 This is a LibraVox recording. All LibraVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibraVox.org. Robert Browning by G. K. Chesterton. Section 1. Chapter 1. Browning in Early Works. On the subject of Browning's work innumerable things have been said, and remain to be said, of his life considered as a narrative of facts, there is little or nothing to say. It was a lucid and public and yet quiet life, which culminated in one great dramatic test of character, and then fell back again into this union of quietude and publicity. And yet in spite of this, it is a great deal more difficult to speak finally about his life than about his work. His work has the mystery, which belongs to the complex. His life, the much greater mystery, which belongs to the simple. He was clever enough to understand his own poetry, and if he understood it, we can understand it. But he was also entirely unconscious and impulsive, and he was never clever enough to understand his own character. Consequently, we may be excused if that part of him which was hidden from him is partly hidden from us. The subtle man is always immeasurably easier to understand than the natural man. For the subtle man keeps a diary of his moods. He practices the art of self-analysis and self-revelation, and can tell us how he came to feel this or to say that, but a man like Browning knows no more about the state of his emotions than about the state of his pulse. They are things greater than he, things growing at will like forces of nature. There is an old anecdote, probably apocryphal, which describes how a feminine admirer wrote to Browning, asking him for the meaning of one of his darker poems, and received the following reply. When that poem was written, two people knew what it meant, God and Robert Browning, and now God only knows what it means. This story gives, in all probability, an entirely false impression of Browning's attitude toward his work. He was a keen artist, a keen scholar. He could put his finger on anything and he had a memory like the British Museum Library. But the story does, in all probability, have a tolerably accurate picture of Browning's attitude toward his own emotions and his psychological type. If a man had asked him what some particular allusion to a Persian hero meant, he could, in all probability, have quoted half the epic. If a man had asked him which third cousin of Charlemagne was alluded to in Sardelo, he could have given an account of the man and an account of his father and his grandfather. But if a man had asked him what he thought of himself, or what were his emotions an hour before his wedding, he would have replied with perfect sincerity that God alone knew. This mystery of the unconscious man, far deeper than any mystery of the conscious one, existing as it does in all men, existed peculiarly in Browning, because he was a very ordinary and spontaneous man. The same thing exists, to some extent, in all history and all affairs. Anything that is deliberate, twisted, created as a trap and a mystery, must be discovered at last. Everything that is done naturally remains mysterious. It may be difficult to discover the principles of the Rosicrucians, but it is much easier to discover the principles of the Rosicrucians than the principles of the United States. Nor has any secret society kept it same so quiet as humanity. The way to be inexplicable is to be chaotic, and on the surface, this was the quality of Browning's life. There is the same difference between judging of his poetry and judging of his life that there is between making a map of a labyrinth and making a map of a mist. The discussion of what some particular illusion in Sardelo means has gone on so far and may go on still, but it has in its nature to end. The life of Robert Browning, who combines the greatest brain with the most simple temperament known in our annals, would go on forever if we did not decide to summarize it in a very brief and simple narrative. Robert Browning was born in Camberwell on May 7th, 1812. His father and grandfather had been clerks in the Bank of England, and his whole family would appear to have belonged to the solid and educated middle class, the class which is interested in letters, but not ambitious in them, the class to which poetry is a luxury, but not a necessity. This actual quality and character of the Browning family shows some tendency to be obscured by matters more remote. It is the custom of all biographers to seek for the earliest traces of a family in distant ages and even in distant lands, and Browning as it happens has given them opportunities which tend to lead away the mind from the main matter in hand. There is a tradition, for example, that men of his name were prominent in the feudal ages. It is based upon little beyond a coincidence of surnames and the fact that Browning used a seal with a coat of arms. Because of middle class men used such a seal, merely because it is a curiosity or a legacy, without knowing or caring anything about the condition of their ancestors in the middle ages. And again, there is a theory that he was of Jewish blood, of you which is perfectly conceivable and which Browning would have been the last to have thought derogatory, but for which, as a matter of fact, there is exceedingly little evidence. The chief reason assigned by his contemporaries for the belief was the fact that he was, without doubt, especially and profoundly interested in Jewish matters. This suggestion, worthless in any case, would, if anything, tell the other way. For while an Englishman may be enthusiastic about England, or indignant against England, it never occurred to any living Englishman to be interested in England. Browning was, like every other intelligent Aryan, interested in the Jews. But if he was related to every people in which he was interested, he must have been of extraordinarily mis-extraction. Thirdly, there is the get-more-sensational theory that there was in Robert Browning a strain of the Negro. The supporters of this hypothesis seem to have little in reality to say except that Browning's grandmother was certainly a creel. It is said in support of the view that Browning was singularly dark in early life, and was often mistaken for an Italian. There does not, however, seem to be anything particular to be deduced from this except that if he looked like an Italian, he must have looked exceedingly unlike a Negro. There is nothing valid against any of these three theories, just as there is nothing valid in their favor. They may, any or all of them, be true, but they are still irrelevant. They are something that is in history or biography a great deal worse than being false. They are misleading. We do not want to know about a man like Browning whether he had a right to a shield used in the War of the Roses, or whether the tenth grandfather of his creole grandmother had been white or black. We want to know something about his family, which is quite a different thing. We wish to have about Browning not so much the kind of information which would satisfy Claro, King at Arms, but the sort of information which would satisfy us if we were advertising for a very confidential secretary or a very private tutor. We should not be concerned as to whether the tutor were descended from an Irish king, but we should still be really concerned about his extraction, about what manner of people his had been for the last two or three generations. This is the most practical duty of a biography, and this is also the most difficult. It is a great deal easier to haunt a family from a tombstone to tombstone back to the time of Henry II than to catch and realize and put upon paper that most nameless and elusive of all things social tone. It will be said immediately and must as promptly be admitted that we could find a biographical significance in any of these theories if we look for it, but it is indeed the sin and snare of biographers that they tend to see significance in everything, characteristic carelessness if their hero drops his pipe and characteristic carefulness if he picks it up again. It is true assuredly that all the three races above named could be connected with Browning's personality. If we believe for instance that he really came of a race of medieval barons, we should say at once that from them he got his preeminent spirit of battle. We should be right, for every line in his stubborn soul and his erect body did really express the fighter. He was always contending, whether it was with the German theory about the Gnostics or with a stranger who elbowed his wife in a crowd. Again if we had decided that he was a Jew, we should point out how absorbed he was in the terrible simplicity of monotheism. We should be right, for he was so absorbed. Or again in the case even of the Negro fancy, it would not be difficult for us to suggest a love of color, a certain mental gaudiness, a pleasure. Quote, when reds and blues were indeed red and blue, end quote, as he says in the Ring and the Book, we should be right, for there really was in Browning a tropical violence of taste. An artistic scheme compounded as it were, of orchids and cockatoos, which emit our cold English poets seemed scarcely European. All this is extremely fascinating, and it may be true. But as has been suggested, here comes in the very great temptation of this kind of work, the noble temptation to see too much in everything. The biographer can easily see a personal significance in these three hypothetical nationalities. But is there in the world a biographer who could lay his hand upon his heart and say that he would not have seen as much significance in any other three nationalities? If Browning's ancestors had been Frenchmen, should we not have said that it was from them doubtless, then he inherited that logical agility which marks him among English poets? If his grandfather had been a Swede, should we not have said that the old sea-loving blood broke out in bold speculation and insatiable travel? If his great aunt had been a red Indian, should we not have said that only in the Ojibweys and the Blackfeet do we find the Browning fantastically combined with the Browning stoicism? This overreadiness to see's hints is an inevitable part of that secret hero worship, which is the heart of biography. The lover of great men sees signs in them long before they begin to appear on the earth, and like some old mythological chronicler, claims as their heralds, the storms and the falling stars. A certain indulgence must therefore be extended to the present writer if he declines to follow that admirable veteran of Browning's study, Dr. Furnival, into the prodigious investigations which he has been conducting into the condition of the Browning family since the beginning of the world. For his last discovery, the descent of Browning from a footman in the service of a country magnet, there seems to be suggestive, though not decisive evidence. But Browning's descent from barons or Jews or lackeys or black men is not the main point touching his family. If the Brownings were of mixed origin, they were so much the more like the great majority of English middle class people. It is curious that the romance of race should be spoken of as if it were a thing peculiarly aristocratic, that admiration for rank or interest in family should mean only interest