Born, at Camberwell, 7 May 1812. Educated at school at Peckham, till 1826. Father printed for him volume of poems, “Incondita,” 1824. Educated by private tutor, 1826–29; attended lectures at University Coll., London, 1829–30. Literary career decided on. Published first poem, 1833. Resided at Camberwell. Started on tour to Russia and Italy, autumn of 1833; returned to Camberwell, summer of 1834. Contrib. poems to “Monthly Repository” (under signature “Z.”), 1834. First met Macready, Nov. 1835. “Strafford” produced at Covent Garden, 1 May 1837. Married Elizabeth Barrett Moulton-Barrett, 12 Sept. 1846. To Paris and Italy. Settled in Florence, winter of 1847. Son born, 9 March 1849. Visit to Rome, 1850; to England, 1851; winter and spring in Paris; to London, summer of 1852; return to Florence in autumn. In Rome, winter 1853–54. To Normandy, July 1858. In Rome, winter of 1859–60 and 1860–61. Wife died, 29 June 1861. Left Florence, July 1861. Returned to London, Sept. 1861. Settled in Warwick Crescent. Hon. M.A., Oxford, June 1867; Hon. Fellow of Balliol Coll., Oct. 1867. Declined Lord Rectorship of St. Andrews Univ., 1868, 1877, and 1884; declined Lord Rectorship of Glasgow Univ., 1875. First revisited Italy, Aug. 1878. Autumns subsequently frequently spent in Venice. Hon. LL.D., Cambridge, 1879. Browning Society established, Oct. 1881. Hon. D.C.L., Oxford, 1882. Hon. LL.D., Edinburgh, 17 April 1884. Hon. Pres. Associated Societies of Edinburgh, 1885. Foreign Correspondent to Royal Academy, 1886. Son married, 4 Oct. 1887. Removed to De Vere Gardens. To Italy Aug. 1888. In England, winter 1888–89. Return to Italy, Aug. 1889. To Asolo. Joined son at Venice, Nov. 1889; died there, 12 Dec. 1889. Buried in Poet’s Corner, Westminster Abbey, 31 Dec. Works: “Incondita” (priv. ptd.), 1824; “Pauline,” 1833; “Paracelsus,” 1835; “Strafford,” 1837; “Sordello,” 1840; “Bells and Pomegranates (8 pts.: i. “Pippa Passes,” 1841; ii. “King Victor and King Charles,” 1842; iii. “Dramatic Lyrics,” 1842; iv. “The Return of the Druses,” 1843; v. “A Blot in the ’Scutcheon,” 1843; vi. “Colombe’s Birthday,” 1844; vii. “Dramatic Romances and Lyrics,” 1845; viii. “Luria: and a Soul’s Tragedy,” 1846), 1841–46; “Christmas Eve and Easter Day,” 1850; “Two Poems by E. Barrett and R. Browning,” 1854; “Men and Women” (2 vols.), 1855; “Dramatis Personæ,” 1864 (2nd edn. same year); “The Ring and the Book” (4 vols.), 1868–69; “Balaustion’s Adventure,” 1871; “Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau,” 1871; “Fifine at the Fair,” 1872; “Red Cotton Night-Cap Country,” 1873; “Aristophanes’ Apology,” 1875; “The Inn Album,” 1875; “Pacchiarotto,” 1876; “La Saisiaz: and the Two Poets of Croisic,” 1878; “Dramatic Idylls” (2 series), 1879–80; “Jocoseria,” 1883; “Ferishtah’s Fancies,” 1884; “Parleyings with Certain People,” 1887; “Asolando,” 1890 [1889]. He translated: Æschylus’ “Agamemnon,” 1877; and edited: the forged “Letters of Shelley,” 1852; Selections from his wife’s Poems, 1866 and 1880; “The Divine Order,” by Rev. T. Jones, 1884; his wife’s Poetical Works, 1889 and 1890. Collected Poems: in 2 vols., 1849; and 3 vols., 1863; in 6 vols., 1868; in 16 vols., 1888–89. Life: by William Sharp (Great Writers’ series), 1890; “Life and Letters,” by Mrs. Orr, 1891.

Personal

  Mr. Browning was very popular with the whole party; his simple and enthusiastic manner engaged attention and won opinion from all present; he looks and speaks more like a youthful poet than any man I ever saw.

  Browning’s conversation is like the poetry of Chaucer, or like his own, simplified and made transparent. His countenance is so full of vigor, freshness, and refined power, that it seems impossible to think that he can ever grow old. His poetry is subtle, passionate and profound; but he himself is simple, natural, and playful. He has the repose of a man who has lived much in the open air; with no nervous uneasiness and no unhealthy self-consciousness.

  Robert Browning is an admirable man, frank, cheerful, and charming. He is said to be the most captivating conversationalist on the Continent; (however, I think there are some in America quite equal to him). There is a genial warmth, and a sparkling merriment in his words, which made us friends at once.

  A younger man than I expected to see, handsome, with brown hair. He is very simple and agreeable in manner, gently impulsive, talking as if his heart were uppermost. He spoke of his pleasure in meeting me, and his appreciation of my books; and—which has not often happened to me—mentioned that “The Blithedale Romance” was the one he admired most.

  At Paris I met his father, and in London an uncle of his and his sister, who, it appears, performed the singular female feat of copying “Sordello” for him, to which some of its eccentricities may possibly be referred…. The father and uncle—father especially—show just that submissive yet highly cheerful and capable simplicity of character which often, I think, appears in the family of a great man who uses at last what the others have kept for him. The father is a complete oddity—with a real genius for drawing—but caring for nothing in the least except Dutch boors,—fancy the father of Browning!—and as innocent as a child. In the New Volumes, the only thing he seemed to care for much was that about the Sermon to the Jews.

  I thought I was getting too old to make new friends. But I believe that I have made one—Mr. Browning, the poet, who has been staying with me during the past few days. It is impossible to speak without enthusiasm of his open, generous nature and his great ability and knowledge. I had no idea that there was a perfectly sensible poet in the world, entirely free from vanity, jealousy, or any other littleness, and thinking no more of himself than if he were an ordinary man. His great energy is very remarkable, and his determination to make the most of the remainder of life.

  At that dinner I sat opposite to Browning, and found that in private life he was much like another man. I had thought that his Comitatus, the Browning Society, would follow him everywhere to explain what he said. But if a man can talk to be understood, why can’t he write to be understood? But those things are not in my line—Homer and Macaulay for me—them I can understand.

	To my good friend
	Robert Browning,
	Whose genius and geniality
	Will best appreciate what is best,
	And make allowance for what may be worst,
	This volume
	Is
	Affectionately inscribed.

  Of course, in the recollections of an Englishman living during those years in Florence, Robert Browning must necessarily stand out in high relief and in the foremost line. But very obviously this is neither the time nor the place, nor is my dose of presumption sufficient, for any attempt at a delineation of the man. To speak of the poet, since I write for Englishmen, would be very superfluous. It may be readily imagined that the “tag-rag and bob-tail” of the men who mainly constituted that very pleasant, but not very intellectual society, were not likely to be such as Mr. Browning would readily make intimates of. And I think I see, in memory’s magic glass that the men used to be rather afraid of him. Not that I ever saw him rough or uncourteous with the most exasperating fool that ever rubbed a man’s nervous system the wrong way, but there was a quiet, lurking smile which, supported by very few words, used to seem to have the singular property of making the utterers of platitudes and the mistakers of non-sequiturs for sequiturs uncomfortably aware of the nature of their words within a very few minutes after they had uttered them. I may say, however, that I believe that, in any dispute on any sort of subject between any two men in the place, if it had been proposed to submit the matter in dispute for adjudication to Mr. Browning, the proposal would have been jumped at with a greater readiness of consensus than in the case of any other man there.

  Is one of the most familiar figures of the metropolis, and he is also one of the few men of letters who do their work within London. A thorough Londoner, born in that commonplace part called Camberwell seventy-six years ago; his father a clerk in the Bank of England—though from his four grandparents, Scotch, creole, German, and English blood meet in his veins; educated at the University of London; living, since his wife’s death exiled him from Italy, for many years in Maida Vale, and now in Kensington—he is perhaps the last person one would select in a London throng as the author of Browning’s poetry. He looks rather like a bank president, a brisk and successful merchant, than a poet, with his well-set figure, his frank and pleasant face, with trim white beard and wonderfully bright eyes, his bonhomie of manner—altogether an agreeable gentleman, much of the world one would say, and by no means a dreamer of dreams.

	Slowly we disarray,
	Our leaves grow few,
	Few on the bough, and many on the sod:
	Round him no ruining autumn tempest blew.
	Gathered on genial day,
	He fills, fresh as Apollo’s bay,
	The Hand of God.

  When I first knew him, twenty-six years ago, he was living in Delamere Crescent with his father, sister, and son. The father was a notable man. Dante Rossetti always contended that there was something Semitic on Robert Browning’s handsome countenance, and the fact that his father had been a clerk of the Rothschilds added plausibility to the supposition. The family were, of old, Congregationalists in creed, but the elder Browning, as I remember, did have a slightly Jewish complexion. It was an old family; the original name, Browning told me, being De Bruni…. No American who knew Browning can write of him without remembering his cordiality for Americans. He met those who brought him letters of introduction with open arms. He enjoyed many of our writers, admired our ladies, and liked our sparkling Catawba—to which I had the pleasure of introducing him in the old days when Longworth made wine fit for any poet’s palate. Not even memories of book-piracy could induce him to abuse America.

  In the centre of the lofty ceiling of the room occupied by him, in the Palazzo Rezzonico, in which he slept and wrote, and in which he died, is the painting by his son of an eagle struggling with a serpent, illustrative of a passage in Shelley’s “Revolt of Islam.”… No more appropriate painting could have been over the poet, in his last days than this. It is a fitting symbol of his voluminous poetry, in which, from the earliest to the latest, his soaring spirit holds and maintains the mastery over what strives ever to overthrow man in his weakness, as the eagle, in the picture, with beak and talons, holds and maintains the mastery over the struggling serpent.

	Gone from our eyes, a loss for evermore,
	Gone to pursue within an ampler sphere
	The aims that wing’d thy soaring spirit here!
	Gone where she waits thee, who when living bore
	A heart, like thine, vein’d with love’s purest ore!
	Gone to behold with eyes serene and clear
	The world, that to thy life was ever near
	In gleams, now perfect dawn, of heavenly lore!
	Gone from our eyes that noble gracious head,
	The quick keen glance, the welcoming frank smile,
	Hush’d, too, the voice with its strong manly ring,
	But not the strains in which our souls are fed
	With thoughts that life of half its pain beguile,
	And hopes of what the great Beyond shall bring!

  The formation of these Browning societies undoubtedly pleased Browning…. It came at a critical period, and he was a more important figure in literature by reason of the existence of these societies. He was quite aware of the ludicrous side of the business, and the effusive enthusiasms of his least wise admirers annoyed him more than he chose to own. One or two American societies seemed to have been founded and worked with little regard to that American sense of humor which so often saves people from ridicule. He was patient with them, accepted their tributes of admiration, took the will for the deed when the expression of it was absurd, and rejoiced to know that beneath all the nonsense on the surface there was a basis of real appreciation for what he himself most valued in his own writings. When appealed to, he no more professed always to know what he had meant than Rufus Choate to decipher his own handwriting after a lapse of time.

  Well do I remember that evening in 1855, at the temporary home of Mr. and Mrs. Browning near Marylebone Church, when Tennyson read aloud his recently published poem of “Maud,” and my brother took a sketch of him as he sat on the sofa with the volume held high up to suit his short sight. When Tennyson had concluded, Browning was implored to read out his “Fra Lippo Lippi,” which, with some little pressing, he consented to do. The contrast between the two readers was interesting and highly characteristic. Tennyson, in his introduction to his “Morte d’Arthur,” has well described his own elocution—“mouthing out his hollow o’s and a’s” (except that “mouthing,” as a term of disparagement, should be altered into some milder word)—his grand deep voice sways onward with a long-drawn chaunt, which some hearers might deem monotonous, but which gives noble value and emphasis to the metrical structure and pauses. Browning’s voice, which was at once rich and peculiar, took much less account of the poem as a rhythmical whole; his delivery had more affinity to that of an actor, laying stress on all the light and shade of the composition—its touches of character, its conversational points, its dramatic give-and-take. In those qualities of elocution in which Tennyson was strong, and aimed to be strong, Browning was contentedly weak; and vice versâ. To which of the two modes of reading the preference should be accorded will remain a matter of taste; in the very small audience on that occasion, most were, I think, in favour of Tennyson.

  Next morning betimes the note was despatched, and a half-hour had not passed when there was a brisk rap at the Easy Chair’s door. He opened it, and saw a young man, who briskly inquired, “Is Mr. Easy Chair here?” “That is my name.” “I am Robert Browning.” Browning shook hands heartily with his young American admirer, and thanked him for his note. The poet was then about thirty-five. His figure was not large, but compact, erect, and active; the face smooth, the hair dark; the aspect that of active intelligence, and of a man of the world. He was in no way eccentric, either in manner or appearance. He talked freely, with great vivacity, and delightfully, rising and walking about the room as his talk sparkled on. He heard, with evident pleasure, but with entire simplicity and manliness, of the American interest in his works and in those of Mrs. Browning, and the Easy Chair gave him a copy of Miss Fuller’s paper in the Tribune. It was a bright and, to the Easy Chair, a wonderfully happy hour. As he went, the poet said that Mrs. Browning would certainly expect to give Mr. Easy Chair a cup of tea in the evening, and with a brisk and gay good-by, Browning was gone…. It was not in the Casa Guidi that the Brownings were then living, but in an apartment in the Via della Scala, not far from the place or square most familiar to strangers in Florence, the Piazza Trinita. Through several rooms the Easy Chair passed, Browning leading the way, until at the end they entered a smaller room arranged with an air of English comfort, where at a table, bending over a tea-urn, sat a slight lady, her long curls drooping forward. “Here,” said Browning, addressing her with a tender diminutive, “here is Mr. Easy Chair.”… The most kindly welcome and pleasant chat followed, Browning’s gayety dashing and flashing in, with a sense of profuse and bubbling vitality, glancing at a hundred topics; and when there was some allusion to his “Sordello,” he asked quickly, with an amused smile, “Have you read it?” The Easy Chair pleaded that he had not seen it. “So much the better. Nobody understands it. Don’t read it, except in the revised form which is coming.” The revised form has come long ago, and the Easy Chair has read, and probably supposes that he understands. But Thackeray used to say that he did not read Browning because he could not comprehend him, adding, ruefully, “I have no head above my eyes.”

  The poet was, personally and to a great extent in his genius, Anglo-Saxon. Though there are plausible grounds for the assumption, I can find nothing to substantiate the common assertion that, immediately, or remotely, his people were Jews. As to Browning’s physiognomy and personal traits, this much may be granted: if those who knew him were told he was a Jew they would not be much surprised. In his exuberant vitality, in his sensuous love of music and the other arts, in his combined imaginativeness and shrewdness of common sense, in his superficial expansiveness and actual reticence he would have been typical enough of the potent and artistic race for whom he has so often of late been claimed…. What, however, is most to the point is that neither to curious acquaintances nor to intimate friends, neither to Jews nor Gentiles, did he ever admit more than that he was a good Protestant, and sprung of a Puritan stock. He was tolerant of all religious forms, but with a natural bias towards Anglican Evangelicalism.

  It was the writer’s good fortune, a few years ago, to meet Robert Browning at St. Moritz, in the Engadine, and later at his home in Warwick Crescent, London…. Mr. Browning was short and stout, and plainly enough the original of his photographs. His face was ruddy, his hair very white, his manner animated. He was noticeably well dressed, there was a comfortable and easy elegance about him. It has long been a matter of common report that Mr. Browning looked like a business man, rather than a poet and scholar. He might have been a banker, a lawyer, a physician, so far as his appearance was concerned. But if a physician, certainly a well-to-do one; if a lawyer, then a lawyer accustomed to good fees; if a banker, connected with an institution which is not going to give its depositors cause for anxiety. But while markedly “stylish,” he wore his good clothes with an air of one who had never worn anything else. In his youth I fancy that he might have been something of a dandy. There was a pleasant atmosphere of large prosperity about him. His manner was simple, kind, cheery. He made one feel at home, and time went rapidly. That blessed saint of American literature, Henry W. Longfellow, made each of his chance visitors happy by his cordial and unaffected manner. But Longfellow’s sweetness was the sweetness of resignation. A young woman who had called upon him told me that he was so amiable that she felt actually guilty! Browning, fascinating hypocrite that he was, made the stranger feel that his visit was not only agreeable, but positively opportune. If visitors stayed longer than they ought, the fault was quite as much his as theirs.

  Here, in this old York Street Dissenting chapel, on the 14th of June, 1812, he was brought to be baptised, and no more valiant soldier was enlisted in the army of things spiritual, at any of the altars of Christianity, on that 14th of June, than Robert Browning. He has been what we call dead for eight years. The loss is great for those who knew him. In my memory he will always live as the most cordial man I ever knew. Never can I forget how on your entrance he would rise from his chair, advance to meet you with both arms outstretched, and cover you with the rich bounty of his welcome.

  We are told by Mr. Sharp that a new star appeared in Orion on the night on which Mr. Browning died. The alleged fact is disproved by the statement of the Astronomer Royal, to whom it has been submitted; but it would have been a beautiful symbol of translation, such as affectionate fancy might gladly cherish if it were true. It is indeed true that on that 12th of December a vivid centre of light and warmth was extinguished upon our earth. The clouded brightness of many lives bears witness to the poet spirit which has departed, the glowing human presence which has passed away. We mourn the poet whom we have lost far less than we regret the man: for he had done his appointed work; and that work remains to us. But the two beings were in truth inseparable. The man is always present in the poet; the poet was dominant in the man. This fact can never be absent from our loving remembrance of him. No just estimate of his life and character will fail to give it weight.

