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ROBERT BROWNING. (Continued from p. 28.)

AT the close of my previous paper I pointed out two or three facts which might induce us to modify considerably the opinion commonly held about the obscurity of Mr. Browning's writings, and expressed my opinion that this would be usually found to vanish after careful and sympathetic study. Yet even his most devoted admirers cannot but admit that he sometimes taxes their power of intuition a little too severely, and makes them long that he had been somewhat more profuse in the assistance that he gives to their thoughtful attempts to reach his meaning. This is especially the case in some of his dramatic lyrics. Indeed this style of poetry, which he has made so pre-eminently his own, though it possesses a power peculiar to itself, is above all others liable to the danger of becoming obscure. It depends for its comprehension on the reader's acquaintance with a certain series of events, which have excited in the hero the passion, intended to be expressed in the lyric; and the story of these is told by means of hints and allusions let drop in the body of the poem. Now even where these are supplied in abundance, it needs no little care and attention to gather them up and group them together so as to present a vivid picture to the mind's eye. But the poet himself, having already conceived the subject of his lyric in a certain position, and having distinctly in his own imagination the train of events which brought him into it, is too apt to refuse his reader the material necessary before he can go through the same mental process, and the inevitable consequence is some confusion and obscurity. Take as an example the collection of dramatic lyrics, which the Laureate published under the title of Maud. I have no doubt whatever but that Mr. Tennyson could give a very satisfactory history of the "fair and stately" heroine, "that oiled and curled Assyrian bull" her brother, and the extremely morbid young gentleman in love with her. Yet most readers would have to give much careful study to those

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exquisite songs, before they could answer the questions that naturally arise from them. Was the brother really slain? Did the hero ever win his Maud? How came the Russian war to expel his madness? Is he restored to sanity at all? Such are only a few of the doubts that spring up to mar our pleasure; and hence it is, no doubt, that this poem has met with so much less popularity than most of its companions. Now it must be acknowledged that Mr. Browning has sometimes fallen into this fault. I can thoroughly enter into the spirit of Coleridge's confession: "I am exceedingly cautious in criticising Shakspere; for where I once saw blemishes, a ripened judgment and increased experience have shown me only beauties," but it seems to me at present that Mr. Browning has more than once given us a problem to solve for which he has not furnished sufficient data. space will not permit me to quote any examples at length, and it would be manifestly unfair to insert mutilated extracts, but I would refer as illustrations of my meaning to "Porphyria's Lover," "In a Gondola," and (must I add?) that exquisitely pathetic lyric "The Worst of It." Others there were that I had placed in this list, but a more careful study has made me remove them from it; and I dare not say that even these few will be left there long; but I think that if there were a Browning Club, these would form its Matterhorns and Aiguilles Vertes. It is a far easier, as well as more grateful task, to point out many in which a perfect mastery over this difficult style of poetry is displayed, as in the "Laboratory," "the Confessional," "a Light Woman," "Before and After," or "Count Gismond."

I have not said anything as yet of the style and diction of Mr. Browning. This is thoroughly his own, terse, vigorous and direct, and abounding in fresh hearty Saxon phrases. It is like that of Mr. Carlyle in this, that it needs some familiarity with it to make it liked at all, and very little more to render it thoroughly enjoyable. Indeed it bears no slight resemblance to what we may fancy Mr. Carlyle's would be, if he were to be induced to sing his thought instead of speaking it. There is the same grim humour flashing about at intervals over the surface of thoughts of deep and terrible. earnestness: the same love for the quaint and the uncon

There are some good remarks on this subject in a paper published in the Saturday Review for Aug. 6th, 1864, entitled "Ho! for a Scholiast!"

ventional, finding vent in the one case in contorted Germanisms and "gigmanity" compounds, in the other in measures and rhymes that surely never entered into the heart of man before. The ingenious grotesqueness of "Hudibras," "Don Juan," and "Ingoldsby," is more than outdone in some of Mr. Browning's writings: take for instance the following from "The Flight of the Duchess," a poem which deepens at times into tenderest pathos :

"Had Jacynth only been by me to clap pen

To paper and put you down every syllable
With those clever clerkly fingers,

All that I have forgotten, as well as what lingers

In this old brain of mine that's but ill able

To give you even this poor version

Of the speech I spoil, as it were, with stammering-
More fault of those who had the hammering

Of prosody into me and syntax,

And did it, not with hob-nails but tin tacks!