in one, not very interesting type of rank and family. The truth is that the aristocrats exhibit less of the romance of pedigree than any other people in the world. For since it is their principle to marry only within their own class and mode of life, there is no opportunity in their case for any of the more interesting studies in heredity. They exhibit almost the unbroken uniformity of the lower animals. It is in the middle classes that we find the poetry of genealogy. It is in the suburban grocer standing at his shop door whom some wild dash of eastern or Celtic blood may drive suddenly to a whole holiday or a crime. I'm going to submit then that it is true that these legends of the Browning family have every abstract possibility, but it is a far more cogent and apposite truth that if a man had knocked at the door of every house in the street where Browning was born, he would have found similar legends in all of them. There is hardly a family in Camberwell that has not a story or two about foreign marriages a few generations back, and in all this the Browning's are simply a typical Camberwell family. The real truth about Browning and men like him can scarcely be better expressed than in the words of that very wise and witty story, Kingsley's Water Babies, in which the pedigree of the professor is treated in a manner which is an excellent example of the wild common sense of the book. His mother was a Dutch woman, and therefore she was born a Karakoa. Of course you have to read your geography, and therefore know why. And his father was a Pole, and therefore he was brought up at the Petropelovsky. Of course you have learnt your modern politics, and therefore know why. But for all that he was as thorough an Englishman, as ever coveted his neighbor's goods. It may be well, therefore, to abandon the task of obtaining a clear account of Browning's family, and endeavor to obtain what is much more important, a clear account of his home. For the great central and solid fact which these heraldic speculations tend inevitably to veil and confuse, is that Browning was a thoroughly typical Englishman of the middle class. He may have had alien blood, and that alien blood, by the paradox we have observed, may have made him more characteristically a native. A phase, a fancy, a metaphor, may or may not have been born of eastern or southern elements. But he was, without any question at all, an Englishman of the middle class. Neither all his liberality nor all his learning ever made him anything but an Englishman of the middle class. He expanded his intellectual tolerance until it included the anarchism of Fa'fain at the fair, and the blasphemous theology of Caliban. But he remained himself an Englishman of the middle class. He pictured all the passions of the earth since the fall, from the devouring amorousness of times' revenges to the despotic fantasy of Instan's Tyranus. But he remained himself an Englishman of the middle class. The moment that he came in contact with anything that was slovenly, anything that was lawless in actual life, something rose up in him older than any opinions, the blood of generations of good men. He met George Sand and her poetical circle and hated it, with all the hatred of an old city merchant for an irresponsible life. He met the spiritualists and hated them, with all the hatred of the middle class for borderlands and equivocable positions and playing with fire. His intellect went upon bewildering voyages, but his soul walked in a straight road. He piled up the fantastic towers of his imagination until they eclipsed the planets. But the plan of the foundation on which he built was always the plan of an honest English house in Kemberwell. He abandoned, with a ceaseless intellectual ambition, every one of the convictions of his class, but he carried its prejudices into eternity. It is then of Browning as a member of the middle class that we can speak with the greatest historical certainty, and it is his immediate forebears who present the real interest to us. His father, Robert Browning, was a man of great delicacy of taste and, to all appearance, of an almost exaggerated delicacy of conscience. Every glimpse we have of him suggests that earnest and almost worried kindliness, which is the mark of those to whom selfishness, even justifiable selfishness, is really a thing difficult or impossible. In early life, Robert Browning's senior was placed by his father, who was apparently a father of somewhat primitive, not to say barbaric type, in an important commercial position in the West Indies. He threw up the position, however, because it involved him in some recognition of slavery, whereupon his unique parent, in a transport of rage, not only disinherited him and flung him out of the doors, but by a superb stroke of humor which stands alone in the records of parental ingenuity, sent him in a bill for the cost of his education. About the same time that he was suffering for his moral sensibility, he was also disturbed about religious matters, and he completed his severance from his father by joining a dissenting sect. He was, in short, a very typical example of the serious middle-class man of the Wilberforce period, a man to whom duty was all and all, and who would revolutionize an empire or a continent for the satisfaction of a single moral scruple. Thus while he was Puritan at the core, not the ruthless Puritan of the 17th, but the humanitarian Puritan of the 18th century, he had upon the surface all the tastes and graces of a man of culture, numerous accomplishments of the lighter kind such as drawing and painting and watercolors he possessed, and his feeling for many kinds of literature was fastidious and exact, but the whole was absolutely redolent of the polite severity of the 18th century. He lamented his son's early admiration for Byron, and never seized adjuring him to model himself upon Pope. He was, in short, one of the old-fashioned humanitarians of the 18th century, a class which we may or may not have conquered in moral theory, but which we most certainly have not conquered in moral practice. Robert Browning Sr. destroyed all his fortunes in order to protest against black slavery. White slavery may be, as later economists tell us, a thing infinitely worse, but not many men destroy their fortunes in order to protest against it. The ideals of the men of that period appear to us very unattractive. To them duty was a kind of chilly sentiment, but when we think what they did with those cold ideals we can scarcely feel so superior. They uprooted the enormous yuppas of slavery, the tree that was literally as old as the race of man. They altered the whole face of Europe with their deductive fancies. We have ideals that are really better ideals, ideals of passion, of mysticism, of a sense of the youth and adventurousness of the earth, but it will be well for us if we achieve as much by our frenzy as they did by their delicacies. It scarcely seems as if we were as robust in our very robustness as they were robust in their sensibility. Browning's mother was the daughter of William Wiedermann, a German merchant settled in Dundee, and married to a Scotch wife. One of the poet's principal biographers has suggested that from this union of the German and Scotch, Browning got his metaphysical tendency. It is possible, but here again we must beware of the great biographical danger of making mountains out of mohills. What Browning's mother unquestionably did give to him was in the way of training a very strong religious habit and a great belief in manners. Thomas Carlisle called her the type of a Scottish gentlewoman, and the phrase has a very real significance to those who realize the peculiar condition of Scotland. One of the very few European countries where large sections of the aristocracy are Puritans. Thus a Scottish gentlewoman combines two descriptions of dignity at the same time. Little more is known of this lady except the fact that after her death Browning could not bear to look at places where she had walked. Browning's education in the formal sense reduces itself to a minimum. In very early boyhood he attended a species of dame school which, according to some of his biographers, he had apparently to leave because he was too clever to be tolerable. However this may be, he undoubtedly went afterwards to a school kept by Mr. Reddy, at which again he was marked chiefly by percussity. But the boy's education did not in truth take place at any systematic seed of education. It took place in his own home, where one of the quintess then most learned and most absurdly indulgent of fathers poured out in an endless stream fantastic recitals from the Greek epics and medieval chronicles. If we test the matter by the test of actual schools and universities, Browning will appear to be almost the least educated man in English literary history, but if we test it by the amount actually learned, we shall think that he was perhaps the most educated man that ever lived, that he was in fact, if anything, overeducated. In a spirited poem he has himself described how when he was a small child his father used to pile up chairs in the drawing-room and call them the city of Troy. Browning came out of the home crammed with all kinds of knowledge, knowledge about the Greek poets, knowledge about the provincial troubadours, knowledge about the Jewish rabbis of the Middle Ages. But along with all this knowledge he carried one definite and important piece of ignorance, an ignorance of the degree to which such knowledge was exceptional. He was no spoiled and self-conscious child, taught to regard himself as clever. In the atmosphere in which he lived learning was a pleasure, and a natural pleasure, like a sport or wine. He had in it the pleasure of some old scholar of the Renaissance when grammar itself was as fresh as the flowers of spring. He had no reason to suppose that everyone did not join in so admirable a game. His sagacious destiny, while giving him knowledge of everything else, left him in ignorance of the ignorance of the world. Of his boyish days scarcely any important trace remains, except a kind of diary which contains under one date the laconic statement Married to Wives this morning. The insane ingenuity of the biography would be quite capable of seeing in this a most suggestive foreshadowing of the sexual dualism which is so ably defended in Fafine at the Fair. A great part of his childhood was passed in the society of his only sister, Sariana, and it is a curious and touching fact that with her also he passed his last days. From his earliest babyhood he seems to have lived in a more or less stimulating mental atmosphere. But as he emerged into youth he came under great poetic influences which made his father's classical poetic tradition look for the time in Sipid. Everything began to live in the life of his own age. As a young man he attended classes at university college. Beyond this there is little evidence that he was much in touch with intellectual circles outside that of his own family. But the forces that were moving the literary world had long passed beyond the merely literary area. Upon the time of Browning's boyhood a very subtle and profound change was beginning in the intellectual atmosphere of such homes as that of the Browning's. In studying the careers of great men