Complete Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning

by Elizabeth Barrett Browning

  A poet! he hath put his heart to school,

  Nor dares to move unpropped upon the staff

  Which art hath lodged within his hand – must laugh

  By precept only, and shed tears by rule.

  Thy Art be Nature, the live current quaff,

  And let the groveller sip his stagnant pool,

  In fear that else, when critics grave and cool

  Have killed him, scorn should write his epitaph.

  How does the meadow-flower its bloom unfold?

  Because the lovely little flower is free

  Down to its root, and, in that freedom, bold;

  And so the grandeur of the forest-tree

  Comes not by casting in a formal mould,

  But from its own divine vitality.

  Here is a sonnet of softer sense, and not less true, referring, we have heard, to a portrait of that lovely “Lady of her own” which Nature made long ago for herself – and for the poet, we suppose – his sonnet being addressed to the painter: –

  All praise the likeness by thy skill portrayed

  But ‘tis a fruitless task to paint for me,

  Who, yielding not to changes Time has made,

  By the habitual light of memory see

  Eyes unbedimmed, see bloom that cannot fade,

  And smiles that from their birth-place ne’er shall flee

  Into the land where ghosts and phantoms be;

  And seeing this, own nothing in its stead.

  Could’st thou go back into far-distant years,

  Or share with me, fond thought! that inward eye,

  Then, and then only, Painter! could thy Art

  The visual powers of Nature satisfy,

  Which hold, whate’er to common sight appears,

  Their sovereign empire in a faithful heart.

  The tender Palinodia is beyond Petrarch: –

  Though I beheld at first with blank surprise

  This work, I now have gazed on it so long,

  I see its truth with, unreluctant eyes;

  O, my beloved! I have done thee wrong,

  Conscious of blessedness, but, whence it springs

  Ever too heedless, as I now perceive:

  Morn into noon did pass, noon into eve,

  And the old day was welcome as the young,

  As welcome and as beautiful – in sooth

  More beautiful, as being a thing more holy;

  Thanks to thy virtues, to the eternal youth

  Of all thy goodness, never melancholy;

  To thy large heart and humble mind, that cast

  Into one vision, future, present, past!

  That “more beautiful” is most beautiful! all human love’s cunning is in it; besides the full glorifying smile of Christian love!

  Last in the volume is the tragedy of ‘The Borderers,’ which having lain for some fifty years “unregarded” among its author’s papers, – a singular destiny for these printing days when our very morning talk seems to fall naturally into pica type, – caused in its announcement from afar, the most faithful disciples to tremble for the possible failure of their master. Perhaps they trembled with cause. The master indeed, was a prophet of humanity; but he was wiser in love than terror, in admiration than pity, and rather intensely than actively human; capacious to embrace within himself the whole nature of things and beings, but not going out of himself to embrace anything; a poet of one large sufficient soul, but not polypsychical like a dramatist. Therefore his disciples trembled: and we will not say that the tragedy, taken as a whole, does not justify the fear. There is something grand and Greek in the intention which hinges it, showing how crime makes crime in cursed generation, and how black hearts, like whiter ones, (Topaze or Ebéne) do cry out and struggle for sympathy and brotherhood; granting that black heart (Oswald) may stand something too much on the extreme of evil to represent humanity broadly enough for a drama to turn upon. The action, too, although it does not, as might have been apprehended, lose itself in contemplation, has no unhesitating firm dramatic march – perhaps it “potters” a little, to take a word from Mrs. Butler; – and when all is done we look vainly within us for an impression, the response to the unity of the whole. But again, when all is done, the work is Mr. Wordsworth’s, and the conceptions and utterances living and voiceful in it, bear no rare witness to the master. The old blind man, left to the ordeal of the desert – the daughter in agony hanging upon the murderer for consolation – knock against the heart, and take back answers; and ever and anon there are sweet gushings of such words as this poet only knows, showing how, in a “late remorse of love,” he relapses into pastoral dreams, notwithstanding his new vocation, and within the very sight of the theatric thymele: –

  A grove of darker and more lofty shade

  I never saw. The music of the birds

  Drops deadened from a roof so thick with leaves.

  Who can overpass the image of the old innocent man praying? –

  The name of daughter on his lips, he prays!

  With nerves so steady, that the very flies

  Sit unmolested on his staff.

  And now to give a fragment from a scene in which Oswald, the black genius of the drama, brings his blackness to bear on Marmaduke who is no genius at all. A passage well known and rightly honoured, will be recognized in the extract: –

  Oswald.It may be

  That some there are, squeamish, half-thinking cowards,

  Who will turn pale upon you, call you murderer,

  And you will walk in solitude among them.

  A mighty evil for a strong-built mind! –

  Join twenty tapers of unequal height,

  And light them joined, and you will see the less

  How ‘twill burn down the tallest. Solitude! –

  The eagle lives in solitude.

  Marmaduke.Even so,

  The sparrow on the house-top, and I,

  The weakest of God’s creatures, stand resolved

  To abide the issue of my act, alone.

