Richard Braithwaite Browning

“ He believed that the world would come out all right in the end, that good would win.
Robert Browning was born on May 7, 1812, at Camberwell, near London. His father, who worked in the Bank of England, was also named Robert Browning. The Brownings were of sturdy stock; but the poet’s mother was delicate. At the age of twelve he had written a volume of poems called “Incondita”; but his parents could find no one who would publish it.
Browning’s early education was rather scant; but he made up for this by a great deal of miscellaneous reading in his father’s library. ”

“ In his management of the story, Browning has intensified the villainy of the Lord at the same time that he has shown a possible streak of goodness in him. The young man, on the other hand, he has made to be of very good stuff, indeed, notwithstanding his year of tutelage from the older man. He makes one radical change in the story as well as several minor ones. In the poem the younger man had been in love with the girl whom the older man had dishonorably treated, and had never ceased to love her. ”

“ It is mainly on this account that I cannot treat the supreme utterances of Browning lightly, or think it an idle task to try to connect them into a philosophy of life. In his optimism of love, in his supreme confidence in man's destiny and sense of the infinite height of the moral horizon of humanity, in his courageous faith in the good, and his profound conviction of the evanescence of evil, there lies a vital energy whose inspiring power we are yet destined to feel. ”

“ Browning, indeed, knew that the consciousness of evil was itself evidence of the presence of good, that perfection means death, and progress is life, on the side of morals; but he has missed the corresponding truth on the side of knowledge. If he acknowledges that the highest revealed itself to man, on the practical side, as love; he does not see that it has also manifested itself to man, on the theoretical side, as reason. The self-communication of the Infinite is incomplete love is a quality of God, intelligence a quality of man ”

“ I do not value society—others do: ‘we are all His children’ says Euripides and quotes Paul.
Now, love, let this be a moot point to settle among the flowers one day—with Sir Thomas Browne’s ‘other hard questions yet not impossible to be solved’ (‘What song the Sirens sang to Ulysses,’ is the first!) in which blessed hope let me leave off; for I confess to having written myself all-but-tired, headachy. But ‘vexed with you’! Ba, Ba; you perplex me, bewilder me; let me get right again; kiss me, dearest, and all is right—God bless you ever—
Your R.
[53]
E.B.B. to R.B. Wednesday Evening. ”

“ No man, no poet assuredly, could love as Browning loved, and fail to be aware, often with vague anger and bitterness, no doubt, of this insuperable isolation even when spirit seemed to leap to spirit, in the touch of a kiss, in the evanishing sigh of some one or other exquisite moment. The poem tells us how the lovers, straying hand in hand one May day across the Campagna, sat down among the seeding grasses, content at first in the idle watching of a spider spinning her gossamer threads from yellowing fennel to other vagrant weeds. ”

“ Browning there is, and his poem tells us why. But, it will be objected, many great geniuses have been immoral men. This is so, but we cannot argue the point here; the poet’s purpose is to show how in this particular case the evil seed bore fruit after its kind. The poem opens with the artist’s attempts to bribe his wife by money to accord him a little semblance of love: he promises to paint that he may win gold for her. The keynote of the poem is struck in these opening words. It is evening, and Andrea is weary with his work, but never weary of praising Lucrezia’s beauty ”

“ While in his later poems the poet speaks of love as an impulse—either blind or bound to erring 359 knowledge—and of the heart as made to love, in his earlier ones he seems to treat man as free to work out his own purposes, and act out his own ideals. Browning here finds himself able to maintain the dependence of man upon God without destroying morality. He regards man's impulses not as blind instincts, but as falling within his rational nature, and constituting the forms of its activity. ”

“ What wife had Rafael, or has Agnolo?
In this world, who can do a thing, will not;
And who would do it, cannot, I perceive:
Yet the will 's somewhat—somewhat, too, the power—
And thus we half-men struggle. At the end,
God, I conclude, compensates, punishes.
'T is safer for me, if the award be strict,
That I am something underrated here,
Poor this long while, despised, to speak the truth.
I dared not, do you know, leave home all day,
For fear of chancing on the Paris lords.
The best is when they pass and look aside;
But they speak sometimes; I must bear it all. ”

“ Faggots no few, blocks great and small,
Reach a man's mid-thigh, no less, no more,—
For they mean he should roast in the sight of all.
CHORUS.
We mean he should roast in the sight of all.
IV
Good sappy bavins that kindle forthwith;
Billets that blaze substantial and slow;
Pine-stump split deftly, dry as pith;
Larch-heart that chars to a chalk-white glow:
They up they hoist me John in a chafe,
Sling him fast like a hog to scorch,
Spit in his face, then leap back safe,
Sing "Laudes" and bid clap-to the torch.
CHORUS.
Laus deo—who bids clap-to the torch. ”