we tend constantly to forget that their youth was generally passed and their characters practically formed in a period long previous to their appearance in history. We think of Milton, the Restoration Puritan, and forget that he grew up in the living shadow of Shakespeare and the full summer of the Elizabethan drama. We realize Garibaldi as a sudden and almost miraculous figure rising about fifty years ago to create the new Kingdom of Italy. And we forget that he must have formed his first ideas of liberty while hearing at his father's dinner table that Napoleon was the master of Europe. Similarly we think of Browning as the great Victorian poet who lived long enough to have opinions on Mr. Gladstone's home rural bill, and forget that as a young man he passed a book stall and saw a volume ticketed Mr. Shelley's aesthetic poem and had to search even in his own really cultivated circle for someone who could tell him who Mr. Shelley was. Browning wasn't short born in the afterglow of the greatest revolution. The French Revolution was at root a thoroughly optimistic thing. It may seem strange to attribute optimism to anything so destructive, but in truth this particular kind of optimism is inevitably and by its nature destructive. The great dormant idea of the whole of that period, the period before, during, and long after the revolution, is the idea that man would, by his nature, live in an Eden of dignity, liberty, and love, and that artificial and decrepit systems are keeping him out of that Eden. No one can do the least justice to the great Jacobians who does not realize that to them breaking the civilization of ages was like breaking the cords of a treasure chest. And just as for more than a century great men had dreamed of this bountiful emancipation, so the dream began in the time of Keats and Shelley to creep down among the dullest professions and the most prosaic classes of society. A spirit of revolt was growing among the young of the middle classes which had nothing at all in common with a complete and pessimistic revolt against all things in heaven or earth, which has been fashionable among the young in more recent times. The Shelley and enthusiast was altogether on the side of existence. He thought that every cloud and clump of grass shared his strict republican orthodoxy. He represented in short a revolt of the normal against the abnormal. He found himself, so to speak, in the heart of a holy, topsy-turvy and blasphemous state of things in which God was rebelling against Satan. There began to arise about this time a race of young men like Keats, members of a not highly cultivated middle class and even of classes lower, who felt in a hundred ways this obscure alliance with eternal things against temporal and practical ones, and who lived on its imaginative delight. They were a kind of furtive universalist. They had discovered the whole cosmos, and they kept the whole cosmos a secret. They climbed up dark stairs to meager garrets and shut themselves in with the gods. Numbers of the great men who afterwards illuminated the Victorian era were at this time living in mean streets in magnificent daydreams. Ruskin was solemnly visiting his solemn suburban ants. Dickens was going to and fro in a blacking factory. Carlisle, slightly older, was still lingering on a poor farm in Doomfresher. Keats had not long become the assistant of the country surgeon when Browning was a boy in Camberwell. On all sides there was the first beginnings of the aesthetic stir in the middle classes, which expressed itself in the combination of so many poetic lives with so many prosaic livelihoods. It was the age of inspired office boys. Browning grew up then with the growing fame of Shelley and Keats in the atmosphere of literary youth, fierce and beautiful, among new poets who believed in a new world. It is important to remember this, because the real Browning was a quite different person from the grim moralist and metaphysician who is seen through the spectacles of Browning societies and university extension lectures. Browning was first and foremost a poet, a man made to enjoy all things, visible and invisible, a priest of the higher passions. The misunderstanding that has supposed him to be other than poetical, because his form was often fanciful and abrupt, is really different from the misunderstanding which attaches to most other poets. The opponents of Victor Hugo called him a mere windbag. The opponents of Shakespeare called him a buffoon. But the admirers of Hugo and Shakespeare at least knew better. Now the admirers and opponents of Browning alike make him out to be a pedant rather than a poet. The only difference between the Browning Knight and the anti-Browning Knight is that the second says he was not a poet but a mere philosopher, and the first says that he was a philosopher and not a mere poet. The admirer disparages poetry in order to exalt Browning. The opponent exalts poetry in order to disparage Browning. And all the time Browning himself exalted poetry above all earthly things, served it with single-hearted intensity, and stands among the few poets who hardly wrote a line of anything else. The whole of the boyhood and youth of Robert Browning has as much the quality of pure poetry as the boyhood and youth of Shelley. We do not find in it any trace of the analytical Browning who is believed in by learned ladies and gentlemen. How indeed would such sympathizers feel if informed that the first poems that Browning wrote in a volume called Incundita were noticed to contain the fault of too much splendor of language and too little wealth of thought. They were indeed byronic in the extreme, and Browning in his earlier appearances in society presents himself in quite a romantic manner. MacReady, the actor, wrote of him, he looks and speaks more like a young poet than anyone I have ever seen. A picturesque tradition remains that Thomas Carlisle, writing out upon one of his solitary gallops necessitated by his physical sufferings, was stopped by one whom he described as strangely beautiful youth, who poured out to him without preface or apology his admiration for the great philosopher's works. Browning at this time seems to have left upon many people this impression of physical charm. A friend who attended University College with him says, he was then a bright, handsome youth with long black hair falling over his shoulders. Every tale that remains of him in connection with this period asserts and reasserts the completely romantic spirit by which he was then possessed. He was fond, for example, of following in the track of Gypsy caravans, far across country, and a song which he heard with a refrain, following the Queen of the Gypsies O, rang in his ears long enough to express itself in his sober and later days in that splendid poem of the spirit of escape and bohemianism, The Flight of the Duchess. Such other of these early glimpses of him as remains depict him as striding across Wimbledon Common with his hair blowing in the wind, reciting aloud passages from Isaiah, or climbing up into the Elms above Norwood, to look over London by night. It was when looking down from that suburban ivory over the whole confounding labyrinth of London, that he was filled with that great irresponsible benevolence which is the best of the joys of youth, and conceived the idea of a perfectly irresponsible benevolence in the first plan of Pippa Passes. At the end of his father's garden was a labyrinth, heavy with his weight of gold, and in the tree two nightingales were in the habit of singing against each other, a form of competition which, I imagine, has since become less common in Camberwell. When Browning as a boy was intoxicated with the poetry of Shelley and Keats, he hypnotized himself into something approaching to a positive conviction that these two birds were the spirits of the two great poets who had settled in a Camberwell garden in order to sing to the only young gentlemen who really adored and understood them. This last story is perhaps the most typical of the tone common to all the rest. It would be difficult to find a story which across the gulf of nearly eighty years awakens so vividly a sense of the sumptuous folly of an intellectual boyhood. With Browning, as with all true poets, passion came first and made intellectual expression. The hunger for beauty, making literature as the hunger for bread, made a plow. The life he lived in those early days was no life of dull applications. There was no poet whose youth was so young. When he was full of years and fame and delineating in great epics the beauty and horror of the romance of Southern Europe, a young man thinking to please him said, There is no romance now except in Italy. Well, said Browning, I should make an exception of Camberwell. Such glimpses will serve to indicate the kind of essential issue that there was in the nature of things between the generation of Browning and the generation of his father. Browning was bound in the nature of things to become at the outset bironic, and vironism was not, of course, in reality so much a pessimism about civilized things as an optimism about savage things. This great revolt, on behalf of the elemental, which Keats and Shelley represented, was bound first of all to occur. Robert Browning Jr. had to be part of it, and Robert Browning Sr. had to go back to his watercolors and the faultless couplets of Pope with the full sense of the greatest pathos that the world contains, the pathos of the man who has produced something he cannot understand, the earliest works of Browning, beer witness without exception to this ardent and somewhat sentimental evolution. Pauline appeared anonymously in 1833. It exhibits the characteristic mark of a juvenile poem, the general suggestion that the author is a thousand years old. Browning calls it a fragment of a confession, and Mr. Johnson Fox, an old friend of Browning's father, who reviewed it for Tate's magazine, said with truth that it would be difficult to find anything more purely confessional. It is the typical confession of a boy laying bare all the spiritual crimes of infidelity and moral waste in a state of genuine ignorance of the fact that everyone else has committed them. It is wholesome and natural for youth to go about confessing that the grass is green and whispering to a priest Horsley that he has found a son in heaven. But the records of that particular period of development, even when they are as ornate and beautiful as Pauline, are not necessarily or invariably wholesome reading. The chief interest of Pauline with all his beauties lies in a certain almost humorous singularity, the fact that Browning, of all people, should have signalized his entrance into the world of letters, with a poem which may fairly be called Morbid. But this is a morbidity so general and recurrent that it may be called in a contradictory phrase a healthy morbidity. It is a kind of intellectual measles. No one of any degree of maturity in reading Pauline will be quite so horrified at the sins of the young gentleman who tells the story, as he seems to be himself. It is the utterance of that bitter and heart-rending period of youth which comes before we realize the one grand and logical basis of all optimism, the doctrine of original sin. The boy at this stage, being an ignorant and inhuman