  Osw. Now would you? – and for ever? – My young friend,

  As time advances, either we become

  The prey or masters of our own past deeds.

  Fellowship we must have, willing or no;

  And if good Angels fail, slack in their duty,

  Substitutes, turn our faces where we may,

  Are still forthcoming; some which, though they bear

  Ill names, can render no ill services,

  In recompense of what themselves required.

  So meet extremes in this mysterious world,

  And opposites thus melt into each other.

  Mar. Time, since man first drew breath, hath never moved

  With such a weight upon his wings as now:

  But they will soon be lightened.

  Osw.Ay, look up –

  Cast round you your mind’s eye, and you will learn

  Fortitude is the child of enterprise.

  Great actions move our admiration, chiefly

  Because they carry in themselves an earnest

  That we can suffer greatly.

  Mar.Very true,

  Osw. Action is transitory – a step, a blow,

  The motion of a muscle – this way or that –

  ‘Tis done, and in the after vacancy

  We wonder at ourselves, like men betrayed:

  Suffering is permanent, obscure and dark,

  And shares the nature of infinity.

  Mar. Truth – and I feel it.

  Osw. What! if you had bid

  Eternal farewell to unmingled joy

  And the light dancing of the thoughtless heart;

  It is the toy of fools, and little fit

  For such a world as this. The wise abjure

  All thoughts whose idle composition lives

  In the entire forgetfulness of pain.

  – I see I have disturbed you.

  Mar. By no means.

  Osw. Compassion! – pity! – pride can do without them; />
  And what if you should never know them more! –

  He is a puny soul who, feeling pain,

  Finds ease because another feels it too,

  If e’er I open out this heart of mine,

  It shall be for a nobler end – to teach,

  And not to purchase puling sympathy.

  – Nay, you are pale.

  Mar.It may be so.

  Osw.Remorse –

  It cannot live with thought; think on, think on,

  And it will die. What! in this universe,

  Where the least things control the greatest, where

  The faintest breath that breathes can move a world,

  What! feel remorse, where, if a cat had sneezed,

  A leaf had fallen, the thing had never been

  Whose very shadow gnaws us to the vitals.

  Anxious to conclude our extracts by something truer to Mr. Wordsworth’s personal opinions than this strong black writing, we have hesitated, as we turned the leaves, before many touching and beautiful poems, wise in their beauty, – before the ‘Grave of Burns,’ for instance, and the ‘Widow of Windermere,’ and the ‘Address to the Clouds,’ and others beyond naming – a certain sonnet which discovers our poet sitting on the chair of Dante at Florence, tempting us for many reasons. But the sun and air (by courtesy) are heavy on us while we write, and subdued besides by the charm of the loveliest, freshest landscape-making (oh, never say painting) in the world, and by the prospect presently of a “little breeze,” we forget our difficulty of breathing and selecting, and fall from the elevation of Fahrenheit down in a swoon in ‘Airy-Force Valley:’ –

  – not a breath of air

  Ruffles the bosom of this leafy glen.

  From the brook’s margin, wide around, the trees

  Are stedfast as the rooks; the brook itself,

  Old as the hills that feed it from afar,

  Doth rather deepen than disturb the calm

  Where all things else are still and motionless.

  And yet, even now, a little breeze, perchance

  Escaped from boisterous winds that rage without,

  Has entered, by the sturdy oaks unfelt;

  But to its gentle touch how sensitive

  Is the light ash! that, pendent from the brow

  Of yon dim cave, in seeming silence makes

  A soft eye-music of slow-waving boughs,

  Powerful almost as vocal harmony,

  To stay the wanderer’s steps and soothe his thoughts.

  But we start from the languor, and the dream floated upon our eyelids by such charmed writing, and come hastily to the moral of our story, – seeing that Mr. Wordsworth’s life does present a high moral to his generation, to forget which in his poetry would be an unworthy compliment to the latter. It is advantageous for us all, whether poets or poetasters, or talkers about either, to know what a true poet is, what his work is, and what his patience and successes must be, so as to raise the popular idea of these things, and either strengthen or put down the individual aspiration. “Art,” it was said long ago, “requires the whole man,” and “Nobody,” it was said later, “can be a poet who is anything else;” but the present idea of Art requires the segment of a man, and everybody who is anything at all, is a poet in a parenthesis. And our shelves groan with little books over which their readers groan less metaphorically – there is a plague of poems in the land apart from poetry – and many poets who live and are true, do not live by their truth, but hold back their full strength from Art because they do not reverence it fully – and all booksellers cry aloud and do not spare, that poetry will not sell – and certain critics utter melancholy frenzies, that poetry is worn out for ever – as if the morning-star was worn out from heaven – or “the yellow primrose” from the grass! and Mr. D’Israeli the younger, like Bildad comforting Job, suggests that we may content ourselves for the future with a rhythmetic prose, printed like prose for decency, and supplied for comfort, with a parish allowance of two or three rhymes to a paragraph. Should there be any whom such a ‘New Poor Law’ would content, we are far from wishing to disturb the virtue of their serenity – let them continue, like the hypochondriac, to be very sure that they have lost their souls – inclusive of their poetic instincts. In the meantime the hopeful and believing will hope, – trust on; and, better still, the Tennysons and the Brownings, and other high-gifted spirits, will work, wait on, until, as Mr. Horne has said –

  Strong deeds awake,

  And clamouring, throng the portals of the hour.