  He was true and tender and simple in heart to the end. My wonder has always been that a man moving among all ranks in the fashionable world for more than thirty years should have remained so untainted, and kept his soul and his art so clear. He lived in Gaza, Ekron, and all the cities of the Philistines, yet he never served their lords and never made sport for them. Moreover, he was just as pleased, as happy, as interested, gave himself just as much trouble, and was just as much carried away in talk when he was with a few unknown men and women, quite out of the fashion, as he was among persons of great fame or of high rank.

  Always full of spirits, full of interest in everything from politics to hedge-flowers, cordial and utterly unaffected, he was at all times a charming member of society; but I confess that in those days (1860) I had no adequate sense of his greatness as a poet. I could not read his poetry though he had not then written his most difficult pieces, and his conversation was so playful and light that it never occurred to me that I was wasting precious time chatting frivolously with him when I might have been gaining high thoughts and instruction. There was always a ripple of laughter round the sofa where he used to seat himself, generally beside some lady of the company, towards whom, in his eagerness, he would push nearer and nearer till she frequently rose to avoid falling off at the end! When he drove out in parties he would discuss every tree and weed, and get excited about the difference between eglantine and eglatere (if there be any), and between either of them and honey-suckle.

  I met Robert Browning at a party, when he happened to be surrounded by many who were congenial to him. He took me in to dinner, and my first impression of him was that he resembled one of our old-school Southern country gentlemen more than my ideal of England’s mystic poet. There was a kind of friendly chattiness in his conversation, more agreeable, I thought, than distinguished. I should have named any of the men at table sooner than he as the author of “Rabbi Ben-Ezra” and “Pippa Passes.”… Browning was always charming, often amusing in conversation, but personally he never appealed to me as much as either Longfellow or Tennyson. Perhaps this was because I frequently saw the last two in their own homes, whereas my acquaintance with Browning was a society one, which least of all reveals the deep, earnest, or best side of any character.

  As I entered the parlor of Madame Milsand one day, I saw comfortably seated near the fireplace, a square, solidly built man, with white hair and beard, dressed in rough gray cloth, and wearing an air of bourgeoise dignity and pleasant bonhomie which betrayed nothing to me at first sight of the author of “The Ring and the Book.” When we were introduced to each other my heart leaped, and it is useless to add that my imagination helped me to recognize immediately the signs of genius in the broad forehead and penetrating eyes under their heavy brows. But what really impressed me in Browning’s look and in his talk was kindness; simple, open, and buoyant kindness. All the chords of sympathy vibrated in his strong voice.

  His [Rossetti’s] friendship with Mr. Browning came to an end through a wild suspicion that in some lines in “Fifine at the Fair” he was attacked. “On one or two occasions,” writes Mr. W. M. Rossetti, “when the great poet, the object of my brother’s early and unbounded homage, kindly inquired of me concerning him, and expressed a wish to look him up, I was compelled to fence with the suggestion, lest worse should ensue.”

  Mr. Browning was a great disappointment at first. He looked [1884] like a retired ship-captain, was short, rather stout, red-faced, with a large nose and white hair, but he was so simple and kindly and polite that I forgave him for not looking the poet.

  A fine-looking man [1882] of seventy years, with white hair and mustache. He was frank, easy, playful, and brilliant in conversation.

  He was a man with men, mixing with the life of his fellows; friendly and manly, taking his part in conversation frankly, and in fit circles an able and interesting talker. In a certain way he was a man of the world, measuring men and their affairs at their due value in the world, yet independent and unworldly at the heart of him. Observant, practical, common-sensible, but with a core of passion and ideality. His nature was, in fact, richly passioned, on a ground of strong intellect, with manly control and even reserve of emotion. But in his love for his mother and for his wife, and in the disturbance of feeling roused by the deaths of these, or by whatever touched the memory of the latter, we see the depth and force, we feel the fire and tenderness of his mind. His strong sensibility to music is another test of his emotional quality. He had, owing to this, a marked tenacity and constancy of affection. He had a keen memory for suffering, and a certain shrinking from it. He was thus an optimist by temper and habit, forced by bias and energy of the brain, and by dramatic observation and sympathy, to weigh his optimism, yet inclined to make the best of things.

  Robert Browning was a strong, glowing, whole-souled human being, who enjoyed life more intensely than any Englishman since Walter Scott… Indeed, only great poets are known so intimately as we know Robert Browning…. Everything that was hopeful his spirit accepted; everything that was sunny and joyful and good for the brave soul he embraced…. Never was there a man who in the course of a long life changed less.

  In his methods of work he became increasingly methodical. He wrote on an average so much a day, and his work was finished at the date he set for himself. In building up his plots he was rapid and definite. The story of “The Inn Album” was decided upon and constructed in a single morning, to be carried out precisely as it was planned; and many anecdotes are told of him showing how vividly and instantly the scheme of his poem, long or short, sprang up in his mind…. His manuscript showed few corrections, and twenty or thirty lines a day seemed to him a good rate of production. His habit was to rise early and read or write before breakfast; after breakfast to give an hour to the newspapers, then to retire to his study for the remainder of the morning, much of which must have been occupied with his oppressive correspondence, as he never willingly wrote even a note after luncheon. Like Tennyson and Landor he was a great walker and preferred the crowded street to a park or suburb.

  A man of the world to his finger tips, who knew every one, went everywhere, and had seen everything, he might pass as a social lion, but not as a poet, or a genius. His animal spirits, his bonhomie, his curious versatility and experience, made him the autocrat of the London dinner table, of which he was never the tyrant—or the bore. Dear old Browning! how we all loved him; how we listened to his anecdotes; how we enjoyed his improvised “epitaphs of country churchyards,” till we broke into shouts of laughter as we detected the amusing forgery. At home in the smoking room of a club, in a lady’s literary tea-party, in a drawing-room concert, or in a river picnic, he might have passed for a retired diplomat, but for his buoyancy of mind and brilliancy of talk. His heart was as warm, his moral judgment as sound as his genius was original.

  At Cortina I met and first knew Browning, who, with his sister Sariana, our old and dear friend, came to stay at the inn where we were. I am not much inclined to reckon intellectual greatness as a personal charm, for experience has shown me that the relation is very remote; but Browning always impressed me—and then and after I saw a good deal of him—as one of the healthiest and most robust minds I have ever known, sound to the core, and with an almost unlimited intellectual vitality and an individuality which nothing could infringe on, but which a singular sensitiveness towards others prevented from ever wounding even the most morbid sensibility; a strong man armed in the completest defensive armor, but with no aggressive quality. His was a nature of utter sincerity, and what had seemed to me, reading his poetry before knowing him, to be more or less an affection of obscurity, a cultivation of the critic sense, I found to be the pure expression of his individuality. He made short cuts to the heart of his theme, perhaps more unconscious than uncaring that his line of approach could not be followed by his general readers, as a mathematician leaves a large hiatus in his demonstration, seeing the result the less experienced must work out step by step.

  His physical conditions were in harmony with his spiritual characteristics. He was robust, active, loud in speech, cordial in manner, gracious and conciliatory in address, but subject to sudden fits of indignation which were like thunderstorms. In all these respects it seems probable that his character altered very little as the years went on. What he was as a boy, in these respects, it is believed that he continued to be as an old man.

Pauline, 1833

  Though evidently a hasty and imperfect sketch, has truth and life in it, which gave us the thrill, and laid hold of us with the power, the sensation of which has never failed us as a test of genius. Whoever the anonymous author may be, he is a poet. A pretender to science cannot always be safely judged by a brief publication, for the knowledge of some facts does not imply the knowledge of other facts; but the claimant of poetic honors may generally be appreciated by a few pages, often but a few lines, for if they be poetry, he is a poet. We cannot judge of the house by the brick, but we can judge of the statue of Hercules by its foot. We felt certain of Tennyson, before we saw the book, by a few verses which had straggled into a newspaper; we are not less certain of the author of “Pauline.”

  At Richmond, whither the family had gone to live,—on the 22d of October, 1832,—Mr. Browning finished a poem which he named, from the object, not the subject, “Pauline.” This piece was read and admired at home, and one day his aunt said to the young man: “I hear, Robert, that you have written a poem; here is the money to print it.” Accordingly, in January, 1833, there went to press, anonymously, a little book of seventy pages, which remained virtually unrecognized until the author, to preserve it from piracy, unwillingly received it among the acknowledged children of his muse, in 1867.

  The poem is defective in construction and hazy in outline. It shows little of that intimate and masterly knowledge of human passion which the author’s mature works display. He seems to be labouring at a work too great for him, while he shows by strokes here and there that he may some day be great enough for any work.

  Browning, as was natural to his peculiarly fixed temperament, his powerful overruling idiosyncrasy, remained singularly unchanged throughout his long career. Yet it is singular that “Pauline,” the remarkable poem which he wrote at twenty (1832), has a freedom of touch, a breadth, in its landscape, a “joy in the world’s loveliness,” which, it has been truly said, never returned to him. With this also is a certain simplicity in style, too infrequent in his work, due, perhaps, to his deep early devotion to Keats and Shelley.

  “Pauline, a Fragment of a Confession,” Browning’s first published poem, was a psychological self-analysis, perfectly characteristic of the time of life at which he wrote it,—very young, full of excesses of mood, of real exultation, and somewhat less real depression—the “confession” of a poet of twenty-one, intensely interested in the ever-new discovery of his own nature, its possibilities, and its relations.

  As for “Pauline,” that work was less connected with Sarah Flower than with her sister Eliza. Mrs. Sutherland Orr asserts that if, in spite of Browning’s denials, any woman inspired the poem, it can have been no other than she. On the same authority, Robert not only conceived a warm admiration for Eliza’s talents, but a boyish love for herself, notwithstanding that she was nine years his senior. It is certain that he had no ordinary feeling of tenderness and admiration for the lady.

  Of the eleven or twelve copies known to exist of the first edition of “Pauline,” three at least are in the United States, and all in private collections. Mr. Foote’s copy, in the original boards, uncut, was sold in New York in January, 1895, for $210. Mr. Maxwell’s copy, bound in brown levant morocco by Mercier, of Paris, brought $260 in Boston in April of the same year.

Paracelsus, 1885

  This is the simple and unaffected title of a small volume which was published some half-dozen months ago, and which opens a deeper vein of thought, of feeling, and of passion, than any poet has attempted for years. Without the slightest hesitation we name Mr. Robert Browning at once with Shelley, Coleridge, Wordsworth. He has entitled himself to a place among the acknowledged poets of the age. This opinion will possibly startle many persons; but it is most sincere.

  The historical P. was a complete charlatan, seldom sober, clever, and cunning, living on the appetite of his contemporaneous public for the philosopher’s stone and the universal medicine; castrated as a child by the jaws of a pig, all his life a vagabond, who at last died drunk in his single shirt at Salsburg.

  A Promethean character pervades the poem throughout; in the main design, as well as the varied aspirations and struggles to attain knowledge, and power, and happiness for mankind. But at the same time there is an intense craving after the forbidden secrets of creation, and eternity, and power, which place “Paracelsus” in the same class as “Faust,” and in close affinity with all those works, the object of which is an attempt to penetrate the mysteries of existence—the infinity within us and without us. Need it be said, that the result is in all the same?—and the baffled magic—the sublime occult—the impassioned poetry—all display the same ashes which were once wings.

  It was a wonderful event to me,—my first acquaintance with his poetry.—Mr. Macready put “Paracelsus” into my hand, when I was staying at his house; and I read a canto before going to bed. For the first time in my life, I passed a whole night without sleeping a wink. The unbounded expectation I formed from that poem was sadly disappointed when “Sordello” came out. I was so wholly unable to understand it that I supposed myself ill.

  The drama is well worth preserving, and even now a curious and highly suggestive study. Its lyrical interludes seem out of place. As an author’s first drama, it promised more for his future than if it had been a finished production, and in any other case but that of the capricious, tongue-tied Browning, the promise might have been abundantly fulfilled.

  Browning’s “Paracelsus” is founded upon Marlowe; he labors for some ideal future; he revives many of the Elizabethan strains.

  In “Paracelsus” we have united the two great principles which lie at the basis of all Browning’s work; one, which has for its end, knowledge; the other, which has for its end, conduct. The first is Browning’s philosophy; the second Browning’s art.

  “Paracelsus” lives, and will continue to live, not so much through the subtlety of its metaphysical speculations, and through certain scattered passages of the narrative, which are instinct with the highest kind of imaginative beauty, nor even through the rich and haunting music of the superb song, “Over the sea our galleys went;” but because in it the youth of twenty-three discovered his own distinctive and surpassing gift,—the divination of individual human character as an organic whole. Nobody had known for several hundred years, nor cared particularly to know, what manner of man Paracelsus was. The callow youth at Camberwell resuscitated and evoked him out of the past; not without patient research, to be sure, yet still by a species of magic.

  In it, Browning’s wonderful endowments are already manifest. His knowledge of the causes of spiritual growth and decay, his subtle analysis of motive and counter-motive, his eloquence in pleading a cause, the enkindled power and beauty, of his language when blown upon by noble passion, all appear in full process of development. The hindrances from which he suffered are also only too clear, especially his tendency to lose himself in tangled thought, and to grow harsh and obscure in pursuing the secondary suggestions of his theme.

Strafford, 1837

  Read “Strafford” in the evening, which I fear is too historical; it is the policy of the man, and its consequence upon him—not the heart, temper, feelings, that work on this policy, which Browning has portrayed.

  “Strafford” was a piece of passionate action with the bones of poetry. It was a maimed thing, all over patches and dashes, with the light showing through its ribs, and the wind whistling through its arms and legs; while in its head and echoing in its heart, was sung its passion for a king. It was printed as “acted.” What it might have been originally is impossible to say, but we have some difficulty in conceiving how it could have been put together with so many disjointed pieces in the first instance. The number of dashes and gaps of omission made its pages often resemble a Canadian field in winter, after a considerable thoroughfare of snowshoes. It appeared, however, to please Mr. Macready, and it was played by him appropriately during several nights.

  So completely does the drama proceed irrespectively of historical truth, that the critic may dispense with the thankless task of pointing out discrepancies. He will be better employed in asking what ends those discrepancies were intended to serve, and whether the neglect of truth of fact has resulted in the highest truth of character.

  The play has its faults, but scarcely those of language, where the diction is noble and rhythmic, because it is, so to speak, the genuine rind of the fruit it envelops. But there are dramatic faults—primarily, in the extreme economy of the author in the presentment of his dramatis personæ, who are embodied abstractions—monomaniacs of ideas, as some one has said of Hugo’s personages—rather than men as we are, with manifold complexities in endless friction or fusion. One cardinal fault is the lack of humour, which to my mind is the paramount objection to its popular acceptance. Another, is the misproportionate length of some of the speeches. Once again, there is, as in the greater portion of Browning’s longer poems and dramas, a baneful equality of emphasis.

  “Strafford” rests under this adverse cloud of pre-conceived opinion as to the capabilities of art. Yet, in the light which Browning’s genius has shed upon these “possibilities of future evil,” I believe a new fact in the development of dramatic craft may be described which promises to show that they are not necessarily undramatic.

  Contains fine things; but the involution and unexpectedness of the poet’s thoughts now and always showed themselves least engagingly when they were even imagined as being spoken not read.

Sordello, 1840

  After a silence of four years, the poet published “Sordello,” which has proved, and will inevitably continue to prove, the richest puzzle to all lovers of poetry which was ever given to the world. Never was extraordinary wealth squandered in so extraordinary a manner by any prodigal son of Apollo. Its reception, if not already known to the reader, may be guessed without much difficulty; but the poem has certainly never been fairly estimated.

  Douglas Jerrold was recruiting himself at Brighton after a long illness. In the progress of his convalescence a parcel arrived from London, which contained, among other things, this new volume of “Sordello;” the medical attendant had forbidden Mr. Jerrold the luxury of reading, but owing to the absence of his conjugal “life guards” he indulged in the illicit enjoyment. A few lines put Jerrold in a state of alarm. Sentence after sentence brought no constructive thought to his brain. At last the idea crossed his mind that in his illness his mental faculties had been wrecked. The perspiration rolled from his forehead, and smiting his head, he sat down in his sofa, crying, “O, God, I am an idiot!” When his wife and sister came, they were amused by his pushing the volume into their hands, and demanding what they thought of it. He watched them intently while they read—at last his wife said: “I don’t understand what the man means; it is gibberish.” The delighted humorist sank in his seat again: “Thank God, I am not an idiot.” Mr. Browning, to whom we told this, has often laughed over it, and then endeavored to show that “Sordello” was the clearest and most simple poem in the English language.

	Who wills may hear Sordello’s story told
	By Robert Browning; warm? (you ask) or cold?
	But just so much as seemeth to enhance—
	The start being granted, onward goes the dance
	To its own music—the poem’s inward sense;
	So, by its verity … nay, no pretense
	Avails your self-created bards, and thus
	By just the chance of half a hair to us,
	If understood—but what’s the odds to you,
	Who with no obligation to pursue
	Scant tracks of thought, if such, indeed, there be
	In this one poem … stay, my friend, and see
	Whether you note that creamy tint of flesh
	Softer than bivalve pink, impearled and fresh,
	Just where the small o’ th’ back goes curving down
	To the full buttock—ay, but that’s the crown
	Protos, incumbered, cast before the feet
	Of Grecian women … ah! you hear me, sweet!