idealist, regards all his faults as frightful, secret malformations, and it is only later that he becomes conscious of that large and beautiful and benigned explanation that the heart of man is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked. That Browning, whose judgment on his own work was one of the best in the world, took this view of Pauline in after years is quite obvious. He displayed a very manly and unique capacity of really laughing at his own work without being in the least ashamed of it. This, he said of Pauline, is the only crab-apple that remains of the shapely tree of life in my fool's paradise. It would be difficult to express the matter more perfectly. Although Pauline was published anonymously, its authorship was known to a certain circle, and Browning began to form friendships in the literary world. He had already become acquainted with two of the best friends he was ever destined to have, Alfred Domet, celebrated in The Guardian Angel, and Waring and his cousin Silverthorn, whose death is spoken of in one of the most perfect lyrics in the English language. Browning's May and Death These were men of his own age, and his manner of speaking of them gives us many glimpses into that splendid world of comradeship which Plato and Walt Whitman knew with his endless days and its immortal nights. Browning had a third friend destined to play an even greater part in his life, but who belonged to an older generation at a state leader's school of manners and scholarship. Mr. Kenyon was a school fellow of Browning's father, and occupied towards his son something of the position of an irresponsible uncle. He was a rotund rosy old gentleman, fond of comfort and the courtesies of life, but fond of them more for others, though much for himself. Elizabeth Barrett in After Years wrote of the brightness of his carved speech, which would appear to suggest that he practiced that urbane in precise order of wit, which was even then old-fashioned. Yet notwithstanding many talents of this kind, he was not so much an able man as the natural friend and equal of the able man. Browning's circle of friends, however, widened about this time in all directions. One friend in particular he made, the Comte de Repère Montclair, a French royalist with whom he prosecuted with renewed energy his studies of the medieval and renaissance schools of philosophy. It was the Count, who suggested that Browning should write a poetical play on the subject of Paracelsus. After reflection indeed, the Count retracted this advice on the ground that the history of that great mystic gave no room for love. Undismayed by this terrible deficiency, Browning caught up the idea with characteristic enthusiasm, and in 1835 appeared the first of his works, which he himself regarded as representative, Paracelsus. A poem shows an enormous advance in technical literary power, but in the history of Browning's mind it is chiefly interesting as giving example of a peculiarity which clung to him during the whole of his literary life, an intense love of the holes and corners of history. Fifty-two years afterward he wrote, Parlayings with certain persons of importance in their day, the last poem published in his lifetime, and any reader of that remarkable work will perceive the common characteristic of all these persons is not so much that they were of importance in their day as if they are of no importance in ours. The same eccentric fastidiousness worked in him as a young man when he wrote Paracelsus and Sordello. Nowhere in Browning's poetry can we find any very exhaustive study of any of the great men who are the favorites of the poet and moralist. He has written about philosophy and ambition and music and morals, but he has written nothing about Socrates or Caesar or Napoleon or Beethoven or Mozart or Buddha or Muhammad. When he wishes to describe a political ambition, he selects that entirely unknown individual, King Victor of Sardinia, when he wishes to express the most perfect soul of music, he honors some extraordinary persons called Ept Vogler and Master Hughes of Saxe Gotha. When he wishes to express the largest and sublimest scheme of morals and religion which his imagination can conceive, he does not put it into the mouth of any of the great spiritual leaders of mankind, but into the mouth of an obscure Jewish rabbi of the name of Ben Ezra. It is fully in accordance with this fascinating craze of his that when he wishes to study the deification of the intellect and the disinterested pursuit of the things of the mind, he does not select any of the great philosophers from Plato to Darwin whose investigations are still of some importance in the eyes of the world. He selects the figure of all figures most covered with modern satire and pity, the a priori scientist of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. His supreme type of the human intellect is neither the academic nor the positivist, but the alchemist. It is difficult to imagine the turn of mind constituting a more complete challenge to the ordinary modern point of view. To the intellect of our time, the wild investigators of the School of Paracelsus seem to be the very crown and flower of utility. They are collectors of straws and careful misers of dust, but for all that Browning was right. Any critic who understands the true spirit of medieval science can see that he was right. No critic can see how right he was unless he understands the spirit of medieval science as thoroughly as Browning did. In the character of Paracelsus, Browning wished to paint the dangers and disappointments which attend the man who believes merely in the intellect. He wished to depict the fall of the logician, and with a perfect and unearing instinct he selected a man who wrote and spoke in the tradition of the Middle Ages, the most thoroughly and even painfully logical period that the world has ever seen. If he had chosen an ancient Greek philosopher, it would have been open to the critic to have said that the philosopher relied to some extent upon the most sunny and graceful social life that ever flourished. If he had made him a modern sociological professor, it would have been possible to object that his energies were not wholly concerned with truth, but partly with the solid and material satisfaction of society. But the man truly devoted to the things of the mind was the medieval magician. It is a remarkable fact that one civilization does not satisfy itself by calling another civilization wicked. It calls it uncivilized. We call the Chinese barbarians, and they call us barbarians. The medieval state, like China, was foreign civilization, and this was its supreme characteristic, that it cared for the things of the mind for their own sake. To complain of the researches of its age on the ground that they were not materially fruitful is to act as we should act in telling a gardener that his roses were not as digestible as our cabbages. It is not only true that the medieval philosophers never discovered the steam engine. It is quite equally true that they never tried. The Eden of the Middle Ages was really a garden where each of God's flowers, truth and beauty and reason flourished for its own sake and with its own name. The Eden of modern progress is a kitchen garden. It would have been hard, therefore, for Browning to have chosen a better example for his study of intellectual egotism than Paracelsus. Modern life accuses the medieval tradition of crushing the intellect. Browning, with a truer instinct, accuses that tradition of over-glorifying it. There is, however, another and even more important deduction to be made from the moral of Paracelsus. The usual accusation against Browning is that he was consumed with logic, that he thought all subjects to be the proper pablum of intellectual disquisition, that he glorified chiefly in his own power of plucking knots to pieces and rending fallacies in two, and that to this method he sacrificed deliberately and with complete self-complacency the element of poetry and sentiment. To people who imagined Browning to have been this frigid believer in the intellect, there is only one answer necessary or sufficient. It is the fact that he wrote a play designed to destroy the whole of this intellectual fallacy at the age of twenty-three. Robert Browning by G. K. Chesterton. Section 4. Chapter 1. Browning in Early Life. Part 4. Paracelsus was in all likelihood Browning's introduction to the literary world. It was many years and even many decades before he had anything like public appreciation. But a very great part of the minority of those who were destined to appreciate him came over to his standard upon the publication of Paracelsus. The celebrated John Forster had taken up Paracelsus as a thing to slate, and had ended its perusal with the wildest curiosity about the author and his works. John Stuart Mill, never backward in generosity, had already interested himself in Browning, and was finally converted by the same poem. Among other early admirers were Lander, Leigh Hunt, Horn, Sargent, Telford, and Moncton Milne's. One man of even greater literary stature seems to have come into Browning's life about this time, a man for whom he had never ceased to have the warmest affection and trust. Browning was indeed one of the very few men of that period who got on perfectly with Thomas Carlisle. It is precisely one of those little things which speak volumes for the honesty and unfathomable good humor of Browning. The Carlisle who had a reckless contempt for most other poets of his day had something amounting to a real attachment to him. He would run over to Paris for the mere privilege of dining with him. Browning, on the other hand, with characteristic impetuosity, passionately defended and justified Carlisle in all companies. I have just seen dear Carlisle, he writes on one occasion, catch me calling people dear in a hurry, except in a letter beginning. He sided with Carlisle in the vexed question of the Carlisle domestic relations, and his impression of Mrs. Carlisle was that she was a hard, unlovable woman. As, however, it is on record that he once, while excitedly explaining some point of mystical philosophy, put down Mrs. Carlisle's hot kettle on the hearth rug, any fragility that he may have observed in her manner may possibly find a natural explanation. His partisanship in the Carlisle affair, which was characteristically headlong and human, may not throw much light on that painful problem itself, but it throws a great deal of light on the character of Browning, which was pugnaciously proud of its friends and had what may almost be called a lust of loyalty. Browning was not capable of that most sagacious detachment which enabled Tennyson to say that he could not agree that the Carlisles ought never to have married, since if they had married elsewhere there would have been four miserable people instead of two. Among the motley and brilliant crowd with which Browning had now begun to mingle, there was no figure more eccentric and spontaneous than that of McCready, the actor. This extraordinary person, a man living from hand to mouth in all things spiritual and pecuniary, a man feeding upon flying emotions conceived something like an attraction towards Browning, spoke of him as the very ideal of a young poet, and in a moment of peculiar