Complete Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning

by Elizabeth Barrett Browning

  And then came “glorious John,” with the whole fourth era in his arms; – and eloquent above the sons of men, to talk down, thunder down poetry as if it were an exhalation. Do we speak as if he were not a poet? nay, but we speak of the character of his influences! nay, but he was a poet – an excellent poet – in marble! and Phidias, with the sculpturesque ideal separated from his working tool, might have carved him. He was a poet without passion, just as Cowley was – but, then, Cowley lived by fancy, and that would have been poor living for John Dryden. Unlike Cowley, too, he had an earnestness which of itself was influential. He was inspired in his understanding and his senses only; but to the point of disenchanting the world most marvelously. He had a large soul for a man, containing sundry Queen Anne’s men, one within another, like quartetto tables; but it was not a large soul for a poet, and it entertained the universe by potatoe patches. He established finally the reign of the literati for the reign of the poets – and the critics clapped their hands. He established finally the despotism of the final emphasis – and no one dared, in affecting criticism, to speak any more at all against a tinkling cymbal. And so, in distinctive succession to poetry and inspiration, began the new system of harmony “as by law established” – and so he translated Virgil not only into English but into Dryden; and so he was kind enough to translate Chaucer too, as an example, – made him a much finer speaker, and not, according to our doxy, so good a versifier – and cured the readers of the old “Knight’s tale” of sundry of their tears! – and so he reasoned powerfully in verse – and threw into verse besides, the whole force of his strong sensual being; and so he wrote what has been called from generation to generation, down to the threshold of our days, “the best ode in the English language.” To complete which successes, he thrust out nature with a fork; and for a long time, and in spite of Horace’s prophecy, she never came back again. Do we deny our gratitude and his glory to glorious John because we speak thus? In nowise would we do it. He was a man greatly endowed; and our language and our literature remain, in certain respects, the greater for his greatness – more practical, more rapid, and with an air of mixed freedom and adroitness which we welcome as an addition to the various powers of either. With regard to his influence – and he was most influential upon poetry – we have spoken; and have the whole of the opening era from which to prove.

  While we return upon our steps for a breathing moment, and pause before MILTON, – the consideration occurs to us that a person of historical ignorance in respect to this divine poet, would hesitate and be at a loss to which era of our poetry to attach him through the internal evidence of his works. He has not the tread of a contemporary of Dryden, – and Rochester’s nothingness is a strange accompaniment to the voice of his greatness. Neither can it be quite predicated of him that he walks an Elizabethan man – there is a certain fine bloom or farina, rather felt than seen, upon the old poems, unrecognized upon his. But the love of his genius leant backward to those olden oracles: and it is pleasant to think that he was actually born before Shakspeare’s death; that they two looked upwardly to the same daylight and stars; and that he might have stretched his baby arms (“animosus infans!”) to the faint hazel eyes of the poet of poets. Let us think in anywise that he drew in some living subtle Shakspearian benediction, providing for greatness.