But to return from this excursion;❞—

Or the comparison (in the same poem) of friendship with old wine:

"Each supples a dry brain, fills you its ins-and-outs,

Gives your life's hour-glass a shake when the thin sand doubts
Whether to run on or stop short, and guarantees

Age is not all made of stark sloth and arrant ease.'

Or where he speaks of the scholar

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"who emends the Iketides While we lounge on at our indebted ease."

We must notice however that lines like these lose much of their grotesque effect when in the midst of hundreds of others more or less similar, all inspired by the same rude vigour, and rushing along pregnant with meaning and instinct with life. Nor are lines of this kind to be found in all his poems. A most accomplished musician himself, possessing a rare acquaintance with the works of the earlier masters, Mr. Browning has given us some lyrics of exquisite polish and rhythm, that one reads over and over again in pure delight at the flowing melody and perfect adaptation of the This is the measure of "A Woman's Last Word":"Let's contend no more, Love; strive nor weepAll be as before, Love,-only sleep!

verse.

What so wild as words are?-I and thou

In debate as birds are-hawk on bough.

* *

Be a god and hold me with a charm—
Be a man and fold me with thine arm!
Teach me, only teach, Love! as I ought,

I will speak thy speech, Love,-think thy thought!
That shall be to-morrow, not to-night

I must bury sorrow out of sight.

Must a little weep, Love, -foolish me!

And so fall asleep, Love, loved by thee!"

Or again, note the effect produced by the change of metre in "Before" and "After":

"Let them fight it out, friend! things have gone too far.
God must judge the couple! leave them as they are...
Once more-Will the wronger, at this last of all,
Dare to say, "I did wrong," rising in his fall?
No!-let go, then! both the fighters to their places!
While I count three, step you back as many paces!"

"Take the cloak from his face, and at first

Let the corpse do its worst.

How he lies in his rights of a man!

Death has done all death can;

And, absorbed in the new life he leads,

He recks not, he heeds

Nor his wrong nor my vengeance- both strike

On his senses alike,

And are lost in the solemn and strange

Surprise of the change.

Ha, what avails death to erase

His offence, my disgrace?

I would we were boys as of old

In the field, by the fold:

His outrage, God's patience, man's scorn

Were so easily borne.

I stand here now, he lics in his place:
Cover the face."

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Specimens of his power over spirited lively rhythm will be found in the "Cavalier Songs." "The Ride from Ghent to Aix," and parts of the "Pied Piper of Hamelin," which I would gladly quote, but must forbear. In blank verse "Andrea del Sarto breathes only the tenderest sweetness; while ever and again in other poems we come across passages where the rush of impassioned thought seems every moment about to burst through the barriers of metre and sweep along untrammelled by its fetters; until we are borne away by the

current to where the channel broadens, and the stream rolls on again in calm and musical flow. Or sometimes we shall find some lyric where the poet

"Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven

"As make the critics weep":

the rhymes entangled in all kinds of subtle fashions, and the mind of the reader so intent in tracing the intricacies of the metre, and wondering how the poet is to get on at all without a trip and a stumble, that it has little time to spare for the sense. Such a poem is "Through the Metidja," of which one stanza (the first) will probably be found sufficient:-

"As I ride, as I ride,

With a full heart for my guide,

So its tide rocks my side,

As I ride, as I ride,

That, as I were double-eyed,
He, in whom our tribes confide,
Is descried, ways untried
As I ride, as I ride."

And so on through four more stanzas precisely similar. This is undoubtedly marvellous legerdemain, but assuredly it is not poetry. But most of the few poems like this must doubtless be regarded as exercises only, whereby the poet trained his prentice hand to use his tools with facility and skill; and if some of the chips and shavings from the workshop have found their way to the public light of day, for which they are little fitted, yet they may well be pardoned when we see the beauty of the perfect work of art, for which their previous production was needful. It is doubtless partly owing to poems like these, that the critics have fallen foul of Mr. Browning for want of music (a charge utterly groundless as far as it concerns the greater part of his writings); but it is partly the result of a theory almost entirely new upon which he has proceeded, and which I think may be fairly defended; it must at least be recognized by those who would criticise his works. I have already referred to the dramatic style of his thoughts and conceptions. Now, rightly or wrongly, he appears to have extended this objectiveness to the form as well as to the matter of his verse. The rhythm in many cases has almost as much to do with the revelation of the character to be depicted as the words he uses. The rough guttural abrupt style of the "Soliloquy in the Spanish Cloister," helps us to conceive the narrow bigoted monk full of

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