“ 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’s social ideals revolve about a trinity of values: the value of love, the value of truth, the value of evil. His ethics are the natural outgrowth of his mysticism and his idealism, with no touch of the utilitarianism which has been a distinctive mark of the fabric of English society during the nineteenth century, nor, on the other hand, of the hidebound conventionalism which has limited personal freedom in ways detrimental to just those aspects of social morality it was most anxious to preserve. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Hampden so long—come—and there's Vane—I know
You'll love young Vane! This is the proudest day!
(The KING enters. WENTWORTH lets fall PYM'S hand.)
CHARLES.
Arrived, my Lord?—This Gentleman, we know,
Was your old friend:
(To PYM) The Scots shall be informed
What we determine for their happiness. (Exit PYM.)
You have made haste, my Lord.
WENTWORTH.
Sire . . . I am come . . .
CHARLES.
To aid us with your counsel: this Scots' League
And Covenant spreads too far, and we have proofs
That they intrigue with France: the Faction, too . . .
WENTWORTH.
(Kneels.) ”

“ 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. ”

“ This lack of being educated with other boys is sometimes supposed to have been one of the causes why Browning found difficulty in expressing his thoughts clearly to other people. It was at first planned that Browning should become a lawyer, but as he had no taste for this, his father agreed to allow his [Pg 271] son to adopt literature as a profession. When Browning had made his choice, he read Johnson's Dictionary for preparation. Pauline, his first published poem, attracted almost no attention, but Browning kept on writing, regardless of inattention. ”

“ Browning was sent to a school in the neighbourhood, but left it when fourteen, and had little other teaching. He had a French tutor for the next two years, and in his eighteenth year he attended some Greek lectures at the London University. At school he never won a prize, though it was more difficult to avoid than to win prizes. He was more conspicuous for the love of birds and beasts, which he always retained, than for any interest in his lessons. ”

“ While Dmìtri shook the reins, urged Droug upon his track!
"Well, soon the month ran out, we just were coming back, ⁠90
When yesterday — behold, the village was on fire!
Fire ran from house to house. What help, as, nigh and nigher,
The flames came furious? 'Haste,' cried Dmìtri, 'men must do
The little good man may: to sledge and in with you,
You and our three! We check the fire by laying flat
Each building in its path, — I needs must stay for that, —
But you . . . no time for talk! Wrap round you every rug,
Cover the couple close, — you'll have the babe to hug. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Browning lived almost entirely in Italy, and especially at that house in Florence, close by the Porta Romana, which now bears a tablet with her name, and which gave its title to one of her best-known volumes of poetry. They had one child, born in 1849, Robert Barrett Browning, favorably known as a painter and a sculptor (p. 194) After just fifteen years' marriage, Mrs. Browning died, in 1861; the frail body almost literally burnt up by the fiery soul within. ”

“ Browning takes this simple and beautiful story, and imbues it with his own philosophy till he has made it his own. In the poem the wanderer from the star (Rephan) , in compliance with the request of his friends, gives some account of the manner of his life before his human existence began upon our planet. In the land he has left—his native realm—all is at most, nowhere deficiency or excess; on this planet we but guess at a mean. In “Rephan” there is no want; whatever should be, is. There is no growth, for that is change; nothing begins and nothing ends ”

“ As a sympathetic critic has remarked, "His stage is not the visible phenomenal England (or elsewhere) of history; it is a point in the spiritual universe, where naked souls meet and wrestle, as they play the great game of life, for counters, the true value of which can only be realised in the bullion of a higher life than this." No doubt there is "a certain crudeness in the manner in which these naked souls are presented," not only in "Strafford" but elsewhere in the plays. Browning markedly has the defects of his qualities. ”

“ I have tried to show that one of the ruling conceptions of Browning's view of life is that the Good is absolute, and that it reveals itself in all the events of human life. By means of this conception, he endeavoured to bring together the elements which had fallen asunder in the sensational and moral pessimism of Byron and Carlyle. In other words, through the re-interpreting power which lies in this fundamental thought when it is soberly held and fearlessly applied, he sought to reconcile man with the world and with God, and thereby with himself. ”

“ In that perpetual contemplation of Nature, which with Wordsworth became an [Pg 14] all-absorbent passion, Browning had but little share: his chief interest was in man. But "now and again external nature was for him ... pierced and shot through with spiritual fire."
Three times punctually he would walk round the gardens, and then walk home. Upon these daily strolls he was accompanied by his sister Sarianna: in whose love and companionship he was singularly fortunate. Sarianna Browning had always been the best of sisters to the poet and his wife,—a kindred spirit in every sense of the word ”

“ No poet, least of all a dramatic poet, goes about seeking concrete vehicles for ready-made ideas, or attempts to dress a philosophy in metaphors; and Browning, as an artist, is interested first of all in the object which he renders beautiful for its own sole sake, and not in any abstract idea it illustrates. Still, it is true in a peculiar sense in his case, that the eye of the poet brings with it what it sees. He is, as a rule, conscious of no theory, and does not 026 construct a poem for its explication ”

“ It is only fair to Browning, to point out how he himself felt later that his artistic mood had here run away with him, whereupon he made amends honorable in a letter in reply to the question whether he had Wordsworth in mind: "I can only answer, with something of shame and contrition, that I undoubtedly had Wordsworth in my mind—but simply as a model; you know an artist takes one or two striking traits in the features of his 'model,' and uses them to start his fancy on a flight which may end far enough from the good man or woman who happens to be sitting for nose and eye. ”