Men and Women. Robert Browning

rises, can scarcely help but feel.

      The aesthetic and religious or philosophical interests vitally conceived and blended, which link together so many of the main poems of "Men and Women," close with "Cleon." Rudel, the troubadour, presenting, in the self-abandonment of his offering of love to the Lady of Tripoli, an impersonation of the chivalric love characteristic of the Provencal life of the twelfth century, intervenes, appropriately, last of all, between the preceding poems and the epilogue, which devotes heart and brain of the poet himself, with the creatures of his hand, to his "Moon of Poets."

      As these poetic creations now stand, they all seem, upon examination, to incarnate the full-bodied life of distinctive types of men, centred amid their relations with other men within a specific social environment, and fulfilling the possibilities for such unique, dramatic syntheses as were revealed but partially or in embryo here and there among the other shorter poems of this period of the poet's growth.

      In one important particular the re-arrangement of the "Men and Women" group of poems made its title inappropriate. The graceful presence and love-lit eyes of the many women of the shorter love-poems were withdrawn, and Artemis, Andrea del Sarto's wife, the Prior's niece—"Saint Lucy, I would say," as Fra Lippo explains—and, perhaps, the inspirer of Rudel's chivalry, too, the shadowy yet learned and queenly Lady of Tripoli, alone were left to represent the "women" of the title. As for minor inexactitudes, what does it matter that the advantage gained by nicely selecting the poems properly belonging together, both in conception and artistic modelling, was won at the cost of making the reference inaccurate, in the opening lines of "One Word More," to "my fifty men and women, naming me the fifty poems finished"?—Or that the mention of Roland in line 138 is no longer in place with Karshish, Cleon, Lippo, and Andrea, now that the fantastic story of Childe Roland's desperate loyalty is given closer companionship among the varied experiences narrated in the "Dramatic Romances"? While as for the mention of the Norbert of "In a Balcony"—which was originally included as but one item along with the other contents of "Men and Women"—that miniature drama, although it stands by itself now, is still near enough at hand in the revised order to account for the allusion. These are all trifles—mere sins against literal accuracy. But the discrepancy in the title occasioned by the absence of women is of more importance. It is of especial interest, in calling attention to the fact that the creator of Pompilia, Balaustion, and the heroine of the "Inn Album"—all central figures, whence radiate the life and spiritual energy of the work they ennoble—had, at this period, created no typical figures of women in any degree corresponding to those of his men.

CHARLOTTE PORTER HELEN A. CLARKE

      "TRANSCENDENTALISM: A POEM IN TWELVE BOOKS"

1855

      Stop playing, poet! May a brother speak?

      'Tis you speak, that's your error. Song's our art:

      Whereas you please to speak these naked thoughts

      Instead of draping them in sights and sounds.

      —True thoughts, good thoughts, thoughts fit to treasure up!

      But why such long prolusion and display,

      Such turning and adjustment of the harp,

      And taking it upon your breast, at length,

      Only to speak dry words across its strings?

      Stark-naked thought is in request enough:

      Speak prose and hollo it till Europe hears!

      The six-foot Swiss tube, braced about with bark,

      Which helps the hunter's voice from Alp to Alp—

      Exchange our harp for that—who hinders you?

      But here's your fault; grown men want thought, you think;

      Thought's what they mean by verse, and seek in verse.

      Boys seek for images and melody,

      Men must have reason—so, you aim at men.

      Quite otherwise! Objects throng our youth,'tis true;

      We see and hear and do not wonder much:

      If you could tell us what they mean, indeed!

      As German Boehme1 never cared for plants

      Until it happed, a-walking in the fields,

      He noticed all at once that plants could speak,

      Nay, turned with loosened tongue to talk with him.

      That day the daisy had an eye indeed—

      Colloquized with the cowslip on such themes!

      We find them extant yet in Jacob's prose.

      But by the time youth slips a stage or two

      While reading prose in that tough book he wrote

      (Collating and emendating the same

      And settling on the sense most to our mind)

      We shut the clasps and find life's summer past.

      Then, who helps more, pray, to repair our loss—

      Another Boehme with a tougher book

      And subtler meanings of what roses say—

      Or some stout Mage like him of Halberstadt,2

      John, who made things Boehme wrote thoughts about?

      He with a "look you!" vents a brace of rhymes,

      And in there breaks the sudden rose herself,

      Over us, under, round us every side,

      Nay, in and out the tables and the chairs

      And musty volumes, Boehme's book and all—

      Buries us with a glory, young once more,

      Pouring heaven into this shut house of life.

      So come, the harp back to your heart again!

      You are a poem, though your poem's naught.

      The best of all you showed before, believe,

      Was your own boy-face o'er the finer chords

      Bent, following the cherub at the top

      That points to God with his paired half-moon wings.

NOTES

      "Transcendentalism" is a criticism, placed in the mouth of a poet, of another poet, whose manner of singing is prosaic, because it seeks to transcend (or penetrate beyond) phenomena, by divesting poetic expression of those concrete embodiments which enable it to appeal to the senses and imagination. Instead of bare abstractions being suited to the developed mind, it is the primitive mind, which, like Boehme's, has the merely metaphysical turn, and expects to discover the unincarnate absolute essence of things. The maturer mind craves the vitalizing method of the artist who, like the magician of Halberstadt, recreates things bodily in all their beautiful vivid wholeness. Yet the poet who sincerely holds so fragmentary a conception of art is himself a poem to the poet who holds the larger view. His boy-face singing to God above his ineffective harp-strings is a concrete image of this sort of poetic transcendentalism.

      [It is obvious that Browning uses the Halberstadt and not the Boehme method in presenting this embodiment of his subject. The supposition of certain commentators that Browning is here picturing his own artistic method as transcendental is a misconception of his characteristic theory of poetic art, as shown here and elsewhere.]

      HOW IT STRIKES A CONTEMPORARY

1855

      I only knew one poet in my life:

      And this, or something like it, was his way.

      You saw go up and down Valladolid,3

      A man of mark, to know next time you saw.

      His very serviceable suit of black

      Was courtly once and conscientious still,

      And

1

Boehme: Jacob, an "inspired" German shoemaker (1575-1624), who wrote "Aurora," "The Three Principles," etc., mystical commentaries on Biblical events. When twenty-five years old, says Hotham in "Mysterium Magnum," 1653, "he was surrounded by a divine Light and replenished with heavenly Knowledge . . . going abroad into the Fieldes to a Greene before Neys-Gate at Gorlitz and viewing the Herbes and Grass of the Fielde, in his inward light he saw into their Essences . . . and from that Fountain of Revelation wrote <De Signatura Rerum>," on the signatures of things, the "tough book" to which Browning refers.

2

Halberstadt: Johann Semeca, called Teutonicus, a canon of Halberstadt in Germany, who was interested in the unchurchly study of mediaeval science and reputed to be a magician, possessing the vegetable stone supposed to make plants grow at will, having the same power over organic life that the philosopher's stone of the alchemists had over minerals, so that, like Albertus Magnus, another such mage of the Middle Ages, he could cause flowers to spring up in the midst of winter.

3

Valladolid: the royal city of the kings of Castile, before Philip II moved the Court to Madrid, where Cervantes, Calderon, and Las Casas lived and Columbus died.