mann, "and come back yourself. Coffee "Outgrow them? Sleeps in the afterwill be ready presently." noon? Says 'Bong' to you? And now look here for all the world he is coming back again, and hasn't been near the stables."

From Saint Pauls.
BROWNING'S POEMS.*

heritage. Take, for an instance, satire, which is the application to mean and base BROWNING has been partially known objects of that genius which "detects idenalready to one generation of the British tity in dissimilar as well as the "differpublic. A second has risen up since the ence in similar things;" which thus uses a appearance of his first poem, before whom heaven-sent torch to light up the recesses of he modestly takes his stand in his latest a tavern; which is as useful a gift to an book, as still a candidate for the favour orator as to a poet, to a Demosthenes which their fathers refused him. There is as to a Juvenal, to Dryden the polished every sign that it will be accorded to him. and witty prose-writer as to Dryden the Everything seems to show that the many are satirist in verse. This power is a favourat length about to concur in the passionate ite with Browning, who certainly possesses admiration of the few, and to make up (as it abundant in measure and trenchant in they are wont) for unreasonable neglect in quality. He has employed it with singular the past by undiscriminating eulogy in the success; but then to its employment he has present. This, though the better extreme not unfrequently sacrificed poetry. We of the two, is neither satisfactory to the look all in vain for poetry in his clever picauthor so treated, when he is such a man tures of the half-conscious, refined, ecclesias Browning's poems reveal himself to be, astical, and the quite conscious, vulgar nor altogether good for those who indulge cheat-"Bishop Blougram" and "Mr. in it; while its effect on the young, who Sludge." We read those two monologues have a taste to form and a model to select for the knowledge of human nature disfor imitation, is sure to be bad, leading played in them, for the portrait each man them to mistake a master's defects for paints in them unintentionally of himself, merits, and to copy them, while possibly while he is using his skill against his neighoverlooking his perfections altogether. bours or in his own defence; but we only The present seems, therefore, a good time call them poems because they are written in for an attempt to consider the most notice- a sort of blank verse.* How if Browning able matters in Browning's works the had made less of this lower gift in order great qualities they reveal, the deficiencies to make the very most of its higher companthey betray; what things his varied ion, his poetic genius, the insight to which powers have achieved already, and what the ideal is revealed and the skill which we may be justified in yet expecting from exhibits it by means of realities? How if there had been added to his vigorous imagination, to his great dramatic faculty and to his fine ear for music, an artistic conscience, and if he had firmly resolved to maintain it in its rightful dominion over his other powers? Then we should have lost some interesting metaphysical discussions which now overbalance and spoil the harmonious proportions of his poems; some admirable traits of character now revealed to us at the expense of dramatic propriety; some racy expressions and exquisitely funny rhymes, which now impart a flavour of grotesqueness to poems which should be purely sublime or beautiful. In a word, we should have lost the Browning whom we know; and we who know him can scarcely refrain from tears at the thought. But what a poet we should have gained! A diver who, having gone down deeper than his compeers, fetched us up nothing but pearls of price; never disappointing us by bringing up vile things instead-precious in his eyes because he had found them at a depth of so many fathoms.

them.

Those powers are varied indeed, far beyond a poet's ordinary equipment; and at times, from their very number and size, an encumbrance instead of a help to their possessor. His proficiency in logic, his skill in metaphysics, his keen wit, and his delight in verbal subtleties, are frequently too much for him, and impel him to display them out of season. The bard wrestles in him with the philosopher, and gets a fall; the humourist trips up the poet.

Much as Browning has written,-doubtless, for one reason, because he has written so much, he has not done full justice yet to some of his poetical endowments; and it is now to be feared that they will never receive it at his hands. Instead of cherishing and making them yield their utmost for our benefit, he has often preferred to elaborate other talents, great in in their way, but not the poet's peculiar

"Paracelsus, Christmas Eve and Easter Day

Sordello." London: 1863.

