BOOKS.

MR. BROWNING'S NEW POEMS.*

THERE are no more original works of imagination in the English language,—though it is hard to call them poems, and harder still to call them anything else,—than Mr. Browning has here given us under the titles, "Rabbi Ben Ezra" and "Mr. Sludge the Medium,"—" Abt Vogler" and " Caliban upon Setebos ; or, Natural Theology in the Island." If we consider the first two only, it is difficult to comprehend a wider range of intellectual drama than we must pass over in going from the one to the other. "From the Hear, oh ! heavens, and give ear, oh earth,' of Isaiah," said Coleridge, if we remember rightly, in his "Table Talk," "to the 0' Clo" of Holy well Street—both of them Jews, you'll observe,—how vast the transition ! Immane quantum discrepant 1" Yet from the 'sublime, single-thoughted, deep-cut stamp of Jewish delight in the glory of God which we see struck for us in iron, as it were, in some intellectual forge, and embodied in the magnificent but harsh lines of "Rabbi Ben Ezra," it is a yet greater stretch of intellectual imagination to pass to the tricky plausible ingenuity of "Mr. Sludge the Medium," who invents one form after another of inconsistent lie in apology for lies, and justifies the swarming vermin of his voluntary super- stition with a casuistry that only retains sufficient memory of what righteousness is to know where suppleness in twisting the conscience is most urgently requisite. Both indeed, as with all Mr. Browning's poems, are achievements of the intellectual imagination. Both are pictures of intellects hard at work to justify different conceptions of life and of its end. But of what extremes of intellect ! The one, strong, steady, concentrated, simple, harmonious, circled round a single focus of burning super- natural light; the other, mean, adroit, flexible, prolific, smart, jumping like a harlequin from one position to another, and only manceuvring to stir up blinding dust which may obscure all clear light, natural or supernatural, by the agility of its movements. The

• idea of the poem Rabbi Ben Ezra is an imaginative development of the old Hebrew thought of the potter's wheel, in the mind of an old man who muses on the number of apparently fruitless beginnings, undeveloped powers, and even wasted affections, which he looks back upon from the end of an apparently petrifying life. "But now, oh Lord, Thou art our Father, we are the clay and Thou our potter, and we are all the work of Thine hand ;" " Woe unto

* Dramatis Personas. By Robert Browning. London: Chapman and Hall.

him that striveth with his Maker. Shall the clay say to him that fashioneth, What makest Thou?" That is the germ of the thought which Mr. Browning expands in the soliloquy of Rabbi Ben Ezra in this fine poem :—

" So, still within this life,

Though lifted o'er its strife,

Let me discern, emppare, pronounce at last,

'This rage was Agra i' the main, That acquiescence vain : The Future I may face now I have proved the Past.'

"For more is not reserved To man, with soul just nerved To act to-morrow what he learns to-day : Here, work enough to watch The Master work, and catch Hints of the proper craft, tricks of the tool's true play.

• "But all, the world's coarse thumb And finger failed to plumb,

So passed in making up the main account;

All instincts immature, All purposes unsure,

That weighed not as his work, yet swelled the man's amount- "Thoughts hardly to be packed

Into a narrow act, Fancies that broke through language and escaped ; All I could never be, All, men ignored in me, This, I was worth to God, whose wheel the pitcher shaped.

"Ay, note that Potter's wheel, That metaphor ! and feel

Why time spins fast, why passive lies our clay,—

Thou to whom fools propound, When the wine makes its round, Since life fleets, all is change ; the Past gone, seize to-day ?

"Fool ! All that is, at all, Lasts ever, past recall ; Earth changes, but thy soul and God stand sure : What entered into thee,

That was, is, and shall be :

Time's wheel runs back or stops; Potter and clay endure ; "He fixed thee mid this dance Of plastic circumstance, This Present, thou, forsooth, wonldst fain arrest : Machinery just meant To give' thy soul its bent,

Try thee and turn thee forth, sufficiently impressed.

"What though the earlier grooves Which ran the laughing loves Around thy base, no longer pause and press ?

What though about thy rim, Scull-things in order grim

Grow out, in graver mood, obey the sterner stress ?

"Look not thou down but up ; To uses of a cup, The festal board, lamp's flash and trumpet's peal, The new wine's foaming flow, The Master's lips aglow !

Thou, heaven's consummate cup, what noedst thou with earth's wheel ?

"But I need, now as then'

Thee, God, who mouldest men ;

And since, not even while the whirl was worst,

Did 1,—to the wheel of life With shapes and colours rife, Bound dizzily,—mistake my end, to slake Thy thirst : "So, take and use Thy work!