  This constant demand exhausts the power of attention in a short time, and the mind is unable to sustain its watchfulness and sureness of action, so that if we read much at a sitting we often find the first few pages clear and admirable, while the last three or four over which the eye passes before we close the book leave us bewildered and jaded; and we say, “Sordello is so dreadfully obscure.” The truth is, Mr. Browning has given too much in his couple of hundred pages; there is not a line of the poem which is not as full of matter as a line can be; so that if the ten syllables sometimes seem to start and give way under the strain, we need not wonder. We come to no places in “Sordello” where we can rest and dream or look up at the sky. Ideas, emotions, analyses, descriptions, still come crowding on. There is too much of everything; we cannot see the wood for the trees. Towards the end of the third book Mr. Browning interrupts the story that he may “pause and breathe,” that is an apt expression; but Mr. Browning seems unable to slacken the motion of his mind, and during his breathing-space, heart and brain perceptive and reflective powers, are almost more busily at work than ever.

  In point of method no importance can be attached to “Sordello;” but the book is full enough of exquisite beauties and nice discriminations of the elements of character to support a considerable essay; and there is in it a luxuriant wealth of sonorous expression, suggestive of joy in a newly-discovered faculty. It is to be noted on the way that the Shelley flavour goes through “Paracelsus” and comes out with great strength in “Sordello,” reinvigorated by the magnificent originality of style developed by Browning in the meantime.

  “Sordello” offers jewels of great price to the diligent searcher, but none other will discover them. It is very illogical for those who have never discovered the treasure to say that it does not exist; yet this charge has frequently been laid against the poet, and critics, irritated and discouraged by the manifest application required of them, have endorsed the popular verdict, so that it has now become the fashion to say that Mr. Browning is totally unintelligible. But when any person of average intelligence devotes himself to the study of the poet’s works he is invariably astonished at discovering how fallacious is this hasty general verdict.

  One half of “Sordello,” and that, with Mr. Browning’s usual ill-luck, the first half, is undoubtedly obscure. It is as difficult to read as “Endymion” or the “Revolt of Islam,” and for the same reason—the author’s lack of experience in the art of composition. We have all heard of the young architect who forgot to put a staircase in his house, which contained fine rooms, but no way of getting into them. “Sordello” is a poem without a staircase. The author, still in his twenties, essayed a high thing. For his subject—

	“He singled out
	Sordello compassed murkily about
	With ravage of six long sad hundred years.”

He partially failed; and the British public, with its accustomed generosity, and in order, I suppose, to encourage the others, has never ceased girding at him, because forty-two years ago he published, at his own charges, a little book of two hundred and fifty pages, which even such of them as were then able to read could not understand.

  “Who will,” says Browning, “may hear Sordello’s story told.” As from the mountain-top Don Quixote beheld, amid the dust and din of multitudes, the great king, Pentapolin of the Iron Arm, struggling bravely in the press, so the poet has singled out a fellow-singer, seen dimly through the gloom of “six long sad hundred years,” and presents him to us.

  I recall, in about my eighteenth year, discrediting the statements I had heard relative to “Sordello’s” unintelligibility, and attempting to read the book with confidence in my own anti-Philistine comprehension of it. But a few pages convinced me that report had not falsified its odious “toughness.” Beautiful gleams occur in it, but they are like flying lights over a surface of heavy darkness. Now and then, for twenty lines or so, you feel as if you had smoothly mastered its meaning; again, all is disarray and density. It is like seeing a fine statue reflected in a cracked mirror: here is the curve of a symmetric arm, but you follow it only to meet an abortive bulge of elbow; there is the outline of a sculpturesque cheek, but you trace below it a repellent deformity of throat; once more you light with joy upon a thigh of faultless moulding, but lower down you are shocked by obese distortion. The whole “poem” resembles a caricature of some Gothic cathedral, in planning which some demented architect has treated his own madness to a riot of gargoyles. The ensemble is monstrous, inexcusable. But, like many of Mr. Browning’s later, modern poems, it strikes you as more of a wilful failure than a feeble one.

  “Sordello” is by common consent the most difficult of Browning’s poems…. A poem so constructed, with such a hero and such a background, could hardly fail to be obscure, and when we add to all this the subject-matter of the poem—the inner life of a Soul—and that Soul a Poet-Soul—the many digressions and parentheses,—and Mr. Browning’s instinct to write from the consciousness of his actors,—which his penetrating poetic insight often renders a subtle and unlooked-for consciousness—rather than to the consciousness of his readers,—we need not greatly wonder that many even of his most ardent disciples have given up “Sordello” as a hopeless problem—too hard a nut to crack, however valuable the kernel it contains. But hard as it is, we believe the nut to be crackable, and the kernel well worth the trouble.

  There is a story of two clever girls who set out to peruse “Sordello,” and corresponded with each other about their progress, “Somebody is dead in ‘Sordello,’” one of them wrote to her friend. “I don’t quite know who it is, but it must make things a little clearer in the long run.” Alas! a copious use of the guillotine would scarcely clear the stage of “Sordello.”

  In brief the way not to read Browning is by means of the commentary and the annotation. One should naturally begin with the simpler poems. He who begins with “Sordello” is not likely to make great progress. Let the non-reader beware of getting his introduction to Browning through “Sordello!” That poem may wait until the last. Then it may wait a little longer; for the time that is needed to extract poetic gold from the ore of “Sordello” may be put to better use on the “Ring and the Book.”

  Picturesque detail, intellectual interest, moral meaning, struggle in vain in that tale to make themselves felt and discerned through the tangle of words and the labyrinth of act and reflection.

  So I thought I would try myself on him in earnest, and I got “Sordello.” Well, it was very hard and difficult—hard in making out what the story meant, hard in grammar and construction, hard in the learning exacted from the reader. But it was plain that it was written for a reader not afraid of trouble, and I accepted the condition. I did take a good deal of trouble, and read it many times, in many moods, in many ways, beginning at the end, or the middle, trying on it various theories, reserving what I could not make out, which was much, treasuring what I saw to be purpose, and meaning, and beauty, and insight. And so I began to feel as if the cloud was lifting, and though I do not pretend to know all that was in the poet’s mind in writing, I got to feel that I had something, and something worth having. And it was an introduction to the poet’s method, to his unflinching view of life, to his ever-present sense (in which he is like Shakespeare, and in a lower degree like our modern Punch), of how much there is of tragic in the most comic, and of comic in the most tragic.

	As when we watch a landscape in a mist,
	See here the cross of a great spire break through,
	Note there a coil of silver river twist,
	Mark yonder, half revealed, a mountain blue
	Struggle above the wind-blown vapors gray,
	Hear lowing kine in many an unseen field,
	And soft-toned bells in the dim distance swung,
	And, baffled sense to fancy giving way,
	We fall to muse on what may lie concealed
	Where the thick fleeces of the air are flung;—
	So he that reads Sordello’s story, sees
	Through misty chaos of the song, arise
	Dim Alps, dim Apennines, dim olive trees,
	And phantom spires thrust up to purple skies
	From river-girdled cities, with the din
	Of all the Middle Ages echoing,—
	The clash of arms, the slaughtered women’s screams,
	The war cries of the Guelph and Ghibelin,
	The strife of mind and force, of Pope and King;
	And on the fruitful gloom intent, he dreams.

  His labours gradually concentrated themselves on a long narrative poem, historical and philosophical, in which he recounted the entire life of a mediæval minstrel. He had become terrified at what he thought a tendency to diffuseness in his expression, and consequently “Sordello” is the most tightly compressed and abstrusely dark of all his writings. He was partly aware himself of its excessive density; the present writer (in 1875) saw him take up a copy of the first edition, and say with a grimace, “Ah! the entirely unintelligible ‘Sordello.’”

Pippa Passes, 1841

  “Pippa Passes” is the title of the first of these little two shilling volumes, which seem to contain just about as much as a man who lives wisely, might, after a good summer of mingled work, business and pleasure, have to offer to the world, as the honey he could spare from his hive.

  His “Bells and Pomegranates” furnish us with a series of poems almost unexampled in their strength and variety, considering the rapidity with which they were produced. The first dramatic poem of the series, “Pippa Passes,” ranks amongst the best of these efforts. All the qualities which have justly earned distinction for Mr. Browning are present in this drama, which he has never surpassed for its exquisite delineation of passion and intensity of emotion, though he has subsequently worked upon broader conceptions. There is a thorough human interest attaching to the career of Pippa, the lovely peasant maid; and in this instance at least the simplicity of the characters in the poem has its counterpart in the simplicity of the poet’s eloquence. In this drama we find beauty, tenderness, grace, and passion combined in an unusual degree.

  There had been nothing in the pastoral kind written so delightfully as “Pippa Passes” since the days of the Jacobean dramatists. It was inspired by the same feeling as gave charm and freshness to the masques of Day and Nabbes, but it was carried out with a mastery of execution and fullness of knowledge such as those unequal writers could not dream of exercising.

  “Pippa Passes” is but a series of dramatic scenes, linked together as by God’s own sunshine, sweet child-Pippa, the innocent bird-song of whose young heart falls, without her knowledge, though with momentous effect, upon the ears of guilty worldly souls who hear. The episode of Ottima and Sebald with their adulterous loves, after the murder by Ottima of her old husband, is one of the most tremendous things in English drama, as, in a livid flash of lightning, the whole ghastly scene starts out upon you; you hear the blood-stained couple talk, and see them move. It is of Shakespearian power.

  The least dramatic in form of all his plays … remains, owing to the capriciousness of its form, a poem to be read in the study rather than a play to be seen on the stage.

  “Pippa Passes” is Mr. Browning’s most perfect work. As a whole, he has never written anything to equal it in artistic symmetry; while a single scene—that between Ottima and Sebald—reaches the highest level of tragic utterance which he has ever attained.

  It has even more of the dramatic spirit than Browning’s poems generally have, yet it is not a drama. It is rather a series of dramatic sketches loosely strung together by the movements of Pippa. The plan suited Browning and set him free from some of the difficulties which prevented him from ever attaining complete success in the regular drama. Each sketch represents one dramatic situation, and depicts a person or a group at a crisis of life. There is no need to follow them through various developments. The critical method, which Browning seems to have followed, suffices.

  That lovely and powerful and tragic dramatic poem, “Pippa Passes,” which alone marks with triumphant certainty Robert Browning as a poet for all time.

  These songs of the wandering Pippa are the most poetical pieces that Browning ever produced, their brevity proving that he could have reached the highest point by placing a master’s restriction on his words.

A Blot in the ’Scutcheon, 1843

  Browning’s play has thrown me into a perfect passion of sorrow. To say that there is anything in its subject save what is lovely, true, deeply affecting, full of the best emotion, the most earnest feeling, and the most true and tender source of interest, is to say that there is no light in the sun, and no heat in blood. It is full of genius, natural and great thoughts, profound and yet simple and beautiful in its vigor. I know nothing that is so affecting, nothing in any book I have ever read, as Mildred’s recurrence to that “I was so young—I had no mother.” I know no love like it, no passion like it, no moulding of a splendid thing after its conception, like it. And I swear it is a tragedy that MUST be played; and must be played, moreover, by Macready. There are some things I would have changed if I could (they are very slight, mostly broken lines); and I assuredly would have the old servant begin his tale upon the scene; and be taken by the throat, or drawn upon, by his master in its commencement. But the tragedy I never shall forget, or less vividly remember than I do now. And if you tell Browning that I have seen it, tell him that I believe from my soul there is no man living (and not many dead) who could produce such a work.

  “Luria” is a lesson; “A Blot in the ’Scutcheon” is an experience; the one is a drama; the other is a heart’s or home’s interior. Luria is stately and inspiring; but Mildred and Guendolen are of us—women kiss them; all sit and weep with them.

  It is full of poetry and pathos, but there is little in it to relieve the human spirit,—which cannot bear too much of earnestness and woe added to the mystery and burden of our daily lives. Yet the piece has such tragic strength as to stamp the author as a great poet, though in a narrow range. One almost forgets the singular improbabilities of the story, the blasé talk of the child-lovers (an English Juliet of fourteen is against nature), the stiff language of the retainers, and various other blemishes.

  It seems but yesterday that I sat by his side in the green-room at the reading of Robert Browning’s beautiful drama “A Blot in the ’Scutcheon.” As a rule, Mr. Macready always read the new plays. But owing, I suppose, to some press of business, the task was intrusted on this occasion to the head prompter,—a clever man in his way, but wholly unfitted to bring out, or even to understand, Mr. Browning’s meaning. Consequently, the delicate, subtle lines were twisted, perverted, and sometimes even made ridiculous in his hands. My “cruel father” was a warm admirer of the poet. He sat writhing and indignant, and tried by gentle asides to make me see the real meaning of the verse. But somehow the mischief proved irreparable, for a few of the actors during the rehearsals chose to continue to misunderstand the text, and never took the interest in the play which they would have done had Mr. Macready read it,—for he had great power as a reader. I always thought it was chiefly because of this contretemps that a play, so thoroughly dramatic, failed, despite its painful story, to make the great success which was justly its due.

  Neither on its first appearance, nor when Phelps revived it at Sadler’s Wells, was “The Blot in the ’Scutcheon” received by the public otherwise than with warm applause.

  I had heard “My Last Duchess” and “In a Gondola” read most eloquently by Mr. Boker, and I then turned to the poet’s works to find for myself the greatest of dramas in “A Blot in the ’Scutcheon.” While I was at once arrested by the majesty of the verse, my mind was more attracted by the dramatic quality of the story, which stamped the author at once as a master of theatric form of narration—the oldest and the greatest of all forms. I saw in Thorold a clear and perfectly outlined character suited to stage purposes; in Mildred and Mertoun a pair of lovers whose counterparts may be found only in the immortal lovers of Verona, Juliet and Romeo, while they are as distinctly original as those of Shakespeare; and in Guendolen a revival of Imogen herself. I saw that the play, like many plays of the earlier dramatists as well as those contemporary with this production, was written for an age when the ear of the auditor was more attentive than the eye, and when the appliances of the stage were less ample than now; and I saw that, with a treatment of the text such as all stage managers have freely given even to the plays of the greatest of all dramatists, the “Blot in the ’Scutcheon” would take a front rank as an acting play.

  The “Athenæum” (Feb. 18, 1843) spoke of “A Blot in the ’Scutcheon” as a “poetic melodrama,” and called it “a very puzzling and unpleasant piece of business.” It does not seem to have had very fair treatment, if we may believe the statements that have been made. It was produced on the same night that a new farce was given—“A Thumping Legacy”—and the opera of “Der Freischütz,” and it is said without Browning’s name. It was played only three nights. It might have consoled the poet had he known that the “pit audience,” some yet unborn, would be found eventually outside the walls of the theatre. Their commendation, if less noisy, has been more lasting. The play was revived by Phelps at Sadler’s Wells in 1848. The late Mr. Lawrence Barrett is said to have obtained in America success with the play in a modified and altered form.

  We are so carried along by the fervor and fire and passion which he puts into his production that we pay no heed to its failure to fulfill the first conditions of dramatic propriety. But a play as a literary product must stand, not upon the excellence of detailed scenes, but upon its perfection as an artistic whole; not upon the beauty of its poetry, but upon its adequate representation of life. The necessities of the drama at times exact, or at least permit, an occasional neglect of probability in the conduct of the characters; but they certainly do not require a persistent defiance of it, as is exhibited throughout this tragedy, which is in no sense a picture of any life that was ever lived. We are in a world of unreal beings, powerfully portrayed; for the situations are exciting, and the pathos of the piece is harrowing. But the action constantly lies out of the realm of the reality it purports to represent, and therefore out of the realm of the highest art.

Saul, 1845–55

  If there is one poem into which Browning has thrown all his artistic power, I think it is “Saul.” How grand is the stage on which we see the suffering Titan! the black tent in the midst of the sand “burnt to powder;” the blinding glare without, darkness within. There he endures in the desert, through which flow no refreshing streams to quench the thirst of his soul; he who once had “heard the words of God, had seen the vision of the Almighty,” is now blinded by the glory, and he knows not the love which his own heart has cast out.

  “Saul” is probably the finest poem Browning ever wrote, and it has the note of immortality. I know not any modern poem more glorious for substance and form both; here they interpenetrate; they are one as soul and body, character and deed, of lofty aim and heroic countenance.

  This is, in every respect, one of Browning’s grandest poems; and in all that is included in the idea of expression, is quite perfect.

  Browning’s “Saul” is one of those superb outbursts of poetic force which have for modern ears, accustomed to overmuch smooth, careful, and uninspired versification, not only the charm of beauty and energy in high degree, but of contrasts as well. It sweeps along, eager, impetuous, resistless as the streams which descend the Alps and rush seaward with the joy of mountain torrents.

Men and Women, 1854

  I fancy we shall agree pretty well on favourites, though one’s mind has no right to be quite made up so soon on such a subject. For my own part, I don’t reckon I’ve read them at all yet, as I only got them the day before leaving town, and couldn’t possibly read them then,—the best proof to you how hard at work I was for once,—so heard them read by William; since then read them on the journey again, and some a third time at intervals; but they’ll bear lots of squeezing yet. My prime favourites hitherto (without the book by me) are “Childe Roland,” “B^P. Blougram,” “Karshish,” “the Contemporary” (How it Strikes a Contemporary), “Lippo Lippi,” “Cleon,” and “Popularity;” about the other lyrical ones I can’t quite speak yet, and their names don’t stick in my head: but I’m afraid “The Heretic’s Tragedy” rather gave me the gripes at first, though I’ve tried since to think it didn’t, on finding the Athenæum similarly affected.

  Elizabeth has been reading Browning’s poem, and she tells me it is great. I have only dipped into it, here and there, but it is not exactly comfortable reading. It seemed to me like a galvanic battery in full play—its spasmodic utterances and intense passion make me feel as if I had been taking a bath among electric eels.

  “Men and Women” … is the most finished and comprehensive of the author’s works, and the one his readers least could spare.

