Browning

“ I look up to Browning as one of the very few men known to me by their works who, with most cordial energy and invincible resolution, have lived thoroughly throughout the whole of their being, to the uttermost verge of all their capacities, in his case truly colossal; lived and wrought thoroughly in sense and soul and intellect ”

“ Browning in this poem is like a demonstrator of anatomy in a famous school of dissection—some Sir Charles Bell lecturing to a crowded room full of students; taking up nerve after nerve, following it through all its ramifications, tracing it from its origin in brain or spinal cord, and never leaving it till it is lost in microscopic fibres at the periphery. He is as impartial as the anatomist, who asks no questions as to the presence of the subject on his table: all he has to do with is the science to which he is devoted. ”

“ Browning is great because of his formative energy: because, despite the excess of burning and compulsive thought —
"Thoughts swarming thro' the myriad-chambered brain
Like multitudes of bees i' the innumerous cells,
Each staggering 'neath the undelivered freight ——"
he strikes from the FUROR of words an electric flash so transcendently illuminative that what is commonplace becomes radiant with that light which dwells not in nature, but only in the visionary eye of man. ”

“ Although Browning was so sublime a metaphysical poet, nothing delighted him more than to listen to an accumulation of trifling (if exact) circumstances which helped to build up the life of a human being. Every man and woman whom he met was to Browning a poem in solution; some chemical condition might at any moment resolve any one of the multitude into a crystal. His optimism, his curiosity, and his clairvoyance occupied his thoughts in a remarkably objective way. ”

“ One must sit up, and think, and be alert when he reads Browning. If we accept these conditions, we shall probably find that Browning is the most stimulating poet in our language. His influence upon our life is positive and tremendous. His strength, his joy of life, his robust faith, and his invincible optimism enter into us, making us different and better men after reading him. And perhaps the best thing he can say of Browning is that his thought is slowly but surely taking possession of all well-educated men and women. ”

“ Browning in her "ideal chamber," neither a library nor a sitting-room, but a happy blending of both, with the numerous old paintings in antique Florentine frames, easy-chairs and lounges, carved bookcases crammed with books in many languages, bric-a-brac in any quantity, but always artistic, flowers everywhere, and herself the frailest flower of all.
Mr. Hillard speaks of the happiness of the Brownings' home and their union as perfect: he, full of manly power, she, the type of the most sensitive and delicate womanhood. This much-esteemed friend was fascinated by Mrs. Browning. ”

“ The Brownings took Paris in their way, finally reaching London after an absence of nearly four years. Mrs. Browning returned to England full of fame—fame not only on her own account but on account of her husband—a happy wife, a devoted mother, and apparently restored to health. What a contrast to her departure on that autumn four years ago, when, almost like a fugitive, the supposed chronic invalid had escaped from her "sofa and silence" across the waters to an unknown fate. ”

“ An utterance of Browning is often like a strange animal walking backwards, who flourishes his tail with such energy that every one takes it for his head. He was in other words, at least in his prose and practical utterances, more or less incapable of telling a story without telling the least important thing first. ”

“ There is hardly a line, there is never a page, without an allusion to some recondite thing: Athenian customs, Greek names, the plays of Euripides, above all, the plays of Aristophanes. "Every line of the poem," it has been truly said, "shows Mr. Browning as soaked and steeped in the comedies as was Bunyan in his Bible." The result is a vast, shapeless thing, splendidly and grotesquely alive, but alive with the obscure and tangled life of the jungle. ”

“ Looking up from his papers, Browning's eye must have rested on that shell-adorned frame which encircled the usual specimens of family portraits. There were the inevitable aunts and uncles, the young man pressing into the focus, to meet the clever dog seated on the table by his side, and a typical presentment of the mother and child as conceived by the lens.
To Luigi, the landlady's son, Browning was from the first very friendly; but how this lad, ever on the alert to make himself useful, could have kept any length of time in his good graces, is a mystery to me. ”

“ It is just as if a man were to say first that a garden was so neglected that it was only fit for a boys' playground, and then complain of the unsuitability in a boys' playground of rockeries and flower-beds.
As we find, after this manner, that Browning does not act satisfactorily as that which we have decided that he shall be--a logician--it might possibly be worth while to make another attempt to see whether he may not, after all, be more valid than we thought as to what he himself professed to be--a poet. ”

“ In his last years Browning, with extreme good-nature, was willing to sit for his portrait to any one who asked him. He was once discovered in Venice, surrounded, like a model in a life-class, by a group of artistic ladies, each taking him off from a different point of view. Of these representations of Browning as an old man, the best are certainly those executed by his son, in particular a portrait painted in the summer and autumn of 1880. ”

“ Nevertheless, though the strongest blood insurgent in the metropolitan heart is not that which is native to it, one might well be proud to have had one's atom-pulse atune from the first with the large rhythm of the national life at its turbulent, congested, but ever ebullient centre. Certainly Browning was not the man to be ashamed of his being a Londoner, much less to deny his natal place. ”

“ Thus we can imagine Browning, with his characteristic perception of the profound significance of a circumstance or a single word even, having written of the knocking at the door in "Macbeth", or having used, with all its marvellous cumulative effect, the word `wrought' towards the close of "Othello", when the Moor cries in his bitterness of soul, "But being wrought, perplext in the extreme": we can imagine this, and yet could not credit the suggestion that even the author of "The Ring and the Book" could by any possibility have composed the two most moving tragedies writ in our tongue. ”

“ From this point in his work, Browning, like the Hindu Brahma, becomes manifest not as himself, but in his creations. The poet whose portrait is painted for us in “Pauline” is the same poet who sympathetically presents a whole world of human experiences to us, and the philosopher whose portrait is drawn in “Paracelsus” is the same who interprets these human experiences in the light of the great life theories therein presented. ”