excitement suggested to him the writing of a great play. Browning was a man fundamentally indeed more steadfast and prosaic, but on the surface fully as rapid and easily infected as McCready. He immediately began to plan out a great historical play, and selected for his subject Strafford. In Browning's treatment of the subject there is something more than a trace of his Puritan and liberal upring. It is one of the very earliest of the really important works in English literature which are based on the parliamentarian reading of the incidents of the time of Charles I. It is true that the finest element in the play is the opposition between Strafford and Pym, an opposition so complete, so lucid, so consistent, that it has so to speak something of the friendly openness and agreement which belongs to an alliance. The two men love each other and fight each other and do the two things at the same time completely. This is a great thing, of which even to attempt the description. It is easy to have the impartiality which can speak judicially of both parties, but it is not so easy to have that larger and higher impartiality which can speak passionately on behalf of both parties. Nevertheless it may be permissible to repeat that there is in the play a definite trace of Browning's Puritan education and Puritan historical outlook. For Strafford is, of course, an example of that most difficult of all literary works, the political play. The thing has been achieved, once at least admirably, in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, and something like it, though from a more one-sided and romantic standpoint, has been excellently done in La Aglain. But the difficulties of such a play are obvious on the face of the matter. In a political play, the principal characters are not merely men, they are symbols, erythmetical figures representing millions of other men outside. It is, by dint of elaborate stage management, possible to bring a mob upon the boards, but the largest mob ever known is nothing but a floating atom of the people, and the people of which the politician has to think does not consist of knots of rioters in the street, but of some million absolutely distinct individuals, each sitting in his own breakfast-room, reading his own morning paper. To give even the faintest suggestion of the strength and size of the people in this sense of the course of a dramatic performance is obviously impossible. That is why it is so easy on the stage to concentrate all the pathos in dignity upon such persons as Charles I and Mary Queen of Scots. The vampires of their people, because within the minute limits of the stage there is room for their small virtues and no room for their enormous crimes. It would be impossible to find a stronger example than the case of Stratford. It is clear that no one could possibly tell the whole truths about the life and death of Stratford, politically considered in a play. Stratford was one of the greatest men ever born in England, and he attempted to find a great English official despotism. That is to say, he attempted to find something which is so different from what has actually come about, that we can in reality scarcely judge of it any more than we can judge whether it would be better to live in another planet or pleasanter to have been born a dog or an elephant. It would require enormous imagination to reconstruct the political ideals of Stratford. Now Browning, as we all know, got over the matter in his play by practically denying that Stratford had any political ideas at all. That is to say, while crediting Stratford with all his real majesty of intellect and character, he makes the whole of his political action dependent upon his passionate personal attachment to the king. This is unsatisfactory. It is in reality a dodging of the great difficulty of the political play. That difficulty, in the case of any political problem, is, as has been said, great. It would be very hard, for example, to construct a play about Mr. Gladstone's home rule bill. It would be almost impossible to get expressed in a drama of some five acts and some twenty characters, anything so ancient and complicated as that Irish problem, the roots of which lie in the darkness of the age of Strongbow and the branches of which spread out to the remotest commonwealths of the East and West. But we should scarcely be satisfied if a dramatist overcame the difficulty by ascribing Mr. Gladstone's action in the home rule question to an overwhelming personal affection for Mr. Healy, and in thus spacing Stratford's action upon personal and private reasons, Browning certainly does some injustice to the political greatness of Stratford. To attribute Mr. Gladstone's conversion to home rule, to an infatuation such as that suggested above, would certainly have the air of implying that the writer thought the home rule doctrine a peculiar or untenable one. Similarly, Browning's choice of a motive for Stratford has very much the air of an assumption that there was nothing to be said on public grounds for Stratford's political ideal. Now, this is certainly not the case. The Puritans, in the great struggles of the reign of Charles I, may have possessed more valuable ideals than the royalists, but it is a very vulgar error to suppose that they were any more idealistic. In Browning's play, Pym is made almost the incarnation of public spirit and Stratford of private ties. But not only may an upholder of despotism be public spirited, but in the case of prominent upholders of it like Stratford, he generally is. Despotism indeed, and attempts at despotism, like that of Stratford, are a kind of disease of public spirit. They represent, as it were, the drunkenness of responsibility. It is when men begin to grow desperate in their love for the people, when they are overwhelmed with the difficulties and blunders of humanity, that they fall back on a wild desire to manage everything themselves. Their faith in themselves is only a disillusionment with mankind. They are in that most dreadful position, dreadful alike in personal and public affairs, the position of the man who has lost faith and not lost love. This belief that all would go right if we could only get the strings into our own hands is a fallacy almost without exception. But nobody can justly say that it is not public spirited. The sin and sorrow of despotism is not that it does not love men, but that it loves them too much and trusts them too little. Therefore, from age to age in history arise these great despotic dreamers, whether they be royalists or imperialists or even socialists, who have at root this idea that the world would enter into rest if it went their way and force war altogether the right of going its own way. When a man begins to think that the grass will not grow at night unless he lies awake to watch it, he generally ends either in an asylum or on the throne of an emperor. Of these men, Strafford was one, and we cannot but feel that Browning somewhat narrows the significance and tragedy of his place in history by making him merely the champion of a personal idiosyncrasy against a great public demand. Strafford was something greater than this. If indeed, when we come to think of it, a man can be anything greater than the friend of another man. But the whole question is interesting, because Browning, although he never again attacked a political drama of such palpable importance as Strafford, could never keep politics altogether out of his dramatic work. King Victor and King Charles, which followed it, is a political play. The study of a despotic instinct much meaner than that of Strafford. Coulomb's birthday again is political as well as romantic. Politics, in its historic aspect, would seem to have had a great fascination for him, as indeed it must have for all ardent intellect, since it is the one thing in the world that is as intellectual as the Encyclopedia Britannica, and as rapid as the Derby. One of the favorite subjects among those who like to conduct long controversies about Browning, and their name is Legion, is the question of whether Browning's plays, such as Strafford, were successes upon the stage, as they are never agreed about what constitutes a success on the stage. It is difficult to adjudge their quarrels. But the general fact is very simple. Such a play as Strafford was not a gigantic theatrical success, and nobody, it is to be presumed, ever imagined that it would be. On the other hand, it was certainly not a failure, but was enjoyed and applauded as are hundreds of excellent plays which run only for a week or two, as many excellent plays do, and as all plays ought to do. Above all, the definite success which attended the representation of Strafford from the point of view of the more educated and appreciative, was quite enough to establish Browning in a certain definite literary position. As a classical and established personality, he did not come into his kingdom for years and decades afterwards. Not indeed, until he was near to entering upon the final rest, but as the detached and eccentric personality, as a man who existed and who had arisen on the outskirts of literature, the world began to be conscious of him at this time. Of what he was personally at the period that he thus became personally apparent, Mrs. Bright L. Fox has left a very vivid little sketch. She describes how Browning called at the house, he was acquainted with her father, and finding that gentleman out asked with a kind of abrupt politeness if he might play on the piano. This touch is very characteristic of the mingled aplomb and unconsciousness of Browning's social manner. He was, then, she writes, slim and dark and very handsome, and, may I hint at it, just the trifle of a dandy, addicted to lemon-colored kid gloves and such things, quite the glass of fashion and the mold of form. But full of ambition, eager for success, eager for fame, and what is more determined to conquer fame and to achieve success. It is as good a portrait as we can have of the Browning of these days. Quite self-satisfied but not self-conscious young man, one who had outgrown, but only just outgrown, the pure romanticism of his boyhood, which made him run after gypsy caravans and listen to nightingales in the wood. A man whose incandescent vitality, now that it had abandoned gypsies, and had not yet immersed itself in causistical poems, devoted itself excitedly to trifles such as lemon-colored kid gloves and fame. But a man still above all things, perfectly young and natural, professing that fabric which follows the fashions, and not that sillier and more demoralizing fabric which defies them, just as he walked in coolly and yet impulsively into a private drawing-room and offered to play, so he walked at this time into the huge and crowded salon of European literature and offered to sing. Robert Browning by G. K. Chesterton Section 5 Chapter 2 Early Works, Part 1 In 1840 Sordello was published. Its reception by the great majority of readers, including some of the ableist men of the time, was a reception of a kind probably unknown in the rest of literary history, a reception that was neither praise nor blame. It was perhaps best expressed by Carlisle, who wrote to say that his wife had read Sordello with great interest, and wished to know whether Sordello was a man, or a city, or