  The series of “Men and Women,” fifty-one poems in number, represents Mr. Browning’s genius at its ripe maturity, its highest uniform level. In this central work of his career, every element of his genius is equally developed, and the whole brought into perfection of harmony never before or since attained. There is no lack, there is no excess. I do not say that the poet has not touched higher heights since, or perhaps before; but that he has never since nor before maintained himself so long on so high a height, never exhibited the rounded perfection, the imagination, thought, passion, melody, variety, all fused in one, never produced a single work or group at once so great and so various, admits, I think, of little doubt. Here are fifty poems, every one of which, in its way, is a masterpiece: and the range is such as no other English poet has perhaps ever covered in a single book of miscellaneous poems.

  “Men and Women” is a series which, for clearness and balance of matter and style, it would be impossible to surpass in the list of his poems, whether it was owing to the period of his mind, then reached, or to circumstances.

  The book by which Mr. Browning was best known was the two green volumes of “Men and Women.” In these, I still think, is the heart of his genius beating most strenuously and with an immortal vitality. Perhaps this, for its compass, is the collection of poetry the most various and rich of modern English times, almost of any English times. But just as Mr. Fitzgerald cared little for what Lord Tennyson wrote after 1842, so I have never been able to feel quite the same enthusiasm for Mr. Browning’s work after “Men and Women.”

  These wonderful poems might still afford a roughness here and there, a measure broken by the very wealth of metaphor and thought, in which the poet’s mind luxuriated, but they could no longer be kept back, even by a thousand parentheses and digressions, from the common intelligence, which by this time also had been trained to receive them. From that period at least, if not before, the name of Browning assumed its place by the side of Tennyson.

The Ring and the Book, 1868–69

  It is full of wonderful work, but it seems to me that, whereas other poets are the more liable to get incoherent the more fanciful their starting-point happens to be, the thing that makes Browning drunk is to give him a dram of prosaic reality, and unluckily this time the “gum-tickler” is less like pure Cognac than 7 Dials gin. Whether the consequent evolutions will be bearable to their proposed extent without the intervening walls of the station-house to tone down their exuberance may be dubious.

  “The Ring and the Book,” if completed as successfully as it is begun, will certainly be an extraordinary achievement—a poem of some 20,000 lines on a great human subject, darkened too often by subtleties and wilful obscurities, but filled with the flashes of Mr. Browning’s genius. We know nothing in the writer’s former poems which so completely represents his peculiarities as this instalment of “The Ring and the Book,” which is so marked by picture and characterization, so rich in pleading and debating, so full of those verbal touches in which Browning has no equal, and of those verbal involutions in which he has fortunately no rival. Everything Browningish is found here,—the legal jauntiness, the knitted argumentation, the cunning prying into detail, the suppressed tenderness, the humanity,—the salt intellectual humour.

  The book, as it stands, though solid truth and fact, is not by itself sufficient for the artist’s needs. Some alloy must be added, in order to render it fit for use. That alloy is fancy. Dwelling and pondering upon the facts stated in the book, Mr. Browning makes exercise of his imagination, and reanimates with the creative faculty that man inherits in a second degree from his Maker the inert and dead, but yet genuine and once vital, matter of the book…. Not the least remarkable thing about this poem is that there is no attempt at concealment in it, no reserve of secrecy until the end. The conjurer lays his cards upon the table, and shows you all the passes in his trick. He depends upon the ingenuity of his movements, upon the intrinsic interest of his game, to rouse and rivet and retain the interest of his spectators.

  “I grant,” says Lessing, “that there is also a beauty in drapery, but can it be compared with that of the human form? And shall he who can attain the greater, rest content with the less? I much fear that the most perfect master in drapery shows by that very talent wherein his weakness lies.” This was spoken of plastic art, but it has a yet deeper meaning in poetic criticism. There too, the master is he who presents the natural shape, the curves, the thews of men, and does not labour and seek praise for faithful reproduction of the mere moral drapery of the hour, this or another; who gives you Hercules at strife with Antæus, Laocoon writhing in the coils of the divine serpents, the wrestle with circumstance or passion, with outward destiny or inner character, in the free outlines of nature and reality, and not in the outlines of a dress-coat either of Victorian or Arthurian time. The capacity which it has for this presentation, at once so varied and so direct, is one reason why the dramatic form ranks as the highest expression and measure of the creative power of the poet; and the extraordinary grasp with which Mr. Browning has availed himself of this double capacity, is one reason why we should reckon the “Ring and the Book” as his masterpiece.

  “The Ring and the Book” is a wonderful production, the extreme of realistic art and considered, not without reason, by the poet’s admirers, to be his greatest work.

  One of the noblest books of this century.

  Certain rare works of literature, like others of art and philosophy, appear too gigantic to have been wholly wrought out each by the one man who we yet know did accomplish it unaided. Such a work reminds us of a great cathedral, which, even if ultimately finished in accordance with the plans of the supreme architect who designed it, could not be completed under his own supervision or during his own lifetime, being too vast and elaborate for fulfillment in a single generation. And as such a colossal work “The Ring and the Book” has always impressed me. And, indeed, without straining comparison, one may pursue with regard to it the suggestion of a great Gothic cathedral.

  Mr. Browning was strolling one day through a square in Florence, the Piazza San Lorenzo, which is a standing market for old clothes, old furniture, and old curiosities of every kind, when a parchment-covered book attracted his eye, from amidst the artistic or nondescript rubbish of one of the stalls. It was the record of a murder which had taken place in Rome…. The book proved, on examination, to contain the whole history of the case, as carried on in writing, after the fashion of those days: pleadings and counter-pleadings, the depositions of defendants and witnesses; manuscript letters announcing the execution of the murderer; and the “instrument of the Definitive Sentence” which established the perfect innocence of the murdered wife: these various documents having been collected and bound together by some person interested in the trial, possibly the very Cancini, friend of the Franceschini family to whom the manuscript letters are addressed. Mr. Browning bought the whole for the value of eightpence, and it became the raw material of what appeared four years later as “The Ring and the Book.”

  The greatest of his works, as a whole, is “The Ring and The Book,” in which is told the story of a Roman trial for murder, in the seventeenth century. Mr. Browning shows us the most intimate feelings and motives of the murderer, the victim, the judges, the advocates on either side; the arguments of partisans, the prejudices of the people; all these are expressed with a master-hand. Such pictures of the workings of many minds, from different standpoints, and on so large a scale, are marvellous for their subtlety and force. The work is more than a narrative, but we cannot call it either a drama or an epic, though it inclines to be both, with a leaning towards the epic. Still, it is chiefly a series of wonderful sketches of character; and we are always, in Mr. Browning’s work, driven back to our definition; he is a master of mental anatomy.

  His greatest work in point of size and in the sense it gives us, of his sustained power. But the whole impression is one of power misdirected. Not to speak of the irritating bizarreries of the advocates and of the factions of Rome, the whole method of the book is anti-poetical. Poetic truth does not consist in displaying the facts of truth disconnectedly: the poet sees life singly and sees it whole, and should enable us so to see it. But if the experiment of trying to give the totality of truth by presenting its dislocated parts in small doses is a failure, what gigantic powers are displayed in the failure!

  All things considered, the greatest achievement of the century in blank verse, is Robert Browning’s “The Ring and the Book.” I don’t mean the greatest in bulk (although it is that, having 21,134 verses, double the number of the “Paradise Lost”); I mean the greatest achievement in the effective use of blank verse in the treatment of a great subject—really the greatest subject, when viewed aright, which has been treated in English poetry—vastly greater in its bearings upon the highest education of man than that of the “Paradise Lost.” Its blank verse, while having a most complex variety of character, is the most dramatic blank verse since the Elizabethan era. Having read the entire poem aloud to classes every year for several years, I feel prepared to speak of the transcendent merits of the verse. One reads it without a sense almost of there being anything artificial in the construction of the language and by artificial I mean put consciously into a certain shape. Of course, it was put consciously into shape; but one gets the impression that the poet thought and felt spontaneously in blank verse. And it is always verse—though the reader has but a minimum of metre consciousness. And the method of the thought is always poetic. This is saying much, but not too much. All moods of the mind are in the poem, expressed in Protean verse.

  I did not mean to make even this slight departure from the main business of these papers, which is to confide my literary passions to the reader; he probably has had a great many of his own. I think I may class the “Ring and the Book” among them, though I have never been otherwise a devotee of Browning. But I was still newly home from Italy, or away from home, when that poem appeared, and whether or not it was because it took me so with the old enchantment of the land, I gave my heart promptly to it. Of course, there are terrible longueurs in it, and you do get tired of the same story told over and over from the different points of view, and yet it is such a great story, and unfolded with such a magnificent breadth and noble fulness, that one who blames it lightly blames himself heavily. There are certain books of it—Caponsacchi’s story, Pompilia’s story, and Count Guido’s story—that I think ought to rank with the greatest poetry ever written, and that have a direct, dramatic expression of the fact and character, which is without rival. There is a noble and lofty pathos in the close of Caponsacchi’s statement, an artless and manly break from his self-control throughout, that seems to me the last possible effect in its kind; and Pompilia’s story holds all of womanhood in it, the purity, the passion, the tenderness, the helplessness. But if I begin to praise this or any of the things I have liked, I do not know when I should stop. Yes, as I think it over, the “Ring and the Book” appears to me one of the great few poems whose splendor can never suffer lasting eclipse, however it may have presently fallen into abeyance.

  A summer vacation devoted to “The Ring and the Book” converted me to a qualified admirer of the poet. Now, after further study of his writings, I regard this poem as the greatest work of creative imagination that has appeared since the time of Shakespeare…. I know of no poem in all literature in which the greatness of human nature so looms up before you, or which so convinces you that a whole heaven or a whole hell may be wrapped up in the compass of a single soul…. I am persuaded that the generations to come will regard “The Ring and the Book,” in the mere matter of creative genius, as the greatest poetical work of this generation.

  Despite the great beauty of certain portions, and the chivalrous and noble defence of the wronged child, Pompilia, the whole unutterably vulgar tragedy belongs to the bad days of Italy, when crime alone seemed universally interesting.

  The career of Guido is Browning’s greatest study in the progress of evil. This creature has been called “the subtlest and most powerful compound of vice in our literature;” he is put among companions congenial to his nature,—mother, mistress, brothers,—himself

	The midmost blotch of black
	Discernible in the group of clustered crimes they call
	Their palace.

The poet’s genius has given us in one word an illustration of how in the vilest there still remains the possibility of reverence for truth and reality.

The Inn Album, 1875

  The raw material of a penny dreadful, such as the theme here is, requires more artistic manipulation than Mr. Browning has given it before it can be called a poem. Beauty of any kind is what he has carefully excluded. Vulgarity, therefore, is stamped upon “The Inn Album,” in spite of the ingenuity with which, by suppressing name and place and superfluous circumstances, the writer succeeds in presenting only the spiritual actions of his characters upon each other in spite of the marvelous scalpel-exercise of analysis which bears the most recondite motives, in spite of the intellectual brilliancy which gives a value to everything he has to say.

  Now it is both incorrect and unjust to say that the “Inn Album” appeals to those tastes which are gratified by a police-report. Not only is there an entire absence of anything like offensive detail, but there is really no description whatever of any of the “criminal” incidents. More than that, they are in some degree connected with the persons in the manner to which we have alluded. And yet they fail to become tragic and do remain, we think, melodramatic, confronting us almost in their native ugliness, because this connection or fusion is incomplete…. With all its power, we are not refreshed, nor awed, nor uplifted by the “Inn Album;” it has no form to charm us, little brightness to relieve its gloom, and except for the dramatic touches we have tried to indicate, the human nature it shows us is too mean, or too commonplace, or too repellent, to excite more than the pleasure of following a psychological revelation.

  This is a decidedly irritating and displeasing performance…. “The Inn Album” reads like a series of rough notes for a poem—of hasty hieroglyphics and symbols, decipherable only to the author himself. A great poem might perhaps have been made of it, but assuredly it is not a great poem, nor any poem whatsoever. It is hard to say very coherently what it is. Up to a certain point, like everything of Mr. Browning’s, it is highly dramatic and vivid, and beyond that point, like all its companions, it is as little dramatic as possible. It is not narrative, for there is not a line of comprehensible, consecutive statement in the two hundred and eleven pages of the volume. It is not lyrical, for there is not a phrase which in any degree does the office of the poetry that comes lawfully into the world—chants itself, images itself, or lingers in the memory. “That bard’s a Browning; he neglects the form!” one of the characters exclaims with irresponsible frankness. That Mr. Browning knows he “Neglects the form,” and does not particularly care, does not very much help matters; it only deepens the reader’s sense of the graceless and thankless and altogether unavailable character of the poem…. He deals with human character as a chemist with his acids and alkalies, and while he mixes his colored fluids in a way that surprises the profane, knows perfectly well what he is about. But there is too apt to be in his style that sputter and evil aroma which characterize the proceedings of the laboratory.

  It is difficult to discover much beyond the mere willfulness of genius in his last volume. It is evident, from the English reviews which have already appeared, that even the most indulgent of his literary friends found it difficult to persuade themselves into admiration. This poem is neither so dull as “Fifine,” so obscure as “Sordello,” nor so provoking as the first half of “Aristophanes’ Apology,” but it is not relieved as at least the last two are, by passages that shine and burn with strong poetic flame.

  Seldom is there a work more inwrought with characterization, fateful gathering, intense human passion, tragic action to which the realistic scene and manners serve as heightening foils, than this thrilling epic of men and women whose destinies are compressed within a single day…. No one of Browning’s works is better proportioned, or less sophisticated in diction.

General

	… from Browning some “Pomegranate,” which, if cut deep, down the middle,
	Shows a heart within blood-tinctured, of a veined humanity.

  His writings have, till lately, been clouded by obscurities, his riches having seemed to accumulate beyond his mastery of them. So beautiful are the picture gleams, so full of meaning the little thoughts that are always twisting their parasites over his main purpose, that we hardly can bear to wish them away, even when we know their excess to be a defect. They seem, each and all, too good to be lopped away, and we cannot wonder the mind from which they grew was at a loss which to reject. Yet, a higher mastery in the poetic art must give him skill and resolution to reject them. Then, all true life being condensed into the main growth, instead of being so much scattered in tendrils, off-shoots and flower-bunches, the effect would be more grand and simple; nor should we be any loser as to the spirit; it would all be there, only more concentrated as to the form, more full, if less subtle, in its emanations. The tendency to variety and delicacy, rather than to a grasp of the subject and concentration of interest, are not so obvious in Browning’s minor works as in “Paracelsus,” and in his tragedy of “Strafford.”

	There is delight in singing, tho’ none hear
	Beside the singer; and there is delight
	In praising, tho’ the praiser sit alone
	And see the prais’d far off him, far above;
	Shakespeare is not our poet, but the world’s,
	Therefore on him no speech! and brief for thee,
	Browning! Since Chaucer was alive and hale
	No man hath walked along our roads with step
	So active, so inquiring eye, or tongue
	So varied in discourse. But warmer climes
	Give brighter plumage, stronger wing: the breeze
	Of Alpine heights thou playest with, borne on
	Beyond Sorrento and Amalfi, where
	The Siren waits thee, singing song for song.

  Browning’s Dramas are not made up of a number of beauties, distinct and isolate as pearls, threaded upon the string of the plot. Each has a permeating life and spirit of its own. When we would break off any fragment, we cannot find one which would by itself approach completeness. It is like tearing away a limb from a living body. For these are works of art in the truest sense. They are not aggregations of dissonant beauties, like some modern sculptures, against which the Apollo might bring an action of trover for an arm, and the Antinoüs for a leg, but pure statues, in which everything superfluous has been sternly chiselled away, and whose wonderful balance might seem tameness to the ordinary observer; who demands strain as the evidence of strength…. His men and women are men and women, and not Mr. Browning masquerading in different-colored dominoes…. If we could be sure that our readers would read Mr. Browning’s poems with the respect and attentive study they deserve, what would hinder us from saying that we think him a great poet? However, as the world feels uncomfortably somewhere, it can hardly tell how or why, at hearing people called great, before it can claim a share in their greatness by erecting to them a monument with a monk-Latin inscription on it which nine-tenths of their countrymen cannot construe, and as Mr. Browning must be as yet comparatively a young man, we will content ourselves with saying that he has in him the elements of greatness. To us he appears to have a wider range and greater freedom of movement than any other of the younger English poets.

  Mr. Browning seems to take his poems, after writing them, and crush them together at both ends, till he gets the well-knit symmetry and consistency of a Bedouin; he succeeds in making a sort of intellectual and spiritual pemmican. Sometimes, indeed, the desire to produce something dense and nervous gets only obscurity for its result instead of an effective vivacity. When Mr. Browning began to write, we say with deference, that this was his besetting sin…. The fancies throng to the pen’s point, throwing dashes and commas behind them, till they get out of sight of their arch instigator in the first lines. We love to linger over such passages, grudging no time, till we tie the two ends together; then we can enjoy the picture so munificently grouped. It is no condemnation of these pages to say that few people will consent to bestow so much time and labor upon them. The lovers of a smooth poetry, which can be caught at a glance, or of an easy flow of didactic talk which does not harass the average intellect, cannot sit in judgment upon Mr. Browning’s involutions and lengthy crescendoes, for they are not the persons who wait to see whether the picture, at first so confused and apparently destitute of a leading group or idea, is worth the contemplation which may finally reproduce the poet’s point of view, and thus call a beautiful order out of the prodigal chaos.