  The Italian poets had “rained influence” on the Elizabethan “field of the cloth of gold;” and from the Italian poets as well as the classical sources and the elder English ones, did Milton accomplish his soul. Yet the poet Milton was not made by what he received; not even by what he loved. High above the current of poetical influences he held his own grand personality; and there never lived poet in any age (unless we assume ignorantly of Homer) more isolated in the contemporaneous world than he. He was not worked upon from out of it, nor did he work outwardly upon it. As Cromwell’s secretary and Salmasius’s antagonist, he had indeed an audience; but as a poet, a scant one; his music, like the spherical tune, being inaudible because too fine and high. It is almost awful to think of him issuing from the arena of controversy victorious and blind, – putting away from his dark brows the bloody laurel – left alone after the heat of the day by those for whom he had combated; and originating in that enforced dark quietude his epic vision for the inward sight of the unborn; so to avenge himself on the world’s neglect by exacting from it an eternal future of reminiscence. The circumstances of the production of his great work are worthy in majesty of the poem itself; and the writer is the ideal to us of the majestic personality of a poet. He is the student, the deep thinker, the patriot, the believer, the thorough brave man, – breathing freely for truth and freedom under the leaden weights of his adversities – never reproaching God for his griefs by his despair – working in the chain, – praying without ceasing in the serenity of his sightless eyes, – and because the whole visible universe was swept away from betwixt them and the Creator, contemplating more intently the invisible infinite, and shaping all his thoughts to it in grander proportion! O noble Christian poet! Which is hardest? self-renunciation, and the sackcloth and the cave? or grief-renunciation, and the working on, on, under the stripe? He did what was hardest. He was Agonistes building up, instead of pulling down; and his high religious fortitude gave a character to his works. He stood in the midst of those whom we are forced to consider the corrupt versificators of his day, an iconoclast of their idol rhyme, and protesting practically against the sequestration of pauses. His lyrical poems, move they ever so softly, step loftily, and with something of an epic air. His sonnets are the first sonnets of a free rhythm – and this although Shakspeare and Spenser were sonnetteers. His ‘Comus,’ and ‘Samson,’ and ‘Lycidas,’ – how are we to praise them? His epic is the second to Homer’s, and the first in sublime effects – a sense as of divine benediction flowing through it from end to end. Not that we compare, for a moment, Milton’s genius with Homer’s – but that CHRISTIANTY is in the poem besides Milton. If we hazard a remark which is not admiration, it shall be this – that with all his heights and breadths (which we may measure geometrically if we please from the ‘Davideis’ of Cowley), with all his rapt devotions and exaltations towards the highest of all, we do miss something – we, at least, who are writing, miss something – of what may be called, but rather metaphysically than theologically, spirituality. His spiritual personages are vast enough, but not rarified enough. They are humanities, enlarged, uplifted, transfigured – but no more. In the most spiritual of his spirits, there is a conscious, obvious, even ponderous, materialism. And hence comes the celestial gunpowder, and hence the clashing with swords, and hence the more continuous evil which we feel better than we describe, the thick atmosphere clouding the heights of the subject. And if anybody should retort, that complaining so we complain of Milton’s humanity – we shake our heads. For Shakspeare also was a man; and our creed is, that the ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream’ displays more of the fairyhood of fairies, than the ‘Paradise Lost’ does of the angelhood of angels. The example may serve the purpose of explaining our objection; both leaving us room for the one remark more – that Ben Jonson and John Milton, the most scholastic of our poets, brought out of their scholarship different gifts to our language; that Jonson brought more Greek, and Milton more Latin, – while the influences of the latter and greater poet were at once more slowly and more extensively effectual.

  Butler was the contemporary of Milton: we confess a sort of continuous “innocent surprise” in the thought of it, however the craziness of our imagination may be in fault. We have stood by as witnesses while the great poet sanctified the visible earth with the oracle of his blindness; and are startled that a profane voice should be hardy enough to break the echo, and jest in the new consecrated temple. But this is rather a roundheaded than a longheaded way of adverting to poor Butler; who for all his gross injustice to the purer religionists, in the course of “flattering the vices and daubing the iniquities” of King Charles’s court, does scarcely deserve, at our hands, either to
be treated as a poet or punished for being a contemporary of the poet Milton. – Butler’s business was the business of desecration, the exact reverse of a poet’s; and by the admission of all the world his business is well done. His learning is various and extensive, and his fancy communicates to it its mobility. His wit has a gesture of authority, as if it might, if it pleased, be wisdom. His power over language, “tattered and ragged” like Skelton’s, is as wonderful as his power over images. And if nobody can commend the design of his Hudibras, which is the English counterpart of Don Quixote – a more objectionable servility than an adaptation from a serious composition, in which case that humorous effect would have been increased by the travestie, which is actually injured and precisely in an inverse ratio, by the burlesque copy of the burlesque, – everybody must admit the force of the execution. When Prior attempted afterwards the same line of composition with his peculiar grace and airiness of diction – when Swift ground society into jests with a rougher turning of the wheel – still, then and since, has this Butler stood alone. He is the genius of his class – a natural enemy to poetry under the form of a poet: not a great man, but a powerful man.