a book. Better known, of course, is the story of Tennyson, who said that the first line of the poem, who will, may hear Sordello's story told, and the last line, who would, has heard Sordello's story told, were the only two lines in the poem that he understood, and they were lies. Perhaps the best story, however, of all the cycle of Sordello legends, is that which is related to Douglas Gerald. He was recovering from an illness, and having obtained permission for the first time to read a little during the day, he picked up a book from a pile beside the bed and began Sordello. No sooner had he done so than he turned deadly pale, put down the book and said, My God, I'm an idiot. My health is restored, but my mind's gone. I can't understand two consecutive lines of an English poem. He then summoned his family and silently gave the book into their hands, asking for their opinions on the poem, and as the shadow of perplexity gradually passed over their faces, he heaved a sigh of relief, and went to sleep. These stories, whether accurate or not, do undoubtedly represent the very peculiar reception accorded to Sordello. A reception which, as I have said, bears no resemblance whatever to anything in the way of eulogy or condemnation that has ever been accorded to a work of art before. There had been authors whom it was fashionable to boast of admiring, and authors whom it was fashionable to boast of despising. But with Sordello enters into literary history the browning of popular bandinage, the author whom it is fashionable to boast of not understanding. Putting aside for the moment the literary qualities which are to be found in the poem, when it becomes intelligible, there is one question very relevant to the fame and character of browning which is raised by Sordello when it is considered, as most people consider it, as hopelessly unintelligible. It really throws some light upon the reason of Browning's obscurity. The ordinary theory of Browning's obscurity is to the effect that it was a piece of intellectual vanity indulged in more and more insolently as his years and fame increased. There are at least two very decisive objections to this popular explanation. In the first place it must emphatically be said for Browning that in all the numerous records and impressions of him throughout his long and very public life there is not one iota of evidence that he was a man who was intellectually vain. The evidence is entirely the other way. He was vain of many things, of his physical health, for example, and even more of the physical health which he contrived to bestow for a certain period upon his wife. From the records of his early dandyism, his flowing hair, and his lemon-colored gloves, it is probable enough that he was vain of his good looks. He was vain of his masculinity, his knowledge of the world, and he was, I fancy, decidedly vain of his prejudices, even it might be said, vain of being vain of them. But everything is against the idea that he was much in the habit of thinking of himself in his intellectual aspect. In the matter of conversation, for example, some people who liked him found him genial, talkative, anecdotal, with a certain strengthening and sensitive quality in his mere bodily presence. Some people who did not like him found him a mere frivolous chatterer, afflicted with bad manners. One lady, who knew him well, said that though he only met you in a crowd and made some commonplace remark, you went for the rest of the day with your head up. Another lady who did not know him and therefore disliked him, asked after a dinner party, who was that too exuberant financier? These are the diversities of feelings about him. But they all agree in one point that he did not talk cleverly or try to talk cleverly as that proceeding is understood in literary circles. He talked positively. He talked a great deal. But he never attempted to give that neat and aesthetic character to his speech, which is almost invariable in the case of the man who is vain of his mental superiority. When he did impress people with his mental gymnastics, it was mostly in the form of pouring out with passionate enthusiasm, whole epics written by other people, which is the last thing that the literary egoist would be likely to waste his time over. We have therefore to start with an enormous psychological improbability that Browning made his poems complicated from mere pride in his powers and contempt of his readers. There is, however, another very practical objection to the ordinary theory that Browning's obscurity was a part of the intoxication of fame and intellectual consideration. We constantly hear the statement that Browning's intellectual complexity increased with his later poems. But the statement is simply not true. Sordello, to the indescribable density of which he never afterwards even approached, was begun and was therefore the third of his works. And even if we adopt his own habit of ignoring Pauline II, he wrote the greater part of it when he was twenty-four. It was in his youth, at the time when a man is thinking of love and publicity, of sunshine and singing birds, that he gave birth to this horror of great darkness. And the more we study the matter with any knowledge of the nature of youth, the more we shall come to the conclusion that Browning's obscurity had altogether the opposite origin to that which is usually assigned to it. He was not unintelligible because he was proud, but unintelligible because he was humble. He was not unintelligible because his thoughts were vague, but because to him they were obvious. A man who is intellectually vain does not make himself incomprehensible because he is so enormously impressed with the difference between his reader's intelligence and his own that he talks down to them with elaborate repetition and lucidity. What poet was ever vainer than Byron? What poet was ever so magnificently lucid? But a young man of genius who has a genuine humility in his heart does not elaborately explain his discoveries because he does not think that they are discoveries. He thinks that the whole street is humming with his ideas and that the postman and the tailor are poets like himself. Browning's impenetrable poetry was the natural expression of this beautiful optimism. Sardello was the most glorious compliment that has ever been paid to the average man. In the same manner, of course, outward obscurity is in a young author a mark of inward clarity. A man who is vague in his ideas does not speak obscurely because his own dazed and drifting condition leads him to clutch at phrases like ropes and use the formula that everyone understands. No one ever found Miss Marie Corelli obscure because she believes only in words. But if a young man really has ideas of his own, he must be obscure at first because he lives in a world of his own in which there are symbols and correspondences and categories unknown to the rest of the world. Let us take an imaginary example. Suppose that a young poet had developed by himself a peculiar idea that all forms of excitement, including religious excitement, were a kind of evil intoxication. He might say to himself continually that churches were in reality taverns, and this idea would become so fixed in his mind that he would forget that no such association existed in the minds of others. And suppose that in pursuance of this general idea, which is a perfectly clear and intellectual idea, though a very silly one, he were to say that he believed in Puritanism without its theology, and were to repeat this idea also to himself until it became instinctive and familiar. Such a man might take up a pen, and under the impression that he was saying something figurative indeed but quite clear and suggestive, write some such sentence as this. You will not get the godless Puritan into your white taverns. And no one in the length and breadth of the country could form the remotest notion of what he could mean. So it would have been in any example, for instance of a man who made some philosophical discovery and did not realize how far the world was from it. If it had been possible for a poet in the sixteenth century to hit upon and learn to regard as obvious the evolutionary theory of Darwin, he might have written down such line as the radiant offspring of the ape. And the maddest volumes of medieval natural history would have been ransacked for the meaning of the illusion. The more fixed and solid and sensible the idea appeared to him, the more dark and fantastic it would have appeared to the world. Most of us indeed, if we ever say anything valuable, say it when we are giving expression to that part of us which has become as familiar and invisible as the pattern on our wallpaper. It is only when an idea has become a matter of course to the thinker that it becomes startling to the world. It is worthwhile to dwell upon this preliminary point of the ground of Browning's obscurity, because it involves an important issue about him. Our whole view of Browning is bound to be absolutely different and I think absolutely false if we start with the conception that he was what the French call an intellectual. If we see Browning with the eyes of his particular followers, we shall invariably think this, for his followers are preeminently intellectuals, and there never lived upon the earth a great man who was so fundamentally different from his followers. Indeed, he felt this hardly and even humorously himself. Wilkes was no Wilkite, he said, and I am very far from being a Browningite. We shall, as I say, utterly misunderstand Browning at every step of his career if we suppose that he was the sort of man who would be likely to take a pleasure in asserting the subtlety and obtuseness of his message. He took pleasure beyond all question in himself, in the strictest sense of the word he enjoyed himself. But his conception of himself was never that of the intellectual. He conceived himself rather as the sanguine and strenuous man, a great fighter. I was ever, he says, a fighter. His faults, a certain occasional fierceness and grossness, were the faults that are countered as virtues among navvies and sailors and most primitive men. His virtues, boyishness and absolute fidelity and a love of plain words and things, are the virtues which are countered as vices among the aesthetic prigs, who pay him the greatest honour. He had his more objectionable side, like other men, but it had nothing to do with his literary egotism. He was not vain of being an extraordinary man. He was only somewhat excessively vain of being an ordinary one. The Browning, then, who published Sordello, we have to conceive not as a young pedant anxious to exaggerate his superiority to the public, but as a hot-headed, strong-minded, inexperienced and essentially humble man, who had more ideas than he knew how to disentangle from each other. If we compare, for example, the complexity of Browning with the clarity of Matthew Arnold, we shall realize that the cause lies in the fact that Matthew Arnold was an intellectual aristocrat and Browning an intellectual democrat. The particular peculiarities of Sordello illustrate the matter very significantly. A very great part of the difficulty of Sordello, for instance, is in the fact that, before the reader even approaches to tackling the difficulties of Browning's actual