Richard Browning

“ 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. ”

“ We cannot cure Mr. Browning, and we must be content to endure him for the sake of old times. The great, crabbed, formless poet gives the buffoons a rare innings; for his jagged, ramshackle blank verse, with its conjunctions protruding at the ends of lines, its parentheses, its small jokes, its puns, its pedantic display of useless learning, its aimless wanderings, its half-hints, all tend to make the reader feel as if he were taking a little walk with a halting cripple who persisted in digging him in the ribs, and kicking up dust before his eyes. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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's poetry has created in many minds an impression that he is more a thinker than a poet: that his poems not only are each inspired by some leading idea, but have grown up in subservience to it; and those who hold this view both do him injustice as a poet, and underrate, however unconsciously, the intellectual value of what his work conveys. For in a poet's imagination, the thought and the thing—the idea and its image—grow up at the same time; each being a different aspect of the other. [86] He sees, therefore, the truths of Nature, as Nature herself gives them ”

“ 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. ”

“ The love which is sung by Browning is more pure and free, and is set in a higher altitude than anything that can be reached by the way of negation. It is a consecration of the undivided self, so that "soul helps not flesh more, than flesh helps soul." It is not only a spiritual and divine emotion, but it also "shows a heart within blood-tinctured with a veined humanity." ”

“ Browning's dramatic sympathies and metaphysical or religious ideas constitute him an optimist. He believes that no experience is wasted, and that all life is good in its way. We also see that his optimism takes the individual and not the race for its test and starting point; and that he places the tendency to good in a conscious creative power which is outside both, and which deals directly with each separate human soul. But neither must we forget that the creative purpose, as he conceives it, fulfils itself equally through good and evil ”

“ In another sense, the major portion of Browning's life-work is, collectively, one monodramatic "epic." He is himself a type of the subtle, restless, curious, searching modern age of which he is the profoundest interpreter. Through a multitude of masks he, the typical soul, speaks, and delivers himself of a message which could not be presented emphatically enough as the utterance of a single individual. He is a true dramatic poet, though not in the sense in which Shakspere is. ”

“ Browning's noblest poem—his noblest, it seems to me—the whole tragedy is distilled into the right words, the whole man raised up and reclothed with flesh. One point only is but lightly touched upon—missed it could not be by an eye so sharp and skillful—the effect upon his art of the poisonous solvent of love. How his life was corroded by it, and his soul burnt into dead ashes we are shown in full, but we are not shown in full what as a painter he was before, what as a painter he might have been without it. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Browning is the last man who in his heart wishes to touch only the few—nobody knows better than he does that that is not the characteristic of the greatest poets, and that not for that is a poet's soul kindled to a white heat. ”

“ She upsprang, she rose upright, in his selle she sate in sight,
By her love she overcame.
XCI.
And her head was on his breast where she smiled as one at rest—
Toll slowly.
"Ring," she cried, "O vesper-bell in the beechwood's old chapelle—
But the passing-bell rings best!"
XCII.
They have caught out at the rein which Sir Guy threw loose—in vain—
Toll slowly.
For the horse in stark despair, with his front hoofs poised in air,
On the last verge rears amain. ”

“ 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. Form for the mere beauty of form, is a playing with the wind, the acceptance of a shadow for the substance. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Browning is a metaphysical poet, and not a metaphysical thinker, to do justice to the depth and originality of his creative power; for his imagination includes everything which at a given moment a human being can think or feel, and often finds itself, therefore, at some point to which other minds have reasoned their way. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Nobody knew better than the popular diner-out, Robert Browning, how few of the men and women who listened to his brilliant talk had any grip upon his inner mind; and he did little to assist their insight. The most affable and accessible of men up to a certain point, he still held himself, in the deeper matters of his art, serenely and securely aloof. But it was a good-humoured, not a cynical, aloofness, which found quite natural expression in a volley of genial chaff at the critics who thought themselves competent to teach him his business. ”

“ In his best works, Browning appears as a poet gifted with a large reason and a wide-wandering imagination; but his reason and imagination do not seem to work genially together—are sometimes in each other’s way—and in their operation they sometimes strangle each other. He thinks broadly and deeply, and he shapes finely ”

“ 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. ”

“ Does not every development, to become normal, require space? Why, our very foot, if you restrict and hedge it in, throws out a corn in self-defence!"
On the 7th of May, it was in 1889, Browning came in after luncheon. "It is my birthday to-day," he said, "and so I came to sit with you and your wife for a while, if you'll let me."
I rejoiced, and at once thought of work in his presence, always a source of double pleasure to me. My wife thought of the pleasure it would give her to offer him some little present by way of marking the happy day. ”

“ It has been well said that the reader of Browning learns a new dialect. But one need not grudge the labor that is rewarded with an intellectual pleasure so peculiar and so stimulating. The odd, grotesque impression made by his poetry arises, in part, from his desire to use the artistic values of ugliness, as well as of obscurity; to avoid the shallow prettiness that comes from blinking the disagreeable truth: not to leave the saltness out of the sea. Whenever he emerges into clearness, as he does in hundreds of places, he is a poet of great qualities. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Browning's choice of subject is determined by his belief that individual feeling and motive are the only true life: hence the only true material of dramatic art. He rejects no incident which admits of development on the side of feeling and motive. He accepts none which cannot be so developed. His range of subject covers, therefore, a great deal that is painful, but nothing that is simply repulsive: because the poetry of human life, that is of individual experience, is absent from nothing which he portrays. ”