  CONCLUSION.

  WE return to the generation of Dryden and to Pope his inheritor – Pope, the perfecter, as we have already taken occasion to call him – who stood in the presence of his father Dryden, before that energetic soul; weary with its long literary work which was not always clean and noble, had uttered its last wisdom or foolishness through the organs of the body. Unfortunately, Pope had his advisers apart from his muses; and their counsel was “be correct.” To be correct, therefore, to be great through correctness, was the end of his ambition, an aspiration scarcely more calculated for the production of noble poems than the philosophy of utilitarianism is for that of lofty virtues. Yet correctness seemed a virtue rare in the land; Dr. Johnson having crowned Lord Roscommon over Shakepeare’s head, “the only correct writer before Addison!” The same critic predicated of Milton, that he could not cut figures upon cherrystones – Pope glorified correctness, and dedicated himself to cherrystones from first to last. A cherrystone was the apple of his eye.

  Now we are not about to take up any popular cry against Pope; he has been overpraised and is underpraised; and, in the silence of our poetical experience, ourselves may confess personally to the guiltiness of either extremity. He was not a great poet; he meant to be a correct poet, and he was what he meant to be, according to his construction of the thing meant – there are few amongst us who fulfil so literally their ambitions. Moreover we will admit to our reader in the confessional, that, however convinced in our innermost opinion of the superiority of Dryden’s genius, we have more pleasure in reading Pope than we ever could enjoy or imagine under Pope’s master. We incline to believe that Dryden being the greatest poet-power, Pope is the best poet-manual; and that whatever Dryden has done – we do not say conceived, we do not say suggested. . . but DONE – Pope has done that thing better. For translations, we hold up Pope’s Homer against Dryden’s Virgil and the world. Both translations are utterly and equally contrary to the antique, both bad with the same sort of excellence; but Pope’s faults are Dryden’s faults, while Dryden’s are not Pope’s. We say the like of the poems from Chaucer; we say the like of the philosophic and satirical poems: the art of reasoning in verse is admirably attained by either poet, but practised with more grace and point by the later one. To be sure, there is the ‘Alexander’s Feast’ ode, called until people half believed what they said, the greatest ode in the language! But here is, to make the scales even again, the ‘Eloisa’ with tears on it, – faulty but tender – of a sensibility which glorious John was not born with a heart for. To be sure, it was not necessary that John Dryden should keep a Bolingbroke to think for him: but to be sure again, it is something to be born with a heart, particularly for a poet. We recognize besides in Pope, a delicate fineness of tact, of which the precise contrary is unpleasantly obvious in his great master; Horace Walpole’s description of Selwyn, un bête inspiré, with a restriction of bête to the animal sense, fitting glorious John like his crown. Now there is nothing of this coarseness of the senses about Pope; the little pale Queen Anne’s valetudinarian had a nature fine enough to stand erect upon the point of a needle like a schoolman’s angel; and whatever he wrote coarsely, he did not write from inward impulse, but from external conventionality, from a bad social Swift-sympathy. For the rest, he carries out his master’s principles into most excellent and delicate perfection: he is rich in his degree. And there is, indeed, something charming even to an enemy’s ear in this exquisite balancing of sounds and phrases, these “shining rows” of oppositions and appositions, this glorifying of commonplaces by antithetic processes, this catching, in the rebound, of emphasis upon rhyme and rhyme; all, in short, of this Indian jugglery and Indian carving upon . . . cherrystones! – “and she herself “ (that is poetry) –

  And she herself one fair Antithesis.