"Tragedies and other Plays." London: 1863. "Lyrics, Romances, Men and Women." don: 1863.

"Dramatis Personæ." London: 1864.
"The Ring and the Book." London: 1868.

Lon

* Sometimes of this kind:
"The caddy gives way to the dram-bottle."
-Mr. Sludge the Medium.

This last thought leads us to the great- | plague-stricken form of painting that est hindrance to Browning's attainment Browning has chosen for his own portion of universal popularity; that popularity as a poet.

which rewards the poet whose genius has His love of abnormal types of character, breadth as well as depth; the love of of morbid conditions of mind, of excepsimple-minded women and children as well tional crimes as subjects for his verse, as of men, of uneducated persons as well will hinder Browning's popularity (in the as of the learned. The hindrance to win-widest sense of the term) even more than ning such acceptance as this lies in Brown- that other barrier about which so much ing's deficient sense of beauty in his choice has been said- his peculiarity of style. of subjects. Doubtless as much skill may Nevertheless this barrier exists also. be shown in painting an ugly as a beauti- Browning is the Carlyle of verse; a lover, ful face, a dirty farmyard as a glorious like that great writer, of odd nicknames,* lake; but who, even of observers with a and a coiner of new and forcible expresspecial knowledge of painting, looks at the sions; like him, inclined rather to run risks two sorts of pictures with equal pleasure? in the attempt to "snatch a grace beyond While to the child, or to the unlearned, the reach of art" than to incur the rethe subject is almost everything, the ex-proach of tameness by following her ecution nothing. Even so Browning's beaten track; like him, through native knowledge of human nature, his very skill originality unconstrained where another in tracking its devious windings and de- man would be odiously affected, applauded tecting its sins in their closest lurking- where that other would be deservedly places, have injured his power of exciting hissed; but also, like him, in the cloud universal interest, by tempting him to which sometimes obscures his meaning; choose subjects which would best display and, therefore, even as he, neither to be this knowledge, without regard to their imitated with tolerable effect nor to be intrinsic beauty. Some of his best-known understood without preliminary initiation. poems make the reader shudder, even It was chiefly from unwillingness to underwhile he most admires their cleverness, by go the trouble of that initiation in an the physical or moral horrors which they unknown author's favour that the last genset before him. And when the child or eration received Browning's first poems as intelligent rustic, who has laughed loud they did. When the new aspirant for over the delicious "Piper of Hamelin," poetic honours invited chance listeners to and cried for joy as the good horse Ro- hear him land's hoofs smite the Aix pavement, tries to read more of the book which delighted him so much, he finds there little that he can understand, except poisonings, and stranglings, varied by public executions of different degrees of cruelty, which culminate in the burning alive of a man before a slow fire.

"Talk as brothers talk In half-words, call things by half-names," and proposed confidentially to

"Leave the mere rude

Explicit details: 'tis but brother's speech
We need, speech where an accent's change gives
The other's soul," +

each

This want of feeling for the paramount claims of the beautiful may be the reason why a writer, who knows every hole and can we wonder if men, whose typical poet corner of the classics, has only drawn one was Byron, who complained of Wordspoem from (pre-Christian) Greek sources; worth's difficulties, stood aghast at "Parawhy the repose so familiar to him in the celsus" and "Sordello," and turned from masterpieces of the ancients is the quality them exclaiming, "Non lectore tuis opus in which his own works are most defi- est, sed Apolline libris?" Is it marvellous cient; why, though delighting in his if they thought the "Now die, dear adopted country's art, though well know- Aureole" of Festus, at the close of his ing (as his poems bear witness) how the friend's long-winded death-bed harangue, sculptor feels as he watches some godlike the most sensible thing in "Paracelsus? form grow beneath his hand, the painter or if they complained that while Sordello's as he looks up to his own Madonna smil- first poet, always profound, is only someing down upon him from her golden light; times obscure, his second, only sometimes the musician as the wave of sound swells profound, chose to be obscure always? round him responding to his conception; Or can we be surprised if even the wiser yet when he comes to deal with his own art, it is too often discords of music, the snake-enfolded struggler of sculpture, the