  It is well for them and all to count the cost of this life of a master in poetry, and learn from it what a true poet’s crown is worth – to recall both the long life’s work for its sake – the work of observation, of meditation, of reaching past models into nature, of reaching past nature unto God! and the early life’s loss for its sake – the loss of the popular cheer, of the critical assent, and of the “money in the purse.” It is well and full of exultation to remember now what a silent, blameless, heroic life of poetic duty, this man has lived; – how he never cried rudely against the world because he was excluded for a time from the parsley garlands of its popularity; nor sinned morally because he was sinned against intellectually; nor being tempted and threatened by paymaster and reviewer, swerved from the righteousness and high aims of his inexorable genius. And it cannot be ill to conclude by enforcing a high example by some noble precepts which, taken from the MUSOPHILUS of old Daniel, do contain, to our mind, the very code of chivalry for poets: –

  Be it that my unseasonable song

  Come out of Time, that fault is in the Time,

  And I must not do virtue so much wrong,

  As love her aught the worse for other’s crime.

  * * * *

  And for my part, if only one allow

  The care my labouring spirits take in this;

  He is to me a theatre large enow,

  And his applause only sufficient is –

  All my respect is bent but to his brow;

  That is my all, and all I am is his.

  And if some worthy spirits be pleased too,

  It shall more comfort breed, but not more will,

  BUT WHAT IF NONE? It cannot yet undo

  The love I bear unto this holy skill.

  This is the thing that I was born to do:

  This is my scene; this part must I fulfil.

  Reviews of Cornelius Mathews’ Poetry

  First published in Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine, 1845

  AMERICAN POETRY

  THIS is a slight book in its exterior form, and the frame-work of the intention of it is slighter still. The American writer, Mr. Cornelius Mathews, is the secretary of the Author’s Copyright Protection Club in New York; and is known in his own country by the “Motley Book,” “Puffer Hopkins,” and humorous prose works of the like order, indicating a quick eye, and a ready philosophy in the mind that waits on it; generous sympathies towards humanity in the mass, and a very distinct and characteristic nationality. He has written also a powerful fiction called “Behemoth.” The small volume before us consists of poems; and both for their qualities and their defects, they are to be accounted worthy of some respectful attention.

  To render clearer the thought which is in us, we pass to general considerations. The contrast between the idea of what American poetry should be, and what it is, is as plain as the Mississippi on the map. The fact of the contrast faces us. With abundant flow and facility, the great body of American verse has little distinct character of any kind, and still less national character. There is little in it akin to the mountains and rivers, the prairies and cataracts, among which it arises. This sound from the forests is not of them. It is as if a German bullfinch, escaped from the teacher’s finger into the depth of the pines, sate singing his fragments of Mozart, in learned modulation, upon a rocking, snowy branch. And we find ourselves wondering how, in the great country of America, where the glory of liberty is so well comprehended, and where Nature rolls out her
waters and lifts her hills, as in attestation of a social principle worthy of her beauty,–the poetry alone should persist in being lifeless, flat, and imitative, as the verse of a court-rhymer when he rests from the bow of office among the fens of Essex. It is easier to set this down as a fact, (and the American critics themselves set it down as a fact,) than to define the causes of it. And the fact of the defective nationality of the literature of a young country, suggests the analogy of another fact,–the defective individuality attributable to many a young writer; and the likeness may be closer than the mere analogy expresses. Nationality is individuality under the social and local aspect; and the nationality of a country’s literature is the individuality of the writers of it in the aggregate. It is curious to observe, that the “wild oats” sown in literature by the youthful author as by the youthful nation, is, generally speaking, as barely tame as any stubble of the fields. Perhaps there is a bustling practicalness in both cases, which hinders that inner process of development necessary to the ulterior expression. Perhaps the mind, whether of the nation or of the man, must stand, before the cream rises. However this may be, we have given utterance to no novel form of opinion on the subject of American poetry in the mass. And let no one mistake that opinion. We do not forget–how should we?–such noble names as Longfellows may nobly lead, as Whittiers may add honour to; we believe the beautiful prophecy of beauty contained in the poems of Lowell. But in speaking of these poets, we do not speak of poetry in the gross: and in speaking even of some of these, the English critic feels unawares that he would fain clasp the hand of an American poet, with stronger muscles in it, and less softened by the bath. Under which impression we are all the readier, let our readers understand, to meet the hand of Mr. Mathews, while it presents to us the slender volume called “Poems on Man, in his various aspects under the American republic.”