  When Voltaire threw his Henriade into the fire and Henault rescued it, “Souvenez-vous,” said the president to the poet, “that I burnt my lace ruffles for the sake of your epic.” It was about as much as the epic was worth. For our own part, we would sacrifice not only our point, but the prosperity of our very fingers, to save from a similar catastrophe, these works of Pope; and this, although the most perfect and original of all of them, ‘The Rape of the Lock,’ had its fortune in a fire safe. They are the works of a master. A great poet? oh no! A true poet? – perhaps not. Yet a man, be it remembered, of such mixed gracefulness and power, that Lady Mary Wortley deigned to coquette with him, and Dennis shook before him in his shoes.

  Nature, as we have observed, had been expelled by a fork, under the hand of Pope’s progenitors; and if in him and around him we see no sign of her return, we do not blame Pope for what is, both in spirit and in form, the sin of his school. Still less would we “play at bowles” with Byron, and praise his right use of the right poetry of ART. Our views of Nature and of Art have been sufficiently explained to leave our opinion obvious of the controversy in question, in which, as in a domestic broil, “there were faults on both sides.” Let a poet never write the words “tree,” “hill,” “river,” and he may still be true to nature. Most untrue, on the other hand, most narrow, is the poetical sectarianism, and essentially most unpoetical, which stands among the woods and fields announcing with didactic phlegm, “Here only is nature.” Nature is where God is! Poetry is where God is! Can you go up or down or around and not find Him? In the loudest hum of your machinery, in the dunnest volume of your steam, in the foulest street of your city, – there, as surely as in the Brocken pinewoods, and the watery thunders of Niagara, – there, as surely as He is shove all, lie Nature and Poetry in full life. Speak, and they will answer! Nature is a large meaning! Let us make column-room for it in the comprehension of our love! for the coral rock built up by the insect and the marble erected by the man.

  In this age of England, however, pet-named the Augustan, there was no room either for Nature or Art: Art and Nature (for we will not separate their names) were at least maimed and dejected and sickening day by day –

  Quoth she, I grieve to see your leg

  Stuck In a hole here, like a peg;

  and even so, or like the peg of a top humming drowsily, our poetry stood still. There was an abundance of “correct writers,” yes, and of “elegant writers:” there was Parnell, for instance, who would be called besides, a pleasing writer by any pleasing critic; and Addison, a proverb for the “virtuousest, discreetest, best” with all the world. Or if, after the Scotch mode of Monkbarns, we call our poets by their possessions, not so wronging their characteristics, there was ‘The Dispensary,’ the ‘Art of Preserving Health,’ the ‘Art of Cookery,’ – and ‘Trivia,’ or the ‘Fan,’ – take Gay by either of those names! and ‘Cider,’ or the ‘Splendid Shilling’ – take Phillips, Milton’s imitator, by either of these! and there was Pomfret, not our “choice,” the concentrate essence of namby-pambyi
sm; and Prior, a brother spirit of the French Gresset, – a half-brother, of an inferior race, yet to be praised by us for one instinct obvious in him, a blind stretching of the hand to a sweeter order of versification than was current. Of Young we could write much: he was the very genius of antithesis; a genius breaking from “the system,” with its broken chain upon his limbs, and frowning darkly through the grey monotony – a grander writer by spasms than by volitions. Blair was of his class, but rougher; a brawny contemplative Orson. And how many of our readers may be unaware of the underground existence of another Excursion than the deathless one of our days, and in blank verse, too, and in several cantos; and how nobody will thank us for digging at these fossil remains! it is better to remember Mallet by his touching ballad of the ‘William and Margaret,’ a word taken from diviner lips to becoming purpose; only we must not be thrown back upon the ‘Ballads,’ lest we wish to live with them for ever. Our literature is rich in ballads, a form epitomical of the epic and dramatic, and often vocal when no other music is astir; and to give a particular account of which would take us far across our borders.