of the transition, an occasional remorseful recurrence by half lines and whole lines, or even a few lines together, to the poetic past. We will do anything but agree with Mr. Hallam, who, in his excellent and learned work on the Literature of Europe, has passed some singular judgments upon the poets, and none more startling than his comparison of Waller to Milton, on the ground of the sustenance of power. The crying truth is louder than Mr. Hallam, and cries, in spite of Fame, with whom poor Waller was an “enfant trouvé,” an heir by chance, rather than merit, – that he is feeble poetically quite as surely as morally and politically, and that, so far from being an equal and sustained poet, he has not strength for unity even in his images, nor for continuity in his thoughts, nor for adequacy in his expression, nor for harmony in his versification. This is at least our strong and sustained impression of Edmund Waller.

  With a less natural gift of poetry than Waller, Denham has not only more strength of purpose and language (an easy superiority), but some strength in the abstract: he puts forth rather a sinewy hand to the new structure of English versification. It is true, indeed, that in his only poem which survives to any competent popularity – his ‘Cooper’s Hill’ – we may find him again and again, by an instinct to a better principle, receding to the old habit of the medial pause, instead of the would-be sufficiency of the final one. But, generally, he is true to his modern sect of the Pharisees; and he helps their prosperity otherwise by adopting that pharisaic fashion of setting forth, vaingloriously, a little virtue of thought and poetry in pointed and antithetic expression, which all the wits delighted in, from himself, a chief originator, to Pope, the perfecter. The famous lines, inheriting by entail a thousand critical admirations –

  ‘Strong without rage, without o’erflowing full,’

  and as Sydney Smith might put it, “a great many other things, without a great many other things,” contain the germ and prophecy of the whole Queen Anne’s generation. For the rest, we will be brief in our melancholy, and say no more of Denham than that he was a Dryden in small.

  The genius of the new school was its anomaly, even Abraham Cowley. We have said nothing of “the metaphysical poets” because we disclaim the classification, and believe with Mr. Leigh Hunt, that every poet, inasmuch as he is a poet, is a metaphysician. In taking note, therefore, of this Cowley, who stands on the very vibratory soil of the transition, and stretches his faltering and protesting hands on either side to the old and to the new, let no one brand him for “metaphysics.” He was a true poet, both by natural constitution and cultivation, but without the poet’s heart. His admirers have compared him to Pindar – and, taking Pindar out of his rapture, they may do so still – he was a Pindar writing by métier rather than by verve. In rapidity and subtlety of the associative faculty, which, however, with him, moved circularly rather than onward, he was sufficiently Pindaric: but, as it is a fault in the Greek lyrist to leave his buoyancy to the tumultuous rush of his associations too unmisgivingly and entirely for the right reverence of Unity in Beauty, – so is it the crime of the English poet to commit coldly what the other permitted passively, and with a conscious volition, quick yet calm, calm when quickest, to command from the ends of the universe the associations of material sciences and spiritual philosophies. Quickness of the associative or suggestive faculty is common, we have had occasion to observe, to the wit (in the modern sense) and the poet – its application only, being of a reverse difference. Cowley confounded the application, and became a witty poet. The Elizabethan writers were inclined to a too curious illuminating of thought, by imagery. Cowley was coarsely curious: he went to the shambles for his chambers of imagery, and very often through the mud. All which faults appear to us attributable to his coldness of temperament, and his defectiveness in the instinct towards Beauty; to having the intellect only of a great poet, n
ot the sensibility. His ‘Davideis,’ our first epic in point of time, has fine things in it. His translations, or rather paraphrases of Anacreon, are absolutely the most perfect of any English composition of their order. His other poems contain profuse material, in image and reflection, for the accomplishment of three poets, each greater than himself. He approached the beautiful and the true as closely as mere Fancy could; but that very same Fancy, unfixed by feeling, too often, in the next breath, approximated him to the hideous and the false. Noble thoughts are in Cowley – we say noble, and we might say sublime; but, while we speak, he falls below the first praise. Yet his influence was for good rather than for evil, by inciting to a struggle backward, a delay in the revolutionary movement: and this, although a wide gulf yawned between him and the former age, and his heart’s impulse was not strong enough to cast him across it. For his actual influence, he lifts us up and casts us down – charms, and goes nigh to disgust us – does all but make us love and weep.