narrative, he is apparently expected to start with an exhaustive knowledge of that most shadowy and bewildering of all human epics, the period of the gulf, and the gibbeline struggles in medieval Italy. Here, of course, Browning simply betrays that impetuous humility which we have previously observed. His father was a student of medieval chronicles. He had himself imbibed that learning in the same casual manner in which a boy learns to walk or to play cricket. Consequently, in a literary sense, he rushed up to the first person he met and began talking about echelot and torrello salinguera, with about as much literary egotism as in English baby shows when it talks English to an Italian organ grinder. Beyond this, the poem of Sordello, powerful as it is, does not present any very significant advance in Browning's mental development on that already represented by Pauline and Paracelsus. Pauline, Paracelsus, and Sordello stand together in the general fact that they are all, in excellent phrase, used about the first by Mr. Johnson Fox, confessional. All three are analyses of the weakness which every artistic temperament finds in itself. Browning is still writing about himself, a subject of which he, like all good and brave men, was profoundly ignorant. This kind of self-analysis is always misleading, for we do not see in ourselves those dominant traits strong enough to force themselves out in action which our neighbors see. We see only a welter of minute mental experiences, which include all the sins that ever were committed by Nero or Sir Willoughby pattern. When studying ourselves, we are looking at a fresco with a magnifying glass. Consequently these early impressions which great men have given of themselves are nearly always slanders upon themselves, for the strongest man is weak to his own conscience, and Hamlet flourished to a certainty even inside Napoleon. So it was with Browning who, when he was nearly eighty, was destined to write with the hilarity of a schoolboy, but who wrote in his boyhood poems devoted to analyzing the final break-up of the intellect and soul. Sardello, with all its load of learning and almost more oppressive load of beauty, has never had any very important influence, even upon Browningites, and with the rest of the world the name has passed into a jest. The most truly remarkable thing about it was Browning's saying in answer to all jibes and misconceptions, a saying which expresses better than anything else what genuine metal was in him. I blame no one, least of all myself, who did my best then and since. This is indeed a model for men of all letters who do not wish to retain only the letters and to lose the man. When next Browning spoke it was from a greater height and with a new voice. His visit to Asolo, his first love, as he said, among Italian cities, coincided with the stirrer and transformation in his spirit and the breaking up of the splendid Palace of Mirrors in which a man like Byron had lived and died. In 1841 Pippa Passes appeared, and with it the real Browning of the modern world. He had made the discovery, which Byron never made, but which almost every young man does at last make, the thrilling discovery that he is not Robinson Caruso. Pippa Passes is the greatest poem ever written, with the exception of one or two by Walt Whitman to express the sentiment of the pure love of humanity. The phrase has, unfortunately, a false and pedantic sound. The love of humanity is a thing supposed to be professed only by vulgar and officious philanthropists or by saints of a superhuman detachment and universality. As a matter of fact, love of humanity is the commonest and most natural of the feelings of a fresh nature, and almost everyone has felt it alike capriciously upon him when looking at a crowded park or a room full of dancers. The love of those whom we do not know is quite as eternal a sentiment as the love of those whom we do know. In our friends the richness of life is proved to us by what we have gained. In the faces, in the street, the richness of life is proved to us by the hand of what we have lost. And this feeling for strange faces and strange lives, when it is felt keenly by a young man, almost always expresses itself in desire after a kind of vagabond beneficence, a desire to go through the world's scattering goodness like a precious god. It is desired that mankind should hunt in vain for its best friend as it would hunt for a criminal, that he should be an anonymous savior and unrecorded Christ. Browning, like everyone else, when awakened to the beauty and variety of men, dreamed of this arrogant self-effacement. He has written of himself that he had long thought vaguely of a being passing through the world obscure and unnameable, but molding the destinies of others to mightier and better issues. Then his almost faultless artistic instinct came in and suggested that this being whom he dramatized as the work-girl Pippa should be even unconscious of anything but her own happiness, and should sway men's lives with a lonely mirth. It was a bold and moving conception to show us these mature and tragic human groups, all at the supreme moment of eavesdropping upon the solitude of a child. And it was an even more precise instinct which made Browning make the errant benefactor a woman. A man's good work is affected by doing what he does, a woman's by being what she is. There is one other point about Pippa passes which is worth a moment's attention. The great difficulty with regard to the understanding of Browning is the fact that to all appearance scarcely anyone can be induced to take him seriously as a literary artist. His adversaries consider his literary vagaries as disqualifications for every position among poets, and his admirers regard those vagaries with the affectionate indulgence of a circle of maiden ants towards a boy home for the holidays. Browning is supposed to do as he likes with form because he had such a profound scheme of thought. But as a matter of fact, though few of his followers will take Browning's literary form seriously, he took his own literary form very seriously. Now Pippa passes is among other things imminently remarkable as a very original artistic form, a series of disconnected but dramatic scenes which have only in common the appearance of one figure. For this admirable literary departure, Browning, amid all the laudations of his mind and his message, has scarcely ever had credit. And just as we should, if we took Browning seriously as a poet, see that he had made many noble literary forms, so we should also see that he did make from time to time certain definite literary mistakes. There is one of them glaring one in Pippa passes, and as far as I know no critic has ever thought enough of Browning as an artist to point it out. It is a gross falsification of the whole beauty of Pippa passes to make them on senior and his accomplice in the last act discuss a plan touching the fate of Pippa herself. The whole central and splendid idea of the drama is the fact that Pippa is utterly remote from the grand folk whose lives she troubles and transforms. To make her in the end turn out to be the niece of one of them is like a whiff from an Adelphi melodrama, an excellent thing in its place but destructive of the entire conception of Pippa. Having done that, Browning might just as well have made Seaball turn out to be her long lost brother and Luigi a husband to whom she was secretly married. Browning made this mistake when his own splendid artistic power was only growing, and its merits and its faults in a tangle. But its real literary merits and its real literary faults have alike remained unrecognized under the influence of that unfortunate intellectualism which idolizes Browning as a metaphysician and neglects him as a poet. But a better test was coming. Browning's poetry, in the most strictly poetical sense, reached its flower in dramatic lyrics, published in 1842. Here he showed himself a picturesque and poignant artist in a wholly original manner, and the two main characteristics of the work were the two characteristics most commonly denied to Browning, both by his opponents and by his followers. Passion and Beauty But Beauty had enlarged her boundaries in new modes of dramatic arrangement, and Passion had found new voices in fantastic and realistic verse. Those who suppose Browning to be a wholly philosophic poet number a great majority of his commentators. But when we come to look at the actual facts, they are strangely and almost unexpectedly otherwise. Let anyone who believes in the arrogantly intellectual character of Browning's poetry run through the actual repertoire of the dramatic lyrics. The first item consists of those splendid war chants called Cavalier Tunes. I do not imagine that anyone will maintain that there is any very mysterious metaphysical aim in them. The second item is the fine poem, The Lost Leader, a poem which expresses in perfectly lucid and lyrical verse a perfectly normal and old-fashioned indignation. It is the same however far we carry the query. What theory does the next poem, how they brought the good news from Gint to X, express except the daring speculation that it is often exciting to ride a good horse in Belgium? What theory does the poem after that, through the Matija to Abed El Kedr express, except that it is also frequently exciting to ride a good horse in Africa? Then comes nationality and drinks, a mere technical oddity without a gleam of philosophy, and after that those two entirely exquisite garden fancies, the first of which is devoted to the obtuse thesis that a woman may be charming, and the second to the equally obtuse thesis that a book may be a bore. Then comes the siliquae of the Spanish Kleister, from which the most ingenious browning student cannot extract anything except that people sometimes hate each other in Spain, and then the laboratory, from which he could extract nothing except that people sometimes hate each other in France. This is a perfectly honest record of the poems as they stand, and the first eleven poems read Straithoff are remarkable for these two obvious characteristics. First, they contain not even a suggestion of anything that could be called philosophy, and second, that they contain a considerable proportion of the best and most typical poems that Browning ever wrote. It may be repeated that either he wrote these lyrics because he had an artistic sense, or it is impossible to hazard even the wildest guess as to why he wrote them. It is permissible to say that the dramatic lyrics represent the arrival of the real Browning of literary history. It is true that he had written already many admirable poems of a far more ambitious plan. Paracelsus, with its splendid version of the faults of the intellectual. Pippa passes with its beautiful deification of unconscious influence. But youth is always ambitious and universal. Mature works exhibit more of individuality, more of the special type and color of work which a man is destined to do. Youth is universal, but not individual. The genius who begins life with a very genuine and sincere doubt whether he is meant to be an exquisite and idolized violinist, or the most powerful and eloquent prime minister of modern times, does at last end by making the discovery that there is after all one thing, possibly a