  What Mr. Browning has produced is great as it stands, but he suggests a power even greater than his achievement. He speaks like a spirit who is able to do that which has been almost impossible in past centuries…. Above every other, Mr. Browning’s poetry is that of a new human species, which can now distinguish words and construe phrases. He has the sort of insight whose peculiar characteristic it is to recognize everywhere, not only forms and facts, but their mutual connections and methods of action. This philosophical power which he possesses of seizing subtle and exact relations is met with in more than one thinker, it is true; but he is one of the first, if not the first, in whom it has reached such development, without becoming the dominant faculty which subordinates all the others. For, strong as it is, it has found in his poetic imagination another faculty still stronger, which has forced it to work as its purveyor and servant. In this lies the essential originality of Mr. Browning.

  Besides “The Blot in the ’Scutcheon” which has been successfully produced at two metropolitan theatres, “Colombe’s Birthday” and “Luria” show not only what he has done, but what with the hope of a great triumph before him he might yet do as a dramatist. I could show what I mean by transcribing the last act of “Colombe’s Birthday.” I could make my meaning clearer still by transcribing the whole play. But as these huge borrowings are out of the question, I must limit myself to a couple of dramatic lyrics, each of which tells its own story.

  One of the most wonderful things in the poem [“Christmas Eve”] is, that so much of argument is expressed in a species of verse, which one might be inclined, at first sight, to think the least fitted for embodying it. But, in fact, the same amount of argument in any other kind of verse would, in all likelihood, have been intolerably dull as a work of art. Here the verse is full of life and vigour, flagging never. Where, in several parts, the exact meaning is difficult to reach, this results chiefly from the dramatic rapidity and condensation of the thoughts. The argumentative power is indeed wonderful; the arguments themselves powerful in their simplicity, and embodied in words of admirable force. The poem is full of pathos and humour; full of beauty and grandeur, earnestness and truth.

  A wonderful thing it [his poetry] is, in many points and parts; but, as a whole, it is a book of puzzles—a vast enigma—a tissue of hopeless obscurity in thought, and of perplexed, barbarous, affected jargon in language.

	Well, any how, here the story stays,
	So far at least as I understand;
	And, Robert Browning, you writer of plays,
	Here’s a subject made to your hand!

  I suppose, reader, that you see whereabouts among the poets I place Robert Browning; high among the poets of all time, and I scarce know whether first, or second, in our own: and it is a bitter thing to me to see the way in which he has been received by almost everybody.

  Robert Browning is unerring in every sentence he writes of the Middle Ages; always vital, right, and profound; so that in the matter of art … there is hardly a principle connected with the mediæval temper, that he has not struck upon in those seemingly careless and too rugged rhymes of his. There is a curious instance, by the way, in a short poem referring to this very subject of tomb and image sculpture; and illustrating just one of those phases of local human character which, though belonging to Shakespeare’s own age, he never noticed, because it was specially Italian and un-English…. I know no other piece of modern English prose or poetry, in which there is so much told, as in these lines, of the Renaissance spirit,—its worldliness, inconsistency, pride, hypocrisy, ignorance of itself, love of art, of luxury, and of good Latin. It is nearly all that I said of the central Renaissance in thirty pages of the “Stones of Venice” put into as many lines, Browning’s being also the antecedent work. The worst of it is that this kind of concentrated writing needs so much solution before the reader can fairly get the good of it, that people’s patience fails them, and they give the thing up as insoluble; though, truly, it ought to be to the current of common thought like Saladin’s talisman, dipped in clear water, not soluble altogether, but making the element medicinal.

  One of the greatest dramatic poets since Shakespeare’s day…. We are confident that Mr. Browning’s dramas and lyrics will long continue to find appreciative readers, and that, as culture and taste and love of pure art make progress, the number of his constant admirers will steadily increase.

  He has many of the qualities which recommend a poet to the people. He is a master of the passions. His humour is bright and keen. He has a fine eye for colour. There is a rich and daring melody in his verse. He observes with minute and absolute fidelity. He is a philosophical poet; but the direct human element is always strong in his philosophy. Tennyson (our popular poet) is essentially an intellectual poet, but Browning is at once a more masculine and a more intricate and subtle thinker than the laureate…. The grotesque rhymes of Browning, like the poetic conceits of Shakespeare, are merely the holiday frolic of a rich and vivacious imagination. Healthy masculine vigor is apt to run riot at times. It is very significant also, that Browning, who has tried his hand at almost every kind of verse, has never written a sonnet.

  Robert Browning, a really great thinker, a true and splendid genius, though his vigorous and restless talents often overpower and run away with his genius so that some of his creations are left but half redeemed from chaos, has this simplicity in abundant measure. In the best poems of his last two works, “Men and Women” and “Dramatis Personæ,” its light burns so clear and steadfast through the hurrying clouds of his language (Tennyson’s style is the polished reflector of a lamp) that one can only wonder that people in general have not yet recognised it. I cannot recommend a finer study of a man possessed by the spirit of which I am writing than the sketch of Lazarus in Browning’s “Epistle of Karshish, an Arab Physician.”

  He is at once a student of mysticisms and a citizen of the world. He brings to the club sofa distinct visions of the old creeds, intense images of strange thoughts; he takes to the bookish student tidings of wild Bohemia and little traces of the demi-monde. He puts down what is good for the naughty, and what is naughty for the good. Over women his easier writings exercise that imperious power which belongs to the writings of a great man of the world upon such matters…. He is the most of a realist, and the least of an idealist, of any poet we know. He evidently sympathizes with some part at least of “Bishop Blougram’s Apology.” Anyhow this world exists. There is good wine; there are pretty women; there are comfortable beneficies; there is money, and it is pleasant to spend it. Accept the creed of your age and you get these, reject that creed and you lose them. And for what do you lose them? For a fancy creed of your own, which no one else will accept, which hardly any one will call a “creed,” which most people will consider a sort of unbelief. Again, Mr. Browning evidently loves what we may call the “realism,” the grotesque realism, of orthodox Christianity. Many parts of it in which great divines have felt keen difficulties are quite pleasant to him. He must see his religion, he must have an “object-lesson” in believing. He must have a creed that will take, which wins and holds the miscellaneous world, which stout men will heed, which nice women will adore.

  I have been thinking of you so much for the last two or three days, while the first volume of Browning’s “Poems” has been on my table, and I have been trying in vain to read it, and yet the Athenæum tells me it is wonderfully fine…. I never could read Browning. If Browning only gave a few pence for the book he drew from, what will posterity give for his version of it, if posterity ever find it on a stall? If Shakespeare, Milton, Dryden, Pope and Tennyson survive, what could their readers make out of this Browning a hundred years hence? Anything so utterly unlike the Ring too which he considers he has wrought out of the old gold—this shapeless thing.

  In the general matter of its style “Balaustion’s Adventure” perhaps represents the personality of its author with less accent and caprice than most of his work. The characteristic of Mr. Browning’s versification is that lines or passages of which the stately march or concentrated sweetness declares him among the foremost masters of English metre, alternate with other lines or passages which seem to disavow in him the sense of metre at all—stubby or zigzag combinations of syllables not to be rolled smooth by any steam-power yet invented. He would not be himself in a work not presenting this alternation in some degree; but Balaustion presents it in a less degree than usual; the fluency of the Attic verse is catching, and scholars have long ago remarked how, at the date of the Alkestis, Euripides retains it at the full, writing with a metrical regularity and smoothness which he afterwards abandons in favour of a more careless and scuttling line charged with resolved syllables.

  The characteristics of Mr. Browning are so marked, that but little critical sagacity is required to detect them. Indeed, they force themselves upon his readers, who cannot escape them, except by refusing to read him. He compels attention, even when he excites dislike. The two qualities which strike me most in his poetry are: first, an intensification of the dramatic faculty; and, second, the singularity of the method by which it is evolved. Mr. Browning is the greatest dramatic poet since Shakespeare, and, like Shakespeare’s, his art is unique. It is to him that we must pay homage for whatever is good, great, and profound in the second period of the Poetic Drama of England. It is not what his predecessors sought to find; it is not what Shakespeare found without seeking; it is something never found, and never sought before. That so strange a flower should spring from such roots is marvellous. It is the Body blossoming into Soul. Such I conceive is Robert Browning and his work.

  Robert Browning is a poet who does not understand that the drama is a poetical form which does not suit his genius. He possesses a great mind and much imagination, but he has no idea of dramatic technicalities. He is a philosophical poet; but on the stage philosophy must be translated into action, and that is what Browning has not been able to do. His poetry much resembles Shelley’s, but he has never succeeded, as the latter has in the “Cenci,” in replacing his visionary ideas by plastic forms.

  If there is any great quality more perceptible than another in Mr. Browning’s intellect, it is his decisive and incisive faculty of thought, his sureness and intensity of perception, his rapid and trenchant resolution of aim. To charge him with obscurity is about as accurate as to call Lynceus purblind or complain of the sluggish action of the telegraph wire. He is something too much the reverse of obscure; he is too brilliant and subtle for the ready reader of a ready writer to follow with any certainty the track of an intelligence which moves with such incessant rapidity, or even to realise with what spider-like swiftness and sagacity his building spirit leaps and lightens to and fro and backward and forward as it lives along the animated line of its labour, springs from thread to thread and darts from centre to circumference of the glittering and quivering web of living thought woven from the inexhaustible stores of his perception and kindled from the inexhaustible fire of his imagination.

  It was Procter who first in my hearing, twenty-five years ago, put such an estimate on the poetry of Robert Browning that I could not delay any longer to make acquaintance with his writings. I remember to have been startled at hearing the man who in his day had known so many poets declare that Browning was the peer of any one who had written in this century, and that, on the whole, his genius had not been excelled in his (Procter’s) time. “Mind what I say,” insisted Procter: “Browning will make an enduring name, and give another supreme great poet to England.”

  While Browning’s earlier poems are in the dramatic form, his own personality is manifest in the speech and movement of almost every character of each piece. His spirit is infused, as if by metempsychosis, within them all, and forces each to assume a strange Pentecostal tone, which we discover to be that of the poet himself. Bass, treble, or recitative,—whether in pleading, invective, or banter,—the voice still is there. But while his characters have a common manner and diction, we become so wonted to the latter that it seems like a new dialect which we have mastered for the sake of its literature. This feeling is acquired after some acquaintance with his poems, and not upon a first or casual reading of them…. His style is that of a man caught in a morass of ideas through which he has to travel,—wearily floundering, grasping here and there, and often sinking deeper until there seems no prospect of getting through…. One whose verse is a metrical paradox. I have called him the most original and the most unequal of living poets; he continually descends to a prosaic level, but at times is elevated to the Laureate’s highest flights.

  He has shown us, in his earlier works, that he can write with a noble simplicity and clearness. Let us, however, grant all the scope demanded by his manner of conceiving and representing characters, all the freedom necessary to an ideal of the dramatic art so severe that it scorns introduction, explanation, or expected sequence;—still, with the exercise of the friendliest tolerance, we cannot excuse the reckless disregard of all true poetic art in his later works. At the line where the ethical element enters into the best composition of an author’s nature, he seems to fail us. We find personal whim set above impersonal laws of beauty; the defiance of self-assertion in place of loving obedience to an ideal beyond and above self; and even petulant exaggeration of faults, simply because others have detected and properly condemned them.

  Nothing is straight, and simple, and easy with that poet. Everything is doubled, and twisted, and knotted at both ends, and the mere mechanical effort of the mind, so to speak, in getting at his meaning, is very great.

  How to make an Imitation of Mr. Browning. Take rather a coarse view of things in general. In the midst of this place a man and a woman, her and her ankles, tastefully arranged on a slice of Italy, or the country about Pornic. Cut an opening across the breast of each, until the soul becomes visible, but be very careful that none of the body be lost during the operation. Pour into each breast as much as it will hold of the new strong wine of love; and, for fear they should take cold by exposure, cover them quickly up with a quantity of obscure classical quotations, a few familiar allusions to an unknown period of history, and a half destroyed fresco by an early master, varied every now and then with a reference to the fugues or toccatas of a quite-forgotten composer. If the poem be still intelligible, take a pen and remove carefully all the necessary particles.

  Browning is the very reverse of Shelley in this respect; both have written one fine play and several fine dramatic compositions; but throughout Shelley’s poetry the dramatic spirit is deficient, while in Browning’s it reveals itself so powerfully that one wonders how he has escaped writing many good plays besides the “Blot in the ’Scutcheon” and that fine fragmentary succession of scenes, “Pippa Passes.”

  In strength and depth of passion and pathos, in wild humor, in emotion of every kind, Mr. Browning is much superior to Mr. Tennyson. The Poet Laureate is the completer man. Mr. Tennyson is beyond doubt the most complete of the poets of Queen Victoria’s time. No one else has the same combination of melody, beauty of description, culture and intellectual power. He has sweetness and strength in exquisite combination. If a just balance of poetic powers were to be the crown of a poet, then undoubtedly Mr. Tennyson must be proclaimed the greatest English poet of our time. The reader’s estimate of Browning and Tennyson will probably be decided by his predilection for the higher effort or for the more perfect art. Browning’s is surely the higher aim in poetic art; but of the art which he essays Tennyson is by far the completer master.

  On Mr. Browning’s new volume, [“Dramatic Idyls”] criticism can find little to remark. Since “The Ring and the Book,” the poet’s style and spirit have crystallized themselves, and every fresh installment can only give us a little more of the well-known matter and manner. We have all made up our minds upon the subject beforehand, and are hardly likely to form any new opinion at this time of day. Those who admire Mr. Browning will admire the present idyls; those who find him incomprehensible will find the latest addition to his incomprehensible more incomprehensible than ever. Probably no poem which he has ever written will prove a sorer stumbling-block to bewildered spellers-out of his meaning than the all but inarticulate story of “Ned Bratts.”

  In knowledge of many things he is necessarily superior to Shakespeare; as being the all-receptive child of the century of science and travel. In carefulness of construction, and especially in the genius of constructing drama, he claims not comparison with Shakespeare. But his truly Shakespearian genius pre-eminently shines in his power to throw his whole intellect and sympathies into the most diverse individualities; to think and feel as one of them would, although undoubtedly glorified by Browning’s genius within. Goethe’s canon is, “The Poet should seize the particular, and he should, if there be anything sound, thus represent the universal.” In this Browning is infallible: but he is, as Shakespeare often is, perceptible through the visor of his assumed individuality. Notice the great number of persons, the wide range of characters and specialities, through which he speaks.

  Robert Browning in his “Paracelsus” showed the failure of one who desired at a bound to reach the far ideal; in “Sordello,” showed the poet before Dante, seeking his true place in life, and finding it only when he became leader of men in the real battle of life, and poet all the more.

  Browning’s prose and poetry are alike in this. He writes like a man who has a simple thought and a simple end in view, but every step he takes suggests some associated thought and he is perpetually sweeping these side thoughts into the path he is making. The main thought is so clear to him, and the end in view so distinct, that he is hardly aware how much he confuses his expression by catching at everything on one side and the other as he goes.

  It is this love of mankind, even in its meanest and most degraded forms, that accounts for the almost entire absence of bitterness and cynicism in Mr. Browning’s works. Blame and rebuke he can, and that in no measured terms; but sneer he cannot. Sin and suffering are serious things to him, and he is lovingly tender to weakness. He knows nothing of the craving for telling paradoxes, and stinging hits, which besets the inferior writers who make pertness and smartness supply their want of finer qualities. Humour he possesses in no small degree, but he employs it on legitimate subjects. Ruined lives are grievous to him, sore hearts are sacred, pettiness and vanity are deplorable; he has no wish to transfix them on pins’ points, and hold them up to the world’s ridicule.

  These early poems owe much of their fascination to a trait which is characteristic of all Browning’s works and rather puzzling at first sight, namely, that preference for giving any one’s thoughts and feelings rather than his own which makes him one of the least subjective poets of the century. He almost always begins by setting the reader face to face with some total stranger, but previous to 1861 it is sure to be some one well worth being known…. His earliest works will always be most read; but even what seems only a tangled mass of briars will be found to have its rose-buds, and to form the hedge around a fairy palace where beauty slumbers, ready to bless him who dares achieve the entrance.

  You ask me to “describe the Browning Society, and set forth its work to date.”… Our main reasons for starting the Society were, that the manliest, strongest, deepest, and thoughtfullest Poet of our time had had nothing like due study and honour given him; that he needed interpreting and bringing home to folk, including ourselves; that this interpretation must be done during his life-time, or the key to it might be lost; and that we could not get together the workers that we wanted, except by forming a “Browning Society.”

  Robert Browning is the poet of Psychology.

  Browning’s first principle or absolute Truth is Love: that which abideth one and the same, the subject and substance of all change, the permanence by which alone change is possible, whose sum ever “remains what it was before,” in short, God or Truth; for, as he tells us in “Fifine,” “falsehood is change,” and “truth is permanence.” In the whole realm of thought, including the laws of nature, and the course of history, and especially the lots of souls, Browning has essayed to pierce through the phenomenal exterior, and the abiding reality that he reaches and brings back tidings of is Love; Love is the Truth.

  The obscurity of Browning does not proceed, as with Hugo and Tennyson, in their latest period, from the vague immensity of the subjects considered, from the indefiniteness of his ideas, from the predominance of metaphysical abstractions, but, on the contrary, from the very precision of the ideas and sentiments, studied in their remotest ramifications, in all their varied complications, and then presented in a mass of abstractions and metaphors, now with the infinite minuteness of scholastic argument, now with sudden leaps over abysses of deeper significance. Browning is, par excellence, the psychological poet.

