CHAPTER I - BROWNING IN EARLY
LIFE
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 practises
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
towards 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, give a
tolerably accurate picture of Browning's attitude towards 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 Sordello, 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
its aims 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 allusion in Sordello means has gone on so far, and
may go on still, but it has it 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 for ever if we
did not decide to summarise 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. Thousands of middle-class men use 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. Then, again, there is a theory that he was of Jewish
blood; a view 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, specially 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 mixed extraction.
Thirdly, there is the yet 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 Creole. 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 favour; 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 Wars 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 Clarencieux 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 biography, and this is also the most difficult.
It is a great deal easier to hunt a family from tombstone to
tombstone back to the time of Henry II. than to catch and realise
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 looked 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
believed, for instance, that he really came of a race of
mediæval barons, we should say at once that from them he got his
pre-eminent 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 a 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 colour, a certain
mental gaudiness, a pleasure
"When reds and blues were indeed
red and blue,"
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, amid our cold English poets,
seems scarcely European. All this is extremely fascinating; and it
may be true. But, as has above been suggested, here comes in the
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 three other nationalities? If Browning's ancestors had been
Frenchmen, should we not have said that it was from them doubtless
that 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-roving 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 Ojibways
and the Blackfeet do we find the Browning fantasticality combined
with the Browning stoicism? This over-readiness to seize hints is
an inevitable part of that secret hero-worship which is the heart
of biography. The lover of great men sees signs of 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 study, Dr. Furnivall,
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 magnate, 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 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 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. Let us admit 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 Brownings 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 at Curaçoa (of
course, you have read your geography and therefore know why), and
his father was a Pole, and therefore he was brought up at
Petropaulowski (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 neighbour's goods."
It may be well therefore to
abandon the task of obtaining a clear account of Brownings family,
and endeavour 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 Fifine 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 Time's Revenges to the despotic fantasy of Instans
Tyrannus; 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
the irresponsible life. He met the Spiritualists and hated them,
with all the hatred of the middle class for borderlands and
equivocal 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
Camberwell. 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 senior was placed by his father (who was
apparently a father of a 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 doors, but
by a superb stroke of humour, 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 in all, and who would revolutionise 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
seventeenth, but the humanitarian Puritan of the eighteenth
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 in water colours, 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
eighteenth century. He lamented his son's early admiration for
Byron, and never ceased adjuring him to model himself upon
Pope.
He was, in short, one of the
old-fashioned humanitarians of the eighteenth 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 senior 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 Upas 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 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.
Robert 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 molehills. 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 Carlyle called her "the
type of a Scottish gentlewoman," and the phrase has a very real
significance to those who realise 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. Ready, at which again he was
marked chiefly by precocity. But the boy's education did not in
truth take place at any systematic seat of education; it took place
in his own home, where one of the quaintest and most learned and
most absurdly indulgent of fathers poured out in an endless stream
fantastic recitals from the Greek epics and mediæval 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 Provençal 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 spoilt 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 sport
or wine. He had in it the pleasure of some old scholar of the
Renascence, when grammar itself was as fresh as the flowers of
spring. He had no reason to suppose that every one 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 two wives this
morning." The insane ingenuity of the biographer would be quite
capable of seeing in this a most suggestive foreshadowing of the
sexual dualism which is so
ably defended in Fifine 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 insipid. Browning 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. About 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 Brownings. 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
realise 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 Rule Bill, and forget that as a young man he passed a
bookstall and saw a volume ticketed "Mr. Shelley's Atheistic
Poem," and had to search even in his own really cultivated circle
for some one who could tell him who Mr. Shelley was.
Browning was, in short, born in
the afterglow of the great 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 dominant 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 Jacobins who
does not realise that to them breaking the civilisation 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 beautiful
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 the
complete and pessimistic revolt against all things in heaven or
earth, which has been fashionable among the young in more recent
times. The Shelleyan 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
wholly 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 meagre 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 aunts; Dickens was going
to and fro in a blacking factory; Carlyle, slightly older, was
still lingering on a poor farm in Dumfriesshire; 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
beginning of the æsthetic 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 Lecturers. 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 Browningite and the
anti-Browningite, is that the second says he was not a poet but
a mere philosopher, and the first says 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
sympathisers feel if informed that the first poems that Browning
wrote in a volume called Incondita were noticed to contain the
fault of "too much splendour 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 any one I have ever seen." A
picturesque tradition remains that Thomas Carlyle, riding out upon
one of his solitary gallops necessitated by his physical
sufferings, was stopped by one whom he described as a 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 gipsy caravans,
far across country, and a song which he heard with the refrain,
"Following the Queen of the Gipsies oh!" rang in his ears long
enough to express itself in his soberer 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 remain, 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 eyrie 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 laburnum "heavy with its 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 hypnotised
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
gentleman 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 plough. The
life he lived in those early days was no life of dull application;
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 Byronic, and Byronism was not, of course, in reality
so much a pessimism about civilised 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 junior had to be a part of it, and Robert
Browning senior had to go back to his water colours 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 that he cannot understand.
The earliest works of Browning
bear 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 Tait'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 every one 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 hoarsely that it has found a sun 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 its
beauties, lies in a certain almost humorous singularity, the fact
that Browning, of all people, should have signalised 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 heartrending period of youth which
comes before we realise 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 benignant
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