Amend what flaws may lurk, What strain o' the stuff, what warpings past the aim !

My times be in Thy hand !

Perfect the cup as planned ; Let age approve of youth, and death complete the same !"

From this purely Jewish imagination, which turns every line of human destiny, complete or incomplete, into a chiselling of a vessel to be used in the service, and to redound to the glory of God,—let us now pass to the vulgar versatility of Mr. Sludge the medium, whose mind, by the way, must be supposed to have just a little more insight into the scope of modern science, and its highest methods of reasoning, than is, strictly speaking, in keep- ing with its low and earthy superstitious. In order to enlarge the circle of Mr. Sludge's defences, Mr. Browning lends him a little more of generalizing power and knowledge than is con- sistent with the superstitions which he affects, in his confessions, to adopt as at least as good as any other sort of faith. But this is in fact only enlarging the dramatic sweep of the satire, and enabling it to strike home at those undrained intellectual swamps in modern society whence we get so large a brood as we now do

of.— "Such souls as shards produce, such beetle things As only buzz to heaven on evening wings."

Mr. Browning wants to make "Mr. Sludge the Medium" assail the state of society which breeds" Sludgehood " rather than s'inply defend himself, and to do this he is obliged to give Mr. Sludge a range of intellectual vision somewhat too great in pro- portion to the jubilant wriggle of his mental prostration. Mr. Sludge becomes, in fact, an accusing angel scarcely professing to justify Sludge, so much as to condemn the world which pro- duces and stimulates his efforts, and an.,,kccusiog angel must of course have the fullest insight into all tte avenues by which the mediumistic lore reaches the heart of man. Beyond this there is no dramatic falsificatio of the conception at all. If a man who has an intelligent " notion " of the modern theory of development can be supposed still to cling to the unluckiness of a single mag- pie, or the omens derived from odd and even numbers at all, this is probably the way he would talk and reason :—

" To give you a notion, now—(let who wins, laugh !)

When first I see a man, what do I first?

Why, count the letters which make up his name, And as their number chances, even or odd, Arrive at my conclusion, trim my course : Hiram H. Horsetail is your honoured name, And haven't I found a patron, Sir, in you? Shall I cheat this stranger?' I take apple-pips, Stick one in either cantkus of my eye, And if the left drops first—(your left, Sir, stuck) I'm warned, I let the trick alone this time.

You, Sir, who smile' superior to such trash,

You judge of character by other rules : Don't your rules sometimes fail you ? Pray what rule Have you judged Sludge by hitherto ?

I can't pretend to mind your smiling, Sir !

Oh, what you mean is this ! Such intimate way, Close converse, frank exchange of offices, Strict sympathy of the immeasurably great With the infinitely small, betokened here

By a course of signs and omens, raps and sparks,—

How does it suit the dread traditional text Of the 'Great and Terrible Name r Shall the Heaven of Heavens Stoop to such child's play ?

Please, Sir, go with me A moment and I'll try to answer you.

The 'Magnum et terribile' (is that right ?) Well, folk began with this in the early day ; And all the acts they recognized in proof Were thunders, lightnings, earthquakes, whirlwinds, dealt Indisputably on men whose death they caused.

There, and there only, folk saw Providence."

But now, as Mr. Sludge points out the "infinitely little," not the infinitely great, has become the ultimate scientific veil behind which Providence is known to lurk, and hence the justification which Mr. Sludge infers for his own apparently puerile tests. On the theory of a "pre-established harmony," there can be no more absurdity, he thinks, in supposing that minute and other- wise capricious coincidences are intended for special omens to guide a man's actions, than in supposing that the minutest natural processes, like the development of the whole animal crea- tion out of a simple "cell," though entirely excluding the view of the real divine force at work, are yet intended to guide our reason in predicting the future. If the opening of the pimpernel is the real index of Providence to the shepherd to look for fine weather, though a pure Providential coincidence, why should not the odd or even number of birds seen by him be a Providential coincidence also, foreboding to Mr. Sludge failure or success ?

"Well, Sir, the old way s altered somewhat since,

And the world wears another aspect now : Somebody tarns our spyglass round, or else Puts a new lens in it : grass, worm, fly grow big : We find great things are made of little things, And little things go lessening till at last Comes God behind them. Talk of mountains now?

We talk of mould that heaps the mountain, mites That throng the mould, and God that makes the mites.