  A poet real and strong is always phenomenal, but Browning is the intellectual phenomenon of the last half-century, even if he is not the poetical aloe of modern English literature. His like we have never seen before. He is not what he is by mere excelling. No writer that ever wrought out his fretted fancies in English verse is the model of him, either in large, or in one trait or trick of style. Of the poets of the day we can easily see, for example, that William Morris is a modern Chaucer; that Tennyson has kindred with all the great English verse-makers, and is the ideal maker of correct, high-class English poetry of the Victorian era, having about him something of the regularity and formality and conventional properness of an unexceptional model—a beauty like that of a drawing-master’s head of a young woman, but informed and molded by the expression of noble thoughts; that pagan Swinburne is Greek in feeling and Gothic in form, and so forth; but we cannot thus compass or classify Browning. Were his breadth and his blaze very much less than they are, we should still be obliged to look at him as we look at a new comet, and set ourselves to considering whence he came and whither he is going amid the immensities and the eternities…. In purpose and in style Browning was at the very first the Browning he has been these twenty years. He has matured in thought, grown richer in experience, and obtained by practice a greater mastery over his materials, without, however, as I think, using them of late in so pleasing or even so impressive a manner as of old; but otherwise he is now as a poet, and it would seem as a man, much the same Robert Browning whose first writings were received with little praise and much scoffing and were pronounced harsh, uncouth, affected, and obscure.

  To read Landor one must exert himself, and the exertion is to some purpose. The same is true, in even a higher degree, of Browning, subtle and penetrating, eminently a thinker, exercising our thought rather than our emotion; concrete in presentation, and, when most felicitous, dramatic, but capricious in expression, and greatly deficient in warmth and music; original and unequal; an eclectic, not to be restricted in his themes, with a prosaic regard for details, and a barbaric sense of color and form.

  Browning is a dramatist for the one and sufficient reason that he is, above all, the student of humanity. Humanity he draws with a loving and patient hand, but on the one condition that it shall be humanity in active and passionate exercise. Not for him the beauty of repose; the still quiet lights of meditation, removed from the slough and welter of actual struggle, make no appeal to him; the apathetic calm of a moral human being, exercised on daily uninteresting tasks, is to him well-nigh incomprehensible; storms and thunder, wind and lightning, passion and fury, and masterful strength, something on which he can set the seal of his own rugged, eloquent, amorphous verse; something which he can probe and analyse and wrap up in the twists and turns of his most idiomatic, most ungrammatical style—these are the subjects which he loves to handle. And so those whose eyes are dazzled by this excess of light, or who lose their breath in this whirl of hurrying ideas, call him unintelligible; while those quiet souls who look for form and measure and control in verse deny that such uncouth and turgid lines are poetry at all. That Browning should have essayed two transcripts from Euripides is a fact not without significance for the critic, for he has thereby opened to us the secrets of his own dramatic aptitudes.

  It is not too much to say that Mr. Browning has not only ignored the general practice of the great poets, but has designedly inverted it. The pleasure which we derive from poetry in general arises from the beauty of its form; we forget the workman in his work. But the prevailing impression created by “Jocoseria” is formlessness, together with the constant presence of Mr. Browning. Several of the poems in the volume are so obscure that it is impossible to discover the poet’s intention. In others, if the track of his idea is momentarily visible, it is almost immediately withdrawn behind a cloud of words; he sets us down in the middle of a monologue, from which, if we surrender our imagination to him, he will construct us a drama; or he plunges us into a labyrinth of metaphysics in which “panting thought toils after him in vain.”

  No other English poet, living or dead, Shakespeare excepted, has so heaped up human interest for his readers as has Robert Browning…. No poet has such a gallery as Shakespeare, but of our modern poets Browning comes nearest him…. The last quotation shall be from the veritable Browning—of one of those poetical audacities none ever dared but the Danton of modern poetry. Audacious in its familiar realism, in its total disregard of poetical environment, in its rugged abruptness: but supremely successful, and alive with emotion…. It is therefore idle to arraign Mr. Browning’s later method and style for possessing difficulties and intricacies which are inherent to it. The method, at all events, has an interest of its own, a strength of its own, a grandeur of its own. If you do not like it, you must leave it alone. You are fond, you say, of romantic poetry; well, then, take down your Spenser and qualify yourself to join “the small transfigured band” of those who are able to take their Bible-oaths they have read their “Faerie Queen” all through. The company, though small, is delightful.

  The wide range of his work is one of his strongest characteristics, and he is remarkable for the depth and versatility of his knowledge of human nature. No poet was ever more learned, more exact, and more thorough. Ruskin has said that he is simply unerring in every line. Of all the poets, except Shakspeare, he is the most subjective—a thinker, a student, and an anatomist of the soul. This is the chief reason why he has not been more recognized. Both he and Wordsworth see the infinite—the latter in nature, the former in the soul. Browning looks into the soul, and loves to see it as God sees it. No poet has more completely merged his own individuality in his work…. It is not from any lack of power of melody that the poet lays himself open to the charge of harshness, nor is his roughness due to carelessness nor defiance. He can use melody both varied and exquisite. The strength of his poetry, however, is in its sense, and not in its form. As to the charge of obscurity, this may be explained by the fact that his thoughts are deep and he deals often with the terrible and grotesque. He is full of strange phrases and recondite allusions, but he is a writer on obscure subjects, not an obscure writer. He does not write down to the level of the society journal or the fashionable romance. Many of his pieces of word-painting, on the other hand, stand comparatively with those of Tennyson himself…. He is essentially the poet of humanity…. In all of Browning’s poems there is something, as Mr. Lowell has said, that makes for religion, devotion, and self-sacrifice. His teaching is better, braver, manlier, more cheerful, more healthy and more religious than all that has ever before passed for poetry. He is pre-eminently a poet of conscience, a poet of love, and a poet of true religion.

  Mr. Browning can construct a mind, as the geologist does a skeleton. And this simile gives us the clue to all his poetry; he is a mental anatomist. His power and his skill, in his own peculiar province, are undeniable; and among his English contemporaries unequalled. Though, in spite of his unrivalled power of describing character, we cannot call him a great dramatist; that is, if we mean by dramas, complete plays, because Mr. Browning’s anatomical instincts, the minuteness of his dissection of individual characters, spoil his plays as wholes. His dramas, like most of his lyrics, are revelations of individual minds; and his searching power of showing single characters prevents him from completing his plays; he is a subtle dramatic poet, then, but not a great dramatist…. His admirers cannot, in much of his work, call him beautiful; the wildest of them cannot, in much of his work, call him musical; so that two important qualities of good poetry are not found always in his. It is undoubtedly far better to have thought like Mr. Browning’s, than the most exquisite wording if it is empty of meaning; and it takes a greater man to give us such thought. But when we concede this to the enthusiasts of the Browning Society we should remind ourselves that those poets whom the world considers the greatest are conspicuous for their form, for their splendid workmanship. All their mental powers might remain, but had they expressed their minds less well, we should certainly not rank them so high as artists.

  Browning, however, follows out all the complexities and sinuosities of reflection in his characters. Every important action, in the human being, proceeds from innumerable little turnings and twistings of the mind, flashes of revery, conflicting sentiments and impulses. All these Browning interprets better than the actual creatures could; for, although we are sometimes aware that our motives are subtle and intricate, we are seldom able to analyze them. The very copiousness of his illustrations, his wealth of simile, his tangle of clause within clause, are the means of art which make it possible for Browning to trace the complexities and mirror them so wonderfully. He does not present them literally, any more than the purely objective dramatists do. He merely employs another kind of symbol. His is diffuse; theirs is succinct. But his way is equally truthful, and it is new. It not only presents the figure and the action, but also presents the mind, irradiated by a mysterious and vivid interior light.

  Archdeacon Farrar thinks Mr. Browning “obscure only in the sense that his thoughts are profound,” and that his obscurity is “simply verbal, the result of an idiosyncrasy which has become a habit.” I suppose the meaning of this to be that Mr. Browning’s thought is never clouded, and that any difficulty in his writings arises from the inadequacy of the poet’s expression. I think the latter is a very great injustice to Mr. Browning, who may have written some things hard to understand, but never fails to say—if in his own manner—just what he means to say. The only real difficulty is to arrive at his meaning when the expression is merely the husk of the thought. This is not often a difficulty. Mr. Browning is a lucid thinker, and his drift is almost always plain. Caliban, Karshish and his other monologists leave nothing in doubt; but to this lucidity I find a notable exception in some verses in “Men and Women.”

  “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came,” a poem for which I have a deeper and keener personal affection than for any other poem in the language, and to which individually I owe more moral inspiration than to any other product of modern literature…. To me “Childe Roland” is the most supreme expression of noble allegiance to an ideal—the most absolute faithfulness to a principle regardless of all else; perhaps I cannot better express what I mean than by saying the most thrilling crystallization of that most noble of human sentiments, of which a bright flower is the motto Noblesse oblige.

  It may as well be confessed at the outset of any study of Browning that he does not observe the methods which have been evolved by the years as most effective for the embodiment of thought. We must grant also that this is a conscious and deliberate act. A man who can command music like that in the Song from “A Blot in the ’Scutcheon,” or vigor like that in “Cavalier Tunes,” is not forced to express himself so blindly as in the last ten lines of the Invocation from “The Ring and the Book,” or so harshly as in “Red Cotton Night-Cap Country.” He chooses so to express himself…. Browning knows English poetry as few of his critics know it. He knows, also, how to make smooth verse which shall tell its story to him who runs. Granting these facts, it is no more than fair that we treat with respect both the poet and his large following, and ask if our notions about art may not need reconstruction.

  In an age when on every wind comes borne the cry of realism, he remains faithful to the spirit of idealism. He finds the soul to be that which transcends all other facts and laws. To him it is the one supreme fact. That is the one phenomenon he desires to study. To an investigation of it, in all its many phases, he has devoted his life. He has been as eager to look into the history of a soul as the scientist is to investigate the history of a star or earth-worm. He has felt that the individual man is worth more than any other fact or law, that he is the one unique phenomenon the world presents, and that he alone gives the inquirer an adequate object of thought. There are in the soul heights, and depths, and glories, and expanses of out-reaching mystery, which Browning has seen with eyes wonder-set and a mind zealous to know the truth. Browning has exerted an influence on literature as fresh and suggestive as that of Carlyle or Emerson. He has the same unique power, he has the same subtle gift of insight, and he has the same intensity of conviction which those men possessed. He is an original force in literature, never an imitator, but one to arouse and to stimulate all who come after him. He stands apart by himself as a poet. He had no forerunner, and he is likely to have no successor.

	To him, whose craft, so subtly terse,
	(While lesser minds, for music’s sake,
	From single thoughts whole cantos make),
	Includes a poem in a verse;—
	To him, whose penetrative art,
	With spheric knowledge only his,
	Dissects by keen analysis
	The wiliest secrets of the heart;—
	To him, who rounds us perfect wholes,
	Where wisdom, wit, and love combine;
	Chief praise be this:—he wrote no line
	That could cause pain in childlike souls.

	O strong-soul’d singer of high themes and wide—
	Thrice noble in thy work and life alike,
	Thy genius sweeps athwart a sea whose tide
	Heaves with a pain and passion infinite!—
	Men’s hearts laid bare beneath thy pitying touch;
	Strong words that comfort all o’erwearied much;
	Thoughts that inspire and mould our inner life,
	Strengthen to bravely bear amid world-strife;
	And one large Hope, full-orbed as summer sun,
	That souls shall surely meet when LIFE is won!
	So round thy memory we our thanks entwine—
	Men are the better for these songs of thine:
	At eve thy muse doth o’er us mellower swell—
	Strong with the strength of life lived long and well.

  One other book I must mention, for it affected at least the form of any work I have done in letters more than any other. In a bookseller’s shop here one day—I dare hardly say how many years ago, but I was still in my teens, still in the stage when books fashion us, and are not merely used by us—I picked up some pamphlets, in yellow paper covers, and printed in double columns. I had never before heard the author’s name, and his form of publication was very unusual for poetry. There was but one copy in the shop, and no one had even asked the price of it. The name of the yellow pamphlet I first picked up was curious. “Bells and Pomegranates, by Robert Browning”—what could it mean? One glance, however, discovered to me that here was a true singer. Of course, I had read all that Tennyson had then published with the delight and admiration which it could not fail to give. But something in these fresh, rough dramatic lyrics seized on me in that book-shop, and I became the possessor, I believe, of the only copy of Browning then in Edinburgh. Very soon I was pestering all my friends to read them, or to hear me read them, successfully in some cases, but to other people they were caviare. I do not know that any of his works since published, except, perhaps, “Men and Women” and (in parts) “The Ring and the Book,” have given me anything like the same pleasure as I got from those early yellow-paper pamphlets. Sorry I am that they have somehow vanished, among the comelier editions that now occupy my shelves, for the sight of them again might revive some of the glory of those old nights when friends—all gone now—gathered in my lodging, and, amid clouds of smoke, I recited “How I brought the Good News from Aix to Ghent,” or “The Flight of the Duchess,” or “What’s become of Waring?” These poems were not only a joy to me; they were also a power. They helped me, at least, to find what little vein might be in me.

  Browning’s language is almost always very hard to understand; but the meaning, when we have got at it, is well worth all the trouble that may have been taken to reach it. His poems are more full of thought and more rich in experience than those of any other English writer except Shakespeare. The thoughts and emotions which throng his mind at the same moment so crowd upon and jostle each other, become so inextricably intermingled, that it is very often extremely difficult for us to make out any meaning at all. Then many of his thoughts are so subtle and so profound that they cannot easily be drawn up from the depths in which they lie. No man can write with greater directness, greater lyric vigour, fire, and impulse, than Browning when he chooses—write more clearly and forcibly about such subjects as love and war; but it is very seldom that he does choose. The infinite complexity of human life and its manifold experiences have seized and imprisoned his imagination; and it is not often that he speaks in a clear, free voice.

  If the varied and sometimes conflicting tendencies of the time are reflected by the Laureate, its master-passion is incarnated in Robert Browning. Browning is essentially the poet of man. He can make poetry of anything, so long as it concerns a human being. In a dramatic age he would have been a great dramatic poet, but the conditions of his time, unfavourable to this kind of excellence, have led him to devise dramatic situations rather than complete plays, and to cast his best thought into intense, impassioned monologues.

  In the natural order of things, he who is susceptible in youth to the influence of Foster will one day find himself led captive by Robert Browning. Many-sided as this most masculine and thought-laden of our poets is, he will find many readers who have not graduated in Foster’s school. But he who has relished the independence, the rugged originality, the fruitfulness of the one, can scarcely fail to be strongly attracted by the other. It was said of Crabbe that he was “Pope in worsted stockings:” it is quite as true to say that Foster is Browning in worsted stockings. There is the same robust fibre of thought, the same pioneering fearlessness, but family likeness to the lecturer and essayist is scarcely recognisable in the travelled poet who has lived in every human condition, and by the marvellous power of poetic genius read from the inside the thoughts and the life of every age. Shakespeare is more simply human, and in normal human life has a wider range. Browning has no women so lovable, no fools so motley, no clowns so irresistible; nor have the bulk of his characters that inexplicable touch which makes them live and walk as real persons. But could Shakespeare himself have entered into a Ned Bratts, or a Bishop Blougram, or a Fra Lippo Lippi, as Browning has done? For what Browning lacks in universality he has made up for by culture, by that enlargement and enlightenment which the religious problems of our own day have brought, and by confronting the Christian faith with every phase of individual experience and of the general progress of thought among men. But of Browning others can better speak, though few can have found in him so unfailing a stimulus.

  “A Death in the Desert,” can be only partly understood by itself. It must be studied with its whole environment. The circumstances of its production must be considered; knowledge of the poet’s principles and methods, acquired by study of his other works, must be brought to bear on it. It needs that freedom of interpretation which he always seems to demand. For while he is lavish in suggestion, he is very chary of information. Very rarely does he give his readers ready-made opinions. His teaching stimulates, it does not forestall, thought.

  Here was, again, a poet whose thoughts fell at once into the dramatic form, whose characters unfolded themselves by act and speech, whose treatment of subject involved a rising interest and a progressive movement, terminating in an adequate denouement, while the verse bore the impress which lives in Shakespeare and his contemporaries, and in “Marlowe’s mighty line,” an heir to the fellowship of those writers who have made the drama’s history sublime and achieved the highest fame. A little familiarity with the mechanism of the theatre, such as Shakespeare, Alfieri, or Goldoni had, such as all the successful dramatists have had, and we should possess great plays as well as great poems from the pen of Robert Browning. Then the grand traits of his two heroines in the dramatic poem “In a Balcony” would have shone in the theatrical frame resplendent with the Antoinette of Giacometti or the Ophelia and Portia of Shakespeare; while the “Flight of the Duchess” and other remarkable poems would have obeyed the grand laws of the dramatic form, and gone into line with the creations of those great poets with whom only Browning may be classed—“the immortal names that were not born to die.”

  Then I came in contact with the robust genius of Robert Browning. His sensuous carnations glorified my wilderness; amid them moved actual man and woman, naked and not ashamed. The pale, bloodless figures of my Oxonian romances were dismissed; in their place moved Pippa, Colombe, Valence, Mildred, the gypsy duchess.

	The clearest eyes in all the world they read
	With sense more keen and spirit of sight more true
	Than burns and thrills in sunrise, when the dew
	Flames, and absorbs the glory round it shed,
	As they the light of ages quick and dead,
	Closed now, forsake us: yet the shaft that slew
	Can slay not one of all the works we knew,
	Nor death discrown that many-laurelled head.
	The works of words whose life seems lightning wrought,
	And moulded of unconquerable thought,
	And quickened with imperishable flame,
	Stand fast and shine and smile, assured that nought
	May fade of all their myriad-moulded fame,
	Nor England’s memory clasp not Browning’s name.

  If aspirations were indeed achievement, Robert Browning would have been the greatest name in the roll of English poets; and even as it is, his work will rank among the greatest spiritual forces of England.