“ In the lyrics to which I am referring, Browning has spoken straight out, in just this simple, direct way, and with a delicate grace and smoothness of rhythm not always to be met with in his later work. Here is a poem called Speculative:
"Others may need new life in Heaven—
Man, Nature, Art—made new, assume!
Man with new mind old sense to leaven,
Nature—new light to clear old gloom,
Art that breaks bounds, gets soaring-room. ”

“ Browning often treats his subject as a pure thinker might, but he has always conceived it as a poet; he has always seen in one flash, everything, whether moral or physical, visible or invisible, which the given situation could contain. ”

“ To the young Browning, the beauty of immortal, joyous life pursuing its heights forever was as a radiant vision, to the Browning who had grappled with the strangling problems of the century this beauty was not so distinctly seen, but its reality was felt with all the depth of an intensely spiritual nature—a nature moreover so absolutely fearless, that it could unflinchingly confront every giant of doubt, or of disillusionment which science in its pristine egotism had conjured up, saying “Keep to thine own province, where thou art indeed powerful ”

“ Stopford Brooke (The Poetry of Robert Browning, p. 99) says of this lovely lyric: "I have driven through that gracious country of low hill and dale and wide water-meadows, where under flowered banks only a foot high the slow river winds in gentleness; and this poem is steeped in the sentiment of the scenery. But, as before, Browning quickly slides away from the beauty of inanimate nature into a record of the animals that haunt the streams. He could not get on long with mountains and rivers alone. He must people them with breathing, feeling things; anything for life!" ”

“ But this is stranded on a thread-bare morality. I have also enjoyed the reading of Browning's poems and dramatic pieces, as well as some by Elizabeth Barrett, the wife of Browning. Browning does not appear to me great as an artist. There is a deficiency of strength and coherence in his compositions. But a something singularly grand and pure in feeling and tendency gladdens and warms the heart. A spirit of noble, self-sufficing heroism permeates his poems. One feels oneself refreshed as by the waftings of a something divinely great. ”

“ For the great value of Browning is that at bottom, in all the deep spiritual and human essentials, he is unmistakably in the great tradition—is, with all his Italianisms and cosmopolitanisms, all his victimisation by societies organised to talk about him, a magnificent example of the best and least dilettantish English spirit. ”

“ As the poet grew, so grew the man in Browning: we reach By the Fireside from these. For the woman in the Last Word, strong to lay aside herself, to "think his thought," could with that strength, used otherwise, bring that husband to the place where stands the man in By the Fireside, when the "long dark autumn evenings" are come, and together with his wife he treads back the path to their youth, to the "moment, one and infinite" in which they found each other once for all. ”

“ Browning is deeply analytic, a trait perhaps derived from his German ancestors along with his peculiarities of syntax and vocabulary and his obscurity of expression. The latter characteristic has largely discouraged the general public, so that the reading of Browning is limited to people with a literary turn. His poetry is, however, well worth the reading. He is by far the deepest poet of the nineteenth century. He leaves environment to lesser poets and concentrates all his energies upon man himself, his passions and emotions. ”

“ It is generally recognized that a considerable part of Browning’s poetry is not really so difficult after all. It can be read and enjoyed by any one whose mind is in working order. Those innocent and stupid [243] Victorians were wrong about it. We alert and sagacious George-the-Fifthians need some tougher poetry to try our mettle. So I suppose the Browning Societies, having fulfilled their function, will gradually fade away,—or perhaps transfer their attention to some of those later writers who have put obscurity on a scientific basis and raised impenetrability to a fine art. ”

“ When Browning was first living in Italy, a telegram which had been sent to him was stopped on the frontier and suppressed on account of his known sympathy with the Italian Liberals. It is almost impossible for people living in a commonwealth like ours to understand how a small thing like that will affect a man. ”

“ While his work is instinct with sympathy for all classes and conditions of men, Browning does not feel the ills of life with the intensity of a Carlyle, nor its ugliness with the grief of a Ruskin, nor yet its lack of culture with the priggishness of an Arnold, nor would he [Pg 213] stand in open spaces and preach discontent to the masses like Morris. ”

“ Browning does, however, full justice to the excesses of popular imagination, once directed into a given channel, in the parallel touches which depict the portentous luxury in which the spy is supposed to live: the poor though decent garret in which the poet dies. ”

“ Browning now enters on the constructive part of his work. He puts the personages of the drama themselves before us, allowing each to plead his or her own cause. The imaginary occasion is that of Count Guido's trial; and all the depositions which were made on the previous one are transferred to this. The author has been obliged in every case to build up the character from the evidence, and to re-mould and expand the evidence in conformity with the character. The motive, feeling, and circumstance set forth by each separate speaker are thus in some degree fictitious ”

“ For those who come after they may indeed serve to set his fame in peril, but the message he had for us was so overwhelming in its appeal that we forgot the crabbed hand in which it was transcribed.
In one respect, and in one respect only, Browning the poet found an echo in Browning as he was known to his friends. That brave optimism of spirit, with its constant nobility of outlook on the facts of life which so finely distinguishes his writing, was also, I think, characteristic of the man. It was always a spiritual refreshment to meet him. ”

“ Luria is one of the noblest and most heroic figures in Browning's works. A Moor, with the instincts of the East and the culture of the West, he presents a racial problem which is very subtly handled; while his natural nobility and confidence are no less subtly set off against the Italian craft of his surroundings. The spectacle he presents is impressive and pathetic. An alien, with no bond to Florence save that of his inalienable love, he has led her forces against the Pisans, and saved her. ”