ABSTRACT
Robert Browning is one of the least known of our great modern writers, although his name has been now so long before the world; yet it may perhaps be questioned whether, with all his native prodigality and munificent endowment of thought, scholarship, and genius, he is not better known as the husband of Mrs. Browning than by the productions of his own pen. He is now in about his fiftythird year, and far as his verses rise above the cockney school of literature, so much the subject of the sneers of the fine-gentlemen critics, he is a Londoner by birth; born in Camberwell, educated in the then especially pleasant little village of Dulwich. The broad and liberal tone of his mind, which never degenerates into the cant of Church-of-Englandism, may perhaps be in some measure attributed to the fact, that as a scholar he graduated at the London University.1 His first effort as a poet-Pauline-we suppose has passed from everybody’s recollection. Its author does not seem desirous that it should be retained. We have never seen it. We suppose it gives no evidence of its author’s powers. Nearly thirty years have passed by since the publication of Paracelsus, a most extraordinary poem to read now. It is not wonderful that it was received with chilling coldness then. At that time our country had no audience for that kind of literature. It is intensely subjective. Much has been done since: Wordsworth has been appreciated, and Tennyson has risen; teaching the cultivation of this poetry of thought. At the time of its publication there was neither school nor class; only here and there existed a solitary mind able to appreciate, and with one or two favourable notices, it fell powerless from the press. The audience would be a small one disposed to read or to listen to it now. Soon after Paracelsus, was published Sordello. Again we have to confess our ignorance. This poem is out of print, and it probably never will be reprinted. We are willing to accept the verdict which pronounces it to be the
books were forbidden excepting lighter fiction. But Mrs. Jerrold, or as one has expressed it, ‘the domestic lifeguard’, was out of the way. The parcel was opened, and Sordello plunged into. When Mrs. Jerrold returned, she found her husband, to her horror, a cold sweat breaking out over his face, exclaiming, “I am mad, I am mad! my mind is gone, I can make nothing of it.” He put the book into her hand, and asked her to read, and as she read, he exclaimed, “Thank God, it’s only gibberish, I am not mad after all!”’ This is a very well known and oftrepeated story [see No. 103 for one form of the anecdote.] We suspect that it is only the judgment of that clever and brilliant wag, Jerrold; but it shows the estimation in which the poem was held by contemporaries able to judge. On the contrary, Mr. Browning still insists to his friends that Sordello is amongst the simplest and clearest poems in the English language. It was in 1846 Robert Browning married Elizabeth Barrett, thus furnishing no doubt one of the rarest and most charming instances of the happy marriage of equal and congenial poets. … During the years of their married life they resided in Florence, and it is something of a drawback to our exceeding admiration of, and gratitude to both, that England and English scenes and English life never seem to enter into the texture either of their genius, their sympathies, or their writings. And here we touch at once the most prominent of those obstacles interfering with the fame of Robert Browning. He writes for men-for men and women-but not for Englishmen. He unconditions himself from those circumstances which would attract English readers, lives in other ages, and other countries, and with a power we believe to be felicitously transparent and clear he seems to determine on making himself obscure. In this particular there is a contradiction between the essentially dramatic structure of his scenery and the magnificent dramatic grandeur of the passions he portrays and embodies, and the frequently involved tortuousness of his versification. A second thought shows us that this is indeed very natural to his peculiar genius. How he delights to work and worm and wind his way to the subtlest places of the soul, and to the mazy problems which the soul is perpetually seeking to solve! His knowledge is most recondite. Out-of-theway magnificent scenes attract and claim and charm him-great historic incidents and historical characters, though great not by the rustle of the robe, or the clash or the armour along the chief streets of history, but by the exhibition they have made of the greatness of souls. He is a dramatist in all that we usually imply by that word, entering into the innermost arena of the being. His poems are, to quote the title of one of his dramas, Soul tragedies. We trust we shall not be misunderstood when we say they present an order of tragedy differing from Shakspeare’s-the agony, the strife, the internal stress are more internalised. He transfers the circumstances of our being from the without to the within. In this way they all become noble pictures of the striving and the attaining soul.
