ABSTRACT
Critical surprise has been more than once expressed, of late, that in an age so militant against the development of the poetic spirit, a single man should find himself (and that, too, at an advanced period of his life) surrounded, not to say besieged, by hosts of ardent admirers. Everybody has now heard of the ‘Browning Craze’, and it is quite probable that many had heard of it while Mr. Robert Browning himself was hardly more to them than a meaningless name. And yet to the majority of literary men and women in England and America this cult has long been a familiar one. Not until perhaps a decade ago did it begin to assume its present spacious proportions. I remember meeting devout Browningites at least twenty years ago, when almost a boy. And as boys will, when their thoughts turn toward the letters of their time and land, I soon felt an ambitious craving to graduate into a Browningite myself. Such a worship then possessed so fascinating an element of rarity! It was so attractive a role for one to give a compassionate lifting of the brows and say, ‘No, really?’ when somebody declared himself quite unable to understand the obscure author of Sordello. You knew perfectly well that any number of his lines were Hindostanee to you, and yet you made use of your patronizing pity and your ‘No, really?’ all the same. There is safety in the assertion that Mr. Browning has driven more pedantic youngsters to unblushing falsehood than any other writer in the language.…
One of the most distressing features about Mr. Browning’s existent reputation —distressing, I mean, to those who discern and measure its basis of humbug-is the way in which his admirers are never tired of saying that it wholly outshines the renown of Lord Tennyson and that its possessor has touched, thus far in our century, the high-tide mark of English poetry. So, until not very long since, fanatics cried that Carlyle, with his barbarisms, loomed above that most masterly
Laureate has indeed served his art with a profound and lovely fidelity, while it is no exaggeration to state of Mr. Browning that he has not seldom insulted his as though it were a pickpocket.