* Witness" Bluphocks" and "Gigadibs."
↑ "Sordello."
+ Dante.

section, who had learned from Coleridge | talk English verse, to grant further that that there is a kind of obscurity in an they may all use the same style of abrupt author which is a compliment to the reader, felt the compliment here too much for their modesty, and longed for less respect and more information?

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transition and startling metaphor. Imagine a Platonic dialogue by Carlyle. Would the speaker, now on this side, now on that, seem any other than the same man addressing us from various positions? Even so it requires all Browning's great dramatic talent to neutralize the effect of his style upon his plays.

Those plays are eight in number, besides two short dramatic sketches, each admirable in its way: "A Soul's Tragedy," for the sly fun of the legate's address; "In a Balcony," for the tragic force compressed into its brief space. Of the longer dramas,

But this sort of talk is now a thing of the past. Browning has modified his style, though he still throws us a hard lyric nut, a Respectability," a Popularity," to crack every now and then. The British public grumbled for awhile, and then patiently learned Browningesque as it before learned Carlylese. So that for the present the advantages of a picturesque way of putting things remain for the reader's sens ble enjoyment; its attendant" Colombe's Birthday " is a true and gracedisadvantages have retired from his im.mediate observation. Nevertheless, they should not be left out of sight in an attempt to estimate their employer's genius; for they must hinder his naturalization among those men of other lands and other ages whom every great poet addresses next to those of his own day and country, and they mark that mind of which they are the natural outgrowth as (whatever its greatness) still below the measure of the stature of those who sit serene on the Parnassian summit.

We do not, of course, mean that the unquestionable (though much-exaggerated) difficulty of Browning's first poems is due to style alone. It is caused fully as much by their subject. For in them a step is endeavoured to be taken beyond epos, beyond drama, for which no firm footing can be secured. They are an attempt to paint the light in its fountain instead of on land and sea, glittering in its beams; the life inside the brain and heart, instead of that same life revealed in the human form divine. They could not, therefore, but prove (artistically speaking) failures, though failures worth more than some successes; gallant, if unauthorized and unavailing, efforts to annex alien dominions to the realms of poesy, and efforts from which many a victory might be confidently predicted for the champion when marching steadily beneath her banners.

To resume, however, our considerations of Browning's style, it is obviously a hindrance to dramatic success by being too marked and peculiar for dialogue. The illusion, which it is the aim of the drama to produce, is the result of a well-understood compromise between the real and the ideal; and it is an infringement of the terms of this compromise to require the spectator, who has already conceded that the foreign personages before him may

ful picture of a young heart passing in one short day from girl to woman, from the vanities of the world's outward show to the knowledge and choice of deeper and better things. The speech of Valence, the youthful Duchess's humble but heroic defender, glorying in his apparently unrequited love for her, is a very noble one.

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'Pippa Passes," the most unique, is deservedly the best known and best loved of Browning's plays. What fancy could be more charming than this of the sweet child who spends her holiday in playfully imagining herself by turns the four people she supposes the happiest in her town while she sings those pretty songs which now enhance, now alleviate, their real misery; who lies down at night, unconscious alike of the good she has effected and the evil she has escaped, commending herself to Him who, while she knew it not, had perfected His praise out of her mouth? Here, too, both the author's lyric and dramatic talent find expression, and mutually support one another. The scene between Ottima and Sebald is powerfully tragic; and the contrast between the hoarse accents of their guilt and the fresh pure voice outside is as overpowering to the spectator as to themselves. Still, are not the dark shades, both here and in a subsequent scene, laid on with a somewhat coarse hand? Are not painful features obtruded on us in this play more than was absolutely needful?