certain style of illustrating nursery rhymes which he can really do better than anyone else. This was what happened to Browning. Like everyone else he had to discover first the universe and then humanity and had last himself. With him, as with all others, the great paradox and the great definition of life was this, that the ambition narrows as the mind expands. In dramatic lyrics he discovered the one thing that he could really do better than anyone else, the dramatic lyric. The form is absolutely original. He had discovered a new field of poetry, and in the center of that field he had found himself. The actual quality, the actual originality of the form, is a little difficult to describe, but its general characteristic is the fearless and most dexterous use of grotesque things in order to express sublime emotions. The best and most characteristic of the poems are love poems. They express almost to perfection the real wonderland of youth, but they do not express it by the ideal imagery of most poets of love. The imagery of these poems consist, if we may take a rapid survey of Browning's love poetry, of suburban streets, straws, garden rakes, medicine bottles, pianos, window blinds, burnt cork, fashionable fur coats. But in this new method he thoroughly expressed the true essential, the insatiable realism of passion. If anyone wished to prove that Browning was not, as he is said to be, the poet of thought, but preeminently one of the poets of passion, we could scarcely find a better evidence of this profoundly passionate element than Browning's astonishing realism in love poetry. There is nothing so fiercely realistic as sentiment and emotion. Thought and the intellect are content to accept abstractions, summaries, and generalizations. They are content that ten acres of ground should be called for the sake of argument X, and ten widow's incomes called for the sake of argument Y. They are content that a thousand awful and mysterious disappearances from the visible universe should be summed up as the mortality of a district, or that ten thousand intoxications of the soul should bear the general name of the instinct of sex. Rationalism can live upon air and signs and numbers. But sentiment must have reality. Emotion demands the real fields, the real widow's homes, the real corpse, and the real women. And therefore Browning's love poetry is the finest love poetry in the world, because it does not talk about raptures and ideals and gates of heaven, but about windowpains and gloves and garden walls. It does not deal much with abstractions. It is the truest of all love poetry, because it does not speak much about love. It awakens in every man the memories of that immortal instant when common and dead things had a meaning beyond the power of any dictionary to utter, and a value beyond the power of any millionaire to compute. He expresses the celestial time when a man does not think about heaven but about a parasol, and therefore he is first and greatest of love poets, and secondly the only optimistic philosopher except Whitman. The general accusation against Browning in connection with his use of the grotesque comes in very definitely here. For in using these homely and practical images, these allusions bordering on what many would call the commonplace, he was indeed true to the actual and abiding spirit of love. In that delightful poem, Youth and Art, we have the singing girl saying to her old lover, No harm, it was not my fault. If you never turned your eyes tail up as I shook upon E in alt, or ran the chromatic scale up, this is a great deal more like the real shaft that passes between those whose hearts are full of new hope or of old memory, than half the great poems of the world. Browning never forgets the little details which to a man who has ever really lived may suddenly send an arrow through the heart. Take, for example, such a matter as dress, as it is treated in a lover's quarrel. See how she looks now dressed in a sledge-ling clap and vest, tis a huge fur cloak, like a reindeer's yoke, falls the lapet along the breast, sleeves for her arms to rest, or to hang, as my love likes best. That would almost serve as an order to a dressmaker, and it is therefore poetry, or at least excellent poetry of this order. So great a power have these dead things of taking hold upon the living spirit, that I question whether anyone could read through the catalog of a miscellaneous auction sale without coming upon things which, if realized for a moment, would be near to the elemental tears. And if any of us or all of us are truly optimists, and believe as Browning did, that existence has a value wholly inexpressible, we are most truly compelled to that sentiment, not by any argument or triumphant justification of the cosmos, but by a few of these momentary and immortal sights and sounds, a gesture, an old song, a portrait, a piano, an old door. In 1843 appeared that marvelous drama, The Return of the Druzes, a work which contains more of Browning's typical qualities exhibited in an exquisite literary shape than can easily be counted. We have, in The Return of the Druzes, his love of the corners of history, his interest in the religious mind of the East, with its almost terrifying sense of being in the hand of heaven, his love of color and verbal luxury of gold and green and purple, which made something he must be an oriental himself. But above all it presents the first rise of that great psychological ambition which Browning was thenceforth to pursue. In Pauline and the poems that followed it, Browning has only the comparatively easy task of giving an account of himself. In Pippa Passes, he has only the less easy task of giving an account of humanity. In The Return of the Druzes, he has for the first time the task which is so much harder than giving an account of humanity, the task of giving an account of a human being. Jebel, the great oriental impostor, who is the central character of the play, is peculiarly subtle character, a compound of blasphemous and lying assumptions of Godhead with genuine and stirring patriotic and personal feelings. He is a blend, so to speak, of a base divinity and of a noble humanity. He is supremely important in the history of Browning's mind, for he is the first of that great series of the Apologya of Apparently Evil Men, on which the poet was to pour out so much of his imaginative wealth. Jebel, Fra Lippo, Bishop Blulgrim, Sludge, Prince Hohenstile Shwangau, and the hero of Fiffine at the Fair. With this play, so far as any point can be fixed for the matter, he enters for the first time on the most valuable of all his labors, the defense of the indefensible. You may be noticed that Browning was not in the least content with the fact that certain human frailties had always lain more or less under an implied indulgence. That all human sentiment had agreed that a profligate might be generous, or that a drunkard might be high-minded. He was insatiable. He wished to go further and show in a character like Jebel that an impostor might be generous and that a liar might be high-minded. In all his life it must constantly be remembered. He tried always the most difficult things. Just as he tried the queerest meters and attempted to manage them, so he tried the queerest human souls and attempted to stand in their place. Charity was his basic philosophy, but it was as it were a fierce charity, a charity that went man-hunting. It was a kind of cosmic detective who walked into the foulest of thieves' kitchens and accused men publicly of virtue. The character of Jebel in the Return of the Druzes is the first of this long series of forlorn hopes for the relief of long surrendered castles of misconduct. As we shall see, even realizing the humanity of a noble impostor like Jebel did not content his erratic hunger for goodness. He went further, again, and realized the humanity of a mean impostor likes Lodge. But in all things he retained this essential characteristic, that he was not content with seeking sinners. He sought the sinners whom even the sinners cast out. Browning's feeling of ambition in the matter of the drama continued to grow at this time. It must be remembered that he had every natural tendency to be theatrical, though he lacked the essential lucidity. He was not, as a matter of fact, a particularly unsuccessful dramatist. But in the world of abstract temperaments, he was by nature an unsuccessful dramatist. He was, it is to say, a man who loved above all things plain and sensational words, open catastrophes, a clear and ringing conclusion to everything. But it so happened, unfortunately, that his own words were not plain, that his catastrophes came with a crashing and sudden unintelligibleness which left men in doubt whether the thing were a catastrophe or a great stroke of good luck. That his conclusion, though it rang like a trumpet to the four corners of heaven, was, in its actual message, quite inaudible. We're bound to admit, on the authority of all his best critics and admirers, that his plays were not failures. But we can all feel that they should have been. He was, as it were, by nature a neglected dramatist. He was one of those who achieved the reputation, in the literal sense, of eccentricity by their frantic efforts to reach the center. A blot on the scruction followed the return of Drusas. In connection with the performance of this very fine play, a quarrel arose which would not be worth mentioning if it did not happen to illustrate the curious energetic simplicity of Browning's character. McCready, who was in desperately low financial circumstances at this time, tried by every means conceivable to avoid playing the part. He dodged, he shuffled, he tried every evasion that occurred to him, but it never occurred to Browning to see what he meant. He pushed off the part upon Phelps, and Browning was contented. He resumed it, and Browning was only discontented on behalf of Phelps. The two had a quarrel. They were both headstrong, passionate men, but the quarrel dealt entirely with the unfortunate condition of Phelps. Browning beat down his own hat over his eyes. McCready flung Browning's manuscript with a slap upon the floor. But all the time it never occurred to the poet that McCready's conduct was dictated by anything so crude and simple as a desire for money. Browning was in fact by his principles and his ideals a man of the world, but in his life far otherwise. That worldly ease which is to most of us a temptation was to him an ideal. He was as it were a citizen of the New Jerusalem, who desired with perfect sanity and simplicity to be a citizen of Mayfair. There was in him a quality which can only be most delicately described for it was a virtue which bears a strange resemblance to one of the meanest devices. Those curious people who think the truth, a thing that can be said violently and with ease, might naturally call Browning a snob. He was fond of society, of fashion, and even of wealth. But there is no snobbery in admiring these things, or any things if we admire them for the right reasons. He admired them as worldlings cannot admire them. He was, as it were, the child who comes in with the dessert. He bore the same relation to the snob that the righteous man bears to the Pharisee. Something frightfully close and similar, and yet an everlasting opposite.