  The truth is that, from a fortunate fusion of several races and characters, we find united in Browning the poet’s sensuous love of all earthly beauty, keen ear for rhythm and turn of speech, pregnant eloquence and high range of thought and image, run through by a steel fibre of unflinching probity and courage, high mystic and religious tendencies, philosophic insight, plastic and perceptive gifts, and virile stability. But he is necessarily, by this very fusion, a poet of a unique growth. It is waste of time to compare or associate him with other poets, English or not—to draw parallels as to style or cast of thought; and, though you may parody, you can never imitate him. It has taken the English people nearly half-a-century to make up their minds about him in any large numbers; an even now a great majority of his admirers seek philosophy where they might easily find live men and women. To Browning, from the minutest detail of gesture or habit to the most thrilling psychological crisis, all humanity has been welcome material; while in actual poetic construction the manner of a phrase or even a grotesque rhyme have, when needful, been as carefully studied in producing and finishing a mental portrait or scene as have his most resonant and majestic passages of poetic eloquence.

  The radical cause for the want of dramatic life in most of Mr. Browning’s characters lies in his novel dramatic form; but whether the age or the author is at fault, it must be plain to any careful reader that Mr. Browning is incapable of using a better form. There is just enough of the dramatic tincture to body forth the man thinking, not the man acting. The end in view, I maintain, does not always seem to be thoroughly poetical or artistic; but for the portrayal of a single creature, careless of his surroundings and embodiment,—yet with perhaps the utmost fidelity to the phases of mental life,—to draw a suppositious being whose every thought and purpose, whose very soul shall be as nature plans, no more effective process could be devised. Were the author to have less of the dramatic form, there would be an entire absence of human interest; were he to introduce more, the characters drawn would be objective ones. We have the mental man all but stripped of his bodily mould.

  A mother’s love! And that mother divine! I cannot conceive of any higher effort of religious ideality. Yet nowhere in Browning have I found any just appreciation of this supreme ideal of love. He touches it rarely and coldly. Would you know the reason? I will tell you. Browning is not simply a Christian; he is a Protestant Christian, a Protestant Anglican Christian, at times an intolerant and polemical Christian, as we see displayed in some unpleasant passages in “Christmas Eve and Easter Day,” in the “Story of Pornic,” and elsewhere. Hence his lack of poetic sympathy with other forms of belief.

  There is no poet of our time more original, be that originality good or bad, than Browning…. There is no poetry on which opinions are so much divided, none so at variance with preconceived ideas, none, therefore, which it is so difficult fairly to appreciate. There is no poet of our time so uneven, none so voluminous, none so obscure…. His poetry, then, is for Browning, but a form of activity, a means of realizing his own individuality. He is not an Eglamour; his poetry is not the end of his existence; he does not submit to his art, nor sacrifice his perfection as a man to the perfection of his work. Like Goethe, he writes not so much to produce a great work,—to please others, as to afford play to his own individuality. Necessarily, then, as he points out in “Sordello,” his work is imperfect. He has himself rather than his reader in view. He is seeking to give complete and accurate expression to what is within him, rather than to give beauty and artistic completeness to his work. Accordingly, the incongruous and non-essential from the artistic point of view, he does not prune away; these are needful for the true and complete expression of his own mind.

	Gone from us! that strong singer of late days—
	Sweet singer should be strong—who, tarrying here,
	Chose still rough music for his themes austere,
	Hard-headed, aye, but tender-hearted lays,
	Carefully careless, garden half, half maze.
	His thoughts he sang, deep thoughts to thinkers dear,
	Now flashing under gleam of smile or tear,
	Now veiled in language like a breezy haze
	Chance-pierced by sunbeams from the lake it covers.
	He sang man’s ways—not heights of sage or Saint,
	Not highways broad, not haunts endeared to lovers;
	He sang life’s byways, sang its angles quaint,
	Its Runic lore inscribed on stave or stone;
	Song’s short-hand strain—its key oft his alone.

  It is as hard to explain how one got to like Browning, as it would be (to me) to explain why I put Beethoven above Mozart; and why I cannot help confessing Bach to be of higher order than Handel, though Handel has written things that seem to me Divine. I can only tell you my experience. Of course I have known Browning, in a way, for years; but I never took to him. I had not laughed at him, because I instinctively felt that he was a person to stand in awe of; and I hold it wrong to laugh where there are evidences of truth and greatness. But I am afraid I sometimes smiled at Browningites…. Oddness was not the word for much of all this; the poet was writing, not in a grand robe, but in his shirt-sleeves, and making faces at you. But through it all was the deep sense of truth, lighted up with gleams of beauty, such as did not belong to any poetry I knew.

  His verse is subtle, for he wrote of the springs of human action as revealed in a thousand situations. Shakespeare summoned all the world to act upon his stage. Browning tested each individual soul in his crucible and compelled it to deliver up such secrets of the inner life as no previous analysis had disclosed. His verse is so strong that he may well be called the poet of energy. Though he wrote some stanzas of surpassing grace, the quality of strength has made his fame, which will be lasting, for his theme was high. That the spirit of man is great and immortal, because always capable of effort towards an ideal beyond, is the truth to which he was constant. Such was his philosophy.

  Browning lived to realise the myth of the Inexhaustible Bottle.

  No poet ever had more perfect opportunity to study woman’s character in its sweetest and noblest aspects than Mr. Browning, and nowhere does this great artist show more consummate power, or more delicate intuition, than in his portraiture of women. Independently of all mere conventional claim on our sympathy, relying by no means exclusively upon slender forms, taper fingers, ruby lips, or the like, Mr. Browning’s women step out of shadow-land into the atmosphere of breathing humanity. They have their adorable perfections and imperfections; they are feminine to the very core. Each word-painting of physical beauty has its spiritual counterpart in characters whose every outward trait bespeaks a corresponding moral quality.

  Browning is animated by a robust optimism, turning fearless somersaults upon the brink of the abyss…. And then Browning loomed on the horizon, surely the brawniest neo-Elizabethan Titan whom our age has seen, and whom it has latterly chosen to adore.

  When Browning’s enormous influence upon the spiritual and mental life of our day—an influence ever shaping itself to wise and beautiful issues—shall have lost much of its immediate import, there will still surely be discerned in his work a formative energy whose resultant is pure poetic gain.

  If his creations were ill-clothed in their bodies of clay, the breath that he blew into their nostrils was life of the most concentrated and passionate sort. As works of art his poems are abnormal and altogether unclassifiable; but as emanations they are strangely and superbly influential with the imagination of a sympathetic reader (that is whenever they are comprehensible at all), and there is that in them which leaves no question of the man’s uncommon genius. All through, from first to last, the optimism of a sane and hopeful soul shines with fascinating intensity…. He was surcharged with song, but his vocal organ was not of the singing sort. In this he and Emerson were alike to a degree; they forgot the tune in the tremendous struggle with the meaning of the words, and they lost the words too often in the overwhelming rush of the thought. Minds thus constituted can create dramas, but they cannot limit the creations so as to bring them within a unit of expression…. A great man he was, with an imagination and a poetic vision of absolute power; this must, I think, be the final word; but he lacked the supreme gift of artistic expression through verse, an expression which, first of all, is luminous, direct and simple.

  His work is related to the ideal life of the nation as Carlyle’s is related to its practical life; and if his influence has not been wielded over quite so long a period as was that of the author of “Sartor Resartus” it has, on the other hand, extended over a more feverishly active time…. That he was a real poet in the sense of having written real poetry will be admitted by every competent critic. But it will have, I fear, to be added that no poet so eminent as Mr. Browning has ever left behind him so large a body of brilliant, profound, inspiring literature, wherein the essential characteristics of poetry will be sought in vain.

  Nay, when he died the most fashionable of the London daily papers wrote of him in a tone of supercilious patronage, with a sort of apology to its butterfly readers for asking their attention to a writer so remote from their world as Browning. That is behind the time and foolish, yet I suspect that Browning’s poetry was far less known to the world of London than Browning himself. So far as he was read in society—which reads little—he was read by the younger generation of fashionable people; to the older he was, I might almost say, unknown. He was literally unknown to some. I have heard the mention of his name followed by the remark: “Browning? Is he not an American novelist.” The lady who put that question is an ornament of society, full of every kind of social intelligence, and it was not many years ago. I doubt whether he has ever been the poet of the classes. The masses, or some of them, were probably those who read him most. The critics have praised him with very large reservations. But there was a class of readers neither literary or smart who found in Browning something they wanted, and who for the sake of the kernel were willing to prick their fingers with the husk or bruise their joints over the shell. They are the people to whom the problems of life are everything, and what drew them to Browning was his penetration and power in handling these problems.

  Robert Browning wrote the sonnet rarely, possibly because he disliked its restraints; possibly he purposed to let no lesser light of his shine by the side of the “Sonnets from the Portuguese.” The “Helen’s Tower” is graceful complimentary and occasional verse, but would not be quoted save for its personal interest. Any one, however, who studies Browning’s poetry will see how inapt the sonnet form is for the wilful, eccentric orbits in which his genius loved to move.

  Of almost any one of Emerson’s essays you can remember some notable phrases, a general atmosphere of that peculiar purity which we find only in New England, but no such thing as organic unity. In fact, I take it, Emerson himself could often have been found at fault, had he tried to explain exactly what he meant. Emerson’s obscurity comes, I think, from want of coherently systematic thought. Browning’s, on the other hand, as some recent critic has eagerly maintained, is only an “alleged obscurity.” What he meant he always knew. The trouble is that, like Shakspere now and then, he generally meant so much and took so few words to say it in, that the ordinary reader, familiar with the simple diffuseness of contemporary style, does not pause over each word long enough to appreciate its full significance. What reading I have done in Browning inclines me to believe this opinion pretty well based. He had an inexhaustible fancy, too, for arranging his words in such order as no other human being would have thought of. Generally, I fancy, Browning could have told you what he meant by almost any passage, and what relation that passage bore to the composition of which it formed a part; but it is not often that you can open a volume of Browning and explain, without a great deal of study, what the meaning of any whole page is. Emerson’s indubitable obscurity to ordinary readers I take to be a matter of actual thought; Browning’s seems rather to be a matter of what seems—even though it really were not—deliberate perversity of phrase.

  Browning’s writing goes best in the bulk—it is the general result that we enjoy, being oftener rather distracted than attracted by the component parts…. Browning’s work is shut out, not only from the presence of poetry but, from the precincts of “good utterance.” Browning need follow no predecessor in the application of the fixed laws of poetic utterance, but he must apply these laws in some way; he must establish the kinship. Where he does this, he is a poet; where he does not do this, whatever else he may be, he is not a poet. The judgment here formed is, that he often fails in this particular; hence, that only a part, the smaller part, of his writing can be called “just,” “legitimate,” poetry.

  Browning is obscure, undoubtedly, if a poem is read for the first time without any hint as to its main purport: the meaning in almost every case lies more or less below the surface; the superficial idea which a careless perusal of the poem would afford is pretty sure to be the wrong one. Browning’s poetry is intended to make people think, and without thought the fullest commentary will not help the reader much.

  The most marked literary characteristic of the poetry of Browning is its intellectuality. This gives it a twofold recommendation. It invites the study of the thoughtful. It rewards them with that for which they seek, their object being not to gain the passing pleasure of a pious sentiment, but the permanent possession of a spiritual conviction. There are other religious poets who have written psalms of life, songs of devotion, hymns of aspiration, which men have made the channels of their prayers and the marching music of their lives. There are none who can surpass or even rival Browning in the chastened beauty, the restrained but earnest enthusiasm, the catholic and genuine sympathy of those of his poems which deal directly or indirectly with the religious life.

  He is a stronger and deeper man than Tennyson; an incompleter artist, but a greater poet; and his method of approaching doubt wholly differs from Tennyson’s. He loves to assault it with sardonic humor, to undermine it with subtle suggestion, even to break out into grim laughter as it slowly disintegrates and falls into a cloud of dust before his victorious analysis. But not the less does he sympathize with whatever there may be of spiritual yearning, of earnest but baffled purpose in it; and no poet has ever been quicker than he to place in the fullest light of tender recognition the one redeeming quality there may be latent in the thing he hates. For faith, in Robert Browning, is a spiritual fire that never burns low. Through whatever labyrinth of guilt or passion he may lead his readers, God is ever the attending presence.

  His best work, the work which will last when the noises are done, is as simple as it is sensuous and passionate; and it is entirely original. It stands more alone and distinct than the work of any other English poet of the same wide range. There is a trace of Shelley in “Pauline,” but for the rest Browning is like Melchizedek: he has neither father nor mother in poetry; he is without descent; and he will be—but this belongs to all great poets—without end of days. “Whole in himself and owed to none” may well be said of him, and it is a great deal to say.

  Mr. Browning had a style, a very remarkable one, but of Style he is absolutely destitute, for his literary manner is one of rapid volubility and constant eagerness—qualities eternally opposed to dignity, to Style, whose very essence is its proud way of never pressing itself upon you.

  Here at last was the second Shakespeare, but with no audience yet prepared…. Thus forty years after Browning seemed to himself and the world to have been forgotten, he is rediscovered as one of the world’s great seers, hailed as the prophet of a new era, and vindicated as the chief poet of the century. No man longer calls in question his greatness or his mission. As fast as men and women attain the capacity to interpret his concentrative figures and appreciate his types, they are drawn to him. Until eye and ear have been prepared, Raphael and Mozart mean less than their inferiors. Each mind must overtake in its own development the progress of the race at large, or it will declare the best thought and sentiment of its times meaningless—though it thereby but publish its own inchoate and arrested culture. Not so very long ago it was popular to decry the symphonies of Beethoven, but little by little the presumption has become general, even among those unversed in music, that the fault is not with Beethoven, but with the undiscerning hearer. Similarly, within the last five years the once frequent girds at Browning have disappeared from public print. What with clubs, societies, and college study, what with the ever-increasing output of primers, handbooks, and commentaries, the persuasion is abroad that this poet evinces the loftiest ideals yet revealed in our literature, as well as fulfills its long delayed and often repeated prophecy of power.

  If Browning’s genius has remained long unrecognized and unhonoured among his contemporaries, the frequent harshness and obscurity of his expression must not bear the whole responsibility. His thought holds so much that is novel, so much that is as yet unadjusted to knowledge, art, and actual living, that its complete apprehension even by the most open-minded must be slow and long delayed. No English poet ever demanded more of his readers, and none has ever had more to give them. Since Shakespeare no maker of English verse has seen life on so many sides, entered into it with such intensity of sympathy and imagination, and pierced it to so many centres of its energy and motivity. No other has so completely mastered the larger movement of modern thought on the constructive side, or so deeply felt and so adequately interpreted the modern spirit…. Of all English poets he is the most difficult to classify, and his originality as a thinker is no less striking. It is true of him, as of most great thinkers, that his real contribution to our common fund of thought lies not so much in the disclosure of entirely new truths as in fresh and fruitful application of truths already known; in a survey of life complete, adequate, and altogether novel in the clearness and harmony with which a few fundamental conceptions are shown to be sovereign throughout the whole sphere of being. It is not too much to say of Browning that of all English poets he has rationalized life most thoroughly. In the range of his interests and the scope of his thought he is a man of Shakespearian mould.

  He is less thoroughly an artist than Tennyson, but not necessarily on that account less a poet. I recall only one poem of Browning which is absolutely without thought. I may raise a clamor of protest when I say that this one is “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came.” In this we have simply a picture. We may put a meaning into it, but to ask what the poet meant by it is to appeal to the fancy. I do not say that the poet had not an allegory in his mind when he wrote; I simply say that the allegory is not in the poem.

  Browning seems destined to take the place of Pope and to vex the minds of future generations (for a very different reason, however) with the query, “Is he a poet?” Whatever Pope’s deficiency in matter may be, no one ever questioned his supremacy in words. He sent his verbal shafts with the accuracy of Ulysses through all the rings of opinion until they fastened firmly in his target, the human mind. But it would take an order of the King to put any of Browning’s phrases into general circulation.

  Browning, though never popular, was an indefatigable writer, who bore the neglect of his countrymen with serene good-humour, and persisted in the choice of recondite subjects, an eccentric method of treatment, a style of versification generally harsh and abrupt, and a style of language now pedantic and now familiar, and frequently obscure. His rhymes, too, are often Hudibrastic, without being effective. His philosophical reasonings, and even his narratives, are difficult to follow; the reader arises from several perusals with only a vague idea of the author’s plan or meaning. One who runs cannot read Browning; he demands the study of a specialist. Yet specialists assure us that if he is difficult to understand, the delight of understanding him is ample compensation for all the toil which the difficulties he interposes entail, and that he is inferior only to Shakespeare in the richness, subtlety, and suggestiveness of his thought. That he could be intelligible and forcible on a first reading when he chose is well proved by such pieces as “The Pied Piper,” “Hervé Riel,” “How they Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix,” etc.

  The humour of Robert Browning was not a dominating constituent in his intellectual endowment, but it was certainly an essential one. Were we to remove from his work the passages in which its presence is obvious, even to the hasty, careless reader, and those still more numerous passages where it eludes the pointing finger or the frame of quotation marks, and yet, like the onion in Sydney Smith’s salad, “unsuspected, animates the whole,” the result would be, not merely impoverishment, but transformation. We should feel not merely that something had gone, but that what remained had lost a certain indefinable quality of interest and charm…. A large proportion of Browning’s humour—witness such characteristic poems as “Bishop Blougram’s Apology” and “Sludge, the Medium”—takes the form of delicate irony, where the something said is delicately poised against the something implied, and we are made to feel the attraction of both. Browning’s satirical irony always preserves the geniality which is of the essence of true humour; it may be mordant, but it is never scarifying; like summer lightning it illuminates, yet does not burn.

