Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning. Robert Browning

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СКАЧАТЬ distinguished." With intimate friends, however, the poet had quite another sort of charm. "To a single listener," says Mr. Gosse, with whom he was on familiar terms, "the Browning of his own study was to the Browning of a dinner party as a tiger cat is to a domestic cat. In such conversation his natural strength came out. His talk assumed the volume and the tumult of a cascade. His voice rose to a shout, sank to a whisper, ran up and down the gamut of conversational melody. Those whom he was expecting will never forget his welcome, the loud trumpet-note from the other end of the passage, the talk already in full flood at a distance of twenty feet. Then, in his own study or drawing-room, what he loved was to capture his visitor in a low armchair's 'sofa-lap of leather,' and from a most unfair vantage of height to tyrannize, to walk around the victim, in front, behind, on this side, on that, weaving magic circles, now with gesticulating arms thrown high, now groveling on the floor to find some reference in a folio, talking all the while, a redundant turmoil of thoughts, fancies, and reminiscences flowing from those generous lips."

      Elsewhere Mr. Gosse summed up his personal impressions of Mr. Browning, as follows:

      "I am bound to tell you that I saw a different Browning from the hero of all the handbooks and 'gospels' which are now in vogue. People are beginning to treat this vehement and honest poet as if he were a sort of Marcus Aurelius and John the Baptist rolled into one. I have just seen a book in which it is proposed that Browning should supersede the Bible, in which it is asserted that a set of his volumes will teach religion better than all the theologies in the world. Well, I did not know that holy monster.... What I saw was an unostentatious, keen, active man of the world, one who never failed to give good practical advice in matters of business and conduct, one who loved his friends and certainly hated his enemies; a man alive in every eager passionate nerve of him; a man who loved to discuss people and affairs, and a bit of a gossip; a bit of a partisan, too, and not without his humorous prejudices. He was simple to a high degree, simple in his scrupulous dress, his loud, happy voice, his insatiable curiosity."

Browning's London life was varied by many summer journeyings to French sea-coast towns, to Wales, and to Scotland. But it was seventeen years after the death of his wife before he could bring himself to revisit Italy. Even then he avoided Florence. He took his sister to Northern Italy; and Asolo and Venice became the towns around which their affections centered. Two American friends, Mrs. Bloomfield-Moore, and Mrs. Arthur Bronson,[6] contributed to the happiness of these Italian sojourns. In 1888 Browning's son, who had married an American girl, bought the Palazzo Rezzonico in Venice, so that Browning had an additional personal reason for his trip to Venice in 1889. He was well, and he took great pleasure in his son's admirably planned restoration of the old Venetian palace. He worked, walked, talked with nearly normal vigor. But a bronchial attack proved more than his weakened heart could withstand, and he died peacefully, almost painlessly, in his son's home on December 12, 1889. On the day of his death his last book, Asolando, was published, so that his brave-hearted "Epilogue" was really his valediction to this and his heroic greeting to another world. He could "greet the unseen with a cheer," because in thought and act he was

      One who never turned his back but marched breast forward,

       Never doubted clouds would break,

       Never dreamed, though right were worsted, wrong would triumph,

       Held we fall to rise, are baffled to fight better,

       Sleep to wake.

      Browning was buried in Westminster Abbey on the last day of the year. The most pathetic element of the imposing ceremonies was the singing of Mrs. Browning's poem, "He Giveth His Beloved Sleep."

THE POETRY OF BROWNING

       Table of Contents

      Before entering upon a discussion of Browning's poetry it will be of interest to note briefly some of the more striking general characteristics of the English literature contemporary with his work. From Pauline to Asolando is over half a century, but as a central and especially significant portion of Browning's career we may take the three decades from 1841, when he began the Bells and Pomegranates series, to 1869, when The Ring and the Book appeared, for these years include all of his dramas and most of the poetry on which his fame rests. A survey of this period at once reveals the predominance of fiction. Within these years come nearly all the novels of Charles Dickens, of William Makepeace Thackeray, of Charlotte Brontë, of Wilkie Collins, of Charles Kingsley, of Mrs. Gaskell, of Anthony Trollope, of George Macdonald, of Charles Reade, much of the work of Bulwer Lytton, all the novels of George Eliot except Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda, and the earliest of George Meredith's books. This is a notable showing. No previous period in English literature had presented anything like so wide a range in fiction or had brought forward so large a number of novels of the first rank. These years were equally rich in essays, including much of Carlyle's work, all of Macaulay's except the early "Essay on Milton," the religious polemics of Frederick Dennison Maurice and John Henry Newman, nearly all of Ruskin's discussions of art and social history, most of Leigh Hunt's literary criticism, and Matthew Arnold's important early critical essays. This, too, is a notable showing. But if we turn to the two realms in which Browning excelled, poetry and drama, we find different conditions. During the central period of his career, there was, aside from his own work, not a single important drama published. The theaters were prosperous, but they brought out only old plays or new ones of inferior rank. In poetry, too, if we set aside the great names of Tennyson and Browning, the period was neither rich nor varied. During Browning's first great productive period, 1841-46, the only other poems of note were Tennyson's two volumes in 1842. In the nine years from 1846 to Men and Women in 1855, the chief poems were Tennyson's The Princess, In Memoriam, and Maud, for though Wordsworth's Prelude was one of the greatest publications of the mid-century, it was written years before, and can hardly be counted as belonging to this era. There are, during the decade, many poems of secondary rank, the most important of them being Mrs. Browning's Sonnets from the Portuguese and Aurora Leigh, but besides Tennyson and Browning, the only poet of high rank is Matthew Arnold, whose slender volumes voice the doubts and difficulties of the age as Browning's poems voice its optimism. In the fourteen years between Men and Women and The Ring and the Book poets of a new kind appear; William Morris's Defense of Guinevere, The Life and Death of Jason and The Earthly Paradise, and Swinburne's early poems are alien to the work of Browning in form, subject-matter, and ideals. The fact is, the more definitely we try to place Browning in his literary environment the more distinctly do we perceive that he was sui generis among his contemporaries. He combined in striking fashion the intensity of the poet and the strong social sense of the prose writer.

      It seems also wise to glance at the outset at a few of the main criticisms that have been made on Browning's poetry, for the result of his marked originality is that no poet of the time has been so greatly praised and blamed.

      A natural first topic is his really famous "obscurity." This obscurity is variously ascribed to a diction unduly learned, or almost unintelligibly colloquial, or grotesquely inventive; to figures of speech drawn from sources too unfamiliar or elaborated to the point of confusion; to sentences complicated by startling inversions, by double parentheses, by broken constructions, or by a grammatical structure defying analysis. It would be quite possible to illustrate each of these points from Browning's works, and it cannot be denied that his poetry is sometimes needlessly and inexcusably hard reading. But in reality the difficulties in his poems come less from stylistic defects than from the subject matter. What Mr. Chesterton calls Browning's love for "the holes and corners of history," leads him to the use of much unfamiliar detail. A large part of the difficulty in reading Sordello arises from the fact that all Browning's accumulated knowledge of medieval Italy СКАЧАТЬ