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III.

MRS. BARRETT BROWNING.

THERE are two things, for which, I think, the world has especially to rejoice, in contemplating the position and circumstances of Shakspeare. The first is, that he was not technically a scholar, that between him and the great ancient hearts whose secrets he was to read, there intervened, not the frosty twilight of antiquarian lore, but only the unpretentious dimness of translation and tradition. How well that, in great Julius, the greater Shakspeare had to recognize the heart only of a brother! How well that the thaumaturgic hand had not to clip, and measure, and adjust, amid moth-eaten cerements and rusty helmets, in order to fashion forth the old Roman exterior and shell of Julius, but only to cast asunder the gates of the human heart that those deathless notes might be heard, which are the undertone of human emotion in all ages, and to show us Julius himself! How well that he, who was to give to the Anglo-Saxon tongue that tune it was never to lose, whose language, exhaustless in range, in delicacy, in force, in variety, taking every hue of thought and feeling as the sky takes shade or sunshine, as the forest takes breeze or calm, was to remain forever the emblem of the multitudinous life and lightly moved and all-conceiving spirit of the modern time, as contrasted with the grave uniformity

and petrified aristocratism of antiquity, was tempted, by no familiarity with ancient writings, to any formal rotundity of diction or obscure involution of sentence! How dreadful the thought that he, whose hall of audience, increasing with civilization, is the world, he who has moved a broader stratum of human sympathy than any other man, might have passed into that narrow chamber, narrowing with every generation, in which Gray, Collins, and such erudite minstrels receive frost-bitten compliments from critics and pedants. But it is wronging Shakspeare to suppose, even for a moment, that the temptation of learning could have overcome him. He, of all men, would have been least apt to prefer the poor glitter of learned paint to God's sunlight of living smiles, the classic drops of Naiad's well or Castalian fountain to the sacred dew of human tears. He, of all men, would have been least apt to set the icy guerdon of a pedant's approbation above the sight of simple emotion, welling irresistibly from the heart of a peasant. Only, when one thinks how much learning has done to veil genius which it is not absurd to name along with Shakspeare's, and reflects that the throne of Milton, though of the loftiest, was never raised, on its classic pedestal, to the height of Shakspeare's, it is impossible to suppress a sense of satisfaction that the greatest author of mankind was not learned.

The next thing for which, perhaps still more expressly, we may be thankful in the case of Shakspeare, is the complex fact, that he never attained to consciousness of his powers, that he heard not the voice of his fame, and that he was never surrounded by a circle of admirers. Healthy, whole-hearted, it perhaps never occurred to him to ask. what precise position he, Shakspeare, might occupy, in relation to other writers. His chief life-work, he may

have, on the whole, concluded, was the realization of a comfortable living in his native Stratford: one can imagine him staggering in bewildered incredulity, if the eyes of all coming generations, hailing him as the mightiest of mere men, had gleamed suddenly in vision before him. Gruff Ben Jonson, too, wishing he had "blotted a hundred” words of his dramas instead of boasting that he never made an erasure, and the other brave spirits of the Mermaid Tavern “whistling him down," when, though, indeed, clever, he was becoming something of a rattle, were not likely to permit Shakspeare to dote over his faults, to coax him into a belief that what the general common sense disliked in his poetry was its peculiar excellence, to make him imagine that any veil filming his genius was greater than his genius itself. Hero-worship is twice cursed; in the hero who is befooled, and in the zanies who befool him. The one is bewildered into extravagance, like, shall we say, Mahomet, or enervated by conceit, like, shall we say, Wordsworth: the other brings himself to rejoice in any feast of shells, if only it is laid out by his hero. The grand evil which hero-worship brings upon the literary hero is confirmation in his mannerism, instead of being left, like Shakspeare, and with nature always assisting him, more and more to cast off his mannerism in the broad light of truth. Living so near Wordsworth as this generation does, and recalling many phenomena allied to that presented by him, his hero-worshippers, and their mutual relation, one is tempted to say that the peculiar danger to which literature is in these days exposed is that of having mannerisms extolled into models. At all events, must we not rejoice that the subtlest of all poisons was never mingled in Shakspeare's cup, that he was all unconscious of his praises, perhaps even of his powers, that, like a great cataract, he rolled heedless down "the dust of continents to be.”

The reader may not yet be prepared to sympathize with me in the feelings with which I regard the poems of Mrs. Barrett Browning. I cannot claim instant assent, when, though allowing that between her and Shakspeare, as well as many other men, there can be instituted no comparison, I yet deliberately assign her the same place among women as Shakspeare occupies among men. To show ground for this opinion will be, more or less, the object of all the following remarks. But it must at present be allowed me to declare, that no circumstance to which reference could be made, in connection with the genius of Mrs. Barrett Browning, is to me more evident or distressing, than the fact that it is prevented, by certain vailing clouds of esoteric culture and repelling mannerism, from casting abroad, with full, sunlike charms, the rich magnificence of its power. If it were the homage of a second rate applause that were challenged for this poetess, if it was to be mentioned in honor of her, that she could translate from Bion and Eschylus, and talk of gnomons, zodiacs, and apogees,it would be absurd to regret that certain characteristics of her poetry withhold it from the many and confine it to the few. But it is the very highest distinction that can be claimed for her; it is that mysterious power, to be com'municated by no culture, and related to learning as the living flower, rich in green leaf and tinted petal, is related to the wooden framework over which it climbs, which she possesses. The power of stirring the inmost fountains of laughter and tears, of bringing music from the rough metal of every day life, of kindling those lights in human eyes, which glance from scholar to rustic, from peasant to king, with the gleam of recognition, reconcilement, and relationship, is hers. To this, all learning is a very small matter. And believing that Mrs. Barrett Browning is gifted with

this, I cannot but deeply regret that it is impeded in its way to that over which such power exerts its noblest sway, the general heart. Why, you cannot but ask, should the words of this woman, burning in their tenderness, penetrating in their truth, so broadly and deeply human in their application, not reach the strongly pulsing heart of common humanity? Why should not the cottage mother thrill with the expression she has given to maternal ecstacy? Why should not the mourner at the village grave see a beam falling from heaven on the sod, at the recollection of her words? Why should not the peasant Christian, who rejoices to trace, with Bunyan, the path of the Pilgrim from the city of destruction to the celestial gate, glow with a still loftier emotion, as this great Christian singer casts for him rays of revealing light, far and deep into the night of history, over the most mysterious sublimities of human destiny? That all this does not happen, that Mrs. Browning's readers are what is called select, and that they are students rather than listeners, is a well known fact. The cause can be easily discovered, a certain obscurity, an excessive demand on the reader;- and I cannot help thinking that this cause came to operate, partly through her learning, (occasioning un-English involution of style,) and partly, however unconscious she may have been of the influence, through some hero-worshipping bray, proclaiming in her ears that her obscurities were her beauties. We are all, geniuses and common persons, subject to weakness. As one hears Mrs. Browning talking of apogees, and addressing Lucifer as Heosphoros, and marks the involved and sonorous Latinity of her style, he can hardly repel the suggestion, that the weapon which, probably with considerable toil, she acquired, with the aid of her fellow-men, for herself, was by her deemed of greater value, than those

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