Of the plays which are regular tragedies, "A Blot in the Scutcheon is incomparbly the best. "King Victor and King Charles" follows it after a certain interval. The four personages of this last play are well drawn and well contrasted; the wily father with the open-hearted son, the artful minister with the noble-minded wife. We have always admired the catastrophe; when the hoary schemer, baffled by his son's plain honesty, has recourse to truth

at last, and, by its aid, attains the privilege | folded to us naturally by their own words of dying with the crown, the object of his and deeds. Where there is a failure, it is life's desires, on his head. But the "Blot" caused by the dramatist placing too many is at once more thoroughly tragic in sub- of his personages on his own level in point ject, and worked out with more complete- of intellect, so that their reasonings disness. It is a play in which not a stroke is play a suspiciously uniform correctness, wasted, in which every speech and every their wit a too equal brilliancy. For it circumstance contributes to the final re- cannot be denied that Browning somesult. Though English in its colouring, times pushes his speakers unceremoniously though it depends for its catastrophe on aside to take their place himself. King the modern code of honour, yet this trag- Victor's reflection on the loathsomeness edy is Greek in the unexpectedness of the of a crafty old age should have been made discovery on which it turns, and in the by some bystander. Colombe's courtiers sense of an inevitable impending woe reveal their selfishness with uncourtly which pervades it. The contrast between frankness. Poor Young Mertoun speaks the prosperous splendour of the doomed of his own youth more like an older man house and its hidden disgrace, between talking of a boy than a boy talking about Mildred's seemingly innocent beauty and himself. Ignorant Phene turns a critic's her real guilt, is most impressive. Nor eye on the students' self-conceit. can any two characters be more touching in their sadness than those of Mildred and her lover; the girl looking up, loving but hopeless, to the hand which she feels must strive in vain to lift her from the abyss into which it plunged her first; the youth's frank nature subdued to unaccustomed deceit, and his brave arm unnerved by his consciousness of guilt. In all the domain of tragedy there are few more pathetic speeches than Lord Mertoun's as he lies mortally wounded, to the man whom he had hoped to call his brother:

"Ah, Tresham, say I not, 'You'll hear me,

now?'

And what procures a man the right to speak
In his defence before his fellow-man,
But-I suppose—the thought that
ently

He may have leave to speak before his God
His whole defence? . . .

And. even dear little Pippa herself is rather high-flown and strained in her first salutation to the daylight, and her "Best people are not angels quite " is over-mature and unchildlike.

This disposition to lend the author's brain as well as his tongue to his characters appears oftener still in Browning's monologues; and oftenest of all in that series which form his latest work. In the "Experience of Karshish," this fine description of the risen Lazarus's state"The spiritual life around the earthly life, The law of that is known to him as this His heart and brain move there, his feet stay here,"

is not within the competence of the suppres-posed writer. The young David reasoning out the hope of the future in "Saul," the aged St. John arguing against the unbelief of later times (and this, too, in a style so remote from that of his published sayings as to give full proof of their verbal inspiration), are anachronisms of thought which at once direct our gaze from the supposed to the real speaker.

Now say you this to her You not another-say, I saw him die As he breathed this - I love her

know

you don't

What those three small words mean! Say,
loving her

Lowers me down the bloody slope to death
With memories-I speak to her

not you,

Who had no pity - will have no remorse,
Perchance intend her. Die along with

The three monologues most entirely free from such faults are two which belongs to the Italy of the renaissance, and one which depicts the darker side of monastic life. wickedness at its height. Each is a legiti Each of these portrays a different kind of mate, because a poetic, exercise of the tremendous power of satire possessed by its writer. And each gives proof of how disinterested he is in its employment; since he forbears all appeal to the ill-nature of his readers by directing its lightnings against evil-doers remote from them, instead (like the older satirists) of aiming them at the sinners at their doors. The Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister" is

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