The Name comes close behind a stomach-cyst, The simplest of creations, just a sac That's mouth, heart, legs and belly at once, yet lives And feels, and could do neither, we conclude, If simplified still further one degree : The small becomes the dreadful and immense !

Lightning, forsooth ? No word more upon that ! A tin-foil bottle, a strip of greasy silk, With a bit of wire and knob of brass, and there's Your dollar's-worth of lightning."

One sees clearly enough from this that Mr. Browning does not object to magnify a little the intellectual powers of his" dramatis persons" in order to help them to paint themselves. He gives them, in short, understandings competent to measure their own nature and define their own limitations, which implies usually with creatures like Sludge or Caliban understandings very much in advance of the nature. It is Mr. Browning dwarfing himself, in all but intellect, to Sludge, transforming himself in all but intel- lect into Caliban, who writes, not Sludge and Caliban themselves. The poem called "Caliban upon Setebos; or, Natural Theology on the Island," is an extraordinary specimen of this sort of metamor- phose. We bear in the Tempest that Caliban's dam Sycorax believed in a god called Setebos. Mr. Browning has taken the hint, and given us a meditation of Caliban's on the nature and objects of this God Setebos in making the world and the island is he has made D. And while the animal malice and low cunning of Caliban are of course accurately reflected in his natural theology, there is yet an activity of intelligence about his observations which soars far above Shakespeare's conception of the monster. For example, Mr. Browning's Caliban is very anxious to prove to himself that though Setebos could not make any creature equal or still less superior to himself as a whole, he may yet have made creatures—(Caliban, for instance)—superior to himself in minor details, and therefore in part objects of his dislike and envy. There is a malicious caprice about the idea itself and a neatness of touch about the illustration of it which exactly ex- press a Caliban of wit enough to understand himself.

"Oh, He hath made things worthier than Himself, And envieth that, so helped, such things do more Than he who made them ! What consoles but this ?

That they, unless through Him, do nought at all, And must submit : what other use in things ?

'Hath cut a pipe of pithless elder-joint That, blown through, gives exact the scream o' the jay When from her wing you twitch the feathers blue Sound this, and little birds that hate the jay Flock within stone's throw, glad their foe is hurt : Put case sfieh pipe could prattle and boast forsoq,th I catch the birds, I am the crafty thing, I make the cry my maker cannot make With his great mound mouth; he must blow through mine ! Would not I smash it with my foot ? So He."

But perhaps the most subtle touch in this striking and original

piece is that which makes Caliban's natural theology a degene- rating one, already beginning to sink beneath the standard even

of that elf his dam Sycorax. He accepts indeed from her that above and beyond the tormentor Setebos there must be some further cause who feels neither joy nor grief, "since both derive from weakness in some way,"—and this further deity, who is im- passible, and who " doth all it bath a mind to," he calls "the Quiet." But his dam Sycorax had held that this superior deity really created all things, and created them for happiness, which Setebos, the inferior, marred. This creed Caliban contemptuously repudiates :—

" His dam held that the Quiet made all things, Which Setebos vexed only : 'holds not so. Had He meant other, while His hand was in, Why not make horny eyes no thorn could prick, Or plate my scalp with bone against the snow, Or overscale my flesh 'math joint and joint Like an ore's armour ? Ay—so spoil His sport ! He is the One now: only He doth all."

Even Caliban, we see, can criticize the " argument from design," and refute by his criticism his dam's inexplicable but more pious

conviction that the true God and true Good did make His creatures here, though Setebos is permitted to vex them. We see here

why the "demiurgus" or deputy-god-of the Gnostics necessarily superseded the Infinite and perfect one, and came to be gradually propitiated as the deity who had power to torment. Setebos commands Caliban's attention because he is imperfect ; for according to him none who should be perfect would act or care to act at all. The more full of passions the more worth pro- pitiating—is his motto, and he regards the far-off" Quiet" above Setebos as a merely speculative God. The very same points which Paley insists on in his argument from design, this fanci- ful Caliban insists on also, but as telling in favour of malicious design. The power to torment is reserved, he argues, by him who made the eyes so delicate,—and what then does the eyelid show except that this power is not always to be used ?

Mr. Browning's volume shows no decline of power. Indeed, it contains perhaps some of the most original poems he- has written. He still "blows through bronze," to use his own des- cription of his own style, and rarely indeed attempts to "breathe through silver." But there are passages in the beautiful poem Abt Vogler, and perhaps in the fine fancy of the Death of St. John in the desert, in which a gentler and more musical tone charms the ear. He can always reach the intellectual imagi- - nation. Now and then only he reaches it by the path of sentiment.