  Browning’s style may be compared to a Swiss pasture, where the green meadows which form the foreground of a sublime landscape are yet combered with awkward blocks and boulders—things not without a certain rough dignity of their own, but essentially out of place.

  Robert Browning is the one poet who has taken human life for his exclusive province; and his method has for its very soul the tracing of development…. The vigorous spirit of Browning roams over all the world, scanning the island off the coasts of Lebanon as the wolf-haunted forests of Russia. From “Paracelsus,” more full of the spirit of Luther’s Germany than the casual reader dreams, and “Sordello,” more full of the spirit and facts of pre-Dantean Italy than the casual reader likes, on through dramas and monologues and epics to the mobile and vivid Hellenic studies of his later years, Browning shows a more frankly human and unæsthetic interest in the past and a wider sympathy than any other poet…. The immense vitality and wide productiveness of Browning demand classification, but the classification is not yet found. Optimist, realist, mystic we may call him if we will, yet all the while we know that the epithet touches only one side of his great and placid nature. His robust versatility serenely defies compression into a phrase. Yet if, with the fatuous affection of mortal man for labels, we insist on knowing by whose side he is to be put, we shall find, I believe, his truest abiding-place if we name him with the great masters of Ionic Art. Humor, and humor tinged with irony, is the most distinctive, if not the most important, element in his genius. Its bitter aroma is never long absent. We believe that we breathe the pure air of the sublime, and a gust of satire slaps us sharply in the face. We feel ourselves wrapt in religious ecstasy; hey! presto! We are in the coarsest region of grotesque.

  It is almost too hackneyed to call Browning a Gothic man, but it is irresistibly true. The typical Greek loved life for its own sweet sake, fully enjoyed it, wished it no other, only unending. Browning, as another great Englishman has frankly confessed, could not have endured heaven itself under such conditions. Struggles, ascent, growth, were sweet to him. To be still learning was better than to know.

  It is impossible for any intelligent admirer to maintain, except as a paradox, that his strange modulations, his cacophonies of rhythm and rhyme, his occasional adoption of the foreshortened language of the telegraph or the comic stage, and many other peculiarities of his, were not things which a more perfect art would have either absorbed and transformed, or at least have indulged in with far less luxuriance. Nor does it seem much more reasonable for anybody to contend that his fashion of soul-dissection at a hard-gallop, in drama, in monologue, in lay sermon, was not largely, even grossly, abused…. Even his longer poems, in which his faults were most apparent, possessed an individuality of the first order, combined the intellectual with no small part of the sensual attraction of poetry after a fashion not otherwise paralleled in England since Dryden, and provided an ordinary body of poetical exercise and amusement. The pathos, the power, at times the humor, of the singular soul-studies which he was so fond of projecting with little accessory of background upon his canvas, could not be denied, and have not often been excelled.

  Browning is a poet who very frequently mentions God, and who a number of times has elaborately written concerning his nature and his relations to man. The arguments in question are frequently stated in dramatic form, and not as Browning’s own utterances. Paracelsus, Caliban, David in the poem “Saul,” both Count Guido and the Pope in “The Ring and the Book,” Fust in the “Parleyings,” and Ferishtah, are all permitted to expound their theology at considerable length. Karshish, Abt Vogler, Rabbi Ben Ezra, Ixion, and a number of others, define views about God which are more briefly stated, but not necessarily less comprehensible. On the other hand, there are the two poems, “Christmas Eve,” and “Easter Day,” which, without abandoning the dramatic method, approach nearer to indicating, although they do not directly express, Browning’s personal views of the theistic problem. These poems are important, although they must not be taken too literally. Finally, in “La Saisiaz,” and in the “Reverie” in “Asolando,” Browning has entirely laid aside the dramatic form, and has spoken in his own person concerning his attitude towards theology.

  From first to last Browning portrayed life either developing or at some crucial moment, the outcome of past development, or the determinative influence for future growth or decay. His interest in the phenomena of life as a whole, freed him from the trammels of any literary cult. He steps out from under the yoke of the classicist, where only gods and heroes have leave to breathe; and, equally, from that of the romanticist, where kings and persons of quality alone flourish. Wherever he found latent possibilities of character, which might be made to expand under the glare of his brilliant imagination, whether in hero, king, or knave, that being he chose to set before his readers as a living individuality to show whereof he was made, either through his own ruminations or through the force of circumstances.

  To sum up our imperfect sketch of this strangely interesting poet, perplexing, disappointing, and fascinating, Browning is confessedly and above all a teacher, whether directly, or when he offers us his superb gallery of semi-dramatic characters and situations—semi-dramatic, or rather, perhaps, intended to be such. For, everywhere, among all sorts and conditions of men and things, how seldom does Browning—despite his disclaimers—escape from Browning! Often, one might say, if he has one eye upon his subject, the other is on himself. Hence, I suppose, many as are the scenes of passion which he has given, one note, last and sweetest—the note of disinterested love—is found all too rarely. These idiosyncrasies inevitably more or less suffuse his landscape. With its many peculiar merits, it rarely seems able to touch the inner soul of Nature herself; it lacks charm; hardly ever is the verse musical, never enchanted:—unique, indeed, to the core; yet not leaving the heart wholly satisfied.

  Of all poets none was more intensely hostile to Parody than Robert Browning. This may have been the result of his disappointment at not being generally recognized as his own parodist, since many of his lines might well pass for parodies of those that precede them. His ramshackle blank verse, with its jagged, jolting lines bristling with prepositions, conjunctions, and interjections, its contractions and elisions, its intrusive parentheses, its smallest of jokes and poorest of puns, its pedantic display of untimely erudition, and aimless wandering from the subject in hand, render it the despair of the would-be parodist. Before Browning exaggeration stands appalled: the master himself wallows in such obscurity and mazy verbiage that when Parody has done its best it finds itself after all only imitation.

  Browning himself was the son of one classical scholar—and the husband of another. He was lulled to sleep as a child in his father’s library with the Greek verses of Anacreon (or rather the Anacreontics, we suspect). If we interpret the poem “Development” literally, he began Greek by his eighth year, and read Homer through as soon as he had “ripened somewhat,” which would hardly point beyond his twelfth summer. Certainly Browning as a student must have been fully acquainted with the best Greek and Roman poets in their own speech. Balaustion, however, his first important essay in translation, appeared in the poet’s sixtieth year. If we examine the whole body of his work up to that time, we shall find surprisingly little of direct allusion, even, to classical themes and persons…. In choice of subjects, in the point of view from which he studied them, and in the mass and measure of treatment, Browning was pre-eminently un-Greek, unclassical.

  Browning’s relation to Christianity and to all that is involved in a belief in Christianity is undoubtedly one of the chief points of interest in his writings, and accounts, I suspect, for the extraordinary popularity which during late years they have attained…. The gist and nucleus of Browning’s philosophy of life, may be said to be summed up in that couplet in the “Ring and the Book,” “Life is probation, and the earth no goal but starting point for man.”

  The “Dramatic Lyrics,” and “Men and Women,” seem to our mind the most characteristically valuable of this virile poet’s contributions to English literature. Though his whole occupation is with problems of the inner nature, and problems, moreover (as a previous critic has noted), less deep than devious, yet his sane and impartial voice, sometimes, in them, trembles with pathos all the more effective because it is so sudden, restrained, and brief.

  He never caught the popular ear—he has never tried to catch it. His productions have had to make their way against storms of criticism, but they have been read by a continually increasing number of thoughtful people. Whatever the student of literature may think of Browning, he must take account of the fact that never before was there a writer of verse for the study of whose writings during his lifetime clubs were formed in every large city of both hemispheres—the proceedings of some of these clubs being regularly published, like the transactions of learned societies…. He cares not so much for the result as for the process—he describes, not so much incidents, as people’s impressions of them…. Rarely, if ever, has this writer’s verse any tinge of the objective, much less of the epic…. Browning is greatest as a creative genius; less great as an idealizer; least great as a literary artist…. Emotion, music, grace—these are not so native to Robert Browning as thought. The philosopher often overtops the poet.

  What is called the “roughness” of Browning’s verse is at all events never the roughness that comes from mismanagement or disregard of the form chosen. He has an unerring ear for time and quantity; and his subordination to the laws of his metre is extraordinary in its minuteness. Of ringing lines there are many; of broadly sonorous or softly melodious ones but few; and especially (if one chooses to go into details of technic) he seems curiously without that use of the broad vowels which underlies the melody of so many great passages of English poetry. Except in the one remarkable instance of “How We Carried the Good News from Ghent to Aix,” there is little onomatopœia, and almost no note of the flute; no “moan of doves in immemorial elms” or “lucent sirops tinct with cinnamon.” On the other hand, in his management of metres like that of “Love Among the Ruins,” for instance, he shows a different side; the pure lyrics in “Pippa Passes” and elsewhere sing themselves; and there are memorable cadences in some of the more meditative poems, like “By the Fireside.”

  I began to read the two poets about the same period, 1841, when I was not quite eighteen, and long before the collected poems of either had been brought together. I then read them both constantly and knew by heart most of those of Tennyson, in particular, before I was twenty years old. To my amazement I now find that I can read these last but little; the charm of the versification remains, but they seem to yield me nothing new; whereas the earlier poems of Browning, “Paracelsus,” “Sordello,” “Bells and Pomegranates”—to which last I was among the original subscribers—appear just as rich a mine as ever; I read them over and over, never quite reaching the end of them. In case I were going to prison and could have but one book, I should think it a calamity to have Tennyson offered me instead of Browning, simply because Browning has proved himself to possess, for me at least, so much more staying power.

  He could not quote Greek verses, but he was steeped in the Greek tragedians and lyric poets. Of course this classical sympathy was but one side of his poetry. Browning was full of sympathy, nay, of worship, for anything noble and true in literature, ancient or modern. And what was most delightful in him was his ready response, his generosity in pouring out his own thoughts before anybody who shared his sympathies.

  These Renaissance poems, then,—aside from their abstract virtue as intensely felt and virily wrought verse,—perform one of the great and rare services possible to literature. They make us to know past beliefs and feelings, people and actions, so that all becomes veritable and explicable: to know them not formally and by effort and intention, but spontaneously, through the dynamic communication of heat and light. Instead of the statics of knowledge we are given the dynamics of life.

  The joyous, fearless activity of Browning, the noble aspirations of his intellect and the mighty passions of his heart, the steady certainty that God and man are one in kind, render him the most distinctly helpful to those who have been vexed with the subtle speculations which have abounded in our scientific age. More than any poet of modern times he has that intellectual fearlessness which is thoroughly Greek; he looks unflinchingly upon all that meets him, and he apparently cares not for consequences. His is “a mind forever voyaging through strange seas of thought, alone.” In many of his poems we find united the two great principles which lie at the basis of all his best work: one, which has for its end, knowledge; the other, which has for its end, conduct. The first is Browning’s philosophy; the second Browning’s art. There are many who delight in Browning’s intricate thought,—pure exercise of the mind,—but we must believe that he contributed more to the spiritual movement of the age by his “Saul,” “Apparent Failure,” “Prospice,” “Abt Vogler,” etc., than by all his argumentative verse. These are indeed veritable fountain-heads of spiritual power.

  Robert Browning had the keenest and subtlest intellect, the deepest and broadest human sympathy, of any English poet of his generation. He stands apart from his poetic contemporaries by the originality of his methods and by the unconventionality and power of his style.

  He very often seems to search laboriously for language that is “fit and fair and simple and sufficient,” as he himself admirably expresses it, and the effort is writ large over the whole. And some of his greatest and noblest thoughts are expressed in language which fails in all four points. In “Christmas Eve,” for instance, there are passages, which approach very near to the sublime, but which stop short of it, because suddenly one feels a great jolt in the metre, or a grotesque rhyme comes in which only provokes a smile, where a smile is out of place…. And then there is that crying sin against style, not so easily defined, but which all readers of Browning know and feel, the introduction of language which belongs by right to the sphere of logical argument into passages which where otherwise the language is that of pure poetry. And we feel that this is deliberately done; for so close is the connection between beauty of thought and beauty of form, that they never would have come of themselves into so alien a country. It seems as if Browning either lacked that fine instinctive feeling for form which preserves many a worse poet from such incongruities, or that, in his anxiety to express himself, he despairingly resorts to any means rather than leave the thing unsaid…. Browning’s supreme title of honour is that he is in the lives of many something distinctive and unique. Many people, looking back, can say that he has spoken to them as no one else has spoken; and that life and death and all things wear a different aspect for his handling. This is saying much; but many will bear me out that these are the words of truth and sobriety.

  That Robert Browning is the greatest dramatic poet of England since Shakespeare we regard as indisputable; that he belongs in the first rank of poets of any description, in spite of some uncouth mannerism, we judge also certain, though not undisputed.

  The elements to which Browning reduces experience are still passions, characters, persons; Whitman carries the disintegration further and knows nothing but moods and particular images. The world of Browning is a world of history with civilization for its setting and with the conventional passions for its motive forces. The world of Whitman is innocent of these things and contains only far simpler and more chaotic elements. In him the barbarism is much more pronounced; it is, indeed, avowed, and the “barbaric yawp” is sent “over the roofs of the world” in full consciousness of its inarticulate character; but in Browning the barbarism is no less real though disguised by a literary and scientific language, since the passions of civilized life with which he deals are treated as so many “barbaric yawps,” complex indeed in their conditions, puffings of an intricate engine, but aimless in their vehemence and mere ebullitions of lustiness in adventurous and profoundly ungoverned souls.

  It is true, indeed, that Browning was at no time a “topical” poet; and much of his long unpopularity was, no doubt, due to his disinclination to come down into the market-place, with his singing robes about him, and make great ballads of the day to the chorus of the crowd. But there is a higher part even than that of a national poet; and Browning is, in a very real sense, the poet, not of England alone, but of the world. His attitude to men and life was never distraught by petty interests of blood or party; the one claim upon him was the claim of humanity. He was a man, and nothing that pertained to man was foreign to himself.

  Browning, perhaps more than any other poet, demands that he shall be kept out of the hand of the theological anatomist; for Browning is the poet of life, of simple human life, of its anguish, its search, its doubt, its despair, its triumph. He does not find life through theology; he finds theology, so far as he finds it at all, through life. He plunges into the midst of man’s life—the life that he, and you and I, and all must live, the life that is so enchanting, so bewildering, so stimulating to effort, so provoking to ambition, so disappointing to desire, so heart-breaking, so hope-raising, so killing, so rejuvenating; plunging into this perplexing, moving, mighty ocean of life, he asks what it means. Will the waves that are around lift us to the height of our desire, or will they overwhelm us and beat out our lives? Will the currents sweep us outward to death in midocean? Or is there some friendly tide which will gently but strongly bear us to some safe and happy shore? Are our struggles in the great sea vain and void? Are we the sport of forces mightier than ourselves? Or do human efforts, strong, manly resolve, and high, trusting courage count for something in the interplay of environing powers? He asks questions such as these, interrogating life with frank and open mind, and he shouts out to us across the storm the answer which he hears.

  No poet ever comprehended his own character better, or comprised the expression of it in better language. This note of militant optimism was the ruling one in Browning’s character, and nothing that he wrote or said or did in his long career ever belied it. This optimism was not discouraged by the results of an impassioned curiosity as to the conditions and movements in the soul in other people. He was, as a writer, largely a psychological monologuist—that is to say, he loved to enter into the nature of persons widely different from himself, and push his study, or construction, of their experiences to the furthest limit of exploration. In these adventures he constantly met with evidences of baseness, frailty, and inconsistency; but his tolerance was apostolic, and the only thing which ever disturbed his moral equanimity was the evidence of selfishness. He could forgive anything but cruelty. His optimism accompanied his curiosity on these adventures into the souls of others, and prevented him from falling into cynicism or indignation. He kept his temper and was a benevolent observer. This characteristic in his writings was noted in his life as well.

  Many of Browning’s characters express opinions which he cannot be supposed to share, and occasionally, as in “Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau” and “Fifine at the Fair,” it is difficult to discover the exact point at which he and his hero diverge. But taking the whole range of his work into account, few poets can be said to have revealed themselves so completely as he has done. His writings are dramatic in form, rather than in principle; his own scheme of thought can be traced through them; and this is definite enough to be systematically expounded. As far as the broad outlines of the scheme are concerned, there is no room for differences of opinion.

  Though the love of Nature was always less in him than his love of human nature, yet for the first half of his work it was so interwoven with his human poetry that Nature suggested to him humanity and humanity Nature. And these two, as subjects for thought and feeling, were each uplifted and impassioned, illustrated and developed by this inter communion. That was a true and high position. Humanity was first, Nature second in Browning’s poetry, but both were linked together in a noble marriage; and at that time he wrote his best poetry.

  Now that his life and his life’s work are ended, there is no more to be said than what the calm-minded critics declared twenty years ago and more; in Browning, the philosopher and literary man stifled the poet. His head poetised and did not suffer his great and noble heart to speak, except in artificial language, difficult to understand. Despite all the “Browning Societies,” he is accounted by his own countrymen as the least intelligible of their poets; and he of whom that is said must bear the blame. All great art is simple and intelligible; moderation and clearness are indispensable to it. Both these are wanting in Browning. He possessed a superabundance of imagination and an astonishing, positively acrobatic skill in verse-making and rhyming; yet he has not succeeded in producing a single lasting work of art.

  In leading up to this statement of the problem of Belief, I have led up to the great lesson of Browning’s poetry, which so many of his interpreters have failed to bring out. Belief arises from an experience together with its intellectual interpretation; hence the worth of the belief depends on the range and depth of the experience as well as on the thoroughness of the interpretation. Browning’s main thought is, the value of work—that is, effort and energy of spirit—in deepening experience and so affording new data for knowledge. His appeal is to the completest possible human experience tested and interpreted by Work,—active productive energy of spirit is the way to the meaning of things.